The Game of Love and Death

by Martha Brockenbrough

  “I will, Nana! I will!” There might have been sidewalk beneath Flora’s feet as she ran, holding her pail as steady as she could. But she did not feel it.

  At Volunteer Park, there was so much noise — the shuffle and murmur of the thirty thousand children in the crowd, the bright urgency of the marching band. Even so, the sound Flora heard most was her own heartbeat thumping in her fingertips and ears. She looked up. The sky was a perfect blue, with just a pair of clouds sliding across, as if swept along by God’s broom.

  She watched them, hoping, as always, that she’d see her parents looking down at her. She’d memorized their faces from the small photograph framed on her dresser. Every so often she was certain she’d seen them up there, the fringe of their fingertips fluttering over the edges of the white, waving down at her as she lay on the grass, holding things she wanted them to see: the doll Nana had made for her out of rags and a tea towel, the first book she read, the first tooth she lost.

  “Is that so,” her nana would say when Flora would report her sighting.

  Those were the words Nana always used when she thought Flora was stretching the truth to better fit her imagination. But if it was possible that her parents were up there, perhaps Mr. Lindbergh had seen them from his airplane. And maybe when she learned to fly herself, she could visit them. Just that one moment it took for her plane to pass the cloud … that would be enough.

  The sky’s brightness flared, making Flora’s vision swim. Sound rippled through the crowd, and Flora turned to look, wiping her eyes. Mr. Lindbergh had arrived in a long black motorcar. All around, the shout arose from her schoolmates. “I can’t see! I can’t see!” And it was true. The children enrolled at Flora’s school had been positioned on the far side of the huge crowd, where there wasn’t any sort of view. She couldn’t help but notice that all of the white people had been given the best spots to stand, and she wondered if Mr. Lindbergh had asked for it to be that way.

  The din of the thousands of children rose as the pilot approached the front, surrounded by a group of men from the city and the mayor herself. From Flora’s spot, she could see a row of hats skimming the surface of the gathered children. But then, across that sea of bodies, an uncovered head attached to a man wearing a baggy leather jacket emerged. He raised his tanned hand to wave it at the throng. Flora glimpsed his face, the same face her parents had seen when he flew by.

  She knew she would not get to touch even his sleeve, let alone give him her extra piece of gingerbread. But she’d gotten something. “And somethin’ ain’t nothin’,” as her uncle often put it.

  Then Mr. Lindbergh was guided back into his motorcar. Its engine faded and the crowd’s roar broke into a quilt of individual voices again. The scattered laughter of children shoving each other in jest, the muffled sound of feet trampling the lawn, the occasional shout from a boy or girl who needed to find a restroom. The roar diminished, creating pockets of silence where Flora could once again hear her own thoughts.

  She was not yet ready to leave, and when the opportunity for her to slip behind a sweeping redwood presented itself, she took it. She could make her own way home. The teacher probably wouldn’t even miss her. She set her lunch pail down. Uncle Sherman could eat the gingerbread. The comforting scent of rich earth, a blend of growth and decay, rose up and surrounded her. Beneath her hands, the tree bark felt rough. Through its swaying branches, she could barely make out the blue overhead. But even that view was enough, and every inch of her strained upward as if she’d been created to be part of it, with threads of her left nice and loose so she might be pulled more easily into the blue.

  At that same moment, Henry was on his bicycle, heading home from the same park, holding his cap on his head with one hand and the handlebars with the other. He whistled a happy tune, as much from the thrill of shaking Mr. Lindbergh’s hand as from being permitted to skip school that day. Having recently lost his father and moved in with the Thornes, he was allowed a variety of small freedoms such as this. He never took them if Ethan objected, but Ethan was home that day with a fever, so he couldn’t possibly mind.

  Henry was tired of people looking at him with sad eyes. He planned to spend his free afternoon riding his bicycle around town, breathing in all the non-school air, the best kind there was. As he passed through the shadow of a giant redwood, a black cat chased a swooping sparrow across the street. Henry swerved to avoid the cat and bumped up onto the sidewalk, where a girl in a blue dress and pigtails had appeared.

