SUGAR, HONEY, ICED TEA
The house—was this a house?—was full of laughter and the aroma of simmering beans. Perry’s mouth watered at the scent, even though he’d eaten the breakfast of his life just a little while ago.
“Damb it, I told y’all I can do it. Just gimme space, now. Come on, now. I remember!”
Perry had been here, or somewhere much like this, before. The area he was in now seemed like a finely appointed residence with marble floors, dark wooden accents, and art hanging on the walls. To Perry’s right lay a combination library and office, and before him, stairs raced up and around to a second floor. To Perry’s left stood a living room full of people and antique furniture.
A white man with wavy dark hair sat on a low, broad chair, his legs crossed, a trumpet balanced impossibly on his knee. “Aw, just play the other one!” he called. His voice was raspy and tuneful, as if he had to force himself to speak instead of singing.
“Ain’t your turn,” said the man sitting at the drums. He was relatively short, light-skinned, and he wore a red baseball cap and a black T-shirt. He was a series of Vs. His eyebrows, his nose, his mouth, his shoulders and waist. His eyes were clear and watchful. “Let somebody start it off, and the rest of us come in.”
“It don’t start with no piano.” The man sitting at the keyboard sounded mortally offended. “Listen here, mother—”
“Hey, now,” the man at the drums cautioned, gesturing with his chin in Perry’s direction. “Little pitchers.”
Perry had ventured into the room without realizing it. He knew now that all the grown-ups in here could see him, and he wondered why that surprised him. He glanced over at a skinny blind boy leaning in the corner—he knew the boy was blind because of his great dark glasses and the way he craned his neck. The boy seemed to sense Perry and gestured to him, as if to say, Listen close.
“I tole you: somebody gonna play this got-damn keyboard, it’s gonna be—!”
“Negro, get on up!” a tall, chocolate-skinned woman commanded as she entered the room. “They say age before beauty, but you old as hell, and I ain’t that cute.”
The woman’s hair was wrapped in purple fabric and piled on her head. Her dress was tight, especially in the booty, but she wore it with taste. She strode like a queen toward the bench and sat without looking. The other piano player got up just in time.
“I’ma sing it, then,” he said, but without much conviction.
“You don’t know it,” said the woman. “You would have started already if you did.” She started playing high with her right hand and pursed her lips, squinting as if in pain. “There it is.”
“Have you got the embouchure?”
Perry shook his head and looked to his right. He couldn’t see Mr. Horn, but a white woman stood beside him, holding a trombone in her left hand. She wore a black-and-white dress and a maroon shrug, and her blond hair had been swept into a neat ponytail. Her face was round and kind, but something that wasn’t kindness lit her gray eyes. It was… excitement? She barely looked at Perry as the piano chords somersaulted across the room.
“The what?” Perry asked.
“The embouchure. It’s how you hold your lips. You purse your lips and buzz.” She demonstrated.
Perry looked back at the woman playing piano. Her expression had softened now, become a little vacant. She was somewhere far-off, concentrating.
“It’s about breath control.”
“Playing the—?” Perry stopped himself. Little pitchers.
“You have to imagine that the air is alive—because it is. It really is. And you breathe all the way down, into your diaphragm, and let the air come up a little at a time, the way you want it, and when it leaves you, it keeps going. It goes to the wall, past the wall, out and out, into the world, and even space.”
Perry nodded gravely, although he wasn’t sure he understood. Any moment now, the woman at the piano would begin to sing, and Perry didn’t think he’d be able to listen to anything else.
“You want music, not noise. You have to have a good tone. If it’s not shaped right, it’ll go wild and do harm. Music is magic. Noise is just… noise.”
Up in Harlem on a Saturday night
When the highbrows get together it’s just too tight
We all gather at the Harlem Strut
And what we do is tut tut tut…
Perry shut his eyes without meaning to. The woman’s voice had taken hold of him with more force than he expected… If she was a woman. Her voice was low, and it wasn’t rough, but there was roughness in it.
“That’s it,” said the woman with the trombone. “See how it’s all the way in you already? It was always there. You have to find it and let it out.”
Old Hanna Brown from way cross to-o-wn
Keeps drinking her liquor and she brings them down
Just at the break of dayyyy, you could hear old Hannah say…
… I want a pigfoot and a bottle of beer!
Send me, daddy, ’cause I don’t care!
I feel just like I wanna clown
Get the piano player a drink ’cause he brought me down!
Got rhythm when he stomps his feeeet—!
He just send meeee right off to sleep!
