The Diviners (47 page)

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.

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.

The sound intruded again—
one, two, three, one, two, three, click, step, step, click, step, step.

“Somebody there?” Gabe called into the shadows. Something darted out from between the wide tires of a parked Ford and Gabe let out a yelp. As the cat slunk away down an alley, Gabe laughed. “Lord, cat. Announce yourself next time. I don’t have no nine lives.”

Shaking his head, he carried on, scatting a little bit of Miss Mamie Smith’s song under his breath, his hands unconsciously fingering an imaginary trumpet. The latticed tracks of the El bridge left stripes of light on the road, and Isaiah’s warning drifted back to him:
The bridge. Don’t walk under the bridge.
Gabe never would’ve said anything to Memphis about it, but there was definitely something not quite right about Isaiah. This business about telling Gabe’s future was a good example. Isaiah took the joke too far; Gabe had actually believed the kid was scared, too. Too much imagination—that was the trouble with that boy.

One, two, three, one, two, three, click, step, step.

There was that damned sound again! Gabriel turned around. It had gotten very foggy all of a sudden. The lights of the Whoopee Club were a distant haze.

Don’t walk under the bridge. He’s there.

Gabe pulled his collar tighter at his throat. Why was he letting that boy’s silly words get to him? The sound of footsteps echoed. It seemed to come from all around. The fog was even thicker. How was that possible? How could it have gotten thicker in just a matter of seconds? Was he walking closer to the river? Had he gotten lost? Gabe felt disoriented. Which way was back toward the clubs? The sound of whistling carried through the mist.

“Gabriel…”

Somebody was calling his name. He didn’t recognize the voice.

“Who’s there?”

“Gabriel, the angel. The messenger…”

“Memphis, that you? Lay off, now….” Gabe looked for something he could use to swing if he needed it, but he couldn’t see.
Don’t walk under the bridge. He’s there.

If this was a joke, Gabe wasn’t laughing. He walked quickly ahead.

The man stepped from the mist as if born of it. His clothes were old-fashioned and he carried a silver walking stick. He was smiling at Gabe. It was a cold, cold smile, and Gabe felt unsteady on his feet.

“Gabriel the Archangel, whose trumpet did rend the sky.”

“If you’re looking for a horn player, I already play with the Count’s outfit,” Gabe said. His heartbeat had picked up something fierce. It was just some odd cat with a cane who was probably drunk. Gabe could take him if it came to that. So why was he suddenly so scared?

Don’t walk under the bridge. He’s there. You’ll die.

“Gabriel, whose trumpet announced the birth of John the
Baptist. Of Jesus Christ. And whose call shall bear witness to the coming of the Beast,” the strange man continued. His eyes appeared to be swirling with fire, and Gabe found he couldn’t look away. “ ‘And the eighth offering was the offering of the angel, the great messenger whose heavenly music aligned the spheres and welcomed the fire in the sky. And lo, he played a sound upon his golden trumpet and heralded the birth of the Beast.’ ”