The Uninvited

by Cat Winters

  Daniel rested his hammer on the floor with a gentle clank and ran the tips of his fingers over his work.

  Another jazz song shimmied through the boarded-up windows.

  I glanced up. “What’s that one called?”

  “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

  “You knew the name of that other song. I figured you might know this one, too.”

  He kept his back toward me, but I could tell by the way he held his neck straight and still that he was listening.

  “That’s too easy,” he said. “‘Livery Stable Blues’ by the Original Dixieland Jass Band.”

  I lifted the bristles off the ground. “Are you a musician?”

  “I play guitar.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” His shoulder blades stiffened beneath his tweed vest. “Really.”

  “Maybe you should go over there and play with them sometime.”

  He glanced back at me with a scowl. “Maybe you should mind your own business.”

  “I just—”

  “You seem like a person who’s ‘always just’ something or other. I’m not going to go play with a band who wouldn’t want me with them. They’re probably also . . .” He stopped and pinched his lips together.

  “Probably also what?” I asked.

  He just sat there, half turned toward me.

  I sat up tall. “What were you going to say?”

  He stood and knocked his knee against the cabinet with a thud that must have hurt. “I think it’s time for you to go.”

  “What did I say?”

  He marched toward me. “Go fix up somebody else’s messes instead of mine.”

  I pushed myself to my feet. “I’m not done with the—”

  He hooked his hand under my elbow and yanked me toward the door, pinching my skin.

  “Wait! I want to finish the job.”

  He pushed me against the door and shoved his blue German eyes and hot breath in my face. “I know who you are, Ivy. Scrubbing away all those bloodstains will never, ever erase what they did.”

  The boarded-up entrance fell open behind me, and I was out in the cold, dark air with the door slamming shut two inches from my nose.

  Chapter 5

  I stopped and leaned against the cold bricks of an unlit corner to catch my breath. My stomach clenched. Pain shot down my legs and burned through my feet, and my skull cracked into two separate pieces, like Emily Dickinson once described in a poem.

  I felt a cleaving in my mind

  As if my brain had split . . .

  He knew who I was.

  Oh, God. He knew.

  Two blocks behind me, the jazz band played on as if nothing were amiss, the beat of the drums a distant pulse, the cornet a faraway wail. The furniture store tugged me back toward it—my legs thrummed with the urge to turn back around and return. To make amends. Yet I forced myself to move again, away from him. Away from the blood.

  A car motor rumbled from somewhere nearby, and a stab of fear shot through me. Maybe someone had seen me enter his store. Maybe Billy’s friend Lucas had been observing my actions ever since that morning—spying, listening, watching with his magnified eyes.

  Headlights rounded the bend two blocks down. Words written in frosted block letters jumped out from the storefront window beside me: BUCHANAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE.

  “Oh no! Damn!” I muttered aloud.

  I had just helped out the prime target of the local American Protective League’s scrutiny, and there I stood, next to their headquarters.

  I dashed around the corner, pressed my back against a wall in the shadows, and prayed the driver would continue heading eastward on Willow. The car growled closer—I could feel the engine humming across the bottoms of my feet. I smelled gasoline and oil and hoped the driver hadn’t seen me. Perhaps he was simply a regular person traveling home for regular reasons.

  The engine pop-pop-popped to a stop around the bend, and I heard someone pull the automobile’s clutch lever all the way back to set the rear parking brake. I sucked in my breath and held the air in my lungs, willing my body and my clothing to blend into the wall. Doors opened and shut. Male laughter bulldozed over the cornet and the piano down the way.

  I calculated how quickly and quietly I could run down to the next corner and disappear into the blackness of night. Before I could even think to move, however, one of the men from the automobile uttered the name “Schendel.”

  I froze.

  “What do you think we should do about the brother?” asked a fellow with the rasp of a smoker, all rocks and sandpaper.

  “He’s not going to be around much longer,” said a man with a voice so smooth, I bet he grinned every time he talked, no matter how viperous the words coming out of his mouth. “He’s going to need a loan if he wants to repair that store, and we’ve already made sure none of the banks lend the Boche any money at this point. Where the hell is Harry? He’s late.”

