Joplin's Ghost (4 page)

The piano was sideways, but there was no mistaking the weathered wood she had just run her hand across a few minutes before. The lighter wood planks underneath the piano showed because it dangled nearly halfway over the landing.

“Hey!” Gloria called up. “Who’s messing with the piano? It’s gonna fall!”

No one answered from behind the piano.

“Somebody thinks they’re real funny!” Gloria said.

Who could have moved it? Mom and Sarge were downstairs, and so was Javier. She’d seen some musicians earlier, but they said they were going to Lincoln Road Mall for a late lunch. She hadn’t seen the janitor today, and the servers and bartenders wouldn’t come until later. The Bell boys, the janitor’s sons, might have moved the piano, but why would they be here if their father wasn’t? Besides, usually they only came upstairs to sneak cigarettes in the storeroom. The Bell boys were thirteen and fourteen, truly repulsive creatures. They made Phoenix dread the fall, when she would have to go to school with seventh and eighth graders. If the Bell boys were any indication, middle school must be like Hell.

The Bells from Hell had moved the piano, because jerks must be jerks.

Gloria had the same idea. “We know it’s just you guys, and we’re not scared,” Gloria called. Gloria
was
a little scared—Phoenix could tell by a slight waver in her voice—but Phoenix was impressed at how well Gloria pretended she wasn’t.

“We better tell Sarge,” Phoenix said.

“We don’t need Sarge. Let’s push it back. Or else it might fall.”

“What if it’s not them?” Phoenix whispered. “You said there’s a haunted piano here.”

“It’s
them
. They heard us talking, and they’re being dickwads.”

Before Phoenix could open her mouth again, Gloria was already bounding up the stairs. Phoenix’s heart tripped with alarm, and she felt dizzy as fear flushed her body. This felt all wrong. This felt B-A-D, and not like in Michael Jackson’s version.

Gloria squeezed herself past the piano. There was just enough room for her to get by. Nothing would stand between Gloria and an adventure. “I’ll pull from behind, and you push from the stairs. OK, Phee? On three.”

Phoenix didn’t move. Her hand held the banister tight. Mom said Gloria was too much like her mother; act first, think later.

“Are you coming or not?”

“I’m gonna go get Sarge.”

“Go on, then. He’ll think we moved it and get pissed off at us.”

No he wouldn’t, Phoenix thought. Sarge knew she wasn’t a liar, even if Gloria’s parents didn’t have the same confidence in Gloria. Gloria hadn’t earned her parents’ trust, Mom said. But Gloria was probably right: It was stupid to be afraid of the piano, thinking it had moved by itself and had made up its mind to fall. The Bell boys had done it, even if she hadn’t seen them. Phoenix couldn’t guess
why
they would do it, but it was almost impossible to guess why boys did anything. She and Gloria could move it back themselves. That would show those boys that girls weren’t as weak as they thought. Stupid jerks.

“OK, I’m coming,” Phoenix said. She climbed up the last eight steps and leaned against the piano with both palms.

“Wait, I said! On three,” Gloria said.

“OK.”

“One…two…”

There was never a
three
.

The piano scooted forward and teetered.
“Hey!”
Phoenix said. The piano’s sudden weight against her hands scared her, so she drew back and stepped down a step. Above her, the piano rocked, tipping.

The piano was going to fall.

Gloria, above her, sounded frantic.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

The loud rumbling came next as the piano launched down the stairs. Pale splintered wood flew from underneath the piano as it crashed on the hard steps, charging from one to the next,
chunk-chunk-chunk
. It sounded like a locomotive, Phoenix thought.

Then, she stopped thinking and turned to run.

Gloria yelled out to her from above, but her cousin’s words were too hurried and slurred to understand. Phoenix had never heard Gloria sound so scared.

