Reincarnation

by Suzanne Weyn

  Lenny leaped at the man as the shot was fired, shielding Del with his body. The bullet threw him back before dropping him hard onto the black tar roof.

  The German agent fired again. He missed Del but her ankle turned beneath her. She was going over.

  Flailing wildly, she fell backward, and the world swirled around her as she tumbled off the roof. Reaching out desperately, she grabbed hold of the outside railing of the fire escape, screaming as her arm wrenched in its socket and her head snapped back. Her high heels clattered down, bouncing off the metal stairs as her legs kicked out, dangling in the air.

  Looking up, she saw Bert coming over the roof toward her.

  Another shot rang out and he sailed off the roof wall, his briefcase opening midair, money swirling around him, whirling through the night.

  Two more shots.

  OhGodOhGod! He flew past her. She swung out and nearly caught hold of his sleeve but he slipped past her fingers.

  NoNoNoNoNo!!!! Turning her head away, she heard him hit the ground.

  “Help!” she shouted, swinging there by one arm. “Somebody help him! HELP!”

  No one came. She had to help him.

  Her heart pounding wildly, Del managed to get her second hand positioned on one of the railings. Kicking hard, she tried to get a foothold on the fire escape, but couldn’t manage it.

  Someone was clanging down the metal stairs toward her. Terrified, she glanced up sharply.

  “Hang on.” Lenny grabbed her by her wrists and lifted her onto the staircase. His white shirt was covered in blood.

  “We have to help Bert,” she sobbed, starting to climb down.

  “I don’t think it will matter,” Lenny replied.

  I stand in the alley and look down at my money-covered body. Blood is making an ever-widening pool under my head. Nasty. I turn away but then must look back, fascinated by my own shattered self.

  Del is climbing down to me, and Lenny follows her. Then she is sitting in the alley beside my lifeless body, shaking me. “Bert! Wake up! Wake up!” she screams. “Bert!”

  She’s in hysterics.

  Lenny kneels beside her, puts his arm around her consolingly.

  The next thing I see is hard to watch. She leans her head on his chest and sobs — cries and cries like her heart has cracked open and every sorrow is spilling out.

  I had known she loved me. Now I realize how much.

  I have to give Lenny credit; although blood was gushing out of his shoulder, he just sat there rubbing her back. That’s one of the crazy things about people: They keep fooling you.

  Nobody shoots down at us or comes over the wall. I guess Lenny has shot the enemy agents. His gun is holstered at his side. Rising again, I decide to go to the roof and see what happened.

  Sure enough, the two Germans lie dead. The velvet bag with the plans is not there and neither is Yvette. It isn’t hard to trace her, though, because there is a trail of blood going down the stairs.

  Down in the club, no one seems to know what has happened yet, but the stage manager is looking for Del because she is supposed to go on soon. I find Yvette in a dark corner leaning heavily on the man from British Intelligence. She is handing him the plans for the rocket.

  Well, what do you know — scrappy, cunning, self-serving Yvette is working for British Intelligence. I follow them outside and watch while the Intelligence guy gets into a cab with her. Together, they drive off. I hope he’s taking her to a hospital.

  Okay, she did try to seduce me and possibly get me killed, but I have to admire her spunk. When you’re already dead, these things don’t seem to matter as much. You can take the larger view.

  And I am dead.

  At that moment, it really hits me.

  D-E-A-D … as a doornail, an expression that never made any sense to me.

  This gives me a unique perspective. I could write a song about being dead from the stance of someone who really knows.

  But I guess that’s the point of being dead — one of them, anyway. You can’t … write a song or anything else. Because you’re dead.

  I go back down to the alley. Del is still there, draped over my body. Sobbing.

  Lenny has moved against the wall. He’s pale. I guess the blood loss is getting to him.

  “Hey, Del,” I say gently. “Don’t cry. I’m right here. I’ll stay with you.”

  She looks up as though she’s heard me and she reaches out like a kid groping in the dark for a light switch. Her hand passes right through me.