  “Do we even know who killed the other brother yet?” asked a third voice, a jumpy one.

  “We have a good idea,” said Mr. Smooth. “It had nothing to do with any of our volunteers, so make sure no one goes around taking credit for it. The mayor isn’t happy. He doesn’t want the word ‘vigilante’ showing up in the paper.”

  “Let’s just go ahead and ship the surviving brother to Fort Oglethorpe,” said Mr. Smoker from down in the rockiest depths of his throat. “Be done with it.”

  “Damn that Harry for always running late.” Mr. Smooth must have pulled out a set of keys just then, for I heard them jangle. “I want to do this fucking walk through town before the night gets any colder. My family jewels are already starting to freeze.”

  The other two fellows chuckled, but their coughs and laughter and terrible language disappeared inside the building before I could hear anything more about shipping Daniel to wherever they wanted to send him.

  My legs longed to run back to the furniture store again.

  Should I warn him? I wondered. Should I park myself in front of his door and protect him through the night?

  I wavered. I tapped my fingers against the chalky bricks of the wall beside me and envisioned myself standing guard in front of Daniel’s store with my arms crossed over my chest and no weapons to speak of.

  Ridiculous.

  Resigning myself to my uselessness, knowing Daniel didn’t even want to see me again, I slipped down the side street in an attempt to slink back to May’s house on less visible roads.

  The back of my neck prickled when I rounded the corner down the way, and I feared that if I turned my head, I’d find the shine of Lucas’s spectacles in the lamplight. Or the face of the deceased Albrecht Schendel.

  TWO BLOCKS LATER, around the corner from Halloran’s Dry Goods, a new disturbance erupted across town: the sputtering coughs of an automobile engine fighting to spark to life. I recognized the desperate sound from my early days of learning how to turn the starter crank on the family’s Model T truck.

  “Oh, God.” I puffed a sigh. “What now?”

  I picked up my pace, and when the choking ruckus grew louder and shrieks of distress joined in with the struggle, I tore around the bend to Lincoln Street, forgetting my own worries. Another block south, an olive-green truck sat on the railroad tracks—an ambulance. Stalled. A Red Cross emblem marked the wooden enclosure on the back. Patients likely lay inside. Flu patients. Children maybe.

  A train whistled down the way.

  “Oh, God!” I ran toward the vehicle with my feet clapping across the asphalt. “Do you need help? Oh, God!”

  Again and again some unseen person down in front of the vehicle’s grille turned the starter crank, but the ambulance sputtered and rattled and refused to budge from the tracks.

  “Put it into neutral and just push it off the tracks!” I yelled. “Get out of the way so we can push it!”

  The fuzzy glow of a train’s lantern came into sight through a patch of fog down the way. Another whistle keened through the night, this time close
r and with an urgency that pierced my heart and quickened my feet. The ambulance stayed stock still, and the person in front of the truck kept cranking and fighting that poor grinding engine.

  “Move!” With the strength of a quarterback, I knocked aside the person at the crank—a blond woman in gray—until she lay in the road, safely away from both the ambulance and the tracks. I shoved the crank into place, gave it a firm upward twist, and jumped into the driver’s seat with the engine rumbling awake. My pulse beat in my ears, and the locomotive roared my way, the whistle blaring, lights shining. I pushed the hand lever forward, released the clutch pedal, and, after a quick adjustment of the spark advance and the throttle, the truck careered off those tracks with a squeal of rubber. The train thundered behind me, its wheels churning, wind whipping across the open driving compartment, and the whistle hollered through the night with the ear-shattering wails of an Irish banshee.

  I brought the ambulance to a stop and, with a groan, collapsed across the steering wheel, in shock that I remained alive and in one piece.

  Beside me, a pair of hands gripped the dashboard. Erratic panting filled the truck while the train whistled farther and farther into the vast and distant void of the eastern farmlands.

  “Are you all right?” I asked whoever sat with me, but my voice—raw and deep—didn’t sound like my own. It hardly even sounded like a voice.

