The Game of Love and Death

by Martha Brockenbrough

  Then there was a sudden lightness in the air, the way she felt when her airplane left the ground. The piano music stopped. People paused in their conversations, drinking, and gambling. The gaze turned to watch as the pianist began to speak.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I present … Miss Vivian Crane and the Starlight band.”

  Vivian Crane. Her mother. Alive. How on earth was this happening?

  Applause crackled like fire. Flora watched her mother emerge from the shadows into the finger of spotlight in the center of the stage, pivoting so that her back was to the audience. Even from behind, she commanded a person’s full attention. When her mother spun at last to face the audience, sparkling reflections of her filled every eye in the room. But she had eyes for only one person. The bass player. Flora’s father. Her heart lurched to see him, to see them both together like this, alive.

  The music began, a shimmer of the hi-hat, a cry from the clarinet, the steady walk of bass strings played by expert hands. Vivian’s lips parted and the sound that emerged was more of a feeling than a voice, one that pressed love and longing into Flora’s borrowed ears, along her wrists, down her throat, and straight into her center. It was hard to breathe.

  The view changed. Flora was still inside the Domino, but now she was looking at a man shooting dice. Somehow, she knew there was a police dry squad uniform beneath his overcoat. She also knew his pockets were fat with payoff cash, which he was spending at the dice table as he sneaked pulls of gin from the flask at his hip.

  And then she was outside in the snow, waiting in a long and elegant convertible with high, round headlights and a many-spoked spare tire riding on its hip. Through the window holes, winter air sharpened its claws on her skin as she sat in the passenger seat. Time passed. Snow piled up. People wandered out of the Domino. Then, finally, the dice-playing man staggered out, supported by a much younger version of Uncle Sherman.

  “You sure you don’t want a cup of coffee, sober up a bit?” Sherman asked.

  The man shook his head. “Cold air’ll do the same trick.” He slapped at his own cheeks and walked toward his car just as her parents emerged from the alley. Her father pulled the collar of her mother’s raccoon coat snug around her shoulders. The moonlight bounced off the snowy street and lit them from below. Her father leaned in for a kiss; Vivian laughed and met him halfway, lifting one heel behind her before she finally came up for air.

  “Happy Valentine’s Day, my love,” she said.

  No, no, no. Flora knew what had happened that night.

  The white man slid into the car, reeking of gin. He turned the key. The car coughed. The engine caught. Trying to throw it into reverse, he cursed when the car bumped forward over the curb. Then he found his gear and accelerated backward into the darkness behind him, his tires sliding in the snow. He hunched over the steering wheel and gulped air. Flora tried to scream, but the mouth wouldn’t respond.

  Flora’s parents stepped into the street. She tried to reach for the wheel, but the arm wouldn’t move. The man’s foot sank into the accelerator. Her parents heard its engine and turned to face the car, still holding hands. The headlights caught bright pieces of them: eyes, teeth, jewelry that twinkled like falling stars in the blackness ahead.

  The man stomped, aiming for the brake, but his sluggish foot found only the gas pedal. And then Flora was outside the car, holding her father. She felt his life flow out of him and into her: the glint of candlelight off the shoulders of his bass, the crack of a bat meeting a softball on Saturday mornings, the smell of corn bread baking in the oven on Sunday afternoons. In a bleak moment, she saw the jagged silver blasts of explosions in the night, smelled the gunpowder, fear and blood, the flash of Captain Girard’s face lit up by a midnight firefight. And then a return to soft light, to the satiny patch of her mother’s skin between her ear and collarbone, the feeling of lips against it. And then her own baby-girl face, all brown eyes and pink gums and fat cheeks.

  The arms released her father and gathered up her mother, and Flora drew in memories of trimmed Christmas trees, of steam curling from oven-hot pies, of spring tulips and green summer lakes, of the feeling of music rising from the tender space where her feet connected with the curving earth, soaring upward through her body and out her mouth. In each of those, even when Vivian was a girl, the small face of the baby was there. Flora’s own face, as though she’d been the one her mother always wanted, the love she carried with her until the day she was able to summon it forth in the form of a child.

  And then she was dead.

  The white man staggered out, tripping and flailing and breathing fists of clouds into the frozen night air. His hat fell off, revealing a pale, fragile-looking scalp covered with a few strands of silver hair. He knelt between the bodies and sobbed. Snow melted into his knees, darkening his pants. He put his hands over his face, revealing an inch of bare flesh and a leather-banded, gold-faced wristwatch that he’d forgotten to wind.

  Then Flora was on her knees beside the man in the snow.

  “Please,” he said, peering at her through his fingers. He’d bloodied a knuckle somehow and a knot was rising on his head. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t live with myself anymore.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” the mouth said. “It won’t be long now.”

  “Thank God,” he said, lowering his hands to his lap.

  The hand reached for the killer’s own. The images at first came in a jumble: the man himself in an undershirt and braces planting trees in a garden, wiping sweat from his tanned brow; him in a police officer’s uniform, giving a rag doll to a weeping, soot-covered child sitting alone in the station; the same man, younger, at his wedding, the stainless steel flask of gin just a bulge in the pocket of his Sunday best suit. The flask of gin that turned into tumblers and entire bottles … what had transformed the laughing man with the straight black hair and clean-shaven jaw into the bleary-eyed mess in front of her.

