THE FIREWORKS HAD ended. Though the thunderclaps of color generally closed out the block party, the music was flowing again at this end of the block. The mounted police had retreated from their stance on Spruce Street, though they’d left calling cards in the form of horse shit. Murmurs of complaints rippled through the crowd about the white racist pigs trying to crash their party. The James Brown impersonator had taken to the stage again in a glowing orange-sequined pantsuit and high-heeled boots. Somebody yelled, “Hey, where’s your cape?” This brought laughter and applause from the crowd. The band leader called back, “Attheend, my man, canwe give thedrummer some, huh!” running his words together so that only every third or fourth one was intelligible. The audience loved it, laughing hysterically. Joe laughed in spite of himself as he moved into the crowd, relieved to see that the cops were leaving. He scanned the crowd for Louise. Saw Valadean and Johnetta, Johnetta whispering something in Valadean’s ear. Valadean put her hand to her mouth as she laughed, and Joe could see that her knuckles were wrapped with gauze. He looked away quickly, his mouth throbbing all over again at the memory of Valadean’s fists punching his mouth to a bloody pulp. He spotted Louise then with Maggie, up on Nathina’s porch. He wouldn’t allow thoughts right now of what he’d just done with Alberta. What he’d just done with Alberta was too complex and he knew he’d grapple with it until his dying day. Joe headed in Louise’s direction, weaving through the bodies dancing out here now. Clara grabbed his arm, and before he knew it he was caught in a dance, unable to get through the tight press of bodies. When the song was over and space opened up, he went directly for Nathina’s porch. But when he got there, Louise was gone. It felt to Joe as if he was looking at a snapshot where Louise’s image had been carefully, meticulously cut away, leaving just the outline of her against the backdrop of Cecil Street.
LOUISE HAD BEEN talking to the man Luther, who had returned to Cecil Street again looking for Deucie. Luther told Louise that he was very attached to Deucie because she reminded him of his mother. “She’s prone to headaches,” he said, his voice cracking even as he halfway shouted to be heard over the drums and the crowd’s enthusiasm for the James Brown impersonator. “Plus, her liver’s gone.” Louise stood so close to Luther under the archway of Nathina’s porch that she could see the sweat glistening on his mustache. She was mesmerized by the scar across his face that hadn’t been properly stitched. She was captivated too by the outline of the gun in his waistband, shadowing against his T-shirt. He was a bad man with his gun and scar and his black, black skin, his heat that Louise could feel moving inside her as they talked. She asked him what hospital should be held responsible for the botched repair job to his face. She was a nurse, she explained, she noticed people’s work, that’s why she was asking. He said he’d stitched it himself. He told her that if she had some time, he could tell her how he’d gotten his face slit in the first place. Most women couldn’t handle the description of how it had happened, he said, but being a nurse and all, he was sure that she could handle it.
Oh, she could definitely handle it, she laughed, as she thought then how easy it would be, given the right set of circumstances, to leave this block of Cecil Street and go home with this Luther, wrap herself around his badness, lose control. She rarely had such thoughts and was getting worked up over this one, squeezing her thighs together, looking right into his eyes that were hard and kind.
“You a pretty lady,” he said. “Married?”
She felt her cheeks going hot and flush as she hunched her shoulders, as if to say she didn’t know. He raised his eyebrows and started moving his shoulders and his arms and his hips and before she knew it they were dancing on Nathina’s porch to the tune of the James Brown impersonator singing out, “I got the feeling, now.” Louise snapped her fingers and shimmied around and around as Luther moved into her back and she could feel the butt of his gun brush against her. She raised her arms and hollered, “All right now.” She pulled her hair straight up and let it fall back disheveled and wild. Luther had his hand on her waist and she slowed herself so that they were moving in perfect sync. His large hands were callused, she could tell as he pressed them against her lightweight dotted-swiss shirt. She imagined how tender his touch would be as he compensated for his rough skin. By the time the song was over and they laughed together, out of breath, Louise was considering inviting him inside Nathina’s house. Who was there to stop her? Maggie certainly wouldn’t; Nathina would probably wink her eye. She reached in and touched Luther’s scar that was the texture of steak gristle. Thought she would pee on herself when she did, and told him that she could definitely handle the story of his scar. But right then she caught a glimpse of Joe far off in her peripheral vision; she hated that she always knew exactly where Joe was in a crowd, even now when she was allowing a desire for another man to build inside her, she was focusing in on Joe.