  “Bert,” she whispers. “Bert?”

  I try to take her hand. Now it’s my hand that passes through.

  I’m no help to her this way. What good will it do if I stay with her? It will only keep her from loving someone who is alive. It wouldn’t be fair. She’s already had such a tough life. She doesn’t deserve to be alone.

  “Good-bye, Del,” I say, trying to brush back some hair that’s fallen in front of her eyes. “I love you.”

  “I love you, Bert,” she whispers, as though somehow she’s heard me.

  I’m not sure where to go after that. Then, like an answer to that question, a gigantic white angel appears at the far end of the alley.

  It reaches out a hand and beckons for me to come toward it.

  And then in the next second I wonder if it is an angel. It might be a column of light.

  Either way, I know what it wants.

  I shake my head and back away. Not me. I’m not leaving.

  I’m too attached to this life to think of going into that light.

  I turn my back and walk away.

  It’s official, I think. I’m a ghost.

  In the next weeks, months, years — it’s very hard to keep track when you’re a ghost — I roam around. The things I see would fill a book. For a while, I narrate some of what I see to a writer. He thinks the ideas are his, of course. His books sell well. I even manage to write some more songs, sitting beside a well-known lyricist as he struggles, whispering inspiration into his ear.

  I want to stay because the world is too beautiful to abandon. What I am seeing, though, is less and less beautiful by the day. War and more war, death, starvation. Misery of every description.

  I see Jews and others rounded up and taken to the obscene camps, crammed into cattle cars without food or water for days. I stay on the trains. I try to be comforting; sing to the children; recite poetry to the old people.

  I see other ghosts doing the same thing.

  I see angels. Many angels.

  One day in 1942, Yvette is herded onto a train headed for the Dancy Deportation Center just north of Paris. From there, she and the others will be transported to one of the larger camps: Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka.

  She is older but still pretty. Her red curls are cut to her chin. She wears a beret and a navy blue coat with the collar turned high. I sit beside her. “Don’t be frightened. I’ll stay with you,” I say. She is someone I knew, after all.

  She looks up sharply. She’s heard me. “Are you an angel?” she whispers.

  “Yes,” I lie. It seems a more comforting reply; my being a ghost might frighten her.

  Yvette sits on the floor, her arms wrapped around her knees. I sit beside her. As she speaks in a soft whisper, people glance at her as though she is insane. It seems that no one else can hear me. She notices the glances but doesn’t care. Besides, under the circumstances, who would blame her if she’s become unstrung?

  “Have you seen Del?” I can’t resist asking. Through all my ghostly roaming I never forget our love, though I resist the urge to check up on her. Thinking of what might have been is too painful.

  “I saw her once in a while. We both spied for the French Underground.”

  “You’re a hero,” I comment, recalling how she had turned the rocket plans over to the British.

  “Not really. You know,” she says, “in many ways I have always been a treacherous girl. It seemed stupid to care about anyone other than myself. Taking care of me was such a huge jo
b as it was. I have never thought of myself as a good person. But this situation is too atrocious for even me to bear. I’ve helped some people these last few years. If I die now, I can go knowing my life hasn’t been wasted. I’ve never felt that before.”

  She is not the same Yvette I took to dinner. The war has changed her — for the better.

  I squeeze her hand. I don’t know if she feels it. “We’re all on a journey,” I say, realizing for the first time that this is true.

  Before Dancy, the train stops in a field. I look at all the victims of the Nazi Gestapo, all doomed to unthinkable fates.

  I am seized with a burning desire to do something for these people. I am a ghost, a rebel defying the laws of the universe. I can intervene, change destiny.

  Why have I never realized it before?

  With that thought, I pass through the train wall, unlock the door, and try to throw it open. It stays shut. I lack the physical solidity for the task.

  Then, later that night, the train strikes something and comes undone. The door is rattled right off its hinges and the people inside push. What a satisfying thud as it crashes, falling out onto the field.

