Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  She opened her eyes. Seven-two-seven. The interpretation came nearly as quickly: seven of diamonds for luck, upright or in reverse, you couldn’t tell with the diamonds because there were no numerals printed on the cards. In the first position, it was a neutral beginning. But then came two, an inversion, spades pointed at the earth. And then seven again, seven of hearts: luck, but also courage in reverse, hearts falling down.

  The hands had begun with all the luck in the world, poised neutrally between the sky and the earth—heaven and hell, if you like, though that wasn’t quite it—but over time, unused, or used for evil purpose, their destiny had been left to rot. The luck, and the power that moved it all, had turned on its once chosen vessel. The crisis embodied in the spades found its resolution in the falling hearts. They spoke of one last chance to stop the corruption, but the heart had failed the hands.

  Lost, everything that the vessel had once dreamed of being.

  The oracle put down the deck, though she left the cards, and the story they told, open on the table.

  Tamara lifted her glass. She trembled, and the liquid splashed onto the wood. She wiped it with her sleeve, unthinking.

  “The heart failed the hands,” she whispered, looking at nothing, anywhere but the numbers.

  She thought of Phyllis sleeping upstairs, of that dreaming child in her belly, of the hands that had once been the terror of Manhattan and now just terrorized this lonely house. Those hands still longed for killing justice, but the man they wanted to reach was already dead.

  Phyllis had killed so many, killed hundreds if you believed the whispers at the Pelican. Tamara did not know the details—she had tried not to hear—but she knew that Dev had killed Victor, at the end, and he would only have done such a thing to spare Phyllis.

  “The heart failed the hands,” Tamara repeated, and swallowed. “Or the hands never gave one goddamn for her heart…”

  There was more, she felt it. That baby, squatting inside Pea, drinking down dreams and spitting them up like poison. She scooped up the numbers in one smooth motion and shuffled. She laid out a star pattern. Left foot first: six of clubs. Right foot: six of diamonds. Seven of clubs and ace of spades, the left and right arms. And for the crown, the angel joker. The child herself, as close as breath. Wreathed in sixes and sevens, bound with clubs and spades. Her hands were strong, but fading. The curse had got to her. She felt the weight of the mother’s hands. Smelled the blood on them, rotting, like the floor of a butcher’s shop. Smelled something else, too—hair grease and Russian dumpling soup. Victor. There had been a curse, hadn’t there? A curse on the father and the mother. But they were the same thing, the curse and the rot, they fed one another. The poison was choking both mother and child. They wouldn’t survive it. The moment that baby tried to come into the world with her pulsing saint’s hands, the power would burn them clean. The mother wouldn’t survive it.

  The mother—Phyllis—Pea—

  How do I save her?

  The answer was in the crown: the angel joker, tricky but merciful. Take it on yourself, young oracle. Bring that corruption over to you and free them both of its taint. Oh, sure, then you have to live with it: that burning anger of the saints without the hands to compensate, Victor grinning silver at you from over the breakfast table for the rest of your life, nightmares. Enough to drive you to drink and an early death. But you could do it. You could take it on for Pea’s sake.

  Or you could leave it alone and let that bloody legacy strangle itself.

  A log cracked in the stove. Tamara jerked upright and into her body. She found herself looking through the window above the kitchen sink, the one that opened onto the garden. Just beyond her own warm reflection, she thought she saw—she might have seen—

  —a silver head and two button eyes, smiling.

  * * *

  Mrs. Grundy woke her up with the pointed toe of one black boot, thrust gently but firmly into Tammy’s lower right ribs. She grimaced against sudden awareness—the press of the noon sun against her eyelids, the chill of the kitchen floor, the acrid aftertaste of two bottles of Bordeaux and a bit of … ashes? Oh yes, she had forgotten the reefer. She groaned, lifted her left hand and peeled back the sleep-crusted lid of one bloodshot eye.

  “What are you doing here?” she croaked.

  Mrs. Grundy’s thin, painted eyebrows rose to the middle of her forehead.

  “I thought you were a burglar.”

  “Passed out on the floor?”

  Mrs. Grundy sniffed. “I mistook your snoring for a saw.”