Now she had to go to the bathroom, urgently. She asked Luther if he would excuse her for just a minute. She ran into Nathina’s house. Barely made it upstairs to the bathroom without wetting herself. Realized then how long she’d been holding in her need to go. Had been holding her water since before she’d even left her house to come down here. Left her house in uncharacteristic disarray because once the house had emptied and the music had stopped, she was frightened by sounds coming up from her basement. For several weeks had been hearing sounds, coming up from the basement but was afraid to go down there until Joe fixed the light switch, afraid there might be rats down there the way that Nathina said there were rats in the apartment above her husband’s shop. It dawned on her now that Tim was lying, there were no rats above the shop. Realized now that there were no rats in her basement either. Her head cleared as she peed. Felt the desire for Luther dissipating with the pee. Now she thought about the woman Luther had come here to find.
She washed her hands as she said the name out loud, Deucie. She dried her hands on Nathina’s satin-edged hand towel. Then she washed and dried her hands again. Then one more time. Always washed her hands three times when she went to care for the dying. She moved through Nathina’s house then, to the back of the house, and left through the back door. Walked quickly through the alley, ducking out of the way of the protruding ivy, taking in the honey-suckle as she turned at the Cyclone fence of her backyard and then to the window that led to her cellar.
The window was open. Louise stooped and pushed her head in and peered through the darkness. Was immediately struck by the smell as she climbed through the window and down into the cellar and followed the odor to the front of the basement, under the steps. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, her nose to the smell that rose up from the mattress of clothes spread out on the floor. Louise knew the smell of death. Not the smell of death that was antiseptic and cleaned up, neutralized, which she worked around all day long in the hospital. She knew the smell of death when it came into a home where people lived trying to deny its approach. It rose off the skin like a fog in the morning if you were willing to look it in the face, know that this was death and that it was mostly a blessing. She hadn’t been able to look at it straight on. She’d cover her face as if she was watching a horror movie, separating her fingers only once in a while to peek through. Though her sister Maggie had tried to prepare her, in her own way. She’d take both Louise’s hands in her own and say, Louise, what are we going to do when we have to tell Mother good-bye? Louise would cover her ears then. She was just a little girl, only ten. She couldn’t even fathom such a thing.
HER MOTHER HAD called for her that morning. She had gasped out Louise’s name over and over. She was struggling to breathe, Louise could tell by the choking sounds she made, the way she was clutching at her throat as Louise walked into her room that morning. Louise didn’t know what to do when she saw her mother flailing about like that. She ran back into her own room and threw herself on the bed and covered her head with the pillow. She stayed like that with the pillow shielding her from those awful gasping sounds for almost an hour. When she unfolded herself from the bed, the house was silent, so still. She went to make her mother’s tea then. The tea brewing always calmed her down as she’d sit and watch the leaves turn the water to a greenish brown. The tea seemed to be taking a long time this morning and she kept boiling more water to rush it. Then she went into her mother’s room, anxious to see her mother smile the way she always did when Louise brought her morning tea. Mama loves her little helper so, she’d gush.
But no smile greeted Louise this time. Just her mother’s eyes, wide open and still. And the stench of death. She thought now as she reversed herself and started walking again through the dark cellar, toward the back window, that it had been the smell that had shocked her and made her hands shake and the teacup rattle around on the saucer, tilting completely, streaming the hot liquid right down her mother’s chest, causing her to worry from then on if her mother had felt the tea scald her as she sat propped up against the headboard, already dead.
