One
On a night of hard frost, in the ruins of a burnt church, I found a body in the snow.
Its hand poked through the powder, gripping a crumbling stone altar. When I touched the wrist, a fistful of white tumbled away, exposing a derby hat and a tuft of thin orange hair spotted with blood.
“Find it?” called the woman I traveled with.
I wiped my hand on my black dress, which had seen much worse than the residue of a corpse, and walked back to her.
“There’s nothing here,” I said, and left the dead man behind. It was no feat. I’d been walking away from corpses all winter long. This was March 1922, when our bodies refused to stay buried.
Ten days prior, I was spitting off the ledge of Berk’s Third Floor. Owned by one of the rare Westsiders as short and uncompromising as myself, Berk’s was a shabby saloon on the Westside half of the stem whose eastern walls and roof had, some years back, simply melted away.
The exposure to the elements made it a pleasant summertime beer garden. In the winter it remained popular only with the committed few: those antisocial types who would happily freeze for a peek over the top of the fence and the chance to drink illegal liquor in full view of the Eastside throng. The people on the far side of Broadway were fat, happy, honorable, and safe, but when they cast their sober eyes up at us, all we saw was thirst. We raised our glasses to say that though west of the fence we had no electricity, no heat, and no conveniences, that though there were no guns on our side of the island but countless murders just the same, that though we lived in what they called hell, we had liquor, and some nights that made it okay.
On the other nights, we spit.
It was at least twenty feet from the lip of the saloon to the fence, but that didn’t stop us trying to expectorate clear over the barrier to the Eastside. Long nights were passed in drunken argument about the proper angle to launch one’s missile, the ideal texture for flight, and the correct place to stand in order to harness the wind. No one had ever seen anyone clear the fence, but every drinker there insisted that once, just once, they had made it.
My mouth was drying and my projectiles were growing feeble when Bex Red appeared at my side, wrapped in every layer of fabric she owned. Born in Florida, but a fixture on the Westside art scene since before the fence was raised, Bex had never embraced the brutality of the New York cold. Sharp blue eyes peeked out through a slit in the scarves that swaddled her head, yet her voice was unmuffled by the cloth.
“Every time I see you, Gilda, you’ve managed to find a worse bar,” she said.
We sat at my table, a few inches from the edge, and I sloshed some gin into a chipped cup. It ran like sludge, and the glass was cold enough to cling to her lips, but she lifted a scarf and drained it. She dug her mittened hand into a coat pocket and pulled out a carefully folded square of thick homemade paper marked up with ninety-nine shades of blue.
“This is every blue I can mix,” she said, “and that’s every blue there is, from the not-quite-black of deep river water to this washed-out near white that’s too fragile even for a robin’s egg.”
“They all look blue to me.”
“You have always lacked an artist’s temperament.”
“Thank you.”
“Any of these look right?” she said with a theatrical sigh. I ran my finger down the page, squinting until my eyes crossed.
“Blue 72, maybe. Or it could be 74.”
“This was my whole afternoon, you know. Do I get paid for the time?”
“You get paid when I get paid.”
“Are you going to get paid?”
“Probably not.” I put the color chart away.
“Well, while we’re on the subject of wasted time . . .”
From deep in her coats she drew a worn paper envelope as soft as an old dollar bill. Inside were three portraits: two I would force myself to look at, and one I could not stand to see. The first showed a man with a gut as round and heavy as a pumpkin, shirtless at a table, a forkful of sausage and cabbage poised before wet red lips. The other was of a woman, handsome but joyless, waiting in line at an Eastside bank.
“These are good,” I said.
“Better than last week?”
“Last week’s were fine.”
“But you like these more.”
“Perhaps. They are so, so ordinary.”
She swirled her cup, scowling at its emptiness. I tilted the bottle in her direction, but she refused.
“It’s not healthy, drinking this filth,” she said.
“Beats the cold.”
She pulled her layers tighter, then leaned across the table and gave me an entirely unworkable hug. I stared as she walked away and wished I knew how to leave by her side. But I had one more appointment to keep.
A party of slummers poured through the door, nearly knocking Bex to the floor, and flung themselves at the bar crying for gin. Berk slid them a couple of bottles, exacting an outrageous price in return, and they occupied the table beside mine, laughing like only Eastsiders can.
“Isn’t it the most marvelous pit?” asked their leader, an overgrown boy in a cashmere overcoat whose slick curls stuck out below the brim of his hat. “Berk’s a troll, but she has her uses. I’ve been coming here for ages, you know, and she loves me like a son.”
I eyed the leg of his chair, which teetered beside the drop. If I smacked it, there was a strong chance he would fall to his death. Warmed by that happy thought, I returned the drawings to the envelope, taking care not to see the one that remained inside, and poured myself another drink.
I was watching snow swirl across the hardwood floor, savoring the mawkish burn of Berk’s red gin, when the bells of Grace Church sang ten o’clock, and Judy Byrd kicked open the stairwell door.
“I come to preach the electric resurrection,” she bellowed, and those familiar with her ministry pulled their glasses close to their chests.
A black woman whose tight curls were just smoked with gray, Judy vaulted onto the oak bar without apparent strain and did not turn her head at Berk’s perfunctory cry that she get the hell down. She wore a homespun orange dress and a tightly knotted kerchief, and spoke with a heavy Haitian accent that I knew to be an affectation. She clutched an ancient broom whose few remaining bristles stuck out at odd angles, hoisting it over her head like an executioner showing off his ax.
“What business have I, an honest woman, a god-fearing woman, what business have I skulking in the worst gin mills the Westside has to offer?” she asked the room.
“I think Miss Berk would take exception to that,” said the cashmere overcoat. He looked around, waiting for the room to acknowledge his barb, but even his friends were watching Judy. She was well into her reverie, which she would follow, as she always did, down twisting paths of mixed metaphor until it led us all to salvation.
“I tell you why I come here, why I drag my frostbitten feet up those unreliable stairs, why I leap upon this bar the same way we all must leap across the valley of death and into the arms of our savior. I do it for love. I love you drunks, the way you slur like the devil’s caught your tongue, the way you stumble like he’s hobbled your feet, the way your skin blisters and cracks and turns as red as hellfire, as bloody as the gin in your glass. I love you all, no matter how you try to blot out the light God lit inside you, no matter how greedily you suck the intoxicating sweat that runs off the devil’s backside. I love you as Christ loves you, and in his name I will sweep you clean.”