He shakes me off. He wobbles a bit as he stands and then straightens his back. “Your angel is pregnant. Didn’t tell you before because I wanted a clean answer. But you might as well know now.”
I don’t hear when he leaves. I only feel the gust of chill air, the smoke that blows in from the flue.
* * *
I lie beside her and she makes room for me. I hold her through what might be a nightmare, or might be another dream flowing through those hands that Alvin says are turning bad inside her. A little after dawn, she shakes me awake.
“We have to leave,” she says. She’s been crying.
“To go to the groundbreaking,” I say.
She stares. “How did you know?”
“Alvin told me. How did you?”
She takes a breath and lets it out in a laugh. “Our baby told me, honey.”
I dress and follow her to the car. I watch as she straps on her knife holster. I get my gun.
“How long?” I ask.
“Three months.”
“How can she tell you anything?”
“She’s got something like the hands, but different. I can’t explain it. Dreams don’t come down for her, Dev, they’re inside her. So they’re inside me, too, you see? She can’t stop it.”
I take her shoulders and kiss her forehead gently. Then I get behind the wheel and we start racing down River Road. The trees smudge like charcoal in my peripheral vision.
“There were guns,” Pea says, white knuckled. “And fire. Do you know what he’s planning?”
“Not Alvin,” I say. “Mae.”
“Oh.” Pea closes her eyes. “Oh, goddamn it.”
She reaches for me when we park behind a line of cars along River Road.
“Follow me,” she whispers.
“To hell,” I tell her.
We run. A ribbon of braided yellow and blue separates the press and public. The crowd is standing and squatting and balancing equipment on the crumbling gravestones. I don’t see Alvin or his mother anywhere, but I know they’re here. Pea elbows her way to the front of the press, where we have a clear view of the men in the graveyard. Bobby Junior, the two Astor investors from the restaurant, the local state senator alongside three other men. Two I don’t recognize, but the third is unpleasantly familiar. Ben Craver is in a wheelchair off to one side, dressed in a charcoal suit that bulges with padding. An attempt to make it fit for the cameras, I suppose. It only emphasizes the sharp bones and pleated skin of his neck and face. I haven’t seen Craver since that day in the hospital, when I left him with Mae. I do not know what has brought him here, suborned by the men who have destroyed everything he ever cared about. But it scares me.
Junior, of course, is talking about his daddy. Martyrdom has been very good for business. Nothing like a small-town murder to rally the national press around an otherwise banal construction project. Craver sees the two of us. His brief smile is beatific, disconnected.
“Wait here,” Pea whispers. “I’ll be back soon.”
She rubs the back of my neck and then runs in the direction of the condemned church. Craver watches her leave, then snaps his gaze back to Junior. He’s taking questions from the assembled representatives of our fourth estate.
“Gerry Davis, New York Sun, I have a question for Mr. Benjamin Craver—”
“Ben Craver,” says Junior with an abrupt, waxen smile, “has joined us today, as I said, in a remarkable show of support and solidarity and an attempt to help heal our community. But he is not well—”
“How do you feel about the move of the graves to First Methodist? Your opposition to the gravesite—”
“I think his presence here is a good indication that he feels that the placement of these bodies in sacred ground, where my own father has been buried not even a month ago, is a worthy compromise. Now—Ben, for goodness’ sake, man, you don’t need to answer—”
Craver has very slowly moved his wheelchair forward. Those of us in the front row can just make out his splintered voice. “It’s all right. I can say … I am very pleased to be here today. I am happy to have reached this … accord in this sacred space. I am grateful to Bobby Bell Junior and the investors for … allowing me to be here.”
Junior closes his eyes and flexes his hands carefully at his sides. Craver smiles with a perfect, holy cruelty. And as a fusillade of barked questions and photographic flashes obscure the strangeness of the moment, I feel it. One finger of a silk glove sliding between the veins of my left wrist. Not a direct threat, nor an immediate one, but undeniable. No sign of Pea at the old church, so I scan the crowd behind me. There’s more I could do to find the source of this threat. But Pea told me to stay. I’m afraid for her—more afraid than I’ve been in my life—she is pregnant—and our child has warned her about what will happen here.
