Joplin's Ghost (54 page)

“All I know is that I don’t know,” the psychic said, and he heard the scribble as she kept writing. “Let’s try some faith. Once we have the piano, Phoenix will show us what to do.”

It was the closest thing to prophecy Carlos had heard since the gunfire at the Osiris that took Phoenix away.

W
as it okay?

Phoenix heard her own voice in the darkness, endless repetition.
Was it okay?

Reenie’s throaty voice joined the chorus, laughing from a tunnel.
Was it OKAY?

Daddy…was it okay?

“You did it, Peanut.” Her father’s voice was in her ear.

Sarge’s voice brought a flash of light, and Phoenix could finally see again. Sparks flared in the distance like fireflies (
but these sparks are from cameras, not the other kind
), and a wave of sound grew louder until it snatched her beneath an ocean, deaf in its vast noise. It took Phoenix a long time—maybe minutes, maybe hours—to realize she was hearing applause.

When the sound of whistling, clapping and shouting became distinct to her, no longer a mystery, her sight sharpened. She knew exactly where she was, suddenly—she was center stage at the Silver Slipper, sitting on the bench of a breathtaking white concert grand piano with its lid raised high, performance-ready. She had dreamed about this piano, long ago, and she had missed it without remembering it was gone.

Then he must be here, too,
she thought, and she peered through the open lid so she could see an identical piano facing hers. Sarge was there, in place at his bench. Sarge wore a black tuxedo and bowtie, and white gloves—but also his mud-cloth skullcap, or it wouldn’t be Sarge.

Sarge grinned. No stream of blood ran alongside his left eye, or down his nose.

“Where you been, Peanut?” Sarge said.

I don’t know,
Phoenix tried to say, but speaking was difficult now.

The audience went deathly quiet. Sarge removed his white gloves one after the other, shaking out his hands to limber them up. “You ready?” he said, winking. “It’s showtime.”

Phoenix glanced down at her piano’s ivory keys. No blood.
Thank you, God.

A conductor stood before them, silhouetted against the footlights. The conductor raised his baton, and Phoenix’s hands went to the keys in the pose Mrs. Abramowicz had drilled into her head—fingers loose, wrists high. There shouldn’t be a conductor, since there was no orchestra, she remembered. But a conductor was here all the same.

The conductor’s baton swooped, and Phoenix and her father played. Phoenix didn’t recognize the piece, but she knew it by heart. It wasn’t ragtime, jazz, blues, soul, rock or R&B, but it was descended from all of them, syncopated and improvised and ordered all at once. Sarge added his own flourishes—phrases from old music never mined that he had passed on to his daughter without his knowledge—but the music was Phoenix’s. Together, Phoenix and her father brought her unborn music to life on their twin pianos.

The conductor’s baton had gone still while she wasn’t paying attention. They were not playing the piece the conductor expected of them, she realized. But they didn’t need the conductor. Phoenix and her father raced and slowed, called and responded, crescendoed and whispered. Sarge began phrases and she finished them, flawless musical discourse. “Just like Pops and King Oliver! Like Dizzy and Bird!” Sarge shouted, laughing, although Phoenix thought they sounded more like Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean, or Big Boi and Andre 3000, or Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Or Nat King Cole and his girl Natalie singing “Unforgettable,” their duet from beyond death.

The piece ended as it was supposed to, with their combined pianos clapping like thunder on the final note. Phoenix felt her body fill with air, that feeling like floating that came after a good show.
You done fucked
up NOW, huh nigger?
someone far back in the audience shouted, but his lone voice was smothered by applause.

When they stood up—her at her piano and Sarge at his—the audience exploded.

“You did it, Peanut. I love you,” Sarge said, with his
Daddy
stare.

Sarge walked around his piano with steady strides to the front of the stage, and the conductor stepped aside to make room. Sarge’s features vanished in the stage lights, but Phoenix saw his shadow waving to the audience, as if he spotted friends.

Elegantly, Sarge took his final bow.

You like Magnums motherfucker?

nononononononononononononononononoNONONONONONONO

“Daddy?” Phoenix called to him, falling back to her bench as feeling seeped from her legs.

Sarge heard her, and turned around. When he stepped toward her, from beyond the light, Phoenix saw the hole in his head above his eye, and the streams of blood carrying him away.

“You’ve got to see about the revolution, Phee,” he said.

