Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “Then tell me something,” Trent said, after a moment. “Something you wouldn’t want others to hear.”

  It was a clever test. “I’m working for the fuzz,” I said, conversationally.

  He’d been prepared for this; he only swallowed. “All right,” he said. “All right. You guys promise you’ll get me out? He’ll kill me for this. And they say he’s got the hands for betrayal.”

  “You’ll have to work with us. But if you give us enough rope to hang him, we’ll give you a new life.”

  “For me and my girl,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said, blithely. What did I care about the moll of some aging stoolie? Pea was tap dancing on the bar and I was dreaming of picking her up and carrying her home.

  7

  The next morning I wake to a twisted cramp reverberating from my knuckles to my elbows. The light is yellow and young. The house is silent save for the creak of Pea’s shutters in the breeze. I run to her room first, even while I sift through the complicated braid of threats and feelings and realize that whoever wants to kill me isn’t currently in the house.

  And neither is Pea.

  The duvet is bunched at the end of her bed, last evening’s clothes lay a trail from the window to the closet. A perfume lingers. She is drying the Angèle Pernets by the headboard, and they anchor a scent indefinable, beloved.

  She’s gone, hours earlier than normal, and the threat still encircles my joints, less forcefully but unmistakably. I wonder if it threatens her as well, and the thought spurs me back to my room. I hesitate, but I take the gun.

  My hands can touch threats. That’s easy, the sort of thing I learned that first summer after the dream on the farm in Murbad, when my only threats came from vipers under stones in my path. But following them is the last thing I ever learned. Even now I have to gather my concentration like a skein of yarn.

  This takes me to the river. Footprints the size of her garden boots slide through the mud to the track that follows the southern bank. It’s choked with leaves from the recent rain and perilous with gnarled roots. I used to prefer this path as a child, until the fact that Bobby Junior also lived in a house with river access made that inadvisable. I still would rather use the road into town, but for some reason Pea went this way, and so does that fading burn of rage and ill intent.

  I follow.

  The river is high today, red with mud and white with the foam of spinning cataracts. It kisses the edge of the towpath, a gentle seduction. But the undertow is strong enough to drown you in seconds. I keep my eye on the steady track of Pea’s boots and think. The trembling edges of an old memory: hard men with misted eyes, dredging the river for Thomas Pullman. One of the boys from Bobby Junior’s gang, my old tormentors. No one ever knew why he went to the river that night. None of the other boys ever admitted that they had come out on a dare, or that Tom had fallen into the river when he tried to push me in the treacherous near-darkness. All I had done was to step neatly to one side. The river did the rest.

  I pass the overgrown grass of Craver’s church, the old family farmhouses nearby. Then I reach the backyard of the River House, squatting on the bank like a fat swan.

  “They’re real beauties,” Pea says, out of sight.

  Another voice answers her. “I used to call them dinosaur eggs when I was a kid.”

  She laughs. “There’s sure something odd about them. Maybe that’s why they’re beautiful. That kind of unnatural nature.”

  A pause. Mae says, “Watch the round leaves, they ain’t weeds, they’re for the aphids.”

  “What’re they called?”

  “Nasturtium. Taste good too, when they flower.”

  I edge around the trees until I have a line of sight to the garden. Pea and Mae are on their knees in a muddy row of vegetables. They seem to be alone. But I have a hard time imagining that Mae could pose a threat credible enough to pull me out of bed. Someone in the big house above? And yet it feels like it’s here, not a dozen yards away.

  “And what’s that?” she asks.

  “Should be black-eyed peas, if the spider mites don’t get them this year.”

  I wish I could say I’d never recognize the city Pea, Victor’s Pea, in this woman quietly weeding another man’s garden. But it’s only blood that washes off. Hearts abide. Pea doesn’t like mornings, but she left early enough to avoid me.

