Three words you must bring with you when you arrive in this most distinctive of American cities. The rest can wait, but these name the people.
A takouma—is a person native to the continent.
A taklousa—is a person of African ancestry.
A takata—is a person of European extraction.
Every citizen you meet will use these words, so you must too. Pack them in your luggage along with this brochure!
—From ANOPA PHRASES FOR YOUR BUSINESS TRIP! issued by the Better Business Bureau of Cahokia
***
Drummond was laughing as they walked out to the car. The sky had closed over again into a ruffled gray. “Ain’t that a perfect exhibition of the human animal,” he said. “Husband not yet buried, and she’s dickering over a few dollars.” “You really are an asshole,” said Barrow. The electric starter on the Model T was playing up, and he had to crank the motor.
Drummond stretched and yawned in the passenger seat. “Honestly, why’d you do that?” he said, when Barrow climbed in to join him. “It’s not goin’ to do her any good, and you don’t owe nothin’ to her. She’s just trash floating on the water, you know; next wave comes, and it’s gone. You should think of yourself.
Free your mind.” “Is that right,” said Barrow, and pulled across the street to join the flow of traffic heading back east. The moving air on their faces was cold and damp; it felt as if it might rain soon. After a couple of blocks they went past a glass and chrome frontage signed HAMELIN’S, looking very innocent and everyday. “Know what I noticed in there?”
Drummond said. “What?” “They’re stony-broke, right? Down to livin’ on beans and borrowing from a loan shark to make the rent. Looks like they ain’t had new clothes in years. But they still managed to pay for ol’ Fred to get the whole outfit for the KKK, robes and sash and all, and that stuff you cain’t get secondhand, and it ain’t cheap either, I happen to know. A few
dollars for this part, a few dollars for that: it mounts up.” He whistled. “You’ve got to admire that, in a way.” Barrow knew Drummond well enough to be sure he didn’t mean that he admired the Hoppers’ costly devotion. “I mean, think about that. Poor people; white trash, really, though I know they don’t
call ’em that back in Oh-hi-oh. Take ’em right, and you can just pump the cash out of them. Now, the Klan’s big in the city right now; it’s grown and it’s grown. Other places, they get choosy about whether your name ends in -oosky or -elli. Here, it’s good enough if you’re takata, any kind. I reckon the ol’ Invisible Empire must have twenty thousand members here
now, maybe more. Maybe thirty thousand. Thirty thousand nice white robes hangin’ in closets. Flimsy white cotton at the biggest markup the market’ll bear. Not to mention dues, and tributes, and tiepins, and rule books, and newspapers, and any other kind of Krap you can spell with a ‘K.’ Someone,” said Drummond, surveying the passing bakeries and
warehouses with a sleepy complacency, “someone has found out the way to squeeze this place for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Got to admire that. I take off my hat to ’em.” He did, literally, raising the snap-brim off his yellow flop of hair and pressing it back down again to cover his tired eyes. “Show me a believer, in pretty much anything, and I’ll show you somebody someplace else who’s making bank. It’s a law of the universe, is what it is. No different for the takouma, mind, with their holy Cardinal to keep ’em in line,
who just so happens to be brother to the Man. It’s all a racket, Joe, everywhere you look, and the only way not to be a sucker is, believe none of it. Free your mind. Free—your—mind.” “Huh,” said Barrow. He had been more impressed when he first heard this philosophy, from a Drummond with a bandaged head holding a cigarette steady for Barrow to puff on, in the field hospital behind the trench lines at Jouy. It
