Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  But now Pea was in the parlor, building up the fire, as though it didn’t cost her to move past the dreams that big-headed baby sent her. Tamara thought of going straight in to confront her, but the shame of admitting how she knew—Stealing Dev’s letter, baby, really? And this is how you plan to prove that you’re better than me?—held her back.

  Phyllis picked up the phone. She dialed a number that Tamara wasn’t in any fit state to guess by the clicks on the rotary dial as it went around, and when she spoke it was in a clipped, professional, white-people voice that felt shocking, given the hour.

  “Yes, sorry to have kept you waiting. I’m moving a little slower these days.”

  Tamara sat up straighter. Phyllis had been spending a great deal of time on the phone with Walter lately. But she wasn’t talking to Walter, not with that voice. More mob business?

  “I’m aware of that. But we proceed on my terms or we don’t at all.” Another pause. Tammy thought of getting closer to the parlor, but then shook her head. Pea, of all people, would notice immediately. Better to hear half of the conversation than none at all.

  “Good. Okay then, these are two men.” Pause. “Quentin and Beauregard Barkley, Lenox Avenue.” She let out a slow breath. “They’re worth a lot. Policy bank. Twenty-eight. Yes, the same place. Finch. But I want to make sure their families are taken care of, after. Yes, I’ll have the funds wired this afternoon.”

  Tammy shivered in front of the pot-bellied stove. There was a shiny black ring on the iron stovetop, precisely the size of Pea’s old percolator that boiled over as regularly as a geothermal vent. She kept her gaze fixed on that artifact of their domesticity even as Phyllis hung up the phone and dialed other numbers—Walter, this time, just to catch up, and then her sister and niece and nephew. Tamara’s knuckles ached from the force of her grip on the edge of the canary-yellow kitchen chair, yet she was not consciously aware of holding anything. She felt as though she had been cast into a turbid river, and the roaring of the water was Phyllis’s voice: they’re worth a lot, twenty-eight, Finch. A voice hard as steel and easy as a good cutting knife. An angel’s voice, a Phyllis LeBlanc voice, a killer’s voice. And why not? How else would she sound, ordering a kill from the comfort of the divan of her upstate country house? And yet, there was that black ring of burned coffee from a percolator that she always complained about but never replaced. Despite that mountain of corpses between them, Pea still existed, and was still—if Tammy could stomach it—her friend.

  Phyllis finished the call with her sister, promising to wire more money, this time for her nephew’s clarinet lessons and her niece’s new band uniform. Tamara gripped the chair so tight that a bit of splinter pricked the fleshy pad of her right thumb. This was who had decided to judge her? This was the one for whom she was supposed to take on a curse and Victor’s smiling ghost? And was Dev any better, staying with her when he knew just what she was? Who were they to judge the choices Tamara had made to stay alive? The cards pricked her, seemed to bend light around them from where they lay on the table. She loosened her grip on the chair and turned her attention to them with reluctance. They’d have something to say about all of this, she knew. Like Aunt Winnie, they never missed out on a chance to comment. They probably wanted to point out that Dev, at least, had more than enough right to judge her for what happened that night with Victor. But Tammy closed her eyes and closed her hands and closed her heart until all she could hear was rushing water. Safe from all contradicting thought.

  Pea’s voice from the doorway shocked her back into reality.

  “You’re not sleeping,” she said, dryly.

  Tammy kept her eyes shut. “And how do you know?”

  The warm laugh in Pea’s voice slapped Tammy across the cheeks. “The cards are out, and the laudanum is still in the cupboard.”

  Tammy cracked open an eye. Pea was leaning against the doorframe, her belly cradled beneath a guiding hand, her eyes red from lack of sleep, folding into crow’s feet as she smiled. Her hair rose in a fuzzy halo around the front of her head, and twisted into a knotted mess in back.

  Tamara could not speak. Pea would die soon. It would never stop being Tamara’s fault.

  Some, not all, of the laughter left those jeweled eyes. “How much did you hear, baby?”

