The Journey Prize Stories 21 (7 page)

He was there, of course, at a table where the bar ended. He was always there when I knew him, except when he was working, which he wasn't much then. He wasn't too drunk and waved me over. Before I asked he said, “Pretty fine. Pretty fine and the same, my man. Yourself?” I said I was fine too, the finest, and I sat, and we ordered Coronas and lime.

The arm he'd waved with stayed suspended. It was a while before it fell and I looked for the tattoo on the back of his
wrist that made him angry then and that he might get rid of. It was true the trumpet was more a trombone and I thought the cigar in the end too much myself, but the mantis was well done. It looked stubborn and wise, and when he flexed it had a jaunt to it. He had never shot through the mantis and I was glad it wasn't gone.

The beer came and went and came again. Then Chummy asked what was I going to do, if I was going to do anything, about the wife. I said that was probably over.

“That's the way,” he said. He'd had wives himself, and been married twice. “It's always done and finished, and then it isn't.”

“Sure. But it's finished sometimes. You can see the skid marks.” I liked talking left-handed like that, and trying to guess where he was going.

“Yeah, it stops. But you can't know when it does. So what you feel when you think it does is just yourself stringing yourself along and hoping. That's the way it is, my man, all the freaking way until you're dead. That's just the true smiling bitch of it.”

This was a little beyond where I wanted to be at that time, so I had to agree, and we let it drop. Before it dropped, though, he said, “Sometimes I think you trust too much.”

“So you do? And what does that mean?”

“I really do, and that's what it means.”

“Well all right,” I said. “I'll put a watch on that, and you can show me the coin for the next round.”

“Fair enough. I'm with you there, my man.” Then he added, “You realize I'm just slinging it, right?”

“Sure. Everything's good.” And it was, even though I knew he meant it then. I held up two fingers, a touch apart. “We're like this.”

“I see,” he said. “Let it be tight like that then.”

Chummy left for a bit to make a call for an arrangement. My mind wandered and I let it stretch. I thought of the wife – her name was Rebecca; Savannah, professionally – and how much she might tell her husband. He was a bit of a dealer and a bit of a thief – nothing serious, just what was easy – and a decent guy despite. Then I wondered why it was, although you couldn't be sure what even the decent were capable of, why it was really that I didn't care at all what she told. I didn't get far with that, so I forgot it and looked around the bar.

It wasn't crowded. The locals were drunks mostly – hawk-faced and devastated, hoarding their tables as though they were precious aeries of refuge – and the others were drop-ins, tourists from the cruise ships. I thought I heard some German but it was probably just Texans. They were blond and loud and what I could see of their faces bored me, so I waited for Chummy and twirled a bottle on the table. When it stopped it pointed at his chair, at the coat he'd draped over it. It was a huge coat, raccoon, and still in fair condition. For a time he kept a gun in the pocket over his heart. It wasn't for use, not directly. But it could solve a situation sometimes. Relax it, I mean, before it happened. But then, the guy who told me that hanged himself in a cell, so there you go. The gun had been pawned after a while, but Chummy kept the coat all the time I knew him. One summer, the whole summer, he wore it through the heat. He said he enjoyed it – the animal feel and breathing of the heat – of course, he was also timing everyone's conversations with a stopwatch then. I never saw him worse, and he couldn't play, but when he could he was something rare.

When he was more or less fit for a time and playing regularly in a not-at-all bad quartet, I went to hear him in a club downtown. It was well after the hour and the rest of them were on the stand already. They tuned and waited, traded a few runs and waited some more, pretending without trying to be convincing that it was part of the show. But Chummy wouldn't come. He just stood at the back, in the raccoon coat against the wall as though nailed there, cradling his trumpet like a damaged child. He stared straight ahead, but what he saw wasn't anything there in the solid sense. In fact you'd have sworn he was completely blind. There was a clear chance of an incident, I suppose, but it didn't happen, and after a while a Korean girl I wasn't familiar with came and got him. She led him shuffling, testing each step like he was feeling for where the cliff was, up through the tables, through the smoke and the elbows and the noise. It was a long way, and he was slow, but he made it to the chair they had for him and gentled himself in. I didn't think he'd be able to haul back from wherever he was, but when they started he was right there, resurrected and sure.

