Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  He cursed and looked up and said something that might have been a prayer. I blinked, which seemed to take a very long time.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said.

  “Tell me now.”

  “You’re not going to die!”

  “Why stay, Dev?”

  I focused on the whites of his eyes, very bright and wide as the sky.

  He whispered, “I’m an informant,” and so it wasn’t the bullet that killed me, after all.

  Two.

  * * *

  After I died, I saw a light, blue and barrel-vaulted, with a tunnel at the end of it.

  * * *

  A little less than common. Three plus eight is eleven: a one and a one. Add that up and you have two.

  * * *

  That dark artery demanded attention, smug with its complication and its vice, but I turned to lines that pointed to a cloudless sky, and I waited.

  The tunnel told me that we don’t have beds, try Harlem Hospital, and what the hell are you insinuating, the poor woman’s as white as you are—but the tunnel should have known I didn’t care, that this train don’t see no white or black, no, this train. And yet the light, all uniformity and grace, seemed content to watch instead of offering its embrace. There were people in it, old men and women, speaking in tongues that had crossed an ocean and died on foreign soil. They wore no chains; in this place they raised their hands.

  At my back, the tunnel’s pulse grew stronger, so that I felt its broken heart, and where a bullet had ripped through its chest.

  It sang me a song I’d forgotten, about how a knife and a mystic liked to sit together in the grass beside the river when half-blown dandelions would catch his eyelashes and her flyaway hair. Silent for an hour, he would turn to her and, smiling, trace the V of cotton curls on her neck. Phyllis, he’d call her, sweet pea, all he ever needed to say.

  And so, unwilling, I turned from the light.

  Knives, knives, knives, wherever you look. But here, you got a heart and your lover does too and a spare one besides, to patch up the ones you’ve broken between you.

  5

  And then you’re twenty-one. It’s that dinner, Phyllis, that dinner we won’t let you forget. Victor’s invited you to some sort of parlay between him and the Barkley twins, heads of a smaller Harlem numbers bank. You know the Barkley brothers. You spent the summer of ’23 collecting single plays for them on 130th Street, between Lenox and Seventh Avenue. Bo Barkley had called you “Yellow Pea” and taught you memory tricks so you wouldn’t get caught with the incriminating strips under your garter. He liked our skills but he didn’t want to use you for them. Back then, you saw the value in that.

  Bo recognizes you, though he plays it off. He doesn’t need no oracle to see what you’re doing, dressed up real fine, your stiff hair bobbed short, among all these white mobsters. He sees the knives you haven’t bothered to hide, strapped to the inside of your wrists, and his eyes say, clear as your mommy’s: “What do you think you’re up to, Phyllis Green?”

  Victor and his gang only know Phyllis LeBlanc, nominally white and creole if pressed. The day they find Phyllis Green is the day they make her go for a swim in the East River. You know this, so you break Bo’s gaze and pretend to get a good look at Vic’s new place. Victor has bought this old gentlemen’s club in the West Village, the kind of joint filled with old Russian men smoking Cuban cigars and playing poker for pennies. He said he was going to make it the neatest blind pig in the Village. The Pelican, he’s calling it, a long bird that can hunt in high water. Tonight the place is half-gutted, an open surgery of exposed pipes and brick walls and thick beams they had to clear of cockroaches. But he has a table set up near the back, where he says his office will be.

  Victor brags that his mother has made you all a real Russian home-cooked meal as you sit down. You’re across from Red Man, who looks bored in that way he has, so that no one around him can so much as slouch. You and Red Man are the same, though back in Harlem they like to say you pass and Red Man doesn’t pass for anything but terrifying. He’s part Cherokee and not particularly red, but different enough that folks have to mark it somehow. His real name is Walter Finch—you asked the first time you met—but it’s hard to call him plain Walter at times like this, when you are all tight and wired with violence.