had seemed like wisdom then, and it had seemed like Drummond proved it by his indifference to the color of Barrow’s face. The 131st was an Illinois regiment, and the social rules it followed were not as harsh as those of the segregated South or the lily-white East, but still a lonely business for someone not-white, caught up at random by the draft in Chicago. The cynic from mixed-up, muddled-up brown Arkansas was the first American he ever ran across in France to meet him and see, principally, a tall guy named Joe. But since then he’d heard the routine over and over—a take on everything that was as predictable as clockwork. “Phin?” he said, after a minute. “I think you better tell me what’s going on. What is the angle here?” There was no reply. He spoke louder, and when there was still no reply, I took a hand off the wheel and twitched the hat off Drummond’s head. He was asleep underneath it. Lids down over the funny-pages eyes, like bulging window blinds. Narrow cheeks slack and stubbled. Big mouth ajar. No doubt he needed it. Barrow didn’t know where Drummond had been when the dispatcher found him in the small hours to call him to the Land Trust, but he might well not have been to bed at all. There was a night-life there that Barrow knew nothing about, any more than Drummond knew what Barrow did off duty, down in Darktown. Let him snatch some rest. They could in theory have reached the southwest of the city, where Yanasa’s lead on the Warriors was located, by continuing to the levee and following the waterfront down. But that way lay an intricacy of docks to thread, and tracks crossing every hundred yards, and therefore endless chances to get locked up behind, or between, the slow-moving freights bringing in cattle to the packers, lime to the cement works, lead and aluminum to the smelters, coal to power it all. Quicker and surer to go east again, then south. Barrow sighed and drove on, thinking about Hopper telling his wife yesterday evening that he was going to “settle accounts.” Whatever it was he thought he was doing, Hopper was definitely expecting something. That didn’t sound like a man who had run into a party of slaughterous takouma extremists by accident. (And who runs into anybody on a locked rooftop in the middle of the night by accident, anyway?) Barrow supposed he would just have to wait and see what fell out when they shook things up with the Warriors. He had the brass knuckles in his pocket. He hoped they would protect his hands. Muscle work was a stupid thing for a pianist to get involved in. But to stop it, he’d have to decide that he actually was a pianist, not just muscle who played a little sometimes. On the wheel, he tapped out a little of the piano part of “Kansas City Stomp”—or his version of it, anyway;
...the tricky piano line for James P. Johnson’s “Keep Off the Grass.”
it was years since he’d heard Morton play it in Chicago, and like all the good tunes it had been tinkered with since by every performer at every performance.
...Barrow considered it. Rain music not dance music for this room, he thought. He flipped out the tails of his overcoat, sat down; stirred up a little slow melody with his fingers while the black branches stirred at the window, and silver streaks descended the glass. “A musical detective,” observed a voice from the direction of the stairs. Not a musical voice; young, but with a croak in it as if its owner had strep throat, or were part-nightbird...
The skyscrapers of the business district, with the Panton Leslie tower ruling over them, were still way ahead, but the buildings were rising and the traffic was thickening and the streets were getting noisier; and intermittently, for a bar or three, he had that illusion that the city’s movement had got into time with the song, wheels and passersby in derby hats and busy crossings and men astride girders up in the air all momentarily joined in one dance, to the pulsing rhythm of his own left hand.
The invisible orchestra of his head provided clarinet, cornet, drums.
I hate to see, that evening sun go down.
Thrown-Away Boy yawned, and went to bed.
But the bumps of the roadway fed such a lot of judder back into his hands that he had to keep gripping the wheel tight and interrupting himself, and over streetcar tracks the narrow tires of the Model T positively jiggered and bounced. Barrow could drive well enough, but he didn’t enjoy it. He switched to humming, and stole a glance at Drummond—only a
glance, because he had a truck behind him and a trolley pulling by on his left—expecting that the noise and the rattling would be waking him. No; Drummond was deep down and far off, being shaken slackly in the seat. In fact, he seemed so thoroughly gone that, a little time later, amid the general rattle and roar Barrow almost missed the sound
Drummond started to make. It was one Barrow had not heard for more than a year: a choked bark deep in his throat, like a cough that couldn’t get free. He glanced across again. This time Drummond’s eyes were twitching under the closed lids, back and forth in jerks. He was dreaming, and Barrow was afraid he knew what he was dreaming of. “Phin,” he said.
