Battle Hill Bolero

by Daniel José Older

  “I mean!”

  For a brief, blessed second, the thunder of this crush is replaced by the thrill of a possible battle. “You really think it could get messy?” I ask.

  He shrugs, throwing a puffy winter jacket on over his cardigan. “Who knows? A year ago, I’d say no. But these days are different. These days are of tragedy and war. Blood. Ogun stalks the streets at night, and he’s hungry.”

  “That’s the orisha of warfare and iron and technology and stuff,” the Iyawo tells me.

  “And Iku is never far behind,” he goes on.

  “And that’s death.”

  Baba Eddie seems to snap out of his reverie. “So, yeah, some bad shit might go down. You got Greta?”

  I heft Greta up from where I’d laid her beneath the counter. Even translucent, the shimmering rocket launcher cuts an imposing form there on my shoulder.

  Baba Eddie looks at me, then shakes his head. “On second thought, leave her. This is sposta be recon, not all-out war. You’ll move faster and be more out of sight without that . . . beast.”

  I grumble and put Greta back down.

  “I still don’t get how the Council just lets you play with all this newfangled ghost-tech,” the Iyawo says. “Especially considering they prolly don’t trust your ass.”

  “I’m the only one that really knows how to use it.” My smile is smug. For once, I have some swagger to my swoosh as I balance Greta and slip over the counter. “And this one, they think she’s broken.”

  “How come?”

  “’Cause I told ’em she is. I realized they were starting to get wary of me a few months back. Fucked up a whole nest of whisper wraiths they’d sent me to uproot; then I reported that Greta had malfunctioned and I had to destroy her.” I pat Greta. “Now we off the grid.”

  The Iyawo flashes a wily smile. “That’s badass. Be safe out there.”

  “Oh, we will,” Baba Eddie says.

  “I was talking to Krys,” the Iyawo says. “But yeah, you be safe too, I guess.”

  —

  For a guy that spent two hundred years wasting away in an underground tomb, Cyrus Langley really has his shit together. Riley’s probably his number-one fan, but we’re all in awe of the old conjureman, his ancient, wry smile and knowing eyes, his mischief and strategies.

  We gather on a snowy hill in Central Park. A few joggers and dog walkers trudge past, braving the cold, but mostly the place is ours. I trade a dap with Jimmy and a nod with Big Cane; Riley says a general “Whaddup?” to the lot of us, and then Cyrus starts pairing us into small groups.

  “I told the heads of each Remote District to gather their people and await my signal. Big Cane and Riley, you’re with Baba Eddie. Y’all fellas keep an eye on Saeen and her District 4 squad. They’ll be at Fiftieth and Fifth Ave.”

  Big Cane is the only ghost I know that can actually lumber; Riley looks like a child next to him as they cross the circle to stand by Baba Eddie. Eddie grins, exchanges a complicated high five with Riley.

  “Each of our smaller groups is to post up nearby, somewhere we can watch from. Damian and Forsyth Charles, you two with Rohan here.” Damian’s already beside the big happy-faced hitman. One of Cyrus’s ghost buddies from the African Burial Ground floats over to them on long legs. He wears a stylish suit, and his hair sits in a big off-center Frederick Douglass fro.

  “You three head to Forty-second and Ten. Moco will be gathering his folks nearby. We won’t be using our ghost-telepathy shit, as Carlos likes to call it; it’s not reliable enough and too easily intercepted by the Council. If soulcatchers make an appearance anywhere near your site, your living member is to call the others. Do not let the Remote District folks know. Do not let them see you. Just stay out the way. Understood?”

  We all nod.

  “Krys.” I meet his eyes, and he smiles into mine. “You and Redd go with young Jimmy here.”

  “Sweet,” Jimmy says. “Who’s Redd?”

  A lanky light-skinned dude with a fade slides up beside us. “That’d be me.” A thin red beard traces the contour of his sharp jawline; freckles dot his round face. He’s got big teeth, big lips, and big, laughing eyes behind long lashes. Must’ve died young—he can’t be much older than me and Jimmy. Long, slender arms hang down from his torn tank top. A sword scabbard hangs from his belt, and a dagger’s strapped to his leg. “What it do?” Just the hint of a smile creases one side of Redd’s mouth. The other side seems to swerve down to compensate, a torqued pout.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “You Negroes head to Columbus Circle down by the corner of the park here,” Cyrus says. “Hole up nearby. Father Desmond sposta show with his folks from Starrett City and them.”

