watch over me

Watch Over Me

By

Eileen Charbonneau

CHAPTER 1

July, 1942

New York City

He was seated, his back to her, beyond the thick glass wall. She saw his hands on the smart creases of his linen suit’s pants, twitching. Kitty frowned.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Wrong? Did I say anything was wrong?” Jack Spenser sighed. “He’s a little jumpy maybe. Come on, Kitty. He’s done good work for us, and had a hard time of it in Spain. He’s all right, really, you’ll see.”

The man hadn’t turned around. Sharp shoulders. Underweight? Jack’s men were rarely underweight. If she had to feed this one, it might wind up costing her.

Jack Spenser pressed a wad of bills into her hand. “He’s quiet. And a gentleman, Kitty. He’s been reading up on New York from an old guidebook. A few of the sights, then tuck him in early at the St. Pierre. He needs to get out, have fun.”

“He’s on his own then.”

Jack exhaled, as he did more and more when his patience with her was running out. “Well, he asked for you, so I owed him a try, but I suppose Gloria would be willing.”

Kitty thought of Gloria’s Betty Boop voice, her constant chatter. “Well. You don’t want to scare him back to Spain.”

Her boss grinned. “You won’t regret it, Kitty,” he promised.

She was already regretting it.

He opened the door. Jack’s salesman stood, those hands sliding to his side. They seemed too big, out of proportion to the rest of him. Rangy. He turned. Dark. Exotic, almond-shaped eyes. And young. Maybe younger than she was. She didn’t usually get the young ones, even when they caught sight of her legs under her switchboard and asked for her. Jack pushed her forward.

“Kitty Charente, meet Luke Kayenta.”

Taller than Jack, who was almost six feet. Much taller than Philippe, who’d fit with panther grace into his cockpit. Stop it, she admonished herself. Start smiling.

“Welcome to New York, Mr. Kayenta,” she said.

“Yes. Good. Thank you, Ma’am.” Each word came out of him labored and precise, with a nasal drawl she couldn’t place. He flashed a desperate look at Jack. Kitty could not picture swanky store owners buying perfume from Luke Kayenta.

“Now, get out of here, the both of you,” Jack ordered.

Kitty had to grab for the crook of his arm as they hit the street or the noon crowd would have swallowed him.

“Want to get a nosh first?”

Something brightened in his face. “Nosh,” he sounded out slowly. “A small meal?”

“That’s right.”

“It’s a Yiddish word. You are one of the Jewish people, then?”

“Naw, I’m a New Yorker. It’s New York talk, I guess.”

He shook his head. “Sorry?” Then he winced at the blare of a taxi’s horn.

“Hey,” she tried louder, “you want to eat or not?”

“Not. No, Ma’am.”

“Would you stop calling me ‘Ma’am?’ I’m not your grandmother.”

“No.”

Damn. Shy to begin with, and she’d cut him down to one syllable already. She took a breath, tried again, slowly. “Jack says you’ve been reading up on our city. Any ideas for a first stop?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Up high. Where King Kong fought off the aeroplanes.”

This was going to be a long day. “That’d be the Empire State Building. We can walk there.”

She grabbed his hand. Strong, but soft. Supple, even. How did he get such soft hands?

As they stood on the corner of 33rd and Fifth Avenue, Luke Kayenta pulled another surprise—he quietly insisted he had to climb on foot to the top of the world’s tallest building.

“Do you know how many stories that is?” she demanded.

“One hundred and two. It is the top place of Manhattan Island-- one thousand two hundred and fifty feet high. Then, a tower, yes?”

“Well. Sounds like you memorized your guidebook. But what’s the matter with elevators? You’re not afraid of them, are you?”

“No. I like to climb.”

She looked away from those wounded eyes. God, she was hell on men lately. “Look, Mr. Kayenta. At my new red shoes. Will you get a load of the spike of the heels?”

His sharp intake of breath whistled as he followed her invitation. He wasn’t smiling, the way other men did when they looked her over. Did he ever smile?

