The Game of Love and Death

by Martha Brockenbrough

  “If no one goes there,” she said, “why does every third automobile in the city have a Coon Clucker tire cover?”

  Henry had no answer. He stood holding his jacket open for her, not knowing what else to do. “Flora, I’m truly sorry. Please. Wear it. Your dress will get soaked, and you’ll catch your death of cold. I’ll go anywhere with you.”

  “Exactly.” She accepted the coat. “That’s part of the problem. You’ll go anywhere. The world is yours.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant I’d go anywhere you’d like.”

  Rain hissed on the pavement, and every so often, cars honked and doors slammed. It was otherwise quiet.

  “There’s one place,” she said after a moment. “It’s called the Yellow House. On Yesler. Open twenty-four hours and they do a pretty mean omelet.”

  Henry smiled. “I don’t suppose there’s any way of doing this without getting soaked.”

  “You should have worn a jacket,” Flora said. “Dummy.” She lifted Henry’s coat overhead to keep the rain away.

  “What can I say,” he replied. “School dropout and all.”

  “On the count of three,” she said. “Let’s make a run for it.”

  “I’m not in any hurry,” he said. “Let’s get soaked.”

  “You are a dummy,” she said. “Here’s to turning ourselves into human dishrags.”

  “To dishes.”

  The restaurant’s windows glowed gold on the sidewalk ahead, lighting their way. A bell dinged as they opened the door. Conversations ceased when the diners caught a glimpse of Henry. He pushed his hair off his forehead with his free hand. With his other, he held tight to Flora. They were both drenched.

  “You all right, hon?” the waitress asked Flora, who’d tried to slip out of Henry’s arm. One of the diners lurched as if he was going to stand. Henry’s pulse raced. He didn’t want trouble, just a spot out of the rain and darkness and something to eat. And someplace to spend time with the person he loved.

  “I’m fine, Miss Hattie,” Flora said. “Just a little wet.” The man sat, but did not resume eating. Henry looked away.

  Hattie inspected them both. “Hmmph.” She shrugged, smoothed her white apron, and took them to a booth by the restroom door. She laid two menus on the table. “Coffee or juice?”

  “Coffee, please,” Flora said. “Cream and sugar.”

  “I’ll also have a coffee, if that’s all right,” Henry said.

  “How dark do you like yours?” Miss Hattie asked. The men at a nearby table snickered.

  Henry studied Miss Hattie’s expression, which reminded him of his long-departed grandmother. She’d always sounded crabby, but she also invariably sneaked him peppermint candies. He had plenty of room in his heart for cranky old ladies. “I like mine the way she likes hers.”

  “Hmmph,” Miss Hattie said. “Cream and three sugars. Be back in a minute with your coffee. You best be ready to order then too.”

  Henry looked at Flora over the top of her menu. “What’s good here? I mean, besides the mean omelet and the cranky coffee?”

  Flora laughed. “Everything except the oatmeal.” She laid her menu down. “That’s like eating marbles.”

  He folded his paper napkin into a boat and pretended to sail it through rough seas toward her, trying to recapture that easy connection they had when they played music together.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He put the napkin down. “I don’t know. Making an ark?”

  Miss Hattie returned with their coffee. “What’s it gonna be?”

  “Two eggs,” Flora said. “Side by side. And two pieces of toast.”

  Henry scanned the menu, looking for something that could build on Flora’s ark joke, but he couldn’t find anything. “Eggs, scrambled, with sausage and a biscuit.”

  “Fine,” Miss Hattie said. “Anything else?”

  “No, thank you, ma’am,” Flora said.

  Miss Hattie sighed and headed for the kitchen.

  “I think you meant Noah thanks,” Henry joked.

  Flora rolled her eyes over the top of her coffee mug.

  “See, we’re finding a place,” he said.

  “One of us might be,” she said. “I’ll never belong in your world.”

  “Flora.” Henry’s voice caught in his throat. “You are my world.” He wrapped his hands around his cup of coffee, wishing its warmth would reach the rest of him.

  Miss Hattie returned with their food.

  As she ate, Flora looked at him with pitying eyes. “I like you. Against my better judgment, I do. The way you play music. Your decency. Even your stupid jokes. But I want other things. If I do what Amelia Earhart is doing, but faster —”

  Henry interrupted. “I get it.” His eggs tasted like paste. He pushed the plate away. If she didn’t want him, what else could he do?

  Flora lowered her voice. “For now, can’t we just focus on the music? Everything else can wait.”

  They sat in silence as the rest of the customers cleared out. Hattie, looking exhausted, leaned against a wall and closed her eyes. Eventually, the first rays of morning sun began to bend through the foggy windows. Henry’s clothes had dried, and he felt a rumpled and weary mess.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, trying to choose his words carefully, knowing his exhaustion made him likely to say the wrong thing. “I don’t see how we could go from everything good that’s happened to this.”

  “It’s safer this way,” Flora said. “Trust me.”

  Henry reached across the table, but Flora wouldn’t take his hand.

  “What do you dream of?” Henry said. “What do you dream of if it isn’t this? You, me, music. We could build a life out of that. I know it.”

