Ballad & Dagger Read online

  Yet some just drove past.

  Doesn’t matter.

  I mean, it does. But right now, it can’t.

  There’s nothing for me to do, no move to make, no one left to help. I could tell someone inside the club, but, like, tell them what? A girl I know ninja-assassined Trucks and then a shimmering guy showed up and then an SUV snatched Trucks’s corpse oh and I puked? There’s no girl, no body, no SUV, no license plate memorized, got no idea who was driving. It’s just me and my puke.

  Plus, and this is really the thing: I have no idea who’s on what side of what. I follow local politics even less than I keep up with Tía Lucia’s spiritual-lore talk. For all I know, I could be telling the people who ordered the hit about me witnessing it.

  Anyway, I have a gig to play.

  Thank God.

  When everything else fails, there’s still music. So, after I stand there just blinking a few more times, once my breath has caught and my heartbeat simmers down, I shake it off as best I can and take one step forward, then another.

  Across the street and up the block.

  Under the shining marquee, through the crowd of families waiting to get inside.

  Past Big Moses Arroyo the bouncer, who shoots me a solemn nod that I return halfway.

  Down a narrow, dimly lit corridor.

  Out into the main event hall, where the final string lights are being hung and tablecloths are sliding into place as waiters from Tortuga Mariscos set up chafing dishes and burners.

  In the middle of it all, as large and languid as an iguana in a sauna, is Tolo Baracasa, wearing his usual wide guayabera shirt and well-creased slacks. He glares at a tall, thin figure in jeans and a T-shirt: Maestro Grilo Juan Gerval.

  Gerval’s smile takes up his whole face, and his hair is pulled back into a ponytail. He stands with one pointy-toed shoe sticking out and a hand on his hip, like some kind of elaborate flamenco-dancing swordsman.

  I had so many words ready for this moment, said them so many times in my head. I knew all the while none of them would come out in the right order, because Mateo, but now that I’ve just witnessed Gerval’s buddy get murdered, I have even less idea of what I’m supposed to say.

  Anyway, it seems like Tolo and Gerval might be getting into it over something. Word is they used to be tight in high school, before they both dropped out. Then one got famous and the other…Well, the other runs the pirate syndicate out of this club.

  It’s impressive, really. Tolo just turned eighteen; he’s built like a refrigerator, and while pretty much everyone loves him, there’s not a soul alive who’d want to be on the receiving end of his death stare. Any and all underworld shenanigans that happen in Little Madrigal go through him, and he’s about to add the political weight of the Cabildo to that, once Anisette Bisconte passes on her position as pirate rep and we formalize it with a vote.

  But the maestro seems utterly unfazed, his smile turned up to ten.

  I wonder if Gerval knows that his bodyguard just got stabbed up by Tolo’s cousin. I also wonder what it must have felt like for Trucks, standing there minding his own business, to suddenly end up sucked into the eternal void and—

  “Earth to Mateooo!” Something soft bounces off the back of my neck. I whirl around to find my best friend, Tams, staring up at me with a mischievous grin, ready to let fly another dinner roll. “We setting up, or are you staring off into space like a five-star goober in a ten-dollar suit?”

  See, this is how you know everyone loves Tams. She says ridiculous stuff like that—makes no sense!—and nobody ever has any slick comebacks. If I ever tried to let the phrase five-star goober come out of my mouth—which, first of all, what does that even mean?—I’d be mocked to within an inch of my life.

  But I don’t care, to be honest, because even on a normal day—one that doesn’t involve homicide—Tams is the only person outside my family who I somehow know how to talk to. Maybe it’s her own special magic, but I know that when I talk, she’s not judging me, not gauging who I am or where I’ve been. She’s listening. And when we don’t know how to say something to one another, we play. The music has always felt true when I play with Tams. Just about every Galerano kid knows most of these weird old ditties by heart—I had to learn them by head, since I was studying them in hotel rooms, far away from all the wild street parties. But Tams somehow did both: she grew up hearing them all around her, and then went ahead and studied the complicated charts and theory behind the songs. She’s the only person I know who’s as nerdy as I am, and rebuilding our friendship after I’d been gone for months at a time never felt like work, it just felt true.

