Tamara laughs, delighted. “Girl, you show off like that—” She stops. A wave of pain is passing over Pea’s face and her fingers are rigid claws against her thighs. I reach for Pea but she shakes me off.
She takes a gulping breath. The force, whatever it was, subsides. “Go on, then, Tammy.”
Tamara puts the cards down, half-shuffled. “And what the hell was that?”
Pea sighs. “A debt. Or a broken promise.”
“Your hands?”
“I don’t think they were ever—wholly—mine.”
I frown. I had dismissed this, before. It was easy to pin it on panic or paranoia, her own guilty conscience. But this time—this time, for a sliver of a second, I had felt something threaten her. My hands had touched an inverted echo: bright and angry and scented with marigolds.
“And since when have they been…” Tamara gestures helplessly.
Pea leans back against the couch and folds her arms tightly across her chest. I watch her, but I know better than to touch. “Since Victor,” she says shortly.
Tamara makes a small, high-pitched noise from behind pursed lips. “But I thought…” she tries. She looks at me, a little desperately.
“I killed him,” I say, in a tone so matter-of-fact, it could have come from another throat entirely.
Pea’s expression is murder. “Oh, did you?”
Tamara swallows. “But Pea, even if your hands are, are—”
“Turning against me?”
“That. Why would they turn on you after you didn’t kill Victor? When you’ve”—Tammy takes another gulping breath—“killed so many others?”
Her voice fades into a questioning whisper. I’m surprised she made it this far. All the time I’ve known her, Tamara has had a champion ability to unnotice the violence surrounding her. I don’t know if it’s curiosity or her love for Pea that has prompted her to, at last, acknowledge out loud what the rest of us know.
“I reckon,” says my lover, with furious self-mockery, “that they wanted me to do the deed. Not our sainted Dev, now fallen, poor thing, in my low company.”
I don’t respond to this; it would be too cruel. I know why she let me do it. I remember how she seized in my arms at the thought of another kill. On the job, we passed around the story of a prison guard, one who pulled the switch on the hot squat. Man woke up one day and could no longer pull that lever. It did not matter that the prisoner would die anyway. It did not matter for what crime. Sometimes a human soul can no longer mete out death, no matter how justified, without destroying itself entirely.
“But there’s got to be a way to stop this!” Tamara says. “Why do they want to punish you now? The man’s dead, anyhow.”
Pea closes her eyes. “Oh, why don’t you ask them, Tammy? Lord, but you are getting on my last nerve.”
A second dream had come to her back in New York. She never told me the details, but I suspect it had involved killing Victor. And she tried. Oh, maybe we had doomed ourselves a decade before, from all our terrible choices, all our flawed love. But she still tried.
I reach out to trace the tight coils by her hairline. She stiffens, then sighs and leans into my hand.
Tammy has picked up her deck again, shuffling so fast you’d think she had the hands herself. Her tongue is poking a tent in her cheek and she has the eyes of a woman whose thoughts are moving as fast as her cards. I wonder what she thinks those cards can fix, now.
She shuffles once, pulls out the top card, shuffles again, pulls out another, then another. Seven of hearts, seven of spades, nine of spades.
“What does that mean?” I ask her.
But Tammy just bites her bottom lip and shakes her head.
Pea slams her hand on the table. Tammy freezes. “It doesn’t matter,” Pea says, and kisses me. As exact as I am sloppy, but we are equally desperate.
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeats. We fall together again. Silent, blessed, purged of conscious thought.
At some point we remember Tamara. I can’t tell if it’s my hand or Pea’s that reaches out when she gets up to leave. Pea’s words bob to the surface of my turbid thoughts: doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Like my secrets and my dead. Like my lingering desire for my old lover.
Tamara, one hand on my shoulder, the other on Pea’s cheek. Pea’s crescent smile transformed to a real one. It doesn’t surprise me when Tamara kisses her first. Pea grips my hand. My knuckles twist and bunch. As if she trusts me to pull her from the rapids, but only if she holds on hard enough.
