Half-Blood Blues (24 page)

‘I know. I know. Just seems sort of strange to me.’

‘Halelujah and praise the damn powers that be. Of course it’s strange, brother.’

We sat for a while in silence then. But I ain’t stopped brooding over it. The rhythm of the tires thrummed up through my legs. I could see an old lady in a scarf delicately peeling a hard-boiled egg across the aisle, holding its white globe between one thorny thumb and finger. She ain’t had but three fingers. I tried not to stare as she sucked the whole damn thing into her mouth and started to chew.

I guess Chip ain’t stopped thinking on it neither, cause after a few minutes he said, ‘I think only Hiero can answer that. The why of it, I mean.’

I gave him a look. ‘Think about it. Kid just come out of internment, why ain’t he headed west? Why go east? You a black man arrested for sticking out like a second head – wouldn’t you go where you less visible? DPs was all over the place back then. Why go east? Don’t make no sense.’

‘I don’t know, Sid. I guess you got to ask him.’

‘He could have gone back to France. He
known
France. Could have gone south. Ain’t never been south. But east? Toward the damn Soviets?’

Chip shook his head.

‘It don’t make no sense to me,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe he was a Communist.’

‘Hell, is
everyone
suddenly a damn Communist to you?’

He looked sheepish, remembering the documentary.

I paused. ‘It’s like he
wanted
to suffer.’

‘There’s easier ways to suffer, Sid.’

‘I know.’

Chip sat there frowning. ‘What’s weirder to me is that he
could
stay here. After the war, like. The Poles was real eager to rid their country of Krauts. Couldn’t be quit of them quick enough. Even before the Potsdam Conference.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen, Charles C. Jones, Human Encyclopedia,’ I said.

Chip reached down into his pocket and pulled out a slim little guidebook. ‘One thing I learned in my life, Sid: sightseeing ain’t but a waste of time ’less you know what you looking at, ’less you know the history.’

I barely heard him. ‘Maybe we assuming too much. Maybe he only just moved to Poland now. Last year, like. Maybe he spent all his life living somewhere else, somewhere west. But then why ain’t we heard he was still alive?’

Chip shrugged, suddenly uninterested. He tucked the book away, settled back, closed his eyes. I watched him awhile, then turned to the window. All that Poland rolling by. Its cliffs and rivers. I couldn’t stop thinking about the documentary, and all of what I’d heard about Hiero. How he’d lied about his pa being royalty, how he been out of place his whole life. Growing up in Köln, folk used to tease him something awful. Called him all sorts of things. Chimney Sweep. Monkey’s Son. Blubber Lips. Black-Eyed Chinaman, because of his squint.

Hell. And to go back into all that, after the war. It didn’t make no sense. But then he ain’t never done what you expect, even as a kid. He’d just go to some cold place inside himself to wait out the teasing. I seen it myself, I remembered how it was. Never struck out. Rarely talked back. Like a shadow.

A shadow of his father, maybe. Florian – that was his father, the blond Florian Falk, if Caspars’ film wasn’t
all
lies – he wasn’t the kid’s real pa. No, sir. Typical war story, but with a kink. Florian, see, he come home from the Great War to find his sweetheart married to another man. So old Florian ends up marrying the sister, Marieanne, who was pregnant by another man. She sweet as dates, sure, but a little touched. From birth she been odd, they ain’t known what was wrong with her. Anyhow. Her sister gone and told Florian that Marieanne been raped by a French soldier, and would he step on in, do the right thing. Well, his heart was broke anyway. What did it matter. I guess he probably thought he’d take the kid on as his own. Ain’t no need to complicate things with the truth, see.

But eight months after the wedding, sweet dark Hieronymus come into the world.

Who the real father was, Caspars claimed to know. Almost seven feet tall and blacker than a power outage. He ain’t been a rapist at all. He was a colonial soldier from Senegal, one of them sent to occupy the Rhineland by the French government. And apparently, Marieanne Falk had loved him.

The old bus was slowing down, turning, its tires crunching into the mud-crusted lot of an old restaurant. Or what I reckoned for an old restaurant. I watched a small boy sitting with his grandpa at the front of the bus, the old man shaking and swaying along with the turn. The boy kept twisting around, staring back at us, like we was something from another world entirely. Go on, boy, I thought. Get yourself an eyeful.

Wasn’t no other passengers left now, just them two and us.

The driver stopped with one last shudder, punched open the folding doors. He leaned far back in his seat, barked out some raspy word in Polish.

‘What do you figure, brother?’ I asked Chip.

He chuckled. ‘Rest stop. How hungry are you?’

Outside there was rickety wood tables under a blue tarp awning, and peeling posts standing off-kilter in the mud. We shuffled on over, our legs stiffer than wood, sat down. A paper menu, all in Polish. I seen Chip’s soft leather shoes was smeared with mud, and smiling, I shook my head. Serves him right. There was a few weathered wood buildings, with wood arcades set out front. I set my hands on the table and looked at Chip. He smiled back.

‘Lovely spot for it,’ he said.

The flies was huge, armoured things, they swarmed in the cool air. There wasn’t no sun in the sky, just a white haze. I slapped weakly at my neck and wrists. I could see the spots of blood where they already got at me.

‘Aw, they got to eat too,’ Chip chuckled. ‘Just leave em.’

‘This a restaurant for folks too? Or just for the flies?’ I stared at the driver who sat with his back to us at the farthest table. ‘You think he deliberately keeping away from us?’

Chip shrugged. ‘No. No, I reckon he just don’t like folk much.’

‘So what is this place?’ I said. ‘Is this an old Soviet commune?’

‘You got me, brother. Ain’t much now, whatever it was once.’

