The Gilda Stories (22 page)

“I got pretty sick of it after a while. But I ain't had no one to hang with me yet and I wasn't ready to fight no man in the street, so I took off up to Roxbury to this woman who had a rep as big as Franklin's. She call herself Danny. Fancy Danny they called her on the avenue. She wore a tiny diamond on three fingers of each hand and one in her ear. Wore the sharpest threads in town. I just went up to Danny's and asked her if I can stay at her place. She laughed and said sure. Then she asked if I want to be one of her girls. And I said yeah, for a little while, kinda nervous you know. And she said, ‘I ain't never had to chain nobody yet.'

“One night he comes to the bar, the 411 matter of fact, and me and Danny and one of the other girls was sittin' having dinner. He ask me to come outside and talk to him. Danny says, ‘We're all family round this table, why don't you just sit down and talk right here?' I was sure he'd jump bad with a load of bullshit, but he just glared at Danny and walked away.

“Well, Miss Danny pulled off each of them rings, wrapped them in the long silk scarf she had round her neck, and gave it to the bartender on her way out.”

“Gus,” Skip volunteered, pleased to take part in the story.

“Ah, what you know about it boy, you wasn't even left home from your mama yet,” Savannah said, laughing.

“Yeah, it was that big, light Gus. She just tossed them rings over the bar at him and followed Franklin out the bar. She wasn't so tall, not even real big, but solid. The only way you could tell she was mad was that sweat was on her chocolate skin, making her forehead shine. Shiny like that black hair she kept pulled back in a bun. Danny come back in the bar ten minutes later, put her rings back on, and ordered a martini. I never forgot it. Cool as a cuke. And that was that.”

Skip was laughing. “Yeah, didn't even get her threads dirty, I bet!”

“Naw, not a speck of dirt. She coulda even left them rings on! Franklin never bothered me again. Even after I moved out of Danny's a year later.”

“A year! What took you so long?” Skip asked.

Savannah laughed, “Well, she was right. She never had to chain nobody.”

Bird laughed out loud for the first time since they arrived. Skip looked puzzled but laughed too.

The night got darker. Bird refused to watch the door or wonder about Gilda. She felt the slight opening of pain in her chest. The uneasiness of it was not difficult for her now, but soon she would have to go out.

Gilda's entrance startled them out of their thoughts. To Bird she said, “I've scouted south on the bay side. Maybe you should look around as well.”

Bird rose silently and left the bungalow. She, too, would return with the flush of new blood on her face. The look would be mistaken for the effects of the sharp salt air and a brisk walk. Bird hurried into the darkness. She wanted to return to the company of these people. It had been some time since she'd spent this type of sociable evening.

Not since Woodard's. The white-haired woman, Savannah, and Gilda had linked in a way that Bird envied. There was an empty space after years of separation where she and Gilda had once been united. She remembered her first sight of Gilda as a girl—she had looked so African with her dark brow and deep eyes. It was warming to see the look echoed here in the varying colors of the others. The same penetrating gaze filled their eyes almost as if the years away from their home soil had not damaged them. She had found this kind of tribal unity with her people, too.

Bird sped into the shadows until she came upon a small house that held more than one person. She slipped inside and found the bedroom of a teenaged boy, sleeping deeply as they do. She held him with the hypnotic quality of her voice while she took the blood from his arm. His desires were simple: good grades on a science test and a date for an approaching dance. Bird felt a rush of tenderness as she slipped inside his secrets, gently prodding open his sense of mathematic and scientific principles so he'd grasp ideas a bit more easily. And she left the idea that it might not matter if he had a companion or not. The evening would be a success if he simply enjoyed everyone as a friend. He did not stir when she sealed the wound and listened to his slowed pulse. As she moved away from him he turned on his side and mumbled out loud, returning to his own dreams.

As Bird ran back toward the bungalow she tried to think of ways to approach the problem, then realized there was no need for that. They were the problem—Fox would approach them. They only had to make sure they were prepared. She had, in fact, discovered something in the attic that might give them a slight advantage.