Sarge turned and gave the Panther salute, and the audience roared its appreciation. Then, he began his walk toward the backstage curtain, head and shoulders high.
Every round goes higher, higher, soldiers of the cross.
Sarge was a soldier, and not the least bit afraid.

Not yet, Daddy,
Phoenix tried to say, but her voice failed her again. She tried to stand to go after him, but her arms yanked her back, her hands glued fast to the piano’s keys.

The white concert grand was gone. Phoenix’s fingers were anchored to the sticky keys of the Rosenkranz. Four stunted, crimson-colored candles burned in its matching candelabra, and hot wax dripped onto the piano’s keys like blood.

Come back to us, Phee. We miss you. We need you here on our side.

Phoenix felt a sudden, startling stillness as everything around her dimmed again. The voice puzzled her, intrigued her. She knew that voice. She knew that place.
Carlos?
she said, or tried to. The name was strange in her mouth even as she uttered it, already forgotten, but its sound strengthened her resolve. She would go to him, even if she had to wade through the river of her father’s blood. All revolutions had blood.

Phoenix pulled at her fingers again, but the piano’s keys held her in place, unrelenting. Phoenix felt a wail about to break itself free in her, a tide of grief and terror.

“Freddie?” a voice said behind her.

The tide receded, stilled. The voice made her heart leap. The stage disappeared.

She still sat the Rosenkranz, her hands wed to its keys, but the candles were gone.
There are no matches in here. Matches would cause an accident.
A hand grazed her shoulder, someone’s lips brushed her ear. For an instant, she forgot her lover’s name.

“Where do you keep vanishing to?” Scott said. “It worries me when you’re gone.”

Her heart celebrated when she saw Scott standing behind her, listing terribly, but at least on his feet. He must have made a tremendous effort to come to her, since he was confined to his bed. Now he was standing by himself, and she was the one who was trapped.

“Why won’t it let me go?” she said.

“Every musician has an instrument that never forgets him, dear heart.”

Trembling from either his anticipation or the effort, Scott leaned down to nuzzle her neck. At first, his cool skin made her flinch, but when their flesh rubbed together, she remembered him. Scott raised an unsteady index finger to her chin. His hand was a block of ice, but his touch jolted through her core, making her toes pinch.

“Let me live, Freddie. Live with me.”

Suddenly, her hands came free from the piano, and warm light appeared, brightening everything until her vision was as crisp as it had been since before she died. It was like having a new pair of eyes—new
everything,
really, because her senses shed their sleep. The piano was so beautiful that she stared at it a long time, and the piano’s beauty helped her see the refinement hidden around her. The room’s walnut bureau was plain but well dusted, without a single scratch. The brass globes on the bed likewise gleamed. The light through the curtain was dying but still deep and fiery, dusk light. Her favorite time of day.

She saw Scott with fresh eyes, too. Scott’s illnesses had aged him, so the man who stood over her might be sixty except for his jet-black hair. If he had lived, Scott wouldn’t have had a gray hair on his head until he was an old man. He was meant to have lived a long time. Scott hadn’t seen a barber in a long while. His hair was springy, a fledgling Afro.

She smelled baking chicken from the kitchen. From the smell, Lottie must be quite a cook, and that made her jealous.

“Is Lottie good to you?” she said.

“When I let her be,” Scott said.

She smiled at that. Scott was the definition of tenacity, she remembered. Like her.

“She’ll make sure you’re remembered,” she said.

“Can’t ask for more than that,” he said, but that was a lie. He knew who he was, and he wanted to see more, that was all. Like everybody else.

“Stop burning your music, Scott,” she said.

“Burning is the only way to send it away for good,” he said. “Ashes to ashes, amen.”

“Stop burning your music. The time will come when you’ll regret it.”

“There are
thieves,
Freddie. They t-take—”

She silenced Scott by taking his face into her hands, bumping their noses gently. His skin still didn’t feel quite right to her, but it was warmer all the time. “What did I say?”

Their eyes were so close, they might be sharing the same pair. Scott’s eyes began smiling at her. Then, dancing. “I won’t burn my music,” he said. “But promise me something back.”

“I won’t promise until you say what it is.”

Scott smiled. “Allow your husband to carry you to our bed.”

