My mouth suddenly tastes like bile and a coldness trickles down my spine.
The phone buzzes in my hands. I drop it on the counter and clasp my hands to my mouth, trying to find my bearings. Another text. My hands shake as I lift the phone and unlock the screen.
Sarah: There’s no use in running. [Sent 10:59 p.m.]
My head is hot and my mouth is dry. I feel dizzy.
Sarah: I’ll kill you like I did your cunt girlfriend. [Sent 11:01 p.m.]
“Are you all right?” Big Mike looms over me, his husky figure silhouetted in the overhead lights. Flashes of the previous night come rushing back. Sarah. Was she . . . Were they . . . arguing in the shadows? When she pushed Sarah against the wall, was she—holy shit, Maggie, are you so fucked up you mistook violence for sex?
I have to get the fuck out of here.
A cool wind rushes through me as I hurry out the door. The streets are empty. I start walking, trying to gather my thoughts. Do I call the cops? What do I say? Fuck, I wish I hadn’t been drinking. The air is cold on my face, but not refreshing. I open my phone to dial 911 and see there’s a new text.
Sarah: You look good from behind. [Sent 11:13 p.m.]
I whip around, but there’s no one in sight anywhere. I walk faster and frantically start dialing. My phone beeps as it drops the call. I try again, and again. Shit! Returning to the bar would be backtracking too far—and if this psychopath really is following me, I might run right into her. I realize I have to run. The gates of the Mountain View Cemetery are at the top of the road. I need to hide. I need to hide and call for help.
I reach the entrance and glance back quickly. There’s almost no light, but I can make out a figure trailing me down the road. I squeeze through the tall iron gates and dash up the paved road, past mausoleums and oversized ornate tombstones.
This place is like a park during the day, with families picnicking on the immaculately trimmed lawns, and guided tours pointing out the more famous interred. Now it’s dark and suffocating. I duck behind the brick archway of a memorial and cup the phone to cover any light from the screen. The battery icon is flashing red. I dial 911 and raise the phone to my ear, trembling.
A low voice answers, “Hello?”
I whisper, high-pitched hiccups escaping between sobs, “I need help. There’s someone after me and I think she killed my girlfriend. I’m in the cemetery—”
“Hi, Maggie,” the voice replies.
I jerk the phone away as if it were alive.
Sarah’s picture is on the screen. 911 is on hold. I frantically press the button to hang up. The battery icon flashes one more time, then the screen goes black. I can’t hold back the choking sobs. Suddenly a firm hand grips my shoulder.
Screaming, I leap up and start sprinting blindly, cold tears streaming down my face. I weave between monstrous weeping angels and huge marble headstones gleaming in the moonlight; I run until my lungs burn and I cannot feel my legs. I scramble uphill through narrow stone pathways, past a pyramid adorned with an eagle and an obelisk jutting from the ground. I look over my shoulder: no one is behind me. I reach a crumbling mausoleum with a broken wooden door. Inside, it smells musty and damp. Things are crawling on the ground but I try to stifle the panic. As my eyes adjust I see a stone tomb in the center of the cramped room. I crouch behind it, covering my mouth to steady my breathing, letting my nose run and tears roll silently down my cheeks.
What the fuck is happening? Sarah, I’m so sorry. Time slows down. I can’t complete any thoughts other than, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . . I’m consumed with fear, guilt, and regret. Will this be the last thing I feel? Is this what happened to Sarah?
Footsteps crunch in the gravel outside. Louder now, heavier. The sliver of light from under the mausoleum’s door is broken by a shadow. I hold my breath, and the shadow retreats. I allow myself a glimmer of relief.
Then the brittle door is kicked open, coming off its hinges. I whimper pathetically as the figure ducks inside.
“You bitches just don’t know how to let things be.”
“What the fuck do you want?! Who the fuck are you?” I kick out my legs, cowering farther into the corner.
“All she had to do was back off,” the voice continues, coming closer. “The same with you.”
Through the shadows, I can make out her face. “Sandro?” I stammer.
