“Okay.” The lawyer turned to Rob Grau. “Do what you need to do. We’ll find out what’s going on with this one.” Gallagher didn’t want to admit, even to himself, that Frank Jethroe was a person. Admitting that would also mean admitting what had happened to him, and how O’Flannery and Muldoon had taken advantage of it.

  Grau had already started rummaging in his carpetbag. I tried to keep from fidgeting as I watched him. The last thing, the very last thing, I wanted was for an ofay who didn’t know what he was doing to mess up the revival. Then he pulled out a dried calabash crisscrossed with beads and snake vertebrae and with a little brass bell attached, and I breathed easier. If he had an asson, he wasn’t so clueless as I’d feared.

  “You a houngan?” I asked him.

  Now he looked at me. I’d changed my thinking about him; I saw him change his about me. He hadn’t supposed I’d know what a houngan was, which is what I get for being how I am. “I’ve had my head washed,” he said shortly.

  “Good enough for me,” I said. He might not have the one drop—I still didn’t believe he did—but he’d been initiated into the priesthood, whether he kept it up or not. He might cope after all. He just might.

  He shook the asson at Frank Jethroe. The gravel or beans inside rattled in a rhythm Chick Webb wouldn’t have been ashamed of. Then he stepped up to Jethroe (who, I saw, had 5149 marked in indelible ink on his raggedy shirt and dungarees) and sketched a big cross above his head.

  And then he made another gesture. Some people will recognize the Grand Hailing Sign of Distress; some will not. Those who do may not describe it, so I won’t. I hadn’t thought to see it in a ritual like this, but Jethroe sure was in distress, so I suppose it had its place. Like musicians, wizards here borrow from wizards there. They always have. They always will. No use getting stuffy about it.

  “I wish I had a chicken to sacrifice,” Grau muttered, more to himself than to me. He shrugged; no chicken in that carpetbag. Or I didn’t think so, anyway, but he reached into it anyway. No, no chicken. He pulled out a little pair—almost a toy pair—of bongo drums. I jumped when he thrust them into my hands and asked, “Can you play these?”

  “Not what you’d call well,” I said. Lord knows that’s true.

  He didn’t care. “Follow along with me the best you can, then,” he said. “It doesn’t need to be perfect, nowhere close. Make noise. Give the asson some bottom, know what I mean? I’m going to summon his soul, his life force, whatever you want to call it, back into his body. I want to make sure it’s able to hear me, wherever it’s gone now that it isn’t with him any more.”

  I looked down at the tiny bongos. Somebody outside the tent might be able to hear them, but not if he was more than twenty feet away. Yes, I understand. It’s sorcery. What goes on Over There isn’t the same as what happens Over Here. Things that seem silly aren’t. This sure was a thing that seemed silly.

  Grau shook the asson at Frank Jethroe’s husk again. It had a different, more urgent, beat this time. I started working the skins. I didn’t think I’d do anything but distract poor Jethroe’s life force, not at first. But then I felt myself getting sucked into the sorcery Rob was building. Following along got easier. It was almost as if I was a part of what he was doing. Or maybe not as if; I seemed to know what he’d say with the calabash before he said it.

  He began to chant. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Gallagher start and come on point, like a bird dog. “That’s French,” he said to Eddie. Then he scratched his head. “No, it isn’t. Not quite.”

  I wanted to tell him to shut up so he wouldn’t distract the wizard. But that would have distracted me, and it seemed as though Rob was doing fine. He went right on in Kreyòl. He sure had had his head washed.

  No, I didn’t know what he was saying. I know of that stuff, but not as much about it as I ought to. My mother didn’t hold with the old ways, the ways that came with our folks from Africa, any more than she held with comic books. And so I also didn’t, not with either one. Things rub off on you without your even noticing that’s what’s going on.

  “Come back! Come back!” Grau called. Don’t ask me what language he was using; I can’t tell you. I didn’t know what language I was using myself, or whether I was Over Here or Over There. Betwixt and between again. The story of my goddamn life.

