Inside, Tamara cackles with laughter. “Walter, why don’t you try dancing with a ten-foot python and tell me how easy it is!”
A pause while everyone considers and discards the easy joke.
My hands feel sluggish and rigid with tension. A river runs through them, wide enough for many bodies and very cold. It is a river of threats that has crossed an ocean to reach me. Men with bullets and men with tanks and men with bombs and men with sorrow in their hearts, who only want to go home.
There is the matter of a curse. I know she has not forgotten it. I hope she doesn’t believe in it. You will never have a moment’s peace. You will regret the day you ever met this—
I smoke the cigarette down, drop it into the snow. I am smiling.
Just you and me, my diamond-headed baby, here at the end. You got something big to say, I know it. But what good has knowing our future ever done us? Should we struggle away from it? Or should I just turn your face to the table, easy, easy, and let our troubled hands play out?
The car began to drift off the road. Tamara grabbed the wheel, screaming.
“Stop the car, Pea, dammit, brake the fucking car!”
At least Phyllis’s feet still belonged to her will. She braked while Tamara pulled them onto the narrow shoulder.
Phyllis, whose hands had at last been returned to her, fumbled with the door handle and then collapsed outside, on her knees on the frozen tarmac. She started to vomit but did not dare touch her hands to her own face. After a moment, Tamara was beside her, a warm arm and a safe voice taking her back around to the car.
“Just go to sleep, sugar,” Tamara said, because she had promised herself—Phyllis needed taking care of, even if Dev hadn’t said so. “It’s over now.”
Tamara’s hands had never touched a dream as it passed through them. But she knew dreams, nevertheless, as an oracle does—from above, from the numbers. She thought of what the cards had shown her just before they left the city: sixes and kings, death and deadly battle.
She and Phyllis were going to ground in a house in the country. Their ghosts had followed them as surely as their lovers had left them, but there was always more than one front in war.
For a moment, Tamara possessed, though she did not know it, the look of a soldier.
THEY
WALKED IN
THE LIGHT
1
“When this war is over, sugar, I’m going to Paris. And I won’t dance, either—not like before, anyway. A cabaret on the Left Bank, that’s where I’ll go, and I’ll sing in French—”
A dry voice from the back seat. “Tammy, you don’t speak a word of French.”
Tamara—the recently retired snake dancer notorious of a West Village gin joint, raised her chin. “Bonjour, comment allez-vous, voulez-vous coucher avec moi—”
Her companion and passenger clapped her hands. “Hope you aren’t planning on saying that to everyone you meet!”
The driver, erstwhile snake dancer, solidly Francophile if not—yet—Francophone, tried to level a quelling glare at the tired, light-skinned face in the rearview mirror, but cracked.
“Let’s see how good you do, then!” she laughed.
The woman in the back—four months pregnant, recently retired hatchet girl notorious of a West Village mob racket—was smiling. In a humorous, surgical tone that always anchored Tamara’s memories of her, the woman said, “But I am not attempting to repeat the successes of the great Miss Baker.”
Tamara smiled into the mirror but kept her eyes on the road. “I will, you watch me, Phyllis Green. I’m sick of up north, sick of the damned cold. In Paris the Seine is made of lights and champagne. Here, what do we have? The Hudson? A stinking mud hole in summer, an ice floe in winter, and nothing on the other side but New fucking Jersey.”
Phyllis Green—lately Patil, though she was taking her time with the paperwork—sighed and leaned back against the camel-brown velvet seats. “Ain’t that the truth.”
The car, a respectable 1936 Dodge sedan, did not belong to either of them, but they had claimed it, as they had claimed each other. The owner, after all, was busy driving ambulances somewhere in the hell of the European front. A little goddess on the dashboard, a brass divinity with ten arms and a skirt of hands, was a reminder of him, though there were others. Phyllis pressed her face into the upholstery, which still smelled a little of the owner’s cigarettes and the cologne he would wear on police business—though she had never made that connection. She drooled as she dozed, and smiled as though she could hear him through a line. Tamara noted this, and then looked quickly away.
They stopped at a gas station just outside of Rhinebeck, and Tamara waited outside in the cold while Phyllis used the ladies’ room. The attendant, a boy who put her in mind of succotash, with his carrot-red hair and string bean–green jumpsuit, frowned at them. He looked back at the older man in the cashier’s booth, wondering, Tamara was sure, if the presence of at least one Negro woman in the only gas station for forty miles merited notifying management. Tamara raised her head and then, remembering, lowered it again. She studied her boots, dark yellow, hand-tooled Italian leather, probably cost more than anyone in this pit-stop town could imagine making in a year—but then, she had learned early that there wasn’t money in the world green enough to make up for black skin in a white man’s eyes. If she were back in the Pelican, she would have glared, she would have dared that white boy to say a damn word. But they were upstate now, far from the relative safety of Walter’s gang, and Tamara Anderson knew how