  “That’s Alvin, you know,” Mae said, after another long pause. “What you said, unnatural nature. It’s God’s gift, those saint’s hands. That dream came to him four years ago, nothing any of us could do about it, and still there’s something uncanny about him. My poor boy. Even to me and his father, we can love him, but there’s some things you just aren’t given to understand.”

  “My mother didn’t have them,” Pea says, “but my grandmother did. And so did my brother.”

  “And you?”

  She looks speculatively at her hands for a moment. Is she wondering if they will behave? There have been a few odd moments lately when her hands have spasmed and she breathed as though it hurt. Pea shrugs minutely and balances the spade, tip down, on her third knuckle, then flips it high in the air and watches calmly as it spins downward an inch in front of the other woman’s face and spears the dirt.

  Both women release sharp breaths. “Lord almighty,” Mae says. “What you do with that?”

  “I used to kill people.”

  Mae nods. “The city girl. They called you an angel? I’ve heard—Junior’s let a few things slip. That’s … well, none of my business, I know, but I say it is a shame to do evil with the Lord’s gifts.”

  Pea slides her fingers into the dirt. “All right. But is it always evil, Mae? Killing?”

  Mae stops short and then laughs. “Well. Got me there, girl. Some men…”

  “Some men.”

  A pause. “You ain’t going to do anything to my boy, are you?”

  “Not unless he tries to hurt me first. Or Dev.”

  “Your man? Davey?”

  A smile thin as a knife edge, but her voice oddly thick: “My man.”

  But Phyllis is nobody’s woman. And the threat that brought me here is just ash against my fingertips. Who could have made it—the mother? Or the angel?

  “My boy’s got ideas, but he’s got no reason to hurt you or yours. Now, the Bells, that’s another story. Thank the Lord for Ben Craver, or I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “The Bells? Not a lot of love for them in this town, is there?”

  The woman presses her palms into the dirt.

  “Tell me something, city angel, you ever been a maid? Cleaned a white man’s house?”

  The city angel moves so they’re shoulder to shoulder. “No,” she whispers, so I can barely hear. “No, I ain’t never, but I’ve heard.”

  And so they remain for five seconds, ten. Pea’s face is gilded with morning light.

  Up the hill someone rings that brassy bell six times. The mother jerks, and Pea stands up, looks over, and sees me.

  * * *

  We walk back the way we came. She laces her hand in mine and takes us unerringly down the wooded track that was once so familiar to me. It leads to the meadow with the swimming hole and the sweet mulberry tree, where I used to hide for hours from Bobby and his gang. I haven’t been back since they spent two days dredging the river to find the body of a young boy, bloated and blue.

  “I found your name,” she says, “carved into the tree.”

  “Just my initials.”

  She shakes her head. She hasn’t combed her hair in days. The woolly curls shine rust in the sun, they stick out like spring shoots in a hedge. The lines by her eyes deepen as they look at me and then around the green. She pulls off her boots and sticks her feet in the watering hole, clear and spring-fed. I am in the grip of her, and of memories of who I was before I met her. She hasn’t said a word about what I overheard. She doesn’t seem to care. But she does.

  “So how did you know?” I ask.

  She dribbles a handful of
water down the back of her neck. I swallow. “It’s the sort of place you’d find, and the sort of place you’d love. You dreamed a lot when you were younger. I did too, you know. But in Harlem it’s hard to find a private place. If I’d been here I’d have found you, too. Or you’d have found me. We’d have carved our names in the tree and gorged on honeysuckle and mulberry…” She looks over her shoulder at me, with a small, embarrassed smile. “Take your shoes off, Dev. The water’s nice.”

  I take my shoes off and kneel behind her and pull her against me. Her sigh bows out against my sternum. Those uncombed curls catch on my stubble and tickle my lips. The clean scent of her, hair oil and garden dirt, shakes me with memory.

  Thomas Pullman fell. And yes, I watched. But for Pea I killed, for her I returned here, for her I would—I am afraid that I would—do anything at all.

  “If you wanted,” I say very softly, “I would let you.”

  She turns abruptly in my arms. She kisses me with her lips and then with the cold barrel of my gun.