  I do know something didn’t want to turn loose of Frank Jethroe’s soul. Something old, older, oldest, Something alongside which even the ancient ritual Rob was going through seemed to have been cobbled together day before yesterday. Whatever it was, it didn’t want me to get a glimpse of it, if that’s the right way to put things.

  “Come back! Come back!” Rob called again. This time, I took it to mean the thing that was clinging to Jethroe, not him. Inside my head, I got a brief glimpse of a fierce profile and a curly beard. Only that glance, and then it was gone again.

  Letting itself be spotted, if just for an instant, seemed to weaken it. “Summon him one more time!” I said to Rob Grau. I think I used Kreyòl. I already told you I don’t know any Kreyòl, but I used it anyway.

  However I said it, he understood me. “Come back! Come back!” he cried, and set the hand that wasn’t holding the asson on Frank Jethroe’s heart.

  Next thing I knew, I was picking myself up off the ground without any idea how I’d got there. I felt as if I’d been blackjacked, only I didn’t have a welt or a bruise. Grau didn’t look much better off than I was. Ridden hard and put away wet, they say in the B-movie Westerns.

  But Frank Jethroe …. He still didn’t move. For a horrible moment, I thought the Something had won and Rob had failed. Then I saw Jethroe blink. He hadn’t done that at all since the guy in the chinos brought him in. He probably hadn’t since they made him into a zombie.

  He blinked again, and raised a hand, wonderingly, to touch his own face. “Where the hell am I?” he said in a voice dry as Death Valley. “What the hell happened to me?”

  Eddie took a coffeepot off a can of canned heat. He poured a cup full and gave it to Jethroe. As he drank, I said, “Tell me your name.”

  “I’m Frank Jethroe,” he answered. With his whistle wet, he sounded twenty years younger. He drank some more.

  “Did you volunteer to become a zombie?” I asked him.

  When he shook his head, the mechanism seemed rusty, but he said, “A zombie? Me? You out o’ your ever-lovin’ mind?”

  I turned to Gerald Gallagher. “You see?” I said.

  “I see,” he said somberly. “We’ll need to discuss an equitable settlement.” I knew what he meant by that: a settlement that wouldn’t cost O’Flannery and Muldoon too much and wouldn’t leave them with their backside bare in the chilly breeze of bad publicity.

  That could wait a little while. Frank Jethroe asked his plaintive questions again: “Where am I? What the hell happened?”

  “What’s the last thing you remember before you woke up here?” I answered his questions with one of my own.

  “I had to take a leak,” he said. “I was gonna go on home after my shift at the tire plant, only I had to take a leak. I went into the head”—five gets you ten he was in the Navy during the war—“an’ I did what I needed to do, an’ I was gonna go on out to the bus stop, an’ this fella says, ‘Hey, want a taste o’ this?’ an’ held out a flask to me. I coulda used me a snort. It was one o’ those days. So I drank, an’ it tasted kinda funny, an’ ….” His voice trailed off.

  “They shanghaied you,” I said. “They turned you into a zombie, and you’ve spent most of the time since working on the Hollywood Freeway.”

  He looked disbelieving, then furious, then worried. “Is Clarice okay? How about the girls? How long I been doin’ this?”

  I told him. He gaped at me. I nodded. “I swear,” I said, and held up my right hand as if taking an oath.

  He was looking at his own hands. The palms weren’t blistered; they were worn raw and bloody. The more he came back to himself, the more blood flowed in him and the bloodier they got. The way he screwed up his face said they hurt more and more, too. He had to work to turn his eyes back to me. “I’m so empty inside, reckon you’re right,” he said.

  One of the guys in the tent came up to him with ointment, gauze, and adhesive tape. He bandaged those battered hands. I turned to Gallagher, who looked more than a little green. “Maybe you people shouldn’t use zombies at all any more,” I said.

  “They don’t feel it unless they come back, and that doesn’t happen very often,” he said.

  “Does that make it better or worse?” I asked him. This time, he didn’t answer.