  “Look at your fingers,” she said. “Covered in ink.”

  “Please don’t change the subject,” Henry said. “But it’s not just ink.” He turned his left palm up and showed her the fingertips he’d played to shreds. “See? Blood.”

  “Ink by day, blood by night. Days of ink, nights of blood,” she said. “Sounds like a song.”

  “You should write it,” he said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not the one being ridiculous,” he said.

  “Henry.”

  “Look how far we’ve come. I don’t want to give up. Not now. Because someday —”

  She yawned and rubbed her temples, as though her head ached. “We can think about that sort of thing another day. But not now.”

  Miss Hattie shuffled to their table. “Heat up your coffee?”

  Henry glanced at his empty cup. “No, thank you.”

  “Then you’ll be wanting to settle the check,” Miss Hattie said.

  Henry took the hint. He pulled out one of the bills Doc had paid him the previous night and laid it on the table.

  “Keep the change.” It was twice the money he needed to leave. But he wasn’t above buying an ally.

  “Flora?” He held out his arm.

  She hesitated. “We should walk away from it now, before it gets worse. It’s what Captain Girard says about flying. ‘Only a fool goes into a storm.’ ”

  “The rain has stopped,” he said.

  “You know what I mean. This won’t end well.”

  “Who says it has to end at all?” he said.

  She took his arm at last, and together, they walked out into the fragile morning light.

  DEATH wished she needed to sleep. How fortunate humans were, to spend a third of their lives unaware. She never had a moment to forget who she was. Never a moment to pretend she was anything but a scourge. It felt better to glean souls as she did it. But then afterward, the pain, the hunger for more, was worse.

  Death wrapped herself in a silk robe. She inserted her pale, soft feet into slippers. Surely Et
han was asleep. Surely she could be quiet enough…

  She blinked and rematerialized in his room, not wanting to chance that someone else in the house was awake. His breathing was slow and warm and even. Through a gap in his curtains, light from the nearly full moon seeped in. She inched toward him. He lay on his back, one arm flung over his head while the other clutched his sheets, his skin indigo in moonlight. She knew exactly how his life would taste. She leaned in and inhaled his skin. His heat warmed her lips. She willed him to remain still. And then she whispered soft things into his ear, words to shape his dreams.

  When morning came, he would rise full of urgent desire. Not for Love, but for what Love kept tucked in a pocket over his heart. The book. The book and its secrets. In its pages, Ethan would learn he was a pawn, and that Henry was in even more danger. However he dealt with that information, she’d have the advantage. And all of it was in accordance with the rules.

  In another blink, Death was back in Helen’s room. Numb. Alone. Waiting for the light of day to wash over her.

  ETHAN gasped himself awake, sweaty and shaking. It was too early even for birds. He heard nothing but his own rushing blood. His dream had felt like a murky pond with something vital beneath its surface. The edges of the memory felt just beyond his fingertips. Something about a book. A book, open in James’s hand. A book in which James was writing.

  Ethan sat up.

  What did James write in his little book?

  He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His pulse was everywhere: in his ears, in his hands, boiling beneath his skin. If the book contained stories about what they’d done, if it listed his name … Ethan threw open the window. Somewhere in the distance, a bird opened its beak and sang a few lonely notes.

  The book contained Ethan’s ruin. He knew it as surely as he knew the feeling of a line drive hitting his glove. It made him wish not for death but for something beyond, to have his existence erased so thoroughly that it would not even echo in memory.

  Someone knocked. He stood still. Please let whomever it was think him asleep.

  “Knock knock.” Helen opened the door.

  She was dressed for the day already in a red frock with black polka dots, and she carried a tray of breakfast offerings. Coffee. Buttered toast. A wedge of flesh-colored melon. Juice from a fresh-squeezed blood orange.

  “What’s all this?” Ethan sneered at her to hide his worry.

  “I had an inkling you’d be up,” she said. “Can’t a girl bring her favorite cousin breakfast?”

  Ethan sat on the deep windowsill. “Henry isn’t here anymore.”

  “You and your self-loathing. Besides, Henry and I aren’t blood cousins,” she said. “Careful there. You might fall out the window.”

  “Yes, and then who would you have to torment?” It was a rude remark, but he couldn’t summon the grace to apologize. Instead, he slid off the sill and picked up the toast, smearing it with jam. “Thank you for breakfast.”

  “My pleasure. Let’s spend time together soon, all right?” She smiled as she left the room, her dress swishing around her calves.

  Ethan ate in silence. There was something he had to do. He just had to figure out when.

  DEATH sat at a rolltop desk in Helen’s room. A sheet of creamy stationery lay on a red blotter, by a bottle of ink and a fine fountain pen. She closed her eyes, willing the tears to rise. One was almost certainly enough. But to ensure the job was thorough, she produced three. These, she transferred to the bottle with a trembling fingertip. The tremor — that was new. No doubt a sign of strain. This Game, unlike the rest, felt slippery, a fish pulled with a bare hand out of a swift and frigid river.