I’ve seen her dozens of times as I walked past her shop. The bulging, oversupplemented muscles and henna tattoos are unmistakable. Her nose ring glitters and I see dark scratches across her face. Sarah . . .
“That fickle bitch,” Sandro spits. “Helping that fucking yoga studio take over my space, driving me out with all that Divine Singularity bullshit.” She says the name in a mocking sing-song voice.
“Wh-what?” I am genuinely shocked. “It’s her job, Sandro!”
“She was a motherfucking double agent!” Sandro screams. Then through clenched teeth: “I work. So. Hard. I paid Sarah good money to write the health blog. I order the supplements from China myself. I make my interns keep perfect inventory. Then I find out she’s helping some yoga shithead take over my place? Do you have any fucking idea how impossible it is to find decent commercial space in this city?”
“You’re crazy! You don’t do anything! You throw money at other people to do your work for you! You’re a fucking lunatic!”
“You people are all the same. You want handouts but have no loyalty, no vision. I gave Sarah an opportunity—and she betrayed me.” Sandro’s eyes are wide with rage. She lunges forward.
I try to fend her off but she slams my head into the stone wall, over and over. I think of what I saw last night, through the window, my last glimpse of Sarah.
Over and over, I think of Sarah.
WHITE HORSE
by Katie Gilmartin
Bushrod Park
Two women walking down the street together doesn’t make sense to anyone when one of them is Negro and the other white. Unless the Negro woman is carrying a bag of groceries or pushing a carriage with a towheaded baby inside. But even then, not after dark. And certainly not if both are dressed to the nines, she in her smart hat and neatly pressed gloves. We always felt eyes on us. The way a hook trolling through water looking for a fish catches on some weed or stump and holds fast, those eyes snagged on our dark and light bodies as we passed. Trying to figure out: what was the relationship between these women that led to the two of them walking down a street together after dark? They don’t like the answer they come up with. Or they like it too much. Roll it around in their minds, caress it with their tongues, till they resolve that the right thing for them to do, the only thing for them to do, is to join us.
So we always walked alert, careful. Quickly and with determination, making it clear we had a place to be and it wasn’t here on this sidewalk explaining how we came to be walking together. We walked side by side, but not too close, and we never held hands. One day, a year or so ago, we’d gone for a walk up in the hills, where redwoods tower so high they were once used for navigation by boats in the bay. It was a sweet afternoon of dappled sunlight, and when she was sure there was no one to see us but those trees, Mabeline slipped her hand in mine. As it settled in, palm against palm, fingers nested, there was no comfort in it; no home there, the way our bodies felt when we slid against each other, the curves familiar and essential. Our hands were strangers to each other. After seven years of loving, I didn’t know her hand inside mine.
On the sidewalk we kept walking when men offered to take us home, bristled when we politely declined. Our place was in the Bushrod neighborhood. The men that followed us were eager to make jokes about bush and rod. There were three or four variations, you can figure them out yourself. We kept walking, as they told us what they believed we did together and then prescribed a remedy for the ailment they presumed we had. We kept walking, hoping to get where we were going before they’d grab an arm—Mabeline’s usually, if he was a white man; mine, often, if he was a Negro, trying to tug us toward
a shadowed doorway or dark alley.
That particular night we were headed to the White Horse, so our stroll was brief. Sam greeted us at the door with a curt nod, a nod that warned us not to allow our alert caution to relax down around our shoulders as it usually did when we entered the welcoming warmth of the dark bar. The subdued murmur as we moved inside confirmed it. We’d heard there’d been two unfamiliar visitors the past weekend, with collars buttoned a little too tight for our comfort.
The crowd was thinner than usual, though not by much. Storm clouds led some to flee, but the regulars planted ourselves firmly for the night. We had too few places to let go of any one of them easily. Mabeline and I made our way to the bar, nodding at familiar faces, sizing up the ones that weren’t. The two men in tight collars weren’t among them. Henry, usually a warm bath of friendliness, served our drinks with a thin-lipped smile and we settled at a table with two couples we knew. Mabeline and I sat facing the rear of the bar, where we could watch the passage that led to bathrooms and the back door. Barbara and Lou had eyes on the entrance. Lester and Evan viewed the bar. We were each other’s eyes.