Take all your razors and your guns
We gonna be ’rrested when the wagon comes!
Behind Perry, a trumpet leaped into the song, following the chorus. It was the white man with the wavy hair. Another white man, this one old and balding, stood up from a low couch and joined him. Their horns dueled, tumbling over each other like alley cats sparring.
Other instruments joined. A bass, at least two other saxophones, and trombone girl had lifted her own horn. When she played, Perry understood many things he never had before. The image of her hand on the slide seemed to stick in the air, her movements lingering as she went from one note to the next. Her music sounded like giant rose petals unfurling in the air, smooth and fragrant…
The horns, the banjo, the piano wandered away from the main tune, following each other happily down one path, then another, like revelers from Away looking for a bathroom during Carnival, and Perry wasn’t sure how they all knew when, but they returned together.
Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer!
Slay me, daddy, ’cause I don’t care
Slay me, daddy, ’cause I don’t care, no, no
Get that piano player a drink because she bringing me down!
Check all your razors and your guns
Send me, ’cause I don’t care!
Send me, ’cause I don’t ca-a-a-a-are!
The music swelled but didn’t stop. It became a current bobbing Perry along, spun this way and that by eddies and whorls. Eventually the horns quieted and ceased, leaving just the bass, the piano, and the drum. Perry wanted to stay here, like this, listening, forever. He realized, in a flash, that he could.
But he had come here with a specific goal… Hadn’t he? Perry had the sense that the goal had been fulfilled, but he couldn’t be sure. The music was intoxicating. Perry knew that if he had a horn of his own right now, he would join in. He would—
“Hey!” Perry said aloud. “Hey, where’s Doctor Professor?”
The music didn’t stop, but it seemed to recede. The man at the drums raised his eyebrows. “You looking for Fess?”
“Yes,” Perry said. “I have to find him. Right away. I’m… I’m on a mission.”
The piano player who’d gotten up for the woman grimaced, clacked his teeth together. “He ain’t here,” he said. “That is, he present, but he ain’t here…”
“Do you know where he went?”
Now the music stopped.
“To do his sacred duty,” the woman at the keyboard said.
“What do you mean?”
“Sacrifice,” she said. She nodded, matter-of-fact, and repeated, “Sacrifice.”
“But he’s already a haint,” Perry said. “How can he sacrifice himself if he’s already dead?”
The drummer shrugged. “Dead is as dead does,” he said. He counted off one, two, one, two, three, four! And the music began again.
Perry was out of time.
Blood seeped from a cut above Stagger Lee’s right eye, running around the orbit and dripping into his upper eyelashes. His top lip had split, and his cravat had come loose at the neck. He knelt in the brackish water on the floor of what had been Daddy Deke’s cell, his shovel-hands hanging at his sides. The tips of his middle fingers almost touched the wet.
“You ain’t look so good, baby,” Peaches said, breathing hard. “You better put up them dukes. This ass-whuppin’ won’t be no fun if you won’t do your part.”
Stagger Lee’s lips moved, but Peaches couldn’t hear his voice over her own breathing and the blood roaring in her ears. Hardly thinking about it, she lashed out with a hard right that landed on his left breast and rocked his entire body into the wall where a cot lay flush against the corner. The flimsy thing stove in when Stagger Lee hit it, crumpling around his body with a squeal of twisting metal. The wall cracked from the force of the collision, but it didn’t crumble. Not yet.
“What was that?” Peaches asked, feeling a mean sort of glee. “What you said to me, you dirty, granddaddy-stealing sumbitch?”
With trembling limbs, Stagger Lee righted himself, levering his palms against the damaged concrete wall. He looked Peaches in the eye and swallowed. Peaches realized now that he was swallowing blood. She could almost taste it herself, warm and metal-red against her tongue.
“I said, ain’t no ass-whuppin’,” Stagger Lee rasped. “This what I got coming to me, I know that, but make no mistake, babygirl. This ain’t no fight. I ain’t raised a hand against you. This murder, what this is. Kill me if you gone kill me but be straight with yaself about it.”
Peaches drew in a big, shocked breath. The air in her lungs felt hot with electricity. “How many people you done shot or beat till they was nothing?” she hissed. “How many lives you done stole just because you could? You calling this murder? You calling me a killer?”
“Countless.” Stagger Lee coughed, swallowed again. “My victims are without number. If there one thing I’m a expert on, it’s killing folk. I know you ain’t heard me, but I’m tryna tell you, I didn’t kill the Ole Man.”