Then: Alvin sprints from the back of the church and starts across the graveyard. He hollers something that I can’t make out for the roar of the crowd. Murderer, they scream. It’s him. Good God, where are the police? Pea chases him just a few steps behind. I start toward her, but she waves her arms and I stop with my gun in my hand and one foot in the air.
“Craver,” she shouts—at least, I think she does, I am reduced to reading her lips. The threat rolls over me again. My hands cramp. It isn’t directed at me, but it will catch me if I stay. I stay. I jump the ribbon and elbow my way closer to the police surrounding Junior and his associates.
A cop intercepts Alvin and wrestles him to the ground. Pea stares at me, but she goes back to help the kid. Craver, I have to reach Craver. He’s going to do something, that’s the only reason he’d ever have appeared here today. I run around the back of the police cordon, vault off the sturdiest of the gravestones, and push my way between a pair of linked arms. I land to the side of Craver’s wheelchair in a wobbly crouch.
“Davey,” he says, softly reproving. He doesn’t seem to have noticed the fracas around us. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“What are you doing?”
He blinks slowly down at me. The officers I pushed aside to reach him have grabbed me by my elbows. I hook one leg beneath Craver’s wheelchair. Buy myself a few seconds. “Giving this,” Craver says, spreading his arms wide, “giving us all, back to the Lord.”
The gesture makes his awkwardly fitted jacket gape between the closed buttons, a little at the armpits. A moment like a sliver of shaved ice: a bundle of wires running from his armpit to his stomach, connected to a series of dark-gray cylinders.
“Officers,” says Craver, very calmly, “please take this man away from me.”
My left shoulder wrenches when they pull me upright. It wouldn’t hurt so much if I weren’t also trying to get away. My warnings sound absurd. I babble them anyway.
I worked long enough back then in Craver’s store to see his storage shed, where he keeps the hunting rifles and their ammunition. And, occasionally, for when highway crews pass through, small batches of state-registered explosives. He always warned me away: One stick of TNT has enough force to blow up half of River House, Davey.
His comparison had struck me even at the time. So he hates them too, I thought, and felt that kinship.
I thought we’d come to the groundbreaking to stop Mae. But I forgot. I forgot that there are so many kinds of threats. And many kinds of strength.
An infinity of vengeance.
“Explosives,” I try again, “Craver has explosives, he’s going to set himself off—”
Some asshole with a federal insignia is pressing Pea’s face into the grass. Alvin shivers beside her, already cuffed. One of her knives is buried in the ground a few feet away. She rolls to her side, sees me.
“It’s dynamite,” Alvin starts to say, but the same fed tough hits him open-handed across the back of his head.
“One more word and I’ll shoot you here, you hear me? Save us the bother of the hot squat.”
Around Bobby Junior and his associates, the frenzy is subsiding. If anything, the crowd presses closer
. Craver watches us. Alvin’s shoulders tremble.
“You killed your wife.”
The voice comes from the earth. From the stones in witness of their own destruction. From the bodies whose repose Craver will guard at the cost of his own place beside them.
“She threatened to leave and expose those pictures you made her take. You buried her body in the potter’s field and told everyone she had left for Vegas.”
The officer holding Alvin jumps back as if he’s been burned.
Alvin sits up slowly, continues: “Bobby Senior had fixed every election since twenty-four. The police and the city council helped him do it in exchange for favors and cash. Bobby Junior was meant to follow him in the last election, but he had killed a man in the city and fathered a colored child and the mayor was worried about the scandal. Bobby Junior has forced himself on ten women, and every one was a Negro who couldn’t say a word about it, because he would destroy them and their families. One killed herself. He can’t get it up, unless he pretends that she’s unwilling, and black. Officer Fisk has two wives—”
There are two guns at Alvin’s temples now, two men implacable with anger and fear.
