Everyone was silent for ten miles or so when Skip said unexpectedly, “I brought your pillow, the soft one.”
Gilda saw one of Savannah’s hands leave the steering wheel to rest on Skip’s leg. She said thanks in a clipped voice, her throat tight. They were silent again. Savannah wanted to ask questions of the dark one, Bird, but could see there would be no answers. Her glance into the rearview mirror confirmed it. The two women sat stonily with Toya wedged between them.
Savannah broke the silence with a sudden loud laugh. Everyone looked at her, startled by the sound.
“Goddamn! Me and Skip got this, what you call, contingency plan together to avoid a funeral, not lead the procession. Skip, I think your girls here need a drink!”
Toya was the first to laugh. It was as if Savannah had pricked her with a pin, releasing the tension that held her tight. Skip passed a flask to the backseat, and it circled the group several times before the tension left the air.
They finally exited off the main road and turned into a small lane. The house was tiny. It was set back and surrounded by a high hedge, its rear toward the bay. They entered the bungalow hurriedly, escaping the damp air. Gilda cautioned Savannah to leave the wooden shutters closed on all the windows as they searched with flashlights for lanterns. Once the amber glow was cast over the room, Skip and Toya exhaled forcefully. It sounded like they had been holding their breath for the entire ride. Gilda walked to the rear of the room where the kitchen remained in shadow. She looked through the back door which opened out onto a small yard over-run with weeds and dead grass leading down to the beach. Bird stood in the center of the room while Savannah unpacked a bag of groceries in the kitchen.
“What’s up there?” Bird asked, staring at a trapdoor in the ceiling. A chain hung from it, a tiny brass ring at the end swaying in the air.
“The attic. It’s got another small bed and a lot of junk stored for the summer,” Skip answered.
Bird stood on a chair and pulled at the chain until the stairs dislodged and she could lower them into the living room. An even stronger musty smell filled the room as Bird climbed up to the attic with a flashlight in hand. She moved above them, feeling the room rather than looking at it. The single bed in its brass frame was next to a shuttered window. There was barely room to stand at full height, and the boxes left little space to walk about.
She came down and said, “We’ll take that room.”
“Sure. We’ve got sleeping bags and everything up there you want,” Skip said, eager to be helpful. Bird watched him as she pushed the stairs back up into the ceiling. He was slightly built and his mocha-colored skin was almost as dark as her own. His closely cut hair seemed conservative compared to the blue sharkskin suit and dark blue shoes he wore. He looked to be about twenty to Bird. She could smell the fear in him, a boy among old women, but she also sensed his fierce loyalty to Savannah. She wondered about him for only a second, then turned to Gilda who was about to open the front door.
“Maybe Skip can do that for you?” Bird said.
“Yes, Skip, how about driving the car around back, into the yard. No point in drawing attention to the house,” Gilda said.
“Sure thing.” He grabbed the car keys from the table, full with his mission. Savannah chuckled and rushed over to kiss the back of his neck as he went out, looking, at that moment, as young as he did.
“O.K., I’m ready for a drink,” Savannah said. “That seems to be the theme of our little get-together tonight.” She unlocked a cabinet beneath the sink and lined up bottles on the small counter that stood between the main room and the kitchen area. Gilda sat on the couch, Toya on the hooked rug at her feet. Bird sat across from them in the one armchair.
Savannah glanced at each of them and asked, “Brandy all around?” Everyone looked up when the door opened. Skip came back in as she poured. Toya trembled, and Savannah gave her the first drink.
“That’s my baby and I use that word advisedly,” she said, handing Skip the next one.
The room was old. The walls and floor met at odd angles; the floorboards were worn in the way that says many people have enjoyed the house. A thin layer of dust covered the framed photographs on the sideboard: several vintage pictures of men and women, someone’s parents in their youth, and snapshots of Savannah and Skip, their arms linked with two slender men in bathing suits.