  He squeezed the brakes, sending up an awful squeal. The bicycle skidded, its wheel sliding forward until the whole thing tipped, taking him with it. He scraped his palms and tore the knee of his pants. The girl, meanwhile, tumbled backward with a shout. He hadn’t hit her, but nearly so. Henry lifted the bicycle off of himself and sat on the sidewalk, dazed.

  “Are you all right?” he asked the girl, who was looking at her own skinned hands.

  She nodded. “But my dress is dirty. And it’s my second-best one.”

  “I’m awful sorry,” Henry said. “Let me help you home.”

  “I don’t need any help,” she said. “It’s just down the hill.”

  Henry thought about letting her go. He didn’t know her, and her expression was anything but friendly. But it didn’t seem the right thing to do. “I ought to walk you home.” He stood and held out his hand. There was a long pause. The sparrow, which had escaped, flitted overhead and trilled.

  “I’m fine,” she said. She brushed the dirt from her dress. The cat lowered itself onto the sidewalk next to them and started cleaning its back leg shamelessly in the way that cats do.

  “How about if I just walk next to you?” It felt like a competition now, to see which one of them would give in first. He looked into her eyes, and she returned his gaze just as fiercely. There was no instrument to measure the slight change in the atmosphere between them. They were scarcely aware of it themselves. Neither would remember the meeting until years later, except in the vaguest of ways. But both would recall the feeling of being brought into something, even as neither had the word for it or the experience to understand what it meant.

  After a pause, she shrugged and stood. “I have some gingerbread. It was meant for Mr. Lindbergh, but if you want it, you could have it. It’s probably smashed, anyway.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” Henry said, falling into step beside her.

  “Are you saying that to be polite?”

  Henry was so relieved he laughed. “Yes. I love gingerbread and I’m hungry enough to eat a goat, beard and all.”

  They shared the cake and talked about airplanes until they arrived at Flora’s small green house, which was about a mile from the park. He told her how it felt to shake Mr. Lindbergh’s hand, which, in all honesty, was pretty much like any other grown-up’s hand. But she seemed interested, so he told her everything about it, including the fact there was a small cut on one knuckle.

  It wasn’t until he delivered her to the porch steps that he remembered to ask her name.

  She bounded to the top of the steps and put her hand on the doorknob. “Flora.”

  Flora. The only Flora he’d met before had been an elderly aunt who smelled like powder and Sloan’s Liniment. But he liked the name for this girl. And she smelled nice.

  “Look what followed us.” He pointed to the black cat.

  “She’s around a lot. I’m not supposed to feed her.” Flora stood in the open doorway and, for the first time, smiled. “But I do. Don’t tell.” She put her index finger to her lip.

  “Your secret’s safe with me.” That smile, that gesture. He liked them. But he couldn’t think of a reason to stay. She didn’t ask his name, which he took to mean she didn’t care to know. It was surprisingly disappointing.

  “Good-bye, I guess,” he said, wishing he could think of something else to say.

  She waved and shut the door behind her. Then he got back on h
is bicycle and headed home, whistling a melody of his own invention, one to which he would someday return.

  WEEKS passed. Late-night jazz music, looks given through candle- and stage light, schemes whispered into the ears of tax inspectors. Why had Death consented to this Game again?

  Ravenous, she stood in a small Spanish market town wearing a simple black dress. She could have been any young woman sent by her family to pick up food for the evening meal: a loaf of bread, a bit of meat, something leafy and green, a bottle of red wine. She was as far as she could be from the modern city by the Sound, and deliberately so. When the hunger was this great, the players were in danger. Her control over the Game was in danger.

  As she walked through the market, stopping to inhale the perfume of flowers, Death felt a fingertip on her forearm. A light touch, as swift as the closing of an eye.

  “For you, beautiful one.” A young man stood before her, offering her a red tulip.