  “You fool, Dev.” Her finger is so still on the trigger I imagine the smell of burning powder. “Still think I’d do it?”

  Her eyes, dark as the bottom of the sea. Her heart, exposed beneath my hands as no one’s should be. I have been too much in the habit of imagining her because I know her better than anyone.

  I pull the gun from her hands. I put it in the grass behind us and wipe her eyes.

  “Damned fool,” she says, shaking. “That’s what that was? You felt something by the River House? Do you want me to kill you? Because I wouldn’t, even if you asked. I wouldn’t, even if you were dying anyway, even if you begged me. Oh, there’s someone I wouldn’t mind killing up on that hill, but it sure as hell ain’t you, sweet fool.”

  The boys in the clearing, laughing when they thought they’d caught me again. All the people Pea killed for justice, while I knew Victor’s scheme and did not tell her. Karma is both patient and inevitable. It will catch me one day. Perhaps I did hope it would be Pea who delivered me back to the wheel of rebirth.

  “Someone wants to kill me,” I say.

  “Probably that damned boy.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She shrugs. “Then we’ll find him, whoever he is. I won’t let you die either, Dev.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  With just a twist of her body she tips herself into the spring and takes me tumbling with her. The water is deeper than it seems from the edge, nearly fifteen feet of frigid stillness, rock shrouded, sacred. Pea kicks off the bottom, knocking the loose stones against one another. I stay below. Watch sun streaking past her yellow skirt, her feet treading water. I run one finger lightly over her left arch. She jerks and shrieks loud enough for its distorted echo to reach me underwater.

  She’s still laughing when I break the surface. She splashes water in my face while I heave for air, then wraps her arms around my neck so we both nearly go under again.

  “I should do you like that,” she says. “Watch, you’ll be sleeping and I’ll just…” She’s kissing my eyebrows. She’s never done that before.

  I laugh. “I’d touch your threat, sweet Pea.”

  “Maybe I’d be faster.”

  The water is so cold and her lips are so warm. Here we are baptized, blessed, reborn. Right now, I believe. Right now, I am grateful to be alive.

  She drags me to the bank.

  “It will get better, Dev,” she says, like she believes it.

  Sometimes I don’t know how we will survive each other. Sometimes the greatest violence you can do to another person is to love them.

  “I know,” I say, like I do too.

  * * *

  Victor’s voice chases me through my dreams that night. He is not a restful companion, but Pea and I sleep apart. So I stay awake, and maunder. I am remembering Walter, and all the times he’s saved me. I can’t go to war, I can’t give Finn what he wants, I can’t work for Walter and risk being the hook that drags Pea back. The Bells will never help me without the dirt that Alvin refuses to give up. Which leaves nothing. I know that.

  Dawn, at last. Just barely, but the rooster chorus is pretext enough to put the percolator on the stove.

  Pea’s door is open. She’s fallen asleep against the frame, her knees tucked under the peach satin gown. Her arms encircle her leather knife holster like the torso of her lover. She opens her eyes when I approach. They are bloodshot and painfully lucid.

  “Shouldn’t walk so quiet past me, Dev,” she says, all Harlem swagger and West Village ice.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  She shrugs and then laughs. “Waiting for you, baby.”

  I reach down and pick her up, which makes her laugh even more.

  “Dev,” she says, “put me the hell down, what are you doing—”

  I drop her on the bed and she stays there, breathing hard, looking up at me.

  “I’ll make the coffee,” I say, and turn. My heart pumps too much blood, my lips sting. She’d give me whatever I needed. But I don’t want to need it.

  We’ve both calmed by the time I return with a tray of flapjacks and late blackberries from the garden.

  “My God, is this a bribe? Where’s the coffee?”

  “You couldn’t have gotten much sleep like that.”

  “You thief! I smelled it, did you drink it all? You did! What did I do to deserve a man who treats me so bad?”

  “I made you flapjacks.”

