Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

  Goose bumps tickled the back of Carlos’s neck. Johnita Poston was spooky. Her Highness could have been a dangerous woman in another life, he thought, peeking around the corner at her. A fly landed on the end of the psychic’s pen, and she held the pen up to her face so she could examine the fly more closely. The insect stayed in place while she stared.

  “It’s almost as if they’re bringing the messages on their wings,” the psychic said, murmuring mostly to herself. Then she went back to writing, intercepting another of the buried whispers. As soon as her pen touched the paper, the fly was gone.

  It had flown away, Carlos was sure. But it had looked like it vanished instead. Poof.

  Carlos went back to Phoenix’s bed and gazed at her eyes, and pain stabbed his stomach again. Phoenix’s face was paralyzed in her life’s greatest instant of horror. He wished he could leap inside her pain and pull her to safety. Come back to us, Phee. We miss you. We need you here on this side.

  “I’m going to get that piano, Ms. Poston,” Carlos said to the psychic. “If we bring Phoenix that piano, will Joplin let her go?” The blunt question made Phoenix’s mother’s face turn ashen. None of them liked to call it what it was, but somebody had to.

  “All I know is that I don’t know,” the psychic said, and he heard the scribble as she kept writing. “Let’s try some faith. Once we have the piano, Phoenix will show us what to do.”

  It was the closest thing to prophecy Carlos had heard since the gunfire at the Osiris that took Phoenix away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Was it okay?

  Phoenix heard her own voice in the darkness, endless repetition. Was it okay?

  Reenie’s throaty voice joined the chorus, laughing from a tunnel. Was it OKAY?

  Daddy…was it okay?

  “You did it, Peanut.” Her father’s voice was in her ear.

  Sarge’s voice brought a flash of light, and Phoenix could finally see again. Sparks flared in the distance like fireflies (but these sparks are from cameras, not the other kind), and a wave of sound grew louder until it snatched her beneath an ocean, deaf in its vast noise. It took Phoenix a long time—maybe minutes, maybe hours—to realize she was hearing applause.

  When the sound of whistling, clapping and shouting became distinct to her, no longer a mystery, her sight sharpened. She knew exactly where she was, suddenly—she was center stage at the Silver Slipper, sitting on the bench of a breathtaking white concert grand piano with its lid raised high, performance-ready. She had dreamed about this piano, long ago, and she had missed it without remembering it was gone.

  Then he must be here, too, she thought, and she peered through the open lid so she could see an identical piano facing hers. Sarge was there, in place at his bench. Sarge wore a black tuxedo and bowtie, and white gloves—but also his mud-cloth skullcap, or it wouldn’t be Sarge.

  Sarge grinned. No stream of blood ran alongside his left eye, or down his nose.

  “Where you been, Peanut?” Sarge said.

  I don’t know, Phoenix tried to say, but speaking was difficult now.

  The audience went deathly quiet. Sarge removed his white gloves one after the other, shaking out his hands to limber them up. “You ready?” he said, winking. “It’s showtime.”

  Phoenix glanced down at her piano’s ivory keys. No blood. Thank you, God.

  A conductor stood before them, silhouetted against the footlights. The conductor raised his baton, and Phoenix’s hands went to the keys in the pose Mrs. Abramowicz had drilled into her head—fingers loose, wrists high. There shouldn’t be a conductor, since there was no orchestra, she remembered. But a conductor was here all the same.

  The conductor’s baton swooped, and Phoenix and her father played. Phoenix didn’t recognize the piece, but she knew it by heart. It wasn’t ragtime, jazz, blues, soul, rock or R&B, but it was descended from all of them, syncopated and improvised and ordered all at once. Sarge added his own flourishes—phrases from old music never mined that he had passed on to his daughter without his knowledge—but the music was Phoenix’s. Together, Phoenix and her father brought her unborn music to life on their twin pianos.

  The conductor’s baton had gone still while she wasn’t paying attention. They were not playing the piece the conductor expected of them, she realized. But they didn’t need the conductor. Phoenix and her father raced and slowed, called and responded, crescendoed and whispered. Sarge began phrases and she finished them, flawless musical discourse. “Just like Pops and King Oliver! Like Dizzy and Bird!” Sarge shouted, laughing, although Phoenix thought they sounded more like Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean, or Big Boi and Andre 3000, or Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Or Nat King Cole and his girl Natalie singing “Unforgettable,” their duet from beyond death.