  And now all she could do was spit up bile. That baby, that damned baby and her sainted hands, why did she have to come and ruin every good thing they’d had together? “Do you think ordering the hit makes it better, Phyllis? Oh, sure, it cuts down on the laundry bills! Afterward you make sure you throw some change to the family, and you feel good and holy, I bet!”

  Phyllis gave her a good look for a long time, until Tamara squirmed in her seat and realized, belatedly, that she was still just a little drunk from last night’s wine. Her tongue felt thick and rotten in her mouth. She regretted saying anything and she knew if she opened her mouth again she would make herself unforgivable.

  “Not so good,” Pea said, at last, “not so holy. I know what I’ve done. I know who I am. I know my sins to the gram, Tamara Anderson. There’s no feather heavy enough to balance them.”

  “Blood money doesn’t make up for doing Red Man’s dirty business!”

  Pea’s nostrils flared. Tamara could have sworn that she was about to laugh, though her eyes were glassy tunnels to a distant pain. “No, it wouldn’t,” she said, and pushed herself from the door frame. “Though money certainly don’t hurt the family, if they’re already dead.” She stepped over the remains of Tamara’s debauchery, made note of the letter in Dev’s distinctive sloping hand on the tabletop, and rinsed the percolator of yesterday’s dregs.

  “Want any coffee, sweetie?”

  “How many people have you killed, Pea?”

  Water ran briskly in the sink. The sharp rap of the filter against the side was prelude to the click of it back into the base, and the faint squeak of the base screwing into the top.

  “Depends on how you count,” she said, matter-of-fact but soft about it. “Fifty-four with my own hands.”

  Tamara sucked her teeth, a spontaneous reaction lingered upon for effect. “Jesus.”

  “Got nothing to do with it, I’m sure.”

  She moved back into Tammy’s field of vision and put the percolator on the potbellied stove.

  “Did you really think it would never come back to haunt you?”

  Pea looked distant, thoughtful. “Maybe I did? Maybe I didn’t care? It’s hard to remember, now. I’m not the girl I was, then. Nor the woman…”

  She looked down at her belly, cupped the child between her cursed hands, and smiled.

  * * *

  The next day, Tamara called Walter again.

  His new assistant answered the ring after three tries and promised to leave a message. He called that night, while she and Phyllis were playing gin with a set of regular Bicycle cards in the salon.

  Tammy left her and took the call in the kitchen. Pea could still hear her if she wanted, but she supposed that was only fair.

  “Walter, you watched Victor all those years, when he found people with the hands?”

  “What, I don’t even get a hello?”

  “This is important.”

  He laughed a little. “You mean when he killed them? Yes. I remember very well, Tammy.”

  “Did you ever notice … anything that they shared? The people he killed? Besides the hands.”

  Walter let out one of his slow, steady breaths. She imagined his mild expression, his wise eyes and the crease between them. “They weren’t white,” he said. “I think one was Jewish.”

  “Anything else?”

  “They lived their lives a little … outside of the stream. Panhandlers, numbers runners, Times Square dancers—apologies to our Pea, that sort of thing. As though the hands were pushing them against the current. Almost none of them had families or even steady lovers. Dev was one of the few who actually worked for the establishment, but, well, you saw how that turned out.”

  “And di
d they ever say? I mean, if you talked to them, before…”

  “Sometimes,” he said, shortly.

  “Did they ever say what they felt the hands wanted? Where they were being pushed?”

  He held a silence again, a soft space in which she wondered if she shouldn’t have asked.

  “It’s funny,” he said at last. “Only one ever told me anything very specific. He painted walls down by the docks, was always getting chased out by police and the owners. He said that he wanted to ‘make it right.’ And now I seem to recall that Alvin said something similar, didn’t he? It’s enough to make you wonder.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “If the dreams, the hands, might not be precisely luck. Maybe something closer to a possession.”

  Tamara, who had kept her silence about Phyllis’s fits and her uncontrollable hands, felt her throat close like a fist.

