A Phoenix First Must Burn

by A Phoenix First Must Burn (retail) (epub)

  She’d never forgotten his face or that contemptuous penny . . . or the star he’d worn on his chest. And she’d never told Mo about any of it, how Smalls was the reason she knew lawmen couldn’t be trusted, that you couldn’t find safety in towns. That maybe there was no safety but the kind you made yourself, and even that had a way of failing sometimes. But then, maybe safety was overrated, and a girl had to embrace danger if she wanted to survive. And maybe survival itself was overrated, and a girl had not to fear death, and that’s the best she could do sometimes.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Abby awoke with a start. Bolted straight out of bed like the devil was on her heels, and maybe he was.

  Barton Smalls was coming.

  She fumbled the covers away, dressed hurriedly in trousers and a long coat. The Lemon Squeezer rested in its box, and she claimed it and the single bullet, chambering it before she left the house.

  The sun was barely a glow of white on the horizon when she came to the road. She stood resolute in the very place he had left her to die. The earth knew her, recognized her by blood and bone, and welcomed her back. To finish what had been started.

  Mo was wrong.

  Barton Smalls came alone. Riding an alabaster mare and wearing a white church suit, a pale rider on a white horse.

  His hair was unkempt and his eyes were wild. There were places on his face where he had scratched the skin clean off and sores ran yellow with pus. He was skeleton thin, and his hands trembled around reins that threatened to fall from loose fingers.

  Abby paused. This was the man who had almost ended her life? Who had haunted her nightmares and kept her from her love? This was the thing she had feared since she was a child?

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, her voice carrying across the emptiness between them.

  Barton didn’t answer, and at first she thought he didn’t hear her. But his brow lifted, his eyes turned in her direction, and the corners of his mouth tilted up.

  “Don’t I know you?” he asked in a voice slurred from pain and drink and the business of dying.

  Abby took a step back, horrified. Had he finally recognized her? The penny was hot in her pocket, next to the Lemon Squeezer.

  Barton’s head rolled on his neck. “Don’t I know this place?”

  “You have a sickness,” Abby shouted, raising the revolver. “The plague . . .” But even as she said it, she knew that wasn’t it. The desert stripped a man of his pretenses. Barton Smalls had always been rotten underneath, only now it showed through.

  “They’re all dead,” Barton said, his gaze falling earthward. “Old Charlie and Dewey and the other boys. All dead.”

  “Then why’d you come?”

  “The desert’s been calling my name.”

  Abby gasped. Could it be her? The covenant she made? Or even . . .

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked. “Do you recognize my face?”

  He peered at her, leaning precariously over his horse, and she held her breath, waiting. After a moment, he shook his head. “I can’t say I do.”

  In a way it was a relief, she supposed. It meant he hadn’t come to Pueblo Libre because of her. This was just another Black settlement to terrorize for him, her friends here just nameless lives stolen.

  She still held the gun, but she was unsure now what to do. Now that the moment had come, it didn’t tempt like it had before. Smalls was wretched, inside and out, and she need not end his life to prove that.

  Her free hand went to the penny in her pocket. She thought about giving it back. Throwing it in his face. Screaming that he might not remember her, but she sure as hell remembered him. And then pulling the trigger on the Lemon Squeezer to make it bark lead until Barton Smalls was dead.

  But she also thought of Mo’s eyes when she’d boarded that train. The way her entire face had flushed hot when she leaned in to kiss her. Even though it was chaste, a brush of lips against her cheek, it was enough to make Abby warm.

  Mo, who had believed in a future. Mo, who even now was somewhere far from the desert. Mo, who would not want this man’s death to stain her hands.

  Abby lowered the gun.

  “I’m too good for you, Barton Smalls. You stay right here and rot away and die. Let the desert keep calling your name until it swallows you whole. I’m done with it.”

  And she turned her back on Barton Smalls.

  The desert pulled at her feet, whispered words of covenant, dark promises, stolen life that she had bartered for but had not yet earned. Distant coyote howls broke across the Rio Grande in the valley below town.