When she nodded, Scott gathered her into his arms like a bundle of bed linens. He pressed his mouth to hers, and the singular taste of him made her eyes fill with tears. His taste was such a comfort, she felt her limbs sag, releasing the coiled fear she had forgotten was there. She would let Scott carry her wherever he wanted her to go.
Ashes to ashes, amen.

He twirled her around, away from the piano, and the drab room suddenly seemed lovely. She didn’t need riches to be happy! The waiting bed and its brown blanket were plain but quaint, and made her recall the pillows on the bed where she had given her virginity to him. Somehow, she had lost that memory before.

But if Scott had been her first lover, had Scott come
after
she met Carlos?

The question was so immense that it rocked her mind. Who
was
she? Was this her home, or was there another home beyond her memory? Who was the man she remembered with his fist in the air, and why did his memory make her so sad?

Scott had questions, too. He lay beside her on the bed, his arms locked around her waist, pulling her so tightly against him that she felt his ragged breathing. His eyes shimmered, fearful. “Am I mad, Freddie?” he whispered. “Or are you really here?”

“Yes, Scott, you’re mad,” she said. “And yes, I’m really here.”

When they kissed again, their questions dissolved.

T
he salmon-colored door to the ranch-style house at the end of the street opened after only one knock, and Carlos took a step back, his breath diving into his lungs. Four days and counting since the Osiris, and sudden movements still startled him.
Dios mio.

The balding man at the door had an ample beer gut and sideburns fashioned after 1970s-era Elvis, wiry bottle brushes alongside his ears. While he gulped iced tea from a glass with a Miami Dolphins logo, the smell of pizza inside tantalized Carlos. All he’d had on the plane was stale pretzels. Hunger, combined with the startling Miami humidity he’d somehow forgotten, made Carlos feel queasy. His cousins in San Juan would laugh.

“You the guy who called this morning?” The man had a leftover Brooklyn accent, a transplant like most of his neighbors. Los Angeles was full of transplants, too.

“Carlos Harris.” Carlos almost shook his hand, but a formal gesture felt awkward, given the insanity that lay beneath this facade of business.
Yes, I’m the nut who called, the one who wants to buy your haunted piano.
Calls to random Burnsides throughout the Miami telephone directory had led Carlos to Rich Burnside in Perrine, the only one who tuned and restored pianos.

Burnside rubbed his moustache, which was mostly brown with sprays of gray. The moustache drooped dramatically, almost a style from another era. “You flew from New York just like that? Same day?” Burnside said. “That’s a lot of trouble for a worthless piano.”

“It’s not worthless to me,” Carlos said. His hands were in his pockets, curled fists. His knuckles chafed against the denim. The odds that Burnside actually remembered the piano Leah had sold him more than a decade ago were slim, but he’d claimed he did. “Can I see it?”

“Why don’t you come in first, grab a glass of tea and a slice? My wife and I just—”

“If you don’t mind,” Carlos said, “I’m hoping to catch a flight to JFK in three hours.”

The man looked at his watch, eyebrows jumping. “Good luck, this time of day. Traffic’s a bitch on 826, and the Don Shula’s a parking lot after four.” He sighed, pondering something, then he turned to look over his shoulder. “Susie?” he called. “I’m running over to Old Cutler. Wrap up my pizza.”

“You
sure
?” came the surprised voice of a woman in house.

“It’ll keep.” Burnside looked forlorn, though. Apparently, Carlos had arrived on the heels of a late lunch. “Let’s vamoose,” Burnside said, fishing his keys from his front pocket. “Fact is, I’m glad to get rid of the piano.”

Carlos’s heart squirmed. “Why?” he said. He’d delayed the questions that would make him sound like a headcase, but Burnside had brought it up.

Burnside shrugged instead of answering. He pulled the front door closed while it chimed behind him, a delicate tinkling of shells. Burnside nodded toward his half-circle driveway of crushed stones, where a white van painted with
A-1 South Dade Piano Tuning and Repair
in red script was parked beside a silver PT Cruiser.

“Too much aggravation,” Burnside said finally, unlocking the van’s driver’s side door.

“Like?”