  “I did not ask for this,” she said.

  “But you are so lovely, I cannot help myself.” The man, who was no more than eighteen, looked down, his face turning red.

  Death understood what he meant. She accepted the flower and noted the dirt pressed into the ridges of his fingertips. These were the hands of a person who spent his days working the earth, coaxing life from the soil. He’d seen a million flowers. Even so, each new bloom could make him smile, and unlike all the other humans who’d passed her, he noticed her. He saw her.

  He is the one who is lovely.

  The tulip was fragrant and beautiful. But, she noted, it was also dead. She would not be able to help herself. She moved on, and after a moment’s thought, turned and looked at him over her shoulder.

  “When you hear the engines in the sky,” she said, “run.”

  She brought the tulip with her when she took to the air in a Stuka bomber. This time, she wore the guise of a young Nazi Luftwaffe pilot who’d left his plane momentarily because he was literally sick with nerves. He would return, pale-faced and sweaty, to discover that the dozen Stukas and half-dozen Heinkel 51 fighters had already risen like a cloud of insects, casting their awful shadows in the late-afternoon sun. Much as he did not want to be part of a German experiment to determine how much firepower was required to bomb a city into oblivion, he also did not want to be executed for dereliction of duty. And yet, why was his plane not still on the ground? The man wondered this the rest of his days.

  Now his plane was above Spain, lighting the sky with reflections of the firestorm below. Death marveled at the noise, at the sudden lightness of the aircraft as it dropped a bomb from its belly. Every so often the roaring of the swooping Stuka was overtaken by the tatter of machine guns strafing the fleeing townspeople below. The noise, the heat, the color, the smell, the buzz of her hands on the yoke. It was almost like music, and she bombed herself senseless, unaware of anything save the plummeting thunder and fire.

  Eventually, all of the town, except a church, a tree, and a small unused munitions factory, had been pounded to bits. The smoke of charred bodies rose, setting the stage for a bloodred sunset. By the time she landed the plane, the sky was smoke clogged and dark, lit only by the reflection of fires that would burn for three days. For each of those days, she returned to the village in the guise of the Spanish girl, walking quietly through the smoking ruins. The soil had been stunned to silence. All around lay the harvest, so many lives. Too many to reap at once.

  She twisted time like a kaleidoscope, suspending the crucial shards until she could visit them one by one, lifting souls from their scorched and shattered cases. The sensation of so many lives rushing into her was deliriously good, so much so that she was insensible to anything beyond it. The enormity of what she’d done hadn’t yet hit her, although she knew it would, ribboning her essence as though it had been run through the blades of an airplane propeller. White-eyed and insatiable, she consumed these souls as one might pick up scattered cards in another sort of game, scraping them into order, fanning them out in front of her, feeling their perfectly balanced weight in her hands before flinging them into the beyond.

  At last, she found the one she had been looking for. He lay beneath a stone from a building that had once held hand-blown drinking glasses. Shards of their remains, some as small as stardust, surrounded him.

  There was life left in him, but not much.

  She knelt beside him, her hand on a stone too heavy for him to remove, for any human to lift alone. His face was sweaty, caked with dust and the dried blood from a cut on his forehead. He shivered.

  “I told you to run,” Death said as she put her hand on his brow. His skin was hot, his eyes delirious.

  “I —”

  If she removed the stone, it was likely he would die. If she didn’t remove the stone, his death was a certainty.

  “I —”

  His eyes focused on her face and she remembered the flower tucked into a pocket of her now filthy dress. Its crumpled petals were still as soft as an infant’s skin. Soft, scarred, ruined.

  “I was looking,” he said. “Looking … for you.”

  “Here I am.” She pinched the stem in her cold fingers.

  His lashes fluttered. Death saw something in his eyes: recognition. And something else: desire.

  “What do you have to live for?” She weighed his soul in her hands, wondering why humans wanted to live so when in the end, everything would be lost.

