Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  Tammy couldn’t continue. Phyllis was thoughtful for a moment, or maybe just hungry. She took four full bites before she responded. “He’s just young, baby. He’s trying, he’s got a good heart, I could see that, but he’s young enough to believe he can stop you from hurting. That he can love you and not leave a mark.”

  “I’m just as young as that fool, and I don’t believe that!”

  “Well,” she said, “you’re a woman.”

  “He told the war office to send me notice if he dies.”

  “His remains?”

  “Go to his mama, thank God.”

  Phyllis took a deep breath, thinking, most likely, of whatever Dev had written to her in that long letter riddled with black smudges from the censor’s edits.

  “You got a smoke?”

  “Phyllis, aren’t you supposed to be cutting back?”

  “No more than five a day, the doctor said. I’ve only had four.”

  Tamara sighed, lit up one of the last in her pocket, and took a drag before handing it over. Their breath clouded the air between them, and then drifted toward the snow-crusted window. Tamara and Mrs. Grundy had barely cleared the driveway from the last storm, but Mrs. Grundy said they were due another tonight. Was it normal for winter to last so long? In her three years in the city, she’d never felt a March like this one, colder than a Virginia January. Tamara didn’t want to complain. She had to seem strong enough to see this through. Phyllis would cut her in a minute; she’d send her home for her own good if it looked to her like she was cracking under the strain. And Phyllis didn’t even know why. What good was it to be an oracle if you couldn’t change a damned thing?

  It would be okay. If the boiler broke down again she’d get Pea downstairs, in front of the fire. They could stay up half the night drinking and telling stories, playing a safe deck of cards.

  Pea shifted against the pillows and swallowed. Tamara tensed, in case she had to help her to the bathroom, or a bucket.

  “They’ve sent him to North Africa now,” Phyllis said. “I can’t tell what he’s doing because I swear a third of that letter had black lines through it.”

  “Africa? What else did Dev say?”

  “That his superior officers are idiots, overflowing with racial prejudice, he’s working with the Algerians, but he can’t say more about his duties. But at least he’s been transferred from ambulance detail.” She clenched her hands over her knees. “He hated that. Too much blood.”

  “They let all that through?”

  “I knew what he wasn’t saying.”

  “He always did hate blood. He’d even look away from the catsup they use in the theater. Poor Dev.”

  “Yes,” Pea said, and stared at nothing in particular long enough for cigarette ashes to scatter on the quilt. She looked down, surprised, and brushed them off. “Tammy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He said he’d had a strange dream and he wanted me to ask you … about that night backstage at the Pelican.”

  Tamara flinched. Phyllis took a drag and peered through the smoke. “He said to put it just like that. He said you’d know what he meant. And you do.”

  “It’s not … a good story, Pea.”

  “That right?” Pea was breathing heavy. Her back hurt her more than she wanted to say.

  Tamara went over to help her. “Why did Dev want me to tell you?”

  “I’m not sure, baby. He just said it was in his dream.”

  Tammy stopped short. “That kind of dream?”

  Pea laughed. “We’re just drowning in dreams over here. What’s one more, is that right, baby?” But she was talking to her belly now. Tammy sat on her heels, forgotten. And is that how it would be if she took on the burden? Cursed and alone, with just the cards for company? Would the taint kill her instead if she tried to have a child? Oh, she’d probably live, that was the worst of it: she’d have to live badly while Phyllis lived well. There was grace in this world but—Job himself could have told her—not much justice.

  Tamara tipped her chin up. She’d tell the story, then. What of it? What was the worst thing she’d done, compared to this woman’s sins? Who here could judge her?

  Not Victor’s ghost.

  Not Victor’s angel.

