WATERS RISE

Stag didn’t fire fast—he was looking to kill a few folks and dispel the crowd, not clog the place with bodies. Still, in their panic, some of the dancers couldn’t decide which way to run. Almost no one who saw Stagger Lee was willing to chance breaking past him, but neither did it seem a good idea to run farther into the club, what with Stagger Lee stalking that way.

On the fifth floor, a trio of revelers barred Stag’s way. Operating as one, they began to perform. The light-skinned man with the dreadlocks began to beatbox while his shorter, dark-skinned, bespectacled friend began to freestyle:

Lemme find out you encroaching on my territory

Cutting up rough, tellin’ my boys that you be gunnin’ for me

Ya made a mistake and ya done fucked up good

Cuz Kamari the Damaja is the king of the hood!

The beat hit Stag hard, and the lyrics raised welts on his skin. He gritted his teeth against the pain. The dark-skinned rapper glanced at the third member of their crew.

My mans tell the truth and he does not lie

You come at Shaina the Maimer, boy you finna—!

Stagger Lee shot her in the face, and the trio’s magic evaporated. With one punch he caved in the other rapper’s chest while the beatboxer turned and ran.

Someone pulled a fire alarm, and the club’s music stopped. As Stagger Lee turned a corner, he saw that someone had forced open a pair of stairwell doors, and one man in neon bike shorts, a spangled feather boa, and a rainbow Afro wig was directing people through it, trying, as he did, to mitigate their panic. Stag shot him just for grins. He laughed out loud when the man fell over backwards and the doors banged shut. The three costumed women jostling to get out wailed in unison, and Stagger Lee considered capping them, too. He had work to do, though, so he moved on. He sensed his quarry nearby.

He started up the ramp to the next level, and by now, the stampede had begun in earnest. The braver souls streamed down the ramp as Stagger Lee walked up. They had sense enough to give him a wide berth, so instead of shooting at any of them, Stag made a game of it. He would count to five in his head and then lash out, backhand, with one hand or the other, breaking bones or killing on impact.

After the third such swipe, Stagger Lee looked up the ramp and saw the figure he’d been looking for this whole time.

Tipsy Tina had lost a button or two off her top, but she was still decent. Her multicolored hair was awry. It looked like she’d been out partying hard, and when she realized she wouldn’t make it home to pass out, she just lay where she was and snoozed. She wore too much foundation, and her makeup was smudged—especially round her mouth on account of all the gin she’d been drinking. Her belly poked out, full of the stuff, but her eyes—mismatched, one gray, one blue—were as clear as they were sad.

As she met Stag’s gaze, he grinned like a shark and pointed at her. BE THERE DIRECTLY, he mouthed.

What she did next surprised Stagger Lee all to hell.

Tipsy Tina slung her legs over the railing where she sat and dropped onto the ramp. The clubbers still rushed this way and that, but they didn’t matter anymore. Right now, the whole world was Tina and Stag. All he needed to do was summon his.45 and blow her head clean off…

… But he didn’t.

Staring into each other’s eyes, the two wayward songs closed the distance to stand face-to-face. Tipsy Tina looked up at Stagger Lee, who was a good two feet taller.

“Well, you got what you wanted,” she slurred. “You done ruint the party. Shit.”

THAT AIN’T WHAT I WANTED, MS. THING. I WANT YOU.

“If I’da known you was this bad, I’da turnt myself over long time ago,” Tina said. She showed him her palms. “Here I’m is. Go ’head and put it on me. Just don’t hurt nobody else because of me, ya heard?”

I DON’T DEAL, BABY. NOTHIN’ TO STOP ME KILLIN’ YOU STONE DEAD AND THEN KILLIN’ EVERYBODY ELSE I CAN FIND EVEN LOOK LIKE THEY WAS UP IN HERE WITH YOU.

The statement seemed to shock her sober. “Why, though?” she asked without a trace of her slur. “What these people ever done to you? All they was trying to do is have a good time and dance.”

WHY? ’CAUSE I’M STAGGER LEE, DAMB IT. THIS ME, BABY.

“You don’t have to do this.”

Stagger Lee sneered.

“Negro, listen to me,” Tina said. “I’m not tryna save my life. This life ain’t never meant much to me. I stayed in the box till the ole man played me, and then I’d come out to dance, and then I’d go back to sleep. If you do what you finna do, either I’ll either be nothing or I’ll be free. Being the biggest and baddest, yeah, I imagine that’s something else, but you know what? If you don’t know why you do what you do, then what difference do it make?”