  I swallow back another roiling simmer of panic. Trucks keeps collapsing over and over again in my mind. But I have to be present. I shove it all away, best I can, and say, “I do look pretty good.” Then I try a little two-step (the same one I do in front of Elegguá) to really bring home the point that everything is fine even though it’s absolutely not. Dressing up isn’t really my thing, but it’s the Grande Fete. My hair is cropped close and I’m wearing some leather bracelets to accentuate my (one and only) suit, and hey! Hey, hey!

  Tams rolls her eyes. “All right, calm down, buddy. The bar is low for tall dudes. You opt for something better than a T-shirt, and everyone is in awe. Well, I’m not impressed.”

  I finish my jig with a spin, almost trip but catch myself, and close out with two extra-corny finger blasts. “Hey, hey!”

  “For the record, ten dollars is not a lot to pay for a suit, buddy.”

  She’s in all white as usual, the brightness contrasting perfectly with her dark skin, but this time it looks like a specially tailored suit. Elaborate textured patterns seem to dance along the sleeves and pants, and her shoes…“Is that snakeskin?” I gape.

  She bows, answering my two-step with one of her own. “Gator, baby. Don’t tell the vegans.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that here. But…you didn’t notice!” I make a show of looking disappointed.

  “Notice what?”

  Jazz hands around my chin don’t help.

  She squints at me. “You got a haircut?”

  I give up and just point aggressively. “The mustache! The beard? They have touched! Eh? Eh?”

  She squints harder. “Are we sure the word beard is appropriate here?”

  “Bah!” I throw my arms in the air.

  “‘Whispers of possible growth follicles on the lower jaw area,’ perhaps?”

  “Forget it!”

  “Chinsinuations, if you will.”

  “Never mind, I said!” But I’m laughing as we head toward the band corner. “How we looking?”

  Tams nods over to the fully set-up kit, complete with a regular jazz snare and toms, kick pedal for the bass drum, congas, maracas, and an extra-large tambourine. “Looking like the percussionist always has to get here an hour early while the pianist strolls in five minutes before hit time, acting the fool.”

  Tolo is walking away, his big bald head shaking slowly back and forth, and Gerval is on his phone. I’m not sure if I should tell the maestro what happened to Trucks or not, but I can’t now anyway, so I follow Tams to our corner of the performance area and slide into my seat at the old wooden piano.

  This is my favorite place in the world—the only place where things make sense. Here, I can work out the world and its terrors, turn them into something malleable. Here, I am unseen, espíritu, like a good kamero should be. I can hide.

  There’s a crisp certainty to these keys, these notes. No matter how terrible I’m feeling, a C minor chord is still a C minor chord. No amount of loneliness or homesickness or fear can change that. Even witnessing a murder can’t change that. People like to get gooey about music, but the truth is, there’s a simple mathematics to all this beauty. It’s just pieces fitting together, notes piling on top of each other, shimmering alongside other notes, becoming chords. Chords rise and fall, harmonies jangle, dissonance escalates, and our emotions follow. Tension builds, then i
t shatters. It’s right there on the page, hiding in those notes. See? Certainty. A certainty I can vanish into when everything else is vague, terrifying, covered in shadow.

  And it is, so I do.

  My fingers dance along the first couple notes of a chord. Something settles within me. I drop my head back and glimpse scattered stars through the huge skylight that makes up most of the ceiling of Tolo’s club.

  When I was a kid, I’d wait till my parents were asleep in the hotel room, plug headphones into the little starter keyboard my dad got me, and just go to town, playing whatever I wanted, making up riffs and melodies, chords. They gave me a book of scales for my ninth birthday, and I had it memorized within a month.

  During our brief stints at home, they’d send me around to the different music masters in Little Madrigal. And then everything really started clicking: all those winding, overlapping Sefaradi melodies, that mix of joy and sorrow, calling out to God, aching for a lost homeland; the singular hilarious tragedy of the shanty, so many voices on top of each other rattling along beneath the relentless stomp forward; the call-and-response praise songs for each spirit over the rumbling batá drums.