Phoenix was scared, too, but she heard herself laughing as the rumbling sound grew louder behind her.
The little piano that could,
she thought nonsensically, just like the children’s storybook about the Little Engine she’d read when she was little. Maybe there was a World Record for racing a runaway piano! Her feet tripped down the steps two and three at time, flying. The picture of herself running away from a piano seemed funnier all the time.

The stairwell twisted, surprising her with nowhere to run. When the piano’s bulk nudged the small of her back, Phoenix’s laugh became a scream.

M
arcus Smalls had thought his life was over when he went to Raiford Maximum Security Penitentiary in Raiford, Florida. He’d been locked up in March of 1971, the same year Louis Armstrong died, so it was a sad year all around—five to ten for illegal weapons after a Florida Trooper found his two high-powered .223 rifles in his trunk while he was making an overnight run from Atlanta to St. Pete, giving a broke friend a ride. No good deed goes unpunished. Sarge hadn’t even remembered his rifles were still in the car, truth be told, but no judge liked to see guns in the hands of a black man with a good recollection of history, even a black man who hadn’t been forced to defend himself yet. When the judge asked him why he had the guns, Marcus told him to turn on the evening news. Fuck Vietnam. What fool couldn’t see the war at home?

Marcus served eight years, just long enough to miss all three of his children’s adolescent years, the ones that might just have mattered most, from what he could see. Locking a man away from his children should qualify as cruel and unusual punishment, Marcus believed, but the judge hadn’t seen it that way. No pussy was bad enough, but not as bad as watching from a distance while Serena, Marcus Jr. and Malcolm grew up wrongheaded without him. Marcus had laid down his life and future at Raiford as surely as if he’d died.

He’d gone to jail for love, he always said. Love for his history. Love for his people. Love for the Panthers. Love had taken Marcus Smalls to Hell and back.

At Raiford, he had seen four men stabbed to death, and would have stabbed one himself if that racist asshole hadn’t seen something in his eyes and decided he’d rather back down and live another day. Marcus also wouldn’t have minded snapping the neck of a CO who routinely confiscated his books because he must have hated to see another black man reading, and
that
self-restraint still amazed him. Marcus had been so lonely for a woman, he’d gleaned the first whisper of
understanding
how lifers could see a fine-featured young man as a substitute, which was more understanding than he’d considered himself capable of in one lifetime and much more than he’d wanted to know. Marcus had never seen so much despair in one place.

At Raiford, Marcus had realized that the revolution not only wouldn’t be televised, it wouldn’t be noticed at all. He and his cause had vanished. A petition with two hundred signatures had circulated on his behalf soon after his sentencing, but he never heard of another effort to free him. Worse, he’d realized that the very people he’d gone to prison hoping to motivate and liberate were sitting home laughing at Archie Bunker, Jimmie Walker and “The Jeffersons,” never expending a brain cell worrying about how they were going to build a black nation and reclaim what they had lost in the blood price their forebears paid. That had hurt almost as much as being locked away from his kids.

All in all, Marcus had thought Raiford was the worst thing that could happen to a man.

But he’d been wrong. The worst thing that could happen to a man, he learned, was seeing his little girl hurt. Seeing Phoenix hurt.

His second-chance life wasn’t supposed to bring new tragedies. He’d seen to it.

He’d cut his ties to the old warhorses he used to run with, those that were still out there running. After the first year, those niggers hadn’t sent Swarita and his children a dime while he was locked up—and his family had been
homeless
for a time—
So fuck those niggers anyway,
he told himself, even though he knew they were busy catching much hell themselves.

God helped him most of all. Marcus felt God’s arms around him in a way he never had before, an embrace that drained anger from his heart. It was a daily struggle, but one he’d been carrying on like breathing. He’d pulled some old contacts to get work managing bands on the road, making a reputation for himself he was proud of. You could ask anyone from Earth Wind & Fire to Gladys Knight, and people knew Marcus Smalls got the job done. He’d made enough money to help Serena open a beauty shop in Atlanta, he’d set aside a little something for Marcus Jr. for when he got out of the pen for dealing shit on the streets, and he’d gotten Malcolm off that same shit by sending him to rehab and helping him get that job deejaying in Savannah. His older kids weren’t the Brady Bunch, but they were doing all right.