  The people pour from the train, scrambling down the sloped field.

  “Go!” I shout to Yvette but she isn’t paying attention. A boy of about four is afraid to jump from the train. His mother is frantically waiting below while Yvette passes him down.

  A Gestapo agent runs into the car, pistol raised. Yvette is the only one standing in the doorway and he shoots her immediately.

  She leaps from her body before she even hits the ground.

  “Bert! What are you doing here? I thought you were dead,” she cries.

  “I am, and so are you.”

  “No, I’m not. Come on.” She tries to hurry children along, putting their hands into the hands of their fleeing parents. She tries to trip the Gestapo agents as they fire on the people in the field.

  “That bullet went right through me. Did you see it?” she asks me, gleefully looking at her slim waist in shock. “I should be dead.”

  “You are dead.”

  “You’re crazy. How could I be dead? That was lucky.”

  Many dead are appearing — more and more of them by the moment. They are helping Yvette try to assist the fleeing people. She is getting almost giddy with her newfound invulnerability as bullet after bullet passes through her. “They must be shooting blanks,” she decides.

  The dead suddenly stand stock still in the field. A towering column of light appears. Its hum is the dark call of a reverberating violin string. They begin moving toward the calling column.

  “Look. The Eiffel Tower,” Yvette says to me, pointing.

  “Yvette, it’s not the Eiffel Tower. Go toward it,” I tell her urgently. “Don’t waste time.”

  The world that is to come might be a horrendous thing. Most likely it will be. I don’t want to think of her as a ghost roaming within the torture chambers of this new world.

  Fear clouds her face and she backs away. “No, I’m frightened. No.”

  I don’t want to be in this world any longer, either.

  I take her hand. “We’ll go together. Trust me. It will be better.”

  “All right. I trust you,” she says, nodding.

  Together we step into the column of light.

  And the blessed process of forgetting begins.

  Mike Rogers came to a three-way crossroads and stopped the car. One of the three girls in the backseat leaned forward to push down the lock button next to him. “Roll up your window,” she reminded him.

  “It’s too hot,” Mike objected. The car’s fan had conked out somewhere around Kentucky.

  “The handbook says to,” she insisted. “We should have done it miles ago, but I was just now leafing through the book and remembered.”

  Beside him, his older brother Ray snorted disdainfully. “I’m not roasting to death in this car. We’re not in the Soviet Union. Don’t be so paranoid.”

  “Shut up, Ray,” Mike said, mildly annoyed (as he often was around Ray). “You didn’t even come to the training in Ohio.”

  Ray rubbed his jaw, a habit that majorly irritated Mike. Whenever he did it, Mike could be fairly sure he was about to say something especially jerky. “I didn’t come to your stupid training because I’d never have come on this lame-brain trip in the first place except Mom begged me to catch up with you and make sure you don’t get yourself killed.”

  This was about the hundredth time he’d reminded Mike about this, implying that Mike was incapable of going it alone. It was not a gesture Mike appreciated. Most likely, Ray’s true motivation for coming along was because he saw it as a treasure trove of available young women. Every time he turned around to the three in the backseat, he flashed that bright shark’s smile at each of them. It made Mike want to kill him.

  Ray had showed up on the last day of their training at the Western College for Women in Ohio. It had been organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which the students referred to as “Snick.” Ray had been warmly welcomed, as they all had been, but Ray was particularly welcome because he looked like the star football quarterback that he had been in college until graduating last year. A big, good-looking, All-American like Ray could come in handy if things got ugly — and they already had. Three Civil Rights volunteers had been murdered in just the first ten days of their drive to register Negro voters here in Mississippi. Two were white, one black. In addition, there had been beatings, arrests, and bombings.

  Rolling up his window, Mike looked at the three signs at the crossroads: Savage, Alligator, Coldwater. One of the girls in the backseat had taken out a map. “We’re headed for Ruleville, so I think we should go that way,” she said, pointing.