We change. No longer two and one, but three. My consciousness has crested past coherency. I am bright and dark and a series of shades in between. I am kissing Pea. I am kissing Tamara. I love. I want. I fuck. I’ve lost the direct object. My penis touches the back of Tamara’s throat. I push my tongue into Pea’s vagina and then withdraw it slowly. She tastes of lemons and grass and, faintly, of blood. It reminds me of—there’s a reason why—
Our desire’s shining fury. The thought dissolves. There is nothing more particular about the taste of her than the smell of her. The way Pea looks at me when I kiss along that corrugated ridge of skin.
She whispers something. Tamara smiles and pulls me down. We are both between her legs, tasting her and then one another. When she comes that first time, she kicks out hard against my hip. It might hurt. She speaks. The words separate into syllables. They dance nonsense in my head. I can see apology in her wet and dreamy eyes. I love. I want. I fuck. And here, the arm at the other end of mine. The weight on the opposing scale. The killing forces, perfectly arrayed: evil, justice, beauty.
Later, we subside. Substances unknowable flake white from our naked bodies. Tamara sleeps, curled against my side. In the hazy dawn, Pea gets a blanket. She places it gently over me and Tamara. Our eyes meet. The sentence completes.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispers, and smiles—remote, indecipherable.
The curve of her spine as she leaves. The creak of the stairs as she climbs them alone.
12
That night, after more than twenty years of silence, a dream descends. My hands open like the lotus and let it in.
I dream of a river like the Hudson, but wider and deeper, trees looming on either side of its turbid expanse like rows of serrated teeth. I dream of a boat on that river, wooden, gleaming with fresh white paint. Sails the color of a sky before a storm. At the prow is an old wooden table, and on that table a body draped in white cloth. For my father, and in my childhood, white was the color of mourning, not black. But I don’t dream of who lies beneath that shroud. Lights appear one by one among the trees. Flickering lights like candles. Bigger ones like torches. Their bearers remain in shadow.
Phyllis speaks from somewhere along the shore: “I will kill him,” she says.
She wears white and there are three knives sheathed in her heart. She does not bleed. She holds the silver lighter I gave her years ago, with the rough circle I scored on one side. With this she sets fire to her dress. Though it burns, she merely shines in its light. Ashes bury her feet.
The river lights up the sky—or the sky flashes brightly enough to shine to the bottom of the river.
Now I can see clearly: it is filled with floating shapes. Not fish, as I first assume, but men. Hundreds and hundreds of men suspended in shallows and the deep like fish hiding from prey. They wear uniforms and they carry guns, but the bullets they fire float like eggs to the surface. They collect against the roots and grass and mud of the shore.
Alvin is there. He approaches from the woods to stand beside her. He rips one of the knives from her chest. “I will kill him,” he says. Phyllis kisses the top of his head.
Craver, wrinkled white skin wrapped around a heart of limestone, crawls from the bullets in the shallows and grasps at the burning hem of Phyllis’s dress. Phyllis takes a second knife from her chest and hands it to him.
“I will kill him,” the old man says.
I come to her then, naked and bleeding from my feet. I’m clutching a
sheet of paper in my right hand: ORDER TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION.
I reach for Phyllis, but she turns away from me. She jumps into the river and swims through its illuminated depths until she reaches the boat. She climbs it, naked and shining. In the back of the boat, on the opposite side from the shrouded body, grows a garden. There are tea roses, pink and yellow, and watermelons starred like the night sky in a painting by Van Gogh.
Phyllis grabs the roses by their thorny stalks and rips them from their bed of warped wood. Her face contorts with pain, but she does not cry. Her hands tear with the force, but the wounds don’t bleed. By the shore, a woman screams her name—Tamara’s voice, though I never see her. Over and over, Phyllis rips the roses until only petals and bleeding green branches remain.
She does not destroy the watermelons. She only picks one up, kisses it tenderly, and hurls it into the river. It explodes like a grenade.