“Wake up, now. Wake up, man.” Drummond only made the choking sound again. And then again. “Phin!” Nothing; a man locked deep in his dream, his very fearful dream; and now he had begun to jerk his head forward in short violent nods, as if that way he could shake out the obstruction he was dreaming. It didn’t work; it never had. His windpipe was filled with a phantom of Flanders earth, and it could not be coughed free. Barrow was still boxed in, baker’s truck behind now and a continuous file of automobiles to his left, but he dared to detach a hand from the wheel and shook Drummond’s shoulder hard for a moment, hoping that touch could recall him. It didn’t. It seemed only to set the demons looser. Drummond bent his whole torso forward from the waist and then slammed it back against the seat, flailing like a gaffed fish. His hands rose and clawed at the air, and his face began to turn purple. All the while the desperate sound of imaginary suffocation came from his throat. Horns sounded from behind Barrow; he was going too slow for the traffic. He was afraid that Drummond would pitch himself off the seat altogether, and fall out into the roadway to his right and be mangled by the rolling wheels behind. He needed to pull over and stop. But as if the nightmare had leaked out of Drummond’s mind into the real fabric of Second Street, and infected it with malignant impossibility, right now he could see absolutely nowhere to pull over. The sidewalk was blocked completely with parked cars. The next intersection allowed no turn to the right. On the block after, everything seemed to be parked so tight it might all have been wedged in with a lever, and then there was another intersection across which the bread truck behind drove him, roaring and honking. He gripped Drummond by the scruff with his free hand and held him in place as best he could as he thrashed about, while his left fought the jitters of the wheel and his feet moved confusedly on the three pedals on the floor. Finally, a space opened up, perhaps too small a one but he didn’t care, and he flung the Model T into it at a slew while stamping on the brake. They hit the back fender of the car parked in front with a heavy metallic clang, and the curb with the front wheel. The Model T rocked and Barrow seized Drummond with both hands and pulled him into a heavy embrace, pounding on his back like someone trying to burp a baby. Except that it was more like holding an armful of live wires; Drummond was still thrashing about, to the point that things were shaking out of his pockets and collecting on the floor round his kicking feet, coins and lighter and pack of half-crushed stogies and something small that rolled away under the seat with a glassy clink. “Hey!” Barrow said in his ear. “Hey. Hey. Come back, Phin. Come back. Wake up. You can breathe. It’s not happening. That was then. That’s over. You’re okay. You’re okay. Wake up, now. Back you come”—these words accompanied by a grip on him that Barrow hoped might work as a lifeline, a point of contact that could be followed home into daylight from the collapsed trench at Château-Thierry where his mind was telling him he lay suffocating. They were parked outside a grocery store just receiving a delivery of ice. The icemen toting the block across the sidewalk had turned to stare, and so had the customers at the doorway, and a very old man in a frayed straw hat sitting on a bench outside, watching the world through faded pale-blue eyes. “Does he have the flooenza?” said the old man. “I had the flooenza. That’s a nasty one.” “No!” said Barrow. “Wake up, Phin. There we go. That’s right. Open your eyes. You’re all right. You’re safe and sound. You’re right here. Okay, now.” Drummond’s eyes flew open, and darted left-right-left-right before fixing on Barrow’s face. “Joe,” he croaked, and drew a gulp of a breath. Barrow let go of him and he began to cough fully, rackingly. “Whatsamatter with him?” said the guy at the rear of the ice, shifting his gloved grip. “Not a thing,” said Barrow, but as he spoke Drummond leaned out over the side of the Model T and vomited copiously right in front of the audience. “Ewww!” went the customers, and averted their faces, except for a gray-haired woman wearing a Woman’s Christian Temperance Union pin who said, triumphantly, “I believe this man is drunk.” Drummond sat back, pale and shaking. The storekeeper came to the door to see what the fuss was about, bare arms seamed with black gorilla hair, and folded them in disgusted sarcasm. “Won’t that do wonders for my trade,” he said. “Thank you very much.—Ike, get the sawdust!” Meanwhile, a beat cop was setting off towards them from the corner, swinging his nightstick. Cop, icemen, storekeep, old man, customers: every single one of them was takata. They drew in, or at least it felt as if they did. Barrow stood up behind the wheel, and pulled back his coat to show his gun and his badge. People stepped back as they tended to at the sudden demonstration of his height, even without the extra platform of the Ford lifting his head eight feet from the ground. “Nothing to see,” he said. “Nothing to see.—Murder Squad, officer; no problem here.” Grumbling, the onlookers departed. In a minute there was no one left to see but Ike and his bucket, and the old man smiling on the bench, as Barrow squatted to squeeze the crank into the awkward cranny under the tangled fenders and restarted the car, reversed free with a squeal of metal, and pulled away onto Second again. Drummond was patting the passenger door and seat as if verifying their solidity. “You okay, there?” said Barrow. “Buried,” said Drummond in a hoarse whisper. “I know.” “Haven’t had that one for a while.” “Yeah.” “Thanks, pal,” he said. Barrow shrugged. “You’d do the same for me,” he said. “You have done the same for me.” Drummond wiped his eyes with his handkerchief, then spat into it to clear his mouth. He lit a cigarette, took one drag, and gazed at the orange glow of the burning end with his shoulders hunched. “I wish it would go,” he said. “I can still taste… mud.” “It’ll go,” said Barrow. “Just give it a minute. Pick up your shit off the floor there. You’ll be right as rain. Tell me about something; that’ll help. And when we get there, you’ll be back on the case, you’ll be too busy to remember it.” “Yeah,” said Drummond, but he didn’t start talking, just sat there hunched in a silence unlike him...