The White Horse had never been raided, at least not in anybody’s memory. The place either had some kind of charmed existence or the other shoe was due to drop. We’d all been watching that Senator McCarthy and his Pervert Inquiry unfold across the headlines, reading about the postmaster general’s campaign to eliminate filth from the family mailbox. We’d all felt the same ice water flowing through our veins. We wondered when, and how, the crackdown would come for us. Maybe this was it: two men in tight collars.
Mabeline didn’t believe in charmed existences, nor did she much worry about other shoes. She was a practical woman. “I’ll bet the Johnsons haven’t been giving the cops their usual fat envelope.”
“You think that’s all this is about?” Barb asked.
“That’s always what anything is about.”
“Well, my drink is still overpriced and watered down,” Lester reported, “so the money’s flowing in like usual.”
“Maybe the police just need to show off.”
“No elections on the horizon,” Lou countered.
“Maybe the Johnsons hired two friends to wear their best suits and scare us away.”
“Could have been some shoe salesmen from out of town,” Evan suggested.
“Could have been Santy Claus’s travel agent, but I don’t think so.” Mabeline looked at me sharply. “You’re not forgetting our agreement?”
I shook my head. “I’m not forgetting our agreement.” Keep your head. Whatever happens, keep your head. I shook my head, and meant it.
Mabeline had known me to be released from jail the morning after a raid and get tossed right back in, fighting with the desk clerk over whether or not she was still inside. She’d known me to be released early and spend the rest of the night under a lamppost not thirty yards from the police station, watching for her to emerge, till I was picked up for vagrancy and thrown back in when she herself was already safely home. That wasn’t the worst of it, either. Some man would disrespect her, and instead of ignoring it I’d slug him. Soon enough we’d both be limping home, bruised and battered. Making a bad situation worse, that’s what she called it. I’m an expert at that. I wanted to be her knight in shining armor. She knew I wanted to ride that horse for her. She’d made me swear that after any raid, once I got released I’d go home, sit down at the kitchen table, and wait for her there.
“Trouble’s cousin just arrived,” she announced. Otis was a young queen who hadn’t yet learned to handle his liquor—or his hands. Last Saturday he’d had his knuckles rapped twice by the bartender, who kept a yardstick behind the bar for that very purpose. Bartenders at the White Horse smacked anybody with the first glimmer of a leer in their eye, before they got so far as putting a hand on a knee, a head on a shoulder, an arm around a waist. All the bars that catered to our kind did much the same thing, though others managed it without the humiliation of a ruler. Since a court ruling had made it legal for our kind to congregate, the cops had to find a new justification for raids. Often as not they created that justification. Luring in youthful ardor was a favored way to do so. Otis was chatting eagerly with a friend, putting quarters in the jukebox, waving his hands around—a bird of paradise in a funeral arrangement. Lester went to speak with him, quietly. The bird’s finery drooped, but only slightly. The ones who are a little crazy to begin with get crazier under pressure. I know something about that. I’d grown up in a small town, fighting my way out of most situations. Fighting my way into the others. Not keeping my head.
* * *
Mabeline and I had met in the dark, labyrinthine passageways of a ship we were building at Mare Island Naval Base during the war, when the world discovered that women, even Negro women, could do all kinds of work we’d been unable to do five minutes before. Suddenly, riveting was just like sewing, and soldering was just like icing a cake, tasks we were all assumed to be adept at. And suddenly we had decent-paying jobs. We’d ride the same streetcar to and from work, and I noticed her—lips slicked a dark red, eyes with lashes long enough to catch mist when the fog settled deep, and a compact, curvy figure that made me wonder how flesh could be so sculpted and so firm. I also wondered whether she felt my eyes on her, and whether they felt good to her, or bad. She gave no sign that I could read.