  “What’s happening?” he said. “I’m seeing —”

  “You’re seeing what I’m seeing,” the mouth said. The whole of her hand sank over his, and Flora was sick with sorrow and loss. The man’s eyes widened. There he was, an infant in a white linen christening gown. And there, walking across an emerald lawn, wobbly on year-old bare feet. Then he was a five-year-old boy riding a pony at the county fair. Then, ten years older, hiking up a snow-covered volcano. That boy, sixteen, on a twilit country road on a summer night, leaning in to kiss a girl who locked her fingers in his hair. And five years after that, marrying the same girl, the love of his life …

  … unless you counted the gin in the bottle, which even the Prohibition hadn’t kept him from drinking.

  “I did love her, you know,” he said. “Like breathing, almost.” The words had space between them, as though it was costing him the last of his strength to pull them out of his mouth.

  “I know. But that’s the thing with love. It isn’t as strong as they say.”

  “Not afraid,” he said. “Glad — glad you’re here.”

  The voice replied: “Life is far more terrifying than its opposite.”

  He grabbed her hands. “Wait. Don’t want to see all,” he said. “Not the last part —” His stomach heaved, costing him his last drink of gin.

  “They didn’t suffer.” The gaze shifted to her parents’ bodies, their skin sugared with the lightest dusting of snow. “What’s more, I’m letting you carry that part with you when you go.”

  “I’d carry it for the rest of time if … if it would make things turn out … different.”

  “You will,” she said, closing her eyes for a moment. “But it won’t. Everybody dies. Everybody. That is the only ending for every true story.”

  The sentence … Flora had heard something like it before. She fought her way back to herself. The skin on her face felt tight, as though it were being pressed against the bones beneath. She pulled her h
and from Helen’s, opened her eyes, and was back at the entrance of the Domino, utterly wrecked. What had happened to her? How had she seen her parents’ last moments this way?

  Helen stood next to her, even as she checked her watch. “Are you all right? You look as if you’ve caught whatever your cook had.”

  “I’m fine.” Flora didn’t want to give Helen the satisfaction of seeing her like this. “Henry’s waiting for me.”

  “We don’t always get what we want,” Helen said. “We play the roles we’re cast.”

  “What are you saying, that I’m trying to be something I’m not?”

  A look of confusion flashed across Helen’s face, then understanding. “I can see how you’d say that.”

  “Henry’s waiting for me,” Flora said again. “So if you’ll excuse me.”

  “What makes you think he’s still there?”

  “Who would have paid his bail?”

  “I might have left a note for the Thornes,” Helen said.

  Flora thought she might be ill. That would make things infinitely worse for Henry. She’d have to reach him first.

  “Don’t tell me you love him,” Helen said.

  “I said no such thing.”

  “I’m sure you’ve considered the cost,” Helen said. “How much it could hurt him.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of hurting him.”

  “But” — Helen paused, as if she were choosing her words carefully — “would you choose him if you could?”

  “Choose him for what?”

  “I think you know,” Helen said.

  “And I think you know this is none of your concern.”

  “Come now. Don’t look so angry. In different circumstances, we might have been friends. There isn’t so very much that separates you and me.”

  “Everything separates us,” Flora said. “You can go where you want. Do what you want. Eat where you want. The world belongs to you and yours. My kind, we’re here to be your mules. Your world rests on our backs. We even have to pay you off for the privilege of entertaining you. And then you arrest us anyway.”

  “So bitter,” Helen said. “And I love it.”

  “We’re finished here,” Flora said.

  “Here, perhaps,” Helen said.

  Flora had made it halfway up the precinct stairs when Henry walked through the door, his bruised face downcast, flanked on either side by two distraught-looking white people. The woman wore a fur coat and hat; the man, a forehead-splitting scowl.

  “Henry,” Flora said. “I’m sorry. I came as quickly as I could.” She’d come in such a rush she’d left her gloves and his hat behind. This, she realized as she noticed his uncovered curls.

  Henry looked up, his eyes wide.

  “Who might this be?” the woman asked, looking horrified. “How does she know your name? Is she the reason you were in this place? Is she — tell me she’s not — someone you hired?” She began to weep.

  The man pulled Henry down the stairs past Flora, who had to take a step backward to let them by. Flora dropped her pocketbook, and its flimsy clasp popped open. The bills she’d gathered fluttered out.

  The hungry children in ratty clothes who’d been skulking against the side of the building rushed forward and snatched most of it up before she could, but Flora didn’t have the strength to care. Henry’s guardians shoved him into the back of the car, which pulled away from the sidewalk with an angry squeal.