~~~
I was immediately fascinated as I began to read this book. It is extraordinary and, undoubtedly, deserves its selection as book of the year... It is a personal favorite for 2024 for me, as well... I have often lamented what occurred to the Indigenous people who inhabited America when it was first found by those across the seas... Especially, when the immigration became so large, that the cruelty of these new occupants was placed toward those who had once roamed the lands here, hunting, making camps and then moving again when weather changed and food was scarce... I am sure they thanked their Ancestors often for what they had been given...
Francis Spufford has studied that history carefully, knowing exactly what had been done, and what sometimes was attempted to be hidden... But there is always somebody who can speak of stories shared by their ancestors and how it all happened. Taking that background, he has created an epic alternative history to that early period by creating a fictional city where the Takouma were the leaders of all things within the city... And, that there are two other groups of people who live in this area. I believe we would now refer to those as African American or European Americans... while referring to the leaders as Native American or Indigenous People...
An early caution, readers will need to quickly pick up the three identifications for all residents there. I found I had to check back to the front of the book once in a while to remember each indigenous name. On the other hand, for at least two of these groups, they act and/or are treated as many think of them in present time.
Specifically, the Europeans are routinely attempting to take over the leadership/government of the city. There is little outward prejudice as we begin to read so what will happen must be taken as read to feel the full impact of the story.
Let me start by pinpointing the main character, Joe Barrow, who is, during the story, named The Thrown Away Boy. Barrow and Drummond were in children's homes together and as they grew, both became police officers in Cahokia. There is a relationship between the two that is important to watch--especially as the investigation of a murder begins! Joe Barrow is also a "red man" who was never before exposed to any of his indigenous connections... Now, he finds it coming into play and he's totally unprepared to be who he is. Especially, when he sees the Tacouma Princess for the first time... Shall we say they each felt the connection? And, finally, and, for me, the most intriguing part, was that he plays piano... And throughout the book he will spend time trying to decide exactly where his future lies... In the meantime, I'm sharing most of his playlist! Early Jazz which was mostly new to me and probably all you readers!
The merge of the old and the new, even in the 20s is presented through the leader who is also considered a god of their people. When corn is ready to be harvested, for instance, it is the Man who dresses and blesses the corn...and we watch as the time for the festival of the Green Corn Planting in the parish of St. Lawrence arrives, and even in the midst of the investigation, the Man prepares to play his role... I wanted to include one of the festivals, but also share how the Man dressed in the past...
He held Barrow’s gaze for a moment longer. Then he snickered, and sounds of amusement could be heard coming from the driver’s seat too. “Oh, detective, your face! Mr. Barrow, I had an American education too. At Harvard, in fact. I know that spring is caused by the regular tilting of the Earth’s axis as it orbits our star. I really do. But I also know that spring is caused by God’s grace, in the form of the sun’s rays, touching this dark earth with new life: a sacred birth, a sacred return, which deserves all the singing, all the dancing, all the ceremony we can give to it.
