The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  “One of them Holy Rollers, huh.” The woman spat another plug of brown spit onto the roof. “And yet you followed me up here.”

  Rosetta shrugged. “I gotta keep an eye on the only other black woman in this place.”

  “Only bla— Oh my God, this girl. This girl!” Minnie threw back her head and gave another squeal that descended into a husky chuckle. Despite herself, Rosetta smiled.

  When the woman got herself under control, she dug in her coat pocket and pulled out a business card. “Here.”

  “What’s this?”

  “My way of sayin’ sorry for swearin’ at you the other day. Tonight. Eleven p.m. Follow the directions on the card.” The woman sauntered to the stairwell. “And don’t let anyone follow ya. We don’t just let any ole person in.”

  The Alley Cat Club was located around 47th and Grand Boulevard, near the Regal Theater. The club itself was hard to find. You had to pass through two alleyways, tap on a back door three times, get ushered through a low hallway into another alley, go down some steps, and tap on another door two times. Prohibition officially ended seven years ago, but the Alley Cat still preferred to remain hidden from scrutinizing eyes.

  And with good reason. Minnie had read in this morning’s edition of the Defender that there had been another club closure. The SPC cited that the owner had a faulty air purifier. Funny that none of the clubs the SPC closed were ever allowed to reopen.

  The Alley Cat was the opposite of the SPC—dim, humid, and smoky, even with the purifiers cranked on high. Dark girls in orange cat ears and floppy tails waded through the sea of tables. Men, black and white, tossed back their drinks and tried to cop a feel from the waitresses, roaring in laughter when they got their hands slapped. Women decked in furs and jewels mocked the men and flirted with the busboys. Onstage, a colored girl in nothing but beads jutted her hips to the strains of a ukulele—which could barely be heard over the chatter, the shrieks, and the occasional crash of chairs toppling over as a fight broke out and just as quickly stopped.

  No one wore face masks here.

  Well. Except one person. When Minnie glanced out at the crowd from backstage, there was the young Holy Roller sitting at one of the front tables, prim and proper, breathing mask firmly in place. She looked so stiff and uncomfortable, one of the waitresses had taken pity on her and poured her a glass of ice water. Now and then she peeked up at the dancer onstage before dropping her eyes back to her hands folded on the table.

  “Hey, Lawler,” Minnie called out.

  He put down the trunk he was carrying and scrambled over. Minnie had met Lawler back in her touring days. He sang on a few recordings with her before managing to woo her away from her first husband. Nowadays he spent most of his days doing the occasional odd job and most of his nights being an asshole. “What’s up, baby?”

  She pointed to the table. “I want you to keep an eye on that girl there.”

  Lawler pulled out a rag to wipe his sweaty face. “She get lost on her way to the midnight prayer meeting?”

  “Goddammit, just watch her. Jesus.”

  The dancing girl did one last shimmy and scampered off, blowing kisses to the audience, and Minnie sauntered onto the stage. Tonight she wore her best jewelry: a ring made from a six-sided die, and a silver-dollar bracelet made from coins minted in the year of her birth. She had brushed her hair back, leaving a few curls high on her brow, and had donned a pair of glasses that made her look, according to one of her male friends, “like a colored lady teacher in a neat southern school.”

  Instantly the audience leapt to a standing ovation; outside the Alley Cat she may not have been well known, but here everyone knew and loved her.

  “Hey, y’all!” Minnie yelled. “How ya feelin’?”

  “Fine!” the audience roared back.

  She strolled to the left of center stage, where, resting against an amp, sat her new toy: a steel-bodied electric National guitar, already plugged in. How Andre managed to get one when they weren’t officially available to the public, she didn’t know. She slung it over herself, got it settled in a comfy position, then drew her fingers down the strings. The electric chord crashed into the room, making people howl and Church Girl jump.

  “Whoo, I don’ know about you, but I feel like singing tonight. Y’all wanna hear me sing?”

  The audience shrieked their approval. Church Girl looked around, her eyes wide. She looked ready to bolt.

  “We got you, Minnie!” Andre shouted from the back. Andre Fuqua, the owner of the Alley Cat, was a big guy with a tiny pencil mustache to go with his high, almost girlish voice. His purifiers were the best ones off the black market, and every so often he paid off a couple of guys to reroute SPC inspectors to other bars and clubs. “Sing ‘Fashion Plate Daddy’ for me!”

