with the tears on my cheeks, gathering on Max’s shoulders. I like the sensation, feel as if I’m being washed away someplace cleaner. Someplace new that God just slapped the serial number on. Maybe that’s what Portland is like, I can’t tell yet from inside this lovely cave where I gasp and shiver. Max smells of sweet cigar smoke and something like cinnamon and the clean starch in his pressed shirt.
“Hush now, hush,” I think he’s saying, “I’ve got you. You need to hush.”
We’re in an alleyway, streetlight from draperies of electric bulbs bathing us and the rain glistening on the pavement, Max and his coat and me inside it. Because Max isn’t an idiot, and this is the sort of thing, in every place in the slow-spinning world except for Harlem, that could get him killed, and why he’s decided to risk his life for nobody at all, I haven’t the faintest idea.
I only calm after Max starts singing “Avalon.” His voice is a low purr.
I found my love in Avalon
Beside the bay.
I left my love in Avalon and sailed away.
I dream of her and Avalon
From dusk ’til dawn.
And so I think I’ll travel on
To Avalon.
◆ Two ◆
Oregon is a land for the white man, and refusing the toleration of negroes in our midst as slaves, we rightly and for a yet stronger reason, prohibit them from coming to us as free negro vagabonds.
—“ALL HAIL! THE STATE OF OREGON,” Oregon Weekly Times, Portland, Oregon, November 14, 1857
The road is muddy. Puddles swell and shimmer. The crying jag left me hollow as a shell casing. Max navigates roads I can’t see save for rain scattering like shattered crystal, humming with his hat pulled low. Finally, he guides me into a side street littered with broken bottles and cracked bricks. A featureless door confronts us, as does the happy stink of fry grease.
“Miss James, welcome to the Paragon Hotel.”
Max pushes his way through.
We’re in a clean, spacious kitchen with a white-and-black tiled floor and copper pots hanging from the ceiling. An extraordinarily thin colored woman with biceps like braided rope and a red kerchief tied ’round her hair marvels at us.
“Maximilian Burton, who do you got there, and what are you doing in my kitchen with her?” she demands.
“Miss Christina.” Max makes a little bow without letting go of me. “Don’t you look swell this morning? I’d stay and chat, but I needs to get Miss James here to a room.”
Thunking a spoon against the pot she tends, Miss Christina crosses her arms over her chest, hunching as if to see me better. She must be well over thirty, but her small size lends her a youthful quality. She’s lean jawed and plain but very lively—the sort who make out spectacularly as flappers, with a few spangles and an artful smear of lipstick—and she appears to suppose I’m some kind of cheap floozy when really I’m an awfully expensive thug.
The fried fish I smell sits on a wire rack, a staff meal for the maids and the doormen. It’s so familiar, it’s heartbreaking—I’ve lived in hotels for my entire life, I know how they operate just before dawn. Bread rises in the oven and beans bubble in the pot with some sort of pork oozing into them. I wonder when I last ate and can’t recall.
“Oh, she needs a room, does she?” Miss Christina’s face screws up. “And whoever done heard of a stray cat, not to mention a white one, following you home, Max?”
“There’s this type of situation known as an emergency,” he hisses.
“Oh, you figure?”
“Yeah, I figure.”
“Your emergency, is it, personally?”
“How many crises you suppose you’ve handled without a direct stake, Miss Christina?”
“My share. But you ain’t right in the head if you figure we can take her in, things bad as they are. She’s unlucky.”
“So’s a white girl’s corpse in one of my sleeper cars. What’s your opinion on broken mirrors?”
Her eyes widen. She shouts out the kitchen door for help. Rainbow spots dart to and fro across my vision. Before I can be so bold as to request a chair, a sturdy blue-black matron charges in with a prim, pretty maid and a pair of half-dressed bellhops who gape at me with varying levels of astonishment.
Then every eye flies to the older woman. As if she’s a high priestess or a queen, possibly both.
“Max, child, there had better be an explanation forthcoming, and I mean at this very moment,” the woman drawls with a peach-dripping Georgia accent.