Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  I’ve never heard that particular slang before. I stick my offending members in my pockets. “I’ve got a trick, sure. What’s yours?”

  He steps from the shadows. Though he seemed harmless before, even pitiable, I take a half step back. It’s the way he smiles. Like a man with a gun in his pocket. I saw that too often in my detective years to not recognize it here. Belatedly, it occurs to me that he could be more like Pea than like me. The thought is terrifying.

  “You wanna see? It’s pretty special, but none of the eggs around here appreciate it.”

  He reaches for me slowly as he speaks, daring me to keep still. I step neatly aside. I don’t know what knack he has in his hands, but this isn’t how to find out.

  “Chicken,” he says. “And what can you do?”

  “I can touch threats. I can tell if you want to hurt me, Alvin.” Which he doesn’t, I realize. But he was thinking about it.

  I don’t know what happened to the rest of Little Easton’s black residents, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the whites ran them out for just a hint of that uncanny extra Alvin and I shared. I recall what Victor had said to Pea, when he decided to drop the pretense that sustained their relationship for over a decade: I can’t say I’ve ever come across another white girl with the hands. His greatest joke. In this, white people were stultifyingly predictable; if they could not steal it, they would kill it, but they would never, ever let a colored person have it.

  White people in the city might not know or care about the hands, but Craver had always made sure that everybody in town knew what he had working for him in his store. I have no doubt the arrangement with Alvin is the same.

  I hear Pea and Craver three aisles over, discussing nebulizers and spray attachments. I think of calling for her. I do think of it. But I lived ten years without her, and danger has surrounded me most of my life. Safety emasculates, I have discovered, far more than hazard, or pain. Safety makes me wonder where she goes for hours, even days at a time with no word. Safety makes me worry not for her, but for myself. Pea is my monster, big enough to scare off all the others. Most days, even the ones I invited myself.

  “Alvin, come over here and make yourself useful, boy. The lady needs some sulfuric acid and one of the ten-pound compost bags from out back.”

  Alvin jerks at the sound of Craver’s thin needle of a voice and pushes past me. I follow slowly. As soon as Pea sees me her expression flickers—a frown, lifted hopefully, mercilessly erased.

  “A new assistant?” I ask Craver, once Alvin has thumped down the back steps.

  He lifts his bony shoulders in a speaking shrug. “You know how it is, Davey. People in this town can be old-fashioned.”

  Craver doesn’t even look at Pea. As if his reasons for cordially disliking her aren’t every bit as hidebound. Living in sin, he has called it in my hearing, but it is Pea who bears the weight of disapproval. Ever since Adam, Pea said one night. Woman, thy sin is beauty.

  That’s not the line, is it?

  She had kissed me gently. Course not. A man wrote it, now, didn’t he?

  “There’s something strange about him,” I say.

  “I’m disappointed to hear that from you, Davey.”

  Pea leans against the shelf. “Now, why’s that, Mr. Craver?”

  “It’s for Davey to tell you the story, not me, Miss Green.”

  I sigh. “The boy told me he has saint’s hands.”

  “And our neighbors don’t like that any more than they ever did.”

  Pea glances at me. “Is he? What sort of saint?”

  “I don’t”—Craver’s self-righteousness snaps like a matador’s cape in Pea’s direction—“see how it matters.”

  Pea leans in. “Oh, the kid’s done something, hasn’t he?”

  “His gift is a test from the Lord, one I’m ashamed to say most of the men—and women—in this town have failed to pass. If we have not sinned in the eyes of the Lord, we have nothing to fear from Alvin’s—”

  An unexpected thud bucks the floorboards. A porcelain elephant topples from a high shelf. Pea catches it without looking. Craver doesn’t notice—the bag of compost has split in the fall, and Alvin stands like a conquistador above the mess and the stink. He looks too young to be so angry. Craver’s wattle trembles. “Boy, what the—”

  But the boy only has eyes for me. “Your worst secret, that’s what I know.” He takes a step forward, then another, tracking old manure and death across the paths of my childhood. “Just one little touch and I can tell you. And her.”

