The Game of Love and Death (4 page)

Henry struck a match.

“Here,” the captain said, showing the matchbook. “This is its name.”

“Come again?” Henry asked.

“This is the club where she works. The Domino. It used to be her parents’, but alas, they were killed in an accident with an automobile when she was just a baby. She has the place now with her uncle. I am ashamed to say I have never been, but I am past the age of music and dancing. She does keep me in matches, though.”

Captain Girard took back the matchbook and Ethan shot Henry a look. Henry shrugged and phrased a careful question to regain control of the interview: “What can you tell us about her airplane?”

As the captain described a change Flora had made to the engine mounting so that the plane was better balanced, Henry took notes, but his mind was elsewhere. The captain seemed to notice.

“The girl,” he said, smiling widely. “You really should take an interest. There is something there. Her name, it suggests she is rooted to the earth, but in truth, the girl has the heart of a bird.” A breeze kicked up, ruffling Henry’s hair, sending a gentle thrill down his spine. Henry swallowed. He looked at her, just as she looked at him. Neither looked away. For a fraction of a moment, it felt as though the earth had ceased its spinning, but his body moved on, dizzy with some unseen force.

“We’re here for the plane,” Ethan said. “But maybe we’ll do another story later. You were telling us about the Staggerwing…”

Henry transcribed the captain’s answers to the questions Ethan asked. But his curiosity had traveled ahead to the Domino. No matter what Ethan wanted, Henry planned to attend a show there, and soon. In a strange way, it felt as though his life depended on it.

T
HE
dress had been her mother’s, and so it was the slightest bit old-fashioned: a black-and-white harlequin-patterned halter that plunged in the back and made Flora feel self-conscious. The entirety of the silky fabric had been covered in sequins, so it was heavy on her skin in the way a fur coat might be, like something that had once been alive. She inspected her reflection, turning to make sure the seams were intact and that she wasn’t going to give more of a show than she intended. One of the waves in her chin-length hair was misbehaving, so she pinched it back into place, sighing in exasperation. She would have preferred to wear her flight coveralls everywhere, along with the braids she wore as a child. Such things were comfortable, practical, and practically invisible. Being togged to the bricks made her feel like a Christmas display.

She’d asked Uncle Sherman probably a thousand times if she could just wear something simple and stay in the kitchen with Charlie, reminding him to go easy on the salt in the brisket rub, telling him to cut smaller pieces of corn bread because too much of that makes a customer too sleepy to drink.

But Sherman wasn’t having it. “The Domino’s half your club, baby,” he’d told her. “You got to be out in front and on that stage. Nobody comin’ to hear Charlie’s corn bread sing. And there ain’t nobody in town who sings like you, and you don’t even half try.”

She wasn’t bad-looking, she knew, but far from the stunner her mother had been. She compared her reflection to the woman in the picture frame on her bureau, glad to be not as lovely. Her plainness had shielded her from the interest of boys, except for Grady. Her own absence of beauty made her miss her mother more.

She had no true memories of her parents. But she’d imagined being hugged and sung to so many times the memories felt like something made of truth.

“Flora!” Sherman’s voice, calling from the parlor.

“Almost ready.” She opened her top drawer, removed the pair of kid gloves that had been her mother’s, and slipped them on. Though it was no longer raining, the night was still cool. And she liked the look and feel of them, the way they still carried the shape of her mother’s hands.

Sherman, dressed in his master of ceremonies tuxedo, whistled at her when she emerged from her room. “I always liked that dress.”

“Thank you.” Flora felt embarrassed by the praise, although she knew it was his way of remembering his sister.

On their way, she passed Nana, who was working on a quilt with patches of red and white.

“Hello, love,” Nana said. “There’s a cake for you in the icebox.”

“Chocolate?”

“Does coleslaw give Sherman heartburn?”

“Hey!” Sherman said. “It’s not my fault your slaw is so good I can’t stop eating it.”

Flora gave him a friendly shove and stopped to kiss her grandmother’s head. “Thank you, Nana. I’ll eat it after the show. But you should have your piece now.”

“I can wait,” Nana said. “I’m not so close to the end that I need to take my dessert first, you know.” She looked up at Flora over the tops of her glasses. “Don’t you look just like your mama.”

“Not half as pretty,” Flora said, waving it off.

“Half again prettier, child. But she would have liked for you to stay in school. Graduate. Not have to work two jobs the way you do. You’re only seventeen. Not old enough to be carrying the weight of the grown-up world on your shoulders.”

“Oh, Nana. We’ve talked about that.” There was no point in school, not when the club was her future and most white folk were hell-bent on keeping colored folk in their place, even if they were polite about it. And not when Nana needed her the way she did. Taking care of the house by herself would be far too much of a burden, and Nana moved so slowly these days, as if every inch of her ached.

“Girl’s right,” Sherman said. “The club needs her. We’ll be able to turn things around and be more like we used to be. And just wait till she sets that record in the airplane. Flora’s got all of Bessie Coleman’s fire, and all of Amelia Earhart’s ice. Miss Earhart won’t know what hit her, and people will line up around the block to hear her sing. There’s no kind of bad fame, you know.”

