PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES

Evie was dreaming.

In the exotic, looping logic of dreams, she sat on the old wooden swing behind her family’s house in Ohio while James pushed her. She felt the desperate need to look behind her, to make sure he was there and to whisper a warning to him, but the swing rose higher and higher and she could do nothing but hold on tightly. On the fourth push, she swung so high that her pendant flew from her neck. Evie reached out a hand to grab it and fell down, down, down into a velvety forever.

A crow snatched it from her grasping fingers and flew with it into a churning, dark-gray sky above a vast wheat field. Lightning shot from the clouds and struck the land. The wheat burned. Evie put up an arm to shield herself from the heat.

When she took her arm away, she found herself on the streets of a deserted Times Square. Under the giant billboard for Marlowe Industries, the hollow-man war veteran sat in his wheelchair, rattling his cup. “The time is now,” he said.

The pretty woman in Uncle Will’s photograph skated past, laughing. “That’s you all over, William,” she said. Evie heard laughter and turned to see that it was Will, the young Will of family pictures. But when she looked again, it was James, standing on the edge of the familiar forest in the mist. He was pale. So very pale. Dark shadows lay beneath his vacant eyes. He waved to Evie, and she trailed him through the woods and into the army camp. Atop a barrel, a Victrola played, the record going round and round: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile….”

Sandbags formed a wall in front of a long trench. A barbed-wire fence stretched for miles. And the fog sat heavily over it all.

“Don’t let your joy and laughter hear the snag. Smile, boys, that’s the style….”

Above the tree line, a long, serrated roof appeared, like a forgotten fairy castle in the mist. Where was James?

The record spun: “What’s the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile….”

The soldiers stood around talking, eating from tins, drinking from canteens. She blinked, and for a split second, the boys became skeletal specters. Evie screamed and hid her eyes, and when she looked again, they were just soldiers. One toasted her with his canteen. He smiled, and locusts hopped from his mouth.

“So, pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, s—”

An explosion rattled the ground. A column of fierce white light pierced the sky and spread out in rapid waves, decimating the trees and the soldiers where they stood—flesh peeled back from bone, sockets missing eyes, limbs melting, mouths open in unheard screams while the Victrola turned on a hiss. Evie ran. Her bare feet squished through fields of bloody mud. It splattered her nightgown, face, and arms. The blood became poppies, which rose beside the scorched trees. She saw James up ahead, his back to her. He was alive and unharmed!

James. She called his name, but in the world of the dream, she made no sound. James, James! She was close. She would reach him and they would run away from this horrible place. Yes, they would run. They would be all right. They—

He turned slowly toward her and removed his gas mask and she saw that his beautiful face was ghastly pale and skeletal, his teeth garish now that his lips were gone.

And then he was melting, like all the others.

Evie woke shaking. She sat up and pulled her knees to her chest and waited for her breathing to return to normal. She knew there’d be no more sleep tonight. Exhausted, she took herself to the kitchen for a glass of water, then settled into Will’s office chair and tried to comfort herself by straightening the mess that was his desk. She picked up a crystal paperweight. A letter opener. A framed picture of the woman she’d seen when she held Will’s glove. If she wanted to, she could press any of these things between her palms, concentrate, and draw out Will’s secrets. Jericho’s, too. And Sam’s and Mabel’s and Theta’s. The list was endless. But it was a form of stealing, knowing people’s secrets without their consent. And she wasn’t sure she wanted the responsibility of knowing.

She put the photograph back in its protected place and let her palm rest against the half-dollar pendant at her neck, feeling warmed by its presence. She’d never been able to read it; the coin was too imbued with her own memories. But she liked the weight of it against her neck. It was her last connection to James, and James had been her connection to everything good. She remembered the birthday note that had accompanied the gift:

Happy birthday, old girl.

Are you seven already? Before I know it, you’ll be pinning gardenias to your frocks and sitting with gentlemen callers on the front porch—under the watchful eye of your dear brother, of course. France is miserably muddy, I’m afraid. You’d have a grand time of it, making mud pies and throwing them at the Germans. Big day tomorrow, so I won’t write again for a while. Here is a little something to remember your old brother by. Don’t spend it all at Hale’s Candy Store.

Fondly, James

A week later, they’d received the horrible telegram that James was dead, and her family had broken and been taped back together, a posed photograph kept behind fractured glass.

On Will’s desk, the Daily News lay folded open to T. S. Woodhouse’s latest article on the Pentacle Killer. Her brother was long dead, and somewhere in this city a murderer was breaking hearts. Evie twirled her pendant and thought about the grieving families of Ruta Badowski, Tommy Duffy, and Eugene Meriwether. She knew what it was to wait for someone who would never come home. She knew that grief, like a scar, faded but never really went away. Uncle Will hadn’t wanted her to use her talents to help catch the killer; he thought it too dangerous. He was wrong. It was dangerous not to use them. Not that it mattered, now that Jacob Call had confessed. Why couldn’t she feel better about that?