By the time she returned to the house everyone except Gilda looked like they were ready for sleep. Savannah pulled out the sofa while Gilda handed down linen from the attic. The ottoman would open up into a single bed for Toya after Gilda and Bird went up to the attic. Bird secured the doors and checked the windows, then took Savannah aside in the kitchen.

“We'll stay upstairs until late afternoon. Please, don't let any of them come up or disturb us unless there's some emergency. I'm sure nothing will happen until the evening, but keep your eyes on the road.”

Savannah nodded with the crispness of a soldier.

“I saw a small boat out back with an outboard motor. Can you get that in operating order?” Bird continued without waiting for Savannah's response. “Whatever you have to do—get gas, plug holes—by this evening.” Savannah nodded again, a bronze-and-platinum statue come to life in the misty lamplight.

Bird and Gilda went up the angled stairs, and Savannah closed them from behind until they fit snugly in the ceiling. Bird took a length of bed sheet and secured the stairs shut by tying one end to the step and the other to a pipe in a corner of the room. They both smiled at the primitive precaution. Bird spread her dark cloak out on the bed, its thick hem filled with the soil of Mississippi and the Dakotas. The two women lay down and drew it tightly around their bodies. The soft lapping of the water so close behind the house kept them alert, even in sleep.

Slivers of light slipped into the attic room at dawn, but neither of them stirred until the afternoon. Bird first heard the soft thud of a mallet on wood. She continued to lay still with Gilda in her arms as she listened to the repeated attempts to get an engine going. The muffled cheers of Skip and Toya reached up to the attic when it turned over.

Bird stretched, then spoke to Gilda. “Fox won't be certain that there are two of us. That is one advantage. He will also not think much of our crew: two women and a boy won't seem impressive to him. That's another advantage.”

Without moving from Bird's breast Gilda said, “And there's the bay.”

“And something else,” Bird said sitting up. She crossed the cool, wood floor to a low chest and returned holding out a small leather pouch. She undid the leather tie that held it closed and spilled the contents onto the bed. Gilda stared down at the syringe and a clear envelope of white powder, then looked at Bird, startled.

“Skip, I think. At least it used to be Skip. That's why it was locked away up here. At dusk I'll cook it down and fill the needle. There should be enough heroin here to slow him down, if we can get close enough to him.”

“You can't!” Gilda almost shouted. “Skip's worked too hard to kick. Savannah has complete confidence in him now. If she knows about this—”

Bird cut in impatiently. “Fox will kill Toya, Savannah, Skip, you, and me if he can! Haven't you understood yet? He is not a misguided youth. He possesses all the powers that you and I do. He's possibly older, certainly more merciless.” Bird stopped. She could see that Gilda understood how irrelevant her human concerns were right now.

Bird brushed her hand across Gilda's forehead, down the side of her face and her jawline as she spoke. “Dear girl, the mortal ones will settle their own worries. To connect with them, yes, but you must live as what you are. Listen to the world from your own powers.” Gilda pulled away and sat up on their cot.

Bird continued. “Is this why you've taken no one into this life? Is the mortal world too sacred?”

Gilda didn't speak, but her eyes were open in the shock of realization. Bird reached out to rub Gilda's cheek again, as if soothing a child, and continued talking more softly. “It is a good thing to love and care for others. That's why I travel, to learn from the people and study what they search for. But we are as we are. Our world is separate from theirs. To ignore our possibilities is to nurture only disappointment.”

“It's been my one-hundred-year journey—away from my people into the world,” Gilda said. “Only now have I felt like I could retrieve them, touch and be touched by them as I was before. In the shop I've grown to understand the rhythm of their lives, their desires. It's not so easy to step back and say cavalierly, ‘Too bad, Savannah, we've discovered Skip's a failure, a junky liar just like you feared!' “

“There's consideration in everything. I make no suggestion callously, but their questions must be answered later, and not by us.”

Gilda's assent was implicit in the quiet, that surrounded her.

The other question still hung in the air. Neither wanted to speak about it, but each knew it weighed heavily. Once subdued, how to kill another like themselves? It would be far from easy. His powers, at least equal to theirs, were fueled by anger and hatred.

