Song of Susannah (11 page)

I . . . see. That’s all. Except if I see it hard enough, it starts to be real. The way Detta Walker got to be real.

All over this version of the Dogan, amber lights were glowing. Even as she looked, some turned red. Beneath her feet—special guest feet, she thought them—the floor trembled and thrummed. Enough of this and cracks would start to appear in its elderly surface. Cracks that would widen and deepen. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the House of Usher.

Susannah got up from the chair and looked
around. She should go back. Was there anything else that needed doing before she did?

One thing occurred to her.

Susannah closed her eyes and imagined a radio mike. When she opened them the mike was there, standing on the console to the right of the two dials and the toggle-switch. She had imagined a Zenith trademark, right down to the lightning-bolt Z, on the microphone’s base, but
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS
had been stamped there, instead. So something was messing in with her visualization technique. She found that extremely scary.

On the control panel directly behind the microphone was a semicircular, tri-colored readout with the words
S
USANNAH
-M
IO
printed below it. A needle was moving out of the green and into the yellow. Beyond the yellow segment the dial turned red, and a single word was printed in black:
D
ANGER
.

Susannah picked up the mike, saw no way to use it, closed her eyes again, and imagined a toggle-switch like the one marked with
AWAKE
and
ASLEEP
, only this time on the side of the mike. When she opened her eyes again, the switch was there. She pressed it.

“Eddie,” she said. She felt a little foolish, but went on, anyway. “Eddie, if you hear me, I’m okay, at least for the time being. I’m with Mia, in New York. It’s June first of 1999, and I’m going to try and help her have the baby. I don’t see any other
choice. If nothing else, I have to be rid of it myself. Eddie, you take care of yourself. I . . .” Her eyes welled with tears. “I love you, sugar. So much.”

The tears spilled down her cheeks. She started to wipe them away and then stopped herself. Didn’t she have a right to cry for her man? As much right as any other woman?

She waited for a response, knowing she could make one if she wanted to and resisting the urge. This wasn’t a situation where talking to herself in Eddie’s voice would do any good.

Suddenly her vision doubled in front of her eyes. She saw the Dogan for the unreal shade that it was. Beyond its walls were not the deserty wastelands on the east side of the Whye but Second Avenue with its rushing traffic.

Mia had opened her eyes. She was feeling fine again—
thanks to me, honeybunch, thanks to me
—and was ready to move on.

Susannah went back.

A black woman (who still thought of herself as a Negro woman) was sitting on a bench in New York City in the spring of ’99. A black woman with her traveling bags—her gunna—spread around her. One of them was a faded red.
NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MIDTOWN LANES
was printed on it. It had been pink on the other side. The color of the rose.

Mia stood up. Susannah promptly
came forward
and made her sit down again.

What did you do that for?
Mia asked, surprised.

I don’t know, I don’t have a clue. But let’s us palaver a little. Why don’t you start by telling me where you want to go?

I need a telefung. Someone will call.

Tele
phone, Susannah said.
And by the way, there’s blood on our shirt, sugar, Margaret Eisenhart’s blood, and sooner or later someone’s gonna recognize it for what it is. Then where will you be?

The response to this was wordless, a swell of smiling contempt. It made Susannah angry. Five minutes ago—or maybe fifteen, it was hard to keep track of time when you were having fun—this hijacking bitch had been screaming for help. And now that she’d gotten it, what her rescuer got was an internal contemptuous smile. What made it worse was that the bitch was right: she could probably stroll around Midtown all day without anyone asking her if that was dried blood on her shirt, or had she maybe just spilled her chocolate egg-cream.

All right,
she said,
but even if nobody bothers you about the blood, where are you going to store your goods?
Then another question occurred to her, one that probably should have come to her right away.

Mia, how do you even know what a telephone is? And don’t tell me they have em where you came from, either.

No response. Only a kind of watchful silence. But she had wiped the smile off the bitch’s face; she’d done that much.

You have friends, don’t you? Or at least you think they’re friends. Folks you’ve been talking to
behind my back. Folks that’ll help you. Or so you think.

Are
you
going to help me or not?
Back to that. And angry. But beneath the anger, what? Fright? Probably that was too strong, at least for now. But worry, certainly.
How long have I—have we—got before the labor starts up again?

Susannah guessed somewhere between six and ten hours—certainly before midnight saw in June second—but tried to keep this to herself.

I don’t know. Not all that long.

Then we have to get started. I have to find a telefung.
Phone.
In a private place.

Susannah thought there was a hotel at the First Avenue end of Forty-sixth Street, and tried to keep this to herself. Her eyes went back to the bag, once pink, now red, and suddenly she understood. Not everything, but enough to dismay and anger her.

I’ll leave it here,
Mia had said, speaking of the ring Eddie had made her,
I’ll leave it here, where he’ll find it. Later, if ka wills, you may wear it again.

Not a promise, exactly, at least not a direct one, but Mia had certainly
implied—

Dull anger surged through Susannah’s mind. No, she’d not promised. She had simply led Susannah in a certain direction, and Susannah had done the rest.