  “It was Christmas Eve two years ago. We were at the Pelican, backstage. Drunk as three cats in a tub of gin. Well, I don’t know about Dev, he could be ossified to his eyeballs and still walk a straight line. But me and Victor, we were good and tight. The place was closed for the night and we were enjoying a bottle of scotch, Victor called it his Christmas present. It tasted like paint thinner and old hay to me, but do you know I got to like it by the third snifter. It got late, I don’t know, about three or four in the morning. Victor was playing with that Colt of his, the one with the nickel inlays. God, I hope they buried that with him. If ever there was a piece that could speak nightmares.

  “Well, what do you know, Victor got it in his head that he wanted to test Dev. Yes, Pea, like that, he wanted to test his hands. He said, We can be scientific about the matter? And Dev and I just stared at him blank, because you never want to answer one of his questions. The only way he knew how to end a sentence was in a trap. No getting out of that one, though. He said to Dev, So touch me, and Dev said something rude, and Victor lifted that piece calm as you please and pulled back the safety. He said, Am I going to kill you, Dev?”

  Tamara stopped abruptly. Phyllis moved, but Tamara hid her face. “What did you do?”

  “I tried to get behind Victor, like he might forget about me if he couldn’t see me. Dev didn’t seem to notice. He said to Victor, You don’t know yet. Just like that. He seemed so calm, so sure. You’re like that too, Pea, with your knives. But I’d never really known Dev that way. It surprised me. Victor pulled the trigger and I screamed, but you know those big pistols, once you fire them everything else starts to sound like a mosquito buzzing around your head. So I was screaming, but I could barely hear myself, and Victor fell back with the recoil he was so stinking drunk and Dev just sat there and pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket. The bullet had put a hole in the wall a few inches to the left of his head. Jesus. Jesus. That’s all I could say. Victor was giggling and poured himself another drink. He said, Don’t worry, dollface. I just need your man for some business. Don’t start blubbering. Then raised that gun, smooth as could be, and it was me facing down that barrel.”

  Tamara shuddered, thinking of it, and the rest of it. She swore for a moment she could see Victor panting and licking his lips just beyond the ice crusting the window.

  “What did he want?” Phyllis said, and caught herself. “Oh. He wanted to know what Dev could tell from touching you.”

  Tamara’s heart was racing, her palms sweaty, her neck pulsing with heat and cold. She couldn’t finish it. Not the real story. Even if it was just Phyllis, who had no right to judge. She found herself straightening crooked things out, making ugly things shiny; an old, bad, habit.

  “He said, Am I going to kill her? You get one chance. And next thing I knew, Dev pushed me to the ground and he just stood there, facing the gun. He said he knew that Victor didn’t want to lose him, so he’d better stop threatening his girl. Victor seemed to lose interest in the whole thing then. He really was stinking drunk. Dev picked me up and we left.”

  “He let you leave?”

  Tamara looked away. “Victor had romantic notions—not with you, of course. But he wanted women to be like the harem girls in The Thief of Baghdad. You know, gauzy as ballroom curtains with bubbly for brains. The ones who cry a lot and faint easily and are forever getting kissed by men they actually want but don’t know it.”

  Phyllis gave a small, knowing smile. “So you made sure that’s what he thought you were.”

  Victor had expected her to fall to the floor. He’d expected to watch her eyeliner run in dirty rivers down her face while she begged for her life and Dev’s. He expected Tamara to be shocked by his violence—and she was. So shocked that she realized a few
fatal beats too late just how she had betrayed herself.

  “Safer that way,” Tamara said. “Don’t give me that look, as though you never played the angel for him.”

  “Did I?” Pea asked, and something made Tamara’s breath stutter in her chest, made her heart ache.

  “Well, I think that’s why he let me—let us—go.”

  “Funny of him. But you never could tell when he drank like that.” Pea gave her a long look, the kind that meant a hundred things she wasn’t saying. “I’m tired, baby. Let me sleep.”

  Tamara tucked her in and brought her water and put the pillows under her back just so, all the while thinking that Dev had some nerve, asking her to tell that awful story whose real ending made her look like some regular mob girl, some cold-hearted creature who only valued her own comfort. And for what? Could he know that Victor’s curse was rattling around his old house? Could he know that Tamara held his wife and daughter’s fate in her soft oracle’s hands?