“Tell that to Bonnie and Clyde.” Nana returned to her quilt.

Flora waited until Nana had finished a slow, careful stitch. Then she bent and placed one more kiss on top of her grandmother’s head. “Don’t stay up too late.”

“Sing your heart out tonight, child. Your mama’s buttons would burst if she could see you now, all grown up.”

Flora found a light coat and stepped into the night. A black cat, the strange but elegant one that had stopped by every so often for years to beg a little supper, skittered from the shadows and wove through Flora’s ankles.

“You again,” she said.

The animal had odd black eyes and seemed to prefer affection on her own terms, never coming when she was called, often hovering near the edges of things, as if she merely wanted to observe. The strangeness of the creature softened Flora’s mood. She’d feed her when she got home. Maybe even some cake.

“Come on, Flora.” Sherman jiggled his keys. “We got to go.”

The cat blinked slowly before turning abruptly and disappearing into the night, as if she were done with Flora. But she’d be back. Flora was sure of it.

On the short ride to the club, they went over the set list, adjusting things here and there based on how the audience had responded the previous night. They arrived a good thirty minutes before the rest of the band. Because Saturday was their biggest day of the week, Charlie had been at work since dawn, slow-cooking pork shoulder, brisket, and ribs. The scent was warm and wonderful, as much of home to Flora as her nana’s house.

“Hit the lights, baby,” Sherman called out from the kitchen as the double doors swung shut behind him.

Flora turned and walked into the heart of the club, a room painted black to hide the many scars in the walls and woodwork — and to make everything in the room disappear save the stage. She flicked on the chandeliers that hung over the dozens of round tables filling the floor. The room went from dark to dazzling. She found a box of matches and struck one, and carefully set about lighting the sea of candles that lay before her, their wicks hungry for the light and heat that would by night’s end consume them. Then she went to her dressing room to warm up her voice.

E
THAN
rolled his eyes as he steered the car to the curb. Down the hill, past the International District, rose the Smith Tower, its lights glowing against the black sky. Beyond that, Puget Sound. It had taken the better part of two days, but Henry had convinced Ethan to go to Flora’s nightclub. His fingers twitched, playing the notes of the Enigma Variations.

They exited the car and put on their hats, swirling mist into the light of the streetlamps. All along the sidewalk, sharply dressed couples strolled arm in arm toward a low brick building with a black awning that read
THE
DOMINO
.

“I don’t know why we’re doing this,” Ethan said. “We’ve got school tomorrow, and besides, Father won’t even let the arts reporters write about this music. He says it reduces people to an animalistic state. We’re not writing the story about the girl pilot anyway, so all of this is a waste of time.”

“It’s just jazz,” Henry said. “We’ve listened to it a thousand times.”

“Au contraire,” Ethan said. “We’ve listened to the uptown stuff. This is something else entirely. You of all people ought to hate it.”

Henry wasn’t so sure. The notes that found their way outside intrigued him. There was a call-and-response aspect to them, the same thing an orchestra did when the melody circulated from the strings to the winds and brass. But this was simpler. More elemental. More like one person chatting with another, one hand reaching out to touch another. He didn’t know whether it was the music or something else, but the air felt electric, almost alive.

They headed toward the line of patrons entering the club. Most were older, in their twenties. Some even as old as thirty. Only about half were white. The rest came in all shades. There was even a couple from somewhere in the Orient. Each pair stopped before entering, chatting briefly with a bouncer who weighed at least three hundred pounds.

Closer to the door, the music grew louder, complicated with rhythms he’d never encountered. His fingers moved along with these new sounds, trying to pick out the notes he’d need to hit if he were playing along. Not that he ever would. It was one thing to dream of playing in an orchestra, which had ties to history and respectability and a connection to the world he was used to. There was no way he could set his hopes on playing in a place like this. The Thornes would toss him right out, and he’d be alone in the world.

They reached the bouncer. “You eighteen?” he asked.

“Yes.” Ethan offered the man some folded bills.

The man laughed, taking the money into a hand that looked like it could remove a head as easily as it could uncork a bottle. “Happy birthday, then.” He unclipped the velvet rope drawn across the double-wide door.

The music swelled and the boys stepped inside, passing a huge oil painting of a couple dressed to the nines, their brown skin burnished with tones of red and gold. Henry and Ethan headed down a staircase. The song ended and a ripple of applause reached them.

“Ugh, it feels like anything goes here,” Ethan said. “Which is to say, a perfect recipe for everything going wrong.”

Henry didn’t respond. He couldn’t. They’d reached the bottom of the staircase and now stood at the edge of an enormous room filled with round, candle-lit tables, a long bar lined with bottles and glassware, bustling cocktail waitresses, and waiters carrying trays of food and drink on their shoulders.