  “I sing whatever I goddamn feel like,” Minnie snapped. And she launched into “Jump Little Rabbit.”

  Her fingers came alive: frolicking, spinning, jitterbugging down the strings, while she belted rhythm on the guitar’s body. She made her voice growl, snarl, and groan as the songs tumbled from her in a waterfall of sound: “Jailhouse Trouble Blues,” “Can’t Afford to Lose My Man,” “Soo Cow Soo.”

  She whipped the audience into a frothing frenzy with “Dirty Mother for Ya,” letting the rhyme lead up to where a cuss word ought to be, then cooling them down with a lick of glissando and a tamer word, only to rile them back up with an arched eyebrow and a jangling of notes. Every once in a while she glanced over at Church Girl, expecting to see her storm out in a huff. But Church Girl stayed put, brown eyes wide and wet above her mask, following every movement of Minnie’s hands on the strings with awe.

  And why wouldn’t she? The blues was the pluck of callused fingers on guitar string, the mmmm thrumming deep in the throat, the ice clinking in a glass of forbidden whiskey. It was the moaning and the wailing locked behind a stoic face, of lowering your gaze when a white man yelled at you, the standing outside of the church and knowing that you will never, ever be let inside. That night Minnie forgot she was Lizzie Douglas, exterminator, whose voice could endanger the lives of everyone in this room. Tonight she was Memphis Minnie, blueswoman, who could play a mean guitar and make a church girl cry.

  When she finished her final lick, Minnie sashayed off the stage, sweating and thirsty. Lawler handed her a gin and tonic on ice, and she went to plunk herself at Church Girl’s table. “So. There’s the answer to your question on the roof.” She tossed down the drink and ordered another one. “What you think of that?”

  Church Girl wiped at her wet cheeks. “You just like breaking the law.”

  Minnie blinked, then howled and pounded the table. “That’s the first thing you say to me? After I pour myself out like that? Jesus . . .”

  The girl broke in: “—is God and Savior and Lord of all.” She then crossed her arms and gave her head a firm, decisive shake as if that settled the matter, which only made Minnie crack up even harder.

  Rosetta came back to the Alley Cat the following week. And the next week. And the next.

  She always sat up front, prim and proper, never drinking anything harder than tonic water. She didn’t need to—she drank the acts onstage with wide, thirsty eyes. Sometimes Minnie caught her tapping her foot or moving her head, but after a few minutes she’d stop, as if mortified she was actually enjoying herself. The girl was so damn solemn. It was hard to tell that she was the same person as the woman in the newspaper, guitar in hand, gazing heavenward. At least she stopped wearing the filter mask inside the club.

  They didn’t speak to each other when they were at the SPC. It was an unspoken agreement; they always got such looks, as if two black women in the same room together was too much of a threat. But at the Alley Cat it was easier for Minnie to hang with the girl. And Rosetta was starting to show signs of loosening up.

  One night they spotted Rosetta’s handler, Marty, sitting at Andre’s table. He looked up, caught sight of them, and turned a deep red. Minnie grabbed Marty by the arm a
nd dragged him, protesting, over to a corner, leaving Rosetta to stand there staring awkwardly at Andre.

  “Look. I don’t know what the SPC got against clubs, but if you breathe one word of me and Rosetta bein’ here, I’ll shoot you with my own gun.”

  “What? Why would I even—”

  “Look.” Minnie jerked her head toward Andre’s table. Rosetta had sat down and was now laughing at something he said, her demeanor relaxed. “This place is doin’ some good for her. If the SPC finds out the both of us been comin’ here, they shut down this place so fast, even you being Andre’s favorite boytoy won’t cheer him up.”

  Marty’s red face reversed color, draining to paper white. “How did you know?”

  “I know Andre. You’re his type.”

  He folded his arms and laid a finger alongside his sharp nose. “Fine, I won’t tell the SPC about you and Rosetta being here. Just don’t tell her about me and Andre. I don’t know how she’ll feel about it.”