  She could feel him trying to wrap his mind around her words, trying to shape an answer with his dry lips. Water. She wished she had some. Footsteps echoed off of broken buildings, and rescuers called out for survivors to hear. There wasn’t much time.

  She moved the stone and touched his cheek, and as she did, the images in the man’s mind splashed over her. A field of blooming flowers. The shape of a woman, a woman whose face he could not yet see, but one whom the man wished to marry when he found her at last. Then the man himself silhouetted against the setting sun on a pleasant spring evening to come, the man and his someday child walking hand in hand through the field.

  “This,” he said at last. “This.”

  Death laid the broken flower where her hand had been. The man gasped.

  “Hay uno por allí,” a rescuer called out. There’s one over there.

  There was a scuffle of running feet, the gust of an anxious breeze heaving the smoke aside. Death disappeared behind the broken stone skeleton of a church before they found the man and put their quick hands all over him, probing him for injuries, brushing away gravel and bits of glass, putting a tin cup of water to his lips, lifting him into the long shadows of early evening.

  She walked the cobbled streets one last time and reimagined herself a dress, a new style, cut close to her frame, unadorned, and also free of blood and dust and smoke, as if none of it had ever happened. The light of the setting sun turned its black edges red. She stood until the pain quieted itself within her and the color of her clothes was at last the same black as a starless sky. Then she brought herself to New York, where she had someone to observe.

  MR. Thorne sat behind his desk, sucking his pipe and reading a stack of newspapers from cities across the continent. He looked up when Ethan and Henry walked into the room in their shirtsleeves and trousers, their hair still wet from washing, their chins glowing pink from the razor. Henry suppressed a yawn as he watched Ethan’s gaze travel over Mr. Thorne’s collection of untouchable tin windup toys from his childhood: cars, clapping monkeys, a painted minstrel, and even a small automaton.

  “Fine job on the Staggerwing story, Ethan,” Mr. Thorne said. “You look like hell, Henry. You get any sleep?”

  “Plenty, sir.” He hoped his lie wasn’t obvious. His was an exhaustion built of late nights listening to jazz music and dreaming of Flora. He’d been every night for weeks. He still hadn’t worked up the nerve to speak to her again. Even so, sitting at his usual table near the stage, he�
�d watched her, memorizing every inch of her. And he’d felt her stealing glances at him, always looking away whenever he’d try to catch her gaze. It had almost begun to feel like a game.

  “Eat some meat, why don’t you. You look low on iron.” Mr. Thorne set his pipe in a stand and snapped open a newspaper from Washington, DC. He cleared his throat and pointed to a grainy photograph on page A2. “See this?”

  Henry and Ethan leaned in, but it was obvious neither knew what Mr. Thorne’s point was.

  “Hooverville. Below the 59th Street Bridge in New York City,” he said. “It’s nothing compared to ours. We have eight encampments. Our largest is ten times the size, easily. But because it’s out west, these newspapers think it doesn’t exist.” He slapped the paper closed.

  Mr. Thorne clamped his pipe between his molars. “You’re going to write a story about Seattle’s Hooverville, Ethan. The big one by the water. It’s a human-interest story, at least. Especially on this new fellow” — he consulted a typewritten sheet of paper on his desk — “a Mr. James Booth, age twenty, who arrived out of nowhere a few weeks back and claims to be their de facto mayor. But here’s the thing. I hear tell they’re brewing liquor in those shacks of theirs. No doubt this Booth character is behind it, trying to build himself a quick fortune. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has connections to the mob. If that’s the case, and if the buyers aren’t paying liquor taxes, then it’s more than a human-interest story. It’s a scandal. And it’s something to show those East Coast clowns that news doesn’t drown when it hits the Mississippi.”

  “Thank you for the assignment, Father,” Ethan said. “It’s all right if Henry accompanies me, isn’t it?”

  Henry braced himself.

  “I suppose, if he can tear himself away from that music. Start by sussing out this Booth character. Where there’s power, there’s most likely corruption.”