The baker believed he was eternally in love with the girl behind the counter, the girl who was laughing and flirting with Grady as though such things came with every cookie sold. Love whispered the baker’s name, knowing it was the single word most likely to send him over the edge. The man opened a drawer beneath the cash register. He pulled out a revolver. Grady backed up against a rack of freshly baked loaves of bread, holding his hands high.
“Now,” Love whispered.
The baker swung the gun toward Grady. Love held his breath as the safety clicked off.
Just then, a figure materialized in front of him. His mind registered who it was as her hand flew against his cheek. The blow broke his hold on the baker, who dropped the gun. It discharged, blasting through the sweets display case. Both the baker and Grady covered their heads to protect themselves from raining glass.
The girl dropped to her knees.
“Please,” she whimpered. “Please, no.”
Embarrassed, Love felt his blazing cheek. Death stood inches away, her eyes narrowed to slits, her mouth a slash of red lipstick. She looked like Helen and she looked like herself at the same time. “What do you think you are doing?”
“You, of all people, ought to know.” Love worked his jaw, half expecting it to break to pieces. There was a flash as the baker bent to retrieve the gun, which he examined like it was something alive.
Death froze time.
“Of course I know what you were doing. What I’d like to know is why. How dare you.”
“How dare I what?” Love said. “How dare I do what you do every day?”
Death clenched her hands, and Love braced himself for another blow. Grady stood frozen, holding the folded newspaper across his chest as if in defense, his mouth parted because he’d been about to speak.
“He’s in the way,” Love said, unable to say Grady’s name.
“He’s a human being,” Death said. “A living soul. And this isn’t how you play the Game.”
Love couldn’t quite read the expression on her face. As ever, her mind was closed to him. “What do you mean? It’s how you play the Game.”
“Exactly,” Death said. “You are not me. You don’t —”
“I don’t what?” He lifted his hat and smoothed his hair. “I don’t want to win? Is that what you think?”
Death made a noise of frustration. She stepped outside. Love followed. “Leave them alone. You don’t need to do this,” she said.
Love looked back at the humans, still frozen in the shop. “Fine. I won’t.”
Death released her hold on time. A look came over the baker’s face. He gazed at the gun, and Love remembered, too late, that poison remained in the man’s heart, more than enough to be dangerous.
The girl flinched. “Please, no!”
Love looked to Death. Her irises flashed white as the baker took aim. She materialized inside the shop as the gun flashed. Too late to save him, Death caught Grady from behind. The bullet had torn through the newspaper. An unholy crimson flower bloomed through the paper and ink. Grady coughed blood, and Death set him gently down.
The baker cried out, his heart drumming a frantic beat. He rushed toward the girl, who’d backed up against the sacks of sugar and flour.
There was second shot, then a third.
Love closed his eyes. “No,” he whispered.
A few moments later, Death stood beside him. Through the shop window, three bodies had been laid neatly side by side by Death, as if sense could arise from this small gesture of order. Blood spattered the bakery walls and floor. Her knees buckled. Love held her up, marveling at how small she really was. She lifted her head and looked at him, her eyes still the silvery white they turned when she was feeding. After a moment, the color flowed back. She pushed away and wiped her eyes.
She’d abandoned her Helen guise and was fully herself, beautiful, ageless, and hard. “My fate is a prison. It’s the one thing humanity and I have in common. You were the only one of us who didn’t need to inhabit one. I took responsibility for these souls for you, even though their deaths are your fault. You should be forced to feel what it’s like for someone to be imprisoned.”
Anguished, she disappeared. Love knew he was meant to follow, even though she had not told him where to find her. In the distance, a police siren wailed. And in a sickening moment of clarity, Love knew where to go.
Death waited for Love on the wind-scraped peak of the Presidio, looking over the hazy water toward Alcatraz. In the setting sun, the island darkened like a bruise on the horizon. It was the worst of prisons, and it’s what she wanted him to see. A eucalyptus breeze lifted her hair. Then a foghorn blew, and she sensed his presence.
“Is it really inescapable?” he asked, closing the distance between them.
“What, the prison?” Given the circumstances, she had to ask.
He nodded. “Has anyone tried?”
“So far, just the one. A little over a year ago.” She searched her memory. “His name was Joe. One day he tried to kill himself by breaking his glasses and sawing through his own throat.”
“Was he insane?”
“Consider where it occurred,” she said. “Also, he steered clear of his carotid artery. He didn’t really want to die. He was sending a message in blood.” The wind blew her hair again, and she pushed it back.
“What else of Joe?” Love asked. “Did he have friends?”
“No. There was no one. Even among outcasts, he was considered a freak.”
“Why was he in prison?”
“He stole sixteen dollars and thirty-eight cents in a post office robbery. Twenty-five years to life.”
“He would have stolen more if there had been more to take,” Love said. “It’s not the amount. It’s the act.”
“He was hungry.” Death raised her voice so she’d be heard over the cold scream of wind off the bay. “He was hungry and couldn’t find work. Care to guess the last image he offered me?”