The world turns, but it is not a clockwork mechanism, detective. It is a circular dance, from birth to death to resurrection, through arches of flowers, and arches of bread, and arches of skulls. We dance the turning world, and it dances us.” Saying this, the Man did not look like a teasing aristocrat. He looked like the ancient priest of something Barrow did not understand. They had reached the western end of the Bridge. More cops, more flares. Oscar extracted them from the line of traffic flowing out west along the main highway, and off to the right, over freight yards twinning those on the city side of the river, and down into the streets of New Cahokia. The always-strange streets of New Cahokia, with or without the fog and the strangeness of this day of crisis, built as they were from the remnants of the Exposition twenty years before, half-transformed for everyday commerce. Among the warehouses and loading docks, glimpses materialized in the murk of the plaster spires of the Hall of the Peoples, the round dome of the Sacramentarium. The sloping white skirts—just the skirts, the rest was gone—of the giant Maria Tamaha, once as tall as the Statue of Liberty, with a café in her crown. “I don’t believe any of that,” said Barrow.
“You sound sad, Thrown-Away Boy,” said the Man. (It was the man who first called his this nickname) “Yeah, well.” “May I ask then what you believe in?” “Is that your question?” The Man sighed. “I wish it were,” he said. “It should be. On any other day, it would be. What could be more right, what could be more fitting for the shape of a tale, than for the third and last question—after the one about the city, after the one about the murder—to be the one that elicited your own nature?” “You’re assuming I’d answer it.” “Oh, you’d answer it, my friend. I know you well enough to be sure of that, by now. Beneath your tough-guy crust, you turn like a sunflower towards any source of warmth. But no, I suppose not. I suppose I had better be practical. Hang on a moment, though.” The Man peered through his window. They had come out of the zone of surreal leftovers now, and into the countryside. They were bowling along a straight one-lane highway, shared with the interurban tracks, on top of a causeway through fields. Here the fog had lifted slightly, and drifted gauzily a few feet above pocket-sized plots to the left and right. The dark soil was laid bare, ready indeed for the planting. Here and there takouma women—all women—were out with hoes. The causeway drew a green line through the white mist across the black earth. The Man tapped on the glass of the driver’s compartment. “Anywhere along here,” he said to Oscar. “Just as soon as I find a passing-place, miko.” The automobile bowled on. The Man leaned back. “So,” he said, “my practical question to you, detective, is: Why did Arthur Vanderberg of Union Cartridge recognize you, back there?” Barrow had not known that the Man had noticed that momentary look. He felt a scrabbling alarm, a sense of the part he was trying to play today being suddenly dragged back by, clutched and tripped up by, the person he had allowed himself to be yesterday. Every day until yesterday. The serious policeman trying to guard the tamaha, versus the friend of Phin Drummond who consented to any amount of bullshit. Because… Why had he done that? Why had he been that person? One step out of the old role and it was already getting hard to understand. Because, he supposed, he had not wanted to choose, about a whole lot of things. Because he was a follower, and there had been someone to follow. And he had followed, like a young duck mistaking the farmer’s boot for his mama and going quacking off after it in loyal pursuit, through the mud and the puddles. “Detective? Is that a difficult question? Why is that a difficult question?” “I… gave him a lift to the Union Club yesterday.” “You gave him a lift? Vanderberg the plutocrat thumbed a ride in your police car?” “No… no. We were over at Union Cartridge, looking for that boy I mentioned, the one who vanished from the train. He works there. My partner said he knew someone in the company, called in; Vanderberg came out himself with the time card on him. Then he asked, could he ride with us. His secretary was surprised.” “I’m sure she was. Weren’t you?” “Yeah. I was. He was doing this big-kid act, how-cool-to-ride-in-a-cop-car kinda thing, but it wasn’t real convincing.” “Contemptuously unconvincing, I’m sure. That’s our Mr. Vanderberg, all right. But how did your partner happen to be able to call him up—him, the owner of the whole company?” “They got some kinda… arrangement.” “About what?” “About… the case, maybe.” “About the Land Trust murder?” “… Yeah.” Saying these things out loud, putting them outside the special cabinet in his mind for the inexplicabilities of Phin, made Barrow hear them clearly himself. Hear them with dread...
