The Perfect Host (27 page)

We began to get big about then. It wasn’t so much Fawn’s playing—she wasn’t brilliant, she was just terrific—but it was what she was to the band. The music business is full of roundheels and thrushes who feed on seed; this kid was from fresh air. She made the band worth staying with. Turnover just stopped, except for a couple of times when a side-man would carry too much altitude and make a
pass. That never happened more than once per man. Then one or the other of us would happily pull the wolf’s teeth. Once Skid busted a four hundred dollar guitar over a guy’s head for that. (A good thing in the long run; he went into electrics seriously after that; but the electric guitar comes later.) And once I gave a spare lip to a trumpet man, pushing three teeth out under his nose, when his right hand forgot what his left was hired for.

She had this wide-eyed yen for Lutch when she joined us, and it was there for anyone to see. But clean, dig me? Lutch, he treated her like the rest of the sides. He kept it just like it was, and we went places. I don’t think I was the only one who lost sleep. As long as no one made a move, everything stayed the same and the band as a whole jatoed. We rose, Jack.

It was Fawn who made the break. Looking back, I guess it could’ve been expected. We were all pretty wise; we did what we did because we thought it out. But she was just a kid. She’d been eating her heart out for too long, I guess, and she had no muscles for a pitch like that. We were in Boulder City that night, taking fifteen about two in the morning at a roadhouse. There was all kinds of moon. I was in a wild hassle with myself. Fawn was under my skin clear down to the marrow by then. I went into the bar and slurped up a boilermaker—they always make me sick, and I wanted a small trouble to concentrate on. I left the rest of the sides jaw-jamming around a table and walked outside. There was a gravel path, the kind that gives a dry belch under your feet. I stayed off it. I walked on the grass and looked at the moon, which was bad for me, and felt the boilermaker seething under my low ribs, and felt but rugged. You know.

It wasn’t only Fawn. I realized that. It was something to do with Lutch. He was so—sure of himself. Hell. I never could be that. Never until now, when I’ve got what was coming to me. Now I’m damn sure where I’m going, and I did it with my own hands. Not everybody can say that. But Lutch, he could. He had talent, see—big talent. He was the real musician. But he didn’t use it, only to guide with his fingertips. He styled Hinkle still, and another man soloed his theme. He was like that. He was so sure of himself that he didn’t
have to hog anything. He didn’t even have to reach out and pick up anything that he knew he could have. Now me, I never could know till I tried. There shouldn’t be guys like Lutch Crawford, guys that never have to wonder or worry. Them as has, gits, they say. There can’t be any honest competition with a guy like that. He’ll win out, or you will. If he does, he’ll do it easy as breathing. If you do, it’s only because he let you. Guys like that shouldn’t be born. If they are, they ought to be killed. Things are tough enough with an even break. Lutch, he had a pet name for the band. He called it the unit. That doesn’t sound like a pet name, but it was. Fluke was his barker, and part of the unit … it didn’t matter that the band would be just as good without me. Any one of us could be dropped or replaced, and it would still be Lutch Crawford’s Gone Geese. But Fluke was in, and Skid, and Crispin and the rest, and that’s the way he wanted it to stay. I was in the bucks, with a future—thanks to him. Thank you very much to him for every damn thing.

So I was standing on the grass looking at the moon and feeling all this, when I heard Fawn sob. Just once. I went that way, walking on the grass, sliding my feet so that left shoe wouldn’t squeak.

She was standing at the corner of the building with Lutch. She was crying without making any more noise and without covering her face. It was wet and sort of pulled down and sidewards as if I saw it through a wavy glass.

She said, “I can’t help it, Lutch, I love you.”

And he said, “I love you too. I love everybody. It’s nothing to get sick over.”

“It isn’t …” The way she said that, it was a question and a whole flood of detail about how sick you can get. “Let me kiss you, Lutch,” she whispered. “I won’t ever ask you again. Let me this once. Once, I got to, Lutch, I got to, I can’t go on much longer like this …”

Now, I hated him, and I think I hated her a little, for a second, but you know, I’d of kicked him clear to Pensacola if he hadn’t done what she said. I never had a feeling like that before. Never. I don’t want it again.

Well, he did. Then he went back inside and got his clarinet and hit a blue lick or two to call us back in, the same as always. He left
her out there, and me too, though he didn’t know I was there. Difference was, he left me alone …

We finished the date somehow, Crispin and his heartbeat drums, and Skid throwing that famous gliss all over the finger-board—he could really glissando with that new guitar, that Crispin helped him design, but I’m coming to that—and the horns and Fluke. Yeah, Fluke, real smooth: “Sweet Sue now, kizd, the sweetest Sue we ever knew, featuring Fawn Amory, the breeze on keys …” And Fawn ripples into the intro, and I give her a board-fade on the p.a. system, and sigh in with, “Oh kizd, ain’t we got Fawn …” and cut back to full volume on the piano mike. And I kept spooning that corn back and back to myself, “Ain’t we got Fawn, ain’t we got—”

Crispin was a big blond guy who was a graduate electrical engineer. He earned his way through school playing drums, and after he graduated went right on playing. If he’d gone into electronics the way he’d planned, he’d of kept on playing drums. By the same token nothing could keep him from messing with electronics while he was a trap man. He was forever rehashing our p.a. system, and Skid’s git-box was like peanuts to him; he kept coming back for more. Skid was amplified when he started with us—a guitar’s pretty nowhere with a pickup in a band nowadays—but all he had was a simple magnetic pickup clamped onto a regular concert guitar. He had a few gimmicks too—a pedal volume control and a tone-switch on the box that gave him a snarl when he wanted it. Trouble was, at high volumes that pickup picked up everything—the note and the scratch of the plectrum and the peculiar squeak of Skid’s calloused left fingers when he slid them on the wound strings, so that a guitar solo always had a background of pops and crackles and a bunch of guys whistling for taxicabs.

