Westside Lights

  Dedication

  For my teachers,

  particularly Robin Smith

  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

  I lost the gull.

  Or perhaps we lost her. We were the ones who found her, claimed her, fed her, and loved her, and we were there when she disappeared. It was 1923—a year when I sank into we. That summer, we did everything as one.

  For a while.

  The bird was a lazy old thing, a one-legged creature with wings so mottled they looked dirty even when she was fresh from a Hudson bath. She flew in half-hearted, sinking circles and squawked like she didn’t care about being heard. She was a beautiful, useless thing, and we named her Grover Hartley in tribute to a comically handsome Giants catcher whom I doted on when I was younger, when the world was closer to sane.

  She was the first pet I’d ever had. I’d never understood the urge to let wildlife into one’s home, as I needed no help keeping my town house a perfect mess, but when Cherub and I began playing at domesticity, an animal seemed a natural addition. It could have been worse. She could have been a cat—or a child.

  We hung a yellow fire bucket from the stern of our little boat and welcomed her with a feast of apple cores, chicken wings, oyster shells, collard stalks, and bread crusts. It was a pleasure watching the gull fatten on our scraps. If one of her brethren dared intrude on Grover Hartley’s meal, we frightened them off by pelting rocks, singing off-key, and slapping stray bits of rope against the deck. She sucked down food like a vacuum cleaner—it was the only time she showed any effort—and when she flew off, belly dragging across the water, I knew that though we could never own her, she was ours.

  On a day when the falling sun dyed the river orange and the breeze carried the first hint of fall, I went to dump our leftovers into the fire bucket and found it nearly full. I felt a sudden certainty that by choice or by tragedy Grover Hartley had deserted us, and that very likely we would never see her again. Some people would have allowed themselves a tear. I simply stood there, twisting a gristly chicken bone between my fingers, trying to decide if I was mourning the gull or the people she’d left behind.

  New Jersey had nearly swallowed the sun when Cherub prodded a toe into my thigh.

  “Something wrong?”

  “The bird didn’t eat.”

  “So?”

  I put on a smile and turned around. He was where I liked him: sprawled across the cramped little cockpit with a cigar stub in his mouth and a pulp magazine folded in his hands, sweat glittering on his body like diamond mail. A year on the water had done nothing to harden his slack physique, but long days in the sun had darkened his complexion from light brown to something that verged on purple. He was as beautiful as the boat he lay on, and she was no hag. Her hull was bone white, her deck as smooth as good bourbon. She had been the jewel of the Hudson ever since the night he stole her from the Eastside docks and christened her in my honor: the Misery Queen.

  I trailed my fingers across his gut. He hated being tickled, and so I did it every chance I got.

  “Our pet is missing. You’re not concerned?”

  “Birds go. They come back or they don’t. For all we know she winters in New Orleans.”

  I opened the bench where we stashed tangled rope and canvas. I shoved the mess aside and tried to hide my irritation when I didn’t find what I required.

  “Where’s my bag?”

  “What bag?”

  “The sack where I keep my lock picks and notes and all the other junk that goes into my work. Where’s it gone?”

  “In the cabin, under the bunk. You weren’t using it, so I put it away.”

  “I see.”

  He stood, leaving a gleaming patch of sweat on the bench. He smelled more powerfully of river than the Hudson itself. The closer he got, the easier it was to forget I was annoyed.

  “Going back to work?” he said, the lump in his throat bobbing like the water beneath our feet.

  “Just thinking of asking around after our gull.”

  “One of your tiny mysteries.”

  “Maybe so.”

  His eyes slid away from me. He drew a meaningful breath. I waited for him to gather the words I was forcing him to say.

  “I was dreaming of flying,” he said. “A year ago. More.”

  “I recall.”

  “Swooping around the skyscrapers up in Midtown, scaring the hell out of the working stiffs. I had these massive white wings.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “It was. And you shook me awake, you monster, tears in your eyes, and told me you were swearing off honest work. ‘I’m going to pieces,’ you said. ‘I need a good, long break. No mysteries, tiny or otherwise.’ You made me promise to hold you to it.”

  I had. For more than a year now, he had helped me resist temptation. When the coasters began disappearing from the saloons, I did not wonder where they’d gone. When scratching sounds were heard underneath the Boardwalk, I fought the urge to cut a hole in the wood and see what they were. I’d refused all requests to go hunting for lost wallets, watches, broaches, bracelets, and fiancées. Curiosity had nearly gotten me killed too many times. I was learning to resist its call. But when Grover Hartley disappeared, the little voice in my head screamed why louder than it had in a long time.

  A dizzying sickness welled up in me. I was on a precipice, unable to decide which way to fall. There was no harm, I hoped, in letting him make my choice.

  “Go ahead, then. Hold me to it.”

  “Let the gull take care of herself until after Labor Day.”

  “And what shall I do in the meantime?”

  “Relax!” He threw his arms wide as he said it, flinging sweat into the current. Upon his shoulders sat the Boardwalk, the city, and the sky. It seemed impossible that anyone could want more than that. “Enjoy our happy retirement.”