  My vision narrows to the boy’s hands, as dark as my father’s. Long, tapered fingers and bitten nails. Scars across his palms, ridged but neat and thin. Pea could tell me what kind of knife made those wounds, but I note the deliberation. He is going to touch me with those hands. He is going to know—everything—not even my father—

  The smell of blood congealing with the dirt and the shit in the yard behind the goat pen. The sight of it, fresh spilled. A horror distilled through years of grief into something desirable, and so desired. The more I hated violence, the more its evidence attracted me. I killed Victor, and the memory of it makes me stiff and miserable at night in the bed I cannot share with Pea. I love her, even the parts I hate, especially those, and I have never told her. Even she couldn’t forgive that.

  A decade ago I met a woman covered in someone else’s blood and she was my darkest fantasy come to life.

  She steps in front of me, my beloved, now very far from fantasy. She pushes Alvin against the shelves.

  He grunts. “I’ll touch you!”

  “Go ahead, kiddo. But if you touch him I’ll break your hands.”

  “Now look here, Miss Green, there’s no call to threaten the boy!”

  Phyllis doesn’t even hear him. She leans closer to Alvin, who gasps for air and shakes. His hands hover above her bare arms.

  “You understand? Dev is off-limits.”

  He tries to spit in her face, but it just dribbles down his chin. Phyllis laughs, wipes it with the back of her hand. I should stop her. I am limp with relief. Alvin is as dangerous as Pea. Another monster.

  There are tears tracking across the monster’s cheeks. He touches Pea and gasps.

  “You—”

  Pea takes a step back. “You got me, kiddo?”

  He just nods.

  “Miss Green, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the premises! I have promised this boy’s parents that I’ll protect him, and I’m honor bound to do it!”

  Pea turns to me and tilts her head in a silent question. “And didn’t you promise Dev’s mother that you would protect him?”

  “Davey is a grown man, Miss Green, and Alvin is an innocent child with an important gift.”

  “We’re leaving,” she says to me softly. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “Don’t hurt him.”

  “It’s you I—” She stops herself.

  Alvin squats in the spilled fertilizer like he’s forgotten how to stand. “Motherfucker,” he swears, staring at Pea. “Who the hell are you?”

  “As dangerous as you wish you were.”

  Even Craver has nothing to say. I follow her outside and take the offered cigarette without a word.

  * * *

  Three days later, Pea disappears.

  She takes the car that morning into Hudson for gardening supplies, but the sun sets behind the river without a sign of her. In the swinging chair in the garden, alone among the greenflies and her watermelon, I contemplate my letter from the president.

  It instructs me to report in ten days. I would rather kill myself than kill anyone else again.

  Dev, I will haunt you—

  The air is thick with the smells of things alive and dead. Fruiting plants redolent and desperate grow upon the casings and nutrient ash of last year’s life. It isn’t so unusual to feel the attraction of life’s impossible struggle from its end. It could even be the root of all sexual desire. And yet I know I am a freak to feel it so particularly. It sickens m
e, the thought of what war might make of that.

  There are ways of dealing with things like my letter. There are people I know, hiding secrets I can use. Not Walter, not after all we sacrificed to get out. He would expect an exchange of services. And if Pea learned what I’d done, she’d go back just to save me. Maybe Finn, my former reporting officer. It’s been years, but we have history. He might help.

  It starts to rain. Fat drops splash the page. The noise of tiny drums. I’m tempted to let them destroy it, but my hands re-fold the damp sheet and tuck it in my vest pocket. I worry about Pea, driving alone, at night, in the rain. But she might not be alone.

  Rain beats on the water at the bottom of the hill. And then, the fainter sound of distant thunder. I look toward the house: dark windows, closed doors, gutters choked and overrun. I am good at solitude. I have made myself develop the talent. But it feels different now. Closer. A cold kiss of a gun against my ribs, a soft suggestion. I never deserved her. She never knew me. And she leaves another hollow space, another windy tunnel that howls to me in Victor’s voice—I’ll haunt you—every time, every time she goes.