  “Isn’t that where they beat up Fannie Lou Hamer just for registering to vote?” another girl asked.

  “I think so,” said the third. “Can you imagine?”

  They drove down a two-lane road past sagging shacks made of wood and tar paper. Vistas of endless cotton fields spread out on both sides. In most cases, the cotton grew right to the front doors of the shacks. “Remember, go five miles under the speed limit,” the first girl coached from the backseat.

  “Is that from your handbook, too?” Ray asked disdainfully.

  “Yes,” she replied. “We don’t want to give the local law enforcement any reason to arrest us.”

  “Paranoid,” Ray muttered.

  They stopped at the address they’d been given, just outside Ruleville. It was a simple, run-down, wooden house with an open front porch. Three other cars were parked in front. A man with a beard, wearing jeans, sandals, and a T-shirt with SNCC on it, came down the porch to greet them.

  “Welcome, I’m Dave,” he greeted as Mike rolled down his window. “There’s a pot of chili inside and ice-cold soda.”

  “Hallelujah!” one of the girls cheered, stepping from the backseat and smoothing her madras shift dress. She led them up the steps, where they were met by other volunteers.

  Mike stopped on the porch to bask in the cool of an old electric fan balanced precariously on a rickety table. Next to the fan was an open record player. At least the place had electricity. That was something.

  Inside were twelve other volunteers — five guys and seven young women. All of them were college-age, white, with middle-class ways. They greeted Mike and his carload with smiles and offers of food and drink. Although his fellow idealists were all strangers, Mike felt right at home.

  The house was dominated by one large central room, which contained a small, antiquated kitchen, a table with a linoleum top, and a faded green velvet couch. Two small bedrooms were behind this room.

  After eating, the tall bearded man took out his guitar and led some singing. Perched on the table and the couch or cross-legged on the floor, they sang protest songs: “Eyes on the Prize,” “Oh, Freedom,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “We Shall Overcome.”

  Inspired by his hero, Bob Dylan, Mike had writ
ten three protest songs of his own. They were in the trunk of his car, and for a moment he entertained the idea of showing them to the group. But before he could work up the nerve, they moved on to popular songs like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles and “Chapel of Love” by the Dixie Cups. Ray grinned at the three girls from the backseat when they got up and did a rendition of “Leader of the Pack.” Mike guessed Ray assumed they were thinking about him as they sang, “That’s why I fell for … the leader of the pack.”

  “Tomorrow you’ll start going door to door to register voters,” Dave told them at about ten o’clock. “It’s not going to be easy. These people have already been threatened not to register and they know all too well that these are not idle threats. They won’t trust you right away. You’re white. Why should they? We have to be up early to avoid the worst of this heat. Better get some sleep.”

  “Should we lock the front door?” the handbook girl asked. During their training sessions in Ohio they had been instructed not to let themselves be taken by surprise at night. Makeshift headquarters like this one had already been set afire, bombed, or raided.

  Dave shook his head. “It hasn’t got a lock. Besides, we’ll die of heat in here if we shut the inside door. Maybe one of us should stay awake. We’ll change shifts every two hours.”

  “I’m not tired,” Mike volunteered. He spread out his sleeping bag on the floor of the main room where the guys were sleeping and settled down with his hands behind his head. In minutes, he heard Ray’s unmistakable snore, followed by Dave’s sputtering version.

  Silver moonlight rimmed everything as it flooded in through the screen door and kitchen window. It was still brutally hot. The crickets were nearly deafening and a mosquito had gotten into the room. When its shrill buzz stopped, he knew someone would feel the red circle of sting in the morning.

  Afraid he might sleep, he walked out onto the porch, where the crickets were louder still. The fan was still on and he indulged himself again in its breeze before heading down to his car.

  Inside his trunk was a knapsack of clothing sitting beside his unstrung bow and quiver of arrows, which he’d left there after his last competition. As usual, he’d won first place. Though not the super athlete Ray was, at least there was one shelf in their paneled den for his many archery awards.