  Dev had been laid up for weeks after that night. Tamara had waited three days before she could bear to visit him. He said he didn’t blame her. Because he loved her, she’d thought. But now doubt came down in a white-hot flash: had he loved her after that night?

  Had he seen through her all this time, and never let it show?

  She’d been so silly, so sure, so complacent about that deep, good-hearted love in him. Tamara had swanned around the Pelican, proud to have a man like him for her own. She’d felt good in the reflection of his goodness. She’d known exactly what Phyllis had lost and regretted, leaving him for all that violence that the angel called justice.

  And now Dev might not have loved Tammy at all. He might have just stayed, out of habit or loyalty or—pity, even, goddamn him, knowing she couldn’t bear an honest assessment of her character.

  What did he really think of her? What had he told Phyllis? What truths were permitted over that connection that time and blood and guilt and dozens of other lovers had not dissolved? Tamara had been jealous, she could admit that now, jealous of every discreet glance, of every casual conversation, of how deliberately they never so much as brushed the other’s sleeve. He would sigh, sometimes, just after he and Tamara made love and she had known he was thinking of Phyllis and would never admit it. What had he written in that letter? What did he know about Tamara? Had his second dream come down, a warning knell from the front?

  Had it told him the truth: that Pea was dying, while Tammy whistled in the wind, doing nothing, saving herself for no one?

  6

  She snuck into Pea’s room after midnight and took Dev’s latest letter from the desk. Pea groaned in her sleep, turned and then subsided. Tamara held her breath until she was back in the hallway. She went back downstairs to the kitchen to read it.

  February 22, 1942

  Pea—

  Well, it seems that the commonwealth has claimed me, despite my best efforts. I have been pulled from and stationed to . I’m afraid this letter will reach you months from now, when no doubt my circumstances will have changed once again, but I will always write, Pea, I promise. As long as I am able.

  I wanted to scratch that last bit, but I suspect the censors will make such confetti of this letter that it would be a shame to aid those enemies of self-expression. So I will leave you with my slightly morbid, always loving, thoughts.

  The air is dry here. Drier than anything I knew in Murbad. It scorches your lungs. The people wear scarves on their heads and robes down to their sandals. It helps against the heat, of course it does. This is their land, they ought to know how to dress for it. The British, however, mock the clothes and supposedly primitive customs of these people all the while swilling quinine, trussed up in their military uniforms and baking in this hard fist of a sun until they look like nothing so much as lobsters in Wolseley helmets.

  Well. I doubt that will get through, but just in case it does, I will imagine you laughing.

  I have not been laughing very much. The ambulance detail was very hard, Pea. Harder than I expected, and I expected a scene from the more brutal levels of the naraka. The dead did not bother me so much, not after a few weeks there. I know this sounds—well—I confront my failure of imagination. I don’t know how this will sound to you, my Kali, my goddess of vengeance. But I have worked where I have for a decade.

  Before last summer, I had never killed before—never killed a human before—but I knew what death looked like.

  But the wounded, Pea. The blood and the screams and the splintered bone and pulped flesh and the blood—I did not imagine that there was so much blood in the world as what I saw in the hospital . We waded through it. It stiffened our clothes. The smell never—never—left my hands. (The censors will probably be appalled that I am describing this to you with so little regard for your sensibilities. You, my angel, may tell them to themselves if I cannot.)

  I was with the Negro unit in Europe. (I gather that Tamara’s beau was posted to the Pacific theater? It’s hell over there, too, that’s what they say. But if he’s lucky enough to get trained he might make it back. Don’t tell her I said that—what am I saying?—I know you won’t.) They were good men. A few were even from Harlem, and one said he knew your family, Pea. Though he probably knew you from your numbers days and didn’t want to spell it out. His name is Barkley, said his father passed a decade ago but that he was a well-known businessman in town. How’s that for a small world?