Gilda recognized Maurice from Mass. Ave., but not the pale man with his hand draped intimately over Maurice’s shoulder. Bird could almost hear the laughter of these carefree friends as they ran up from the beach and collapsed in this weary room. When Savannah sat next to Gilda on the couch, the cushions sank under her weight. Skip took the ottoman that matched the faded cover of Bird’s chair. He stretched his legs in front of him and leaned back on his elbows. Everyone was quiet, not sure how to pass the evening.
Bird shifted in her chair after a moment, then said, “Gilda?”
“Well, I don’t think anything will happen tonight,” she responded, as if they’d already started the conversation in their heads. “He’ll search the city ’til dawn. Go to his regular hangouts. My house probably, maybe to yours, Savannah, if the people in the bar say you left with us.”
“I don’t think so. Not one of them barflies likes the dude. I mean this is a guy any of them would walk backwards away from in the desert if they thought they could get away with it.”
“He has persuasive ways, so we can figure he’ll check everywhere in town before he comes out here tomorrow night.”
“What if he comes in the morning?” Skip asked. “I mean, why should he wait? He might think we’ll just try to skip town, head west…”
“He won’t come in the morning. He’ll be here tomorrow evening. We’ll have a plan by then, but you all must do exactly as we say. No questions, no hesitations. It’ll be hard to surprise Fox. But I think we have one for him. Maybe even a couple of them. The main thing is that we don’t panic.”
Gilda’s last words were aimed almost directly at Toya. Bird peered at her, looking for signs of hysteria.
“Fox broke my jaw once,” Toya said in a softly accented voice, “just backhanded me across the room. But I never hollered, never cried. All the way to the hospital they kept looking at me, waiting. But I couldn’t. Later he did things, mean things like threw out my letters from mama, then he ripped up my favorite dress ’cause he didn’t like the color. I couldn’t cry when he did that stuff. I knew he was waitin’ for me to fall apart. He was doin’ ’em to make me cry. So I couldn’t, and I ain’t gonna now. I’ll cry when I know he’s gonna leave me alone. And if that means he got to be dead to do that, then like the preacher say: may God have mercy on his soul.”
“Amen!” Skip said.
The assent of the others came in silence.
Gilda rose and said, “I’m going out to scout around the house, just a bit. I’ll be back in an hour.”
The silence remained unbroken until Savannah spoke. “Hell, I ain’t had to hide out from no nigger since 1940. You heard tell of Franklin, ain’t you?” She directed her question to Toya, who nodded. “Well, he took it into his head he wasn’t gonna let me leave him. Which was something else since I ain’t never gone with him in the first place. He just started following me around, hanging over me like a fool. Got so I couldn’t leave the bar but he’d be right there. Scared off half my customers. I was so mad I thought I’d croak the guy.”
“What’d you do?” Skip asked like a child hearing a bedtime story.
“I got pretty sick of it after a while. But I ain’t had no one to hang with me yet and I wasn’t ready to fight no man in the street, so I took off up to Roxbury to this woman who had a rep as big as Franklin’s. She call herself Danny. Fancy Danny they called her on the avenue. She wore a tiny diamond on three fingers of each hand and one in her ear. Wore the sharpest threads in town. I just went up to Danny’s and asked her if I can stay at her place. She laughed and said sure. Then she asked if I want to be one of her girls. And I said yeah, for a
little while, kinda nervous you know. And she said, ‘I ain’t never had to chain nobody yet.’
“One night he comes to the bar, the 411 matter of fact, and me and Danny and one of the other girls was sittin’ having dinner. He ask me to come outside and talk to him. Danny says, ‘We’re all family round this table, why don’t you just sit down and talk right here?’ I was sure he’d jump bad with a load of bullshit, but he just glared at Danny and walked away.
“Well, Miss Danny pulled off each of them rings, wrapped them in the long silk scarf she had round her neck, and gave it to the bartender on her way out.”
“Gus,” Skip volunteered, pleased to take part in the story.
“Ah, what you know about it boy, you wasn’t even left home from your mama yet,” Savannah said, laughing.