“You lyin’ to live.”
Stagger Lee grinned a mouthful of broken teeth. “You think… I want to live—?”
Just then, Daddy Deke walked through the wall, holding Brendy’s hand.
Peaches’s mouth fell open when she saw the old man. For a beat, she let herself believe that the empty skin had been a nasty trick, a prank played by the same haint who’d stolen her daddy’s letter, but in the next second she realized she could see right through him and Brendy both. Their figures shone in the dim of the room.
Peaches bit her right fist to stifle a wail.
“Don’t worry!” Brendy chirped. “I’m still alive, I think! I think I’m at home, sleep!”
“Stagolee tellin’ the truth,” Daddy Deke said. “He ain’t laid a hand on me. Your friend Mr. Larry ain’t the friend you think he is.”
“Mr. Larry…? What…?”
“His real name Koizumi Yakumo,” Stagger Lee rasped. “And he ain’t nothing nice.”
“Where Perry at?” Daddy Deke asked. “Where you seent him last?”
“I left him on the Live Side,” Peaches said. “He was sleeping at my house.”
“We best get back there posthaste,” Daddy Deke said. “Yakumo could come back anytime, and we ain’t got a hope of beating him without a lil something I got squirreled away.”
The cell’s heavy metal door squeaked on its hinges as Mr. Larry let himself into the room. “Too late,” he said sadly. “Too, too, too late. Did you think I’d leave you all to collude against me if you had any hope of stopping me?”
Peaches stared, dumbfounded, at the haint she’d thought was her friend. She said something then, but she hadn’t meant to, and the words left her so quickly that she wasn’t sure what they were.
Mr. Larry sucked his teeth. “Profanity, my darling? Utterly unbecoming.”
The darkness was itself a substance. Peaches felt it clammy on her skin, like damp newspaper. It filled her nose, flooded her lungs, pressed sick against the pit of her belly as if she’d eaten too much.
I gotta do this, Peaches thought, but the thought sounded faint and tinny inside her skull, as if the darkness had sapped its resonance.
its much worse than that im afraid
Peaches gritted her teeth, clenched her eyes shut, and tried to ignore the evidence that until now, her eyes had been open.
you need not respond im confident you hear me
Don’t listen. Don’t listen to him, Peaches thought. Everything he says is lies.
havent you wondered at the circumstance that brought you to nola doesnt it seem strange that your father has left you alone to live in this cursed city scrambling to find the letters he sends you on a schedule without rhyme or reason
Don’t you talk about my daddy, Peaches snarled. You keep his name out your mouth.
yes his name what was it again
Peaches clenched her teeth harder and harder until her jaw began to ache. She tried to radiate disdain the way a gas oven radiates heat.
i couldnt say his name if i wanted to your father never had a name because he never was
How could you do us like this? Peaches thought. How could you do me like this?
you dont have a daddy peaches youre not a girl at all youre barely a song you are a tuneless little ditty the heathen indians used to hum before the white man ventured into louisiana bits of your melody were repeated over and over until just about every tune born in new orleans exhibited a piece of you that is how you came by your titanic strength you are the intersection of forgetting and remembrance
I remember my daddy, Peaches thought. I know he loves me. But did she? Did he? She was sweating now. She could feel the slickness on her skin. She felt a fizzing sensation in her skull, and her chest constricted. Panic strobed within her, a bright, scouring thing that made every thought sharp enough to cut.
does he Yakumo asked, and now Peaches knew he’d been listening to her thoughts all the while. if he loves you peaches where is he your memories of him your silly little letters these are just manifestations of the song that is you
Impossible, Peaches thought. I know who I am.
you deserve to know the other songs died ignorant of their true nature but you the greatest of them deserve the truth
You crazy. You out your mind.
Yakumo’s voice grew deafening, ringing in Peaches’s mind. OF COURSE IM MAD OF COURSE IVE BEEN TRAPPED IN THIS PARODY OF MY BELOVED NEW ORLEANS FOR AN ETERNITY He seemed to struggle for composure and continued in his rasping whisper. thousands of years thousands of thousands i have watched you all go about your idiot business gossiping with talking animals and automatons never never realizing you lived in what amounts to a dirty fishbowl
aeons ago i realized that in order to escape id have to kill the music that holds this sick dreamland together i couldnt bear to sacrifice innocent lives o no o no o o but ever so slowly i came to realize that the alternative is far worse an eternity spent here as the only one who knows the truth id sooner be damned better to roast in hell than to continue decade after decade year after year day after day unliving bound to a locale that by its very nature cannot grow or change
I don’t care how long you was trapped here, Peaches thought. This city better than you deserve.