  I am alone. And then I’m not. Curiosity dances down my arms like a chill. Someone else’s intense, focused curiosity. Not Pea. Whatever else I sense from her presence, the love is always unmistakable. This person wants to use me. A familiar sensation, but one I haven’t felt for months. That old sense of danger pricks me, and I come awake.

  The rain feels fresher, colder.

  I forget about Pea.

  The boy from Craver’s store watches me from the unlatched kitchen window. I walk back quickly because of the rain, as if I have no awareness of him. In the vestibule I take my time with my coat and shoes, focusing on his attention and what I can learn from it. When I’m ready, I flip the light. He doesn’t have time to hide, only crouches behind a chair as if it might provide protection. From me, I suppose it does. But I’m not the one he’s afraid of.

  “Pea’s not here,” I say. “Which makes you lucky.”

  Alvin stands slowly. He’s wearing overalls like he had in the store, but they’re stained dark across the chest. He drips greasy water onto the kitchen tiles. His hands are bruised. A lump squats below his right temple. I wonder what happened to Craver’s protection.

  “I won’t touch you, I promise,” he says. “You tell her that.”

  “Then why are you spying on me from the kitchen?”

  “Because I want to talk to you.”

  I take a careful seat across from him. I’m still damp, uncomfortable, real because of it. “Then talk,” I say.

  “Bobby Junior wants to kill me.”

  He looks perfectly serious. In the sunroom, the grandfather clock marks the half to an unknown hour.

  “Why you looking at me like that?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He spreads his hands wide. “God’s honest truth. And you know I got good reason to know. The shit—I mean, the stuff I saw about that lady killer of yours—”

  “You will kindly leave Phyllis out of this.”

  “Phyllis. That’s not what you call her.”

  “And you’ll call her Miss Green.”

  “Miss LeBlanc. Miss angel. Some kind of angel.”

  I wonder if I hear a car turning up the drive, but it passes without stopping. “I can believe a lot of things of Bobby Junior, but murder…”

  “He’d kill. He and his mayor daddy. You know it.”

  At that I smile faintly. “I know it. But they’d never do it with their own hands. Never if they could be caught. They’d hire someone—no, and don’t tell me they could hire Pea, they would never and she would never.”

  He had opened his mouth to say just that, I guessed, but now he nods. “All right, I won’t. But he’s going to kill me. And men like that never get in trouble for killing people like us.”

  I acknowledge the point. “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Help me. You know that family, they respect you a little. They fear you a little, so even better.”

  “Don’t you already have Craver’s protection?”

  He snorts. “That old man? He can’t do nothing. Doesn’t even want to. He’d do anything to save that old graveyard of his. He’d sell me.”

  “So why does Bobby Junior want to kill you? Did you touch him?”

  “My mom cleans their place and I’ve touched her all my life. Touched them a few times too, before they decided they believed. Mayor Bell is willing to leave me be, I think, but the Junior wants me dead.”

  “You want to tell me what you know that makes him so eager to bump you off?”

  Alvin gives me a long look, then shrugs. Looks out the window like he’s waiting for her, too. “No, I don’t think I do.”

  “But you want my help. Why? My hands? You want me to touch the threat?”

  At this Alvin takes a hasty step back. “Don’t think so, Davey. Not unless you want me to return the favor.”

  I shrug, but at least now I know: this is a move in a game. I can believe Bobby Junior hates him, but Alvin would have no motive to hide from my hands if that were the whole story. Alvin is a boy, not particularly strong, almost grown. A boy like I was, and fear makes him dangerous.

  A moment. His face is a strong tree in a stiff breeze. It barely moves. But I feel something pass, an animus. Bigger than Alvin but a part of him. It threatens me, yes, but it is a knife at the throat of someone else.

  “Where is she?”

  I don’t remember standing. I don’t remember the movement of my hands, hovering over his neck. I am trying to breathe in a downpour.

  Alvin fetches against the rain-lashed window. “You touch me, I touch you.”

  “Tell me about Pea. What do you want with her?”

