7

Pace was never quite the same after he was shot. He recovered well enough to live much as he always had, but he knew something was missing, an inner strength or confidence that had been a reservoir of energy to defy whatever or whoever he felt was working against him. It was not a condition easily explained, not even to himself. Pace could handle this sign of vulnerability but it was not easy for him to get used to.

On the local radio station the morning after the day Pace dreamed that Misty Tonga called him, there was a bulletin alerting listeners to be on the lookout for a missing child, a seven year-old African-American girl from Bug Town, the community just west of Bay St. Clement, named Gagool Angola. Her mother, Oswaldina Capoverde, said that the child either had been kidnapped or run away, she didn’t know which. Gagool’s father, Rangoon “Ray-Ray” Angola, from whom Oswaldina was divorced, was doing a dime in Pee Dee for aggravated assault, so he was not a suspect if indeed the girl had been stolen. Gagool had been missing for forty-eight hours. She was described as being almond-skinned with a dime-sized, diamond-shaped birthmark below her left eye. When last seen she was wearing a white cotton dress decorated with red and yellow ladybugs, and her reddish-brown hair was tied in pigtails.

Pace stuck to his writing, concentrating on the period immediately following Sailor’s death in a car wreck, when Lula felt at loose ends, uncertain what to do with the rest of her life. It had been the most difficult time for Lula, more than those earlier stretches when Sailor was incarcerated. Her man’s being gone forever was an altogether different situation; there was nobody to wait for, and Lula leaned heavily on Pace, as well as her best friend, Beany Thorn, for emotional support and sustenance.

It was late that afternoon, just past five o’clock, when Pace discovered Gagool Angola hiding in his woodshed. He had bent over to take an armload of small pieces for the stove and there she was, shivering in the white cotton dress spotted with ladybugs.

“Hey, girl,” Pace said, “you lost?”

The child shook her head slowly from side to side, her eyes half-closed.

“Well, I can see you’re cold. Come inside and get warm.”

Pace gathered the wood he’d come for and motioned with his head for her to follow him, which she did, keeping back a few steps. Once they were in the cottage, Pace fed the fire in the wood stove and then draped a quilt around the girl’s shoulders.

“Set yourself on the couch there, honey. Are you hungry?”

She nodded and said, “Thirsty, too.”

“Okay, I’ll make you a grilled cheese sandwich and hot chocolate. How does that sound? In the meantime, here’s an apple.”

Pace handed the apple to her. She grabbed it and took a big bite. One of her two front teeth was only half-descended. The diamond-shaped birthmark under her left eye was blue.

As Pace prepared the hot chocolate and grilled cheese sandwich, he asked the girl, “Is your name Gagool Angola?”

She finished the apple before answering, eating the core but not the stem, which she twisted and knotted around the pinky finger of her right hand.

“Um hum. I be name after a witch in a story my daddy know. How you know me?”

“I don’t know you, but I heard on the radio that your mama is looking for you. She’s afraid you might have been stolen.”

Gagool laughed. It was not so much a laugh but a shriek, as if what Pace said was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

“Nobody gon’ steal me. I make too much trouble for ’em. That’s why I run off. Mama say I’m too damn much trouble. I be too damn much trouble for you, too, you keep me.”

“I won’t keep you, Gagool. As soon as I finish up fixin’ you this meal, I’m going to have to let the people who are searching for you know that you’re here.”

“I be gone before they come. I got no desire be finded.”

“Come sit at the table,” said Pace.

He set down a plate with the sandwich on it and a cup of hot chocolate. The girl shrugged the quilt off her shoulders, went over and sat down and took a bite out of the grilled cheese, then sipped the hot chocolate.

“Why don’t you want to be found?”

“I’m big enough now to go see my daddy, so I’m goin’. He’s in prison.”

“Doesn’t your mama sometimes take you to visit him?”

“Uh uh. She say he bad but he ain’t, not even a little bit. Her new man, Bee Sting, be bad, and he don’t like me. He hit me when he feel like it. My daddy never did. I tol’ Bee Sting when my daddy Ray-Ray get out he gon’ bust him up good and take me away.”

“Your mama lets Bee Sting hit you?”

“She don’t mind. She say I be doomded just like my daddy.”

Pace knew he had to call the police but he stood and watched her eat. When she had finished the sandwich and drunk the hot chocolate, Pace asked Gagool if she was still hungry.

“Um hum. You got more?” she said, and smiled at him. He loved that her half front tooth stuck out the way it did.

“Comin’ right up.”

After he’d poured another cup of hot chocolate and made another sandwich, Pace went to his desk phone and dialed the police.

“I’ve got the little girl here you’ve been looking for. Gagool Angola, yes. The one from Bug Town. I found her hiding in my woodshed. She’s fine, I’ve just given her something to eat. This is Pace Ripley. I live at the old Delahoussaye place off Rachel Road. But listen, she says she’s been beaten by her mother’s boyfriend, a guy called Bee Sting, so she ran away to visit her father who’s serving time at Pee Dee. Okay, sure. Right.”

Pace hung up. Gagool Angola was standing by the door.

“Thank you, mister,” she said. “Now I’m goin’.”

“No, honey, you’ve got to wait here for the people to fetch you. They’ll make sure your mama’s friend doesn’t hit you again.”

Gagool dashed out before Pace could stop her. He went after her but she had already disappeared in the darkness. Pace went back into the cottage to get a battery lantern and as soon as he had stepped outside again two police cruisers, their warning lights flashing, zoomed up the driveway. The cars stopped and four patrolmen got out.

“Where’s the kid?” said one.

“She ran out of the house. I was just going to look for her.”

“Spread out,” the lead cop told the others, who split in three directions.

“Why didn’t you lock her in?” he asked Pace.

“She was starving, so I fed her, then I called you. I didn’t think she’d bolt like that.”

The cop curled his upper lip and said, “I hate it when people think. You should have called us right away, before you fed her. Don’t go anywhere.”

He went to join his fellow officers in the search. Pace stood in front of his cottage. It was a moonless night. He figured the girl had headed for the woods behind Dalceda’s house. Gagool, the evil witch, was a character in a novel by H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines. Pace had read it when he was fourteen. He wondered why anyone would name his daughter after her.

The world was a difficult place for a woman, Pace concluded. Punzy, lost and adrift, giving herself to Abstemio Cruz and worse; Bitsy, shot and killed by her humiliated husband; Misty Tonga, apparently under a spell cast electronically by a wigged-out ex-merc; poor little Gagool Angola, abused and driven from her home by some Neanderthal named Bee Sting; the list was endless, of course. He remembered John Lennon and Yoko Ono singing a song they’d written titled “Woman is the Nigger of the World.” And then there were societies that forbade women education, didn’t allow them to show their faces or exercise free will in any form, forced them to submit to cliterectomies, stoned them to death for looking at men other than their husbands. Neither were men spared victimization, or wild beasts slaughtered for food, baubles, clothing and medical research. This planet was certainly one wrong piece of work, which was no news at all.

After the police had left without finding the girl, Pace built up the fire in his wood stove and poured himself a triple shot of Glenmorangie. He took a hard swallow and thought some more about brave and hopefully not “doomded” Gagool Angola. She needed a chance to live her own life without being continually subjected to stupidity, cruelty and indifference. What could he do about it? Pace knocked back the rest of his Scotch and promised himself to find out.