  The piece ended as it was supposed to, with their combined pianos clapping like thunder on the final note. Phoenix felt her body fill with air, that feeling like floating that came after a good show. You done fucked up NOW, huh nigger? someone far back in the audience shouted, but his lone voice was smothered by applause.

  When they stood up—her at her piano and Sarge at his—the audience exploded.

  “You did it, Peanut. I love you,” Sarge said, with his Daddy stare.

  Sarge walked around his piano with steady strides to the front of the stage, and the conductor stepped aside to make room. Sarge’s features vanished in the stage lights, but Phoenix saw his shadow waving to the audience, as if he spotted friends.

  Elegantly, Sarge took his final bow.

  You like Magnums motherfucker?

  nononononononononononononononononoNONONONONONONO

  “Daddy?” Phoenix called to him, falling back to her bench as feeling seeped from her legs.

  Sarge heard her, and turned around. When he stepped toward her, from beyond the light, Phoenix saw the hole in his head above his eye, and the streams of blood carrying him away.

  “You’ve got to see about the revolution, Phee,” he said.

  Sarge turned and gave the Panther salute, and the audience roared its appreciation. Then, he began his walk toward the backstage curtain, head and shoulders high. Every round goes higher, higher, soldiers of the cross. Sarge was a soldier, and not the least bit afraid.

  Not yet, Daddy, Phoenix tried to say, but her voice failed her again. She tried to stand to go after him, but her arms yanked her back, her hands glued fast to the piano’s keys.

  The white concert grand was gone. Phoenix’s fingers were anchored to the sticky keys of the Rosenkranz. Four stunted, crimson-colored candles burned in its matching candelabra, and hot wax dripped onto the piano’s keys like blood.

  Come back to us, Phee. We miss you. We need you here on our side.

  Phoenix felt a sudden, startling stillness as everything around her dimmed again. The voice puzzled her, intrigued her. She knew that voice. She knew that place. Carlos? she said, or tried to. The name was strange in her mouth even as she uttered it, already forgotten, but its sound strengthened her resolve. She would go to him, even if she had to wade through the river of her father’s blood. All revolutions had blood.

  Phoenix pulled at her fingers again, but the piano’s keys held her in place, unrelenting. Phoenix felt a wail about to break itself free in her, a tide of grief and terror.

  “Freddie?” a voice said behind her.

  The tide receded, stilled. The voice made her heart leap. The stage disappeared.

  She still sat the Rosenkranz, her hands wed to its keys, but the candles were gone. There are no matches in here. Matches would cause an accident. A hand grazed her shoulder, someone’s lips brushed her ear. For an instant, she forgot her lover’s name.

  “Where do you keep vanishing to?” Scott said. “It worries me when you’re gone.”

  Her heart celebrated when she saw Scott standing behind her, listing terribly, but at least on his feet. He must have made a tremendous effort to come to her, since he was confined to his bed. Now he was standing by himself, and she was the one who
was trapped.

  “Why won’t it let me go?” she said.

  “Every musician has an instrument that never forgets him, dear heart.”

  Trembling from either his anticipation or the effort, Scott leaned down to nuzzle her neck. At first, his cool skin made her flinch, but when their flesh rubbed together, she remembered him. Scott raised an unsteady index finger to her chin. His hand was a block of ice, but his touch jolted through her core, making her toes pinch.

  “Let me live, Freddie. Live with me.”

  Suddenly, her hands came free from the piano, and warm light appeared, brightening everything until her vision was as crisp as it had been since before she died. It was like having a new pair of eyes—new everything, really, because her senses shed their sleep. The piano was so beautiful that she stared at it a long time, and the piano’s beauty helped her see the refinement hidden around her. The room’s walnut bureau was plain but well dusted, without a single scratch. The brass globes on the bed likewise gleamed. The light through the curtain was dying but still deep and fiery, dusk light. Her favorite time of day.