  “Aye,” Forsyth Charles says. “Where will you be?”

  “Me and Dag Thrummond will glide back and forth between RD 7’s meet-up point and Vincent and his Bed-Stuy folk.” A massive ghost emerges from the shadows of the park. He’s another from the Burial Grounds—wide shoulders, shaved head, an axe in each hand. Cyrus’s bodyguard, I take it. It’s a comforting thought. “We’re shorthanded for living folks tonight, what with Carlos and Gordo out handling some shit, but that’s alright. I don’t expect trouble from Kaya and Breyla, and Vincent is like a son to me.”

  The snow started as we stood there talking. First a speckle here and there, then vast, windswept droves of it filled the sky, blitzed through our shimmering forms, and swirled up into the glow of the streetlights.

  —

  The cold don’t really bother us dead folks, but the wind and snow whipping through us as we work our way through the park makes for slow going. Jimmy’s teeth are already chattering, but I’ve told him a hundred times he gotta layer up beneath that puffy jacket and he don’t listen.

  Redd and I squint and point our heads into the storm. I don’t know if I trust him yet, but if Cyrus does that’s good enough for me. Anyway, that cutlass hanging from his belt is not a small piece of metal and something in Redd’s cool cockiness tells me he knows what to do with it. You can smell arrogance that’s born from fear, and this ain’t it. When the wind sweeps through Redd’s shirt, I see white bandages hugged tight against his chest.

  Jimmy sees it too, I guess, and decides to be an ass. “You ain’t really a boy are you?”

  I swipe him across the chest, but with all the snow and ice he barely notices.

  “Are you?” Redd says. Jimmy stops walking. So does Redd.

  “I mean, yeah.”

  I’m between them. If it comes to blows, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.

  “How you know?” Redd’s face betrays nothing—no rage, no challenge. The question is sincere.

  “That was a fucked-up question,” I tell Jimmy.

  Redd just stares.

  “I mean, I got a dick,” Jimmy says with a scowl.

  “That it?”

  “I mean.” He knows he’s getting it wrong, that he’s losing just by flailing in the face of Redd’s stillness. “I mean shit. I dunno, I’m a dude. That’s it. It’s simple.”

  When I was alive, my best friend Wendy took me up on a sunny hill near our school one day. I have something to tell you, Wendy said in a shaky voice. I’m not a girl. And I’m not a boy.

  I nodded, and Wendy exhaled. The silence that opened between us was a gentle one, not the treacherous kind. So you’re both and neither, I said, and Wendy smiled.

  Redd isn’t both and neither, though; Redd’s a boy, through and through. Just has a pussy, is all. I wanna speak up, tell Jimmy all about Wendy, and that ain’t nothing simple ’bout gender, but I don’t have the words and I don’t even think it’s my place.

  Redd lets him squirm for a few more seconds and then smiles. “God put me in the wrong body, is all. He musta been drinkin’ that night.”

  Jimmy barks a laugh, mostly from relief, I think, and all the tensi
on seems to whisk away on these icy winds.

  “Where you from?” I ask.

  “Born in Jamaica, but I ain’t stay there long.” We settle back into our march past the snowfields and shimmering trees. “My mama was part of a slave uprising, she handed me off to maroons the night before an attack. They smuggled me onto a ship, but that got attacked by pirates out in the bay. Hopped from ship to ship mosta my life till I ended up on a schooner outside New York Harbor. We’d post up like we bouta do here ’n’ wait for the ships that’d come collecting fugitive slaves. Then we’d roll up on ’em fast once they made it out to deeper waters and throw the crew overboard, take the slaves back to port.”

  “Whoa, that’s badass,” Jimmy says.

  Redd shrugs, but you can tell he feels good ’bout who he is and what he’s done. We’ve passed through a line of bushes and now crouch by the low wall dividing Central Park from the chichi avenues of Midtown Manhattan. Across the street, a stone Columbus surveys the snowy traffic circle from atop his pillar. Skyscrapers loom above us.

