Bone Dance

We were in a lavishly cluttered, languorous room, where the light filtered through slatted blinds and folds of lace. The unmade bed beneath one window looked right and proper, as if the linens weren’t woven to lie flat, but would always form those shadowed valleys, that textile refuge. There were rugs on rugs, so that even Dana’s heeled slippers were soundless. The chairs were strewn with things: clothes, magazines, single shoes, embroidered towels, gloves, strands of beads, and a box spilling tissue and printed with a shop logo rarely seen in the Night Fair. On the kitchen table was a bowl of full-blown roses, and I smelled rose incense, very fresh. The room was sleepily warm, and all its colors were indistinct.

Dana swept a robe and a cedar box off a kitchen chair and onto a footstool. “Have a seat,” she said. “D’you want some tea?”

I wanted, in fact, to leave. “No,” I said, and sat down in a cloud of disorientation. “I want to move a corpse.”

“Well, if it’s already a corpse, then there’s no hurry.”

“In this heat?” I wanted to break this slow, hypnotic atmosphere with something crude. But the imagined stink of decay couldn’t hold out against the incense. I looked around and found it still burning on a wicker table half curtained with lace. There was a figurine there, too, draped with veiling, surrounded by an oval mirror, a shell comb, and nine pink candles. Maitresse Erzulie, the queen of love. At the foot of the statue was an apple, cut apart and fastened back together with straight pins. The skin at the cut marks was just starting to pucker. I thought of Cassidy the night before, suffering in silence. What was Dana asking for, so early in the day? What lay under Erzulle’s dominion that Dana didn’t have?

She stood at the counter, filling the kettle from a stoneware jug. Her hair fell straight down, between her face and my eyes. From behind it, she said, “This body, is it… Did you kill somebody?”

Her voice was smaller than it usually was. When I didn’t answer immediately, she pushed back the hair curtain and darted me a glance. I read her expression: If I had killed someone, well, the world was tough, and she was tough enough to live in it, wasn’t she? I realized suddenly that I didn’t know how old she was. A confusion of feeling smacked me from the inside, understanding, pity, tenderness. My thoughts leaped away from all of them.

“No,” I snapped.

“Oh.” She was trying not to be relieved. She moved out of sight behind me. I heard a cupboard open; then her fingers stroked my shoulder. “What kind of tea do you want?”

I shook my head, as if to dislodge something (which didn’t work). “There’s a dead person in my apartment. I don’t know anything about him, except that there were people after him that I don’t want after me. For all I know, they’re not the only ones after him. I don’t want his debts, I don’t want the blame, and I don’t want any tea. What I want is someone who can make him disappear.”

Dana shrugged. “Dump him on the sidewalk.”

“No. I mean disappear. I’m co

“Easy, sugar. While the tea’s making, I’ll go call somebody.” She gave me a sweet, indulgent look. “You see? It’s not so bad, having friends. Nobody can be by herself all the time. So who is — was — this character?”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to decide if that was a lie or not. “It was just — sometimes you bump into people.”

“And take them home,” she added sourly. I wondered if she disapproved of my recklessness, or was only jealous of some imagined intimacy.

“Well, in this case, he got the worst of it.”

“What kind of tea?”

“Will you — Earl Grey,” I said, because I hadn’t seen Earl Grey tea anywhere since… Someone, once, had given me some, but I couldn’t remember who, or when. A long time ago.

She laughed and pulled a stopper out of one of a cluster of tins on the counter. The smell, very strong and fresh, added itself to the incense and unlocked a memory. At the edge of a town in what had been Ohio, in a farmhouse kitchen full of dirty dishes, a fast-talking man with piercing eyes behind thick glasses, who told stories as if they’d been corked up in him and my arrival had broken the seal — he had poured tea into a cup for me. The dark liquid had spun and swirled, and wide-eyed, I’d asked, “Why does it smell like that?”

Dana dropped some of the tea in a china pot and lit the gas under the kettle. “Be right back,” she said, and whisked out the door.

“Wait!” I yelled. “Wait… You don’t have a private line, do you?”

She stuck her head back into the room and smiled. “I’m discreet, sugar.”

Without Dana, the room was much larger. Still, nothing in it seemed quite in focus. I stared at the wide-open roses in front of me. Down the hall I could hear, barely, the rise and fall of Dana’s voice as she talked on the phone. Finding me a corpse-removal service. I could probably have done it myself, if I wasn’t so rattled. But no — the telephone; this apartment, uncontestedly hers, filled with luxuries; the shop logo on the box; the tea — Dana had co

She came back in. “Where’s your place, sugar?”

“Why?”

“They’ll meet us there.”

I told her, because I couldn’t see any way not to. She went back down the hall.

When she returned, the teakettle had begun to hoot. She did appropriate things with kettle and teapot, and brought all the paraphernalia to the table.

“Shouldn’t we go?” I asked. If my privacy had to be invaded, it seemed better to get there first and prepare the ground.

“Drink your tea.” She poured, through a strainer, into two thin china cups that matched. For some reason, I thought of Sherrea, with no food in the house. I drank my tea, with milk in it.

It was begi

“Why do you treat Cassidy so badly?” I asked suddenly.

“Do I treat him badly?” She sipped tea. “I don’t think I do. He’s one of my best friends, honey.”

“That’s not how he thinks of you.”

Left shoulder up, eyebrows raised, mouth pursed — it was such a graceful expression of regret that I couldn’t tell if it was genuine. “I can’t do anything about that.”

“You could stop giving him encouragement.”

“I treat him just the same as I treat you.”

“Ah, but I’m not your type.”

“Neither is Cassidy.”

“You should tell him so.”

She laughed. “Oh, Sparrow, honey, when did you start up in the lonely-hearts business? I thought you didn’t mess with romance.” She put the emphasis heavily on the first syllable, and gri

It was true; it wasn’t my place, my right, or my business. I turned my teacup around between my hands. I hadn’t had caffeine for months. I could almost feel my blood vessels narrowing.

“Cassidy,” she continued, “is having himself a fine time. He’ll collect just enough heartbreak, and then he’ll get tired of it and give up. In the meantime, he’s getting a little excitement, and not taking any harm. D’you want anything to eat with that?”

I shook my head. Dana pushed my cup gently down on the saucer and filled it again. It was time we left. I pointed to the wicker table and the draped figurine. “I didn’t know you were hoodoo.”