Westside Saints Read online

  Dedication

  For August,

  born on the Westside

  of our apartment

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by W. M. Akers

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  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 fro
stbitten 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.”

  She snapped her old broom down on the bar, sending a hail of cigarette butts and stained linen to join the snow on the floor. She ran the length, giggling as she swept empty bottles and dirty glasses crashing to their death.

  “By god, boys, she’s insane!” cackled one of the slummers, drawing Judy’s eye for the first time. With three quick steps, she bounded onto their table. They stopped laughing. The man in the cashmere coat spun around and glared at Berk, who watched the whole scene from a stool at the edge of the room, her face like stone.

  “So help me,” he said, “if you let this Negro clown spill a drop of my liquor—”

  He never completed his threat. With a practiced flick of her wrist, Judy flung their glasses into space—all save that of the leader, whose cup she tipped into his lap, staining his cashmere beyond repair.

  He grabbed her by the ankle. She pointed her broom handle at his forehead, a matador preparing to deliver the final blow. He snickered, the way you do when your father has money and you understand the whole world has been set up for your benefit. No one else laughed.

  “You’ll pay for that liquor,” he said. “The coat, too.”

  “You’re the one who’ll pay,” Judy answered, as readily as a comic taking the straight man’s line. “The cost is far more than the dime Miss Berk charges—it’s ten million years in a pit of fire, with snakes pricking your pecker until it bursts, over and over again.”

  “Cut out that noise and buy us another round or I’ll throw you into the street.”

  “God wouldn’t let me die.”

  The man tightened his grip on Judy’s leg. I saw no sign that God was preparing to intervene, and so I stepped in. I placed my hand on his soft black glove.

  “Let her go,” I said.

  “What’d I tell you boys,” he said to the friends who could no longer meet his eye. “Westside women are hellcats.”

  “You are outnumbered and badly disliked. This could be an amusing anecdote for your fellows on the Eastside, or it could be a tragedy. What would you prefer?”

  He chuckled. His laugh sounded like slime. In a room without a wall, he was backed into a corner, and I really didn’t know if he’d give up or lash out. I believe I was ready for either. His friends made the decision for him, cinching their scarves and slinking for the exit. Seeing that he really was outnumbered—even rich boys must learn some arithmetic—he broke his grip on Judy’s ankle and followed them out.

  Even through the cold, my face felt hot. I drained my drink, grateful it had survived the sermon. Judy jumped down and wrapped me in a welcome embrace.

  “Gilda Carr,” she said. “My favorite sinner. God truly takes all forms.”

  “Are we getting the gospel tonight, Judy, or ain’t we?” asked one of the men at the bar.

  “Give ’em a show,” I said, and she launched back into her sermon, howling of thumbscrews and broken bones, eager demons and weak flesh, evil liquor and the healing power of God’s infinite grace. And she told about the coming resurrection, when our dead would rise from their graves and walk the Westside streets, when all the wounds we bandaged with liquor would finally be healed. She punctuated every paragraph by sweeping another heap of the mess she’d made over the edge of the vanished wall, where it crashed onto the street to startle the fleeing slummers. I reached behind the bar for an unbroken bottle, dropped a dime in the bucket, and poured myself a fresh one.

  Before I could settle in, a hand brushed my elbow. Behind me was a sallow white man in a perfectly tailored suit that would have been the height of fashion thirty years before. His hands were bare, despite the cold, and he held a tidy wad of pamphlets that offered scriptural backing for Judy’s unpredictable testimony. He was her brother, Enoch Byrd.

  “A tract, Miss Carr?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve read them all.”

  Enoch was at least a decade older than me, but there was something boyish about him. While his sister spoke in a rambling torrent, he chose his words with care, pausing for seconds at a time as he searched for one that fit. He reminded me of the sort of boy I met too few of as a young girl, who were too tongue-tied and pathetic to ever seem a threat.

  I often saw him on cold mornings, pushing a soup cart down snowy streets, waking those who had passed out on the sidewalk, helping them get warm and get home. He ordered them about with the precision of a drill sergeant, an attitude that would have been irritating if it hadn’t saved lives. A few years prior, my father had often been one of those woken on Enoch’s morning rounds, and I had been deeply fond of this dull, middle-aged man and his rowdy sister ever since.