The Man made no move, gave no signal that explicitly drew the driver in, but Barrow understood that he was before a tribunal of two. And was under judgment. It occurred to him that no one knew where he was. He was way out in the sticks alone with them and a machine gun, in the fog, with deep water to swallow all secrets no doubt nearby. There were ways to make him bow out that would be very final. That did not square with what he had seen of the Man, or guessed of his principles. But what did he know, on the basis of two conversations...“No,” he said, “I should do it. I shoulda done it before. Anyhow, you need this thing solved by the PD, if it’s gonna convince the takata. If it’s gonna calm things down.” The Man thought. Barrow waited. “I do believe in redemption,” he said eventually. “More joy in heaven over one sinner that doeth penance, and so on. But if your kingdom is of this world, you have to back up hope with a calculation of the probabilities…. Very well. Very well, then. You go and find him. You have twenty-four hours.” “Because then you’ll put somebody else on it?” “No, because by then, if it’s all gone wrong tomorrow, it won’t matter anymore. Welcome to the horrible burden of trust, detective. Now please get out of the car.” “You’re leaving me here?”
“I’m asking you to give me some privacy while I change my clothes,” the Man said, mild again. Barrow opened his door and climbed out of the Duesenberg. The fog here was cleaner. It smelled just as much of river, but less of coal smoke and more of damp earth. He crossed the metals of the interurban and went and stood on the other side of the road by a telegraph pole, and lit a shaky cigarette. It was quiet in the green and white and black world. There was no other traffic in either direction. A bird sang in the mists. A hooter sounded off on the river. He could hear the murmur of the two or three women in the nearest field as they peered at the car, and stopped the rhythmic slice and slap of their hoes. The magical strangeness of the earlier part of the ride, and the courtly courtesy, and the game of questions, seemed far away already, replaced by guilt. His sewn eyebrow was stinging again. Back at the limo, the Man had drawn curtains across the back windows, and Oscar had fetched him a collection of boxes and bags from the trunk. Then the chauffeur came across the road to join Barrow. “Spare smoke?” he said. Barrow offered the package, and then his lighter. “Thrown-Away,” Oscar said in acknowledgment, bending to the flame. “Lodge Boy,” said Barrow. “You worked it out, huh.” They stood side by side smoking in silence, the white cylinder in Oscar’s mouth looking not much bigger than a toothpick. “Not sure you were going to go on calling me that,” Barrow said, after a while. “He decides to trust you, that’s good enough.” Another pause. The curtains in the back of the Duesenberg rippled. The women in the field were coming over. “Hear you’re a pretty fair pianist,” said Oscar. “A-huh.” “Hear you dance pretty good, too.” Barrow said nothing. Oscar indicated the car with the burning end of his smoke. “Just remember,” he said, “they’re not like us. They’re flames. They burn. If you get too close they burn you.” Barrow dropped his stub on the ground and stepped on it. “I gotta find a trolley back into town,” he said. “I heard that,” said Oscar calmly. “Maybe ask these ladies here where the stop is.” The farmers had reached the top of the grassy bank. They were two capable-looking takouma in their forties or fifties and one much older and smaller, by the looks of things their mother, back bent over by decades of stooping to the corn. “Ishla,” said Oscar. “Ishla,” echoed Barrow. They chorused a greeting back, but their attention was all on the car, from which the Man was climbing out, transformed. The outfit for a Bostonian gentleman had vanished.
