Joplin's Ghost Read online

  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.

  It wasn’t technically a coma, the doctor kept telling them—she was unconscious, as if the distinction made a damn bit of difference to him when his daughter had not opened her eyes in a week solid. Phoenix had been lying in a twisted heap behind that piano on the stairs when he’d found her, and she hadn’t moved since. Broken ribs. Broken leg. A crack, not a break, in her skull, thank Jesus. The gash to his daughter’s head had painted the piano’s keys with a stripe of blood. If he hadn’t been so desperate to get help, Marcus would have curled up on the floor and cried at the sight of her. And he’d thought nothing could feel worse than Raiford.

  “Phee? Can you hear me?” Marcus said daily, squeezing her hand. Marcus had more stomach for the hospital room than Leah did, so often he sat alone with her, leaning against her bed’s aluminum guardrail, so much like a baby’s crib. The swelling on her face was going down after a week, so she looked more serene to him, as if she really were only sleeping, after all. “It’s Daddy, sugar. It’s Sarge. I’m right here, Peanut. I’m just waiting on you to wake up. The people from the World Records called, and they’re gonna make up a new one just for you.”

  Sometimes when he said that, her eyelids seemed to flutter. He was sure of it. She’d be mad as hell at his lie, but he’d make it up to her if God gave him the chance. Phoenix had such long, lovely eyelashes, they rested beneath her eyelids like the soft fur of a mink cub. Against her white pillow and sheets, Phoenix’s cocoa-butter complexion looked bronze.

  He blamed himself for the accident. Gloria had a lot to answer for, too—that headstrong, too-grown brat—but he and Leah knew they had to watch Phoenix when her cousin was around, because something going on in Leah’s sister’s house was making that girl grow up too fast. They hadn’t expected a crazy stunt like trying to move a piano, but with Gloria you never knew. That was the way it had always been. It was his own fault.

  Eventually, Marcus stopped talking to Phoenix much during his hospital vigils, because he figured she was in a place words couldn’t reach. Music would speak for him, he decided. He kept his cassette player on her table, playing new music each day. Only the best, though.

  Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” or Ellington in the morning, Mozart at lunchtime (Eine kleine Nachtmusik was still his favorite, with that timeless violin burst at the start), and the earthier stuff at night: B. B. King and Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye. Or Mahalia Jackson and Shirley Caesar, but only if he wanted to cry. Marcus Smalls played all the music he was afraid his daughter might not live to hear: He played Miriam Makeba and Jelly Roll Morton, Sly & the Family Stone and Scott Joplin, Gil Scott-Heron and Louis Armstrong (the Hot Five sessions), Dizzy Gillespie and James Brown. He played her a 1928 recording of Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River,” and Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” in 1939. He played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, John Philip Sousa’s “Thunderer,” and “Respect” sung the way only Aretha could. He played Earth Wind & Fire and Arturo Sandoval, Al Green and Eric Clapton, Fats Domino, George Gershwin and Ella Fitzgerald. Each day, Marcus offered Phoenix the best music he could, hoping to guide her home to him, or else home to God. She’d be humming and happy either way.

  Nine days after her accident, when Phoenix finally opened her eyes with a matter-of-fact “Hi, Sarge,” she affirmed what he suspected: She had heard the music in her dreams.

  “Were you playing your trumpet?” she said. Her voice was unchanged, and for a moment he only blinked as he stared at her. She’d been unconscious, but now her cinnamon-colored eyes were wide open, and she’d asked him a question. A miracle in a heartbeat.

  “I only wish. That was Pops.” Marcus’s mouth was dry. His joy and sorrow, intertwined, made his limbs gel beneath him. He felt God walk through the room, assess His work for a hot minute, and move on. “Hallelujah, Jesus,” he whispered.

  “Mom promised me a new doll. Any doll I want. I heard her,” Phoenix said.

/>   “She sure did.” Marcus squeezed her hand so hard he startled himself, afraid he might crush her little bones.

  The next thing Phoenix said was, “Is the piano all right, Daddy?”

  The piano was very all right. Too damn all right. Except for the bloody keys, it looked no worse to Marcus than it had in the storeroom all these years. He and Javier and the boys had moved it next to the stinking Dumpster outside the Silver Slipper’s rear exit, naked to the elements to await disposal by Miami Beach Sanitation. Many times, sitting in this very spot, Marcus had sworn to drive out to the Silver Slipper in the middle of the night and set that piano on fire, or to smash it into dust. But something in Phoenix’s earnest yearning froze Marcus’s tongue when he tried to tell her that.