At first glance you might think Mabeline was just a cream puff, but you’d be wrong and sure to discover your mistake. I was topside at the end of my shift when I noticed a glove missing, so I headed back down into the maze of steel passageways. Retracing my steps, I heard a muffled cry. Sound bounced and echoed in that hard place, distorted and disorienting, so it took me awhile to find them, and along the way I heard his taunting voice say wetly to her, “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the fruit.”
When I reached it the room was gone, its definition lost in darkness—I saw only the white-hot glow of her blowtorch and the crotch it was dangerously close to. Her words were a low, controlled murmur: “The next time you decide to help yourself to a measure of my body, or to show me the great glory God gave you, I’ll be going to see your wife.” She bit the word off like an epithet. “I’ll be telling her about that mole just to the left of your thing. And just in case, when she asks you how a darky girl like me might come to know about it, just in case you plan to tell her I’ve been throwing myself at you, I’ll also let her know that I’m the one who sent you home with the crotch of your work pants singed to ember.”
As the tip of that torch crept closer to the center seam of those dungarees, I heard a yelp and a whimper, neither coming from Mabeline. I couldn’t tear my eyes away as the torch hovered there, as the fabric darkened and the slightest whisper of a plume of smoke formed. The whimper turned to a yowl. The torch crept to the right, then to the left, creating a blackened patch of fabric that I knew could burst into flame any moment. Then the torch leapt to the side, where it found a headlamp on the ground next to a work pail with its contents spilled across the floor.
She bumped into me at the doorway and hissed, “You in line? I may have to start charging.” Then she checked her movement, seeing my eyes—seeing them focus on the darkness where the man she’d left behind stood. “Leave it,” she spat. I gave her room, then followed her out. Later, I hung nearby to make sure she got on the streetcar okay. Of course she got on the streetcar okay. I followed because I wanted to be the one ensuring she got on the streetcar okay.
A week later she asked if I wanted to join her for a drink after work. She didn’t need to drop any hairpins and wait to see if I picked them up. During the war it was easier to blend in, with so many women wearing pants to work, most keeping their hair shorter for safety, and saving scarce lipstick for weekends. But I was still obvious to anyone who knew the signs. We didn’t discuss that encounter in the hull. We talked about work, about the war. We talked about the difficulty of getting meat and sugar, eyes dancing with smiles around the latter. I walked her home, and
she allowed me to kiss her in the hollow of her doorway. When we surfaced she gripped my gaze in the dim light. “I don’t need any knight in shining armor to save me. Second, I gave him reason not to retaliate—you had none. Third, you’d have put both of us at risk: think what kind of rumors he could have spread.” Then she turned and disappeared in her door.
On my back porch I stared up at the night sky, turning over her words, savoring the kiss, pondering the proximity between them. A spiderweb stretched from the eaves to the corner post, its impossibly fine lines etched against the sky’s blue-black glow. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw a lower half emerge, catching the faintest light from a neighbor’s window, shimmering against silhouetted trees. Suddenly the fat body of the largest spider I’d ever seen dropped precipitously from the roofline and dangled there, legs arranging and rearranging in some inscrutable purpose. It swayed slightly with the air currents but remained casual, luxurious, arranging and rearranging, on its back no less, as though it were bathing rather than suspended a hundred times its body length above the ground from a thread so fine I couldn’t see it. I marveled at the confidence it had in that thread, to trust space that way, to dangle there. I wondered if anything would ever sustain me so sturdily, would endow me with that kind of trust in life, so that I might dangle, calmly arranging and rearranging. Mabeline became that thread for me.
’Course, we lost our jobs as soon as the men returned from war. I was back at the cannery, Mabeline back in a kitchen. But come evening, she was on the back porch with me.
“You ever been with a Negro girl before?”
“No. You ever been with a white girl before?”
“No. But it’s not the same thing.”
“Isn’t it?”
“White people believe all kinds of crazy things about Negro girls.”
Oakland Noir Page 6
