Trouble the Saints Truly Came Into Its Own
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For Elizabeth Jones Johnson, who I met before I could remember. And For Lillian Wayne Prillerman Fogg, who warned me. SAINTS CAME IN Seven. That’s what we’re starting with. I woke with the dream late on a Thursday night, sometime in July. It’s a good one, as far as sevens go. The angel joker for the zero, plus seven of spades, that’s seven, clean as the air you breathe. Well, cleaner, if you breathing in Harlem. “Tell me,” the dentist said while he lit my cigarette. He was using the lighter Dev gave me after I’d dropped mine in the Hudson, the one I kept by my bed still. I blew a shaky plume that scattered in the crosswinds of the fan and the raunchy East River musk slinking through my open window. “Was I in it?” he asked when I didn’t say anything. The dentist was nervous, which made me laugh a little, considering, and he eyed the holster hanging easy and louche on the post of my bed. “Nope,” I said. “But Vic was.” The dentist squeezed my shoulders. He was looking at me like anyone might, or at least anyone who heard that Victor’s angel had, at last, been given her second dream. Like he was working out which runner would take his numbers on the day, hour, and minute of my death. You get the hands with a dream, a dream that runs true. In Harlem, we might throw a party or we might keep it real quiet—sometimes that extra dose of juju doesn’t go over well with the neighbors—but we always play the numbers. The dream that gives you the hands never fails, they say. Well, what the Lord giveth he can taketh the hell away. You get a second dream, you and your uncanny hands better play the numbers, so your widow can pay for your casket. “Victor came up to me in the Pelican with Red Man just behind him. He said, ‘Here’s a job for you, Phyllis LeBlanc,’ and then I was standing next to him in this long white dress. I had on my holster, but there were two severed hands in it instead of my knives. And then Red Man pointed to me and said, ‘You killed that man!’ Just like the end of some Charlie Chan flick. Can you believe it? As if that would surprise anyone, let alone Red Man.” The dentist didn’t laugh. “And then?” “A wind blew through, a hot wind, and it was so bright and blue I could hardly see. Just Red Man’s silhouette like a halo. He lifted his arms and said, ‘Don’t fail us.’ And then I heard—someone’s voice. Calling my name. That was it.” “Don’t fail?” Now the dentist laughed. “Have you ever failed at killing someone, darling?” My heart puckered like an old wound. “No.” “Are you sure it was really … that kind of dream?” My hands still ached from the memory of it all. The last time the dream came down I’d been ten years old and my easy knack for throwing darts had become, overnight, the uncanny force that makes folks slide away from you at church but come up to you after to ask for their numbers. They said we had saints’ hands, called us jujus and witches and confidence artists. You believed or you didn’t; no matter to the hands. They were our latter-day flood—or our plague—descended upon us after Emancipation. Ever since we moved north, the extra had run in my family: my great-uncle could tell a card just from touching it and my great-great- grandmother could pick up lightning in a storm. Mommy used to say that there were fewer of us in every generation, so she didn’t know why the dreams had struck two of her three children. I think she wanted to believe that it wasn’t her fault. Especially after my brother died. Especially after I went downtown. But now—I hadn’t done a job for Victor in nearly seven months. I’d told the man who gave me my past that I was thinking of a different future. He hadn’t said no. This little number in the first position, it’s the past sticking its fat nose into your present business. Might even be a good thing, but see these cards? They could mean some trouble just as easy. Those spades got sharp edges and no one likes a joker with a knife. “It was,” I said, soft, “that kind of dream.” 1 “Oh, Phyllis…” It had been Dev’s voice at the end of the dream; just his voice, warning me against nothing I could see; just his voice, pushing me awake, and away from him, again. He had only ever called me Phyllis in extremity: mortal danger, orgasm. I wondered which it would be this time. “Christ,” said the dentist, jamming his cigarette into my silver ashtray and getting another. “Christ, where’s that lighter? I hate even thinking about Red Man, and you have to go and dream about him…” “He’s not so bad. Not like Victor.” The dentist flinched. “You know what they say, the things he’s done. You just like him because he likes you … you and that snake girl, what’s her name—” “Tamara,” I said, not for the first time. The star of the famous snake dance at the Pelican Club was my best friend in the city. Lately, because my life has not tended to kindness, she’d also been Dev’s girl. But my own lover couldn’t bother himself to remember the name of some Negro showgirl. I leaned over the dentist to take another cigarette too, but instead he caught up my hand and gently traced its scars. I hated when he did that, though I never stopped him. The dentist’s hands were chapped with alcohol and smelled like rubber, while I rubbed mine with shea butter every morning. But his had done nothing worse than pull teeth and fix caps for Victor and his men. He found my scars to remind me of the necessary distance between us, the dentist and the hatchet girl. “Are you going to take the job, if it comes?” Was it disgust that flattened his tone? Or indifference? My heart shuddered uselessly, but I kept steady and kissed behind his left ear, the way he liked. He groaned. The dentist was my bargain; the dentist I could keep. It was easier to move through the world with him on my elbow than alone, when the doormen were more suspicious of women of my complexion. Unlike most white men of my acquaintance, he rarely let a bad word escape his lips about Negroes or even any other group. Besides, he was handsome enough and in possession of an understanding wife. For those qualities, I overlooked his other lapses as a lover—an aversion to cunnilingus, the ghoulish whiteness of his teeth, the faint but clinging scent of antiseptic. My dissatisfactions were, I knew, the inevitable neuroses of his profession, and considering those of my own profession, I was inclined to anticipatory forgiveness, hoping to get the same gold for myself. If I lost him, I wouldn’t have an easy time finding an old man half so nice; not at thirty-five, with my first grays wiggling out of my lye-made hair, and the scars that only Dev might have loved. “How long has it been since the last one, darling?” “Months,” I said, not wanting to own the number—seven—which felt too long and too short. I took a breath before answering the other question. “They’re bad people, you know, that’s all Victor gives me. Murderers and rapists. Real scum. When I signed on with Victor, that was our deal. That I’d be more than a hatchet man. That I could make the world a better place.” By killing people? You really believe that. I could hear Dev’s voice in the silence; the dentist only nodded. “Russian Vic’s angel of justice. His holy knife.” Pronounced carefully, like he was reading it from a book. My fingers locked. Most people called me that first thing—Victor’s angel, sometimes of justice. But only a few, the ones who had known me longest, called me his knife. “Where did you hear that?” I asked. The dentist looked out the window. “That—I mean, the Hindu bartender —Dev, right?—called you that once.