  Somebody in there gave Jethroe a sandwich and a thermos. Even more than the bandaging, that was a genuinely kind thing to do. He ate as if he’d never seen food before. Well, he hadn’t, not for a long time.

  Rob Grau was staring at him as if he’d invented him. In a way, he had. “I never did that before,” he said to me. “I knew how, but it isn’t real till you do it.”

  “You did great,” I said. Glancing at Gallagher again, I added, “Maybe you’ll be doing it a lot.” Gallagher still didn’t answer.

  He did drive Grau and me and Jethroe back to the O’Flannery and Muldoon offices. When we got there, he found Jethroe a set of work clothes a man with an intact soul might use. They were nothing much, but a thousand times better than the rags he was wearing. Jethroe put them on in a bathroom. His face was damp when he came out, so he’d probably washed it with a wet paper towel or something. He might have done more if his hands weren’t torn up.

  “I can draw up some papers for you to sign …” Gallagher said.

  I answered before Jethroe could: “Nobody’s signing anything yet. We’ll talk with a lawyer. Then we’ll be in touch.”

  Gallagher looked unhappy. “Don’t go to the papers till you know what kind of compensation we’ll offer, okay?”

  “For now,” I said, to make him flinch. He didn’t know I’d already tried to go to the papers, and they’d been scared to look at it? Good!

  “Can I get on home now? That’s all I want to do, go home.” Frank Jethroe shook his head. “Dunno how I’ll get in or what I’ll do. Ain’t got no wallet or nothin’.”

  “We’ll manage,” I said. I walked him over to the closest Red Line stop. A southbound trolley clanged up. We got on. While we rode, I filled him in on who I was and how I’d come looking for him. “Your wife is a pretty special gal,” I finished.

  “I sure think so.” His face clouded. “Wish I could call her, let her know I’m … I’m me again. The cleanin’ she does, though, I got no idea where she’ll be at. Don’t seem right. Kids’ll come home from school, they won’t expect me, neither.”

  “Everybody’ll be glad to see you. That’s what counts,” I said.

  I had some lockpicks in my pocket, but I turned out not to need them. The longer Jethroe was Jethroe, the better his brains worked. When we got to his house, we went into the back yard. He asked me to lift up one of the flowerpots on the fence between his place and a neighbor’s. Then he grabbed the spare key hidden under it.

  “We owe you more’n I know how to tell you,” he said as he opened the back door. A second later, he yawned. “I wanna sleep for about a year.” He laughed. “I was dead, near enough. Why do I wanna sleep?”

  Because they worked you harder than they’d work even a slave. I didn’t say it. He was no dope; he’d see it for himself. I did say, “I’ll have my lawyer call you tonight. His name is Wally Baker. He’ll bust his tail for you.”

  “He—?” Jethroe didn’t go on, or have to. He smiled when I nodded. “All right. Obliged again.” He went inside and closed the door. I headed back to the trolley stop.

  He owed me more than he could tell me, he said. Whether that ever translated into any real money for me, I’d have to see. It would depend on how hard Wally could squeeze O’Flannery and Muldoon. He’d get a fair chunk of that dough himself, of course. He wasn’t in it for his health, any more than anyone else was. But if that made him work harder, so much the better.

  It was dark outside when I woke up. I could hear Dora moving around in the front room. That might have been what woke me. Or it might not. I’d had strange dreams. In the way of dreams, I didn’t remember as much as I thought I should. What I did remember was bits and pieces, none of them connected.

  Eyes. Beards. A stern scowl that made me think of “Ozymandias.” You read it in school, too. You know. This bit:

  Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown

  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read …

  Only “Ozymandias” talks about ancient Egypt. Shelley didn’t get that right, or else I was more confused than usual.

  Before I could sort things out, Dora walked into the bedroom. “I thought I heard you stirring,” she said. “Did things go well while I was … absent?”

  “They did, yeah. Frank Jethroe is a live person again, and he’s a live person who I think’ll get quite a chunk of change from the people who used him while he was a zombie.”