  The passenger didn’t answer. I lifted my head and, in the light of a streetlamp shining through the windshield, I saw a skinny black girl, no older than seventeen, wearing a white surgical mask over the bottom half of her face. She was dressed in a dark necktie and a Red Cross coat, skirt, and hat—all made of gray wool—and her arms and shoulders trembled. She stared at me in that hazy light, her brown eyes wide and damp.

  “What happened to Nela?” she asked with a squeak in her throat.

  “Who?”

  “Nela. The woman at the crank. Where is she? We’re supposed to be doing this together.”

  “I’ll go . . .” I peeled my fingers off the steering wheel, one by one, the muscles so stuck in a crooked position that my hands curled like claws. “I’ll make sure she’s all right.”

  I slid out of the driver’s seat and landed too hard on my feet, jarring my neck, and then I staggered over to the supine blond woman lying in the road near the tracks. She also wore the gray Red Cross uniform, and like the girl in the front seat, her mouth and nose hid beneath a gauze mask, the blue eyes above it wide and unblinking. Her chest rose and fell with shallow contractions that didn’t make a sound.

  I bent down beside her, my knees digging into the sharp gravel below my skirt, and I touched the wool-covered arm above her right elbow. “Are you all right? Can you hear me?”

  “They said . . .” She still didn’t blink, and her voice emerged from her larynx as a breathy murmur. “They said . . . we could help the Southside families at night.” Her accent—what I could hear of it—sounded Polish. Maybe Russian, or Czech. “But we had to drive ourselves. I do not know how to drive. She does not know how to drive.”

  “Neither of you—?” I furrowed my brow. “You mean to say that the Red Cross sent two nondrivers out to helm these vehicles at night? Don’t they know how dangerous these railroad tracks are—and how badly a person can break her arm if she doesn’t know how to turn the crank?”

  The woman finally blinked, her blond eyelashes fluttering. “One of our own volunteers, another Polish woman, is lying in the back of the ambulance with a fever. She was to be our driver. Liliana.”

  A pair of feet crunched across the crumbled flakes of asphalt in the road behind me. I peeked over my shoulder and found the young black volunteer walking toward us with her arms wrapped around her waist. “We have to deliver everyone in Southside,” she said, “the Poles, the Russians, the Romanians, the blacks—everyone—to Polish Hall.”

  My jaw dropped. “The hospital isn’t treating Southside residents?”

  Both women shook their heads.

  “It’s too full,” said the blonde. “No room.”

  “Here, can you sit up?” My hands hovered over the woman’s shoulders. I feared I’d fracture one of her bones if I touched her with even the gentlest of movements. “Does anything feel broken or numb?”

  “No.” She wiggled herself up to her elbows. “I was just stunned. I didn’t expect anyone to fly at me in the dark, and that train . . .”

  I slid my arm around her back and helped to raise her up to a seated position while the other girl crouched down beside us. The three of us sat in the street, not more than five feet down from the still-humming tracks. If the APL brought their nighttime walking patrol to that part of town and spotted us huddled together on the ground like that, so close to an ambulance, I wondered if they’d even bother to ask if we needed help.

  “How many patients are lying in Polish Hall right now?” I asked.

  “Over a hundred,” said the blonde. “Maybe two hundred, with five to seven deaths a day.”

  “Five to seven?”

  “Will you help drive us, ma’am?” asked the younger girl. “You somehow seem to know a thing or two about trucks. I’ve never seen such a useful white woman in all my life.”

  I looked between the two of them. Both women peered at me with those damp and pleading eyes that poured the weight of the world upon my shoulders.

  “Well . . .” I swallowed. A flock of excuses flapped around inside my brain. It’s too late, and I’m tired . . . I’m too busy worrying about the brother of a murdered man . . . The APL are prowling the streets tonight . . . My heart is still pounding over that escape from the train . . . My father always told me Southside was a breeding ground for diseases, and I should never, ever think of going near it . . .