She didn’t cozen me; she let me cozen myself.

Mia stood up again, and once again Susannah
came forward
and made her sit down. Hard, this time.

What? Susannah, you promised! The chap—

I’ll help you with the chap,
Susannah replied grimly. She bent forward and picked up the red bag. The bag with the box inside it. And inside the box? The ghostwood box with
UNFOUND
written upon it in runes? She could feel a baleful pulse even through the layer of magical wood and cloth which hid it. Black Thirteen was in the bag. Mia had taken it through the door. And if it was the ball that opened the door, how could Eddie get to her now?

I did what I had to,
Mia said nervously.
It’s my baby, my chap, and every hand is against me now. Every hand but yours, and you only help me because you have to. Remember what I said . . . if ka wills, I said—

It was Detta Walker’s voice that replied. It was harsh and crude and brooked no argument. “I don’t give a shit bout ka,” she said, “and you bes be rememberin dat. You got problems, girl. Got a rug-monkey comin you don’t know what it is. Got folks say they’ll he’p you and you don’t know what
dey
are. Shit, you doan even know what a telephone is or where to find one. Now we goan sit here, and you’re goan tell me what happens next. We goan palaver, girl, and if you don’t play straight, we still be sittin here with these bags come nightfall and you can have your precious chap on this bench and wash him off in the fuckin fountain.”

The woman on the bench bared her teeth in a gruesome smile that was all Detta Walker.

“
You
care bout dat chap . . . and Susannah, she care a
little
bout dat chap . . . but I been mos’ly turned out of this body, and I . . . don’t . . .
give
a shit.”

A woman pushing a stroller (it looked as divinely lightweight as Susannah’s abandoned wheelchair) gave the woman on the bench a nervous glance and then pushed her own baby onward, so fast she was nearly running.

“So!” Detta said brightly. “It’s be purty out here, don’t you think? Good weather for talkin. You hear me, mamma?”

No reply from Mia, daughter of none and mother of one. Detta wasn’t put out of countenance; her grin widened.

“You hear me, all right; you hear me just
fahn.
So let’s us have a little chat. Let’s us palaver.”

STAVE:
Commala-come-ko

Whatcha doin at my do’?

If you doan tell me now, my friend,

I’ll lay ya on de flo’.

RESPONSE:
Commala-come fo’!

I can lay ya low!

The things I done to such as you

You never want to know.

Mia said:
Talking will be easier—quicker and clearer, too—if we do it face-to-face.

How can we?
Susannah asked.

We’ll have our palaver in the castle,
Mia replied promptly.
The Castle on the Abyss. In the banquet room. Do you remember the banquet room?

Susannah nodded, but hesitantly. Her memories of the banquet room were but recently recovered, and consequently vague. She wasn’t sorry, either. Mia’s feeding there had been . . . well, enthusiastic, to say the very least. She’d eaten from many plates (mostly with her fingers) and drunk from many glasses and spoken to many phantoms in many borrowed voices. Borrowed? Hell,
stolen
voices. Two of these Susannah had known quite well. One had been Odetta Holmes’s nervous—and rather hoitytoity—“social” voice. Another had been Detta’s raucous who-gives-a-shit bellow. Mia’s thievery had extended to every aspect of Susannah’s personality, it seemed, and if Detta Walker was back, pumped up and ready to cut butt, that was in large part this unwelcome stranger’s doing.

The gunslinger saw me there,
Mia said.
The boy, too.

There was a pause. Then:

I have met them both before.

Who? Jake and Roland?

Aye, they.

Where? When? How could y—

We can’t speak here. Please. Let us go somewhere more private.

Someplace with a phone, isn’t that what you mean? So your friends can call you.

I only know a little, Susannah of New York, but what little I know, I think you would hear.

Susannah thought so, too. And although she didn’t necessarily want Mia to realize it, she was also anxious to get off Second Avenue. The stuff on her shirt might look like spilled egg-cream or dried coffee to the casual passerby, but Susannah herself was acutely aware of what it was: not just blood, but the blood of a brave woman who had stood true on behalf of her town’s children.

And there were the bags spread around her feet. She’d seen plenty of bag-
folken
in New York, aye. Now she felt like one herself, and she didn’t like the feeling. She’d been raised to better, as her mother would have said. Each time someone passing on the sidewalk or cutting through the little park gave her a glance, she felt like telling them she wasn’t crazy in spite of how she looked: stained shirt, dirty face, hair too long and in disarray, no purse, only those three bags at her feet. Homeless, aye—had anyone ever been as homeless as she, not just out of house but out of time itself?—but in her right
mind. She needed to palaver with Mia and get an understanding of what all this was about, that was true. What she
wanted
was much simpler: to wash, to put on fresh clothes, and to be out of public view for at least a little while.

Might as well wish for the moon, sugar,
she told herself . . . and Mia, if Mia was listening.
Privacy costs money. You’re in a version of New York where a single hamburger might cost as much as a dollar, crazy as that sounds. And you don’t have a sou. Just a dozen or so sharpened plates and some kind of black-magic ball. So what are you gonna do?