  Turned out Marty wasn’t all that bad of a guy. He and Minnie chatted for hours about blues artists such as Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Bessie Smith. Minnie also tried to pick his brain about the SPC. The longer she worked at the SPC, the more things bothered her. For instance, just what did they do with all the stump dust she and Rosetta collected? Where did it all go? How come she and Rosetta weren’t allowed to go down to the lower levels of the building? What was with all the lab coats?

  Marty didn’t know. “I’m not allowed on the lower levels either. The only reason I got this job is because I don’t ask too many questions. I just do what I’m told, you know?”

  The SPC assigned Minnie a new handler, a thick mooch of a guy who must’ve felt he was a sergeant in the army. He yelled at her if she did not stop singing immediately when he told her to stop. Forced her to sit in the back seat of his car and not touch anything. Harassed her if she lingered over lunch just a little longer than the required fifteen minutes, or if she needed a break or the bathroom during an extermination. After a week of this, Minnie was at her wits’ end.

  It was Rosetta who suggested that she and Minnie combine forces at work. “Right now we’re both doin’ our own thing. If we’re the only exterminators in the black part of the South Side, we need a better way of hitting all the stumps that pop up. We need to plan our routes together. That way we can cover more ground, and your handler gets more work to keep him busy and not so focused on you.”

  So from that point on, Minnie had her handler take her to Rosetta’s apartment, where all of them divvied up the stump sightings for the day. At first the mooch grumbled and complained, but he shut up quick when Minnie not only started meeting her quota but exceeding it. For the first time since becoming an exterminator, Minnie was finally making money.

  “Hey, we make a pretty good team,” she told Rosetta. “Maybe one day you and I need to get together to play for real. I keep hearing how good of a guitar picker you are.” Minnie grinned, showing all her gold teeth.

  Rosetta matched her with a rare grin of her own. “They used’ta say to me, Shout, sister, shout! and I would do this trick I learned from Mom—”

  She broke off and turned away, her face gone stiff as if shutting her emotions behind a door.

  This always happened. Rosetta would get to relaxing and then something caused her to shut down, pulling a hard shell of grief down to protect herself. For any other person, Minnie would’ve given up.

  But Minnie had seen Rosetta’s fingers twitch on the table when a horrible guitar picker would be onstage at the Alley Cat, drumming out correct notes with a dexterity that intrigued Minnie. This girl needed to play again; that much was clear.

  So Minnie invited Rosetta over to her house on Thursday nights for dinner. She taught Rosetta how to play spades. She told stories of when she toured with the Ringling Brothers Circus and busked on the Midway at Beale Street, though she only talked about the good times, not the darker, more questionable things she did to survive. It felt good to hang out with a fellow musician. Now if she could just get the girl to loosen up, things would be good. She just needed time, and if there was one thing that Lizzie “Memphis Minnie” Douglas had, it was plenty of time.

  That is, until the day the SPC shut the Alley Cat down.

  One morning Rosetta opened her front door, expecting to greet Marty, but found a slew of SPC agents instead. They took her to the SPC, where she spent a full day undergoing a full body check for spores, inside and out. Throughout it the agents asked her about the Alley Cat. How long had she been going there? Did she ever sing?

  Bewildered, Rosetta said she had never, ever sung at the Alley Cat. She kept quiet, however, when they asked about Minnie, staring at her hands in front of her, not willing to tattletale on the only female friend she had had since . . . well, since her momma died.

  The agents sighed and made Rosetta rewatch the movie reels they had showed her at training.

  It was close to midnight when they finally released her to Marty, who told Rosetta the truth. “The SPC stormed the Alley Cat after you left last night. They said they found stump dust in a small closet and shut the whole place down.”

  Rosetta wanted to curl into a ball. Her eyes felt gritty, but when she closed them, she kept seeing the images of dead people from the training, their pain and horror frozen forever on their faces. “How did they know Minnie and I were there?”

  “Minnie’s handler. He tailed her after work and saw the two of you meeting up in front of the club.” Marty scowled. “Andre’s a wreck. He said that closet is part of his routine check day and night and he hadn’t seen any stumps there at all.” Marty stopped, peered closer at Rosetta. “Are you all right? You’re shaking.”

  The full body check had included a laxative to clean out her insides. Her mouth tasted like chalk. “I’m fine. How’s Minnie?”