Love shook his head.
“It was his own face. Unlooked at. Unseen. Unloved. In his life, there was one moment of great resolve: the moment he chose to climb the stone wall and escape. And then the guard’s bullet found his back.”
Love swallowed. “And you know this from a touch? How do you remember it all?”
“How do you remember your own hands?” Death said.
Love reached into his pocket and removed a chocolate bar. He broke off a square and handed it to her. She put it in her mouth, where it began to melt.
“Bittersweet,” she said.
“It seemed the thing. Chocolate contains some of the same chemicals the human brain produces when it’s in love. I’m surprised you have any taste for it.”
She stared at him. “Condescension does not become you.”
They finished the chocolate as stars emerged in the endless cage of sky, a few at a time, beautiful unblinking monsters.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” Love said.
Death squeezed his hand. “Play as yourself. Not as me. Trust me on that.”
Love nodded. Had any human eyes been on them that moment, they would have seen what looked like a couple in love standing beneath a sky pinned in place by a fishhook moon.
HENRY made a deal with himself. If he read fifty pages in his history textbook, he could go to the Domino. Never mind that he’d be out late again and would certainly be too tired afterward to finish his remaining calculus problem. Other calculations mattered more — as in how he might get Flora to change her mind about “someday.”
Clutching a sheaf of unruly pink peonies from Mrs. Thorne’s garden, Henry hastened toward the club. He was sheepish and excited and had a million things to say. Mostly he wanted to be in his seat, watching Flora sing. He wouldn’t press for more, but he had to be near her.
It was strangely quiet on the street outside
the club. Usually, snatches of music leaked out of the building. Or couples on their way inside chattered with each other and called out greetings to their friends. Maybe it was just a slow night. Or maybe — he picked up his pace — a police raid had shut the place down. The bulb above the door was dark. The bouncer wasn’t standing at his post. Something was wrong.
Henry pounded on the door until his knuckles hurt. Eventually, as he was about to give up, it opened. Flora’s uncle emerged from the shadows.
“Club’s closed,” he said.
“Closed?” Henry felt stupid for saying it.
“Now I know you don’t got a hearing problem, son. Otherwise, you wouldn’t come here so often. So don’t make me say it again.”
Henry could hardly feel his limbs. “Closed … closed for good? What happened?”
“For now, kid,” the man said, his voice bitter. “Bass player got shot and killed, not that it’s any of your concern.”
Henry felt ill, as if his antipathy for the man had caused his death. “But Flora, she’s all right?”
The man did not answer. “Go home, son. You look like something a cat coughed up.” Then he closed the door.
THREE days later, the band gathered after Grady’s memorial service for a backyard picnic at Flora’s. Several of the players, still wearing their funeral suits, were distracting themselves with a game of croquet using an entirely unorthodox set of rules. The core of the band — Harlan Payne, the drummer, and Palmer Ross, their pianist — sat around the table, arguing with Sherman about whether Jack Johnson would’ve beat the stuffing out of Joe Louis if they’d been the same age.
Despite the weight of the occasion, it was a fine day to be outside — warm and sunny, the air filled with the sweetness of cut grass and wisteria blossoms. If anything, though, it made the guilt worse. The last time Flora had seen Grady was after she’d been with Henry. Grady had dropped her at home without a word, which at the time had felt like a relief. Now it sharpened the feeling inside her that his death had been her fault. She wanted to get in Captain Girard’s plane and leave town, start over somewhere else as someone else. She’d never do it, not with Nana depending on her. But the urge was there.
Flora, who knew better than to stick up for Joe Louis in front of Sherman, changed the topic before an amateur backyard boxing match could break out. “A month off won’t hurt the club,” she said. “That gives us time to find a new bass player and do it right — work on our sets, learn some new numbers. Don’t you boys want to take a vacation?”
“Music is my vacation,” Harlan said. “I get bored without something to do.” He drummed the table with a spare pair of sticks.
“So we practice,” she said. “We just don’t perform.”
“You know who’s good?” Palmer said, rubbing his whiskery chin. “That new fellow they have at the Majestic. What’s his name? You know, Peaches Hopson. I say we try to recruit him.”
Sherman clinked ice tea glasses with Palmer. “Now you’re talkin’.”
Something brushed against Flora’s ankles. The cat, looking for a handout. She dropped a scrap of chicken. The cat’s teeth made a wet grinding noise against the meat.
“That animal is playing you for a sucker,” Sherman said.
In no mood to be conciliatory, Flora reached for an entire leg. She dangled it between her thumb and forefinger.
“Don’t!” Sherman said. “That’s my favorite part.”
Flora tossed it beneath the table. “I can’t believe you’re talking about stealing Peaches from the Majestic. They’re our friends,” she said. “How’d you feel —”
“They’re the competition,” Sherman said. “It’s business. Doc’ll understand. And I thought we’d agreed after that tax situation that you’d focus on the music, and I’d focus on everything else.”
