Lady Yesterday (3 page)

He saw me looking at it and smiled for the first time, showing pink gums. He was breathing almost normally now. “Fanny.” He patted the weapon. “Named her for my second wife. You looked friendly enough coming around the house or I’d of knocked you down like a baby seal.”

“At close range the shovel’s better.”

“What I thought, but I ain’t got the muscle for more than one swing. I did last month. I don’t want to think about March, if I see March. I got it, son. It’s got me. I never thought it would, somehow.”

“Seen a doctor?”

“Seen two. They wanted to admit me, shoot me full of nuke juice and go to cutting on me like an apple with a brown spot. Shit. She tell you they robbed me?”

“The doctors?”

“Well, them too. These sonsabitches roughed me over and tied me up and took my axe. Only thing I carried out of the house when Henrietta upped and left. That was my third wife. They got my TV too, but the hell with that. That bass sang sweet as Mister B.”

“They get in the house?”

“No, they heard a sireen and cut out. I see them again they’s two dead niggers.”

“Easier to talk about than carry off,” I said. “Or to get along with when it’s done.”

“I won’t have to get along with it long.” He dropped into the recliner, hard enough to splay his legs. The chair dwarfed him. He hadn’t the leverage to tilt it back. “George Favor. Yes, that boy blowed good tailgate. Not great; I blowed some of it myself when they wasn’t no bass work and I showed him some licks he never heard of. We all of us doubled back then, not like now. I tripled on the box. What Georgie was was dependable. He was always straight and he never stepped on a man’s solo. Couldn’t run a band for shit, though, and it roont him.”

“Ruined him how?” I sat on the sofa.

“Man, you gots to be a ripe son of a bitch to lead a band. Tommy, Jimmy, Mister Miller—Hitler didn’t have nothing on them white boys. Georgie, he wanted everybody to like him. Nobody came to rehearsal twice in a row because he didn’t fall on them like a safe when they didn’t and they sounded like Canadian geese up there. Hell, they’d probably be a hit these days. Back then no place’d book them after a while and when George couldn’t pay them they took their horns and split. He never got over it, Georgie didn’t. Was all he talked about. He was solo by the time I knowed him and I never seen that big grin that was on all his pictures.”

“He had it in Jamaica. They held the band over six weeks.”

“Floyd Gleaner was probably still with him then. Played cornet and French horn and done the arranging and I hear he was son of a bitch enough for the both of them. He quit to work in pictures.”

I wrote down the name. “Know where I can reach him?”

“Forest Lawn. Blowed his brains out through that horn twenty years back and throwed hisself under a truck in LA.”

I crossed it out. “Iris says you saw Favor four years ago.”

“Just about that. Harold’s Hotcake Hacienda it was then. I was still driving then, parked my crate around back. When I come out after breakfast there he was emptying cans into the dumpster. I almost didn’t know him. Bald, and what he had was pure white—and him we didn’t call Blackie on account of his skin, like black patent leather that pomp was, oh my, with enough straightener in it to take the bends out of the Mississippi. ‘George?’ I says. ‘George Favor?’ And he looks at me but he don’t know me, but I can see now it’s him all right and I says, ‘Joe Wooding,’ and he still don’t know, but he says, ‘Oh, sure,’ like you do. I axed him was he working there, like he ain’t got on a apron that says kitchen help all over it. He says yeah, washing dishes and cleaning up. Well, he don’t look too ashamed, so I axed him was he still playing and he said he sat in sometimes at the Kitchen.”

“Down in the warehouse district?”

“Man, you know another Kitchen? Well, I went down there oncet or twicet after that but I never seen him and the waiters never heard of him, so I figure he just told me that so’s I didn’t think cleanup’s all he’s good for.”

“You go back to Harold’s?”

He shook his blocky head slowly. “They closed it not too long after and then someone turned it into the kind of place you got to scrub your nails and put on a clean shirt before they let you in the door. Henrietta cut out about that time and who gives a shit about Georgie Favor.”

I did some scribbling. His eyes were burning holes in the crown of my hat.

“That badge you carry worth shit?”

“Just about.” I put away the notebook.

He fumbled then in a pocket on the side of the recliner and drew out a Ziploc bag containing brown cuttings and a handful of Zigzag papers and rolled himself the neatest joint you ever saw, licking the paper and without twisting the ends. “I axe you to join me but I got just enough to take me through the end of the month.”

I cocked a palm and he put away the makings and came up with a wooden kitchen match and fired it off his square thumbnail the way no one knows how to do it anymore.