“Yes,” he grunted out softly. My shoes are new, too. Maybe we should take them off?”

“What? My stockings would shred to pieces!” Nylon stockings, that Philippe had supplied, courtesy of Royal Air Force contraband, when most women were drawing seam lines on the back of their legs.

She was getting that blank look again. So she reached down to her calf, took a piece between her fingers, and snapped.

He winced, swallowing. Mortified at the sight of a little leg. Holy Hannah, Kitty thought, Gloria would have eaten this one alive.

“No stockings,” he proposed. “Bare feet. For both of us. I’ll carry your gear. I’ll carry you, if you get tired, Mrs. Charente.”

Something bubbled up in her at the absurdity of their conversation. She let it out. It was a laugh. Hollow, but a laugh.

“If we’re showing each other’s feet, you’d better call me Kitty,” she told him.

“Yes? Is this a custom?”

Aeroplanes. Customs. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“You can tell?” One of his brows arched, disappearing in dense black hair. He wore no dressing in it, so although straight and neat, it looked wild. “If you’re Kitty, I should be Luke, then, maybe.”

“Deal.”

“Deal?”

“Agreement?”

“Ah, yes. Deal. Trade. Agreement.”

“Now, listen,” she connived, for the sake of her feet, “You don’t seem like an inside kind of fella to me.” His tan gave that away easily enough. “The deck on the eighty-sixth floor has the best views, and an outside walkway.”

“I need to be there, outside. Might we go to that place, please?”

“You’re the boss.”

He frowned. “No. Your guest.”

“The guest is always right,” she said, clipping sixteen floors off their climb, at least.

* * * *

How was he to find guidance here, in this loud place, full of beings flitting like hummingbirds, but without their purpose? The letter against his heart had survived the way he had, hidden. Remember. Remember who he was, even while climbing endless steps in a gray, airless place, like the solitary cell. There had been no light, no air there, a worse place.

They still visited his dreamtime, the scent of his flesh burning, the questions. He struggled, at the end of that time, to remember who he was.

They’d advanced his rank before they brought him to Jack Spenser, his superior officer. His branch of the service finally had a name: Office of Strategic Services. Jack Spenser had asked questions, too. Luke did not have to answer all of those, either, for he had promises to keep. And miles to go, he remembered the words from the poet, the one whose spare graceful lyrics reminded him of the songs of his people. Miles to go, before I sleep.

His mother would be proud of his new standing in the world of the belegaanas. His grandmother would have a Blessingway done, to ask the Holy People to watch over him.

“Don’t they have tall buildings in Spain?” Kitty Charente asked him, panting, as she collapsed on the landing of the stairs marked with the number thirty-nine.

Luke pictured his mother’s frown. Caught up in his thoughts of his own Blessingway, he had not noticed a woman’s weariness. He stooped beside Kitty Charente.

“I don’t know,” he said. “When in Spain, I lived in the mountains.”

“You didn’t sell perfume in the mountains.”

“No.”

His shoes, their strings tied together and carried over his shoulder, clunked softly against hers, tucked under his arm. Both pairs smelled of new leather. He sat beside the airman’s wife.

“This climbing was not such a good idea, maybe. I’m sorry, Kitty.”

She closed her eyes. Was she out of patience with him? He approached closer, closer than he would have with a woman at home if she’d looked so displeased. But he was not home. And this woman was scented with a flower he did not recognize. Or perhaps a perfume. From that place she worked, full of scents.

“We should take the elevator now, maybe?” he tried.

“But, I thought— I mean…”

“What did you think?”

She looked down at her toes, shining, painted red, like her mouth. She hadn’t believed him, he realized. She’d thought him afraid of elevators. But she had the grace to look embarrassed.

“Nevermind,” she snapped in that way she had of running words together. “Comeon.”

Having to break up her syllables in his mind, made Luke feel thick, slow.

She opened a door, guided him through. On the other side everything was higher, brighter, bigger, and gleamed with shining metalwork.