There was a big red sign hanging over the door of the far building. It been scratched out with what looked like a blowtorch. ‘What you reckon that was?’ I said, nodding toward it.

Chip didn’t even turn around. ‘Hell, Sid, I told you. I ain’t got no idea.’

I said nothing then. We was both tired, I known it. I didn’t see the old grandfather and the boy. Turning in my seat, I caught them making their slow way back down the road, carrying a sack each.

‘It’s just us now.’ I felt depressed somehow.

‘What?’

‘It’s just us now. All the other passengers is gone.’

Chip shrugged. ‘Long as this bus keep going, I don’t care if even the driver decides to get off.’

‘Hell, brother. Don’t it feel to you like they all know something we don’t?’

‘You mean, like rats on a sinking ship?’

‘No. Maybe.’

‘Sid, they getting off cause this is their stop. Ain’t nothing more than that.’

But there
was
something more. I could feel it, though I wasn’t able to explain it. You get old enough, you start to trust your damn instincts sometime. Or, least, you start to listen to them. I stood up unsteadily.

‘I be on the bus for a bit,’ I said. ‘Don’t mind me.’

Chip looked at me. ‘You want me to order something for you?’

‘I don’t much feel like eating.’

‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you what I’m having. Go get away from these damn flies.’

The bus felt lower somehow, longer, the ribs of its chassis leaner. I climbed back onboard.

Then it was like something guided my eye, drawn my old hand down toward Chip’s carry-all. I dragged his bag out from under the seat, running a finger over its print of interlocking Ls and Vs, its precious leather. I unzipped it.

It didn’t take but a minute to find the envelope. The stationery Hiero had written on was brown as dishwater.
Mr Charles C. Jones
, scrawled in bad handwriting across the front above his address. That handwriting – I known it right away. With shaking hands, I fumbled open the flap, the paper rough as newly sanded wood.
My Dear Friend
, it began:

I hope this letter does not come as too much of a shock. If it is any consolation, it is probably just as much of a shock for me to write it. You see, until recently, I did not know you were alive. Please do not take offence at this. Last week someone told me about a Falk Festival taking place in Berlin sometime this year – imagine it! – and that you were one of its featured guests. I was also given some of your press. I must tell you, I was delighted to see how well you are doing – as we both know, yours is not an easy vocation. Congratulations on your continued success, your President’s Medal and the Hall of Fame citation. I am genuinely proud, if that is not too presumptuous to say.

I have a favour to ask. Seeing as how the festival will bring you to Europe, if it is not too much bother, I would very much like to reconnect with you. As you can see by the envelope, I live a little off the beaten path now. As I cannot travel – my health will not permit it – I would like to ask you to visit me here when it proves convenient for you. Actually, ever since I learned you were alive I have felt the urgent need to see you.

I eagerly await your reply.

Yours,

Thomas Falk (Hiero)

PS – I would appreciate if you did not pass on my contact information to anyone. My life is a quiet one; I could not bear it any other way.

I sat there, the paper’s grain harsh against my fingers. My god, he was really alive. Surely and truly alive. I’d believed Chip while at the same time not believing him.

My throat going dry, I glanced back down at the paper.
Thomas
Falk. He’d dropped his first name. And he didn’t
sound
like the old Hiero: his praise detached, his invitation to Chip warm but not boyish.

His invitation to
Chip
. Like that, it hit me.

The kid hadn’t asked for me.

And then it was like the bus tilted sideways and I couldn’t breathe. I felt dizzy, hot, sick with it. I stood up, the bag falling from my lap. The air coming in from the windows stank of mud and horses.

The bus creaked and rocked as I sat down. Chip was climbing slowly up the steps, his huge hand on the greasy rail.

‘You grub’s getting cold,’ he called in. ‘Sid?’

You right bastard, I thought. You old son of a bitch.

‘Sid? What you doing?’ He stopped when he got a look at me.

My voice was shallow. ‘Hiero didn’t ask for me. In the letters. He didn’t mention me.’

Chip was looking down the length of the bus.

‘In his letters,’ I said, louder now. I shook the envelope at him. ‘The kid didn’t ask me to visit him at all. Everything was addressed to you.’

‘Oh, hell, Sid.’ He seemed to relax. ‘Of course it was addressed to me. He didn’t have your address.’

I was near tears, frustrated beyond myself. ‘You don’t know that. You don’t know nothing about it. All you know is what’s in this letter.’

He ain’t understood none of it. ‘It don’t matter, does it? Of course he wants to see you. Hell, Sid, he probably don’t even know you still alive.’ He come slowly down the aisle. ‘Sid, you got to relax. Why wouldn’t he want to see you? Think about it, brother. We was all friends back then.’

I wasn’t able to look at him. ‘What have you done?’ I muttered.

‘Sid.’ Sitting down on the seat in front, he stared over the back of the headrest at me. ‘Sid, you got to calm yourself down. I mean it.’

I was shaking.

‘What are you worried about? The documentary? Hell, Hiero was
there
, brother. He knows the
truth
.’

‘I
know
.’

He grunted. ‘Right. Good. Now, we going to eat? Last I checked that driver was wolfing down some goulash mess and I reckon when he done, we done. His bus don’t wait for no one.’

‘No,’ I said, barely listening. ‘No I reckon it don’t.’

I looked out at the shabby grey hamlet we’d stopped in. It seemed to me we’d left something behind us, something essential, and we just kept getting farther and farther from it.

PART FIVE

Paris 1939

1

First night, we slept dreamless in the freezing car. In the early hours Montmartre looked sick, exhausted. I wasn’t half awake before the streetlamps gone out, one by one, the street cleaners clattering on past. I could see Chip’s head hanging at a bad angle in the seat beside me. Hiero whimpered in his sleep. Shivering so hard I could hear my damn teeth, I slept again.