  The tears hissed as they fell into the bottle. And there was an odor: sharp, tinged with decay. The blank page before her contained infinite possibilities. But not for long. The moment she set the pen to the flesh of the page, certainty would return. Certainty. It was her kingdom.

  She dipped the pen. Her fingers shook again — damn them. A spot of ink made a fierce little shape on the page. She rocked the blotter against the wayward ink. She’d gotten ink in the space between her second and third fingers too. And on her dress, another drop. The lack of control it indicated thrilled her, as if in this body she’d finally become someone else, someone unpredictable.

  She did not wad up the page, but put her pen to it again. The words flowed. Scandalous. Reckless music. Dangerous mixing of the races. Not what God intended. She would send this letter to the editor of the newspaper — Ethan’s father, Henry’s employer. It would reach the eyes and hearts of concerned citizens, moving them to close the Majestic, to end the spectacle of a white boy singing a love song to a dark-skinned girl. Flora and Henry would lose it all: their livelihood, their hope, their friends. Their love would die. Flora would run from him. Or, more likely, fly.

  It was a shame, really. Most humans laid waste their hours to the superficial, to the transitory. Great oceans of passion poured over smoke, while the actual fire burned elsewhere. Henry was one of the rare men with a firm grasp on the important. She set down the pen and blew on the glistening ink. Ah, well.

  She sealed the letter in an envelope and sensed a presence behind her. Annabel.

  “What are you doing?” the girl asked.

  “Writing a letter.” She showed Annabel the envelope. “Would you like to learn how to send one?”

  “Yes,” Annabel said. She set down her doll. “Yes, I would.”

  Death taught her.

  WITH the money from his first paycheck, Henry had moved into a boarding house on Capitol Hill. The room was simple, in an old Victorian run by a tiny tyrant named Mrs. Kosinski. Henry shared a bathroom with eight other residents, but the room itself was his own and infinitely better than Hooverville. It came furnished with a bureau, a twin bed, and a narrow closet. His bass was the most beautiful thing about the place, kept by the west-facing window where the light would grace it during the late-afternoon gap between work at the printing press and performing.

  His new life felt full and right. Flora’s band had picked up other gigs here and there. But it was their opening act at the Majestic that shined. The crowd loved “Someday,” as Flora’s uncle had predicted. It had become a duet featuring the two of them.

  Ever since Henry had moved into the boarding house, Ethan had been stopping by every afternoon for help with his article about Hooverville. Something was amiss; Henry could tell. Since graduation, Ethan had lost weight, and he looked exhausted. Henry had asked Ethan once or twice what was the matter, but Ethan waved him off. For certain, though, the Hooverville story was part of it.

  “Father’s going to blow a gasket at this, isn’t he?” Ethan lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling.

  “It’s true, right? You’ve managed to take some notes documenting everything?”

  “Yes, but I also know these facts inside and out.” Ethan rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Would you read me that last part again?”

  “Certainly.” Henry cleared his throat.

  “ ‘Hooverville is the abode of the forgotten man. By this journalist’s count, six hundred thirty-nine live here, each one with a story worth hearing — far too many to include in these humble columns. They are the modern melting pot, counting among their ranks Filipinos, Scandinavians, Africans, Mexicans, Indians, South Americans, and Japanese, along with Caucasians who fell down on their luck during the Crash of ’29.

  “ ‘Some men had wives and children. Some owned homes. Some worked as laborers and craftsmen. Others helped tame the forests surrounding the city, providing the lumber for houses and businesses. Others still were maimed in the Great War and cannot work. They have come together in shabby camaraderie to form an ethnic rainbow, dreaming not of a pot of gold at the end, but a pot of soup and respectable employment.

  “ ‘It is not so different, really, than what any man wants. Respectability, repast, and a roof ove
r his head. Or so says James Booth, a charismatic and handsome twenty-year-old fellow who calls himself the mayor of Hooverville.

  “ ‘ “If people could see us for who we were,” Mr. Booth said, “the better angels of their nature would respond.” ’ ”

  Ethan sat up. “That bit,” he said, “was it too much?”

  “The part about James being handsome and charismatic?” Henry said. “You could perhaps leave that out.”

  Ethan’s expression shifted and Henry stopped himself. In that instant, he understood something. Something that made his stomach fall, though not with horror, as it might have before he and Flora had found each other. The feeling was sadness and compassion. It made Henry want to confide his own secret to Ethan, to let this person who was like a brother to him know that he understood. But he could not betray Flora in the process. Even if she had not consented to be with him, not yet, their bond felt sacred, secret.

  The situation worried Henry. Ethan would soon be occupied with college. Henry, who had not graduated from high school, would not be able to help. These secrets, this distance … the natural thing might be to drift apart.

  But he would fight that.

  “Never mind,” he said. “It’s good. It’s the truth. What does the Bible say about truth? Veritas vos liberabit?”

  “The truth shall set you free,” Ethan said, looking out the window. “The older I get, the more I hope it’s true, but the less I believe it.”

  PROTESTORS stood in front of the Majestic carrying pieces of painted cardboard.