  The Barkley brothers are in their fifties but look twenty years younger, especially now, impeccably tailored in wide-legged and high-waisted suits of blue and sage green. They have matching silk in their pockets and Bo has a feather in his hat. Quentin and Bo aren’t identical, but it’s hard to tell when they’re tricked out like a matching set. You don’t get very far in the Harlem policy racket without a keen sense of style. Something that Victor, sadly, lacks. But then, white men always get twice the reward for a quarter of the work.

  Which is why, it turns out, he’s invited them here tonight: Russian Vic’s had a good look at the money that “Negro pool” brings in, with its thousands of penny bets a day, and he wants in. The Barkleys have a respectable bank but it isn’t as big as Madame Stephanie’s or Casper Holstein’s. Victor wants it for the numbers, then, but also for the hookers, which it turns out is Quentin’s side of the business. You didn’t know that.

  You feel, for a moment that is not nearly long enough, as young as you are.

  After Mrs. Dernov has served you all her dumpling soup and scurried out like a rat from a sinking ship, Victor places his hands flat on the table with a force that startles everybody.

  “So here’s how I see it. You fine brothers keep a percentage and run the operation, and I take my cut for protection. I also get my pick of the girls to set them up down here. There’s always a market for the mulattoes … I believe you people call them high yellow?”

  You think—you’re not sure—that he glances at you as he says this. Just for a moment, a barely malicious slide across your freckles and wide nose, but it’s enough to make us clench and ease the knife from the left wrist holster. We’re ready to defend, but you’ve always been careful, and Victor’s gaze is now steady on Quentin and Bo. They are silent with outrage and fear. The brothers don’t have the experience to play with Vic, and he knows it. The numbers might be illegal, but they’ve never been mob business. Until now.

  “Your cut,” Bo says, at last, in his best white-people voice. “And how much would that be?”

  Victor fishes out a dumpling with his fingers and drops it in his mouth whole and chews, smiling all the while. Red Man shifts, very slightly, to his left. The knife slides the rest of the way out of your holster before you realize it. We know, even if you don’t, how this will end.

  “I’m feeling generous,” says Russian Vic, around a half-chewed mouthful of stewed pork and beef. The brothers haven’t done more than sip the broth. “Let’s say … fifty percent? That seems…”

  There is a moment, in the airless gap left by Victor’s dangling verb, in which you think you won’t need us. Bo is too clever to fall for Victor’s jawed traps. Then Quentin speaks for the first time all evening:

  “Outrageous. That’s extortion, not protection.”

  Bo glances sharply at his brother and puts a restraining hand on his shoulder. “My brother means to say, that we’d like some time to consider your terms, and perhaps negotiate a little, no offense intended for your generous offer.”

  Vic slides his greasy fingers into the broth again, puts another dumpling into that gaping maw. And you know. Victor never eats so much as before he gets to killing someone.

  You look at Bo, straight at him. “Run,” you whisper.

  He stands, he manages that much, but Quentin won’t budge, and so is an easy target when Victor nods and one of the men standing behind them shoots Quentin in the shoulder.

  “Now, is that outrageous enough for you?” Victor says. “Because I can do more.”

  Quentin roars; there’s no other word for it. He rocks the table as he pushes himself upright and Victor’s soup bowl spills over.

  “We came
here,” Quentin pants, clutching his arm, “in good faith. In good faith! We run a clean business—”

  “Aside from the hookers and the numbers,” Victor says, very mildly. He picks a dumpling, split and leaking, from his lap. You swallow and feel every unchewed morsel of meat and dough in your stomach rise like the Euphrates.

  Bo tugs again on his brother’s good arm, but he hasn’t taken his eyes off Victor. “We agree,” he says, and you hear every dirty curse he doesn’t use behind those soft words. “Now let us go home.”

  You take a breath to speak into the silence that stretches across the table, but Red Man puts a finger on your knee, soft as a moth, and your voice falls away. You have a sudden vision of Bo as Jesus in an awful white man’s parody of the Last Supper, his brother on one side and his greatest enemy on the other, a man who would sup with him and then kill him, a man who has placed himself beyond God, beyond all covenants. The deal Victor’s offering them is an insult, and he knows it. He also knows they have no choice but to swallow the shit he’s serving them and thank massa for allowing them even half of the empire they built. After all, a black man’s labor is only his until a white man decides he wants it.