  DEATH watched Flora leave the Domino, no doubt headed to the jail with her sad little wad of bills in hand. She drove a short distance away from the club and parked. It was late afternoon, a virtual dead zone for the neighborhood. No one was there to watch the intense, dark-eyed girl in the red dress walk up to the club and slip inside its locked door, which she opened with a single touch. Thus unobserved, she hastened down the stairs, knowing exactly where she’d start, hoping that the end would be as she intended: to take the last thing from Flora that was keeping her in Seattle.

  Death lit a candle and placed it on the bar, inhaling the scent of burning wax as the glow of the lone flame found the edges of the room. Grady’s bass, still tinged with the essence of Henry’s touch, lay in the shadows. Though it was the size of a grown man, the instrument felt light in her arms as she moved it offstage, across the floor, and onto the bar. She placed it on its back, an echo of human sacrifices that had occurred over the millennia, gifts offered in the name of various gods, and every one a death that seeped into her endless hollows instead.

  She materialized on the other side of the bar, filling her arms with clinking bottles: rum, vodka, bourbon, Scotch. Death set each one down. She uncapped the first of the bottles and emptied it over the instrument as one would anoint a corpse. Then the second and the third and the fourth. The wood groaned at the assault. Its pores drank in the booze; puddles of ruin trickled into the F-shaped holes on its face, drumming its back, scenting the air with dust and spirits.

  She rested her hands on top of the bar, remembering the life she’d pulled from the wood the night she’d taken Flora’s parents. There was even less life remaining, less to fight the flames. The sight would be spectacular. She took the candle and held it inside the curved opening.

  A claw of smoke rose; the edges of the wood reddened, then charred. And then, as if the fire had discovered its own thirst, the wood exploded into flame. It lapped up the ooze of liquor that had leaked down the countertop. It flowed like a red river over the edges of the bar, finding places to bite the floor, the shelves, the velvet curtains.

  Death picked up the gloves she’d once left in the small green house. They were hers, after all, and she always took what was hers. Then she turned to leave, feeling the smoke and the heat on her back, knowing it was true what Love said about fire. This one was its own sort of creature, a singular soul.

  Long may it burn.

  FLORA left the jail and headed to the Domino, where she intended to finish with the food preparations as best she could before the show. She’d retrieve her gloves and set Henry’s hat aside. She’d find a way to get it to him later, and then leave him to his life.

  In the distance, a dark finger of smoke touched the sky. She wanted to believe it was not her club in flames, not her livelihood being consumed, but she could feel the ruin of it in her depths, as if a part of her very self was being reduced to ash.

  She stopped the car a short distance away and ran toward the burning building. The heat pressed against her face and arms, and the smoke smelled oily and toxic, no doubt fed by the well-stocked bar and kitchen, the curtains, the wooden stairs … everything familiar to her, the last bits of her parents’ legacy. The painting of them. When she realized that was lost too, along with the gloves she’d treasured, she could not hold back the tears. She stopped running.

  Behind her, the bells of fire engines clanged, not that they would be able to do anything but keep the fire from spreading. Flora’s shoulders heaved. Next door, the Miyashitos were frantically pouring buckets of water on their business. They cried out to each other in Japanese, and she felt even worse. It would be everything they had too.

  A police car was parked across the street. When the officers inside saw Flora approach, they stepped out. One held a sheet of paper in his hand.

  “You’re the owner of this establishment?” the officer asked.

  Flora nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  He handed her the paper. “Seems a shame to deliver this right now, but I’m legally required to.”

  Flora scanned the document. An order from the city, shutting the club down on corruption charges. A flake of ash settled on Flora’s cheek, but she ignored the sudden prick of pain. She turned away from the police officer, crumpled the paper into a ball, and hurled it into the fire.

  Words echoed in her mind, in a familiar voice she could not quite place.

  Someday, everyone you love will di
e. Everything you love will crumble to ruin. This is the price of life. This is the price of love.

  Someday had arrived.

  MR. Thorne’s mouth twitched as he sat behind his desk and ticked off the many ways Henry had failed.

  “You stole Ethan’s car —”

  “I would have lent it to him,” Ethan said.

  “Don’t interrupt. You stole the car, you left school during a day you had a final examination to take, you fraternized with … with … a colored nightclub performer, whom you then had cousin Helen bail out of jail, exposing her to Lord knows what kind of seaminess.”

  Henry blanched. He hadn’t expected the Thornes to discover all that; Helen’s betrayal there surprised and wounded him. It was possible, he realized, that this was her retaliation for his choosing Flora over her. The rest of the accusation — that Helen was the fragile type who could be harmed by helping out someone their age — was nonsense. But Henry kept his mouth shut.

  “Does that about sum it up?” Mr. Thorne said. “Or are there more things you’d like to disclose?”

  He glanced at Ethan. Henry interpreted the pleading look on his face as a request to say nothing about visiting Hooverville or socializing with James afterward. And Henry was certainly not going to confess how much time he’d spent at the Domino, or how far his grades had fallen.

  “I believe that sums it up, sir.”

  Mr. Thorne’s mouth twitched again. He pressed his hands against his desk and stood. His bulk blocked much of the light from the window, and his shadow crossed Henry’s face as if it were a thing of substance. “You’ve put me in a terrible spot. A terrible spot.”