The Rounds — Wednesday, 5 December 1990, 4:25 PM

Kendrick’s Auto / West Side / The Torch / Seventeenth Street Gary, Indiana

She woke hungry. Not the word for it. The word for it hadn’t been invented yet, because the people who invent words have never spent seven days with their blood pool at a number that makes the walls seem thinner, the cinderblock seem warmer, the propane heater’s dead click seem louder than it has any right to be.

The space heater had quit sometime during the day. The cot smelled like motor oil and DeShawn’s jacket and the ghost of whoever had slept here before Sable turned the garage bay into a coffin with better ventilation. She pushed up. The cold came through her coat and settled in the places where cold doesn’t register anymore but the body remembers.

Three. She could count the blood the way a checkout girl counts pennies at the end of a shift, mechanical and contemptuous. Three out of fourteen. Seven nights. DeShawn’s heartbeat came through the sheet metal of the garage door, thirty feet away, steady as rent, and every chamber of it sounded like an invitation she was supposed to decline.

She declined.

Outside: December. Gary. The sky the color of old newspaper. Sunset had been at 4:25 and the dark was already settled in like it owned the place. On Broadway, two blocks north, the water main break had put half the streetlights down and the other half were running off a generator that hummed and coughed on the back of a flatbed. Orange cones. Detour signs. City workers in reflective vests standing in mud to their shins.

Sable walked south on Adams. Hands in her coat. The posture of a woman with somewhere to be and no time for conversation, which was a lie on both counts. She had nowhere to be and the only conversation happening was between her and the thing that lived behind her teeth and wanted her to stop walking and start taking.

The flagger was alone at the barricade’s dead end. Fifties. County parka under the reflective vest. Virginia Slim, last quarter inch. She had the face of a woman who’d been promised something twenty years ago and was still waiting to collect, and the anger – Sable could feel it before she could smell the blood – came off her in waves that had nothing to do with the cold.

Marie. Her name was Marie. Later, when it mattered, when Sable was being careful about names (because the alternative, because the version of herself that didn’t learn names, was the version she couldn’t afford to become), she’d remember that.

The approach was social because social was the only thing left. At three blood the Beast wanted teeth, wanted throat, wanted speed and silence and the alley behind the laundromat where nobody would find the body for hours. Sable gave it a handshake instead. Touched the woman’s arm – thank you, which way to Fifteenth? – and the fingers closed and she pulled her behind the sawhorse and into the dark and it happened the way it always happened, mouth to neck, the gasp, the softening, the warmth flooding back through both of them like a debt being settled.

Choleric blood. Marie’s anger tasted like an engine running hot – burned and immediate, someone else’s overtime wrapped around someone else’s grievance, and underneath it the copper of a woman who’d given forty-eight years to a city that couldn’t keep its own water mains from splitting.

Four points. She counted. She stopped.

The second one she shouldn’t have taken. The coworker came looking (flashlight, clipboard, Guerrero on his name badge, mid-thirties, the kind of worried that reads as annoyed) and Sable stepped into the beam and opened Entrancement like opening a door and he walked through it with a smile that said he’d been waiting all night for someone to tell him what to do.

He talked while she fed. They do that – the Entranced, the devoted, the temporarily ruined. He gave her words because words were what he had, and buried in the recitation of shift complaints and union problems and night-shift strangeness came the thing she’d needed without knowing she needed it: the white van. Econoline. Adams one night, Seventeenth the next. A man who sits in it after midnight and writes in a notebook and watches the street with the patience of someone who has been trained to watch streets.

She took four from Guerrero and stopped and licked the wounds and set him against the chain-link fence and left. Behind her, the crew found Marie. Shouts. Radio. The sound of people deciding something was wrong but not knowing what.

She drove south. The third one was a gift from the dice or from God or from whatever passes for luck in a dead steel town in December – a pipe-fitters conventioneer from Dayton with a Holiday Inn lanyard and a gin-and-tonic problem, sitting alone at a strip bar near the Genesis Center, looking at the door like he was waiting for permission to ruin his marriage. Sable gave him something better. Or worse. The blood was flat, melancholy, negligible resonance, like drinking lukewarm tap water after two glasses of wine. But it filled the last three points and when she licked the wounds and walked away from his rented Pontiac in the parking lot she was fourteen out of fourteen for the first time in longer than she wanted to calculate.

