Whistles and hollers, laughter and cheers and the wind chime percussion of clinking glasses. Phyllis came to her attention all at once, as though a spotlight had swerved and stilled at the edge of her sharp, freckled cheeks, the smooth curve of rose silk over her belly. The crowd surrounded her, but she held herself apart with a stillness that perhaps only Tamara could recognize as fear, even shame. Pea’s eyes darted to the bar, and Tammy felt alongside her the shivering vertigo of realization, that he wasn’t there, that nothing would be the same for any of them, not ever again.
A familiar hand settled on her shoulder and she jumped. He didn’t feel anything like Victor, but old defenses were hard to lay down. “How are you two holding up? How is she?”
Walter pointed his chin with admirable subtlety at Phyllis, staring out at nothing, drinking a glass of something amber and chilled with two precise cubes of ice, seated like a dowager queen at the center table just as Charlie and his boys were getting started.
“She’s—well, I don’t know, Walter. We’re fine, really—”
“That bad, huh?”
“We’re fucking miserable. This war…”
“This war,” Walter agreed.
They shared a tight smile and allowed the room to distract them. Tamara drifted from table to table, sharing jokes, sampling the best Mexican reefer, even kissing a few of the boys who asked for it. She sat at Victor’s old table near the back, empty even now, out of respect or superstition, though the place was packed. Feel it, she told herself, feel it, ’cause it’s all yours now. But that hazy distance held her back. It was Victor, Tammy could swear it, that old juju of his even now spreading its greasy fingers across the gleaming chrome of his precious club. She took in a sharp breath. The cards, tucked inside the band of her brassiere, were in her hands in a heartbeat. “Well?” she whispered to them. “Well?”
A simple shuffle and cut: the king of diamonds. Suicide king, axe in hand, here for revenge. She sucked in a breath. There was more, but she didn’t want to hear it. Instead, she did what she should have done from the first; she went to relieve Pea from a little of the burden of her loneliness.
Pea smiled with an arch knowledge when Tammy sprawled in the chair beside her.
“Having fun?” she asked. Her eyes were going glassy. Tammy wondered how many thumbs of whiskey she’d drunk here alone tonight.
“Not even a little. You?”
“Just remembering. So, that would be a no. The cards tell you anything?”
Those eyes didn’t miss much, even wet with liquor. “Nothing useful.”
Pea seemed paler than usual; she wiped her forehead with a handkerchief and avoided Tamara’s eyes. It was probably the baby. That child of two saint’s hands was apparently able to give her mother visions, sights either inexplicable or better unexplained.
The hour got later, Tamara went backstage to ready herself. Charlie kept playing. The haze of reefer clung to walls like a soft blanket as she started her set, lifting poor old Georgie over her head like a barbell, while he seemed to look back at her reproachfully. At some point the spirit took her, and Tamara started dancing among the tables, stomping her feet to the esoteric rhythms of the bass. They felt her and she felt them, folding her into the improvisation as smoothly as that pellet of yellow color folds into white margarine. She let Georgie wend his tired way around her neck and shook so that her breasts twirled in opposite directions and the tassels on her pasties glittered in the stage lights. They all watched her, but no one hollered or even smiled. Tamara was present, at last, in this place that had been her refuge for so long. But she couldn’t seem to pretend anymore. Not about Victor, not about Walter, not about Phyllis. Not about whatever she might be herself—
The trumpet swooped up and she arched back, fingertips brushing the sticky floor.
Someone was swinging from the ceiling.
A slow back and forth, like a mother rocking her baby’s cradle.
The legs twitched, one foot bare and the other in a bloody boot. With a wrench of effort that her belly would make her feel later, Tamara flipped upright.
The swinging changed direction. The rope groaned against the tree limb, and the man didn’t make a sound. A cool breeze brushed past; it smelled of creek mud and cut grass and, very faintly, of blood and urine.
Charlie put down his trumpet. “Is that blood?” he asked, and she was surprised, because that meant that they could all see the ghost of Pete Williams, who’d been lynched outside of town the year before she left Virginia.
A flash of silver—and then Victor sat in the empty chair across from Phyllis, lounging in a suit of narrow gray pinstripes and a navy-camel hat. He bared his gleaming teeth, said something Tamara couldn’t hear, and blew a long puff of smoke. It formed the shape of a gun and discharged a billowing bullet at Pea’s bowed head.
“Call a doctor! She’s fainted!”
Pea was slumped against the table, her glass in pieces on the wet floor. Blood dripped down her legs and mixed with the urine that she couldn’t hold back as the child turned in her belly, and saw and saw.
3
The doctor insisted on bed rest, on peace and quiet somewhere in the country. Pea hadn’t even asked; Tammy had looked at her huddled on that hospital bed and told her she’d be coming along.
Now they were here, too late and too cold for second thoughts, both haunted by ghosts that had no business following them so far up the Hudson.
Tamara and Mrs. Grundy between them managed to carry Phyllis upstairs.