  “We’re too young to retire.”

  “Pretirement, then. We’ve earned it.”

  He was close enough for my eyes to trace every crack in his full lips. I slid my hand up his back and pulled him to me, kissing him until his knees buckled and we sank to the deck.

  Relax.

  There was nothing harder for me to do. But for him, for us, I would try.

  I threaded my fingers around his. Light, dark, light, dark, light, dark. No matter how much sun he got, I grew evermore pale. I squeezed his hand until it hurt us both.

  “I’ll give it till Labor Day,” I said. “I don’t want this to end.”

  “It doesn’t have to. The water’s not going anywhere and neither am I.”

  If I’d been feeling petulant, I’d have reminded him the water was going somewhere all the time. But it was easier to let the bobbing ship and the booze drifting through my blood take hold. One more kiss and I sank halfway to sleep, forgetting this wasn’t heaven, that my mind was elsewhere, that the closer we got to autumn the more I wanted to run away. But the itch had started. Our bird was gone, and I wanted to know where.

  We had come to the river looking for happiness. To my surpr
ise, we found plenty. Cherub was my oldest friend, my favorite lover, a retired gangster who had proposed marriage once or twice or more. In the spring of ’22, I came as close to death as I ever had, and I decided the experience had earned me a little taste of life. Cherub had been dreaming of the waterfront, and I asked if I could come along. I expected it to blow up in a week or less, but he was easy to live with—even in the cramped confines of a stolen sloop—and the time melted by.

  For work, for play, for everything we could dream of, we had the District—a tenderloin where slummers and drunks from across the city could choose from a menu that included raw liquor, cocaine, heroin, cheap sex, lewd dancing, boxing, wrestling, ratting, and the finest jazz north of Lake Pontchartrain. Thanks to lawful society’s aggressive disinterest in the Westside—an overgrown paradise where nature reigned, where electricity faltered, where guns did not fire but murder was common, where modernity had no place—people could do whatever they wanted there. Cherub, myself, and the few thousand other natives of the Lower West had known that for years, even before the fence was built down the middle of Broadway.

  Now, though, our secret was out.

  The District was the result of a treaty struck between the self-styled emperor of the Westside, Glen-Richard Van Alen, and the Roebling Company, a publicly traded gang of corporate goons whose blandly indistinguishable foot soldiers were known as the Gray Boys. Van Alen owned the land, the Roeblings controlled the entertainment, and as long as not too many people died, the police and the Volstead enforcers were grateful to turn a blind eye. The District was meant to solve all the problems of both organizations, providing the Roeblings with a limitless audience for their ruthlessly cheap brand of vice and safeguarding Van Alen against a war that would have meant the destruction of the Westside. Like my time with Cherub, I’d expected it to crumble within a week, but the profits were astonishing, and money is a superlative glue. People filled the Boardwalk with gin in their stomachs and narcotics in their veins and music in their ears. Everyone was rich and good looking. Everyone was happy.

  Even, occasionally, me.

  I cannot clearly explain what brought us there. Even on the Lower West, where cold and hunger and the countless horrors of the night had left behind a population too preoccupied with survival to waste time on bigotry, love between a white woman and a Black man was only easy as long as we stuck to my town house and the deserted avenues that rolled lazily upward from Washington Square. Drawing attention to ourselves would mean anything from inconvenience to violent death. With that threat added to my inborn hatred of crowds, there was no reason for us to forgo the serene emptiness of our Westside for the suddenly thriving waterfront. And yet, when the District opened its rusty gates to the world, there we were, living on the river, returning to the town house only when nasty weather or a craving for Hellida’s cooking drove us inside.

  It would be simple to say that Cherub yearned for the water, and the docks in the District were less rotten than anywhere else on the Lower West. He also had a half-baked idea to use the Misery Queen as a ferry, charging wealthy fools a fortune to carry them around the Battery and, if he felt generous, bring them safely home again. But it would be closer to the truth to say that we were on the run. He had lost every friend he’d ever had in the gang war of 1921, and I had endured a particularly unsettling family tragedy in the bleak winter that followed. Along the way I had killed, maimed, and threatened, a streak of violence that was either completely at odds with my character or simply the person I had become. Truth was, there were too many ghosts on Washington Square. There were ghosts on the river, too, but when you were watching a one-legged gull circle lazily in front of the setting sun, they were easier to ignore.

  The District would have died swiftly if it weren’t for the genius of Ida Greene and Vivienne Bourget. Van Alen’s chief deputy, Mrs. Greene oversaw the charitable side of the empire of light. When a woman on Amsterdam Avenue gave birth, Mrs. Greene paid the midwife and, very often, cut the cord. When a boy on West Twenty-Third watched cholera claim his parents, she found him a new home. She was as precise as a scalpel, capable of making the miraculous seem routine.