YOU LYIN’. YOU AFRAID TO DIE.

Stagger Lee willed the gun into his palm and slowly raised its barrel.

Tipsy Tina reached down with both hands and grabbed Stagger Lee’s left hand, gun and all. With surprising strength, she wrenched it up and pressed her forehead to the barrel. “BANG!” she shouted, and laughed uproariously.

Startled by the noise, Stagger Lee squeezed the.45’s trigger.

Everything that had been inside Tipsy Tina’s head fled out the back of her skull. Piano music and a bluesy braying voice. The choruses, the verses, all at once, and along with them an inhalation, a sort of negative-sound, as of a sneeze, but backwards.

Even as she fell, her body and clothes dissolved to nothing, and Tipsy Tina was gone. Stagger Lee stared at the spot where she’d stood. He sensed vaguely that the clubbers seemed to fear him less now. They bumped past him in their haste to leave Tha Bangin’ Gardens, as if unaware that Stagger Lee was the one they were fleeing in the first place.

Darkness descended like a velvet curtain as the power went out all over town.

There are thoughts so powerful, so freighted with meaning, that the moment one thinks them, one is forever changed. Sometimes a man or a woman—even a boy or a girl—can sense themselves on the verge of one of these changing thoughts, and on rare occasions, can try not to think them. (Which never, ever works.) Sometimes that effort is instinctive, and you try to unthink a thought even as it occurs, like a waiter momentarily losing control of a pile of dishes and regaining that balance before everything can leave his grasp and crash down. That’s what Stagger Lee tried to do now.

The thought was simple: This shit ain’t right.

Just four words, but their implication was terrible.

This was much worse than when Stagger Lee had had Jailbird and then the boy with the clackin’ bag right in his sights. That time, the mighty little redbone girl had knocked the gun aside, and Stag’s shot had gone wild, and then the boy with the bag had defied him, fearless, and confused Stag with his words—the magic ones and the mundane—before he disappeared.

But this… Stagger Lee found himself powerless but to admit that he hadn’t meant to shoot Tipsy Tina. He hadn’t truly made the decision. He wasn’t a fool—he knew he would have shot her before long, but he would have at least tried to understand where the other song was coming from. How she managed to seem so unafraid.

Because, let’s face it, that song was terrified… wasn’t she? Stagger Lee knew what courage was—the ability to act against the paralyzing influence of fear—but the true absence of fear made no sense to him.

Another, even worse thought: What if you don’t understand a body being unafraid because you scared out your natural mind? What if you scared right now? So scared you don’t even know it?

“Naw,” Stagger Lee murmured to himself. “Nuh-uh. No way. I ain’t awful, baby. Awful is me.”

Maybe, Stagger Lee thought, but if awful is me, then what Yakumo is?

Brendy stood on the roof of One Canal Place, gazing way off into Metry. Rain fell all around her, and wind gusted hard, but Brendy felt the weather as if from far away. She knew with a fuzzy certainty that she was divided, that the Brendy of Dreams stood here in her patent-leather shoes as Real Life Brendy lay sleeping soundly on her parents’ living room sofa. If this was a dream, though, it was also not. The wet, the wind, the salt smell gusting at her off the Gulf were all as real as real could be. So was the angry purple sky and its cloud-to-cloud lightning that clattered back and forth.

“Okay!” Brendy called into the storm. “Here I’m is! You got sumpthin to say to me, come on wit it!”

Just then, lightning split the air, bathing Brendy’s surroundings in stark, false daylight. By the illumination, Brendy saw a white wicker basket like the one Mr. Ghiazi kept by his desk in Brendy’s homeroom class. From it rose a flower with a bright yellow face and puffy pink petals. Each of its eyes was a thick black X, and its mouth was a round black circle with two buckteeth right at the top.

At the sight of her old friend, a thrill of recognition lit Brendy from the inside. “Froggo!”

Daddy Deke had given Brendy the plush flower for one birthday or another. It hadn’t even been her big gift from him—Just a lagniappe meant to sit on the mantel in Brendy’s bedroom and make her smile whenever she glanced at it—but in the way of such things, it had captured Brendy’s interest immediately, and she had fallen desperately in love with the toy. She’d named it Froggo—or had it named itself? Brendy couldn’t remember whether the flower had been capable of speech or if she had simply imagined it so. Some wise, removed part of herself understood that the distinction didn’t matter.

Not Froggo, said the flower. Bilipit.

“Aw! Billy! Why you look like Froggo? I ain’t never seent you before. Can’t you look like you?

