Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “Wait till winter,” Dev said. “It seems to me we’ll be in this by then, one way or another.”

  “I’m thinking of enlisting, before my number comes up. Wouldn’t mind flying against those Japanese Zeros.”

  “I’ve heard from a few who are doing that. At least you get a choice, they say.”

  “That’s right—though are you likely to get called? You don’t sound American.”

  Dev shrugged. “My mother’s British, but I got naturalized years ago. I’m as liable as you. But I’ll take my chances. Don’t think I’d care for army life.”

  I tried not to listen, or at least to pretend like I’d gone judiciously deaf, but at this I turned my head, surprised into laughter at the understatement. He didn’t even eat meat.

  Dev flicked a glance to the side at the same moment and our gazes snagged and held, a burr on clean cotton, until I thought some warm answer flashed inside him. Then he ripped me with a shrug and waved a greeting to Tamara, just come from backstage.

  “The usual, sugar,” she called, shaking the bangles on her arms like maracas as she danced through the crowd. They cleared a path to get a better look; in high-necked satin or a grass skirt, Tamara always commanded attention. She was an earth goddess come to vibrant life, with brown skin, glossy hair, an ass like a naked peach, and eyes like the bottom of a well. My resentment of her had only managed to last a weekend; sure, I had known from the start how she fascinated Dev, but he hadn’t been mine for a long time now and there was something about Tamara—the way she cared about everyone, the way we listened to one another—that had made us fast friends without me having hardly any say in it. Dev watched her face as he lit her cigarette.

  “Well, that’s better,” she said, and, catching sight of me, “Sugar! Gorgeous as always, where have you been? Are you drinking? Of course you are. Make that two French 75s, Dev. Have you tried one, Pea? They’re my new favorite. Our Dev’s a genius.”

  This flow of uninterrupted, low-throated chatter was accompanied by a peck on both of my cheeks, French-style, which I bore with a smile and a small shrug in Dev’s direction. Tamara admired no one more than the dancers of the French avant-garde, Isadora Duncan and Josephine Baker; she had no time for the fluttering weightlessness of the traditional ballerina.

  She reached into a well-concealed pocket and pulled out a small blue hardcover, scarred with water and the multicolored mold of several continents. She pushed it across the zinc bar to Dev. A book of poems by Sarojini Naidu, who I had only heard of because Dev had mentioned her to me in an unguarded moment three years ago, after Charlie had played until dawn and the ten of us left weren’t so much standing as draped over tables and one another, buffeted by clouds from sweet spliffs whose spent butts crunched beneath our feet like roaches. His gaze intent upon Tamara, tears or sweat rolling down her cheeks while another man kissed up and down the soft inside creases of her joints, Dev had lifted his soft voice like an axe beside me and swung down:

  “Shelter my soul, o my love!

  My soul is bent low with the pain

  And the burden of love, like the grace

  Of a flower that is smitten with rain:

  O shelter my soul from thy face!”

  I caught my breath, hard. “What’s that?” I had managed.

  He told me her name then. “An Indian nationalist and poetess from Hyderabad. They say I met her when I was younger, but I don’t remember now.”

  Tamara had been with us for just a few months then, but I knew: not that he wanted her, because everyone wanted her, but that Dev would have her soon enough.

  “I confess,” Tamara said now, smiling at her lover, “that poetry still ain’t exactly my bag, but there were two or three I swear I … well, I don’t know if I liked them, but they made me want to dance.”

  Dev lifted the book, gazed at the smudged and blackened gilt on the embossed cover. The Golden Threshold, I read. His eyes met mine for a fraction of a breath. Then he smiled at Tamara and hid the book beneath the bar. “I think that’s even better,” he told her. “You should dance it one Thursday night. Isn’t that something they’re doing in the Irish theater these days?”

  Tamara nodded while her gaze shot beyond us, glowing distantly with calculation. She could not stop, our Tamara. With Victor she had found something better than a safe haven or a sugar daddy: she’d found someone who gave her power. Sure, Tammy had to sell a lot of herself, piece by piece, to keep it. I could tell her what the view was like from fifteen years in Victor’s back pocket. But like I had once been, she was still too young to care.