DON T YOU DARE I DON T DESERVE THIS TORMENT NOBODY DOES
When the first chords sounded, Peaches’s heart leaped. She recognized the tune right away. She’d know “Tipsy Tina” anywhere. But this wasn’t “Tipsy Tina.” The lyrics were just as hoarse and bluesy, but this song was about someone else.
Baby I’m so damn tired
Because I ain’t slept a wink
If you and me baby sailed the seven seas
I’d pitch you in the drink!
Peaches still couldn’t see, but hearing Doctor Professor banging out his chords, singing the guitar, the bass, the horns, cheered her anyway. Of course, if what Yakumo said was true—if she had no daddy, if she wasn’t a girl at all—then she didn’t know how she’d live, but the music made her think she just might find a way anyhow.
You evil when you sleepin’
You cruel when you awake!
Ain’t no good at nothin’
But a-kissin’ and a-huggin’
Girl you more than I can take!
This was it. This was crunch time. This was Nola’s way of thanking Peaches for all she’d done. She’d fought to protect the city, and now the city was reaching out to save her. Peaches went very still, summoning all her strength. Girl or song, damn if she wouldn’t go out fighting.
The singing roused Stagger Lee back to waking. He lay in the brackish water, his eyes swollen shut, bruises and abrasions tightening his skin. He savored the pain. He didn’t remember feeling physically broken before. That girl Peaches had made him remember a time before he was a monster.
Stag had never heard Professor Longhair sing with such fervor. He seemed to mean every heartsick word.
Stagger Lee opened his left eye just enough to see Yakumo standing legless in the air above him. His head had split open, but not at the neck or the throat. He had split to his waist, and his red-orange tentacles wrapped around Peaches, Brendy, and the Ole Man. No. The Ole Man’s ghost. It was the discovery of his remains that had sent Peaches over the edge. That had spurred her to use her whole strength against Stagger Lee.
The shaggy-haired haint wheeled in the air, his tendrils sizzling against Peaches’s pale skin.
henry byrd Yakumo sneered. far too late you ve summoned the courage to face me
“I come to stop you killing that girl,” Fess said.
what girl the song you mean the song you hid in plain sight when you and your band created this mockery of new orleans
Stagger Lee didn’t know what Yakumo meant, but then it dawned on him. Peaches was like him? A song?
“You don’t need to sacrifice her,” Doctor Professor said. “It won’t work, nohow. You wrong about her. You wrong about a lotta thangs. That Storm done got down in ya, ruined yo brains.”
Stagger Lee’s body seemed to move on its own. One moment he was lying in the muck, the smell of mold and turned earth clogging his nostrils, and the next he was on his feet, gun in hand, aiming at his former master.
Before he could squeeze the trigger, Yakumo’s blood-red eye flared to life. It hung from the tattered ribbons of Yakumo’s pale flesh, but it worked. Stagger Lee swung his pistol and fired.
Time ground to a halt.
Stagger Lee roared his protest. Yakumo had taken control of his very body and forced him to revise his aim. The bullet entered Doctor Professor’s left temple and passed through his skull, dragging most of the musician’s brain with it. Instead of a spray of gore, a pregnant sizzling sound unfolded into the thick air of the room. Was Doctor Professor’s magic so powerful that even Stagger Lee’s gun couldn’t end him?
Light thick as egg yolk spilled into the room, and a little chocolate-brown woman emerged from the middle of the air. The little girl—Brendy—her body lay slung across the woman’s shoulder, and the way her hand lay against the small of Brendy’s back told Stagger Lee that this was her mama or her granny. Only blood could touch a child with such tenderness.
The woman’s other hand extended, fingers spread, in Professor Longhair’s direction. This must be why the old haint’s head was still intact. If she eased her grip on him, even a little, his head would be gone, and the city would die with him.
Yakumo seemed just as surprised to see the woman as Stagger Lee was. Quickly, his head formed again, the tendrils extended from his open mouth. He wheeled in the air to glare at the little woman, but as he did, his control over Stagger Lee’s body eased just enough.
Barely aiming, Stagger Lee swung his pistol again and fired once, twice, three, four times, and each report was loud as the Last Trump signaling the End of the World. Stagger Lee had just enough time to worry that the noise would damage the woman’s control, force her to let go of Fess, and that all of them, the songs, the little girl, both ghostly old men, would be done for.