They stood in this world barefooted, a fact that even the bustling hummingbird people noticed. Foolish. They looked foolish here, without their shoes on.

The airman’s wife tugged at his sleeve. Wry amusement replaced the annoyance that he thought lived in Kitty Charente’s eyes. This was good. He knew that look, many women at home used it. On him, on most of the men. He put the shoes in her hands. Red shoes, the color of his grandmother’s ceremonial skirt.

Once they reached the observation deck liveliness infused her guest’s step. Like a kid, he couldn’t get enough of the high summer clouds, the canyons of skyscrapers below them.

He leaned over the ledge. “That one. It looks like a toy.”

“There are lots of toys in there. That’s Macy’s, the world’s largest store,” she told him.

“How large?”

“Two million square feet.” Men loved numbers, so she’d memorized enough of them to impress Jack’s strays and their questions.

“I can’t imagine needing that many things,” he said.

“It must have been tough to sell perfume with that attitude.”

He shrugged before walking to the south facing side of the building. “That one.” He thrust out his chin, instead of pointing. Philippe pointed all the time. At maps, at their fancy air-route globe, at the sun going down over the skyline. “Do you know the name of that place?" her slow talking guest asked. "The one like an arrowhead?”

“The Flatiron building?”

“It pleases me.”

“It’s very old. One of the first skyscrapers. That used to be the windiest corner of Manhattan, twenty-third and fifth. The cops— policemen- used to shoo away the swells who stood by the Flatiron, hoping for a peek at the ankles of girls passing by, way back before the last war.”

“What are swells?”

“Fellas. Looking for a good time.”

“From seeing ankles?”

“Well, it was what they could hope for back then, when women were more covered.”

“Oh. Now, this word-- ”

“Never mind. If you have to explain ‘em, they ain’t funny.”

“I’m sure it is funny.”

“Forget it. Enjoy the view.”

He talked so little. Still, that earnest drawl was making her even more irritated than his silence. Jack should have gotten Gloria to show him around, then take him to her place, to fuck his loneliness away.

His words broke into her thoughts. “This place is where we scrape the sky, yes?”

“Yeah. Sure. See the speck to the right?” she barreled on, like the worst-tempered tour guide, even in New York. “See it? In the harbor?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the Statue of Liberty.”

He nodded. “A gift from France. She’s made of copper. American schoolchildren paid for the base.”

She dropped a nickel in the big sightseeing binoculars. “Look closer.”

Kitty felt his rapt attention as he molded himself to the machine.

“She’s my mother’s rival, that French hussy,” she said impulsively rattling into the family story her nephews always asked for. Maybe if she imagined him as a kid she could be nicer to him.

He took his wind-blown head out of the view. “Tell me of this.”

The lunch hour crowd had left. They were alone. She stepped back. There was too much of him, that big hand pulling the poker straight hair back from his forehead.

Kitty faced the Hudson again. “My father came here from Slovenia, a place in Eastern Europe which isn’t even a country any more since Austria gobbled it up, then Hitler gobbled up Austria. They even changed his name—Barichievich—to Berry when they’d processed him at Ellis Island. Anyway, the Statue of Liberty was the first thing he saw here in America, when he was like the poem, you know— poor, huddled, yearning to be free?”

“I don’t know it. Tell me this poem.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Well. Pop had all of us kids memorize Miss Liberty’s words by the time we were five.” She cleared her throat awkwardly.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!”

cries she with silent lips.

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

She wasn’t looking at him. But she could feel the intensity of Luke Kayenta’s eyes. “Pop,” she heard herself babble on, “he says Mama was the second American beauty he saw, after Lady Liberty. Mama was not too tall for him like the statue was, so he married her.”

“A good story.” Luke Kayenta smiled. He could smile, then. His teeth were straight and white.

He found Central Park next.

“Are they hiding beneath the trees?” he asked as she pointed out the Sheep Meadow.

“Are who hiding?”

“The sheep.”

“There are no sheep.”