Louise followed this stench now to the back of the cellar, this stench a mixture of urine and bile, dried blood, sour skin. She was at the window now, the wooden pony under the wide-open window. She hopped up and pushed herself up and out again into the backyard. Light from the alley lamp drizzled down and she could see drops of blood in the yard, like bread crumbs, leading to Alberta’s yard. She went into Alberta’s yard and up the back steps and knocked. When she didn’t get an answer, she pushed through the door and went on in. She alternated between calling for Alberta or Neet as she walked through the kitchen and into the dining room and living room, following the droplets of blood and the occasional spots of watery shit. She caught a whiff of Brut aftershave in the living room, recognized it as such because that’s what Joe wore. She called louder as she walked up the stairs, thought she even smelled Joe in the close hallway, shook off the thought because she was at the bedroom door that she guessed must be Alberta’s room. She saw a white-robed figure in the center of the bed. Her hands were opening and closing and she was making clucking sounds. Louise could see even from where she was the jaundice that had yellowed her eyes, her skin.
“Deucie?” Louise said as she walked all the way into the room, recognized the robe as her mother’s robe that had been packed away so many years ago.
“Alberta?” Deucie replied.
“I’m sorry, no, I’m not Alberta, I’m Louise. I live next door. You must be Alberta’s mother, right? Deucie. A man named Luther’s been looking for you, Deucie.”
“Chile, I know,” Deucie said, her voice high like a whistle, slow, as if she was translating her words from a different language as she spoke, and had to first think about the pronunciation. She paused. “But I’m dying,” she said, finally.
“I know you are, baby,” Louise said. “You want to go to the hospital?”
“Lord, no. Please, no!”
“All right, all right. I can understand that. But I’ma stay here with you till Alberta gets back. I don’t know where she is, Neet either. Might have gone to church. I’ma help you though. You don’t mind, do you? If I stay right here and help you, maybe soften it for you some?”
Deucie shrugged her shoulders. “You done enough,” she said. “Feeding me.”
Louise lifted Deucie’s hand and held it, taking her pulse as she did. “So you been in my cellar for, what was it? A month?”
“That place sure brought my appetite on.”
“You hurting?”
“Not so bad.” She motioned then to the spot just above her stomach.
“Cirrhosis?” Louise asked.
Alberta nodded.
Louise put her hand to Deucie’s forehead. Then she rubbed her hand down the side of her face, stopping at the gash just below her cheekbone. “You were a fighter, huh?”
“Chile, I kicked some ass in my day,” Deucie said.
Louise smiled as she tried to imagine Deucie with clear eyes, a plumpness to her sagging cheeks, her soft gray hair combed out. She told Deucie that a nice sponge bath would help right now.
Deucie had fallen off to sleep by the time Louise was back in the room. She set a pot filled with water on the floor next to the bed and dampened a washcloth and proceeded to wipe the dried mucus from the corners of Deucie’s eyes, then moved on to clear away the blood caked under her nose. She gently pulled the robe down from around her shoulders, the bones in her shoulders protruding. By the time she had sponged down her arms, wiping between her fingers, flexing and bending her fingers in a tender massage, Deucie was awake, staring at her, her face softer now after having been cleaned up.
Louise smiled at Deucie. “You and Alberta favor one another,” she said. “Y’all both pretty.”
“Shit, you crazy,” Deucie said, the whistle still in her voice, though her voice had more energy to it now. “Nothing pretty ’bout me.”
“You wrong. I bet you had many a man weak in the knees in your day.”
“Had ’em doing it on their knees,” she said. And Louise could tell that she was trying to laugh though the laugh caught in her throat and she grimaced instead. So Louise squeezed her hand until her face relaxed.
“All right now with your little fresh self,” Louise said. “I need to change this water and then turn you over and do your back. Can I trust you to behave while I go get some more water?” She thought Deucie winked as she quickly backed out of the room, flooded suddenly with an intensity of feeling for Deucie.