  She picks one up with her fingers and takes a bite. “Persuasive.” She pours a puddle of maple syrup on the plate and dunks. “Damn, Dev, can you always cook for us?”

  “You wouldn’t miss the bacon?”

  She looks up at me as she chews. “Well?” she says. “They’re getting cold.”

  I use a knife and fork to eat my own, which she seems to regard as the custom of a strange and savage people. She lies upside-down on the bed once she’s eaten two—not enough, but I don’t want to ruin the moment by telling her so. She nestles her cheek against my thigh.

  “You’re scaring me,” she says softly.

  I stroke her hair absentmindedly as I finish the last flapjack. “With my hidden culinary talents?”

  “Don’t make me so happy, Dev, don’t take it all away.”

  I stay like that, stroking her, hurting just a little bit less, until her breathing evens out and I know she’s gone back to sleep. I wait a half hour. Then I call Walter.

  8

  I met Trent on the elevated train and we rode for an hour while he sketched what he could offer us in exchange for protection. His knowledge was patchy and oddly specific. It’s a foolish cop who believes that an informant is confessing the unvarnished truth, but I wondered what Trent wanted from us. He talked mostly about hunting men for Victor, men—and some women—with saint’s hands that Victor could use in his service.

  “And what does he do with them?”

  Trent glanced again at the old man sleeping at the other end of the train car. We were otherwise alone, stuck on the tracks right before the last stop.

  “I can’t say.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “I don’t know exactly—”

  “No need to be exact.”

  “Listen, it’s that—what do you fellas want from me?”

  “We want to bring down Victor and as many of his officers as possible on charges of murder and racketeering.” Finn had been very careful to drill me in this. Whatever other petty crimes wafted through the air of the Pelican (police bribery, for example) mattered very little to him.

  “I can’t tell you anything about racketeering,” he said. “I stay out of the business side.”

  “Murder, then.”

  The train lurched forward and the old man startled awake.

  “Not listening,” I said, before Trent could ask.

  He swallowed. “I might,” he said, “know a bit about that.”

  “Go on.”

  “So does your old lady.”

&nb
sp; A flush suffused my neck. Did he think I didn’t know that? I stayed up nights plotting the lies and gentle blackmail I would use to get her out of this. All she had to do was promise not to kill. All she had to do. I was—this is not an excuse—too self-righteous and too in love.

  “What do you know, Trent?”

  He gave me an appalling look. Like he pitied me. And then he gave me an address in Queens. He told me to go there tonight and to watch.

  “It’s a full moon. You’ll see something.”

  And so I did.

  9

  At exactly six o’clock that afternoon a silver Packard climbs up the drive. Pea pulls a knife and then tosses it in the air just as a dark hand waves a paisley scarf from the passenger window.

  “Sugar,” calls a voice I had dreamed of often and still somehow forgot. Caramel warmth salty with unshed tears.

  Pea runs down the porch steps, bruises her feet on the gravel as Tamara falls out of the passenger door. The strength of their embrace is all they need to say. I approach slowly.

  “Hello, Walter,” I say as he pulls himself from behind the wheel. He stretches his arms over his head, a gesture neither deliberately menacing nor wholly benign.

  “Good to see you, Dev.”

  “Didn’t expect you to come in person.” That’s all I’ll say this near to Pea.

  He nods. “We had reason.”

  We catalogue our subtle changes in the months since my precipitous departure. A few more grays salt the temples of Walter’s slicked-back undercut. A certain softness in his cheeks and belly hints at a life more pleasurably lived. And mine: natural hollows edged a little more sharply with shadows and light.

  Tamara holds Pea at arm’s length and says, “Well, you couldn’t look more country if you were holding a fishing pole, sugar, it’s just fabulous to see you so well. Walter and I were so worried, weren’t we, Walter? That’s why we came all the way here, we left this morning. I insisted after what my cards told me—don’t put that face on, Pea, my cards have helped you out a dozen times over, even if you don’t ever play the numbers.”