“Yeah, it was that big, light Gus. She just tossed them rings over the bar at him and followed Franklin out the bar. She wasn’t so tall, not even real big, but solid. The only way you could tell she was mad was that sweat was on her chocolate skin, making her forehead shine. Shiny like that black hair she kept pulled back in a bun. Danny come back in the bar ten minutes later, put her rings back on, and ordered a martini. I never forgot it. Cool as a cuke. And that was that.”
Skip was laughing. “Yeah, didn’t even get her threads dirty, I bet!”
“Naw, not a speck of dirt. She coulda even left them rings on! Franklin never bothered me again. Even after I moved out of Danny’s a year later.”
“A year! What took you so long?” Skip asked.
Savannah laughed, “Well, she was right. She never had to chain nobody.”
Bird laughed out loud for the first time since they arrived. Skip looked puzzled but laughed too.
The night got darker. Bird refused to watch the door or wonder about Gilda. She felt the slight opening of pain in her chest. The uneasiness of it was not difficult for her now, but soon she would have to go out.
Gilda’s entrance startled them out of their thoughts. To Bird she said, “I’ve scouted south on the bay side. Maybe you should look around as well.”
Bird rose silently and left the bungalow. She, too, would return with the flush of new blood on her face. The look would be mistaken for the effects of the sharp salt air and a brisk walk. Bird hurried into the darkness. She wanted to return to the company of these people. It had been some time since she’d spent this type of sociable evening.
Not since Woodard’s. The white-haired woman, Savannah, and Gilda had linked in a way that Bird envied. There was an empty space after years of separation where she and Gilda had once been united. She remembered her first sight of Gilda as a girl—she had looked so African with her dark brow and deep eyes. It was warming to see the look echoed here in the varying colors of the others. The same penetrating gaze filled their eyes almost as if the years away from their home soil had not damaged them. She had found this kind of tribal unity with her people, too.
Bird sped into the shadows until she came upon a small house that held more than one person. She slipped inside and found the bedroom of a teenaged boy, sleeping deeply as they do. She held him with the hypnotic quality of her voice while she took the blood from his arm. His desires were simple: good grades on a science test and a date for an approaching dance. Bird felt a rush of tenderness as she slipped inside his secrets, gently prodding open his sense of mathematic and scientific principles so he’d grasp ideas a bit more easily. And she left the idea that it might not matter if he had a companion or not. The evening would be a success if he simply enjoyed everyone as a friend. He did not stir when she sealed the wound and listened to his slowed pulse. As she moved away from him he turned on his side and mumbled out loud, returning to his own dreams.
As Bird ran back toward the bungalow she tried to think of ways to approach the problem, then realized there was no need for that. They were the problem—Fox would approach them. They only had to make sure they were prepared. She had, in fact, discovered something in the attic that might give them a slight advantage.
By the time she returned to the house everyone except Gilda looked like they were ready for sleep. Savannah pulled out the sofa while Gilda handed down linen from the attic. The ottoman would open up into a single bed for Toya after Gilda and Bird went up to the attic. Bird secured the doors and checked the windows, then took Savannah aside in the kitchen.
“We’ll stay upstairs until late afternoon. Please, don’t let any of them come up or disturb us unless there’s some emergency. I’m sure nothing will happen until the evening, but keep your eyes on the road.”
Savannah nodded with the crispness of a soldier.
“I saw a small boat out back with an outboard motor. Can you get that in operating order?” Bird continued without waiting for Savannah’s response. “Whatever you have to do—get gas, plug holes—by this evening.” Savannah nodded again, a bronze-and-platinum statue come to life in the misty lamplight.
Bird and Gilda went up the angled stairs, and Savannah closed them from behind until they fit snugly in the ceiling. Bird took a length of bed sheet and secured the stairs shut by tying one end to the step and the other to a pipe in a corner of the room. They both smiled at the primitive precaution. Bird spread her dark cloak out on the bed, its thick hem filled with the soil of Mississippi and the Dakotas. The two women lay down and drew it tightly around their bodies. The soft lapping of the water so close behind the house kept them alert, even in sleep.
