Creatures of Passage. Morowa Yejidé

in the raging bonfires of the night, he knew all that could be known about what was lost and what was found. He even kept a tin can hidden deep in one of the junk piles. It was filled with what he called “last things,” those final items that a lost soul possessed. Like the last Nacotchtank Indian’s leather cord and a runaway slave’s silver coin. Like the gold necklace he found in that trunk and the little pink hair barrettes he found in a creek. There were those last things and more. But no matter how desperate he was to relieve the pain of losing what he could never find by selling or trading what he collected, once he put something in his secret tin can, he never touched it again. Because for reasons that he could not explain, he felt responsible for the safekeeping of these last things in a kind of cosmic escrow, until those who lost them came looking in this life or the next.

      “Just want to pass on through,” Nephthys said, looking into the skeins of the scrapyard. She was feeling the onset of the stiffness again, and she grew anxious as she stood talking to the stranger. “Gotta do. Gotta move.”

      “Ain’t no way to pass through this place, lady. All’s you can do is move around in it.”

      Nephthys shrugged, intrigued. “Long as I can keep going, I aim to move around forever.”

      “Look, lady. Leaving is all you can do.” Find Out was getting aggravated by her being there, an interruption of his fixation, for the substance he needed to stay dead was calling him again. But then he saw a swirl of blue smoke form and rise behind her and gather about her head. It was an unusual sight—the smoke showing him someone he hadn’t been searching for—and he looked at the woman carefully. “What’s your name?”

      “Nephthys.”

      “What?”

      “Nephthys.”

      “What you want, Nephthys?”

      “Ain’t sure.”

      The blue smoke of his trade had trailed down a tunnel of flattened and stacked steel, and Find Out thought of the Plymouth he’d found by the Anacostia River and parked back there. It was just where he left it all those years ago. And now he wondered, as he watched the blue smoke curl above this woman’s head, if she was who the car and its occupant were waiting for. Like the last things in his tin. “You wanna see it?”

      “Wuh?”

      “The car.”

      Nephthys shrugged again, eager to get moving. “All right.”

      They walked deep into the metal cavern, each tunnel of refuse tunneling into another, one pathway dimmer than the one before it. On they went, until they came upon the car like the discovery of an eighth wonder of the world. A 1967 Plymouth Belvedere, blue like the sky.

      Find Out pushed away the steel bumper of a truck that had fallen on the hood without leaving a single scratch. He stood by the trunk and waited, listening.

      There was a low thump.

      He looked at the blue smoke circling, thinking about how the car had once served one purpose but now might serve another. The key was still in the ignition. “Try it.”

      “Why fuh?”

      Find Out watched the blue smoke swirl about the car. “You’ll know. All I know is that it’s yours.”

      Nephthys looked sideways at Find Out. “Cyan’t drive. Never learned.”

      “It won’t matter.”

      The stiffness was getting worse but Nephthys hesitated.

      “Go ahead. It’s your car.”

      Nephthys looked at the Plymouth, incredulous. “Cyan’t be no car of mine.”

      “But it is. Go on.”

      Nephthys got into the car and sank down into the seat.

      “Turn the ignition.”

      “Wuh?”

      “Turn it on.”

      Nephthys fingered the key and turned it. The car roared to life.

      “See, like I told you.”

      Nephthys listened to the engine rumble, thinking of the places she could go, how she could keep moving with such a vessel. If only she could drive.

      There was a loud thud from the trunk.

      “One more thing,” said Find Out. And here he paused, thinking about that night when he passed out in the tall reeds of the Anacostia River, and awoke to two men pulling a body from the trunk of the Plymouth. Through the smog of the substance he’d been consuming so as not to feel alive, he watched the men carry the body to the banks and throw it into the current. He found what traces were to be found after they were gone, including a gold necklace he fished out of the trunk and put in his tin can. “The car is haunted,” he said. “But she won’t hurt you.”

      “Who?”

      “The white girl in the trunk.”

      Nephthys blinked. “Oh.”

      There was another loud thud.

      Find Out watched the blue smoke swirl and dissipate slowly. “Look like she been waiting for you.”

      Nephthys then felt an inexplicable comfort as she gripped the steering wheel. She looked at Find Out. They would later engage in another transaction—she and this man—the likes of which could not yet be imagined. But as she stared into the dash board, she knew what was next. And without having to be taught any steps, she released the brake and put the car in drive, pressed her foot on the gas pedal, and maneuvered out of the tunnels of the scrapyard.

      * * *

      Nephthys took the haunted Plymouth wherever her wandering heart carried her, the ghost in the trunk a kind of charm it seemed, for she was never stopped by the police, nor did the car break down for any reason or ever run out of gas. The fuel gauge remained in the same position since its trunk dweller’s fateful night—three-quarters full—and never moved again. But one dawn, as she sat in the Plymouth near the banks of the Potomac River, a fog formed over the surface of the hood. It grew thicker and rose higher. Nephthys stared through the windshield as it moved toward her, and it snaked into the car and coiled around her thoughts, giving them voice and eyes and skin.

      The truth was that Nephthys wasn’t the first, for there was one of her kind in each epoch. The last one was an enslaved woman who hailed from the Ashanti Empire. She once lived on the campus of Columbian College (which later became George Washington University) with the wealthy college steward who owned her. And she too looked into the fog and heard the cry of wandering hearts. For in that low visibility of the fog’s atmosphere, where the living felt around as if blind, the fog tried to help men realize that they were but creatures of passage, pointing the way from one destination to another. So that the enslaved woman snuck off the Columbian campus each dawn and moved in secret from one quadrant to another, helping those she heard in the fog to escape elsewhere.

      But Nephthys had no way of knowing this as she sat in the Plymouth in Foggy Bottom, staring into sentient mist. What she knew was that every phosphorous dawn after that, the fog came to her, and she heard within it the eerie call of wandering hearts. And that was when her unbreakable bond with the fog began.

      * * *

      A dog barked in the dawn and Nephthys shifted in the driver’s seat, feeling stiff. She looked at the timepiece on the Plymouth’s dashboard. She’d been looking at it for years now, not because she needed to know the time, for she had her own sense of the passage of minutes and hours. She looked for the assurance of knowing exactly what the pointing arrows indicated. They read 5:35 a.m. She nodded, comforted by the surety of the hands. Because numbers were more certain to her than words. And in her decades of living, she had learned that she knew more than what letters and words and sentences could describe, and she saw and felt and spoke of things that such glyphs were too limited to convey. What the alphabet formed in little combinations had never held more importance to her than the happenings of