  “So how y’all know each other?” Redd asks.

  “So, I was dating this girl Mina, right?” Jimmy says eagerly. “Mina Satorius, and one time she invites me over to her house in Staten Island.”

  “Man,” Redd sighs. “Staten Island. Musta been some grade A pussy.”

  Jimmy cranes his neck, mouth open to the falling snow. “Bruh.”

  Twenty minutes later, he’s still talking about Mina—how they broke up after all that shit with her grandma went down, but they stayed friends and like, always had that connection, you know? And she had some spiritual magic-type shit going on that Jimmy could never get to the bottom of and she would never talk about, and how this one night, yadda yadda yadda—shit Jimmy and I been over a small mountain of times, none of which has a thing to do with how him and I met, but ay . . . He’s craning back again, explaining some weird porn he saw that reminded him of her and ignited the whole relapse, when Redd catches my eye and smiles.

  It’s just a muted grin—if he unleashes the full glory of those giant teeth, even the obtuse living world would take note. This is a laser beam, though, for my eyes only, and I have to dampen my own fast-expanding giant grin to return the slyness in kind.

  Then a tinny electronic voice over a beat blots out the moment: “I am the riot the riot the mothafuckin’ riot!”

  I roll my eyes. “You ain’t changed that damn ringtone yet, Jimmy?”

  “Or learned when to set it to vibrate?” Redd says. “Shit.”

  “Sorry!” Jimmy says, fumbling the phone out of his jacket pocket. “Hello?” His breath rises in little cumulus phantoms. He squints. Nods. Says, “Okay. Okay. Shit. Alright. Thanks, Rohan.” He stands, repockets the phone. “Well, that’s that.”

  Let me tell you something about ghosts: fucking with the physical world takes effort. Unless you’re really, really good, all your physical and mental capacities gotta be laser focused on what you’re doing. And it’s exhausting, even for a badass like Riley. So when Redd wraps a firm hand around Jimmy’s wrist and physically pulls him back down behind the wall, I’m impressed. He does it with an unhesitating certainty, and you can tell from Jimmy’s face he’s startled.

  “What?” Jimmy demands.

  “That’s never that,” Redd says. “Never. What did Rohan say?”

  “That the soulcatchers just massed over by the West Side Highway at Forty-second. Him and Damian and the flower guy—”

  “Who the fuck is the flower guy?” Redd says.

  “I dunno—he’s one of yours from the Burial Grounds . . . Magnolia Fred? Hyacinth Bob?”

  “Forsyth Charles,” I say.

  “Oh my God,” Redd says. “Your mind is a very strange place, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy shrugs, undaunted. “Anyway, they’re gonna go let Cyrus know, and that’s that. Moco the fucking snake.”

  “Ain’t no that’s that,” Redd says, a whisper of urgency in his voice now. “All we know is soulcatchers are at the West Side. And we don’t even know that. We know that Rohan said that. We trust Rohan?”

  “I don’t know Rohan that well,” I say. “But Cyrus and Carlos both trust him entirely, and that alone is enough for me. I get what you’re saying, though.”

  “I mean,” Jimmy says. “Wasn’t nothing mentioned about all the other possibilities of what could go down. We here tryna smoke out the mole; we found the mole. Now we dip.” He frowns. “Right?”

  Redd shakes his head. “How you know it was Moco even?”

  “Because,” Jimmy is saying, but then we all shut up and freeze because there’s movement in the park around us. Ghost movement.

  “See,” Redd hisses. “This the shit I’m talking ’bout. Ain’t no that’s that.”

  Translucent shrouds flash through the underbrush. I glimpse the horseshoe-crab helmet of a soulcatcher rush down a hill, then another. Then many more. They emerge from the shadows of the park, converge in long strides on the stone entranceway a few dozen feet further along the wall we crouch at.

  Blades are drawn; a cruel wind whips up, the collective frenzy of so much spiritual activity. It tastes acidy and somehow sweet, and I realize I’m terrified. If they spot us, they’ll know who I am instantly—these are my fellow soldiers, and then the jig’ll be up, so to speak. I’ll have to watch my every step, never knowing when that freaky connection they have to all of us will kick in and I’ll be caught.

  And then tortured maybe.