Flora was in no mood to be reminded of what had happened with Mr. Potts. “The union might have something to say about the scheme you’re cooking up.” They were all members of the Local 493. “We’d do better to take out an ad. We could put one in papers from here to Los Angeles. Bound to find someone who wants a new gig. And then we could use that as a reason to draw people in. Besides, the bass player is the music.”
“Girl has a point,” Harlan said. “I wouldn’t like it much if Doc tried to pirate Palmer or one of the Barker twins.”
Palmer laughed. “No one but us would take Chet and Rhett.” Chet and the trombonist, Sid Works, had pinned Rhett to the lawn with croquet wickets around his ankles, wrists, and neck. “Not Sid either.”
On the street, someone killed a car engine. A door slammed. The cat scrambled away.
“Rotten thing didn’t even eat the whole leg,” Sherman said. “What a waste of tasty.”
Flora smiled despite herself and took a sip of ice tea. “So we take out an ad, then. Do a search in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans. We could look in Chicago and New York too.”
Sherman rubbed his face with his palm. “Sounds as much fun as clipping my toenails with an ice pick. I still think we ought to just liberate someone from another club. Be done and open again by next week.”
The screen door leading to the backyard slapped open, and Nana poked her head out.
“Sherman,” she said. “Can you step inside?”
Behind her stood a figure silhouetted in the afternoon light. Sherman let the screen door bang behind him. Flora cocked an ear — it sounded like he was giving the heave-ho to a traveling salesman. They were always trying to get Nana to buy their encyclopedias, knives, brushes. Nana hated saying no, and she made Sherman do it whenever he was around.
There was a bit of chatter and then Sherman’s voice. “More likely to find an Eskimo Pie in hell.”
“Oh, Sherman.” It was Nana’s voice. “Are you certain? What would it harm?”
“You know what he’s probably really after, don’t you?”
“Don’t be silly, Sherman.”
Flora wondered what the salesman was offering.
More murmuring, and then, “Talk to her?” Sherman’s voice carried. “How’d you say you knew her? Say, aren’t you that boy who’s been sniffin’ around the club? I didn’t recognize you in the daylight. Now you get going before I take out my foul mood on you.”
“Sherman!” Flora realized who was standing in her house. She didn’t want to face Henry just then, but she didn’t want her uncle being rude to him either. She raced up the steps. Henry didn’t seem like the sort who’d sell things door-to-door. He might have come calling for a different reason entirely, a reason that made everything worse.
Red-faced, she pulled open the screen door. He wore a clean shirt and had just shaved — there was a tiny cut on his chin still red with blood. He’d combed his hair until it shined. And by his side, in its case, was a bass.
“Henry,” she said.
“This slice of white bread here says he wants to be our new bass player,” Sherman said.
Since when did he play music? And since when could someone like him play her kind of music?
“I — I just heard you were looking,” Henry said. “You are, aren’t you?”
“As it happens,” she said, “we are. But —”
“I’m interested in the job,” Henry said. “Baseball’s nearly over. I could rehearse after school. And then I graduate next month and will be looking for work.” He turned to unlatch his case.
The black cat slipped through the open screen door and brushed Flora’s ankles. She put a hand on her chest, feeling dizzy. Probably from too much chicken and sunshine and not enough ice tea. She shooed the cat away, and it entangled itself in Nana’s ankles.
“There’s that creature again,” Nana said. “I swear it will be the death of me.”
Flora shook her head. The idea of Henry in her band was madness. And yet she was surprised to find she wanted it. Without knowing why,
and with the certainty of knowing she’d never want anything else nearly as much. This was why she had to say no, and firmly. It would only hurt them both when he played and was terrible. She’d never be able to face him after that.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just —”
“Just what?” Henry said. “Do you think I can’t play or something?” His eyes challenged her. Flora wanted to take a half step back.
“It’s not that.”
“What she’s saying,” Sherman said, “is that is the least of your problems. There’s also the matter of your age. If you’re over eighteen, I’m a juggling nun. I’m gonna have to talk to Bathtub about who he’s lettin’ in the place.”
“Flora isn’t eighteen,” Henry said.
“Flora owns the club. The rules don’t apply to her. Go on home, boy.”
“Flora.” Henry loosened the knot on his tie. “May I at least audition?”
The way he said her name sank into her core. Terrified people would guess her feelings, she stepped backward and smashed the cat’s tail beneath her shoe. The creature hissed and zipped outside.
Then she said the last words she wanted to say. “I don’t — you’re not the one for us. I’m sorry.” She turned away. As she walked down the steps and outside again, she heard Nana’s voice.
“Can we at least offer you a bit of chicken? I fried it up myself.”
Henry declined politely, and his silhouette disappeared from the screen door.
He hurried out, trying not to hit his bass on the edges of the doorway. She wouldn’t even listen, a possibility he hadn’t imagined, couldn’t believe. It had been audacious to want to audition. But he had talent, and he’d been playing her songs almost since the moment he’d first seen her onstage. He’d practiced so much his fingertips were raw. She’d dismissed him without so much as an explanation.
The Game of Love and Death Page 12