  You owe us, it said. A life for a life. You promised!

  The rumble started far off and closed in fast. It took Barton by surprise, knocking him from his horse. He lay unmoving on the ground, on the road where he’d once left her. She watched in horror as he seemed to deflate, the life draining out of him. And then his skin bubbled and split and filled again, but not with Barton Smalls. Something else inhabited his body now, and it rose up on coltish legs and reached out overlong arms and blew hot breath across her face. Colorless eyes caught her gaze, and a gaping hole of a mouth spoke.

  You promised!

  “You have your life,” she said. “Take Smalls and be done with me.”

  Still hungry, and you promissssssed!

  The creature was greedy, and Abby was not impressed. She raised the Lemon Squeezer, the gun Aunt Mary said never missed. Pointed it at the thing that had been Barton Smalls.

  “I changed my mind.”

  She pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  “Good morning, ma’am,” the conductor greeted her as she stepped on the train. He motioned for the younger man next to him to take her steamer, and he dutifully complied. Abby handed him her ticket for inspection. “You heading to Los Angeles?”

  Abby nodded.

  “You have friends there?”

  “Someone special who I hope will be my family someday.”

  “A sweetheart,” he said with a knowing wink. “Well, they’ll be mighty happy to see you.” He gestured down the aisle, indicating the seat assigned to her. “Get comfortable, and I’ll let you know when supper is served.”

  “How long is the trip?” she asked, taking her seat.

  “Not too long. And the scenery is quite something. We’ll pass right by the Grand Canyon.”

  Abby dug into her pocket and flipped the young man who took her steamer a penny. He grabbed it out of the air and bobbed his head, grateful for the tip. Abby pulled down the window shade.

  “I don’t much care for the desert scenery,” she said, “but I’m quite looking forward to the ocean.”

  THE RULES OF THE LAND

  By Alaya Dawn Johnson

  Years later now, when I look out over the mangroves at dusk and hear the gray waves whispering in my mother’s tongue to return, to return, I think of my father, who took from the sea and was taken in his turn, and whose failures haunt me as much as his love.

  My mother has turned her back on the sea. My father sleeps among the mangroves. I stand watch at the midline, my voice muted and my feet clumsy. It was not always this way. I’m sure it won’t always be. There is a war on, after all, and war changes things. I am bound to Yemaya now, and one day I will step into the white-capped waves and never rise again. What was my parents’ debt is mine; I took it willingly, I don’t complain. Yet it is a tight vise around the free heart of a young girl who knows that her parents cannot bear the weight of how she came into the world. They could not bear the fire of my voice. I had to fight for that for myself.

  In those days before the steel ships of the Tanger blockade sat with cannons ready to rain fire just beyond the horizon at the mouth of the Egun Bay, Laarin fishermen like my father made good livings going a few days out to the sea mouth in their brig
htly painted one-sail skiffs and returning with holds so full of catch the boats waddled low in the water like black ducks. Rumor held that my father had caught a sea maid in his nets, huddled among the bass and the ladyfish, and brought her back to Laarin to be his wife. It was a good story, an expected and understood story, and Daddy never tried to correct it.

  The truth was that my mother found him passed out from too much palm wine, about to drown at the breakwater. She saved his life.

  I don’t regret my birth. Mami sure could have picked a better father—but then, who am I, if not my daddy’s child? I’m no drunk, but I have my vices: dancing past reason, dancing till dawn, dancing with my feet or in my little skiff as I dare those soldiers secure in their slow metal ships to stop me. I can hear his laughter when I slip by them, smell the yeasty ferment of his palm wine as he congratulates me on another successful run. It isn’t so bad, keeping a bit of him close.

  He gave Yemaya’s daughter a kiss in return for saving his life, even though she had come to him as a sea cow. But when he entered the water it was a pair of human arms that wrapped around his bare torso, and it was human lips, soft as clay, that touched his.