“You shut that hole you use for a mouth now, boy.”
“Believe me,” Alvin says, so calmly he looks possessed. Not by the devil—by a divinity. “Craver has loaded himself with dynamite. He is about to—”
Someone shoots. Pea has launched herself from the ground so quickly that I don’t realize what she’s doing until she’s on her side in the dirt and Alvin is crying and bleeding all over her lemon-colored skirt.
I jerk against the officer holding me, though Pea is all right, I can see it in her eyes.
“Damn it, I told you—”
I mistake the sound for gunfire at first, but it’s coming from the church. Explosives detonate in rapid succession. They spit smoke and fire against the milky sky. Deafened, I crawl toward Pea. Ashes and debris rain over us, they burn where they land. Alvin writhes, but I can no longer hear those wordless howls. Pea has worked her hands free somehow. She rifles through the pockets of the officer who must have shot Alvin, the one who killed his wife. He has fallen while the old church made of itself an offering. He has fallen and the remains of his brain and skull have mixed with the ash falling around us. Three more thuds that I can feel but not hear, three more mortal rains.
Pea’s hands still. We look at each other. I wonder if we will die, if our child will die, before we ever had a chance to know her.
“To hell,” her lips say. Then she smiles, tangles her hand in my hair, and pushes me to the ground.
I can hear the bass of the moment Craver gives himself back to God. It vibrates through the graves he has died to save. Pea has made sure I can’t see. The air smells of hell, or war. Of charred flesh and charred earth and the blood that covers them both. Only my position on the ground keeps me from vomiting. My position prostrate, facing away from Craver’s massacre and toward the church.
From its wreckage, a solitary figure emerges, now that there’s almost no one left to witness. A black woman, slight but strong, with enmities as venerable and fierce as Craver’s, better hidden. She wears a scarf over her hair and ashes on her dress.
Mae didn’t threaten Craver that afternoon. But I should never have left them alone.
She sees me looking but doesn’t pause. She just points to her boy and slips out of sight.
* * *
The Little Easton Massacre is the biggest news in the country for eight days. Bobby Junior survived. He ran moments before Craver detonated—the only one who, at last, believed us.
He has been a very helpful witness to the police.
Conspiracy to commit mass murder. The commission of said mass murder. Political terrorism. Destruction of property. Trespassing.
At that last, even Finn couldn’t stop a bitter laugh. Pea and Alvin and I are set to spend a reasonable time in jail followed by a short appointment with the hot squat. Walter managed to get us out on bail. He has been quiet about our prospects for freedom.
“I’ll say I did it all with Craver,” I tell him. “I’ll confess so they have to drop the charges against Pea and Alvin.”
“You’d leave your kid without a father?” Walter asks.
“Better to lose a father than a mother.”
A considered pause. “You could give Phyllis up. Declare loyalty to the fuzz and turn informant. They’ll keep you out of the draft and I’ll get her out before they can make charges stick. Wait a few years and you could be in the kid’s life, at least.”
“She would never forgive me.”
“Of course not. But she wouldn’t kill you. For the kid’s sake.”
I have to laugh. Oh, if only one of our hearts were hard enough. But hadn’t I made my decision the moment that I knocked Jack cold from behind, the moment I grabbed Pea’s knife and turned on Victor? And then that wet, putrefying silence of Victor’s curse and Victor’s death—there is nothing simple about survival, after giving yourself over to love like that.
Walter sighs. “I had to mention it. There’s always the truth.”
I’m suspicious. “What truth?”
“That Mae Spalding did it. She and Craver between them. That old mayor had let his son do whatever he wanted with her for years, hadn’t he? And I think she and the mayor had been together before that. So she had killed the mayor. Thought she could get away with it. She didn’t expect Junior to go on an attempted killing spree after finding his father’s body. They threatened her whole family, too, so she worked with Craver to destroy them. The fuzz would leave you out of it, if they had to—if they knew the truth.”
It’s what Walter would do in my place, I think. He does care for people, but he hasn’t become Red Man by overindulging his mercy.