“But the book said-- ”

“Your guidebook’s out of date. They got shipped out to Brooklyn in ’34.”

“Why?”

“To make room for Tavern on the Green— see?”

But his attention stayed on the meadow.

“It’s a good place for sheep,” he declared stubbornly.

“Was, until the Depression. Homeless people started living in the park then, and stealing the sheep.”

“For the wool?”

“To eat.”

“Oh, of course.”

Luke Kayenta was the most peculiar of Jack Spenser’s men yet, Kitty decided. But at least he didn’t have the over-educated self-importance of most of them.

He looked up, toward the Empire State Building’s remaining floors and its pinnacle tower, where King Kong had swatted at those fighters.

“Thank you for bringing me to this place, Kitty,” he said.

“You’re welcome.” Was that her voice? So soft? Where was her gum? She needed gum to crack, though Jack would have taken a dim view of that. Gloria was the gum chewer, the good-time girl. Kitty was for the shy ones, the faithful husbands, the ones who wanted company, not temptation.

“How many times did you see the picture?” she asked.

“Picture?”

“The movie, you know. King Kong?”

“Oh. I never saw it.”

“But, how--?”

“My friend, he saw it. We planned to come here together.”

“And, he isn’t going to make it?”

He looked out over the Hudson. “No.”

She knew the final sound of that “no.”

“It was a good story, King Kong,” he continued. “He told it to me many times. How beauty killed the beast. We didn’t understand that part. It seemed to us that the man who brought the animal here to New York City was a coward, blaming the woman. She screamed well, my friend said. She honored her grief.” He winced. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I talk too much.”

Not too much. Too close. Why had this sad-eyed man asked Jack for her company?

“Kitty. Please sit here. Wait for me. I’ll be back.”

He led her to a bench, then soundlessly disappeared around the corner.

A high wind came up. What if he’d promised his friend to do something stupid, like climb as high as King Kong had? Men were always doing stupid things like that- climbing steeples, sitting on flagpoles, flying high-risk missions over France. Luke Kayenta wouldn’t do something stupid, would he?

Was that what she couldn’t place about his eyes? That desire? Of course not. Her boss wouldn’t put her out on the street with a crazy man.

She tried to sit still. But she was in charge of him, wasn’t she?

What was in his eyes? Death? Did he want to die? It’s what she had wanted, after Philippe. The memory of it seared through her, burning wider the hole that lived in her gut. Sometimes she wondered if it had killed the baby, that desire. The doctor at Saint Vincent’s said to put her mind away from there and concentrate on her own healing. She’d tried. But the trying was so hard. For a little while she’d had them both. And now, she had only the emptiness.

I’ll be back. The same words. But not connected to Luke Kayenta, so tall, so different from Philippe. A perfume salesman in an expensive suit. Of military age, but not in uniform. Stop it. Why should he be? This Spanish country boy was lost in her city, that’s all. He wanted to reach its height.

Did he want to fly?

Hell, no. Not on her watch. I’ll be back. Philippe had made that promise, that last day she ever saw him, held him, made love.

Lying bastard.

She rammed herself into the edge of the bench, yanked out her compact with hands shaking worse than Luke Kayenta’s had. She pulled out her handkerchief, cleared off the smudge. Then she cocked the mirror to peer around the corner.

He was there, his feet in his shoes, his body still on the observation deck. She breathed again.

* *

The flash of her mirror. The airman’s wife was watching him. Luke didn’t want to frighten her, but he had his duty.

Ya-Cith-Kah, Ghin-bi-shai;

Un-deen-tah, Ghin-bi-shai.

High in the clouds, the eagle flies;

With magic wings, the eagle flies

Luke sang the words softly. His voice sounded like a rusted wagon wheel. The one who was not here-- his was a fine voice, full of power and laughter. It had sustained Luke through the dark time in Spain, his clan brother’s chanting. Luke didn’t have to tell Jack Spenser, or any of them, about hearing the singing, did he?

