“You’re just a dog, aren’t you?” he said to Dev now, waving that gun. “A poor dog, aren’t you? You trade Phyllis for this fine piece of sugar, and look, she’s got as much womanly sentiment as my Colt. You’re a real poor dog, making me feel sorry enough to let you go. A lying bastard who thinks he’s better than me. But at least I don’t have a girl that would leave me on the ground like that, you poor dog.”
Dev didn’t say anything. He was panting like it hurt to breathe. Tamara wanted to cry. She wanted to get down there with him and cry into his shoulder until she could stand to look at herself again. But she just stood there and tried not to shake.
“Tammy,” Dev said again, “get out of here.”
Victor gave her more of that funny look. She’d never seen him like that before. And then he surprised her. “You know what, take him. He might be a lying bastard, but he’s a poor dog, so why don’t you take him home, dollface?”
Tamara and Victor stared at one another. Those narrow brown eyes. That lingering whitewash of the smoke from his cigarillos. She was scared then. She was terrified that he could see her.
Later, Dev said that he understood, that she just wanted Vic’s protection. But it was worse: she didn’t want him to think of her as anything more than his pin-up girl, the curator of his better image. She didn’t want to be like Phyllis. She wanted to be small enough to hide behind him.
Which was why she’d laughed. Her brightest laugh, soft as silk tassels and the calfskin soles of new dancing shoes. She knelt and lifted up Dev by his armpits and sat him down in the nearest chair. He winced. Maybe one of his ribs was already broken. He didn’t say anything to her, then. He had known what she was about to do.
“I think you two must have some business to discuss. And you know I don’t do business, sugar.” She laughed again, pecked Victor on the cheek where his stubble burned her lips, and she left. She just picked up her mink and swung her hips like a bell clapper. Like she had no goddamn idea what she was doing. She could have taken Dev out of there. She could see in Victor’s eyes that his offer was an honest one. But what would he have thought of her, after? If she weren’t just the dizzy dancer? He would have respected her more. But she had never wanted his respect.
In the back alley, out of range, she heard Victor screaming, smashing in the side of Dev’s face with the butt of that pistol, breaking the orbital bone. You. Will. Tell. Me. Victor kicked him in the side five, six times. You poor dog, he said, and she knew even then that she could go back in there. She could brave Victor and save Dev from the worst of it. In the hospital, they told her Dev had cracked five ribs. The day he came back to the Pelican, his face looked fine, but he still couldn’t take a full breath. He made sure to dance with her in front of Pea. She didn’t have any standing to object.
11
The house was swaddled in darkness, as Tamara was swaddled in memories, and neither of them sufficiently braced against the evening chill. Behind her, the lights of the taxi illuminated the driveway as it crunched down the gravel, making and unmaking the path to come until it swung out onto the road and disappeared entirely.
She climbed the stairs slowly. What felt different? She had only left that morning, but she was not the same.
Phyllis opened the door before she could knock. She did not invite Tamara in.
“Forgot your toothbrush?” She was arch, but Tamara could feel the effort it took her to keep her spine straight and her eyes cold. Phyllis wasn’t the same either. Hadn’t been for a long time, strange that she’d only now noticed.
“Forgot a card,” Tamara lied.
“Which one?”
“Devil joker,” she replied immediately.
Pea cracked a smile. “Oh? Could have sworn you’d taken him with you this time.”
“He’s got a habit of popping up where I least want him. So I figured maybe I’d stop running away.”
“For a change.”
“For a change,” Tammy echoed uncertainly. “Pea. Walter says he found the snitch.”
Pea’s expression didn’t shift, her hands didn’t twitch, the soft pulse of her exposed jugular continued its steady beat, unperturbed. If Tammy hadn’t already known, she never would have guessed. She was a wonder, this best friend of hers, as strange a creature as any Tammy had encountered in her literary days back in Lawrenceville or her grandmother’s stories.