The cuttings caught quickly and the familiar stench thickened the air. He sucked in air and some smoke.

“That the goods, yours cut out on you too?” The dope constricted his vocal cords. He had sounded like a man gargling washers to begin with.

I said it was.

“Leave a note?”

I nodded.

He took another drag. Then he rolled over onto the gun and pulled a frayed brown leather wallet out of his left hip pocket. The joint burned between his fingers while he separated a limp shred of paper from the rest of the contents. He held it out and I got up to take it.

It was a half-sheet of ruled pulp torn from a tablet and folded in quarters. It had worn through at the creases and almost fell apart when I opened it. The message was written in smeared pencil in a round, childlike hand: “Joe, I sit here day after day watching you rub resin on that bow, stroking it like you used to do me and then putting it away without ever playing. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of you. Don’t waste your time looking for me.” It was unsigned.

“I did a lot of muggles that night,” he said. “That was taped to the mirror in the crapper when I rolled out around noon. I left it up there six months and took it with me when I closed the place up. That and my bass, that’s all I took. Everything else is still in there. I bought this place furnished and here I stay. What I get for marrying a girl was born the day I played the Astor.”

I gave back the note. “Try to find her?”

“I had the cops in. Fat sergeant looked at the note and told me to wait for the divorce papers. I never got them. I waited a couple of months and swallowed a bottle of Bayers. Threw ’em right back up. If I had Fanny then I guess we wouldn’t be talking.” He showed me his gums again. “Joke is, I ain’t been up to playing that big fiddle for ten years. I sit there holding it between my legs and I can’t get from one note to the next. Them two sonsabitches couldn’t of taken anything I got less use for. Maybe I should of told her.”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything. Nobody leaves because of a bad habit. It’s just a screen.” Standing over him I was starting to feel hollow-headed. Whoever his source was, he wasn’t stopping at Acapulco. It was Bogotá or bust with him.

“Really the blues, man.” He took in some smoke and held most of it and released the rest. “Hell of it is, I can’t even use them.”

I hung at the door. “Do you need anything?”

He looked up at me for a long time from under his mantel of forehead. He’d forgotten who I was.

“A great big juicy slice of nineteen fifty-five,” he said. “That’s what you can get me. I ate it too fast the first time.”

I thanked him for the information and let myself out into the yard, into the cold sweet air of the yard.

M
Y LUNGS COULD TAKE
only so much fresh air. I lit a Winston off the dash lighter, deadening the new-car stink a little, and started the engine. The house Sweet Joe Wooding didn’t live in anymore didn’t look so empty as I left the driveway. It was as full as a sick old man’s skull and almost as dark.

I took Ford Road onto the Edsel Ford and followed it into Detroit. The sky was pewter and the air tasted of it, promising more snow. The city under it, flat rows of houses and two-story shops bristling into a fistful of skyscrapers as I continued east, had a grainy look, like the pictures of Stalingrad after the siege, or of Berlin cowering under clouds of Allied bombers. The river was choppy and smoke-colored. Windsor was a line of broken shadows on the other side. Some of the drivers had their lights on downtown, pale yellow circles in the dusklike Michigan winter morning.

When people come up missing you go to one end or the other to find them, never the middle. If you have a jumping-off point, a place where they were last seen or a person who had seen them last, you go there first, and I had done that. If that doesn’t turn anything you go back to where they were first seen, but I couldn’t afford the trip to Jamaica and Iris couldn’t afford to send me. What Wooding had told me about George Favor saying he sat in sometimes at the Kitchen was a thin place to try and get your thumbnail under. If Favor was lying to save face it wasn’t a place at all. But sometimes the lies are as good as the truth and anyway I had nothing else to scratch at but a thirty-year-old snapshot of a man who hadn’t looked like himself in years.

The Kitchen was a corner establishment on one of the broken streets that wind through the warehouse district, one block up from the Renaissance Center, from where you could look down a double row of scorched brick buildings with discolored panes in their windows and heaps of blasted paving and see the Center’s towers glistening at the end; the old Detroit with its hackles up snarling and lunging at the dainty heels of the new. Some of the warehouses had been converted into office buildings, not very convincingly, and the local press was starting to call the whole area Rivertown. The rats there are as big as condos.