  Dora was a silhouette to me. I couldn’t see her expression. But she sounded wistful, or as wistful as a vampire’s ever likely to, when she answered, “This is a possibility my kind does not have. We are as we are, with no going back, not ever.”

  “It’s … easier for your folk now that there are blood banks and things,” I said.

  We’d talked about that before. Even so, I should’ve kept my big trap shut. I didn’t help; I made things worse. “Is it … easier for your folk now that there are machines to do the things they were bought and sold to do?” She made a nasty mimic. I hadn’t heard her really mad before, either, but I sure did then.

  I worked not to get mad myself. “It is easier, yeah. Not easy, but easier. Things are better now than they were when my great-greats were slaves. Not as good as they ought to be, but better. That’s all I meant.”

  She could have thrown me out—either told me to hit the road, Jack, or picked me up and flung me out the door. She didn’t. She stood there and thought for a few seconds. Then, grudgingly, she nodded. “Yes, that is fair, I admit,” she said, and things between us were all right again. I can’t think of many live people who could have switched gears like that.

  “Tomorrow, I need to talk to Doctor Berkowitz up at County General. I’ll give blood again while I’m there. You do what you can.” I didn’t tell her I’d passed out after I did it the last time.

  “Ah?” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “It is good that you are willing to give your blood to vampires. It is very good. But do you want to give it to any hungry vampire or to one hungry vampire in particular? I am, you know. I was going to go out tonight to tend to that. If I do not need to go out …”

  And there it was. I’d wondered if it would come, and how it would if it did. I licked my lips. “Two things before I tell you to go ahead.”

  “Yes? And yes?”

  “You won’t … accidentally take too much?”

  Dora laughed. I’d been afraid I would make her angry again, but I tickled her funnybone instead. “If I took too much, it would not be by accident. I will take what the blood bank would, no more, no less. What is your other worry?”

  “You won’t make me into a vampire while you’re drinking from me?”

  This time, she didn’t laugh. She’d never sounded so serious as she did when she answered, “I would never do that, never, not unless I knew you wanted it with all your heart and all your soul and all your might. Perhaps not then, either, not with you.”

  Either she meant it or she was lying. If I thought she’d lie about things like those, what the hell was I doing there? “Go ahead, then,” the same way I would’ve said Let’s go, then when we had to take some trenches in Italy.

  And she did. She nuzzled my neck. She kissed my neck. Somewhere there, she bit my neck. I don’t know exactly when. You know how a mosquito can get you and you don’t feel it did till the next day? I think vampires do the same thing.

  She’s feeding from me, I thought. I’ve made what she needs, and she’s taking it. Mothers who nurse their babies must think things like that while they’re doing it. It’s an amazing notion, when you get down to it—more intimate … than anything, really.

  (My mother fed me from a bottle. That was modern.)

  She didn’t need any longer than they would have at County General. When she finished, she licked the little punctures she’d made, and they stopped bleeding. I don’t think a nurse at County General would have done that, but it sure worked.

  “Thank you, Jack. You make me strong, and you taste very good,” she said softly.

  I hadn’t done anything. I hadn’t even got out of bed. I’d just lain there. “Any time,” I said. I didn’t feel like moving or doing anything. It wasn’t just like when you smoke a cigarette afterwards, but it wasn’t far from that, either.

  She laughed again. “I will not ask you more often than the hospital would, I promise,” she said. “Now, what can I give you to show you how grateful I am for what you have given me?”

  I didn’t answer; answering would have been doing something. But she already knew what she’d do. She slid down the bed, away from my neck, and started doing it. I wasn’t sure I had enough blood left to get the most out of it, but I did. Oh, did I ever!

  Afterwards, I went into the bathroom to clean up a little. Once I’d set myself to rights, I looked in the mirror. The marks on my neck were fresh, but they didn’t look any bigger or deeper than any of the nips she’d given me while we made love. I don’t know how that’s possible, but I’m not a vampire.

  When I came out, she said, “Now you should eat something. You need to build more blood.”