The first notes were serene, with a lot of space between them. Then he played some half ones fast and stricken. He went on alternating like that, stacking them apart as though he were building two separate things. Toward the end he mixed them and soldered, and they held and made a kind of arch. For a moment we all passed naked through it into some place we did not belong, but was ours anyway until it ended. That's what I liked about music, and about Chummy too. Everything was as possible as nothing, and you weren't obliged to choose or be responsible.

So when Chummy came back at last and gave me the good word on the arrangement, we tossed around whether the foghorns should be thought horns, or a whole section of basses that the wind bowed. We decided on both and drank some more and considered the waitress. She was young and we admired her nylons, the soft brush when she walked, and her wrists' efficiency. She had china bones. Then we switched to scotch and talked of Clifford Brown and how rotten it was what happened. Chummy had a thing about Clifford. He used to say quite often that it was a source of wonderment that he, being what he was, had already lived nearly twice as long as someone like that, someone with so much jump and knowing in his horn, and so clean in his habits. That's the way, we said. Everything's yours, right in your hands the whole deal, then it's yanked and nothing.

And we talked of what impossible hurricane of luck might blow us clear to Guatemala or Belize, somewhere warm at least, and how we would live there rich for a long time like real human beings if we could, and enjoy the rain even, and be gracious toward everyone. Then we drank some more, and the horns welled and we were quiet.

It was probably about then I noticed the old people. They were some kind of couple and they were dancing, I guess. He was still tall and she never was, so he had to stoop to keep her his and gathered. They were both thin as pipes. The music was junk but they liked it enough. They picked up the pace, they swanked and juddered, and she held on her best.

Chummy by this time was blinking. He made a fist on the table, placed his head on it, and nodded out. I let him go and watched the old people again.

Jesus, they were ancient, and the strobes were merciless, badging them unearthly with reds and purples, and a very mean slash of yellow. But they were spry too, like they'd just been dug up and were hungry and they were meat to each other. They had the floor to themselves but were only using a foot of it. Then they kissed and kept at it. They were glued and feeding, working their jaws like pumps.

It was gruesome, I suppose, and it might have been disgusting. What made it amazing was, when they broke away for breath, there was a long loop of spit that drew out between them. It hung swaying from their chins and stayed with them as they danced, as they shut their eyes and danced, oblivious and serene inside their own scrap of forever. That's what knocked me out.

Chummy by that time had roused, and was humming or mumbling into his hand. “Chummy,” I said, “you think you'll love me when we're old?”

He reared then. There was no blinking, and he seemed actually to focus, heaving his whole proud landscape of a face across the table into mine. “I don't even love you now, man.”

C
hristopher, my husband, is angry – my husband is so angry – he is so profusely angry that he is dying that it is in everything, his anger is in everything. I can smell its sour smell and feel it burning, even in this shocking equatorial heat, and I can hear it buzzing in the air even as he sleeps beside me and the mosquito netting hardly moves in the lake breeze, which does not carry his hot, reeking anger away.

For three weeks after Christopher was diagnosed, his calm and confidence seemed as deep as ever, and then he sold his collection. I returned from a day at the institute just in time to see the last box loaded into the U-haul. It all made sense as Christopher, steady while I wept, explained what he had done. When he died I would not know how to deal with the records, or what was a fair price. He wanted them to go to someone who appreciated them. He had simply alerted his Internet discussion group to their availability, had announced his imminent death and his need to find a buyer promptly, and there
had been no negotiation, only a thorough exchange among his followers and fellow doo-wop aficionados across the continent, a consensus on a fair price, and then a sale. He took my hand and we went down to the basement together, where we stood among the empty metal shelves and turned about in the frightening new spaciousness, and I think now that right then he began to shift and we began to separate. My throat tightened and something numbed and corrupted the contact of my feet with the floor, of my hand with his, and I knew, without realizing I did, that he was banishing me.