Phyllis faces the prow of the ship, its shrouded body. She pulls the last knife from her chest.
“I have killed them,” she says, and she bleeds for the first time: a dark rain between her legs.
* * *
Tamara takes the train back to the city the next day. She grips my hand on the platform as though she longs to tell me something. In the end she just puts on her smile and kisses my cheeks.
I do not tell Pea of my dream. I wonder, as she must have, if this presages my death, or another kind of change.
The following morning is Mayor Bell’s memorial. It dawns winter-cold. Two state squad cars have parked alongside the hearse in front of the church. Which means Bobby Junior is already inside. The police are monitoring his movements until the attempted manslaughter case goes before a grand jury. Though Craver might never wake up, several local papers have called even that charge a political frame-up. They blame it on anarchist elements in Albany.
My mother asked me to come to Mayor Bell’s farewell. To represent the family, she said. The war has made regular communication with Britain impossible. She’s as safe as anyone can be, on a Devon country estate, out of the range of the blitz. But the connection was predictably terrible, and her request unexpected. I was too shocked to object.
Pea hasn’t told me why she wanted to come. I didn’t need to ask. Her reason appears a moment before the reverend steps up to the lectern. An eddy in the crowd of latecomers standing by the doors. It ripples outward in whispers and gasps and second glances over shoulders.
“She dares?” whispers a woman in front of us. I wonder how Pea plans to protect Mae Spalding, here to bid farewell to her former employer. The man police claim that her son murdered.
The pastor, unaware or pragmatic, continues his eulogy of the late mayor: “a legendary statesman,” “a loving father.” Even that last seems suspect. Junior’s manfully suppressed tears notwithstanding. The Bobby Senior I remember ran this town like a despot king. He exploited it with a jovial immorality bred into him by generations of Bells.
Pea twists at the far edge of the pew. She fixes her gaze on the church attendants flanking Mae. For the rest of the ceremony they stand guard beside her. I assume the hope is to induce her to leave without causing a scene. If so, they are disappointed. Every time Junior darts a look from the front, she sets back her shoulders. Her gaze is righteous and direct, Moses come down from the mountain. She sweats like a man in the desert, too. A steady stream dampens the collar and armpits of her gray dress. Twice during the service she closes her eyes and sways. But after a moment she seems to regain her equilibrium and we relax.
The recessional is “Be Thou My Vision,” bloodless liturgical fare that Pea would mock in happier circumstances. One moment I’m mouthing my way through and the next Pea has sprinted to Mae’s side. Mae leans against her in a half faint, eyes rolling, breath spastic.
Junior’s control snaps. He barrels down the nave ahead of the pastor and rips Mae from Pea’s grip.
“Leave!” He shakes her. She looks at him as if she has just woken up. Smiles slowly.
“Did you imagine you’d be welcome here? Your son killed my father! If we weren’t in a church—”
He stops. Pea has a knife at his throat.
“Let her go,” says Phyllis.
He lets her go. His skin breaks against the edge of her knife every time he gasps.
“Now,” she says, “walk out of this church. The memorial is over and you two got nothing more to say to each other.”
“No, no.” Mae stands upright with unexpected energy. “I got something to say. One last thing to say.”
Phyllis nods permission. She looks proud, as if she had hoped this would happen. I can’t fault Mae’s fury. But I don’t understand the benefit of staging a confrontation at the funeral.
“This I say to you, Robert Randolph Bell Junior, who I fed and clothed and protected like my own until you made clear you weren’t any of mine: there exists justice, if not in this world then in the next, and it will find you, for the Lord hath no creed nor color, the Lord keeps his scales, the Lord knows and the Lord abides.”
Outside a cloud must break. Light pours through the south window. It paints the three in shades of ocean: cerulean, verdigris, and pearl.