He was now dressed in an embroidered buckskin tunic, knee-length, with saffron-yellow leggings under it and moccasins on his feet. There were yellow gloves on his hands, which he was spreading in welcome. He had braided his hair with a yellow tie. He still had a cross around his neck, but it was now at the center of a gold sun disc. Most startlingly, he had painted his eyelids gold. There was a double flash whenever he blinked. The old lady said something in Anopa which Barrow, though he didn’t understand any of the words, had no difficulty in translating as I told you it was him, and all three surged forward. “Miko!” they said, bobbing their heads, and Barrow saw that they took care not to touch the Man, but it was a respectful familiarity they showed towards him—as if an oracle passing by, or a messenger from heaven, was a stroke of luck but nothing too far out of the ordinary. A rapid conversation in Anopa ensued. The Man bent his head down gravely, bestowing golden blinks. “What are they talking about?” Barrow asked Oscar. “The weather. If it will be a good season for the corn. The Man says he thinks it will be a dry summer. The old one says, that’s not what they say on the radio. The Man says, he doesn’t think the sun will obey the forecasters. This makes them smile. Now the one on the left is complaining about how much their crop insurance is costing—” “Yeah, okay.” “It matters to them,” said Oscar. The conversation petered out in declarations of mutual esteem. The Man turned back to the Duesenberg. “Do you want me to translate for you?” Oscar asked. “No, I’m good,” said Barrow, put on his mettle. He was almost sure that the term for a trolley was ikcoli. Adding “please” should do the job. “Bana, ikcoli?” he said to the old lady, as the leader of the group. She stared at him. Then she grinned, showing her gums, and went into a saw-toothed cackle. She slapped Barrow on the back—the lower back, she couldn’t reach very high—and said something in Anopa that caused her daughters to start laughing too. Rocking, whooping, thigh-slapping, funniest-thing-in-years laughter. It was infectious. Oscar roared. The Man covered his mouth and shook. “What did she say?” demanded Barrow. “What? What?” “She said,” Oscar managed to get out, “that you’re a good-looking boy but she thinks you’re a little bit young for her.” “Oh God,” said Barrow. “What did I say?” “Trolley is chanali. You asked her for something else. Something all women have. Something not very polite.” “Oh God.” “Don’t worry about it. You did say please!” Everyone laughed some more. “Please apologize to her,” said Barrow. “It’s okay, it’s okay. She says… it’s nice to know she can still catch the fish. That means—” “I got it. Really.” “Also, you can get the interurban in the next village, about a mile along. C’mon, we’ll drop you off there.” The farmers trooped off down the bank. As they picked up their hoes, one of the daughters must have repeated “Bana, ikcoli” because they all went off into whoops again. Barrow had clearly provided them with entertainment that would last months, if not years. Oscar turned the key and started the engine. Without discussion, Barrow joined him in the front, shifting the Tommy gun carefully aside. There was something about the Man dressed like this that made it clear he was no longer a being you could share a car seat with. “Hey, it’s a pity you can’t come along to the Planting,” said Oscar, when they were rolling again. “There’s a party afterwards. It gets pretty lively. You might’ve found somebody younger who wanted to share her trolley-stop. Maybe only seventy years old. Maybe sixty!” “You ever gonna let me forget that?” said Barrow. “I don’t think so, Thrown-Away.” They left him in the village of St. Louis, which was a church, a gas station and a general store, clustered under dripping oak trees. There was a sign put up by the state historical society saying the place had been founded by a French settler in 16-something...
~~~
The body had been found on a roof, cut in a manner which would seem to be ritualistic... The man was takata (European). And the death was created to match an Aztec-style tableau...gruesome, with body parts lying alongside the body, yet intriguing as each part of the destruction was studied. Questions started coming the longer they worked: how did this takata get into the building. And why was he on the roof? This was sacred Takumba stuff. Barrow began looking around and noticed that a nearby building had a lit window from which, perhaps, somebody could have seen something. Asking around he learned what they thought he should already know... It was the house of the Moon--that is, the niece of the Sun--The Man...the closest heir in the city. Other than Frankie Blackhawk, but he's out in Hollywood making movies. And, in a short time, they learn that Blackhawk had been killed!
Was this going to move toward a war between the citizens as it happened in the past? When the first murder occurred, the Man had sought out Barrow and let him know that he expected to have him report back to him, keeping him up-to-date on what was happening. Readers will begin to see tension rising, and Barrow soon in the midst of "Indiana Jones"-type action for which readers will be holding their breaths as he makes it through each event! This is one of the best historical alternative novels I've ever read. Don't miss it!
GABixlerReviews
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