Instead of elaborating, Burnside waved Carlos into the van. He pulled a cigarette from the pack of Salems in the glove compartment and lit up before starting the engine. While Carlos strapped on his seat belt, Burnside pulled out of the driveway and navigated through the neighborhood of L-shaped homes, which Leah said was close to where Phoenix had grown up. Many of the houses sat on the bank of a winding canal as wide as a small river, beneath eucalyptus and palm trees that made portions of the street feel like the tropics. Burnside slowed the car to let a trail of ducks meander across the street, all of them ignoring approaching traffic as if they were blind.

Burnside’s van was an older model, with a cassette player instead of a CD. Burnside punched on the music, and Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It” filled the van with a serene reggae vibe that didn’t match Carlos’s mood. He didn’t want to be nervous, but he was. Gloria had changed her mind about coming with him to retrieve the old piano, and he could understand why.
I’m in no hurry to see that piano, dude,
she’d admitted, and Carlos wasn’t either, except that he had to be.

A sharp fear that Phoenix was going to die—a fear so rooted that it reared as a certainty—coursed through Carlos until it was a hot boulder on his chest. The idea that he would never again be able to talk to her, or hear her soul’s laughter through her music, paralyzed him. In his mind, he had already cleaned up their history to tell their grandchildren:
I met her the day she graduated from high school, on her eighteenth birthday. When I first heard her demo, I knew she was a star already.

“The good ones always go young,” Burnside said suddenly, and blood drained from Carlos’s face. Burnside went on. “Tosh. Marley. The greats always kick before their time.”

The term
kick
made Carlos feel sick to his stomach, forcing him to imagine Phoenix’s IV feeding tube and the flies hovering near her bed. “Not all of them do,” Carlos said in her defense, but there was no arguing the point. Aaliyah had just started to get his attention when she died. “I’d like to hear what happened with this piano, if you don’t mind. You never told me.”

Again, Burnside went quiet. Old Cutler Road appeared at the end of a lonely roadway, and Burnside turned left, keeping his eyes trained on the road like an old man. Old Cutler Road had once been a cool haven from the sun, but the foliage in South Dade hadn’t grown back the same since Hurricane Andrew in ’92. Some spots were still dead.

“Brace yourself for something that’ll sound crazy,” Burnside said, his voice husky.

“Try me.”

“That piano’s been trouble since the day I bought it. This one gets herself lost. What I mean to say, the damn thing
moves
. You get me?” His profile was rigid.

“I get you.”
And I’m way ahead of you,
Carlos thought.

This was the right piano.

Old Cutler Self-Storage (
AIR
-
CONDITIONED
!
FIRST MONTH FREE
!) was a collection of drab warehouses with bright orange doors, hidden on the roadway behind eucalyptus trees with dangling roots. The facility’s asphalt was black, new. Burnside drove to the unmanned arm blocking the entrance and punched in a code, and the arm lifted to let him in. He coasted to a stop beside the rear line of warehouses, a stone’s throw from the green water of the Saga Bay lake.

Carlos watched the circles of ripples that appeared on the water’s surface, invisible fish looking for food. The life beneath the water was like the unseen world in Phoenix’s room.

“You saw the piano move?” Carlos said. His tongue felt sticky.

“Didn’t need to,” Burnside said, leading Carlos on a gravel path toward a large storage room. “When I bought her, I carted her straight to my garage, figuring I’d look her over closely the next day. I wanted this one on sight, for some reason, but I had a feeling the soundboard was shot to hell, and if that was gone, I’d wasted my money. I wanted to put off the bad news. But the next morning, when I went out to the garage, she was gone.”

Burnside mashed out his cigarette on the path before jangling through his keys to find the one for the lock on the storage door at 8A. “I called the police, filed a report. That same day, my son Danny goes into the workshop behind our store on South Dixie, and the missing piano’s sitting against the wall like it’s always been there. But I didn’t move it there, and neither did Danny. I’m saying it moved
itself
. And that wasn’t the only time. It showed up here on its own, too. If you don’t believe me, Danny and Susie will tell you.”

Burnside hesitated, his key poised beside the lock. He overcame his sheepishness and stared Carlos in the eye. “You get me?” he said again, his head tipping forward. Burnside’s eyes were a friend’s, not a businessman’s.

Carlos nodded, his palms wet. “Yes,” Carlos said, trying to sound sure of himself. He nodded to Burnside.
Go on. Let’s go in.