  Tammy closed her eyes. “Sweet Lord, tell me I’m still dreaming.”

  The Lord was not so kind. After a moment, she pushed herself onto her side and then upright. The room swayed once or twice and then settled into an ice pick behind her right eye.

  “Are these playing cards…”

  Tammy blinked hard and realized that she’d let her beauties fall every which way after that last reading—or visitation, depending on how you looked at it. She fought back nausea as she put the deck back together, counting all fifty-four cards like old friends.

  “Go check on Mrs. Patil, if you please,” she said.

  Mrs. Grundy gave her a long look and then left without another word.

  The deck secured and safe again in her pocket, Tammy staggered to the bathroom, deposited the contents of her stomach in the bowl, and splashed cold water on her face. The boiler had gone out in the night; they’d need to light it again before she cleaned the rest of her. She dared a look at her haggard face in the mirror and then looked back down at her stockinged feet.

  “So now what, Oracle?” she asked herself. She’d meant it to be mocking, but the cards were with her now, and they knew a truth when she spoke it.

  Her choice was a joke, a cosmic trick played by bitter ancestors. Take on the curse or let her best friend die? But it wasn’t Tamara’s fault that Phyllis had covered herself with mob justice. And it wasn’t her fault that Dev had killed Victor and brought that old bastard’s curse down upon them. None of this was the baby’s fault, either, but it wasn’t up to Tamara to save anyone. She had problems of her own. A West Village club to get back to, once this business was done. She had wanted to help Pea. She had come here because she hadn’t been able to see her way around it. She loved that woman, for heaven’s sake! But to take that heavy fate on for her? She was an oracle, a snake dancer, a regular girl taking shelter in the mob’s long shadow, not Job.

  She had tried to be good, but this was too much. Too much for anyone. The cards and whatever moved them were wrong to ask it of her.

  We didn’t ask for anything, that slinking deck seemed to say when she finally left the bathroom. We just show. Maybe it’s you that’s asking, Oracle?

  She told them to hush.

  Pea was just coming down the stairs. They took one another in: Pea bloated with that baby, pale and pinched with the after-effects of laudanum and a night spent wrestling a curse; Tamara puffy from a night on the floor, wrung out from a night spent wrestling a choice.

  Pea was delighted to see her. “Slept well, I take it?”

  Laughter bubbled up like last night’s dinner. “Like a princess on a pea.”

  Mrs. Grundy looked between the two of them and flared her nostrils. “You should sit, Mrs. Patil. I wouldn’t want to have to carry you up those stairs again.”

  Phyllis winced. “Yes, ah—I’m sorry to have been such trouble. Thank you for your assistance.”

  In truth, Phyllis had the best white-people voice of the three of them. It made sense: she was the only one whose survival, for a time, had depended on convincing white people to overlook her yellow skin and thick lips. Even being white like Mrs. Grundy couldn’t compare to that brutal schooling in the ways of white folk.

  “I brought another bottle of laudanum to leave here in case you’re in need of it again.” She drew it from her bag and put it on the table. “Well, then. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Patil.”

  She held out her
hand. Easy, Phyllis shook it. Tamara closed her eyes; they were burning. Her hands she strangled behind her back.

  “Are those sorts of fits … normal for you, Mrs. Patil?”

  Phyllis sounded darkly amused. “Normal? Not really. Regular? Unfortunately.”

  “Well. I’ll just make something quick in the kitchen, Mrs. Patil. I’m sure you haven’t eaten.”

  “That would be delightful, Mrs. Grundy,” she said with an amused glance in Tamara’s direction. “We’ll be in the parlor.”

  A sick weight settled in her stomach as she followed her friend’s slow progress to the parlor couch. She kept thinking: but this is Phyllis, this is Pea, the terror of the Village, the angel of justice, Victor’s knife. She was a violent goddess, a creature of legend, not some poor woman to be brought low by a damned baby. Tamara kept churning between swooping disbelief and the hard slap of the cards until she thought she might just need to bend over a porcelain seat for the second time that morning. She swallowed hard and busied herself with making a fire. Phyllis lay against the couch, hands on her belly, breathing.