“That’s good news, isn’t it? I take it Mrs. Robinson was safe.”
“Yes. Pea. That’s not it. They found the Barkley brothers. He said that the family was going to take the money they came into and start a numbers bank. He said he wouldn’t interfere, as long as that was as far as this goes.”
Phyllis shivered. But that might have just as well been the open door, the bracing air, the encroaching night.
“Well,” she said, at last. “Come inside, honey. The nights are still cold.”
They went into the kitchen and Pea uncovered a pie on the table and cut two generous pieces.
It had to be pumpkin from the color, but covered in the oddest fluffy white crust, and who put crust on a pumpkin pie, anyway?
“Is that meringue?”
Pea laughed. “Would you believe I told her that it was ‘very white of her’ and she just thanked me!”
Tamara laughed so hard she had to wipe her eyes, probably more than the joke deserved, but it felt so good to be here again.
“And your sister?” she asked.
“Coming in two days. It was the soonest she could take off. Are you going back again, once you find your card?”
“Oh, no,” Tammy said, stretching back, draping her coat over the back of the chair, settling in for good. “You ain’t getting rid of me again till that baby is born.”
And she would be, Tamara thought, as Pea skimmed off the meringue and then tasted it with the tip of her pinky. The three of them would make it through this; no dead ofay’s curse or angry ancestor could stop them. The oracle made her choice in that old kitchen; she put her hands over the angel’s—bloodstained both—and said in her heart, I will take what you cannot bear, love, and gladly.
* * *
They went to the river, still high and red from the winter melt. Spring had finally arrived in full: new blossoms on the trees, new bugs in the grass, and birds screeching so loud it made Tamara think the city was comparatively restful. They shared a caramel apple while they sat on the blanket. Mrs. Grundy had brought back a whole dozen, individually wrapped in waxed paper and nestled like eggs in a basket of straw. Tamara had been all astonishment and her lips brimming with thanks, but Mrs. Grundy had only given her a soldiery nod and said, “I’m glad you decided to return, Miss Anderson.” Tamara had just stared at her. She supposed Mrs. Grundy had been thawing toward her for a while now, but this felt decisive. As though even this not-quite-old white lady could see the battlements crumbled inside her and the wildflowers just peeking their colors out above the wreckage. Then Tamara had remembered Pea’s story and was politely overcome with a fit of coughing.
Tamara smiled again now, remembering. Phyllis was buried deep in one of her silences. Tamara might have taken it for judgment, before. She might have goaded Pea into speaking about her past, just to make her ashamed. Now, Tamara settled on one elbow and dedicated herself to polishing off the apple. She contemplated the cards, restless in her pocket. She had made the decision, but she still hadn’t found a way to formally make the exchange. She supposed she should try tonight. Pea was as full as an old moon; they didn’t have much time. She wiped her mouth with a sticky hand.
“Pea.”
“Hmm?”
“What will you do, after the baby is born?”
Pea tilted her head slowly in her direction. She yawned. “I haven’t thought much about it.”
Tamara sat up a little straighter. “That’s a lie.” She couldn’t have known. She hadn’t spent these long months afraid that her life was in danger. Or, worse, that the thread it hung on was tied to Tamara’s self-protective heart.
“Is it? I’m not like you, sweetie. I’m not the most … natural mother.”
Tamara snorted, relieved. “Neither was mine, but we made do.”
Pea smiled and looked back out at the river. She wrapped herself again in silence, and this time Tammy didn’t dare break it. She’d nearly fallen asleep to the lullaby of kestrels and gurgling water when Pea’s voice startled her back into the world.
“My God, did they tell a good lie. Look how it even got you, Tammy. You went looking for a bad white man, and you found Victor. A bad bargain from the word ‘go.’”
“I found you,” Tammy said hoarsely, “and Dev and Walter. Not such a bad bargain.”
Pea seemed as distant as a ghost, looking back upon her life. She laughed like it hurt.