  7

  When she was seven years old, Tamara’s best friend was Little Sammy, so called because his daddy was Samuel Senior, and his mother wanted everyone to know it. His mother was the neighborhood prostitute and Samuel Senior was a big man, more protector than pimp. Little Sammy had a dream come down when he was ten, the only one in their generation, but before then he was a little kid like the rest of them, running barefoot to the creek before their mothers could tell them to put their shoes on, fishing with bits of string and hooks they bent from old needles and chicken wire. Even then, he had a knack for the fishing line. Tammy didn’t, and one day when she was trying to get a rock perch that was wiggling on her hook, the metal went clean through her hand. They took her to the town doctor, who let her drink Grandma’s medicinal bitters while he cleaned and bound her wound. “Just take it easy with that hand,” he had told her. But even though it hurt, she could not leave that puckered flesh alone. She would unwrap the bandage and show it off to Little Sammy and his friends. At night alone, she’d poke around the bloody edges, marveling at how the most swollen areas went white at her touch. It got infected, of course, and then her mother had to take her to Richmond for stronger medicine; her daddy gave her a whupping for it when they got back, as though an infected hand weren’t enough punishment.

  But Daddy wasn’t here to whup her anymore—Tamara’d whup him right back if he tried—and pressing the wound of Phyllis’s ugly past and ambiguous present was a torture too exquisite, too perfectly suited to her oldest needs, to leave alone. So what if she made herself sick over it? She wanted to goad Pea until one of them popped.

  So she asked more questions, each more intrusive than the last: Who was the first person you killed? Who was the ugliest? Who was the richest? Did you steal from their bodies? Did you end up covered in blood? Did you hide their bodies? Did you lie to Dev? Did he really know exactly what you were up to?

  At that, Pea gave her an answer dry and raspy as a cat’s tongue. “Even better than me, Tammy. Don’t make the mistake I did.”

  “What mistake would that be? Leaving him?”

  Pea laughed, filled with a strange and distant delight. “Imagining that he is easy to know.”

  That stymied her into silence for the next day. The larger Pea got, the less Tammy could stand the sight of her. Winter lingered into the start of spring and she felt consumed with bitterness, like a root vegetable left too long underground. Phyllis should have felt it too, but she seemed impossibly content with her slow, careful movements, her long, dreaming silences, her early-morning phone calls to New York mobsters.

  Tamara wrote Clyde:

  I’ve been thinking of a play, a kind of cross between French existentialism and surrealism, all the actors in a round standing like statues as they scream at one another. Here’s the setup: two people at the edge of the River Styx. One’s a killer, a real nasty piece of work. Mobster with so many skeletons in his closet he’s gone and bought a few extra closets. The other’s a normal sort of person, not too bad, not too good; made some compromises, sure, and maybe watched someone die, but certainly never did anything active to kill them. Here’s the twist: the boatman gives them a choice. The killer can go to hell, no questions asked, hellfire for all eternity. The other can just go to heaven, and it’s business as usual. Or, the regular Joe can take on a bit of that weight the baddie has in his pockets. Then both of them can make it as far as purgatory. So what does the regular Joe choose? Get to heaven, but feel responsible for sending the baddie to hell? Or resign himself to purgatory and save the killer from eternal damnation?

  What do you think, Clyde? Would it work? I think you could get an audience really worked up, thinking about all of the moral angles of the thing. I might try to put it on at the Pelican next year, if I can find a writer. But I’ve just got one problem: I can’t think of how it should end. What choice should the hero make? Does the mobster deserve grace? Does the hero deserve heaven?

  Love,

  Tammy

  P.S. I wrote and tore up about a dozen replies to your last letter, and you should be damn grateful, because I really wanted to tell you exactly where to stick it. If you are really planning on leaving me behind, don’t you dare respond to this letter. I’ll be damned if I let you play me for a fool again.

  If you make it back, we are going to write plays together and raise a little army of actors and singers and dancers and, sure, if one of them wants to be a doctor or an engineer, well, there’s no accounting for taste, and don’t you dare die over there, do you hear me, Clyde? I’m here waiting for you, so don’t you dare.