  “Don’t you look at me, fisherman.” That was Daddy’s voice, imitating my mother. “Don’t you dare look.” And so he didn’t, not the whole while they spent in the warm water. But when they finished, he opened his eyes, just a slit, for just a peek—

  All he saw was a sea cow’s sleek brown back as it dove for deeper water.

  Eight months later, a woman walked out of the ocean. A woman with hair the color of a whitecap at the breakwater and a belly as shiny and round as an onyx cabochon. At that point in the story, Daddy always got quiet and soft. Not precisely remorseful, but his mouth full of a devastating awareness of what he had done.

  “I had the advantage, Nena,” Mami told me once, in that singing tongue that belonged only to us and to the sea. “I knew his face in the moonlight, and he had loved me without ever knowing mine.”

  “He knew one of your faces, Mami.”

  At that her nose crinkled, a little joke between the two of us. “Nena, your father is a fisherman. He does not see the face of a fish any more than he can see the face of the mangrove.”

  “The mangrove has a face?”

  She sighed like a wind across the open sea. “Child, you cannot imagine how beautiful.”

  Mami lived with us and cooked for us like a good Laarin fisherman’s wife. She and I took baskets of salted herring south every ten days to the great market on the nearby Ofu border. We stayed until sundown, when only a layer or two of fish sweated at the bottom of our great baskets, and the red canvas stalls lay in their deconstructed geometry on the packed earth of the international fairground. Mami would ask, “Is there anyone left to give us their money, Nena?” And I would reply, even when I could spy a few hearthwomen hurrying from last stall to last stall like panicked vultures, “No, I don’t see anyone, Mami.” The last few fish were for the beggars. I knew that, just as I knew we were never to tell Daddy. After the market guards were off drinking the day’s pay at the tavern boats docked in the placid north edge of the Egun River, we gave one herring each to anyone who approached us until we had no more left.

  When we returned, Daddy would count the money, look at Mami, and mutter something about selling the stock too cheaply. Mami would pretend that she hadn’t heard, if it was a good day. If it was a bad day, he’d go on and on about shoddy business practices and make wild conjectures about how Mami spent the extra money. Food, wine, prostitutes of all genders, trinkets for me. I would try to intervene: “Daddy, don’t you want to hear a song I learned at market?” or “Daddy, why don’t we go to Uncle Uche’s tavern together?” When he’d really gotten going, even this last wasn’t enough to move him. He’d look at me as though I were a runt of a fish left straggling at the bottom of his boat. He’d take Mami’s hand and drag her into the bedroom and lock the door. Sometimes he’d hit me, sharp, between the ribs, and I would sit, gasping just like that fish. For years I sat watch outside that door, as though I could do something about whatever was happening inside. Their screams. Their silences.

  One day, Mami shattered his wine jug against the wall. She pulled open the door so fast that I fell backward, staring up at her face, still as a mangrove’s. She stepped around me and walked out to the sea. She waded up to her waist in the waves, and no further, the white of her hip-cloth billowing around her. “Yemaya, Mami Wata, Mother,” she called, over and over, in that susurrating tongue, while I watched with my heart in my throat.

  Daddy stumbled out of our two-room cottage and down to the shore, telling her to come back, begging her forgiveness, swearing his love. She ignored him until he gave up and went back inside. I stayed; I was always the stronger of the two of us. After the moon had risen high in the sky, she left the water. She climbed up that hill on legs that did not tremble, and paused like a ghost in the doorway, limned by the moonlight behind her. I crouched between them, forgotten, afraid I might not exist, afraid I was no one’s child.

  “I went to find a locksmith,” she said, in a careful, clipped tone I would not hear again for years.

  Daddy gasped as though she’d shot him with a Tanger cannon. He looked up at her and then down, disbelieving, at the wound: the iron key strung on a double cord of twisted rhinoceros leather that had never left his chest since I had known the world.

  “I-it’s been charmed,” he said.