  Victor breaks the silence. “Sit,” he says. “Sit, please. You haven’t finished your soup.” He smiles. It’s the first time you’ve seen that smile, though you will mark it more often over the years. It’s a smile that will grow sharper the more metal he folds into his jaw, but even now the holster of the five-inch knife is warming in your left palm. You keep your hands ready. We gave them to you for this kind of danger, after all.

  But you don’t use our gift—that power. You’re terrified of that moment you defend them and Victor and Jack and the Body and every other white man at that table turns and sees Yellow Pea. Red Man already does, but you’ve always known that your colors are safe with him. So you wait. And we judge you for it, Phyllis, we make the first red mark in your ledger. Not for your first half-dozen kills, not even for pretending to be one of them, but for when you denied us our purpose, stilled our power and allowed great evil to pass on by.

  The Barkley brothers sit. They don’t speak, though Quentin grunts occasionally as his blood soaks his fine suit jacket. What a waste of good tailoring, you think. We don’t judge you for this. We all cope in our own ways.

  “Now,” Victor says, “I think we ought to make that split sixty-forty, what do you…”

  “We agree,” Bo grits out.

  “Good!” Victor says. “Let’s shake on it and you can be on your way.” He stands and reaches across the table to Quentin’s bloody right hand. Quentin yelps in pain when he catches it, which turns into a scream when Victor yanks him hard across the table, spilling the rest of your dinners into your laps. Vic pulls out his gun, a nickel-plated Colt .45, and smashes it three times across the back of Quentin’s head. Bone crunches like wet popcorn. Quentin convulses for a few seconds and then goes still. He is dead. Just like that, one of the finest numbers men in Harlem is dead and you did nothing to stop it.

  Bo stands just where he is, unmoving, in shock. “Quin?” he whispers. “Brother?” But you know Bo knows he’s gone. “We had a deal,” he says.

  Victor makes a show of wiping the wrong end of his gun. “Well, we do, but then you goddamn niggers just had to get up your noses. Now that won’t do. Won’t do for people to think Vic can get disrespected by a pair of know-nothing niggers.”

  You and Bo flinch every time he says the word. Beside you, Red Man is as still as glass.

  “So let’s say that your brother here is a … lesson? And you go back home about your business?”

  Bo nods, nods again, looks at you—just for a second, but he does it, because he knows what you are and he is witness to your silence—and says, “Like hell I will, you ofay devil.”

  His bullet grazes Victor’s neck. It’s the only one he has time to get off: first Jack, then Victor, bring him down with five body shots.

  Victor walks around the table. Somehow Bo is still breathing.

  “Red Man,” Vic says. His voice is shaky, like he’s just climaxed.

  “Yes, Vic?”

  “Tie him up. I want to take my time.”

  You end it, then. Take us up when it’s too late to do much good and sink a three-inch knife precisely into Bo Barkley’s temple.

  “They agreed,” you say, before Victor can spit something out past his rage.

  “And I changed my mind, angel. I don’t appreciate rogue knives. Never know who they might cut?”

  “Someone is going to notice they’re gone. They’re respected businessmen up in Harlem, how do you expect—”

  And Victor, he just waves his hand. Lucky for you, his rage has passed.

  “They’re just a pair of niggers in nice suits. Police wouldn’t do a thing even if I asked them to. Now somebody get me a goddamn bourbon. You do it, angel, you know just how I like it.”

  And you do.

  The hands that hold our gift chip ice as good as they throw knives.

  The rot settles in, then, settles in for good, but power is a fine perfume.

  You won’t smell it for years.

  * * *

  “She’s waking up. Can you hear me, darling?”

  I heard the dentist first. I wished I couldn’t. I took a breath and then attempted, with some small success, to push the air through rough vocal chords.

  “Good girl, Phyllis. Open your eyes, that’s it.”