She sat the pot in the tub and ran the water, then went down the hall to Neet’s room looking for a picture of Alberta to show to Deucie. Had already searched Alberta’s walls and dresser and seen pictures of Neet at various stages, but none of Alberta. In Neet’s room, she opened a heart-shaped photo album with picture after picture of Neet and Shay, Neet and Little Freddie, even Neet and Brownie, but none of Alberta. She noticed Neet’s Bible then. There in the inside flap was a yellowed Polaroid of a breathtakingly beautiful woman. Louise gasped because she’d seen this woman before in that foxtail-collared suit that hung off the shoulder. Years ago. She’d not forgotten. How could she ever forget the look on the woman’s face that night sitting alone at a table in the back of the club. Louise had wanted to slap that look of heat, of desire, that had come over the woman’s face as Joe played his horn. It was that look, that face that convinced Louise that night that Joe would have to put his horn down. Realized that night that she couldn’t, wouldn’t compete with every pretty woman in a club affected by Joe’s playing, allowing their passions to accumulate as he played, showing so shamelessly on their faces what he was doing to them as he played, enticing him, pulling on him with their looks of base desire, calling him away from her. Night after night. That couldn’t be her life, she’d decided that night as she’d watched that woman with her shoulders sparkling in the fox-collared suit jacket. No way. He’d have to cut the strap that hung that sax around his neck. Relegate his playing to a hobby instead of a vocation. Pick up the habits of a nine-to-five-type man. The picture shook in her hands as she told herself that no way could this be Alberta, not dowdy, stiff Alberta. She turned the picture over, her eyesight blurring as she took in the words on the back, “Alberta, you are one fine lady. Your Always Friend, Pops.”
She swallowed hard as she left Neet’s room, trying to submerge the dense compress of emotions expanding and edging up her throat. She wondered if Joe knew Alberta back then, wondered if Alberta had just been an adoring fan, or someone attached to Joe’s emotions.
By the time she was back in the room where Deucie was, Louise wanted to ball the photo up in her hands, but the sight of Deucie softened her. She showed Deucie the picture. “I bet you were prettier even than Alberta in your day,” she said as Deucie grabbed for the picture and stared at it, a thin stream of water running from her eyes.
They were both quiet as Louise finished cleaning up Deucie, Deucie watching her intently as she tried to help Louise out by rolling in the direction Louise nudged her. Louise dressed Deucie in a lightweight cotton nightgown from Neet’s drawer. Told Deucie it was her granddaughter’s. Told her what a lovable child Neet was, smart, honor-roll student, so pleasant to be around, so giving, bright, bright future waiting. She felt a surge of emotion coating her words as she talked about Neet. Telling Deucie now that Neet had been through a trauma recently. Said that she faulted herself partially. Had she only allowed herself to know consciously what she knew deep inside, she could have helped Neet before things got too far gone, taken her to a safe, clean place. “I just pray to God she doesn’t suffer permanent damage as a result. She doesn’t deserve that.” Louise was no longer looking at Deucie, she was looking at Alberta’s dresser, the hairnet on the dresser, bothered by the sight of the hairnet, but then she felt Deucie’s hand wrap around her wrist, pulling Louise’s attention back to her. “She’ll heal,” Deucie said. “Already has.”
Louise felt a great relief opening up in her chest even as she dabbed at the trickles of blood draining from Deucie’s nose. Figured that she could trust what Deucie had just said, that Neet would heal. Deucie was too close to death not to know such things.
“Wonder if me and Joe will heal,” she said, more to herself than to Deucie.
“Chile, nothing better than loving what you ain’t got to own,” Deucie replied, eyes closed now, already half asleep.
Louise couldn’t tell if Deucie was rambling or if her words meant something. She didn’t try to keep her awake and talking to find out. She propped herself up in the bed and listened to Deucie breathe. The room was still and the outside sounds floated up here, the block-party sounds that Louise had been oblivious to once she’d washed her hands in Nathina’s bathroom. She focused in now on the scatters of voices, remnants of music, laughter. “Thank you, Jesus,” she shouted at the realization that Neet would heal. “Thank you, Lord.” She hadn’t intended to shout like that, didn’t want to pull Deucie from her sleep. Deucie was smiling in her sleep, as if she understood why Louise had just shouted. Louise bent over and kissed Deucie’s forehead that smelled now of Ivory soap.