  She was drunk when she wrote it, and drunk when she sent it, and spent the next day brutally sober, nursing a hangover and the shakes and a bad case of regret. Mrs. Grundy diagnosed her tactfully with a cold and sent her to bed with mint tea and honey and a heavy bone broth. Pea came in and kept her company. Tammy wanted to resent it, but she held on to her hand like a sick child and breathed.

  “Stopped the laudanum, did you?”

  “Been sleeping … too much. The cards don’t like it.”

  Phyllis nodded thoughtfully, though always before she had treated the cards and Tamara’s role as the oracle as an amusing personal quirk. “And what do they do when they don’t like something?”

  “Jokers and suicide kings. They tell me so, Pea. And then I see Victor.”

  “I can see why you’d want to avoid that.” Pea lifted the cooling bowl of broth from the sideboard and held a spoon in front of Tammy’s mouth.

  “Oh, leave me be.”

  “Just drink a little more. You look like Victor’s been sucking the life out of you.”

  Tamara took a sip and then another. It felt nicer than she would ever admit out loud. She’d always wanted to be taken care of, and could never trust anyone enough to let them.

  “Pea,” she said, “why haven’t you asked me about what happened that night?”

  “With Victor and Dev?”

  Tamara nodded.

  Phyllis put the bowl back on the sideboard and sank down into the pillows beside her. “I thought I already had.”

  “But you knew I was lying.”

  Phyllis shrugged. “You’ll get around to it when you’re ready. Don’t forget I know you, Tammy.”

  “Don’t look at me like that!”

  “How am I looking at you?”

  “That sly little smile! You think you’re wise just because you’ve seen more than I have? You think that you have the right to judge me? Sure, I’m not perfect, maybe I’m not the girl I always wanted you and Dev to see, but I’m not—I’m not bad.”

  She’d tore that smile out of Pea’s eyes, at least. It didn’t make her feel any better.

  “But I am, is that what you mean, Tammy?”

  She wanted to say yes as emphatically as the ferryman, she wanted to send her best friend all the way down the river. But her heart wouldn’t cooperate. “No—not you … but we’re not the same! I never killed anyone, I never spent decades living on someone else’s blood … I’m not still ordering goddamned hits! We’re not the same, Phyllis.”

  “Did I
ever say we were?”

  Tamara turned away. The cards were beating a tattoo against her temples, a tenderizing mallet on raw meat. They said, Choose, Oracle, or we make the choice for you.

  * * *

  The shakes had mostly gone after two days, but nightmares plagued her. Tamara felt cards bouncing and pinching her in her dreams, demanding her attention like a willful child. She didn’t want to open up that yellowed ivory handkerchief. She didn’t want to read the numbers and feel them inside her head, arranging themselves into patterns that she had intuited from the first moment Aunt Winnie made her cut the deck and lay down a simple set of three. But the cards had to speak and it was her duty to listen, hadn’t it always been?

  Aunt Winnie always spoke of responsibility, of the sacred role of the oracle. Tamara had rolled her eyes at the time. She hadn’t wanted to take the cards, or the force behind them, seriously. She had just wanted to be a regular Lawrenceville girl, going to the theater on weekends to see the double feature from the balcony with her friends, ogling the St. Paul’s boys who seemed to her at the time as sophisticated as Parisians. She hadn’t wanted to be marked like Little Sammy, whose life after the dream came down to him had been short and firefly bright. But she couldn’t resist the numbers, even when she tried. The world they opened up was hers, as uncomfortable as it felt sometimes. The more she had accepted the life of the cards, the more she had found what moved her—French philosophers, Irish poets, British dancers, Harlem playwrights, Shakespearean St. Paul’s actors with more ambition than sense—until she found herself no kind of Lawrenceville girl at all, a philosophical exile in her own home. She had only stayed as long as she did for Aunt Winnie. After her death, only New York would do, and evil men with long shadows. Aunt Winnie would have burned her ear off with that acid tongue of hers if she had known Tammy’s plans. Even dead, to be honest, it seemed to Tamara that she sat in judgment from behind the smudged eyes of the queen of hearts. Respect your elders, that’s what they had told her. They hadn’t mentioned it was because your elders would always be watching you, and finding fault.