  She was the mistress of the Pelican’s off-nights, the goddess of our integrated Village oasis, the bleeding heart of an artistic mecca that privileged the iconoclast and stylized and generously syncopated. She could be thoughtless in her majesty, she could even be cruel, but I knew the sweetness underneath it all: she fed the alley cats with scraps after closing, no matter how many times Victor told her to stop. She bought everyone drinks and cadged everyone’s cigarettes, in a proportion dependent on which member of her extended family currently occupied her spare bedroom. Her family, it seemed, was uniformly parasitic, and none as amiable as Tamara, who yet loved them all as genuinely as I had to suppose she loved me, or Dev, or those yowling cats behind the Pelican. She danced like an earthquake and she sang like a bullet, and some nights my heart felt bruised and overripe just to look at her.

  I had never been that young, that beautiful, that good.

  Tamara swam back to reality and shook her head to see me there. In a lower voice, not one for show, she asked me, “Everything all right?”

  She squeezed my hand and I wished Dev would hurry with those drinks just so I’d have something else in my throat. “Got your cards on you, Tammy?” I said, hoarse.

  She was surprised. “I always do. But you don’t usually want to hear what they say.”

  Tammy had a way of reading not just the numbers, but your future from a regular playing deck. Even old Widow Baker had used her cards to play policy, but Tammy claimed the numbers carried your fate on their backs like firewood. She said an old conjure woman from Baton Rouge taught her the trick when she was living in Brooklyn, but you never knew with Tamara—she’d bet her life on those cards, but she liked stories, too.

  “I had a dream. A second dream, Tammy.”

  Dev finally handed us our drinks. She left hers sitting on the bar. “As soon as I’m done here, we’ll go back to my place. I’ll light some candles, burn some incense, and do a layout in three sets. The cards speak clearly in threes.”

  “It’s the hands, I swear it is. They want something from me, or they’re calling me to account, but for what? I haven’t done a job, Tammy, not for months, so why now—”

  She put a finger on my lips. “Don’t you worry, sugar, we…”

  She trailed off and tipped her head, looked through me as though I’d faded out in front of her. I turned around and saw that my fellas had come after all, the three of them fine as new pennies: shoes shined, uniforms pressed, and hair smooth and stiff with the combined efforts of Murray’s pomade and a boar-bristle brush. I waved and they hurried over, but I didn’t have any illusions about my own appeal beside Tamara’s. What surprised me was how Tamara was staring at them—particularly my admirer from this morning. She took her drink from Dev without so much as a glance in his direction, and tossed it back like Romeo took his poison.

  “Tammy?” That was my admirer, taller and broader than his friends, with the gap between his teeth.

  Tamara shook her head, not in negation, but as if she’d been sleeping and wanted to clear the fog. “My God, my God, Clyde, what the devil—you got some nerve—oh, you’re looking…”

  She would have dropped her glass if I hadn’t caught it for her, neat and easy. Jerry and his friend didn’t see it—they were too busy ogling Clyde, who had wrapped his arms around the best-looking girl in the city while she bussed him hard—but Dev did. He touched my hand. I shorted out.


  He was the raw current and I the badly insulated wire; the room seemed to flicker and dim around me, leaving only my scarred hand and his fingers—darker, smoother—resting against my stark metacarpals. I heard his voice, faint and crackled, but it took two shaky breaths for the meaning to reach me and by then I knew that I’d betrayed myself.

  “Someone’s looking for you,” he repeated slowly. Behind us, Tamara and her long-lost beau were talking over each other, discovering between them the story of how they’d come to meet in a clip joint years after leaving the small Virginia town where they’d met. Dev and I might as well have been alone.

  “Must be Victor.” I pulled my hand away, so he couldn’t tell me any more, and drank the French 75, which at first tasted faintly of champagne and then of nothing at all.

  “Victor?” For a moment I thought he’d touch me again, but Dev reached for a glass instead and poured himself a shot of that good bourbon. “I couldn’t tell … I don’t know that it felt like him. Are you two on the outs?”