  “You strike those matches any harder, you’re liable to burn the whole box.” Pea’s voice made her jerk.

  Tammy’s hands trembled as she struck another. The stick flared between her fingers and let off a stench like a devil’s fart. She stared at it, frozen, until the flame burned down to her fingers and she let it drop onto the rolled-up newspaper with a yelp. The paper caught and curled like a sleeping child as the flames kissed the logs and kindling above.

  “Something happened.”

  Tammy lifted her chin, tried on a smile. “I had to choke you till you passed out and then had a good conversation with a couple of bottles of Bordeaux, but other than that, nothing really.”

  But she was thinking: Pea, Phyllis, Pea, that goddamned baby! There had to be a way out, a way to save her. She had to ask the cards again. Search until they gave her a different answer. Taking on the curse couldn’t be the only way.

  Phyllis gave her a very mild look, and Tamara felt naked, undone, judged and shriven.

  “Well, sit down, baby. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Tamara laughed, high and giddy. “I did!”

  “Victor is dead, Tammy.”

  Tammy put her hand over Pea’s and squeezed. She tried to feel the rot, the poisoned roots that would strangle her and her child to death, but she couldn’t.

  She just felt love like an arrow.

  4

  Walter called the next morning and Phyllis stayed on the line with him for nearly half an hour. Tamara sat in the kitchen, watching her oatmeal cool beside the cards. They were laid out in her fifth set of three of the morning. Jack of diamonds, jack of spades, two of hearts. Death and death, they said. A curse that ran through gristle and bone. An oracle who could witness, or who could act. In the background, the woman who had started all of this back when Tamara was just a child in Lawrenceville discussed the bloody business as though it weren’t about to kill her and her baby.

  “It’s the body, then,” Phyllis said. A second later, Tamara mentally corrected herself: the Body, the second-most-notorious hatchet man in Victor’s gang. She left the cards and went to the sink. She ran the tap.

  “Baby, the body count might be exactly why he’d snitch—I know that. That’s where he got the name, isn’t it? When he hides a body, even Saint Peter can’t find it? But hey, Walter, no one’s perfect. And even the NYPD gets lucky once in a while.”

  She laughed, a laugh freer than it had any right to be, considering the subject of conversation. The sink was full of last night’s dishes, so Tamara made her hands busy. A soapy wineglass fell from her stiff fingers and the stem broke clean off the base. Dregs of red wine mixed with the soap and glass and ran, businesslike, down the drain.

  “Dev’s hands aren’t magic, Walter. He gave you what he could, and it ought to be enough. Maybe it’s the Body, maybe it’s Marty, maybe it’s someone you haven’t thought of yet—Mrs. Robinson must have seen enough to burn her eyes after all these years … Oh, Walter, the cleaning lady.”

  Tamara liked Mrs. Robinson. The woman was seventy if she was a day, but wouldn’t tolerate any young do-gooder trying to help her with her groceries. She had a sinewy strength and a face so professionally straight that you just knew she could tell some tales if she had a mind to. Tamara’s grandmother had spent her life cleaning other people’s messes, and if you caught her on a good summer night, after she’d poured herself a fortifying tumbler or two of curative bitters, she could make you bust a gut for laughing. Grandma’s white folks stories had been Tamara’s favorite as a young girl, just realizing what it meant when those laughing, red-faced men passed through town in their trucks. When Mrs. Robinson cleaned Georgie’s cage, she always commented on his appetite and fed him precisely one cricket. Tamara would try to tease a laugh from her, or at least some tutting disapproval, but the most she ever managed was one thin eyebrow very delicately raised, and, in tones so dry they surpassed even Phyllis, “Well, you young people keep having your fun, for as long as you can, I say. They’ll knock it out of you soon enough.”

  Mrs. Robinson had cleaned Victor Dernov’s toilet for more than a decade. Mrs. Robinson, Tamara was sure, could tell the best sort of white-people stories, ones that made you cry for laughing. Or just cry.

  “I’ll let you know if I think of anything,” Phyllis said, after a silence. “You’ll talk to them?”