She fed the ghouls at Kendrick’s. DeShawn first, then Pete – wrist, quick, one point each, the bond humming in their eyes like a pilot light catching. She gave DeShawn the van assignment: white Econoline, Seventeenth or Adams, after midnight. Watch. Note. Don’t approach.

At the studio on Fifth Avenue, the answering machine blinked twice. September she knew. November she didn’t.

Her mother’s voice. Different this time. Tighter. Mrs. Henderson told her Sable had moved months ago. Aunt Clarice thought she saw someone who looked like Sable in Hammond.

Call me. Please.

The machine clicked and went steady and Sable stood in the dust and the turpentine ghost and did not call.

At the Torch, Allicia was at the piano. Chopin. The nocturne in C-sharp minor, which is the one that sounds like it was written by someone who understood that the most precise expression of grief is restraint. Nobody in the bar was listening. Three men at the television. A couple in a booth. Victor behind the bar, polishing the same glass he’d been polishing since 1938.

Allicia looked wrong. The face was the same (Toreador, eighth generation, the architecture of the bone structure doesn’t negotiate with entropy) but the skin was tighter, the wrists narrower, the black dress hanging where it used to fit. She was disappearing. Not dramatically. Not romantically. The way a photograph fades when you leave it in a window – slowly, irreversibly, and without anyone noticing until the image is almost gone.

Sable read her aura from the end of the bar and the colors confirmed what the dress already said. The old bond – fifty-two years of violet – had gone the shade of a bruise that refuses to heal. Depression lay over everything like silt. The rose thread (Sable’s blood, Sable’s bond, the newer and thinner connection) brightened when she walked in, pulling through the smoke toward its other half. The gold was almost gone. A fleck. A memory of hope that hadn’t been fed in five months.

They talked under the Satie. Carefully. The way you handle something that might break if you set it down too fast. Allicia’s hours. Modius’s calls. Milwaukee. The name she recognized from 1971.

Modius had stopped asking about the foreign blood in her. Three months of silence.

That’s worse, Allicia said. When he stops asking, it means he already knows.

They both knew what came after certainty in Modius’s vocabulary.

My answer is you, Allicia said. Said it to the keys, not to Sable, but the rose thread in her aura flared when she said it and there was no performance in that.

Sable nodded. One gesture, one syllable of motion, and left before the visit became long enough to note.

Reva Watts, at the east side bar, gave her three things over a conversation that cost nothing but patience and the appearance of interest. A new Gary PD task force. The Torch’s declining foot traffic. And a well-dressed white woman from Chicago who’d come asking about a pretty young Black woman, new in town.

Reva hadn’t told her anything. Good woman. Smart enough to know that questions about her customers were not questions she owed answers to.

And at twelve-forty in the morning, on Seventeenth Street, the van was there.

White Econoline. Parked facing south. One figure in the driver’s seat. Sable approached from the south through the alley grid, staying in the shadow of the boarded duplex, and opened her senses and read what her blood could read – the notebook (dome light on and off in short disciplined bursts), the reading glasses on a chain, the thermos on the dashboard, the thick dark book on the passenger seat. White male, fifties or sixties. Not forties. Patient. Trained.

She opened the second sight. The one that reads the colors of the living and the dead and the things between them. She looked at the man in the white van and the light hit her like a hand across the face.

White. Not the white of confusion or the white of emptiness or any white she had a name for. A solid, burning, clean white that filled the cab of the van like a sun that had decided to set inside a Ford Econoline on a dead street in Gary, Indiana, and it HURT, it hurt in a place behind her eyes that she didn’t know could hurt, and she flinched back against the duplex wall with her hand over her face and a sound in her throat that was not hers.

When she could see again, the second sight was gone. Burnt fuse. Dead channel. She couldn’t open it. Not for him. Not tonight.

The man turned a page in his notebook.

He hadn’t seen her. He hadn’t needed to see her. Whatever he was, whatever that white was, it didn’t require awareness to function. It just was, the way a bonfire is, the way gravity is, the way the thing that happens inside a church when someone believes hard enough is.

Sable walked back to the Buick in the dark. Three blocks. Her hands were shaking and she put them in her pockets and that didn’t help because the shaking wasn’t in her hands.

She drove back to Kendrick’s. Parked. Locked the door. Sat on the cot in the cinderblock dark and thought about the man in the van and the color that had no name and the thing inside her that had recognized it before she did and told her to run.

The Beast was not often right. But the Beast was old, older than language, older than names, and it knew the vocabulary of things that burn.