  Uncommonly kind and perfectly ruthless, there was no one else Van Alen would have trusted to provide the District’s gin. At a distillery on Morton Creek, Mrs. Greene’s women worked around the clock to produce a beet-stained liquor that, while not quite toxic, could strip the lining from your stomach and the worries from your soul. It was said the liquor caused strange effects—from soaring euphoria to hallucinations both chilling and divine—but those were the ravings of poets, lunatics whom I have the sense to ignore. But the Lower West has always had cheap liquor, and even though Mrs. Greene’s gin seemed to get stronger every year, it was nowhere as novel as the Devices of Professor Bourget.

  They arrived a few weeks after we did, in the soft perfection of June 1922. At first, there were nine of them: one at each intersection in the District and a bigger one perched in the middle of the flattened block between Spring and Houston that was already being called Spring Square. Later, we were promised, there would be more. For weeks they sat wrapped under canvas, guarded, like every valuable in the District, by the Peacekeepers—the District’s version of law and order, whose patrols invariably paired one of Van Alen’s rainbow guardsmen with a glowering Roebling man. Rumors spread that the Devices were instruments of surveillance or death, or advertisements for a particularly well-financed Broadway show. For those of a curious bent, like myself, the anticipation was torture. When they announced the unveiling, Cherub had no interest, but I couldn’t stay away.

  A whitewashed dais was thrown up before the largest of the things, and a hundred or so gawkers crowded around. Naturally, there were speeches. First came Van Alen, tall and thin and gray, his hands clenching the podium to keep them steady. Ida Greene was at his elbow, as always, ready to catch him if he should fall. When I’d met Van Alen, he’d been an oak. Now he was a splinter. It reminded me of my father in an especially unpleasant way.

  His address was followed by a few short words from a representative of the Roebling Company, a Chinese man named Oliver Lee who was so at ease in evening clothes that it was rumored he’d been born in a tuxedo. In an organization whose soldiers prided themselves on being white, flabby, and dull, he was either an anomaly or the first of a new breed. I’d seen him around enough that he knew my name and what I drank, and I wasn’t sure if I was flattered or scared. He enjoyed acting as though we were friends, even though we both knew that somewhere on one of his ledgers was a notation for how much it would cost to have me killed.

  Bourget spoke last. She wore a heavy black dress that looked stolen from my wardrobe and a cap tilted so rakishly across her snow-white hair that I was surprised it didn’t fall off. She looked impatient to reveal her marvel to the world, but she bowed to the occasion, making a short, hopeful speech about the majesty of technology and the glittering future of the Lower Westside. That’s what I assumed, anyway. I was at the water’s edge, where the wind was blowing in, and I didn’t catch a word.

  At last she tore away the covering to reveal a many-layered orb etched with lacy patterns, perched on a heavy iron pedestal. When the sunlight hit, its jagged steel and glass panels sparkled like they had been spritzed with morning dew. It was beautiful.

  No one was impressed.

  “The hell is it?” cried one of the crowd.

  “It looks like a polished testicle,” I said, and the woman behind me cackled.

  I hadn’t noticed her before. I don’t know how that’s possible. She was six feet tall, as thin as a switch, and perhaps forty-five, with unfashionably long, flat hair and a string of pearls that dangled past her waist. Her laugh poured out like acid. She clapped me on the shoulder—her touch was skeletal—and passed me a half-full bottle of champagne. I drank deep. The wine was so cold, it stung my teeth. In a lifetime of Westside summers, I’d never tasted anything so well-chilled.

  “Thanks.”

 
“No trouble. Such a pleasure to meet a Westsider who sees this is nothing but a very expensive farce.”

  “Do you know what the machine is supposed to be?”

  “Nobody does. I was at a demonstration last week for representatives from the local papers and weekly magazines. They showed off the whole thing from top to bottom but didn’t dare turn it on.”

  Bourget reached into her pocket—you must respect a woman whose dresses have pockets—for a glittering crystal shard. She twisted it above her head, soaking it with sunlight, then slid it into a slot at the base of the machine. She turned a crank. Beneath her dress, muscle strained. The Device’s plates began to whir, and the crowd oohed, though the machine appeared to be doing nothing at all.

  “The professor gave us a little talk,” said the woman in the pearls, “said that this whatever-the-hell-you-call-it was made from civic pride, an attempt to lift the Lower West out of the Middle Ages. Horseshit.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s about money. Nothing else. They’d slit the throat of every person here for a little spare change.”

  “Yes. Yes, I think they would.”

  The ball whizzed into a blur. It was hard to believe something so delicately constructed could move so fast. The gawkers stepped back—first a few inches, then as much as the crowd allowed—as Bourget’s machine spun quicker and quicker, giving off only the faintest hum, like a fly flitting past your ear. Still, it did nothing. On the stage, Van Alen shook his head in disgust, Ida Greene inspected her cuticles, and Oliver Lee maintained a forced smile. Bourget dictated notes to an assistant, a baby-faced man in a white lab coat, her eyes unblinking as she stared, waiting for something that clearly was not going to come to pass.

  “A bust,” said the woman behind me. “Probably won’t even get a column out of it. Damned waste of my—”

  And then it happened.

  An explosion of light as bright as a newborn star.

  “Holy god,” I said.

  It was a silly thing to say, but when the impossible happens, it’s never easy to choose one’s words.