  Before she realized what she was doing, Tamara shut off the tap and ran into the living room. “Don’t you dare!” she shouted. Phyllis looked up, at first annoyed and then alarmed.

  “What happened?

  “Mrs. Robinson is no rat and you know it, Phyllis Green! Don’t you touch her!”

  “I never said she was,” Phyllis said, very carefully. Tamara thought: her knives may be rusting in the garden, but that don’t make her less dangerous.

  Walter murmured something on the line. Phyllis frowned and cupped her hand over the receiver. “No, no—don’t worry about it, Walter. Yes, we’re doing fine. Right. Goodbye.”

  Tamara was breathing hard, her heart galloping like a lame horse. Her skin prickled in cold waves. She thought she might faint. She had never—what had she been thinking?—done anything like that before. She knew her goddamn business!

  Phyllis reclined on that old couch like Pharaoh’s mistress.

  “What’s got into you, Tammy?”

  Tamara clenched her fists, but she had so little strength in her fingers that they slipped out again to flop against her thighs. She took a little step to the left and collapsed onto the ottoman.

  “You said you were looking for the snitch, and that Mrs. Robinson—”

  Phyllis tilted her head. “I doubt she is. But it’s possible. That was my point. Walter is just looking at his lieutenants, but there’s a lot more people watching.”

  Tamara gulped a breath. “Well, don’t hurt her.”

  “Her son’s a small-time banker in the Bed-Stuy policy racket. She’s got no reason to snitch, and Walter knows it.”

  Her son? And then Tamara remembered a good-looking boy who brought Mrs. Robinson home some nights. He’d asked Tammy for some numbers once, and she’d teased him about betting against the bank. She turned her head to the side and shrugged.

  “Well, I don’t know about those sorts of things.”

  Phyllis looked more like Pea again to her; she gave Tamara a confused, sad smile, the kind that seemed to come at the tail end of some great pain.

  “You sure about that?”

  “I know what I need to, but I don’t get involved.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I’m just the snake girl! What the devil does mob business have to do with me shaking my titties on a stage?”

  “Well, if you’re shaking your titties for the devil in charge, baby, I’d say it does.”

  The rage hit Tamara so hard she rocked back with it.

  “Don’t you look at me like that, n
ot you, Phyllis! You’ve got ghosts like a country dog has fleas, and you don’t even know it! Goddamn it, goddamn it, Pea, why did you have to take it all so seriously? Couldn’t you have knocked off a few baddies and called it a day? Couldn’t you have run off with Dev that first time and stayed here in this cracker country? Oh no, but you got to be the best, don’t you? Be the very best angel for the devil himself, and now where has that got you? Sick to death with a baby, your man in the war, and your devil’s old ghost settling in for the winter! And now I’m supposed to fix it? I gotta clean up this goddamned mess you made? I love you, Pea, I swear I do, I never had a friend like you, but—”

  Grief cut her off like a closed fist. Phyllis just stared at her, mouth open, eyes wet.

  Tamara stood up, walked straight through the kitchen to the side door and out into the cold punch of winter.

  To sit back and watch her die. To know she could have done something, but to choose, instead, nothing. To live the rest of her life with that most damning of proof that she had always been better at pretending goodness than being good.

  She kicked a stone. It wasn’t Tammy who’d spent fifteen years cutting a bloody swath through New York’s lowlife. She hadn’t submitted her will to a man with no more moral sense than those silver teeth Marty stuck in his mouth every year.

  Sure, said Tammy’s own thoughts in Pea’s damned voice, but you danced for him.

  * * *

  The cards weren’t any more forthcoming—two of hearts, five of clubs, seven of diamonds, primes, those solitary figures, accusing her: choose her or choose yourself, Oracle, but we both know who you really are. And then the other ghosts started crawling their way through Tamara’s peripheral vision, along with old silver himself.

  Her uncle Chester, who had died of a heart attack last summer, in his mistress’s bed.

  Great-Aunt Winnie, eyes eloquent with disappointment and reserved pride.

  A light-skinned woman who reminded Tammy of Pea, and must be her great-grandmother herself, whose cards and kerchief she had kept in trust all these years.