It's true that I would not have appreciated the records the way another collector would, true that I would have appreciated them differently, and the sale brought money enough to pay for this trip and more. We certainly had enough money to pay our way through airport immigration, but Christopher refused and continued to question and demand as the immigration agent continued to insist. Our papers were not in order, we needed different visas, something was wrong with our visas, we would simply have to turn around and reboard for the return flight to Heathrow. Behind us the whispering, coughing, grumbling grew louder, and yet I knew that I could not simply pay the bribe, that Christopher was already receding and I could not risk a setback. I would have to live with his new stubbornness, his useless anger, and try to find a way to slide by and reach him once more. “These visas are missing the second authority. They are not valid without the second authority,” the agent said again. Christopher smiled.

We were at the passport office the first time I saw this smile, suggesting something like appreciation for a particularly cruel joke, one with a wit that Christopher could not deny despite
being its victim. He had looked at the passport clerk and then leaned forward and reached forward with his short, strong arms to grasp the edge of the counter. He took his weight through his shoulders as his knees bent, and then he looked up, just over the clerk's head, to look at nothing and be distracted by nothing as he smiled appreciation for the witty twisting of his insides. There was no counter to lean on at the airport, and Christopher bent over, put his hands on his big thighs, and looked down. His chest heaved. He rose, closed his eyes for a moment, and dismissed his smile. He spoke again, in his “Mutual voice,” which we named years ago after the lucrative national spots he recorded for an insurance firm, when he, in his words, “took all the black out,” cooled his vowels and clipped his consonants to produce a flattened, actuarial authority. He said, “No, I am sure you will see that it is all in order; all is in order here. Look again.” The immigration agent did not look again; he glanced at Christopher and then at the impatient lineup, shrugged, stamped our passports, and thus we continued. No look for me, no signal that relief or anything else from the experience was to be shared.

From the airport we took the
tro-tro
into the city. Twice as the little bus roared along the highway the power went out behind us, as though it had been on only for our passing, and I turned and saw the darkness where we had been. When we arrived I stood in the blue-tiled lobby, drained utterly, despairing and drained, while Christopher checked us in and asked the clerk about clubs in the city and the best highlife bands. Soon an eager circle of men materialized to share their enthusiasms for bars and bands, for brothers who sang, uncles who played guitar, and sisters who owned clubs, and they were
inviting Christopher and me to dinners and parties, while he wrote down names, locations, and confusing directions. Only after one of these men interrupted to say, “Your lady looks so tired,” which drew much sympathy and offers to carry bags, did Christopher put away his pen and with me follow a solicitous clerk to our room.

We have come for highlife. Christopher wants to hear it, not on record, not in a little Detroit club with an audience of the curious and the dutiful, but in its home, though he is emphatically not so naive as to believe he will be getting at something uninfluenced, some sound of an idealized, untouched continent, as he knows that the local musicians have been listening to the West for decades, playing guitars and horns, and that nothing pure exists now and never did. He hasn't had to tell me these things and we haven't talked about them; we've stopped talking in the old way. But I think he imagines that he will find something like the energy and meaning of doo-wop, of the original, not the anachronistic recreations. I know his position well; he's clear that it hasn't changed since he first wrote for
Zoom
. Christopher believes that the innocence, optimism, and beauty of doo-wop weren't a pose, but they weren't only what they appeared to be; they expressed defiance, insisted that these qualities could withstand the oppression, the humiliations, the decades of crimes against dignity, assaults on identity. In articles, at conferences, he has explained that doo-wop is as political, affirmative, and subversive as soul, hard bop, and gangsta rap. It is as connected as they to a tradition and history broken by slavery, and he hopes he will find something like it in the enduring exuberance of highlife and be uplifted before he dies.