The biggest surprise of all: He’d found Leah Rosen. All these years Marcus had been bad-mouthing other niggers for their white women—it had seemed like a damn initiation rite among the nationalists to pluck a stringy-haired, wide-eyed white girl to follow them around—so God had played a practical joke on Marcus by sending him a white woman, too. The gazes he and Leah occasionally encountered from white men were nothing compared to the laser eyes of the sisters, who could sense a black man with a white woman before you turned the corner. Marcus knew what the sisters had been through, but he couldn’t apologize on behalf of the brothers who’d forsaken them for forbidden fruit. It wasn’t like that with Leah. They dug each other’s souls, and they were the only two people who needed to understand that. Fuck anyone who couldn’t take the joke, as far as Marcus was concerned.

He’d met Leah the night the Miami riots started in May of 1980, when he’d been free a little more than a year and was still having nightly dreams he was still at Raiford. He’d been in Liberty City trying to plan a gig at a community center when he heard about the Arthur McDuffie verdict on the news, the police brutality case everybody in Miami was talking about. Marcus had known that verdict would mean trouble. Outside, he’d seen a white woman waiting at a red light on Northwest Fifty-fourth Street in a black BMW with no idea that the teenagers walking in her direction with baseball bats weren’t on their way to a sandlot game. If he hadn’t pulled her out of that car and taken her inside, Leah would have been another statistic on the nightly news. The riots might have turned into hunting season on black folks in the days to follow, but white folks were
dying
that first night, when the verdict came down.

And there was Leah after he’d brought her inside, fresh from her near miss with death, tears shimmering in her eyes. She wasn’t crying out of gratitude, or because she’d abandoned her bourgeois status symbol in the middle of the road and nearly been killed. No, Leah was sobbing because she couldn’t believe the twelve cops who’d pulled Arthur McDuffie off his motorcycle and beaten him to death had been set free.
How could the jury say they’re NOT guilty? How could anyone say that? They BEAT him to death and tried to make it look like his motorcycle crashed. What’s not to understand?
Leah had been hysterical, like she wanted to go back outside and burn something down herself. A moment like that shows you who someone really is. That was when Marcus Smalls realized he could love a white woman.

Marcus had never expected white cops to be convicted for killing an unarmed black man, and he’d learned after Martin died that the swell of power that came with chants of
burn, baby, burn
vanished with the flames and the morning light. As for killing bystanders, that was between the rioters and God; that had nothing to do with McDuffie. But Marcus didn’t go back out in the streets trying to tell those kids how to feel either. They’d be more likely to shoot him than heed him, and powerlessness was a lesson every generation of black men had to learn for itself.
Safe journey, young bloods,
Marcus had thought sadly as he watched plumes of smoke floating into the clear Miami night sky.
Safe journey.

Marcus didn’t know if he would have married Leah if she hadn’t gotten pregnant within a month of their meeting, but that was a moot question as soon as he heard the news. It had been Leah’s idea to name their baby Phoenix. Rising from Liberty City’s ashes.

The day Phoenix was born, Marcus had held his tawny daughter in his arms and vowed to be a proper father to her. Period. Nobody was going to make him mad enough to go to prison again—not if he was an eyewitness to another Arthur McDuffie killing, not if the revolution started today and got twenty-four-hour coverage on all three networks. Marcus Smalls was going to be about his own business and God’s, and no one else’s.

Phoenix was his second-chance child, and this was his second-chance life.

That was why Marcus felt bewildered each day as he sat as his daughter’s bedside at Miami Children’s Hospital ten years after she’d been born there and tried to fathom how his little Phoenix could be in a coma. This was not supposed to happen to him now. He thought he’d sown his major tragedies behind him.