  Or maybe what I felt was Pea in trouble, thinking her way to me?

  Alvin jerks his head—emphatic and yet ambiguous. He ducks under my arm and scrambles for the door.

  “If you’re worried about her, ask Bobby Junior. I saw them in town this afternoon, drinking at the inn.”

  We stare at each other. I am thinking of certain looks, the heat of which I avoided. I am thinking of the way that I kissed her before I pulled back, each time. I am remembering the smell of blood and the smell of saliva. The sweet peas in the garden, and the watermelon.

  Alvin takes one step into the rain. “If you don’t help me,” he says, “you’re killing me.”

  Without a touch. And the one thing I will never do is kill again.

  3

  Pea never guessed.

  I wondered why I didn’t feel more guilty about all the lies I had to tell, but I supposed I was busy enough trying to save her from my colleagues without bothering with the finer moral quandaries. She knew that I didn’t approve of her execution of justice. She knew that I could feel her enemies when we touched. She knew, even if I didn’t, that I had drowned in her; drowned as quickly as that boy I had let fall into the river when we were twelve.

  Pea didn’t know all of me. I certainly didn’t know all of her. Knowledge, it turned out, was a red herring.

  Drifting in twilight sleep all night while we pressed every possible inch of skin to the other’s body, then we shifted to touch more, breathing and sweating and fucking and sleeping and waking up to find her so unexpectedly still there—that was the thing.

  Leaving her, “I have work, I’ll be back in the evening, at 8 p.m. sharp, no I don’t care if you won’t be back then, I’ll wait, sweet Pea, I’ll wait—”

  I did wait, and I did go to work, after a fashion.

  It occasionally felt wrong, how often I would watch her when she didn’t know I was looking. But it also thrilled me, it made me love her more and in ways I would never be able to tell her—to see the woman whose smile to discover me beside her in the morning was as sweet as jaggery, calmly discussing knife thrusts and mob justice with Red Man or Russian Vic. That those expressions could colonize and transform the same beautiful features made her seem supernatural
to me, a Kali in truth.

  And when we lay together at night, that secret knowledge of her gave me a power I could only express in how much I left unsaid. The other ways I found to say it. We read each other in light reflected from unshed tears—and yes, I saw more than she did, but I didn’t see enough.

  I never went to headquarters. The uniformed cops were almost entirely white, and they didn’t take kindly to colored rookies like me walking their halls. Though I of all people could tell if eyes had followed me there, the policy was for undercover cops to make reports in a diner two blocks away: Sal’s Sunshine, integrated—at least to friends of cops—and home to the greasiest burgers and soggiest french fries south of Houston.

  I always got the egg cream, and Finn always made a point to say it was his five-year-old’s favorite too.

  “Dev, you all right? You look sick, wrung out. You know most of that bootleg liquor they sling at the Pelican ain’t safe. Might be drinking arsenic for all you know. Gotta take it easy, kid.”

  “Haven’t been there as much recently,” I said, taking a spoon of the sweet foam head and sucking until the only taste left on my tongue was chocolate and the metal tang of aluminum alloy.

  Finn, older than me, but young enough to still feel the hunger for that break-or-die snap of a big case, gave me a long look over his cherry cola. He’d dumped a solid slug of whiskey in it from his hip flask, as always. Plenty of cops had kept drinking straight through Prohibition, though few with quite so much brio as Finn, who used to bring whiskey in canteens to interrogations and offer sips to the detainees. He had an ex-wife who hated him with a passion that jolted me every time I touched him in passing. I never asked him about it. We all had our dirty seams. Places an enterprising rookie cop could stick the crowbar and apply pressure. But I hadn’t seen any need for it.

  “So you really have shacked up with that old lady? The hatchet girl? What do they call her?”

  “Phyllis LeBlanc,” I said. I took a sip of the egg cream and a little dribbled down my chin. I put it down, very carefully.

  “Victor’s angel,” Finn said, and banged the heel of his palm on the table. “Well, isn’t that just peachy. Look at you, with some pretty white girl who could just as easily cut your balls off as kiss you.”