Jericho had forgotten to draw the shade before bed, and now the weary neon of the night-owl city woke him. He crossed to the mirror and stood shirtless before it, examining himself. He was tall, six-foot-two, with the broad shoulders of a farmer, which he would have been if he hadn’t gotten sick. Silently, he slid his bureau drawer open and took the leather kit from its hiding place under a stack of folded undershirts, unrolled it, and ran a finger along the dark blue vials. He wanted to bring a fist down and crush them all. Instead, he brought his hands out in front of his body and held them there for a few long seconds, watching, before dropping them to his sides again. His hands were steady, his skin smooth, his eyes clear. His heart kept a steady, comforting rhythm. To look at him, you’d never know. Only someone who was very close to him would ever know the truth. And he didn’t intend to let anyone get that close.

He sensed movement in the apartment and opened his door a crack to see Evie leaving Will’s office, on her way back to her room. The bluish light cutting through the windows silhouetted the shape of her body beneath her nightgown and Jericho felt a stirring deep in his belly. He admonished himself for looking, but didn’t stop. When she disappeared from view, he shut the door quietly and dropped into a push-up position, driving himself through a punishing routine of exercises, counting them off in his head: Thirty… fifty… one hundred. When he’d finished, his body glistened with a fine sheen of sweat that gave Jericho a sense of relief. Sweat was good. It was healthy. Normal. He held out his hands again. Steady as a rock. He buried the leather kit under his shirts and closed the drawer.

In a garden apartment in Harlem, Alma’s rent party was in full swing. Gabe’s trumpet wailed and growled like a man on the prowl. The small flat was packed with bodies dancing and drinking, singing and shouting into the night. When Memphis had first stepped into the packed apartment with Theta on his arm, he’d gotten some raised eyebrows, and one or two stares. That ended when Alma’s girlfriend, Rita, walked straight up to Theta and said, in a loud voice, “Got a cigarette?” Theta answered, “I’ve got ten. Which one do you want?” To which Rita laughed and said, “She’s all right,” and it was all fine after that. Soon enough, everybody was lost to the good times. Or almost everyone was.

Gabe pulled Memphis into a corner. “Brother, when I said you should find yourself a girl, I didn’t mean a white girl.”

Memphis didn’t want to get into it with Gabe, so he just said, “It’s a free country.” He walked into the kitchen to buy a couple of drinks, and Gabe followed.

“No, it isn’t. You know that.”

“Well, it should be.”

“Should and is aren’t the same thing. What happens when she gets tired of you, or worse, accuses you of something? You remember Rosewood?”

“Two beers!” Memphis told the man with the liquor. “Why you bringing that town into this, Gabriel?”

“That town got burned to the ground because a white woman said—”

“Gab-ri-el!” Alma called over the din. “You gonna blow that horn or run your mouth all night?”

“Don’t get hot, sugar,” Gabe called back, smiling. He dropped the smile as he turned back to Memphis. “It’s not enough they’re slumming it up here and taking the best tables in our own clubs when we can’t even get a table in theirs! Or that they’re trying to take over our business from the inside, like what happened with the Hotsy Totsy. Now you want to go and parade around with one of them?”

“I am not parading, Gabriel.”

“Brother, you are borrowing trouble. Do us all a favor: Escort her out front, help her to a taxi headed downtown, and say good-bye.”

“Don’t tell me how to run my life, Gabe,” Memphis snapped.

Gabe grabbed hold of Memphis’s sleeve. “I’m not trying to run it; I’m trying to save it. You get caught by the wrong people, and you won’t be able to heal what they’ll do to you.”

“Told you, I can’t heal anymore,” Memphis said through gritted teeth. He twisted out of Gabe’s grip, paid for his beer, and pushed his way through the dancing party to where Theta sat, swinging her leg along to the Count’s crazy piano rolls.

“You copacetic, Poet?” Theta asked.

“Me? I don’t wear worry.”

“Sure you don’t,” Theta said, watching his face closely. “Kind of smoky in here, huh? Maybe we should take a breather?”

Alma’s flat was jammed with people from where they sat to the door at the far end. It would take forever to try to get through. So Memphis nodded to the window, and he and Theta climbed through it into a neat square of garden crisscrossed with clotheslines hung with the day’s washing. The air was brisk but welcome after the close quarters inside.

“Where you from?” Memphis asked Theta.

“Everywhere.”

“But where are your people from?”