  She saw Scott with fresh eyes, too. Scott’s illnesses had aged him, so the man who stood over her might be sixty except for his jet-black hair. If he had lived, Scott wouldn’t have had a gray hair on his head until he was an old man. He was meant to have lived a long time. Scott hadn’t seen a barber in a long while. His hair was springy, a fledgling Afro.

  She smelled baking chicken from the kitchen. From the smell, Lottie must be quite a cook, and that made her jealous.

  “Is Lottie good to you?” she said.

  “When I let her be,” Scott said.

  She smiled at that. Scott was the definition of tenacity, she remembered. Like her.

  “She’ll make sure you’re remembered,” she said.

  “Can’t ask for more than that,” he said, but that was a lie. He knew who he was, and he wanted to see more, that was all. Like everybody else.

  “Stop burning your music, Scott,” she said.

  “Burning is the only way to send it away for good,” he said. “Ashes to ashes, amen.”

  “Stop burning your music. The time will come when you’ll regret it.”

  “There are thieves, Freddie. They t-take—”

  She silenced Scott by taking his face into her hands, bumping their noses gently. His skin still didn’t feel quite right to her, but it was warmer all the time. “What did I say?”

  Their eyes were so close, they might be sharing the same pair. Scott’s eyes began smiling at her. Then, dancing. “I won’t burn my music,” he said. “But promise me something back.”

  “I won’t promise until you say what it is.”

  Scott smiled. “Allow your husband to carry you to our bed.”

  When she nodded, Scott gathered her into his arms like a bundle of bed linens. He pressed his mouth to hers, and the singular taste of him made her eyes fill with tears. His taste was such a comfort, she felt her limbs sag, releasing the coiled fear she had forgotten was there. She would let Scott carry her wherever he wanted her to go. Ashes to ashes, amen.

  He twirled her around, away from the piano, and the drab room suddenly seemed lovely. She didn’t need riches to be happy! The waiting bed and its brown blanket were plain but quaint, and made her recall the pillows on the bed where she had given her virginity to him. Somehow, she had lost that memory before.

  But if Scott had been her first lover, had Scott come after she met Carlos?

  The question was so immense that it rocked her mind. Who was she? Was this her home, or was there another home beyond her memory? Who was the man she remembered with his fist in the air, and why did his memory make her so sad?

  Scott had questions, too. He lay beside her on the bed, his arms locked around her waist, pulling her so tightly against him that she felt his ragged breathing. His eyes shimmered, fearful. “Am I mad, Freddie?” he whispered. “Or are you really here?”

  “Yes, Scott, you’re mad,” she said. “And yes, I’m really here.”

  When they kissed again, their questions dissolved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The salmon-colored door to the ranch-style house at the end of the street opened after only one knock, and Carlos took a step back, his breath diving into his lungs. Four days and counting since the Osiris, and sudden movements still startled him. Dios mio.

  The balding man at the door had an ample beer gut and sideburns fashioned after 1970s-era Elvis, wiry bottle brushes alongside his ears. While he gulped iced tea from a glass with a Miami Dolphins logo, the smell of pizza inside tantalized Carlos. All he’d had on the plane was stale pretzels. Hunger, combined with the startling Miami humidity he’d somehow forgotten, made Carlos feel queasy. His cousins in San Juan would laugh.

  “You the guy who called this morning?” The man had a leftover Brooklyn accent, a transplant like most of his neighbors. Los Angeles was full of transplants, too.

  “Carlos Harris.” Carlos almost shook his hand, but a formal gesture felt awkward, given the insanity that lay beneath this facade of business. Yes, I’m the nut who called, the one who wants to buy your haunted piano. Calls to random Burnsides throughout the Miami telephone directory had led Carlos to Rich Burnside in Perrine, the only one who tuned and restored pianos.

  Burnside rubbed his moustache, which was mostly brown with sprays of gray. The moustache drooped dramatically, almost a style from another era. “You flew from New York just like that? Same day?” Burnside said. “That’s a lot of trouble for a worthless piano.”

  “It’s not worthless to me,” Carlos said. His hands were in his pockets, curled fists. His knuckles chafed against the denim. The odds that Burnside actually remembered the piano Leah had sold him more than a decade ago were slim, but he’d claimed he did. “Can I see it?”

  “Why don’t you come in first, grab a glass of tea and a slice? My wife and I just—”

  “If you don’t mind,” Carlos said, “I’m hoping to catch a flight to JFK in three hours.”