“Not an option, Walter.”
“She wouldn’t have to know you told.”
“But I would.”
* * *
We visit Alvin in the hospital, after the doctors are forced to amputate the arm. When he wakes, Mae takes his scarred hand so he’ll have something to do with it. That’s how we discover the other reason for Victor’s grisly hoodoo: there’s no such thing as one saint’s hand. The one that remains is just flesh. Alvin’s face twists the moment he realizes. Pain or anger, I think.
But it’s relief.
“It’s done,” he says. “I wasn’t worthy of them.”
“Of course you were, son,” Mae says. Her eyes are red, but dry as tinder. “None of this is your fault.”
I remember his cold recitation in the graveyard of sins uncountable. His profound lack of surprise. What would it do to a soul, to know the darkest kernel of every one it touched?
“We’re going to get you out of here and free, Alvin. I promise.”
No one in the room—all of whom are perfectly aware of what Mae has done—says anything to this. I wonder about Mae now. I wonder about the unfathomable force that gives our hands power and takes it away. If Mae had had that luck, the Bells of Little Easton would have met a sacred justice years ago. Even with her son under arrest, she hasn’t turned herself in.
Alvin meets my eyes. “Matthew 5:30.”
My heart’s so full it chokes me. Pea frowns. I bury my fingers in the tangled mass of her hair. “Do you regret it?” I ask him.
He takes a sharp breath. “Hell, no.”
* * *
The Little Easton river resort project is officially canceled after the surviving investors withdraw support. Six days later, the little they could scavenge of Craver’s remains are interred in a plot just outside the sacred grounds of the Lutheran cemetery in Hudson. The ceremony is well attended by the press and not many others. Seven days later, Alvin goes home.
Eight days later, the world forgets all about Little Easton and its lethal church politics. The Japanese have destroyed some naval base in Hawaii, news that feels at once inevitable and absurd. Congress hasn’t made the formal declaration of war yet, but everyone knows they will.
I keep my radio tuned to the blustering outrage on the news, awaiting confirmation. A little past eight, I pull into the cold parking lot of the Albany PD headquarters. Every office light is still on, including Finn’s. His secretary lets me in without even asking my name.
He has been smoking the cheap cigarettes that his second wife hated. The pall lingers above his bare head. It tries to choke me as I sit down.
“You said you had an idea,” he says.
“You know I didn’t do this.”
“I don’t think you did, kid. But you’ve changed since those New York days. You could be capable of all sorts of things I don’t believe.”
“Benjamin Craver did it.”
“Couldn’t have done it all alone. He was half-dead himself.”
Now’s the moment. Spill on Mae, solve our problems. And a part of me—the part of me that still wishes I didn’t love Pea—would if I could.
“You know who helped him,” Finn says, after a moment. “Give them up. Or better yet, give up your old lady. Dewey would definitely settle for Victor’s angel.”
So many opportunities for salvation. But there are many turns on the wheel of rebirth. If we meet again, it won’t be as her traitor. I flex my hands. “You remember Erenhart?”
“The crooked cop? That your girlfriend killed?”
“You used to go to Lefty Manusco’s old place in the theater district, didn’t you? He’d lend you some chips on his account.”
Finn just stares.
“They say even Dewey went a few times. In the old days, before his big promotion to district attorney. Well, I wouldn’t know about that, but one way or another some weekends Manusco’s was half cops, wasn’t it? Funny, I remember back in ’35, after all the goods I gave you on Manusco’s prostitution ring you ended up putting everything on Lucky Luciano instead.”
“Get the boss first, kid. The bit players can wait.”
“That’s what everyone told me. All the same, Manusco had a good racket going before Finch had him bumped off … a few months ago, was it? I wonder who inherited Manusco’s little black books—he was famous for his record-keeping, that I remember. Now that I mention it, I don’t suppose that’s anything to do with Dewey’s sudden interest in bringing down Finch, is it?”
Trouble the Saints Page 21