“But it’s on me for believing it. That I could make myself up in whiteface and kill for them and still come out clean … All that power they got, and here we are just wanting a nibble. And for that nibble they take our souls.”
“They can’t do that. No one but God can do that.”
“It’s just the earth, Tammy, that takes us in the end.”
“And the ancestors? The hands?”
Pea shrugged. “I only know what I’ve seen. And you have to admit, I’ve seen my share. Maybe they linger a bit, some strong souls. Some good, some cankers like our Victor. But the earth is billions of years old, Tammy. Even Methuselah’s got nothing on that.”
“The earth is … Phyllis, I don’t mean to sound ignorant, but isn’t a billion a million million? The earth is a million million years old? How is that possible?”
“Time has a habit of passing. And so do humans, and every other living creature on this green earth. And if they all got a soul, then the air ought to be full of them, we ought not to be able to see for all the spirits passing through us.”
“God is a lot greater than the earth. If He sees fit for us to have souls, then He’ll find some space for us.”
Phyllis took a soft, slow breath. “Sure, baby.”
“Well, you know plenty of folk agree with me. And doesn’t it make it worse, if those folks you killed, well, if that was all there was to them?”
“Does it make it worse?” She sounded bleak, her voice leached of color. “That every bit of what made them a person on this earth drained away when I sliced their throats? That they had existed and then they didn’t, and I’m the reason why?”
“Pea, I didn’t—”
“I watched the light leave their eyes. I hauled their dead bodies, which had lost everything of dignity, cold and wet and stinking of blood and shit; they felt like nothing alive, like cold clay … there is a soul, Tamara, I believe that, I believe that. But it dies too.”
They shared the blanket for an hour more. They didn’t speak. They just watched them pass: the river, and time, and their awareness of them both.
* * *
She waited until that night, after Mrs. Grundy had left. They sat together in the parlor, listening to a new blues record that Phyllis had ordered and had just come into the post office. When the torture of anticipation outpaced the pleasure of her last curse-free hours, she got up from the couch, turned off the music, and faced Phyllis.
“I need to do something,” Tamara said.
Pea considered that for a moment. “With the cards?”
“How did you guess?”
“You were different when you got back. And who knows better than I do what those cards meant to you, Tammy?”
“I’m an oracle,” Tamara said aloud, for the first time in her life. She pulled out the cards and they settled into her like home.
Phyllis nodded slowly. “You want to tell me what this is about?”
“After we’re done.”
Pea didn’t object. Where had she come by that easy trust when Tammy’d had to fight so hard for hers? Or maybe it wasn’t so easy for her. Pea always kept a little back, locked away in that strongbox of her heart.
Pea stayed on the couch and Tammy knelt on the carpet across from her. She shuffled in waterfalls and bridges, more than she needed to, but it felt good, and it gave her a chance to feel the cards. She needed to show that she was willing, at last, to make the trade. But she had never needed to speak to the cards before. How could she manage it?
With tricks, Aunt Winnie said, clear as the river beside her. Tamara smiled, missing her.
She found the cards she wanted and seeded the deck with them. She asked Pea to cut the deck, and made sure the card she wanted was on bottom: her old friend the suicide king of diamonds, his stubby legs flailing over an abyss. Victor and his silver smile. He should have come out of the woodwork for this, she’d almost looked forward to spitting on him personally. Still, she didn’t miss him. She had Pea shuffle the cards this time and then cut again. It was a bit like dancing, it came out without her thinking too hard about it. Pea pulled out the ace of spades, just as Tammy wanted. The curse, the knives, the angel and her corrupted justice. Her vision had been pure, the oracle told them. And now for the third card, shuffle and cut: six of hearts, death and rebirth, the oracle’s card and Tamara’s heart, bearing them both. The power of the cards was rushing down to her now. She only had time to look up, catch Pea’s eyes and Pea’s hands, and say her name as a drowning man might call to the shore—
A dream grabbed her, pulled her under. It was not her dream; it was the cards, it was Durga. The child was already there, as close as a breath. A baby like a wheel, spinning in a wind of blue light. She had changed, in the months since the oracle’s last reading. Her saint’s hands had transformed into something else. And behind her were more wheels and more winds, turning and turning, blowing up from below in the colors of the earth. They were coming, these dreamers with their uncanny hearts and the force of ancestors and spirits and gods and old, aching hands behind them. Rejoice! they said. For we will not await our own destruction. We will rise up to meet them and turn them aside.