Slivers of light slipped into the attic room at dawn, but neither of them stirred until the afternoon. Bird first heard the soft thud of a mallet on wood. She continued to lay still with Gilda in her arms as she listened to the repeated attempts to get an engine going. The muffled cheers of Skip and Toya reached up to the attic when it turned over.
Bird stretched, then spoke to Gilda. “Fox won’t be certain that there are two of us. That is one advantage. He will also not think much of our crew: two women and a boy won’t seem impressive to him. That’s another advantage.”
Without moving from Bird’s breast Gilda said, “And there’s the bay.”
“And something else,” Bird said sitting up. She crossed the cool, wood floor to a low chest and returned holding out a small leather pouch. She undid the leather tie that held it closed and spilled the contents onto the bed. Gilda stared down at the syringe and a clear envelope of white powder, then looked at Bird, startled.
“Skip, I think. At least it used to be Skip. That’s why it was locked away up here. At dusk I’ll cook it down and fill the needle. There should be enough heroin here to slow him down, if we can get close enough to him.”
“You can’t!” Gilda almost shouted. “Skip’s worked too hard to kick. Savannah has complete confidence in him now. If she knows about this—”
Bird cut in impatiently. “Fox will kill Toya, Savannah, Skip, you, and me if he can! Haven’t you understood yet? He is not a misguided youth. He possesses all the powers that you and I do. He’s possibly older, certainly more merciless.” Bird stopped. She could see that Gilda understood how irrelevant her human concerns were right now.
Bird brushed her hand across Gilda’s forehead, down the side of her face and her jawline as she spoke. “Dear girl, the mortal ones will settle their own worries. To connect with them, yes, but you must live as what you are. Listen to the world from your own powers.” Gilda pulled away and sat up on their cot.
Bird continued. “Is this why you’ve taken no one into this life? Is the mortal world too sacred?”
Gilda didn’t speak, but her eyes were open in the shock of realization. Bird reached out to rub Gilda’s cheek again, as if soothing a child, and continued talking more softly. “It is a good thing to love and care for others. That’s why I travel, to learn from the people and study what they search for. But we are as we are. Our world is separate from theirs. To ignore our possibilities is to nurture only disappointment.”
“It’s been my one-hundred-year journey—away from my people into the world,” Gilda said.
“Only now have I felt like I could retrieve them, touch and be touched by them as I was before. In the shop I’ve grown to understand the rhythm of their lives, their desires. It’s not so easy to step back and say cavalierly, ‘Too bad, Savannah, we’ve discovered Skip’s a failure, a junky liar just like you feared!’ “
“There’s consideration in everything. I make no suggestion callously, but their questions must be answered later, and not by us.”
Gilda’s assent was implicit in the quiet, that surrounded her.
The other question still hung in the air. Neither wanted to speak about it, but each knew it weighed heavily. Once subdued, how to kill another like themselves? It would be far from easy. His powers, at least equal to theirs, were fueled by anger and hatred.
“I have killed,” Gilda said in a tremulous voice. “I hold the faces as I should, but it was not intentional. And not one of us.”
“It will have to be done. He’ll accept nothing less. You’ve seen them, I know. Their hunger for destruction and death is insatiable. He would torment her for his own enjoyment for as long as he’s amused. If we’re to give her this second chance, we have to make her free of him.”
“I don’t know that I can do it…deliberately…to one of our own.”
“Don’t be sentimental here; he is not among the living. We are. He seeks only to drag others into death and thrives on watching their descent. Don’t forget what you’ve learned about people, about us.”
Gilda remembered Eleanor’s frigid smile as she’d ordered her to kill Samuel, and nodded.
They pushed the stairway down, rejoining the group and leaving the answer to prove itself in the action. Skip announced that he and Savannah had gotten the engine going and that he was off to wash and then start dinner. Savannah rinsed the oil and dirt off her hands in the kitchen sink, then plopped down on the sofa with a bottle nearby.
The Gilda Stories Page 19