The Game of Love and Death (8 page)

F
ROM
the floor of the Domino, the white steps leading to the stage looked substantial. Like the kind of marble used to carve an angel for a church or graveyard, the kind of thing that could withstand eons of rain and lightning. From the top, they were anything but. They were wood, coated in glossy paint to reflect the most light from the chandeliers, and flimsy enough to vibrate with the music of the band. Flora had to be careful not to step in the wrong place, or they’d sag. So many things in life were not what they appeared. It was a wonder she trusted anything.

But she trusted herself as she made her way down the steps, aware of the audience, aware of the steadiness of Grady’s bass line supporting her. That reliability. It was supposed to be enough. She put one hand on the microphone, then another, as if she were cradling a face. Only it wasn’t Grady’s she was thinking of.

She opened her mouth and let the first note rise, acutely aware that Henry wasn’t there for the first time in weeks, probably because of their run-in at the park. What a disaster, even if it had broken the weird spell between them. She was more disappointed at his absence than she could have believed, and the feeling leaked into her song. But she didn’t mind. There was little difference between disappointment and yearning.

She closed her eyes and sang, focusing on technique. Shutting out the audience helped, and by the end of the number, she felt more herself again. She opened her eyes, and there he was, at his usual table. The surprise made her miss her cue for the next song by a half beat, and she had to rush to catch up. The band covered for her, but Grady shook his head and looked at her with pity.

As her irritation hardened into anger, she could feel it color the song. She worried she might lose control of the performance. This only frustrated her more, so she was surprised to notice the effect it had on the audience. People leaned forward. They set down their cocktail glasses. Some held their forks midway to their mouths. Encouraged, Flora focused on the notes, making each as heartfelt as she could. The full disaster of her feelings spread from the deepest part of her and flooded the room. The band responded, Grady especially, turning heat into sound.

She avoided looking at Henry until a thought struck: That was just another way of giving him — and whatever was between them — power. She remembered when she’d first started flying and feared contact with the earth and the danger it represented. The way to conquer that, Captain Girard had taught her, was to remember she was the one in control. The plane would do what she told it to. She would not be harmed. It was that simple.

She turned her face to his and sang to it, wishing she hadn’t noticed him in the first place, but a mistake like that, she could recover from. Her blood was just a bit of fuel she had to burn off. Burn it, she would.

By the time she finished the tune, sweat coated her back. The last note out of her mouth soared overhead and then dropped, ringing against the hard surfaces of the room, burrowing into the soft ones. The crowd erupted. Her heart felt lighter. She’d done it. She was safe. She looked away from Henry and let herself smile as she disappeared backstage, ignoring Grady’s hurt and perplexed look.

She’d faced Henry and stayed in control. This thing that was happening — whatever it was — she would survive.

T
HE
Game haunted Love as he walked the streets of Seattle in the guise of James Booth, past hollow-eyed men holding cardboard signs begging for work. Days had passed. A week, and April turned into May, bringing longer days and soft earth, warm with growth, along with a visit from Death. She materialized without warning at the shanty in Hooverville, where he lay looking at the sky through the cracks in the ceiling.

“I don’t see how you expect to create any sort of love from this vantage.” She sat on an overturned peach crate, her face lit by a candle on the floor. The shadows underscored a haunted expression, even as her voice radiated arrogance. “Honestly. You’re making it too easy.”

“You might be surprised.” Love found a bottle of wine and two glasses. It was a good wine, one he’d picked up on a quick trip to France.

“Red?” she said.

“I’m not going to be superstitious about things anymore. I won’t give you that power.”

She sipped from her glass. Love put his to his lips, but he could not drink. “What you did in Spain.” His voice cracked.

“Stop.” She held up a hand. “You don’t know what I go through.”

“Sometimes …” He paused, weighing his words before he tossed them across the table at her. “Sometimes I feel as though you haven’t any heart.”

“You know nothing of my heart.”

“Why are you here?”

Death sipped her wine. She was hiding her thoughts, as ever. Love tried to read her face, but couldn’t.

“To tell you that it’s not too late,” she said.

“Too late for what? It’s certainly too late for all of those people in Spain.”

“Let me have her now,” Death said, “and I won’t take any others from either player.”

“Call off the Game? Is that what you’re saying?” She’d never done this before. Then again, she’d never looked so awful. He was almost concerned enough to ask after her, to ask if there was anything he might do. But then he chided himself for the foolishness. She was worried, worried that he might win.