  “They released her a little bit before you. Are you sure you’re all right? If you want to take tomorrow off—”

  “No,” Rosetta said firmly. “We’ll work, same as always.”

  “But—”

  “That’s my job, isn’t it? To prevent something like this from happening? Come on. We’ll talk to Minnie tomorrow.”

  But Minnie didn’t show up to Rosetta’s house the following day. Or the day after that. At the end of the week, Rosetta had Marty drive her straight to Minnie’s tiny house, not too far from her own apartment. All the shades were shut, and no one answered the door. “Maybe she isn’t home,” Marty said. Rosetta threw him an annoyed look and went around to the back.

  Minnie had finally earned enough from the exterminating job to buy an air purifier, a hulking beast which stuck out of her left kitchen window. “Like my twenty-year-old ass,” Minnie had joked while it was being installed. Because of that, she no longer used her window filters, so Rosetta and Marty were able to peer into the kitchen window to see Minnie, clad in a pink housecoat, lying facedown on the kitchen floor. The back door was unlocked, and Rosetta and Marty had to shove it open. A strong reek of moldy food and unwashed funk greeted them. Empty bottles, newspapers, and dirty dishes littered the floor.

  “Oh dear God,” Rosetta said, surveying the mess. “Is she dead?”

  Minnie curled into herself and coughed a small stream of clear liquid onto the linoleum.

  “No,” Marty said, wrinkling his nose. He stooped to pick up a half-empty bottle of gin. “Just drunk.”

  “Oh.” Rosetta looked down at the still form of Minnie for a long time, then turned to Marty with a bright smile. “Okay. You head on home. I’ll take it from here.”

  “You sure?”

  Rosetta bent over Minnie to hide her face. “Go on. I’ll be fine.”

  When Marty left, Rosetta dropped her smile. She half steered, half carried Minnie to the bathroom. She started the shower, then reached for Minnie, uncertain of whether she should undress Minnie or just stick her under the spray. But Minnie was coming out of her stupor, grumbling and pushing away Rosetta’s hands to fumble at the houseco
at’s belt. Rosetta started to speak, then pressed her lips tight and went back to the kitchen. She put coffee in the percolator, found a somewhat clean skillet, and braved the icebox for bacon and eggs.

  By the time Minnie moseyed in, toweling her hair, the bacon lay, still sizzling, on a plate and Rosetta had slipped the last egg into the hot bacon grease in the skillet. Minnie plopped herself at the small table in the center of the kitchen. “Hooooooweeee! Man, I’m so hungry, my stomach hurt like it’s got meningitis. Hey, you know I wrote a song about that?” She began humming, slapping the table in beat. “‘Hmmmm hmmm hmmm . . . the Minnie-jitis killin’ meee.’ Get it? Minnie-jitis?” She chuckled at herself.

  Rosetta stirred the grits, keeping her face toward the hot stove. “How long have you been lying on the floor like that?”

  “Damn, girl, you never ain’t seen a bender? Hell, this ain’t nuthin’. Should tell you about the time when I was busking back in Memphis. Got into a drinking match with Tiny Joe. Drunk him under in three hours. Then he drunk me into bed, and oooweeeee!” She leaned back in the chair, chuckling to herself. “Came home strutting like an alley cat. Stinkin’ like one too.”

  Rosetta flipped the eggs over easy. “I just thought you’d have more common sense than this.”

  “So I drank too much. Don’t worry yourself, Church Girl. Get some food in me and I’ll be back singing for the Man and my supper in no time. Jesus Christ—”

  Rosetta didn’t correct her.

  Minnie started rooting through the dirty dishes on the table, looking for her tin of tobacco. “All right, what’s with you? So the SPC finally caught up to us. No harm done.”

  “No harm done?” Rosetta whirled to face Minnie. “They found stump spores at the Alley Cat. If you had sung, people would’ve died. And not only that, you missed a whole week of work! And for what? Because you were lying drunk on the floor all week?”

  “Yeah, but no one died, didn’t they?” Minnie finally found the tin and tried opening it. Either the lid was on too tight or she was still too hungover to do anything, so she threw it back on the table in disgust. “Hell, it could’ve grown and burst anyway without us being there at all.”