AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Comport yourselves with dignity,” Doc growled from the driver’s seat, earning boos and hoots, calls of “Pardon me, Daddy!” and plenty of rolled eyes from the girls.
“I must’ve been plumb out of my mind to take this gig,” Doc muttered. He pushed the electric starter and the bus purred to life. “Next stop, Philadelphia, P-A! Look out, America—here we come!”
Ling and Jericho learned everyone’s names. The girl in the fur-trimmed coat was Guadalupe—Lupe to her friends—and she was the drummer. Doc was the promoter and bus driver. The blue cloche girl was Eloise; she played clarinet. The kind girl up front who’d offered Ling a seat was Babe: “I play the saxophone.” The girl checking her lipstick was Dorothy, who played piano. There were the twins, Sadie and Sally Mae, both on trumpet, and Emmaline, a pixie of a girl with a dusting of freckles across her nose who informed Ling and Jericho that she played “banjo, guitar, and poker, but not in that order.”
“And I sing and dance and lead the band,” Alma said, stretching out her long legs on the seat.
“Here come the Harlem Haymakers!” Lupe called and whistled.
At a stoplight on 125th Street, several police wagons blocked the street. Police officers fanned out, going door to door, stopping in all the businesses.
“Who’re they looking for?” Babe asked.
“Bootleggers, I’ll bet,” Alma said quickly as Ling shrank down in her seat and pulled her coat collar up.
“Must be somebody big,” Doc said from behind the wheel. “Guess I’ll have to go around.”
“Say, who knows all the words to ‘California Rose’?” Alma started up a song to distract everyone, and soon the bus was full of Harlem’s all-girl orchestra singing every blues and jazz number they knew. The bus ride took them downtown to Canal Street. As they rattled past Chinatown, Ling got a catch in her chest. The news would be hitting her street, too. Ling worried about how much shame this would bring to her parents. All the gossip flying around the neighborhood: “Did you see about Ling Chan?” “Yes! An anarchist!” She worried that people would stop going to their restaurant or—worse—that people would show up to harass her family. Ling loved her parents deeply. They were good parents, and she had tried to be a good daughter. It was astonishing how quickly your life could be upended. One day, Ling could walk, and then, after her sickness, she couldn’t. Yesterday morning, she had been a good citizen; today, she was a wanted criminal with a price on her head.
“You okay?” Jericho whispered.
Ling was surprised that he noticed. “Just tired.”
“You’ll see them again,” he promised.
And all Ling could do was nod again so she wouldn’t cry. Alma and the others were still singing. She hoped they weren’t going to sing the whole way. She bunched up her sweater to use as a pillow, placed it where the seat met the window, leaned her head against it, and closed her eyes.
She woke inside a dream. As always, she marveled at the freedom she had when dream walking. She could walk. Run. Dance. Paralysis had no reach here. She hoped she might be able to communicate with Henry.
“Henry?” she called.
She stepped through a doorway and found herself on the evening streets of a Cubist Chinatown. It was like looking into her little part of the world from many different angles. Long blocks of light for windows; soft blobs of red swaying between steeply angled fire escapes. Lanterns. The tenements stretched into points until they were joined to the night, and it was impossible to tell where building began and sky left off. People moved about like shades, quivering shapes with eyes set at odd angles, seeing nothing. Was Henry among these many shapes?
“Henry?” she called again, moving among the faceless crowd.
It wasn’t Henry but Mr. Levi who appeared. He had been their neighbor for many years, but he’d died a month earlier, and Ling had thought it sad to watch them carry out his possessions to the junk man. He looked just as he had the last time she’d seen him, in his white shirt and long tweed coat, a hat on his bald head. His face was thin and gray.
“He’ll test every one of you in time,” Mr. Levi said, then melted like paint.
Whispers bounced through the canyon between tenements, a pressure building inside Ling’s body: We’re coming, we’re coming, we are coming. Around the blind curve of Doyers Street, a monstrous shadow clawed up the fronts of the buildings, reaching over the fire escapes toward the lighted windows and the precious life inside. It swirled around the ghostly figure of Will Fitzgerald. He looked haunted. He raised his hand as if trying to hail her from far away.
“Change…” was all Will managed before the shadow rose up behind him like a wave, blotting out everything.
Ling woke. The bus was noisy with chatter and the hum of the road.
“You were dream walking,” Jericho said quietly.
Ling nodded.
“Anything?”
“I didn’t find Henry, or any of the others,” she said. “But I saw Will.”
“And?”
She shook her head. “It was like he wanted to warn me, but, I don’t know, I don’t know. I keep thinking about what those ghosts said to us in Central Park. You did this. Did what?”
EVERYWHERE