He laughed and finished his wine. Death reduced herself to the form of a cat and slipped out into the night. The candle flickered out. Love refilled his glass and let the darkness surround him as he drank. He’d made a mistake, laughing at her. He’d have to be more careful.

N
O
one likes to be laughed at, Death least of all. This time she did not venture as far as Spain, but rather to the East Coast, where she had two errands. If he didn’t want to call off the Game, she’d make it worse. Far worse.

Her first stop was Lakehurst, New Jersey, where she waited at the edge of a naval airstrip, watching the sky. She looked clean and modern in her smart black suit and red cloche, even if she felt as though she’d been stuffed with the ashes of an apocalypse.

The afternoon was stormy. A charge hung on the air, reeking of dirt and ozone. Clouds gathered; humans did the same. At seven in the evening, a silver airship glided into view, its shadow a swath of black below. The craft looked like a blind whale and was the biggest thing that had ever flown. Humans had already conquered land and sea. With the
Hindenburg
, they’d rule the sky.

Death adjusted her hat and allowed a smile to stretch her lips. The ground crew waved the ship off, so the captain turned it sharply toward the sinking sun. The man’s emotions spilled down on her just as surely as the shadow of his ship. He was on edge. Her smile now had teeth.

Four minutes later, he renewed his approach. Death dropped her gloves into her handbag. She gestured, bare fingered, and the wind shifted. None of the humans standing near her noticed the way her hands trembled, or the slight sheen that developed below the brim of her hat.

The captain, fighting the wind, turned the dirigible away from the swiftly fading daylight. Death held out her hands, palms facing upward. The crew dropped massive quantities of water, first six hundred pounds, then another six hundred, and finally more than a thousand, to right the listing beast. Liquid crashed down, sounding like a falling sky. No one on the ground spoke as the mist settled against shoulders and faces and hands, mixing with sweat and dust.

For a moment, the strategy appeared to have worked. The airship held steady, limned by the last filtered light of the sun. Two mooring lines dropped, tumbling nearly three hundred feet to the ground. Workers would attach these to a winch that would bring the
Hindenburg
down.

The first line was secured. The ship bounced on it, and the ground crew raced for the second line. The air shivered, and overhead, the cloud-bruised sky continued to darken. Then, on the upper edge of the great ship, the chemical-soaked cotton cloth that had been stretched over the zeppelin’s aluminum frame fluttered. The movement was small enough that it might have been some trick of the failing light.

It was anything but. And in the helter-skelter thirty seconds that followed, the ship was gone, swallowed by a mouth of fire that ate its skin and turned its metal skeleton into a pile of twisted, glimmering red bones. Lashed to the ground, the wounded ship writhed. The screaming from all quarters was intense. Death watched the ravenous flame, another for Love to get sentimental over, no doubt.

Death plucked the rising souls like flowers, decorating her mind with the residue of human experience while the fire lit and warmed her face. Hungry, she searched for the captain through the smoke and flame. His life’s essence would be infinitely satisfying at a time when she needed all the strength and comfort she could get.

She walked the length of the scene looking for him, worrying he’d been consumed too quickly to be noticed. As she turned to leave, disappointed, she sensed something behind her. She stopped walking and peered over her shoulder, which was dusted with still-warm ash. And there he was, the burnt skin on his face smoking in the glow of the fire. He was trying to go back on board so that he might save a few more hopeless souls.

It would taste splendid to kiss that face directly, to feel the heat and ash on her lips, to inhale the heartbroken entirety of him. She was about to set upon him when his first officer lurched forward and pulled the captain away from the wreckage. He struggled and then collapsed on the ground. Alive! He would be scarred inside and out. But he could live, so she let him.

She would catch up to the captain later; she preferred to, in fact, when he would be seasoned in the bittersweet brine of survival.

Meanwhile, she had a train to catch.

F
LORA
was cooking breakfast when her grandmother held up the morning paper.

“My merciful heavens,” Nana said. “Did you see this?”

Flora glanced at the headline.
HINDENBURG
BURNS
: 35
PERISH
.

“May I?” Reading over Nana’s shoulder as sausage sizzled in the pan, Flora read about the accident that had occurred two days earlier. No one was certain what caused it, although several commenters were happy to suggest it was God objecting to human incursions into the heavens. She doubted that. Sometimes, bad things happened for no reason. The deaths of her parents, for example.