Must not, said the flower. Div aspect dire and frighten. Here to protect. Trap. Trap!

“Protect…? Wait. What’s a trap? Me being here?!”

The squeal of metal door hinges sounded several yards to Brendy’s left. She turned to see the roof access door swing open, and Gun Man hisself, Stagger Lee, stepped onto the roof, wide-eyed and grinning.

“Wake up,” Brendy said, unaware that she spoke aloud. “Wake up now!” But nothing happened.

WHAT IT DO, LITTLE BIT? Stagger Lee thundered. MUSTA FORGOT YO BODY AT HOME.

Panic sank like a stone into the pit of Brendy’s belly. Brendy knew she should run—but run where? She didn’t know how she’d got here in the first place! What could she do? Jump off the roof? She looked this way and that, hoping to catch sight of Billy-as-Froggo, but he was nowhere—Billy shifted, and Brendy realized he was closer than she’d thought. He twined around her left arm like a friendly snake.

I smite, Billy said. His “voice” was low and dangerous.

No, Brendy thought. Wait. Then, aloud, “Whatchoo want, Gun Man? If you wanna fight, you finna get one, ya heard?”

AIN’T HERE TO HARM YA, BABYGIRL. JUST THOUGHT YOU MIGHT WANT A VISIT WITH YO GRANDADDY.

“For real, for real?” Brendy said. “You take me to Daddy Deke, I won’t even hurt you none.”

Trap, Billy said. Smite!

Oh, I know it is, Brendy thought. And we gone smite. Just not yet!

“I know you don’t believe me, Gun Man,” she said aloud, “but I’m deadass. If you don’t mess with me, I won’t hurt you, okay? But that’s my promise, not Perry’s. Perry still gone kill you for snatching Daddy Deke and hurting Peaches, all right?”

IS HE, NOW?

“Did I stutter, or did yo mind skip, Mistuh Man?”

COME ON SEE THE OLE MAN, THEN WE SEE WHO DO WHAT TO WHO.

You ready? Brendy thought.

Ready, Billy said.

Then let’s do this.

“Awright, then,” Brendy said. “Lead the way, Mr. Gangsta-est Gangsta!”

Stagger Lee came forward and held out his big, thick right hand. Brendy gazed at it for a beat, then took it. She glanced up at Stagger Lee’s face, and her gaze lingered there. “Oh, wow.”

WHAT?

“I didn’t know you could look sad.”

The walk home seemed interminable. By now it was raining so hard that Perry could barely see through it. His visibility was so bad that it was not until he stepped into water up to his waist that he realized how badly the neighborhood had flooded. He trudged, careful not to bring his feet down on anything sharp and to avoid tripping. He wondered whether he was crying and how he would know even if he was. His nose and sinuses were clear, so he supposed it must be rainwater only running down his face. Besides, he felt bad, but he didn’t feel weepy. Something had hardened inside him since he awakened to find Peaches gone. It was like a lump of coal or a great diamond. He could have pitched it through a pane of glass and made a satisfying crash.

Mama Lisa was waiting on the front porch when Perry reached the house. She wore one of Perry’s mama’s sweaters. More than one size too big, it hung on her like an orange sloth on a tree branch, enfolding her neck and chest like furry arms.

They watched each other as Perry’s feet found the front walk and carried him out of the grimy waters.

Perry took a deep breath and reached into his pocket for the sack. He didn’t pull it out yet—in a quick flash, he remembered the man from the car yard and the look on his face when he had reached for the gun he didn’t have and Brendy and Perry had steeled themselves to use their own weapons.

Because that’s what Brendy’s rock and Perry’s Clackin’ Sack were: weapons.

He felt the fabric with his fingertips. It comforted him, reminded him that he was not entirely powerless in all this.

“They’ve got her,” he said. “They’ve got Peaches.”

“Yes,” Mama Lisa said. “And now we must plan to get her back.”

“Tell Brendy it’s time to go.”

“I will not,” Mama Lisa said. “I don’t lie, and it is not yet time for you to go.”

“I can’t waste time arguing,” Perry said. “I don’t have time for you to tell me grown-up stuff that don’t make sense. It’s up to us. Us kids.”

“Come inside. You need to eat, and while you do, I’ll do my best to tell you what you need to know.”

“Who will decide what that is?” Perry asked. “You?”

“Perry.”

“You complicate things on purpose. You know you do. The question is simple, but you’ll say something that doesn’t make sense, and it’s not because you know so much, it’s because you don’t. Peaches was right about you. All of you. You tell lies even when you don’t mean to, and there’s no such thing as you. No such thing as grown-ups.”