The storage bin’s aluminum door rolled up with a rusty
tick-tick-tick
while Burnside grunted, pushing with one arm. The cool, dank space huffed out the smell of old wood, mildew and a strong cleanser, maybe turpentine. Carlos couldn’t see anything except the shadows of what might be a dozen pianos. They stood in a dark collection of silence.

“I call this my Graveyard,” Burnside said. “Special projects I don’t have time for. About the time I bought this one, I had a bad piano habit. Susie made me stop going to estate sales, so now I only refurbish to customer request. I should get rid of most of these, I guess, but I keep thinking I’ll get to them one day.” He surveyed the dark room, which apparently didn’t have any lighting beyond the open door panel. “Shit. She’s done it again.”

Carlos knew, then: The piano was not there. The piano was not
anywhere
. He had flown to Miami for nothing, and something awful had happened to Phoenix while he was gone.

Burnside pointed. “This morning she was in back, but there she is, misbehaving as usual.”

As light poured into the room from the open door, Carlos’s vision improved. Most of the pianos were lined up neatly along the sides of the storage bin, but one shadow stood in the path of the doorway, ten yards back. When Carlos stepped forward, the shadow became a dark, aged piano with two adorning candelabra, room for two candles on each end. Clear as day. He hadn’t seen the piano when the door first opened. How had he missed it?

Carlos opened his wallet and felt for his cross. This time, he kept it in his balled hand.

“Not exactly what you’d call ideal storage conditions,” Burnside said. “Even with A.C., this room’s too humid. I’d never bring a client’s piano here. I keep promising I’ll clear the place and save the money on storage. That and a decent round of golf, and I could die a happy man.”

When Carlos took three strides toward the piano, his feet burned as if he’d stepped into an anthill. Carlos stopped walking, stamping his feet on the bare concrete floor. Phoenix’s mother had told him something about itching feet.

“That goes away,” Burnside said matter-of-factly, but Carlos noticed that Burnside walked no closer to the piano himself. Instead, he stood in the light, keys still jingling. “Go on, take a closer look if you want. I’ve got a flashlight in the van, if you need it.”

Carlos didn’t want to examine this piano any more than he would want to lean over a table at a morgue and study a fresh corpse. The discarded instrument glowered, and the thought of bringing this piano to Phoenix’s room felt worse than foolish. It felt spiteful. The piano’s presence was larger than the space it occupied; it filled the room, an unsettled energy that reminded Carlos of what it would feel like if three or four people were hiding inside here, lying in wait. How could this piano do Phoenix any good?

The Queen Psychic’s intuition felt more fragile in the piano’s presence. This piano was more powerful than Johnita Poston, and he was sure the Queen Psychic had never encountered anything like it. He should have sent her here instead, a translator for whatever the piano was whispering beyond his hearing. He should have stayed with Phoenix.

Carlos steeled himself and took two more steps toward it. The piano shuddered as some kind of shadow passed behind him, maybe a bird, making the light into the storage space blink. Carlos raised his arm, unconsciously tilting his body sideways as he drew closer to it. The piano felt like an animal, as if it might spring. And it
had
sprung at Phoenix, he reminded himself.

Holding his breath, Carlos took in the piano’s details: Dingy, piss-colored keys, a cabinet so weatherworn it was like a skeleton, and two candelabra that looked mocking instead of stately. The piano’s ugliness offended him more because of how majestic it once must have been. It put a bad taste in his mouth. Finally, Carlos looked away. He didn’t intend to look at it again, not soon. He wished he never had to see it again.

Carlos craved
evidence
that the piano was the answer, the same standoff he had reached with God when he was thirteen and decided he was agnostic. Did he truly believe he needed the piano, or did he only want to believe because there was nothing left?

“Can the movers pick it up in the morning?” Carlos said after a deep breath.

“Danny can wait here awhile, but not all day. Pin them down on a time.”

“How much do you want for it?” Carlos said. He and Leah had decided to get the piano at any cost. Neither of them wanted to, but they would ask Ronn to help, if it came to that.

“Well, she’s worse off now than when I bought her, and whatever I paid was too much,” Burnside said. “You’ll be paying more than she’s worth to haul her to New York, so I don’t have the heart to charge you. She never belonged to me, anyway. I’m just a caretaker.”

The gesture was so appropriate, Carlos forgot to thank Burnside for his generosity. Burnside should be paying
him
to take this piano away.

“Why do you want it?” Burnside said. “If it’s not too bold to poke my nose in.”