  The false bookshelf fell back into its recess and Victor walked out, his arm slung around the dentist’s shoulders, and Red Man a few paces behind them. I wondered what business the dentist had with Victor, but I didn’t care enough to ask. Victor spotted Tamara, lips locked with her soldier boy, and gave the smallest of frowns. She would hear about this later—Victor liked Tamara to at least tease availability on busy weekend nights. Certainly Dev knew better than to kiss her in public.

  “Not on the outs,” I said, watching them, “he just wants me to do a job.”

  “And you don’t want to?”

  I started to answer, and then realized that I couldn’t. After all I’d done, what should my wanting have to do with my yes or my no? I didn’t trust myself anymore and now the hands had sent their second dream, their warning, another round of their dangerous luck.

  “I’ve been asking myself,” I said, “what you would do.”

  I hadn’t known this was true until I said it. It surprised us both. Dev rested his lips on the edge of the tumbler.

  “That might not work as well as you think, Pea.”

  Walter said that woman was murdering people like Dev and me for our hands. Stopping that evil was a pure and fiery purpose, and I craved it with the flat desperation of any junkie six months, three weeks, one night clean.

  “I haven’t done a job in seven months.”

  Dev started. The wrinkles spread like stars around the corners of his eyes and he leaned forward.

  “How about that,” he said. “Six months more than you managed for me.”

  “I didn’t … back then I still thought that justice…”

  “You thought it was worth the karma.”

  “Victor won’t let this one go.”

  His gaze flicked over my shoulder, to Victor’s usual table. I didn’t turn around.

  “Another French 75?” He pulled out a clean glass before I could respond. While he busied himself behind the bar, he said in a low, conversational tone, “Who is it now?”

  “Some woman. Maryann West. Red Man—Walter says she’s—” I stopped short. How to explain without invoking the memory of everything that had gone wrong between us a decade ago? The day Walter tempted me with Trent Sullivan and his stolen hands; the night I left Dev to kill and the night he found me too late. Dev had waited until he washed the blood away to make it gently, perfectly clear that he wanted nothing more to do with me.

  “Maryann West?” Dev repeated. His hand trembled as he filled my glass.

  “Don’t tell me you know her?”

  Dev shook his head once, an emphatic negation. “What does Victor say this woman did?”

  And here we came to it. I felt as though I had waited months for this moment and now I only wanted to hide, or kill something. “The hands,” I said to my drink. “It’s happening again, Dev. She killed someone like us.”

  His breath caught. “Now, see, that’s curious, Pea. Because the Maryann West that I know used to be Trent Sullivan’s girl. You’ll remember him—the fellow you murdered on his bed while his girlfriend screamed herself bloody in the bathroom?”

  We stared at each other, long and hard enough for Charlie to finish his set with a tumble of notes. People jostled us, called for drinks, but Dev still stared and I couldn’t catch my breath. Maryann West was Trent’s girl? Impossible. Wouldn’t I have recognized her voice? But regret had amplified and distorted those screams in my memory. If she was really Trent Sullivan’s girl, it wouldn’t be a coincidence.

  But after so much time, why would she commit the same crime that got her lover offed? For the first time in fifteen years, I wondered: had Victor always told me the truth?

  “How do you know her?” I asked.

  “Two G&Ts, Dev!”

  “Hey, what sorta whiskey you got?”

  “Trent used to work for Victor. You had to know that.”

  I had to know? I started shivering.

  “Walter didn’t tell me.”

  “And since when has Walter told you everything?”

  Everything important. Hadn’t he?

  “You gonna make that drink or what?”

  “Hold on one minute, Charlie!”

  “Aw, Christ.”

  “Do you hate me, Dev?”

  His expression stripped me; bleak and remorseful and entirely closed to the possibility of hope. “I’ve never hated you, Pea. I—I just couldn’t stay.”