On the far side rose a stage flanked by red velvet curtains and pearly lights. Everything had seen better days, to be sure. But it was the biggest, brightest thing Henry could remember since before the Crash, and for a moment, he almost felt as if he were back in that old world, the one he’d lived in with his family before the influenza took his mother and sister, before his father … Henry stopped the thought in its tracks. Now wasn’t the time.

A group of musicians stood on one side of the stage, and the drummer kicked off a new song. Center stage, stepping down a wide white staircase with curving handrails, was Flora, looking paradoxically the same and yet so different from the way she looked on the airstrip. She smiled as she walked, but it was clear she couldn’t care less about the audience clapping and hooting on the floor below. A spotlight pinned her in front of a nickel-plated microphone.

“Something wrong?” Ethan said. “Don’t tell me you’ve come to your senses.”

“It’s not that. I just —” Henry shook his head. “The singer.”

“Not that it matters, but she’s not bad-looking out of that canvas getup,” Ethan said. “I’ll grant you that. Even if her dress looks like something that was in style twenty years ago.”

Henry didn’t care about the dress. It looked fine to him. More than fine.

Flora opened her mouth to sing and Henry swallowed hard. He’d never heard anything like her voice, which made him wish he had his bass in his hands, just so he could return the sounds, a mix of chocolate and cream, something he wanted to drink through his skin.

Once upon a time I dreamed

Of how my life would go …

He recognized the song: “Walk Beside Me.” But her voice nailed him to the floor. It made him feel as though something had slipped under his skin and was easing everything nonessential straight from his bones.

I’d span the globe, a lonely soul

Beneath the moon’s white glow …

“Cigarette?” A blond wearing a short red dress and a tray of Viceroys slung from a strap around her neck leaned in toward them, blocking Henry’s view.

On that day I saw you

It wasn’t love at first sight

But slowly, like a sunrise

You revealed your light

Henry craned around her as Ethan waved the cigarette girl away. “Your kind always says no to mine,” she muttered as she left. The maître d’ approached holding menus.

“Follow me, gentlemen,” he said. “It’s your lucky night. We have a table right up front by the dance floor.”

Henry had heard “Walk Beside Me” many times on the wireless. But he had never heard it like this, slow and tender. And the accompanying music was nothing like the orderly, upright way the Ozzie Nelson Band played it. This was something unsettling here, something unpredictable, as if some set of rules, both written and unwritten, was being shattered like glass. The awareness of it dampened his forehead and made his blood sing, raising all the tiny hairs on his arms and the back of his neck.

Flora moved on to the chorus.

I may have dreamed before you

Of how my life should be

The only thing I want now

Is for you to walk beside me

Beneath her voice, a skinny young bass player plucked a steady rhythm, holding her on a sturdy web of notes. For some reason, Henry immediately hated the man, his mustache, his pompadour, his trim tuxedo, the way he looked at Flora as though she were a thing he owned. The music picked up a notch, taking Henry’s pulse with it as the song traveled back to the main melody, now with the full band. It was a conversation with a piano, a guitar, a saxophone, two trombones, and a pair of twins playing trumpets that turned the reflection of the chandeliers overhead into movable stars.

Henry felt as though he’d dived deep into the water of Lake Washington on a hot day, braced by the coolness of it, knowing he’d have to surface to breathe. He was vaguely aware that next to him, Ethan was saying something and gesturing with the menu.

“Beg pardon?” Henry said, unable to take his eyes off of Flora.

“I was saying,” Ethan said, his voice edged with something sharp, “I ordered you a gin fizz and a rack of ribs with collard greens on the side. This place is supposed to be the best, if you like that sort of food.”

It took Henry forever and a day to process Ethan’s words. It was as though his mind was forcing him to untangle the letters, as though they were unspooling from a knotted ball of twine.

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

“What’s with you?” Ethan asked, his expression dark. “The eating had better be good because this music does nothing for me. And this club is a shambles. It’s worse than her dress.” He flicked his hand toward the stage, and his gesture extinguished the candle burning on their table.

Henry looked again at the gown, wondering what Ethan could see that he couldn’t. Under the spotlight, the sequins followed Flora’s curves in places he wanted to touch. And the club, well, it had seen better days, but what place hadn’t? Ethan and his family might not have felt the full weight of the hardship that had afflicted most these long eight years, but it was never far from Henry’s mind that he was one friendship away from nothing.

A waiter set down their order and leaned in to reignite the candle, and Henry focused on Flora, hoping she’d see him too. The moment the flame caught, there was a flash of recognition in her eyes, a quick stiffening in her shoulders, the slightest break in her voice. She looked away, and Henry leaned back in his seat and forced himself to breathe.

Ethan’s voice cut in. “I suppose that’s the thing with real life. It has a way of not living up to the one you imagine.”

Henry downed his drink so he wouldn’t have to reply. As far as dreams went, his imagination had never conjured anything as powerful as the hold Flora’s voice had on him, and the only thing he could do was sit still and swallow it whole, trying not to feel Ethan’s disapproval too sharply.