  “I suppose . . . all right.” I nodded. “I can help for a bit, but I can’t guarantee I’ll feel well enough to drive for long tonight. Just . . . tell me how to get to the social hall, and we’ll start by getting your patient delivered. My name is Ivy, by the way.”

  “Thank you, thank you, lovely Ivy,” said the blonde, grabbing hold of my elbow. “God bless you. I am Nela, and this is Addie. And, as I said, Liliana lies in back.”

  “It’s nice to meet you.” I helped Nela to her feet by holding her arm and the back of her waist. “I’m just sorry I had to meet you this way.”

  DOWN ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE TRACKS, the monstrous shadows of the textile mills and railcar factories rose up along the river like smokestack-covered watchmen. We drove past endless rows of immigrant housing with webs of clotheslines crisscrossing alleyways and yards, and the air smelled of industry and pollution. Soot and refuse. Progress and poverty. The darkness seemed a living thing down there, its fluid weight settling over the homes and the factories and the treeless strips of weeds for yards. The entire region exhausted me. Everything seemed to sleep and wither and drown in blackness.

  “There it is,” said Nela, pointing across the steering wheel toward the left-hand side of the street. “Polish Hall.”

  I peeked through the windshield and spied a two-story brick building attached to a small Polish grocery store. Electric lights illuminated every window despite the late hour and the lack of life in the rest of Southside. I pulled the ambulance alongside the curb.

  Before I even set the emergency brake, both of my passengers leapt off the seat and disappeared toward the back compartment. I followed after them and found them lifting a canvas stretcher that held a pale young brunette woman, also dressed in a gray Red Cross uniform. Her eyes were closed, and the movements of the stretcher jostled her small shoulders and her long legs.

  “Hurry!” Nela hoisted up the front end of the stretcher and led the way to the brick steps of the hall. She said something to her patient in Polish, but all I understood was the woman’s name—Liliana.

  “Nie!” Liliana’s eyes flew open, and she grabbed hold of Nela’s hand. “Do not take me here! Nie! Nie!”

  “What can I do to help?” I asked, and I hurried past them
so I could at least open the front door for them.

  “Stay with us so you can drive us,” said Addie, maneuvering the stretcher up the steps from the back. She had to duck her head to avoid Liliana’s feet kicking her in the head with those thick Red Cross boots.

  I pushed open a weighty paneled door, and the stench of vomit and whiskey socked me in the face with such a blow that I stepped back and held my breath. In the main front room, beneath beautiful golden-wood walls and stained-glass windows, a shivering mass of coughing and wheezing bodies huddled beneath blankets, both on the floor and on cots. To my utter horror, blood flowed inside that hall—nosebleeds mainly. Horrific scarlet rivers that drenched clothing, cots, blankets, people, and even the walls. I swear upon a stack of Bibles: people bled from their noses with such force and velocity that the blood from their nostrils shot across the room and hit the walls. They resembled victims of heinous knife attacks, or people wounded in the face by bullets. Not sufferers from influenza.

  Not more than five feet away from me, a woman leaned over the side of her cot and vomited a black fluid that resembled tar, her lips blue, her face a purplish brown. A mahogany-colored body with wide-open eyes lay on a pile of blankets not more than five feet from where I stood, clutching the door, my legs shaking.

  Nela and Addie lugged Liliana to the back of the room and turned to the left, through an open doorway. I covered my mouth to stifle the smells and attempted to follow after them—to do something besides gaping at the horror. My feet slipped in a dark puddle. I gasped, righted myself, and kept walking.

  A young black man buried beneath a pile of blankets grabbed hold of my leg and forced me to a stop.

  “Get me outa here, miss,” he said from down on the floor, his fingers tight on my shin, hurting the bone. “I gotta go. Please, get me outa here.”

  “No, it’s for the best if you stay.” I peeled his hand off my leg and lowered his head back down to the scuffed floorboards. “There are doctors who can help you here.”

  “How many doctors do you see here, miss? How many?” He nodded across the room toward a gray-haired physician in a white coat who forced a man down to a cot as the man shouted, “I want to kill myself! I don’t want to die like this. I want to take a knife to myself and my family.”