  Mami’s lips curled up. He lurched to his feet and ran to the other room, where he kept the strongbox. I had never seen him open it, and he didn’t now. He just cursed in smugglers’ pidgin and squatted in front. He was so scared. I wanted to ask Mami what she’d done, but she stayed staring at the hollow space he had left, and I knew she could not see me. I cried for her, instead. I cried for the child they had never let me be.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Daddy got sober for a few years after that. Got sober and found religion, old Ofu style: he was baptized for Olokun, the god and goddess of the deep, the progenitor and partner of Laarin’s own Yemaya. He went out as a sailor and shrine-keeper on Ofu-sponsored deep-sea voyages to other islands and the Tanger coast, trips that lasted months and gave me and Mami plenty of time alone. No more night smuggling raids for Daddy’s drinking money. He was a respectable Laarin trader now. She remembered me, with Daddy gone. She smiled more, but not as wide. Daddy had moved us to a better house in a better part of town. It was also farther from the water. We stayed in our familiar hut until the days when the ship was due back, when we’d break out the fancy cloth and head scarves and cowrie ankle bands that he had bought for us, and clean the dust from the floor and the eaves of the two-story house in eastern Laarin, with real windows of thick, opaque glass.

  When Daddy left, there was the mother tongue, the waves, and the deep. There was the water, which ran through me as it did my mother, though it had been transmuted by humanity.

  “I’m weaker than you, Mami,” I told her.

  “I cannot even put my head beneath the waves, Nena. It is you who are powerful.”

  “You would be a goddess if he had not kept you here. I’m half human. I’m weak, like he is.”

  “You think your human side makes you weak? Your father became weak, Nena, but he did not start that way.”

  I could hold the lightning in my hands when I was thirteen. I could drink a rain cloud like a pint of palm wine, and the next morning my piss was orange as fire. But when I hovered in secret over a noontime pool of still water, the haunted eyes of a little girl stared back at me; her face faded into the scenery, like a ghost in her own life, barely there.

  When I was fourteen, and the Tanger trade partnership turned into something quietly ominous, Daddy skipped the dry season’s trading expeditions. Mami and I worried that he’d go back to the taverns, but he stayed with us. He took me out among the mangroves and then to the br
eakwater so I could learn how to throw the nets and haul in a catch. He taught me how to knock a red-beaked parakeet from a tree with a slingshot and how to smoke out a wasps’ nest so that we could feast on the honey-soaked paper within. I felt some new, spiky thing growing within me over those long, hot afternoons, with their easy words and loamy silences. I was not just the daughter of a sailor and the granddaughter of a goddess: I was a girl whose eyes looked past the shoreline, and whose face was just coming into color. I don’t know if he saw it, but it wasn’t for him anymore, in any case. “Do you want to dance, child?” he would ask me some evenings, as he rowed us back along the mangrove coast. I always said yes. When we got back at sundown, he brought us to the town square.

  Mami was a terrible dancer. She balanced on those banyan legs like a newborn giraffe, and even her years on land, it seemed, couldn’t change that muscle-deep distrust of open air and hard ground. Laarin is famous for its feast days and dances—at least, it was, before the Tanger blockade stopped the flow of foreign ships and the musicians who lined our circular plaza and played until sunrise. But she sang like a summer storm, and Laarin opened its heart to her in those blessed days. That’s what we call them now, the last free trading season before the Tanger invasion of the southern Ofu territories and the blockade of the Egun Bay. The last time we had our music. Not the gods’ chants of Ofu priests and priestesses or the rolling drums of the Highat tribes to the east, but a Laarin beat: polyglot, inventive, wild, and irreverent. To us, this was Yemaya’s music, no matter what the official Ofu liturgy held. And my mother was one of ours, though Laarin had watched her with careful eyes since the day she rose from the shallows, clad in a simple shift of white. She had never tried to appear human, which angered and embarrassed me and made me love her even more fiercely. She was a child of the sea, a daughter of Yemaya, a goddess stripped of her skin and locked behind one uncanny face.