She leaned back against the headboard. Her thoughts bounced around the way they always did when she was about to fall asleep. Thoughts running the gamut from the hairnet on the dresser to the way she’d swung her hips when she danced with Luther, to Neet, to Alberta in that picture. She picked the picture up from the bed where it had fallen from Deucie’s hands and propped it up on the nightstand. After all of her cajoling, her sweet persuasion, her turning her dark eyes on and off, teasing one minute, threatening the next, after all of that—the one in the picture had ended up right next door. She had the thought as she drifted off to sleep that maybe Alberta and Joe had run off together. That had been the problem with Joe, or when she thought about it, the problem with her—she’d always been waiting for him to leave her. Always focused on what he was doing. How many of her own years had she lost trying to keep Joe, trying to own Joe.
IT WAS ALMOST dawn and Joe was a wreck not knowing where Louise was. He’d been unable to go to bed, had half slept in the chair by the bedroom window, waking with a start every fifteen minutes, calling for Louise, walking through the house all over again. Nobody else had seemed to be worried about Louise as the block party had finally begun to fizzle out and even the most diehard dancers had taken to a step, a porch, and finally inside a house. Joe had gone up and down the block and around the corner. Went to Nathina’s and Joyce’s and Clara’s, Johnetta’s, BB’s. Each time he came back to his own house praying for Louise to be here but was met with her absence, her absence shuttling his emotions from concern to the near hysteria he was feeling now. Shay and Neet were each curled up in a chair in the living room, having reunited on the porch with a crying then a laughing fest, joined by Maggie later. Maggie, snoring openmouthed now on the couch, a half-empty bottle of Manischewitz Concord grape on the floor next to her bag; wine-stained shot glasses next to the chairs where Neet and Shay slept. Joe would ordinarily have been amused by such a scene, but now the scene made Louise’s absence all the more stark. He picked up the phone to call the police, then put it down, strangled by the thought that Louise might have left him. He walked through the house one more time just to make sure she hadn’t come in. His horn was sitting in the high-backed corner chair where he’d left it after he’d played last night. Played last night really for Alberta. “What have I done?” he said out loud as he picked up the horn and put the strap around himself, and walked out onto the porch. “Damn, what I have done. Awl man, what have I done?”
Daylight was organizing itself over Cecil Street in layers of royal blue and red and orange and pink. Joe stood on his porch and put his horn to his mouth. He played tenuously at first, trying not to cry as he realized that he’d never done this before. Played for Louise. He’d played for his dead father and sister and mother, played for the Pittsburgh he’d left years ago, played for Alberta, played for the many nameless women who’d sit front and center during his shows, played for Cecil Street and the surrounding blocks that could likely hear him when he played. But he’d never played for Louise. He did now. Begged as he played that she’d come back. Swore his love as he played. Asked her forgiveness as he played. Didn’t know he had the song in him that he now played. A song of his own creation. It was wide and beautiful and just for Louise. Right now he played for Louise.
Louise was coming to from the surprisingly deep sleep she’d fallen into propped up in the bed next to Deucie. Deucie was still asleep, still alive, though Louise could hear the phlegm attached to her breathing now, the death rattle. She tiptoed to the hallway and cocked her ear. The house was still. No Alberta yet. Wondered where Alberta could be. She started for downstairs to get salt so she could rinse out her mouth. Then stopped because she thought she heard a horn playing. A saxophone. Couldn’t be. But there it was. Had to be Joe. Was he crazy? Out on the porch this time of morning playing his horn. She ran back into the bedroom certain that the sound of the horn would rouse Deucie. It did, and now Louise was already planning how she was going to bang that fucking horn like it was a tin can. Deucie sat straight up then. Her shoulders were squared and her head was high. Louise thought she should be too weak to hold herself erect like that. She was pulling at her neck as if she was trying to speak. Louise put her ear in close so she could hear what Deucie was trying to say. “What is it, sweetheart?” Louise asked.