  It never felt like I was learning something new, just finding out the names of harmonies I’d made friends with long before.

  And it felt like home. If I couldn’t be in the place itself, the one thing I could do was hear it, over and over; I could feel it sliding out of my fingertips, across those keys, right back into my ears.

  On the wall behind me, a mural shows the three archetypal founders in a battered raft. A pirate, a rabbi, and a Santero gaze up in awe at a beautiful woman made out of light who floats above the ocean: San Madrigal. A banner across the top reads nunca vencido, nunca conquistado—Never defeated, never conquered—our motto, which, you know, sounds nice. And it’s true, San Madrigal was one of the only Caribbean islands to have made it out of the colonial era and into the neocolonial one without ever falling to European rule. Of course, that’s mostly because the place was so tiny and hard to find that no one bothered conquering us—it’s strategically useless, really. It was a myth, and then it was gone.

  And we never had slavery, a point the elders will bring up again and again when arguing with other island folk. But really, the bar is so low; like, wow, none of our founders owned another human! Congrats! No one should get gold stars for the bare minimum, if you ask me.

  And sometimes I wonder…

  Tams, now at her kit, catches my eye. “You okay?”

  I nod, shake my head, shrug.

  Onstage, this kid from school, Vedo Bisconte, is warming up the crowd with another dry We are all pirates, we are all Sefaradim, we are all Santeros–type spoken-word joint.

  It.

  Is.

  Abysmal.

  At least he looks appropriately awkward about it—his light brown, freckled face is burning with embarrassment, and those big puppy eyes keep blinking. And here’s the thing about all that nunca conquistado stuff with us. Somehow, we still managed to end up with the lightest-skinned folks wielding all the economic power. Vedo, for example, is from the wealthiest, most politically connected Galerana family. His mom, Anisette, is a city councilwoman and the pirate rep on the Cabildo. His dad’s a businessman of some unclear but probably corrupt type. And on and on. You can’t tell me that’s coincidence. (They also pretty much raised Gerval after some tragedy with his parents, but that’s a whole other story.)

  The Hidalgo-Baracasas are one of the only darker-skinned families to come anywhere near real wealth—but as far as I’ve heard, they had to fight for generations to get there.

  And because the pirates are in charge of the banking, no one really knows where the money comes from. But they’re pirates, so the understanding is that they’ve robbed the rich and corrupt, and that works well enough for most people.

  Tams and I have stayed up for hours trying to figure out the intricacies of how race and power worked on the island, but it’s all hazy, because folks are so caught up in that One Big Familia myth and don’t talk about it much. It all comes back to this, though: so much of the colorism problem around the world goes back to the colonial powers bringing slavery and all its false justifications and hierarchies everywhere they went. Then how do a people who have supposedly escaped the shadow of empire still manage to cling to some of the worst power structures inherent to it?

  My parents and I are all right in the muddled middle somewhere, like most Galeranos, a little this, a little that. They both went to medical school off-island, which brought them its own strange outsider status, and then they kept traveling the world, never quite settling in any one place. And me? I’m still figuring it all out, but mostly I’m just staying here in the shadows, heard and not seen.

  “Did something happen outside?” Tams asks me as Anisette clacks onto the stage in her high heels, hugs her son, and takes the mic from him.

  Yes, indeed. “That guy, Trucks…” How to even say it? My voice trails off with an “Umm…”

  “The dude who wishes he was a cop so bad it hurts to look at him?” She cranes her neck around. “Where is he? Usually, Gerval doesn’t leave home without him.”

  “See, that’s the thing—”

  “Ahoy, mi gente!” Anisette Bisconte croons, half singing, half speaking over the loudspeakers as Vedo retreats to his table, shoulders slumped. “And shalom! Before the announcement, we will do the customary prayer for the dead. Please rise, and Hakham Hidalgo will get us started with a brief passage from the Talmud!” Most people just call him rabbi, but Anisette winks when she says the more traditional Sefaradi term for a religious leader—hakham—probably trying to score points with the elders.