  The man looked at his watch, eyebrows jumping. “Good luck, this time of day. Traffic’s a bitch on 826, and the Don Shula’s a parking lot after four.” He sighed, pondering something, then he turned to look over his shoulder. “Susie?” he called. “I’m running over to Old Cutler. Wrap up my pizza.”

  “You sure?” came the surprised voice of a woman in house.

  “It’ll keep.” Burnside looked forlorn, though. Apparently, Carlos had arrived on the heels of a late lunch. “Let’s vamoose,” Burnside said, fishing his keys from his front pocket. “Fact is, I’m glad to get rid of the piano.”

  Carlos’s heart squirmed. “Why?” he said. He’d delayed the questions that would make him sound like a headcase, but Burnside had brought it up.

  Burnside shrugged instead of answering. He pulled the front door closed while it chimed behind him, a delicate tinkling of shells. Burnside nodded toward his half-circle driveway of crushed stones, where a white van painted with A-1 South Dade Piano Tuning and Repair in red script was parked beside a silver PT Cruiser.

  “Too much aggravation,” Burnside said finally, unlocking the van’s driver’s side door.

  “Like?”

  Instead of elaborating, Burnside waved Carlos into the van. He pulled a cigarette from the pack of Salems in the glove compartment and lit up before starting the engine. While Carlos strapped on his seat belt, Burnside pulled out of the driveway and navigated through the neighborhood of L-shaped homes, which Leah said was close to where Phoenix had grown up. Many of the houses sat on the bank of a winding canal as wide as a small river, beneath eucalyptus and palm trees that made portions of the street feel like the tropics. Burnside slowed the car to let a trail of ducks meander across the street, all of them ignoring approaching traffic as if they were blind.

  Burnside’s van was an older model, with a cassette player instead of a CD. Burnside punched on the music, and Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It” filled the van with a serene reg
gae vibe that didn’t match Carlos’s mood. He didn’t want to be nervous, but he was. Gloria had changed her mind about coming with him to retrieve the old piano, and he could understand why. I’m in no hurry to see that piano, dude, she’d admitted, and Carlos wasn’t either, except that he had to be.

  A sharp fear that Phoenix was going to die—a fear so rooted that it reared as a certainty—coursed through Carlos until it was a hot boulder on his chest. The idea that he would never again be able to talk to her, or hear her soul’s laughter through her music, paralyzed him. In his mind, he had already cleaned up their history to tell their grandchildren: I met her the day she graduated from high school, on her eighteenth birthday. When I first heard her demo, I knew she was a star already.

  “The good ones always go young,” Burnside said suddenly, and blood drained from Carlos’s face. Burnside went on. “Tosh. Marley. The greats always kick before their time.”

  The term kick made Carlos feel sick to his stomach, forcing him to imagine Phoenix’s IV feeding tube and the flies hovering near her bed. “Not all of them do,” Carlos said in her defense, but there was no arguing the point. Aaliyah had just started to get his attention when she died. “I’d like to hear what happened with this piano, if you don’t mind. You never told me.”

  Again, Burnside went quiet. Old Cutler Road appeared at the end of a lonely roadway, and Burnside turned left, keeping his eyes trained on the road like an old man. Old Cutler Road had once been a cool haven from the sun, but the foliage in South Dade hadn’t grown back the same since Hurricane Andrew in ’92. Some spots were still dead.

  “Brace yourself for something that’ll sound crazy,” Burnside said, his voice husky.

  “Try me.”

  “That piano’s been trouble since the day I bought it. This one gets herself lost. What I mean to say, the damn thing moves. You get me?” His profile was rigid.

  “I get you.” And I’m way ahead of you, Carlos thought.

  This was the right piano.

  Old Cutler Self-Storage (AIR-CONDITIONED! FIRST MONTH FREE!) was a collection of drab warehouses with bright orange doors, hidden on the roadway behind eucalyptus trees with dangling roots. The facility’s asphalt was black, new. Burnside drove to the unmanned arm blocking the entrance and punched in a code, and the arm lifted to let him in. He coasted to a stop beside the rear line of warehouses, a stone’s throw from the green water of the Saga Bay lake.