Mama Lisa sighed. “Perilous, what Peaches told you about grown-ups is true. But part of being grown up is understanding that a thing can be true and not-true, all at once.”

“See?!” Perry said. “Right there! That doesn’t make any sense! You know what I’m going to ask you, and you’re being confusing so you can make up an answer that isn’t a lie and isn’t the truth, either! I was gonna—! I was going to ask you to tell me what I need to know, but I can’t because that’s how you do it. That’s how Mr. Larry did it. He really is Mr. Larry, but he’s also Yakumo at the same time. He lies without lying, and he’s out to get us.”

“Do you think I’m out to get you?”

“No,” Perry said. “No, but—but you’re not on my side, either, because you don’t know about me or what I—what I—! You don’t understand what’s happening to us.”

“I understand what’s happening to you, child,” Mama Lisa said. “Your power, your… might is blooming like a flower. It’s stretching up and up like a mighty oak, and the height of its towering dizzies you.”

Perry stopped short and ran his grandmother’s words back through his mind. Blooming, stretching… She was exactly right, and there was nothing slippery about her description.

“How much will it change me?” Perry asked. “Will I still be me? Am I now? Will there be two of me like Mr. Larry?”

“You’re nothing at all like Mr. Hearn,” Mama Lisa said. “For starters, you’re alive and you’re sane.”

Perry withdrew his hand from his pocket and crossed to the porch steps. These last few steps seemed longest of all. His throat felt raw, as if he’d screamed himself hoarse. His back ached between his shoulder blades. He felt as if he was still trudging through the floodwaters. As if he always would be. Should he ask his grandmother about the horn? Should he tell her about his…“vision” didn’t seem like the right word.

“I’m all wet,” he said. “It’s bad out here.”

“And you need dry clothes, at least, don’t you?”

“I touched something. I reached in, and I felt something, and I was someone else. I played music and everyone was sweaty, and the floor was dirt, and they danced.”

Mama Lisa’s eyes widened. She opened her mouth but said nothing. She closed it again.

“Will you tell me? Tell me what’s in the sack that I can use on Yakumo and Stagger Lee.”

The shock in her expression softened, but her eyes still looked hollow. The worry in her was plain to see, but Perry wasn’t sure what was bothering her so badly. Was it the storm? The threat to the city? The prospect that they were all about to die? Or was it what Perry had just told her? Maybe it was all those things, but Perry wasn’t sure what that meant for his present circumstance. She was family, after all. Did that mean she could be trusted?

“Come in and get out of those clothes. Take a shower, and I’ll tell you what I can.”

The little girl talked too much. Just talked and talked without waiting for answers, but as long as he ignored half of what she said, Brendy—for that seemed to be her name—didn’t even work Stag’s nerves.

Leaving Tha Bangin’ Gardens took time. Stag had guided the girl into a stairwell that reached all the way down to the street. He hoped to spare her the sight of dead bodies, and the fact that to do so had occurred to him at all bothered him badly.

Stagger Lee tried not to think about what he was doing. He tried not to think through the implications of his actions. He—

When they reached the seventh floor, Brendy stopped walking. Stag continued on a few paces before looking back to see what kept her.

She crossed her arms over her little chest, glowering at him, obstinate. “I know this a trap,” she said. “You think you slick, Gun Man, but you can’t fool me.”

I GOT NO USE FOR TRICKERY, Stagger Lee said. His voice sounded brittle in his own ears. Her accusation had stung him. Was he going crazy? IF I MEANT YOU HARM, I’D JUST HARM YOU.

“You swear on a stack of Bibles you taking me to by Daddy Deke?”

WE BEEN OVER THIS.

“Yeah,” Brendy said. “But I figured you was just lying. I mean you a criminal and errythang, right?”

Stag creased his neck. AIN’T NO CRIMINAL.

“So you think fightin in the street and breathing fire on folks something a good, churchgoin’ Mistuh Man would do?”

I THINK I WAS A CRIMINAL ONCE. A GANGSTA. BUT NOWDAYS I’M MORE OF A ELEMENTAL EVIL.

“Hate to break it to ya, baby, but that mouthful o’ jewels says you still gangsta as gangsta get.”

With great effort, Stagger Lee spoke like a man. “Listen to me,” he said. “Listen. Do you know the name Lee Shelton?”

The girl seemed taken aback by… something. The emotion in his voice? She looked at him sidelong for a beat. “I don’t know,” she said. “Should I?”