* * *
Craver wakes up two weeks later. He tells the police that he doesn’t remember who attacked him that night. He tells them that it was probably Alvin. Bobby Junior is cleared of all charges, and Marnie hosts a celebration in his honor at the inn that doubles as a fundraising dinner for next year’s election. The architects and prospectors begin preliminary work on the grounds of the old church and graveyard. No one tells Craver, slowly recovering in the hospital.
I go to town to pick up a telegram.
TAKEN CARE OF. T SENDS LOVE.
I smile and burn it with the ash end of the cigarette that I smoke outside the hospital doors. Mae waits with me, patient and watchful. Legally, there is no reason we can’t enter this hospital as freely as a white man, but Mae and I are more than familiar with the two faces of northern segregation. I promised her I would get us in anyway. I feel wary of seeing my old mentor again, but Mae deserves to say her piece and to help her son. This is a good that my hands can still do, when they have of late been merely self-serving.
“I think,” Mae says, apropos of nothing, “that all this time Craver’s been like that other one Phyllis told me about, the white man you killed in the city. He’s just hid it better, that’s all.”
It’s news to me that Phyllis has told Mae about the nightmare that we’ve been dragging behind us. I pull my jacket closer and look over at the car, parked at the end of the street, where she’s waiting for us. My fingertips vibrate with the feel of her, a liminal tension.
“How … precisely … is Craver like a New York mobster?”
Mae looks at me as one would a particularly dense schoolchild. “Not the murdering and the money. But the taking. He couldn’t have Alvin’s gift, or yours, himself, so he put himself over you both instead. He made sure other white men like the Bells believed in your gift too, just so they would give him even more of what the world already gives him just for breathing.”
I stare at her while the cigarette burns to the filter in my mouth. I never considered it that way.
Craver’s piety has long since calcified to myth. But hadn’t he benefited from the fear my hands caused around town? Hadn’t he made sure that white folks who normally never spared any thought for the power of colored people had feared us and respected him?
I drop the butt onto the concrete and put my hands deep into my pockets.
“The receptionist just left,” I say. “Let’s go see what the man has to say.”
* * *
Craver’s room smells like a summer wake. Lilies of the valley, gladioli, hydrangeas, Ophelia and white Killarney roses at the peak of their bloom. From his Hudson flock, I assume.
The servant of God himself is as pale as the lilies I have to brush aside to give Mae a place to sit. But his cheeks are flushed. He grimaces when he glances at he
r. He has his finger on a page of a Bible he isn’t reading.
“They let you in?” he asks me. He seems offended. That’s a lot of energy, I think, from a man who woke up from a coma the day before.
“We didn’t ask permission, Mr. Craver,” Mae says. Smooth as silk stockings. She hasn’t taken her eyes from his since she sat down. “Dev has a way of not being seen when he doesn’t want to be.”
“I know that about him.” Each word costs him. He speaks softly. Bobby Junior’s bullet caught him in the side, ripping through his lung and skimming his liver. That he is still alive could give one cause to believe in God. But not his God.
“And we weren’t going to let this being a white hospital stop us from seeing how you fared.”
His eyes slide over the top of Mae’s head and land on his Bible. He’s scared of her. He’s lucky we left Pea sleeping in the back of the car downstairs.
“They say I’ll survive. A few more years.”
“Jesus is merciful,” says Mae, looking anything but.
“Craver,” I say, “who did this to you?”
He bites a thin, cracked lip between still-sturdy teeth. “They say”—he breathes—“that they will soon break ground on the resort. They have permission”—like fire through a straw—“to move the bodies.”
Mae is a woman all wrung out of pity. “You know my Alvin didn’t do this, old man.”
He skims her face again. Gets closer to her eyes. “Of course not.”
“Then who did?” I ask. “Bobby Junior? Tell the police the truth. You can’t let them string up an innocent kid for … what?”
“He’d already murdered Mayor Bell!” Craver pants. If Pea were here, she would have objected. I expect Alvin’s mother to do the same, but Mae is silent—and if even she isn’t sure, I don’t know how I can be. Craver catches his breath. “I could do nothing else for him. And I have others to think of.”
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