  “The piano’s fine. And you’re fine,” Marcus said. He didn’t notice his tears until then.

  Phoenix smiled, seeming satisfied, but when that spark of earnestness melted away, he saw lines near her eyes that had never been there before, and the pallor of her skin, and a small, pained wince in a secret corner of her mouth that only a father would see.

  Phoenix’s recovery was slow, and almost as terrible as her coma. Marcus had never been able to stand seeing his baby in pain, and for a while she was in pain all the time. He couldn’t tell if it was harder on Phoenix, or on him and Leah. The burden shifted back and forth. During the time Phoenix was hospitalized, Marcus saw Leah wilt. She snapped at Phoenix most of the time, mad at her for nearly dying, then she would catch herself and collapse into tears, rocking against Phoenix while she braided her hair, singing her a young child’s lullabies.

  “It’s OK, Mom,” Phoenix told her. “The world record for being in a coma is thirty-seven years, a hundred and eleven days. I wasn’t anywhere close to that.”

  Phoenix asked about the piano so often that, after a while, Sarge felt obligated to rescue the deadly hunk of wood from the garbage pile. He couldn’t muster the warm feeling toward it Phoenix still had somehow, but he’d do anything to make her happy.

  He found it in the moonlight, soggy with rain. The sight of it filled Marcus with rage.

  Still, he strained and groaned to wheel it back through the rear entrance, careful not to bump its underside too hard on the doorstop. That done, Marcus went to a corner market to buy some talcum powder and powdered milk to see if he could lift those bloodstains off the keys, a trick he’d learned at Raiford. After two hours of scrubbing, Phoenix’s blood was gone and the keys shone as much as their age allowed. Without the blood, the sight of the piano did not piss him off nearly as much. He left it alone when his feet started itching, but not before he decided to consider granting Phoenix’s wish. Maybe he could ask Javier or Mr. Bell and his bad-ass boys to help him take the thing home.

  He never got the chance. As soon as he mentioned the idea to Leah, his wife ranted to him about how the accident with Phoenix proved that the piano was cursed. Marcus couldn’t pretend he didn’t understand his wife’s conviction—he’d had a few brushes with things he couldn’t explain when he was Phoenix’s age, and he knew that everything on this Earth is not meant to be understood. He didn’t like the piano any more than Leah did. But Marcus also wasn’t willing to sacrifice his daughter’s wishes on the basis of superstition, not when Phoenix was already suffering so much. He and Leah debated for three days, until his wife threw her hands up and told him she could live with whatever he thought was best.

  The next afternoon, the piano was waiting for Marcus on their front porch.

  When Leah changes her mind, she don’t waste time, he thought, pushing the piano into his living room the way he’d pushed it out of the rain. But that was his wife: always a hundred percent, never fifty. The subject was still sore between them, so he didn’t question Leah about what had motivated her to call the movers herself. And she never mentioned the piano to him.

  So, Phoenix had saved the piano. The piano saved her in return.

  When Phoenix screamed in a tantrum during physical therapy—like she almost always did, because the doctor said she might not ever walk right again if they didn’t push her—Marcus used the piano to coax her through. If she just could finish her last set of leg lifts, he reminded her, if she would just finish the rest of her sessions, the piano was waiting for her. Except for the blood, he promised he would leave its sad appearance exactly as it was, because that was what his Peanut wanted.

  Phoenix was in the hospital for a month. That month passed like a dozen, and when it was over, it was as if a powerful tide had swallowed them and stolen much of what they recognized from their lives. For a time, everything became different.

  Marcus began turning down gigs, even though money was tight, because he couldn’t bear a long stretch away from home. That lasted for a while, anyway. When he did go for a week or so, Leah had less patience for his raunchy road stories, or any stories that didn’t paint a world where good people did good things and were rewarded for their works. Leah still seemed to be in mourning although Phoenix was better all the time, so Leah’s mother sent her to therapy. The therapist called it post-traumatic stress disorder, an affliction Marcus knew all too well, but he’d always called it “the shakes.” For years after he’d walked out of Raiford, the shakes had snatched him from sleep in the middle of the night with dreams that he was still behind bars.