“Alberta? That you, Alberta?” The whistle was gone from her voice, not enough air for a whistle now.
Louise nodded, her eyes misting over as Deucie took in her face.
“You—really made—you softened it—” she said, breaking between her words to try to breathe. “And—and Gab—? Gabriel’s horn?”
Louise nodded again as she lightly rubbed Deucie’s hands. “Yeah, sweetheart, that’s Gabriel’s horn,” she said.
“Blow for me, baby,” Deucie said. “Yeah, Gabriel, yeah.”
Louise felt a breeze then that seemed to start at the bottom of the nightgown that Deucie wore. She watched the breeze gently ripple up the gown and then onto Deucie’s face, tilting her chin like a lover seeking a kiss, opening her eyes all the way, moving through her hair like the swipe of a wide-tooth comb. And just like that, Deucie was gone. Louise drew her hands over Deucie’s eyes to close them. She rubbed Deucie’s hand even as the warmth was leaving the top of her skin. She rubbed her hand and cried. Cried finally. Finally, cried. She listened to Joe play as she cried. Allowed Joe’s playing to move inside her. She’d never allowed herself to really listen to him before. Such a nice backdrop his playing was now to this room crowded with the angels guiding Deucie home.
She cried now over how beautiful it was, his playing, Deucie’s passing. How big. Thought now that she could forgive almost anything from a man who knew to blow his horn at the exact moment when it had the power to soften death. She cried now like she’d been meant to cry over the years since her own mother had died, but never could. Now she could.
She sat with Deucie and cried until Deucie’s skin started to cool, until the angels left the room, as Maggie would say, until she heard Joe calling for her. His voice fading in and out as he walked up and down Cecil Street calling her name. Louise dialed for the medical examiner and then went home.
JOE’S PLAYING MUST have wakened the block, Louise thought, because it was more like five in the evening and not the morning out here. Chatter jumped over the banisters from end to end about how last night’s had been the best block party ever. Assemblages gathered in the street now to bag the trash and hose down under the rides with water and bleach. Louise stepped over the banister and onto her porch and into the living room to the sight of three beautiful sleeping lumps. Maggie on the couch, and Shay and Neet each in a chair. Louise just stood there and took in the scene, wondering how they’d slept through Joe’s horn playing just now. As if on cue, Shay sprang suddenly awake. She almost knocked Louise over the way she ran for her and jumped on her and hugged her and asked her where had she been. “God, Mom, Dad was going crazy, and me and Aunt Maggie and Bonita were even getting worried.”
Louise buried her chin in the softness of Shay’s ’fro and told her it was such a long story. They should wake up Neet, she whispered. She’d been next door caring for Neet’s grandmother who’d just died. Maybe Neet knew where Alberta was. Did Neet say last night where her mother might be?
Shay shook her head, stunned. “Neet’s grandmother died?” Then she started to cry.
Joe blasted through the front door like a gunshot then, calling out Louise’s name. He dropped his saxophone from around his neck when he saw Shay standing there crying. “Louise, don’t, please don’t,” he said, thinking that Louise had just told Shay that she was leaving. He pulled her into the barricade he made with his arms, held her there as he begged her to stay. “Please, Louise, stay. Please. Stay.”
Louise didn’t say anything. She let Joe hold her. Remnants of his Brut aftershave still clung to the space under his neck. And something else. The smell of leather and brass and mint. The way he’d always smell after he’d just done a show and she would breathe in his essence, trying to pick up another woman’s scent. Trying to figure out why he looked so drained in a satisfied way, as if he’d just prayed and seen God. Only knew of one thing that made a man look that way. She gobbled up the smell now, understood it now. Just his breaths, that’s all. His breaths transformed in the notes he played, changing him. This time, changing her too.