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“Oh, Phyllis…”
It had been Dev’s voice at the end of the dream; just his voice, warning me against nothing I could see; just his voice, pushing me awake, and away from him, again. He had only ever called me Phyllis in extremity: mortal danger, orgasm. I wondered which it would be this time.
“Christ,” said the dentist, jamming his cigarette into my silver ashtray and getting another. “Christ, where’s that lighter? I hate even thinking about Red Man, and you have to go and dream about him…”
“He’s not so bad. Not like Victor.”
The dentist flinched. “You know what they say, the things he’s done. You just like him because he likes you … you and that snake girl, what’s her name—”
“Tamara,” I said, not for the first time. The star of the famous snake dance at the Pelican Club was my best friend in the city. Lately, because my life has not tended to kindness, she’d also been Dev’s girl. But my own lover couldn’t bother himself to remember the name of some Negro showgirl.
I leaned over the dentist to take another cigarette too, but instead he caught up my hand and gently traced its scars. I hated when he did that, though I never stopped him. The dentist’s hands were chapped with alcohol and smelled like rubber, while I rubbed mine with shea butter every morning. But his had done nothing worse than pull teeth and fix caps for Victor and his men. He found my scars to remind me of the necessary distance between us, the dentist and the hatchet girl.
“Are you going to take the job, if it comes?”
Was it disgust that flattened his tone? Or indifference? My heart shuddered uselessly, but I kept steady and kissed behind his left ear, the way he liked. He groaned.
The dentist was my bargain; the dentist I could keep.
It was easier to move through the world with him on my elbow than alone, when the doormen were more suspicious of women of my complexion. Unlike most white men of my acquaintance, he rarely let a bad word escape his lips about Negroes or even any other group. Besides, he was handsome enough and in possession of an understanding wife. For those qualities, I overlooked his other lapses as a lover—an aversion to cunnilingus, the ghoulish whiteness of his teeth, the faint but clinging scent of antiseptic. My dissatisfactions were, I knew, the inevitable neuroses of his profession, and considering those of my own profession, I was inclined to anticipatory forgiveness, hoping to get the same gold for myself. If I lost him, I wouldn’t have an easy time finding an old man half so nice; not at thirty-five, with my first grays wiggling out of my lye-made hair, and the scars that only Dev might have loved.
“How long has it been since the last one, darling?”
“Months,” I said, not wanting to own the number—seven—which felt too long and too short. I took a breath before answering the other question. “They’re bad people, you know, that’s all Victor gives me. Murderers and rapists. Real scum. When I signed on with Victor, that was our deal. That I’d be more than a hatchet man. That I could make the world a better place.”
By killing people? You really believe that. I could hear Dev’s voice in the silence; the dentist only nodded.
“Russian Vic’s angel of justice. His holy knife.” Pronounced carefully, like he was reading it from a book.
My fingers locked. Most people called me that first thing—Victor’s angel, sometimes of justice. But only a few, the ones who had known me longest, called me his knife.
“Where did you hear that?” I asked.
The dentist looked out the window. “That—I mean, the Hindu bartender—Dev, right?—called you that once. Stuck in my head. Sounded more biblical when he said it, though.”
To Dev, there was no such thing as holy violence. I hadn’t quite believed him when he first said so, not even when I let him take me from the city. He told me about karma and the weight of our past and present lives, but I only felt it long after.
These days I avoided Victor, I refused jobs, I worried alone because I could not add to my ledger, and I could not bury my knives. But Red Man would visit soon. The dreams the hands give don’t lie. I had to choose, one more time.
I could go back to Harlem, to the shabby familiarity of the old apartment complex at the corner of 130th and Lenox. Move in with my sister Gloria and her husband Tom and their kids. Red Man would find me there but he’d leave me alone if I asked. I wouldn’t have Dev, and I wouldn’t have the knives, and I wouldn’t have everything I hated and loved about being Victor’s angel of justice—
Gloria loved me, but she wouldn’t open her home to a murderess, not even her sister.
“Aren’t you afraid?” the dentist asked.
For a jittery moment, I thought he had read my mind—or seen my ghosts. Lenox Avenue, the tony apartments on Sugar Hill around the corner, afternoon number runs for Madame Stephanie and the Barkley brothers, the barber shops and the stoops and the rent parties and buffet flats that lasted till morning, the sex and the poetry. Policy slips like numbered confetti in the silk purse bound tight by my garter.
But the dentist only knew Phyllis LeBlanc, not Phyllis Green.
“Afraid of the second dream,” he said when I just stared at him.
My voice cracked on a laugh. “It’s just a superstition. I know someone with the hands in—uptown—who’s had four.” Most white folks had either never heard of or didn’t believe in the hands, but the white men in Victor’s service all believed, or at least were good at faking it.
The dentist made a very sour smile. “Or Russian Vic, who’s had, what is it now? Seven?”
This was a bit of a joke, too dark and too dangerous to make at any other hour. Victor claimed he had the hands, but no one quite believed him. He would make announcements out of his dreams, listing out his visions of those who had betrayed him. You learned to fear those, if you wanted to last.
The dentist fell asleep and I stayed awake for a little while longer. Ten years ago, I had walked away from the happiest life I would ever know for the sake of a pair of hands. And now, if I had dreamed true, Red Man would bring me another. I wondered if I could make a different choice.
* * *
A little before 6 a.m.—an hour I made a point of never seeing from a vantage other than the night before—I woke again. It was the dentist, this time, his insistent hand on my shoulder. I started to complain, but even in the pallid dawn light I could see the whites distinct around his irises, and felt the urgency in his grip. He tried to speak.
“A lady,” he finally said. “On your stairwell.”
I grabbed my holster and stumbled out of bed. My eyes were still foggy, but my hands were singing. This time, this time, they said and I told them not to get their hopes up; I was through with the justice racket.
Copyright © 2020 by Alaya Dawn Johnson