He felt alone, here at the top of this place of glass canyons, so different from those at home. Alone, even with this woman he had been dreaming about. He irritated her. Would she care for him even less once he’d kept his promise to the airman? Always Luke had his friend with whom to talk over such things. He wanted to have that one beside him. Why was he not here?

A disrespectful question. He’d been living among the belegaanas too long.

Still, the wind answered, whistling, reminding him to continue the ceremony. Luke reached into his pocket, behind the airman’s letter, for the pouch.

He drew it out, took the pouch's contents between his fingers. He sang as he spread fine grains toward the summer sky. The wind picked them up. A good sign, he judged, though he was not very experienced at this.

He’d been one of those children the elders had chosen long ago, because he listened well. But he had stopped thinking about becoming a Singer. Could he ever find that deep-listening child inside him again? Could he remember the songs he’d learned before the boarding school’s harsh Christianity, the college’s skepticism, and now, the world gone mad?

Luke faced the place that had given him joy, Central Park, where the sheep had once roamed, and released a few more grains. He turned toward the south of this island, then again out over each river--the one the belegaanas called East and then the Hudson, and did the same. He wished he knew the rivers’ true names, the names the original people had given to them.

Liberty was the woman in the harbor’s name. He now saw her as Kitty Charente’s stepmother. Luke thanked Hosteen Liberty for her welcome to him. His ancestors had been immigrants, too, to this land where the world now lived. The song of the morning dove for her daughter came into him, so he sang it out:

Yoo-woo-o!

Sh kay-la chee!

Oh look!

I have red shoes!

Luke sprinkled the remaining grains of his offering on his own head as he finished his song to the birds.

Ee-yaa, Ee-yaa, ah-nin-ne-aye

Up, up, I fly away

Then, he waited. For the birds to answer.

* * *

After all the strangeness she’d witnessed through her mirror, Kitty watched Luke Kayenta’s long arms stretch out, as if he was about to take a package. His eyes closed. He didn’t make a sound for a long time.

When he opened his eyes again he looked disappointed, as if the package hadn’t come.

He grunted before slowly, carefully, returning the pouch to his pocket. Kitty yanked out her lipstick and did a quick touch up, embarrassed by her spying.

He stood above her. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

He looked different: burnished with wildness, but somehow calmer too. Hungry eyes. Plain, for-food hungry. She understood that.

“You need to eat,” She told him in her mother’s brook-no-argument voice.

“Yes,” he agreed, reaching out his hand for hers like an exhausted child.

She felt the fine dust between the pads of their fingers as they walked toward the elevators. Oh, God, she thought, do Spanish people cremate their dead? Was his friend in that pouch?

“Corn,” he said quietly. “Corn pollen, that’s all. You don’t have to be afraid of me, Kitty.”

“Afraid? Who’s afraid?”

“Hey ya.”

The soft call came from the man getting off the elevator. He was as deeply tanned as Luke. He wore an unbuttoned vest over rolled up shirt sleeves. A tweed cap covered his head. He was loaded with the tackling and equipment of his profession— window washer in the world’s tallest building.

“Looking for this?” the man asked.

Luke accepted a black and white feather from him. “Ya ‘eeh te’h,” he said.

“Huh? Oh, sorry.” The window washer shrugged, making his equipment clank together. “I don’t talk your talk, brother. I don’t even talk my own. Off the res two generations now.”

Luke nodded. “I am Dinè,” he said.

“Kanien’Kahake,” the window washer answered, grinning. “Mohawk. We like high places.”

Luke placed his hand on the small of Kitty’s back, steering her to take the window washer’s place in the elevator.

He stepped in beside her. The doors closed.

“That wasn’t Spanish,” she said.

“No,” he agreed.

“But—you do speak Spanish?”

“Si.”

Luke Kayenta placed the feather carefully into the breast pocket of his elegant suit. He was very agreeable for someone who was hiding so much, Kitty decided.

Thank you for visiting WATCH OVER ME opening chapter. I welcome your comments and suggestions...eileencharbonneau@gmail.com