“I have killed,” Gilda said in a tremulous voice. “I hold the faces as I should, but it was not intentional. And not one of us.”

“It will have to be done. He'll accept nothing less. You've seen them, I know. Their hunger for destruction and death is insatiable. He would torment her for his own enjoyment for as long as he's amused. If we're to give her this second chance, we have to make her free of him.”

“I don't know that I can do it…deliberately…to one of our own.”

“Don't be sentimental here; he is not among the living. We are. He seeks only to drag others into death and thrives on watching their descent. Don't forget what you've learned about people, about us
.”

Gilda remembered Eleanor's frigid smile as she'd ordered her to kill Samuel, and nodded.

They pushed the stairway down, rejoining the group and leaving the answer to prove itself in the action. Skip announced that he and Savannah had gotten the engine going and that he was off to wash and then start dinner. Savannah rinsed the oil and dirt off her hands in the kitchen sink, then plopped down on the sofa with a bottle nearby.

“You think he'll come tonight?”

“Yes, just after dark.” Toya's body tensed as Gilda spoke.

“You'll all go down to the edge of the water with the boat. Keep it ready to take off. I don't want anyone coming back to the house unless Bird or I bring you back. No matter what you see or think you hear, stay at the water unless you're looking right at me or Bird.”

“You can't believe I'm goin' swimmin' while you two take that bastard. Besides that dinky boat can't hold but two people. Skip can watch the girl; I'll stay up here with you.” Skip started to protest but, like Gilda, he felt Savannah's resolve.

Gilda stepped forward, peering into Savannah's eyes and was about to speak when Bird said, “Maybe she's right. Even if Fox doesn't think much of what we're likely to do, why don't we just give him a little surprise?”

“O.K., ladies, you're about to have the meal of your life. Skip's old-fashion-down-home recipe spaghetti with fried chicken tomato sauce.” While he worked cutting meat from leftover chicken into a steamy tomato sauce, Toya stood by the back door looking out over the grey yard toward the bay.

“I guess if we got any family heirlooms that's breakable I better put them away, huh?” Savannah said, looking around at the make-shift furnishings and giving a loud snort. She slipped the photos into the drawer tenderly. The smell of garlic and tomatoes filled the room as Skip stirred the sauce which threatened to bubble over the top of a deep iron frying pan.

“I forgot to pick up Italian bread. I make a pretty mean garlic bread.”

Bird and Gilda looked at each other and then laughed out loud.

“What's so funny, I ain't supposed to like to cook?” Skip asked puzzled.

“Hell,” Savannah said, “Skip's a better cook than most people I know, except my mama.”

Bird said, “No, just a private joke from the old days,” as she pulled the brass ring, lowering the stairs into the living room. She went up, still chuckling to herself. Savannah pulled dishes from the cabinet.

In a few moments Bird came down again, the leather pouch strapped to her belt. Skip saw it first; his shiny tan skin blanched. He stared at the bag as if it were a snake that would uncoil and spring at him.

Savannah felt his reaction and looked at Bird. “Where'd that come from?” Her voice was hard-edged. Although she spoke to Bird the accusation flew through the air toward Skip.

“I always kept that bag, just for sentimental reasons, mama. You knew that.”

“Ain't no sentiment tied up with that bag, fool. Ain't nothing mixed up with that bag but death!”

“In that case it will come in handy tonight, don't you think, Savannah?”

Savannah's eyes blazed at Skip. At first he looked away, his eyes darting around the room searching for a clue to his response and escape. Then he met Savannah's stare full on and said simply, “I'm clean, Savannah. Been clean since we got together, and I expect to stay clean a long time more.”

“Yeah, if we live through tonight,” Savannah said, turning her back on Bird, wanting the bag to disappear hot only from the house but from the past as well.

“He's coming,” Gilda said sharply.

“Let's go,” Skip said, as he pulled Toya by the arm, shoving sweaters into her hand.

Gilda opened the back door, letting light pour out to the yard.