A photo of the zeppelin the moment after it caught fire sickened her, though. It was no stretch for Flora to imagine the terror people must have felt with flames racing toward them as they hung some fifty feet in the air, suspended by an explosive gas.

“I worry about you in the sky like that.” Nana accepted the plate Flora offered. It was Saturday morning and she was still in her housecoat, as was her tradition. So was their breakfast of cinnamon French toast and fried sausage.

“I’m not flying a zeppelin,” Flora said. She bit into a sausage. “I stick to the airplanes.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Nana said. “Airplanes, blimps. All the same thing, taking over God’s blue sky.”

Flora swallowed. “If God felt that way about the sky, we wouldn’t have all those birds.”

“God put birds in the sky,” Nana said. “He did not put man there. Or girls. What if this article is right? What if God doesn’t want you to do what you’re doing?”

“If God didn’t want me to fly,” Flora said, reaching for her coffee, “why on earth would God have made me want to fly so much?” She took a sip of coffee and it felt fantastic on her throat, soothing and invigorating at the same time. She was so glad Nana had finally given her permission to drink it. “I’m not going to die in a plane, Nana. I promise.”

Nana pushed herself away from the table, tipping her nose up the way she did when she was feeling ignored. “Those are not the kinds of promises a girl can rightly make, Flora. You keep your humility about you or it will kill me from worry.”

“I’m sorry, Nana,” Flora said. She held out her hand and Nana took it, giving her three squeezes.
I love you
. Flora returned four squeezes.
I love you more
. “I’ll wash the dishes, Nana. You sit down. Put your feet up.”

She couldn’t help but worry; her grandmother was getting shorter of breath every day, it seemed. And she was forever rubbing her swollen ankles. She never complained, but Flora could tell they gave her pain.

“We’ll wash up together,” Nana said. “Many hands make light work.”

“Sit, Nana. Please,” Flora said. “I can’t eat if you’re not resting.”

“Just a minute.” Nana opened a cabinet and pulled out a canister marked
SUGAR
. She reached inside and pulled out a wad of bills, mostly small denominations that had obviously been saved over a long span of time.

“Do you really want to fly?” she said.

“More than anything.”

“Then here. Let me help you. I know it’s not all you need, but I do believe a girl needs to follow her heart.”

Flora interrupted. “No, no. That’s your money, Nana. You might need it.”

Nana sat and Flora could hear the wheeze in her lungs. “It’s for your dreams. Those are what I live for.” She set the money on the table. “That is all I have to say about it.”

The look she gave made it clear she’d brook no argument. Flora surrendered. She’d accept the money to make Nana feel better, but she’d never use it. She’d slip it back into the canister later, when Nana wasn’t looking. As much as she wanted to fly, she wouldn’t take a cent from her grandmother. She couldn’t. This wouldn’t be enough, anyway. She could hardly bear the thought of the many things that stood between her and her dream of flying around the world. First, she’d need enough money to enter the Bendix. Then, she’d need to persuade Captain Girard to lend her a plane. After that, she’d need to win, and even when she did, the purse still wouldn’t be enough money for a plane of her own, let alone fuel and a navigator’s salary for the grand trip. It was enough to make Flora want to yank out her own hair. She ate a few bites of breakfast, though she no longer had much stomach for it. Then she led Nana to a comfortable seat in the parlor, as far from the dishes as she could get.

“Bring me my quilt, lamb. I am so close to finishing,” Nana said.

While her grandmother hummed and sewed, Flora cleaned the kitchen. As she did, she remembered something she hadn’t thought of in years: that day Charles Lindbergh came to town. That boy who almost hit her with his bicycle. As she scrubbed the pan, she wondered what became of him. There was something so likable about the boy who’d walked her home when he didn’t need to, who was so happy to eat Nana’s gingerbread. And he was so eager to tell her what it was like to shake Mr. Lindbergh’s hand; it had given her the feeling that she’d done it too.

Though this boy was still a child in her memory, he’d be almost grown now. She tried to imagine what he’d look like, and the face that came to mind was Henry’s. No doubt because he’d watched her perform so often at the club, he was fresh in her mind. A bit irritated by his intrusion into the quiet of her mind, she turned her thoughts to other things: a thousand errands to run, a million things to do before work that evening.

She bathed and dressed, and on her way out, she took one last look at the ball of flame that had once been the biggest thing to ride the clouds — and then she put it out of her thoughts. It was a tragedy, but it was all the way across the country. Such a disaster wasn’t in the cards for her. She saw no reason to waste energy on worry.