  The business with the blue ink had started in late November, on what must have been our last tolerably warm day, when Enoch found me on my stoop pelting rocks at pigeons and watching night sweep over Washington Square. He was silent until I asked him to sit down, and then he pointed past the bare trees that filled the park to the clean, pale eastern sky.

  “That blue,” he said. “You only get it at this hour, when the sun is sinking and the shadows are long and day is just clinging on. It’s my favorite color in the world.”

  “It’s good enough.”

  “I have dreams in that color. Dreams of hell. Not nightmares. I’ve had them my whole life. My father used to preach about the blue flames of hell, and I’ve decided I’d like to do a tract in his honor, with three-color printing, that shows damnation as only he could paint it.”

  He slid a pile of meticulously printed religious blather, each eight pages long and printed in black, white, and a different shade of blue.

  “And no matter how many different blues you try, none of them hits the mark?” I said.

  “How did you know?”

  “I know the look, that special brand of misery that comes from trying to make the real world line up with something perfect in your head.”

  “And these are the cases, the tiny mysteries, that are your specialty?”

  I was wary. This was the type of thing I would usually turn down. It was tiny, sure, but it was also impossible. Enoch had standards—you could tell just by looking at his perfect little tracts—and that was hell in a client. But that fall I needed work, in every way a woman can.

  “I’ll turn the city upside down until you have the blue you want,” I said. “As long as you can tell me what’s so special about this shade.”

  I chucked another rock, missing the bird badly, and he told me a story about a little boy who grew up in the heart of Lower Manhattan, long before a fence divided Eastside from West, the son of a gifted preacher who loved his children, but loved his ministry more.

  “Even when we did get Papa to ourselves, we never got to be alone with him,” he said. “Except for one afternoon, when he took me to see the carriage parade in Central Park. Afterward, we walked the length of it. I was watching the sun set over the lake, when he told me to turn around and look east instead. He died soon after. My whole life, that blue has stayed in my heart.”

  Over the next months, whenever I had the pep to get out of bed, I stalked Manhattan up and down, sifting through shops for printers, authors, artists, stamp collectors, pen collectors, calligraphers, weavers, forgers, pornographers, and anyone else with an eye for beautiful things. To the Lower West I brought bits of paper stained with every blue I found, and to all of them Enoch apologized and shook his head.

  At last I found an old woman in an underground shop on the U
pper West, who promised she could make ink to match any shade in creation, so long as I could provide her with a sample. But of course that was impossible. In all of New York, there was no paint shard, no fabric scrap, no broken pot or torn dust jacket or dead bug that quite matched the flames burning inside Enoch Byrd’s head. I didn’t mind. The longer he was unsatisfied, the more I would eventually bill him, and the longer I put off finding something else to do with my days.

  That night at the saloon, I smoothed Bex’s array of blues out on the table and watched him run his finger down the rows of color, wondering how long it would take him to shake his head.

  “Your instincts are good,” he said. “Blue 72 is close to what I’m after.”

  “But close is . . .”

  “Still a bit wrong. I’m sorry, truly.”

  “All part of the job.”

  With a final cackle, Judy cast the last of the broken glass over the lip of the building. She tucked her broom under her shoulder and sidled up to her brother, eyeing his purse.

  “Any sales?” she said.

  “Three dollars’ worth,” he answered.

  “Berk says we owe two twenty-five for the glassware.”

  “You might avoid the ashtrays, sister. They are expensive.”

  “You know better than anyone that Christ demands a clean sweep.”

  Enoch sighed, counted the money, and dropped it in the bucket on the bar. Berk nodded, and Judy saluted with her broom.

  “Have you nearly finished that drink, Miss Carr?” asked Enoch.

  “Yes,” I said, “but I haven’t even started on the next one.”

  “I wonder if you would consider postponing it. You’ve done such marvelous work looking for my blue ink and I wondered if, well . . . my mother wants a word.”

  I pulled the dregs of the gin through my teeth and remembered how Enoch would hold my father’s hand as he trembled up our town house steps. My glass thudded, empty, onto the bar.

  “Anything for the Byrds,” I said.

  Down on the street, on the frozen, broken pavement of that road some still call Broadway, the heat from Berk’s felt far away, and the lights from the Eastside glowed only faintly over the top of the fence. Judy lit a cigarette and took a slow, sacred drag.