“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.
THE ANGEL GABRIEL
Gabe didn’t feel the press of ghosts as he walked west toward home, his head still buzzing from the reefer he’d smoked at Alma’s party. The night had turned chilly, and he blew on his hands to warm them. It had been a good day, as good as any Gabe could remember. Meeting the great Mamie Smith. He was only eighteen, but the other cats treated him like he was one of them, grinning as he took his solos, complimenting him on his chops.
The only cloud had been the fight with Memphis. What was he thinking, bringing that girl to their party? Sure, she was pretty. But there were lots of pretty girls who weren’t trouble—or, at least, no more trouble than most women were. He didn’t like that they’d left it on such a bad note. Memphis and Theta had breezed on out without even saying good-bye. If that was the way he wanted to play it, fine. When that girl dropped him for some white big shot, who would have to hear the whole sob story? Gabe, that was who.
A sound startled him. One, two, three; one, two, three. A three-legged cadence, like an off-tempo waltz. But when he turned around, he saw no one.
He was getting worked up about Memphis and his girl, and it was killing his good feeling. Gabe flipped up the collar of his jacket, a temporary buffer against the wind howling off the Hudson, and kept walking. The wind had to content itself with kicking a tin can down the street. Overhead, the tracks of the Ninth Avenue El groaned in their emptiness. In his head, Gabe replayed the day’s best moments. The camaraderie with the other musicians. Shaking hands with Clarence Williams, who promised him a bright future with Okeh Records. “Gonna have you playing for everybody,” he’d said, and Gabe felt made.