  What are you? Dev had asked the first time I ever saw him, blood sticky on my arms while I heaved in an alley. A break in the clouds let the moonlight through and I saw his eyes, dark and knowing. He saw a girl covered in blood in a New York alley, and he never once thought to ask if it was hers.

  A knife, I’d said, and he walked me home.

  Dev’s fingers brushed the back of my hand and closed on empty air as I propelled myself from the barstool.

  He called after me, and I ignored him. Tamara, watching this, pulled away from her new man and angled herself so I couldn’t pass her.

  “Did something happen?”

  “Oh, everything’s swell, Tamara. But I’d leave me alone right about now.”

  She flinched, but rubbed my shoulder. “You know, Pea, there was a broad over by the door just now, giving you the oddest stare.”

  “I’ve got to—really?”

  Tamara glanced at Clyde. He nodded at me. “White lady. Older. Busted up, like her old man’s got a nasty temper.”

  This night was trying to unravel every awful feeling I’d ever had coiled inside me. Maryann West was here. And if Dev was telling the truth—

  I had to find her and talk to her, before Victor noticed. The crowd had grown thick while Dev quietly skewered me from behind the bar. I wiggled my way through it, looking everywhere for Maryann and not finding her. I angled for the door, and might have made it if not for the hand that fell on my shoulder.

  “Looking good, dollface,” a familiar voice said. “What’s your rush?” Russian Vic had the voice of a newscaster, nasal vowels pressed into service of staccato sentence fragments. He dangled subjects like fishhooks, and baited them with implied interrogatives.

  I pivoted on the ball of one foot and engaged a smile. “Fresh air,” I said. “I hate smoking in this press.”

  “Red Man said you never gave him an answer. So you’re gonna…”

  “I’m going outside,” I said, firmly. “And I just found out about this job today. Our deal from the start was that I get a choice, Vic. Remember that.”

  Victor looked back at Walter, sprawled across a chair and surrounded by a two-foot radius of free space. “They may call you my angel,” he said, conversational, “but you remember this: you’re my knife. A knife’s edge gets dull, well, you have to…”

  I stepped backward. “Go outside, Victor. You have to go outside. We’ll talk about this later.”

  Victor had a shock of silver-gray hair and more than a dozen silver teeth to match. He’d had all his own teeth when I met him, but it seeme
d the dentist gave him a new one each year. He grinned, and all that silver flashed. “Sure we will.” His soldiers were all convinced he had saint’s hands for detecting disloyalty, but I—like my dentist—figured he was lying. I’d never known a white man with saint’s hands.

  If I could have sprinted through that crowd, I would have. No one scared me quite like Victor. Not because he was ruthless—if anything Red Man was better known for his artistry with violence—but because I had been trading on his power for years too long.

  I reached the door without any sign of Maryann West. Out on the sidewalk I could breathe again. I pulled out a cigarette with jittery relief. I flicked Dev’s lighter on and off, on and off, struggling to regain enough control to go back inside.

  Victor might kill me.

  Seven months didn’t matter to Dev at all.

  Someone’s heels clicked on the sidewalk. I turned to see Maryann West walking straight toward me. She’d cleaned up since this morning, but it still hurt to look at her. She squinted and stopped five feet away.

  “I need to ask you something,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  As she reached into her pocket someone else sprinted up behind me, someone who was screaming my name in a voice completely different from the one that had said I just couldn’t stay.

  Dev pushed me. I thought that was why I had fallen until I smelled blood, which was familiar, and felt it on my hands, which was also. I tried to grip my knife, and then tried again, even though by now the pain had started and I knew the blood for my own.

  “Phyllis,” Dev said, like he had back then, a note low and joyous that gave meaning to the silence around it. He stilled my hands and pressed his jacket to my chest.

  There was something in his face I needed to understand. Not the horror or grief, which anyone might feel while holding the dying woman they once loved, but something beyond it, or before it.

  “Why?” I asked, and shook.

  “Shh,” he said, “Pea, stay still—”

  “Why work for Victor? Why stay?” I trusted him to understand the rest. Why stay in my world after I’d rejected his? Why watch me and let me watch him for a decade while we slept with other people?