  Rabbi Hidalgo lumbers to the mic, looking dead serious. Then flashes a sudden, disarmingly gentle smile and waves at everyone. Then he gets somber again. “Be as bold as a leopard,” he recites, “and light as the eagle, and swift as the deer to do the will of your Father in Heaven.”

  That’s the cue.

  Tams knows exactly what to do when her dad, Baba Maximo, begins listing name after name and Baba Johnny bangs a heavy, ribbon-covered stick on the ground. She comes in with a thundering roll on the tom in time with the slow-pounding dirge, and I drop a chord full of all the dissonance and shimmer I can muster, just right for the Muertos. Reading off the names of the dead is usually Tía Lucia’s part of the ceremony, and it feels a little weird not to hear her familiar voice calling them out. I don’t like that she still hasn’t shown up. It’s not like her, and this night is already too much.

  But in this moment, the moment of music, I come alive. No matter what else is going on—even murder—somehow those notes, they protect me, become me, and everything else falls away.

  Rabbi Hidalgo begins the mourner’s kaddish: “Yitgadal v’yitkadash…” All the while, Baba Maximo rattles off muerto after muerto, and I lead Tams into a bluesy vamp. I spot Chela in the crowd behind the rabbi. She’s solemn-faced, head nodding to the rhythm. How can she just…be here acting normal after what she’s done? I imagine myself leaping up, running across the room to confront her, telling the world she’s a murderer.

  Instead, I just keep playing as the list of names goes on and on.

  And here comes the part that always creeps me out: one by one, the slightly glowing translucent forms of the ancestors appear all around us.

  Most Muertos aren’t like Aunt Miriam. I’ve always assumed she’s superpowered on account of Tía Lucia being a badass spiritualist. All that talking and flitting around the apartment Miriam does, mostly visible? That’s rare. Usually the dead just kinda hang there creepily translucent, unable to talk or move very much. Some wear Santero whites or regalia from various Turkish and Spanish and West African traditions or torn sailor’s outfits. Others have on suits and ties, or T-shirts and hoodies, or ball gowns.

  I catch myself glancing around for a specter in body armor.

  The whole thing, it’s always…unnerving. But especially tonight, and not just b
ecause of what I saw earlier. Something’s different. I can’t put my finger on it at first, but then I realize: the Muertos normally show up with their heads bowed, eyes closed in quiet reverence for the ceremony.

  Now, though, all those hazy shrouds are glancing around with urgent, worried glares. Something is happening. It’s like they hear a distant rumble but can’t figure out where it’s coming from. And it’s getting louder and louder.

  My fingers find each chord as I trundle up and down the keyboard, keeping it sparse so everyone can hear each name, keeping it a little off-kilter, a little jangly, a little weird. The San Madrigal way. I wonder if Gerval is paying attention.

  The song winds down, and the ancestors are fading, still glancing around fearfully even as they vanish. A concerned murmur erupts across the hall.

  Tams and I ham it up with the music, all shimmering cymbals and elaborate major chords rising in intensity as Anisette takes the stage. “Alafia and shalom!” As is our way, San Madrigalera greetings take a while—lotta bases to cover. People settle down, and various segments of the room respond in kind; the Santeros cross their arms over their chests and dip into slight bows.

  “I come with some exciting news tonight!” she says, bopping her head in time with our vamp. Sea espíritu. No one looks at us, light moves through us. Our music is all we are. “Some news that will change the very fabric of our lives!”

  Tams hits the cymbals again, totally over-the-top.

  “For centuries, we have been a people of the shadows! Hidden from the world! Sea espíritu, the great maestro Archibaldo Coraje Medina taught, and maybe, just maybe, we all collectively took that advice just a little too seriously!”

  Uh…this is awkward. No one seems to know what to make of this speech, or what the pivot will be, but clearly, it’s coming.

  “And tonight I’m here to tell you that it’s finally time for San Madrigal, our culture, our people, to step out into the spotlight and be seen by the world!”