  After the accident, Marcus never again dreamed about being inside. His baby girl had lived, so he’d been set free. Truly free, this time.

  The biggest change, though, was Phoenix’s.

  Instead of carrying her dog-eared copy of the Guinness Book of World Records with her everywhere she went, she left it on her bedroom desk, always open to the same page. And she played with her toys, but not the way she used to. Phoenix’s imaginary tableaux were usually all over the house: Tonka fire vehicles parked beside the fireplace awaiting their next rescue mission; a Barbie U.N. beach party on the patio (Barbie dolls from around the world sitting stiffly at miniature patio tables and sunning themselves by the plastic pool); and a ferocious GI Joe standoff in the Florida room, where two fallen soldiers were buried beneath a handkerchief while their three brethren crouched just beyond them, their M16s trained on whatever giant enemy might round the corner.

  One day, Marcus noticed that the fire trucks were gone, the pool party had ended, and the soldiers had gotten leave. Curious, Marcus inched Phoenix’s bedroom door open and found her made-up bed covered in toys. Her Tonka trucks were propped up on her pillows as if climbing a tough terrain, manned by oversized GI Joes. The international cadre of Barbies was huddled together in a group, in their ceremonial clothes. The only Ken was shirtless, a casualty lying facedown on the mattress while an African Barbie mourned over him. A GI Joe consoled a blond Barbie with one arm hooked around her thin waist while the other soldiers guarded the perimeter, guns drawn. Phoenix’s Star Wars figurines, which Marcus had not seen in years, were scattered throughout, mismatched in size. One bearded GI Joe stood at the edge of the mattress with his arms planted on his hips, his head tilted upward so his eyes were trained toward any intruder in the doorway. Yoda stood beside him, as if in counsel.

  “How long has this been like this?” Marcus asked Leah in the hallway outside of Phoenix’s doorway. Their daughter’s room smelled like peppermint.

  “A few days. She’s been sleeping on the floor in her sleeping bag so she won’t muss it.”

  The collection of dolls and action figures on the bed meant something, he knew, but since Phoenix was spending the night at Gloria’s, he didn’t ask his daughter to explain the intricacies of the story line that had brought all of her toys together, a snapshot of his daughter’s youth. When Phoenix came home, her toys vanished into a box in her closet. He never saw her play with them again. When he asked her about them, she mumbled about going to middle school in the fall, so she had to stop playing with dolls.

  But she did play her new piano, which sat in the middle of the living room floor like an unkempt visitor. Phoenix practiced for an hour eac
h day, sometimes two, playing the slightly sour-sounding keys while her eyes hung on the sheet music and her tiny hands struggled to stretch from one octave to the next. She began to master her assigned pieces, playing without a single mistake. The accident had matured her, Marcus thought, and he was glad. Focus would take his daughter a long way in the world.

  One night after Phoenix was back at home, Marcus dreamed he saw his wife lying beside him in a white dressing gown, the kind her grandmother might have worn. Something was wrong with her. He felt the same despair as when he’d seen Phoenix at the foot of the stairs, a hurt that made him sick to his stomach. Leah’s face looked younger and smoother in the dream, not like her much at all, really, but it was his wife just the same. He knew that in the dream.

  And she was sick, he realized. She was dying. Marcus shook her, trying to wake her. “Freddie?” he whispered, as if that were his wife’s name.

  That was the end of it.

  When Marcus awoke, he realized Leah was shaking him, not the other way around. He expected her to have the face he’d seen in his dream, but it was just her usual face, and she had her hair knotted behind her head in a scarf the way she always did, not hanging loose like the woman’s hair in his dream. In his dream, Leah’s skin had been darker, too, just a drop.

  “Do you hear that?” Leah said.

  “What?” Despair still flamed in Marcus’s stomach, acid.

  “That piano.”

  Then, he did hear it. He must have heard it all along, because its commanding sound filled the house. While the bass notes set a slow, confident waltzing pace, the melody repeated with a simplicity shrouding deep mournfulness. The piece played like a waltz, but it hadn’t been born in old Europe. There was something else to it, a nagging familiarity. Had he dreamed this song?

  The piano’s next passage was louder, the melody emboldened by two octaves instead of one. Phoenix had never played so well. Her right hand must be stretched to its limits.