I left the car with some others in a little gravel lot and let myself through a heavy oak door into a narrow entryway scabbed over with black-and-white pictures in glass frames. In them, bored-looking policemen in baggy uniforms stood on docks with their thumbs hooked in their belts watching men in fedoras and tight overcoats strapping crates onto the running boards of medieval-looking cars. The restaurant had been a speakeasy when the Purple Gang shot it out with the Coast Guard and their rivals the Licavolis on the river, and unlike the current administration it was proud of that part of Detroit’s past. The original sliding peek-a-boo panel was still in the door and the oak-plank tables, carved all over with initials, had shelves underneath where drinks could be placed out of sight of passing policemen, as if they hadn’t had enough incentive to look the other way in the first place. Newspaper headlines from Prohibition plastered the ceiling posts and there was a small platform in one corner for live entertainment in the evenings. The lights were dim and salmon-colored.

“One for lunch?” A pint-size hostess of eighteen or nineteen looked at me through orange bangs. She had a silver star pasted on her right cheek and a set of bracelets on both arms that clanked when she slid a laminated menu out of a wall rack. Black sacklike sweatshirt over ratty jeans and gold sandals. She went with the décor like tear gas.

“It’s a little early,” I said, although the place was already filling up. “Manager handy?”

“I’ll say.”

I grinned and she went to fetch him, carrying the menu. I watched her little round jean-covered rump going away. It made me feel like a child molester.

Presently she returned trailing a large heavy young man in a black processed suit and white shirt with a black knitted necktie. He had a head on me, which was going some, and outweighed me by sixty pounds, all of it babyfat. His light brown hair was plastered down like a seal’s coat and he had pale blue eyes in a scrubbed pink face without a trace of whiskers. The other kids would have called him fatty, and not so long ago. His face wore a pink concerned look.

“Sir, is something the matter?”

I gave him a card. “I’m looking for a man named George Favor, a musician. He used to play here.”

He looked annoyed. Expressions showed on big soft faces like his like thumbprints in lard. “Come back tonight and talk to Zelinka. Zelinka manages here nights and books all the talent.”

“He might not have been booked. He told someone he sat in sometimes.”

“Talk to Zelinka.” He gave me back my card and went back the way he’d come. I looked down at the card. No one had ever done that before.

“Blubber-butt.” The orange-haired hostess curled a lip at his back.

I put the card away. “Who’s Zelinka, a belly dancer?”

“Drago Zelinka. We just call him Z. He like throws out the scumbags and puts back everything that fat jerk screws up during the day. Hog-bucket’s only temporary while the real manager’s in California. The rest of the time he stands here being fat and I wait tables.”

“Isn’t that a step up?”

A small nose got wrinkled. “Shit. Nobody tips the hostess.”

I gave her a dollar. “Tell Z what I want to talk to him about, okay? A trombonist named George Favor. I’ll be back tonight.”

She put the bill in the pocket of her jeans and smiled at me. She had a gold tooth right in front.

Back at the office I picked up the mail and filed the bills in the wastebasket. There wasn’t a final notice in the batch. That left me with a one-time-only chance to cruise the Caribbean and an advertisement for a correspondence
course
in forensic chemistry. I filed the advertisement with the bills and stapled the cruise brochure with its picture of a white ship on a cobalt sea to the corkboard on the wall next to the desk.

I called my service for messages. I burned some tobacco. I dusted the telephone and sharpened some pencils. A shaft of wood insisted on beating the lead to the point and I kept resharpening it until I had a razor tip and an inch and a half of pencil. I put it in the drawer and stood the others on their erasers in the chipped cup, arranging them into a bouquet. I dumped the shavings into the wastebasket. I was having a busy morning.

It didn’t much matter if any customers came in or if I sat there all day weaving a bulletproof vest out of paperclips. The walls were soaked stud-deep in clients’ problems and they were all beginning to sound depressingly alike. Mr. Detective, my husband is missing. Mr. Detective, my employees are stealing me blind. Mr. Detective, my wife is missing. Mr. Detective, my daughter is marrying a man next month and so far no one knows who he is or how many wives he’s murdered. Mr. Detective, my son is missing. It was getting so I couldn’t see them for the furniture. The same pinched women sitting with their knees together and their fingernails lined up on their purses in their laps, the same middle-aged men in pinstripes and reps and something screaming behind their tired faces, the same couples grown to resemble each other at a rate identical to the rate at which they had fallen out of love, not quite hating each other yet but getting there. They all stumbled down my hole with hope in their faces and despair in their eyes, animated ore cars forced off their worn wobbly rails by the reason I was in business. Even when I was able to give them what they asked for I was never sure if I had given them what they wanted. People aren’t pencils.