  Victor was here, too. He was no harpist in heaven, and I discovered an ache, in and among the others that had gathered in celebration of my unexpected return, because he had bothered to come and that meant he still intended me to be of use to him.

  I squinted up at the two hovering faces—one dark-haired, one crowned with tarnished silver—and thought of many questions, none of which I could, or would, ask.

  The dentist rubbed my fingers between his hands, warm and treacherously comforting. “Darling, they say you’ll be all right.”

  “Whoopee.”

  Victor frowned. “The woman who shot you…”

  I stared at him.

  “Recognize her?” he tried again. “Your job, angel. That mark you didn’t want to kill nearly killed you. And got away. Think you ought to…”

  I couldn’t help it: “Kill her?” I raised an eyebrow, since I couldn’t even manage to tilt my head.

  He shrugged. “When you’re healed up. Red Man will look for her till then. My angel needs…”

  “A trip to the country?”

  Victor grinned like that was a good joke. “Revenge, dollface.”

  “Crickets, Victor. Clean air. A whole lot of nothing to do, that sounds good right about now. Shit, I hurt.”

  The dentist squeezed my hand. “Should I call the nurse? You can have more morphine.”

  “Outside, Marty. Your gal and I have something to discuss.”

  The dentist’s head left my field of vision and a door closed softly. I grimaced, and Victor caught it. “Bit of a limp fish, that man of yours.”

  “Not in bed.”

  That made him laugh. I’d been good at that in the old days, when he and I had spent years building the legend of Victor’s angel of justice. I’d reveled in the messy grit of it; I had killed with the passion of the newly converted, and the vision of a Harlem girl unexpectedly divested of obscurity.

  “Get healthy, Phyllis. Get strong. But then you’re going to kill that woman, ’cause no one’s going to talk about Victor’s angel the way they’re talking now. You’re my girl.”

  “Your knife,” I said.

  His smile was crooked, fond. “With the killing edge.”

  “What if your knife got lost, Victor?”

  He rested a veined hand on my collarbone, where the bandages began, and traced its length. “I’d look for it. This doesn’t have to be complicated. We’ve done pretty well by each other, over the years.”

  My hands jumped.

  “There’s a copper out there who wants to see you.”
<
br />   I squinted at him. “What’s the matter, they stopped taking your money?”

  “When someone gets gunned down on Bleecker, forms gotta get filed. You don’t know anything, right? Didn’t even see the dame?”

  “Where’s Dev? Or Tamara? They saw her.”

  Victor gave me a long look. “Not an integrated hospital, Phyllis. Have to save the family visits for when you get out of here.”

  I wondered what he meant by that, just like he wanted me to. A hundred blunt needles, iron-hot and intermittently electrified, bored into my right side. Disordered with pain, I nearly called his bluff—so my great-grandmother was a slave and my grandaddy was a sharecropper and sure as shit I grew up in Harlem, Victor, I’ve always been your Negro angel—but that wasn’t how we played the game. Flat on my back in a hospital bed wasn’t the time to change the rules. And I remembered—or someone had reminded me—of a dinner, an ambush, and the forgotten Negro blood that had baptized the Pelican.

  Someone knocked and opened the door. The cop—young, and not one I recognized, which meant he might be one of Commissioner Valentine’s rotating army of squeaky-clean recruits—nodded at Victor and pulled up a chair.

  “Just a few minutes, ma’am,” he said. “You can wait outside if you like, Mr. Dernov.”

  Victor smiled. The cop pretended not to notice. “Got places to be, anyhow. Rest up, Phyllis. I’m sure this fine officer of the law will keep his questions to the point.”

  The cop frowned after him. I decided he was either clean or on the take and unhappy about it. Either way, dangerous. I affected unthreatening weakness, which wasn’t difficult.

  “Your full name is Phyllis LeBlanc, correct?” he said.

  I nodded. A little joke, that name. Phyllis Green only existed north of 110th Street. I wondered when Gloria would start to worry about me. Knowing Gloria, it would probably be two weeks before she even bothered to knock on my door, and thank goodness.