  Or fed into one of those throng haints people keep talking about.

  Or just destroyed.

  Suddenly, all that joking around we were doing just a few minutes ago seems utterly insane. We sit in the belly of the beast; at least three Council squads are converging less than thirty feet away. What were we thinking? “What’s the move?” I whisper, because anything is better than just sitting here, waiting. Except, there’s probably nothing better to do than sit here and wait.

  Redd shakes his head. “Ain’t shit to do right now.”

  “Damn,” Jimmy sighs. “This probably means there two rats. None of the RD leaders knew about each other’s meet-up spots.”

  “In theory,” Redd says. “They coulda told each other.”

  “But if Father Desmond ratted and Moco ratted, what happens to their groups? Like . . . are both those Remote Districts out the game now? Are they on the Council’s side? Shit.”

  “We can’t know none of those answers right now,” I say, just wanting everyone to shut the fuck up so this moment can be over. It won’t end, though, not yet, anyway. The soulcatchers cluster at the entranceway. What few pedestrians had been out and about quickly disperse, probably suddenly nauseous from the burst of annoying Council energy. Three soulcatchers hold court in the middle of all the rest: one leans on a cane like Carlos; another looks to be a captain of some kind. I can’t make out the third at first—too many bodies in the way—and then I see: Botus.

  The chairman himself has deigned to make an appearance. They really gunning for us, then, in case that wasn’t already clear.

  “Rohan,” Jimmy whispers into his phone. “We got soulcatchers here too. At least three squads.” Rohan’s extravagant curse barrage comes over in a tinny thunderstorm; I only make out a couple words, but I get the gist.

  “What you wanna do?” Jimmy says. “Where’s Cyrus?” He nods, eyes wide, says, “Okay,” and hangs up.

  Redd and I glare our questions at him.

  “He doesn’t know,” Jimmy reports.

  “Doesn’t know where Cyrus is, or what we should do?” Redd demands.

  “Either. He just said, ‘Man, fuck this, fuck everything, shit, sit tight, little tall dude, sit tight, shit.’”

  That’s probably a word-for-word account too.

  “If we make a break for it, they gonna see us,” Redd says. “And Krys, you on the inside. You cannot be
seen.”

  I nod and then shake my head. “Yes, but if we stay here we just waitin’ for them to stumble on us. They everywhere. I know you don’t like sitting and waiting, Redd.”

  Redd smiles with half his face again, this time even wider, his mouth slightly open, one eyebrow raised. “How you already know that ’bout me an’ you just met me?”

  “I mean—”

  “Don’t matter. Point is, you right. That’s why I’m not gonna. But you are. Me? I’ma divert.”

  Jimmy scrunches up his face. “Divert?”

  I frown. “Redd, no,” I say, but it’s too late. He’s already up, over the wall, and flitting across the street on those long legs. He moves fast to the far side of the traffic circle, cuts hard down an avenue, and then saunters out again, cool as could be. I watch, my eyes wide and mouth hanging open. Even if he survives long enough to make a run for it, I’m not sure they’ll send enough ’catchers after him to make a difference.

  For a very surreal few moments, Redd stands just outside the huge throng of Council warriors. They’re so engrossed in whatever debate Botus is having with the captain and this limping ghost, no one pays any mind.

  I shake my head, squinting. “Probably shoulda all just made a run for it. They ain’t lookin’ anydamnway.”

  “Nah,” Jimmy says. “They’da seen the three of us. My tall living ass scampering off with your fat ass and Redd’s pirate ass? They’da seen us.”

  He’s right. I know he’s right.

  Redd leaps, pirouetting across the open air, and lands on a soulcatcher. The ’catcher stumbles forward, and Redd unsheathes his cutlass. “The fuck, bruh?” Redd yells. “Watch where the fuck you goin’!” A dozen helmets turn to face Redd. “Oh, y’all thirsty? You wanna taste Bitchmaker?”

  “Hey!” The captain who had been arguing with Botus shoves his way through the crowd as shiny ghost blades emerge in the haze of falling snow. “Who exactly do you think—”

  He doesn’t get to finish, because Redd lurches forward, cutlass flashing. The captain steps back, draws his own blade just in time to parry twice, and then the other soulcatchers flush forward.