Is that possible? the oracle thought. Power corrupts, and power is corrupted.
No one answered her. They were all too busy dreaming.
She felt the weight of the mother’s curse here. Smelled the blood on her hands, rotting.
Let me take it! the oracle shouted into the blue wind. Let me fulfill the bargain.
The blue wind paused and faced her. She felt them inside it: the ancestors, the oracles of her family, the long line that stretched to the slave ships, to old stories painted in forgotten languages. It will be hard for you, Oracle. We have given the child a different gift.
But I can take the curse? The mother will live?
The child and her kind will remake the world. If you accept her burden, the mother we will forget.
Relief shook the oracle, but a lifetime’s caution made her pause.
What has changed in her?
Look, Oracle! This is our gift: her heart.
But the oracle could see this was no gift, or no easy one. The child would grow up filled with dreams. Like fire she would spill them, before and behind her.
How can you make them bear this?
Aunt Winnie came to her as a thin note from that faceless chorus.
Because it is to be borne. The hands can no longer serve. What would you have us do? Sit idly by while the world turns against us? Our people have as much a need as we ever did; no, we have more. We have given you our hearts! Oracle, remember your duty! I taught you as well as I could in the time I had. You are to witness. You are to hold them to the path. You are to be our voice in the world of the living!
The oracle held out her simple hands. Give it to me, then. I will bear what I must, and I will help that child when her load grows heavy.
They swept her up so that she lost sight of the babies in their wheels, rocking like buoys in a storm. It was only her and the blue. They sang a tune she would never recall, but it pierced her like a butterfly, right to the wall. It hurt, of course it did. The smell of rot was in her nostrils now, the splattering grief of five dozen souls. It flayed her
and choked her and then settled, all at once, upon her heart. Like the old roots of a killing tree, it squeezed. The oracle cried out, but she did not deny it. Then comfort, sweetly come: a soft breeze of honeysuckles and fresh-cut clover, cicadas churning the evening air. A strong voice, made soft in her ear: You done good, Tammy.
She came to facedown in the carpet, each thread in the weave as large as cornstalks in her blasted vision. Bloody saliva dripped down the side of her face. She was shivering too hard to swallow. Pea got her onto the couch and under a blanket, those saint’s hands trembling like a young girl’s, or an old woman’s. Their gazes met, stripped Tamara naked as a child.
“What did you do, Tammy?” Pea whispered. “I felt—something—”
Tammy laughed and then coughed for a good while. Her vision went white at the edges, and she might have seen old Vic there, waiting. She didn’t care. She had done it, she had done it, as well as any oracle could. Breathing again, she held Pea to her, Pea and that dreaming child, who would live.
* * *
She awoke the next morning to the sound of Phyllis on the phone, giving directions to some anonymous cop about where to find fresh evidence of old murders. They looked at one another from across the room after she hung up the phone.
“It’ll get back to Walter.”
“I can handle Walter. Are you sick, baby?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what is it?”
“Just some old ghosts. How’s Durga?”
“She’s—” Pea looked surprised, put an unconscious hand on the lower swell of her belly. “—sleeping.”
Tammy smiled as her heart squeezed to pieces.
A few days passed. The cucumbers and watermelons put up energetic shoots. She kept her cards wrapped in their silk sheath and dreamt of where they would go when the baby was born, when the war was over: Paris, Hollywood, Mexico. She wanted to dance again.
Trouble the Saints Page 32