  About to get smaller—how many of those boys I left there are alive now? The base just after I left.

  And now I am here in the desert, aiding one set of colonizers against another set of colonizers on behalf of a new power whose colonial ambitions haven’t gone past their own continent as of yet, but whom I strongly suspect of waiting to seize the pie. The dreams and desires of the aren’t even the nail clippings of a concern for any of these nabobs— Pea.

  I cannot tell you what I’m doing, but at least it’s no longer ambulance duty. When I work with the locals it isn’t so bad, but the British officers are worse than even my memory of them. It appears that having grown up does not save one from much torment. Being a Hindu—and not a servant—is more than enough to stir their nationalist bile.

  Goodness, I can’t imagine that any of that went through. Unless the censors are American, of course. Wave to good old Uncle Sam, Pea. The land of the free, the home of the brave. That star-spangled banner does seem to be hanging in there after all these years, doesn’t it?

  It makes me wonder about my hands, in fact. All of our hands. It makes me wonder about a universe that would give these people almost all of the power and then, of a moment, give a little sliver of it back. But with such a burden, it sometimes seems better to be powerless. Not quite. And yet, the hands torment you. They are obsessed with our necessary complicity. Even here, they hate what I have to do and for whom.

  They would rather kill us for the greater good than let us find happiness in this lifetime.

  Durga visits me in my dreams sometimes, don’t ask me how. Please stay safe. I’m not sure what we are bringing into this world, but I am sure that Durga is a soul burnished by fire.

  I must end this letter—they’re calling me at headquarters. But I must ask—I had a very strange dream the other night—one of Durga’s, I hope. It reminded me of an incident with Tamara a few years back. You should ask her about it. That night backstage at the Pelican. Though maybe you shouldn’t bother. You know Tammy, she’ll just lie about the bad parts.

  Goodbye, my sweet Pea. Touch our Durga for me and tell her to be still and to send the bad dreams to me.

  Your

  Dev

  Tamara didn’t sleep that night. She sat in the dark in the kitchen, knees hugged to her chest, stomach churning along with her brain, thinking of all the ways that the people who she loved the most saw straight through her, and how much she hated them for it. She burned with the unfairness of it: she, who had never done anything truly bad, even if she’d gone knocking on bad’s door, now had to tolerate th
e judgment of the Village’s most notorious killer and her stoolie lover?

  She felt hot and cold, as though she had a fever, as though shame could eat her up from the inside and leave her zombie corpse rattling around come morning. Had Phyllis known she was lying? You know Tamara, Dev had written, as though Tamara’s untrustworthy character were an old, reliable joke. Sure, she had loved Dev—she’d certainly enjoyed being his lover—and Phyllis was like a sister to her, but those relationships had always been within certain parameters. Tamara was the regular girl, the good one, the foil against which their bad decisions stood out more starkly. It was supposed to be a fair exchange: Tamara’s innocent, easy friendship for their hard reputations and checkered pasts. She made them feel better about who they had to be while they protected her from the world. But now … did they think, all this time, that they had been doing her the favor? Had they indulged her rosy vision of herself while believing that she was really just like them? And if so, why had they never told her?

  Her nails had dug four half-moons into her palms by the morning. An empty bottle of wine spilled little red drops on the floor by her feet. Another wineglass lay shattered somewhere behind her; she’d seen Victor around midnight, picking at his silver teeth with a chicken bone. He’d vanished after she threw the glass. She finished the rest of the bottle direct. She ought to take that laudanum, she thought. She ought to just drug herself and drown the clawing shame in dreamless sleep. And she might have, but for the unexpected sound of someone coming down the stairs.

  Tamara held her breath, but Phyllis didn’t come to the kitchen. She went to the parlor, instead. What was she doing? Pea had been sleeping all the time lately. Even with Tamara’s bad habits—the cards, the wine, the relieving drops of old-fashioned medicine—she would wake up a little before noon, which was generally when she managed to rouse her friend.