“People sure like to know where you’re from in this country, who ‘your people’ are,” Theta grumbled. “Tell you the truth, I don’t know. My father ankled before I was born. My mother left me on some church steps in Kansas when I was a just a baby. When I was three, I was adopted by a lady named Mrs. Bowers. She wasn’t what you’d call the motherly type. From the time I could put on tap shoes, I was on the Orpheum Circuit, eight shows a week.”

“I can’t imagine anybody ever leaving you,” Memphis said with such sincerity that Theta felt a catch in her chest.

“Careful there, Poet. I might start to believe you.”

“I’m a believable fella.”

“Yeah? Prove it. Tell me a secret about yourself.”

Memphis thought hard for a moment before answering. “I used to be able to heal,” he said at last. “They called me the Harlem Healer. Miracle Memphis. Once a month at church, I’d stand up at the front and lay hands on people, take away their pain, their sickness.”

“Are you pulling my leg?” Theta’s expression was very serious.

Memphis shook his head. “I wish I were.” He told her about his mother dying, about how he lost the gift that night and hadn’t ever gotten it back. “Just as well, I guess.”

Theta listened closely. She could tell he was on the level about all of it. She wanted to tell him about Kansas. About what she’d done, and why she’d had to run. But what kind of fella would stick around after he’d heard that?

“Come here.” Theta crooked a finger and Memphis followed her down the narrow alley between the two rows of laundry. Safely hidden, they shared a kiss while the night raged around them. Their mouths tasted sweetly of Alma’s coconut cake and home-brewed beer.

“This is happening pretty fast, isn’t it?” Memphis said. He could not remember a time when he didn’t know Theta, a time when she didn’t occupy his thoughts and dreams.

“Life goes fast, Poet.”

Memphis cupped her cheek in his hand and put his mouth on hers. Theta had never been kissed the way Memphis was kissing her now. There had been fumbling boys thrumming with nervous want. There had been theater owners, older “uncles” who pawed at her when she walked past or who wanted to “inspect” her costume to make sure it was decent down to the undergarments, men she granted the occasional kiss in order to stave off something worse. And there was Roy, of course. Beautiful, cruel Roy, whose kisses were declaratory, as if he needed to conquer Theta, to brand her with his mouth. Those men had never really seen Theta. But Memphis’s kiss was nothing like theirs. It was passionate, yet tender. A mutual agreement of desire. It was a kiss shared. He was kissing her. He was with her.

Memphis pulled away. “Everything jake?”

“No,” Theta said.

“What’s the matter?”

Theta looked up at him through thick, dark lashes. “You stopped.”

He drew her to him. She grabbed the clothesline to steady herself, and they fell to the ground, laughing, in a tumble of laundry that would have to be washed all over again.

“Let’s just stay right here,” Memphis said, and Theta rested her head against his chest, listening to the steady beat of his heart as he held her close.

Outside, the city stirred and sighed in its sleep. Steam hissed up from sewer grates and coiled around a lamppost like the tail of a forgotten god. Deep under the ground, in the half-finished tunnels of the new subway lines, rats scurried along tracks just ahead of something they imagined chased them, something more horrible than their rat dreams ever conjured. A storefront psychic whose connection to the spirits was nothing more than the pull of a string with a toe to make a knocking under the table felt compelled, quite suddenly, to cover her crystal ball with a cloth and lock it up in a wardrobe. In Chinatown, the girl with the dark hair and green eyes bowed reverently to her ancestors, offered her prayers, and readied herself to walk in dreams, among the living and the dead. North along the Hudson, in an abandoned, ruined village, the wind carried the terrible death cries of some ghostly inhabitants, the sound reverberating ever so faintly in the village below so that the men bent over their checkers in the back of the general store glanced nervously at one another, their play suspended, their breath held for several seconds until the wind and the sound were gone. Elsewhere in the country, there were similar stirrings: A mother dreamed of her dead daughter and woke, she could swear, to the chilling sound of the words Mama, I’m home. A Klansman who’d left his meeting in the woods to piss by an old tree jumped suddenly, as if he’d felt hanging feet dragging across the tops of his shoulders, marking him. There was nothing there, but he brushed at his shoulders anyway, scurrying back toward the fire and his brothers in white. A young Ojibway man watched a silvery shimmer of a hawk circle overhead and disappear. In an old farmhouse, a young boy nudged his parents awake. “There’s two girls calling me to play hide-and-seek with them in the cornfields,” he whispered. His father ordered him sleepily back to bed, and when the boy passed by the upstairs window, he saw the incandescent girls in their long skirts and high-necked blouses fading into the edges of the corn, crying mournfully, “Come, come play with us….”

And farther still, in the vast prairies mythologized in the American mind, a figure stood shadowed in the dark, biding his time, a scarecrow awaiting harvest.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 633