That didn’t happen. Not quite.
Yakumo fell into the dirty water. Peaches and the spirits fell with him, free of his tentacles. As soon as Brendy hit the muck, she pressed her palms together like a diving swimmer and jumped into her body.
The old man, Daddy Deke, said something unrepeatable, then, Lisa…? Izzat you?
“What’s happening here?” Stagger Lee asked. “What in hell is going on?”
“What’s going on is I bought us minutes if we’re lucky and seconds if we’re not,” the woman snapped. “Brendolyn. Wake.”
Brendy stirred on her shoulder, shook her head sleepily, then, “Haniran sayala alagbara!” she thundered.
A flock of black shadows exploded into the air from her fist and hung there, chattering.
“Help Mama Lisa!” Brendy shouted. “Make her stronger and help her hold on. This I command!”
Mama Lisa exhaled slowly, her teeth clenched tight.
“Now what?” Stagger Lee asked. “I done kilt Yakumo. What else can I do for y’all?”
“You haven’t killed me,” Yakumo rasped bitterly from where he lay. “You’ve injured me badly, but still I cling to a mockery of life. My imprisonment persists.”
How you still alive? Daddy Deke asked. Is it because Lisa keeping Fess together?
“What difference does it make?” Yakumo said. “I’m… I’m still here! Still bound!”
“Fool,” Mama Lisa said. “You were never trapped. The Storm brought you here to act as its agent. You let it twist your thoughts, your love, until you became… this. Ask yourself: Have you ever tried to leave? You’ve always been free. Everyone is.”
Stagger Lee felt hot and cold all over. “Every…? Even me?”
“… What?” Yakumo asked.
“You searched in vain for a way to free yourself. You schemed and lied. You did everything but try. Nothing and no one can make you free.”
Yakumo’s face twisted. His mouth became a square of hate. But then something seemed to stop him short. The tension drained from his face. He looked less like a pale-faced ghost and more like a little boy. A blood-red tear spilled from his good eye. “I could have left…?” he said. “I could have gone to Setsu and the children?”
Still can, dummy, Daddy Deke said. You ain’t got no reason to stick around unless you wanna. That’s the way haints work. Why you think I’m still here after you hollowed me out with your weird-ass tentacles? It’s because I ain’t ready to let go my peoples. What you holding on to?
The water around him began to bubble and boil. The disturbance seemed to lend Yakumo a bit of vitality. He surged upward toward the ceiling, rearing like a cobra. This time, he split completely, seemed to turn inside-out. The tentacles emerged from his raw red inside, whipping angrily back and forth.
too late he said. if i am to journey on by god and by damn you re all coming with me
That was when the boy appeared. He hung just above the water, his feet bent toward the floor. He wore a classically cut tuxedo and patent-leather shoes. His bow tie was tied as crisply as any Stagger Lee had seen. A horn hung in his right hand, gleaming so brightly that Stagger Lee could barely stand to look at it. He glared at Stag and raised the horn to his lips.
“Not him!” Lisa shouted. She pointed up at Yakumo. “There!”
Perry whirled away from Stagger Lee, and Yakumo expanded across the ceiling. The tentacles spread down, striking in what seemed like every direction.
Perry lifted the horn to his lips and blew.
In that sound was every note of music Stagger Lee had ever heard. Instinctively, he reached out to touch it, and as he stared his hand began to dissolve. He blinked, shocked, and found himself standing on tamped-down dirt. The crisp air smelled of woodsmoke.
Stag looked right, looked left. The sky was untroubled and blue, and a rickety train depot stood forlorn before him.
Stagger Lee touched the knot of his cravat and brushed off his lapel.
He climbed the steps to the train platform and glanced to his left, where an elderly Black man stood with a push broom and a long-handled dustpan.
WHERE WE AT JUST NOW?
“Cain’tcha read, son?” asked the old man. He gestured with his chin to a sign above the ticket booth: BELUTHAHATCHIE.
WHEN THIS TRAIN COME, WHERE IT GONE TAKE ME?
“What you doing out here if you don’t know nothing, boy?” the old man asked. He shook his head, disgusted. “This here line is the train to Hell.”
THEY GOT MUSIC IN HELL?
“Naw,” said the old man. “Can’t say as they do.”
THEY BOUT TO, Stagger Lee said. He took a breath and felt his chest expand. Hell. That sounded right up his alley. THEY BOUT TO.
He thought of them kids. Of the flooded cell and the mad city teeming with musical life. But those memories were already fading.