“I’m not sure,” Stagger Lee said. He hated the sound of his own voice. He sounded weak and childish, capable of nothing. He sounded like the kind of sniveling little nobody who could be done wrong by anyone at all. “I think I had a family. A home,” he said. “We took your granddaddy from y’all, but we was supposed to have turned him loose by now. Keepin’ him in the basement going stir-crazy, it ain’t… I know what it’s like to be imprisoned. I remember, I think.”

Brendy’s eyes widened. “You remember being inside the Mess Around?”

His nod was slight, not because he felt meek or frightened, but because he was uncertain. He remembered a darkness and a silence, and he remembered being drawn from it from time to time to live again in the throats and instruments—especially the pianos—of sorcerers. But he also remembered something before that. Striped coveralls. Eating gruel in a mess hall. He remembered Billy Lyons begging for his life, and at the time, he’d clenched his teeth and squeezed the trigger.

Brendy crossed the landing to grasp Stag’s left pinky in her right hand. The touch caused a spark of static electricity. “Listen,” she said. “I know you havin’ emotions alla the sudden, and I’m with that, you know? But if you serious about giving Daddy Deke back to me, you best hurry up so I can take him home before the weather get worse.”

“You just a little girl,” Stagger Lee said. “You tryna disrespect me?”

“That’s the thing,” Brendy said. “Ain’t nobody owe you no respect. And just cuz people afraid of you don’t mean they respect you, neither. If we going, let’s go.”

“Where’s everybody else?” Perry asked as his mother set plates before him and Mama Lisa.

He sat at the dining room table. Usually he took the middle seat on the kitchen side, but this time Mama Lisa sat at the table’s head and Perry sat to her right, in the corner by the horse-collar mirror.

He hadn’t realized it till halfway through his shower, but Perry was desperately hungry. Coming down the stairs, he was nearly bowled over by the smell of food. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten.

“I thought we were all eating together.”

Mama Lisa shook her head. “Just you and me for now. You wanted to talk, and that is what we’ll do.”

Thunder clattered like bowling balls rolling off a truck. Mama Lisa flinched, blinked her eyes rapidly. With visible effort, she composed herself. “First, we say grace.”

“Right,” Perry watched Mama Lisa, waiting for her to begin. She just stared back at him until he realized that, for the first time, grace was his job.

“Dear God who divided the darkness and parted the waters of nothing…” Perry began, not sure where he was headed, “we thank—we thank you for this food. Please bless us to use the strength it gives us to… to protect our home from any and all who mean us harm.” He paused to consider all the prayers he’d heard before. Thinking of the pressure to open his eyes, look up, fidget, having let his attention lapse. He felt none of that this time. In its place was a stillness, a listening, that he’d never felt before. He spoke directly to it. “Great God, we quake with terror as the earth shifts beneath us. We feel the vast, hydrogenous sweep of the cosmos reordering around us, and it is Your joyful and deathless power that we sense and fear. Please, please, gift us some of that force so we can accomplish the task you’ve set before us. Amen.”

“Amen,” Mama Lisa croaked.

When Perry looked at her, her eyes were wet. She tore a chicken wing in half and took a bite from the drummette. “So,” she said.

“How do I fight Mr. Larry?” Perry said. “How do I save Peaches and save the city?”

“I don’t know.”

Perry’s heart sank. “What do you mean you don’t know? You said you’d tell me the truth.”

“I did, and I am. I don’t know how you will save the city and the one you love.”

Perry squeezed his eyes shut. He felt as if he’d fly apart, but he found that stillness he’d felt before and grasped it tight. He buttered his waffle, cut into it, took a bite with real maple syrup, and marveled at its malted goodness.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Then that was the wrong question. How can I make saving Peaches and saving the city the same thing?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

At first, Perry had hoped the Wise Woman was being slippery, waiting for him to ask the right question, but now he sensed otherwise. “That’s the truth?” he asked. “You don’t know anything?”

“I know a great deal.” Mama Lisa paused to work on her chicken. “I know more than I remember. Your task is almost immeasurably great. The questions you’ve asked so far are enormous—you’ve asked more than I’m able to tell. Great questions, however, are usually combinations of many, many smaller questions, and in order to solve them, you must ask a trail of questions that might lead to your answer. This is not a game or a lesson, so start. Smaller.”

Perry frowned. He looked at his plate and remembered being small. He remembered his father carefully cutting his smothered chicken thigh from the bone and into small, chewable pieces.

“Okay,” Perry said. “Smaller, then. First: Where have you been?”