Crispin, he fixed that. He was a big, good-natured cat that everybody liked on sight, and sometimes when we went into a new town Crispin would go down to Radio Row and talk some repairman into the use of his shop for a couple days. Crispin would drag in Skid’s guitar amplifier and haul its guts out and attach tone generators and oscilloscopes and all like that, and after that would spend good sleeping time telling Skid how to run the thing. After a couple of
years Skid had an instrument that would sit up and typewrite. He had a warble-vibrato on it, and a trick tailpiece that he operated with his elbows that would raise a six-string chord a halftone while he held it, and some jazz called an attenuator that let him hit a note that wouldn’t fade, just like it was blown out of an organ. Skid had a panel beside him with more buttons, switches, and controls on it than a custom-built accordion has stops. He used to say that the instrument was earning his keep—any three-chord man from a hillbilly band could take his spot if he got that instrument. I thought he was right. For years I thought he was right when he said that.

It was before rehearsal the next day, that time in Boulder City, that Crispin came to me and talked like with my mouth. I was in the sun-porch thinking about that moon last night and all that went with it, about Lutch and the way everything came so easy to him, he never had to make up his mind. Crispin lounged up next to me and said,

“Fluke, did you ever see the time when Lutch couldn’t make up his mind?”

I said, “Brother,” and he knew I meant no.

He looked at his thumb, threw it out of joint. “Cat gets everything he wants without asking for it. Never has to think of asking for it.”

“You’re so right,” I said. I didn’t feel like talking.

He said, “He rates it. I’m glad.” He was, too.

I said, “I’m glad too.” I wasn’t. “What brings up all this jive, Crispin?”

He waited a long time. “Well, he just asked me something. He was all—all—ah, he was like a square at the Savoy, shuffling his feet and blushing.”

“Lutch?”
I demanded. Lutch usually came on like coke, all steam, no smoke. “What was it?”

“It was about Fawn,” he said.

I felt something the size and weight of a cueball drop into my stomach. “What’s with Fawn?”

“He wanted to know what the sides would think if he and Fawn got married.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“What could I tell him? I said it would be fine. I said it didn’t have to make any difference. It might even be better.”

“Better,” I said. “Sure.” Much better. Even if it was out of your reach, at least you could dream. You could hope for some break, some way. Lutch and Fawn … they wouldn’t fool around with this marriage kick, now. They’d do it up right.

“I knew you’d think the same way,” he said. He sounded as if there was a load off his mind. He slapped my back—I hate that—and walked off whistling
Daboo Dabay
.

That was when I made up my mind to kill Lutch. Not for Fawn. She was just part of it—the biggest part, yes; but I couldn’t stand this one more trip his way of the silver platter. I remember once when I was a kid hitch-hiking. It was cold and I’d been at a crossroads near Mineola for a long time. I began to wish real hard, hard like praying. A long time later I remember what it was I wished for so hard. Not for a ride. Not for some guy with a heater in his car to stop. What I wished for was a whole bunch of cars to come along so I could thumb them. Dig me? The biggest break I ever wanted was to have the odds raised for me, so I could make my own way easier. That’s all anyone should have. Lutch, born talented, good-looking, walking through life picking up gold pieces … people like that shouldn’t live. Every minute they live, a guy like us gets his nose rubbed in it.

For a second there I thought I’d quit, walk off, get clear. And then I remembered the radio, the jukes, people humming in front of elevator doors—and I knew I’d never get away from him. If he was dead it would be different; I could be glad when I heard that jive. No, I had to kill him.

But I’d play it smart.

For a couple of days I thought about it. I didn’t think about much else. I thought about all the ways I’d ever heard about, and all the tricks they use in whodunits to catch up on all the ways. I had about decided on an auto accident—he was all the time driving, either with the band or on quick trips for mail or spare reeds or music and all like that, and the law of averages was in my favor; he never had
accidents. I was actually out casing the roads around there in Lutch’s car when I had one of those fantastically unexpected pieces of luck that you dream about if you’ve got a good imagination.

I’d just turned into the highway from the Shinnebago side road when I heard sirens. I pulled over right away. A maroon Town-and-Country came roaring around the bend of the highway at about eighty. There were bullet holes in the windshield and the driver was hunched low. There were two cats in the back blasting away with automatics. Behind them came a State Police car, gaining. I didn’t wait and watch; I was out and under before I knew what I was doing. Peering around the rear of my machine, I looked up just as one of the men in the Town-and-Country straightened up, holding his right forearm. Just then the driver hauled the car into the road I’d just left. It couldn’t be done at that speed but he did it, the tires screaming from Dizzy Gillespie; and the man who was hit went sling-shotting out of the car. First he bounced and then he slid. I thought he’d never stop sliding. About the time he hit the road, the police car flashed by me with the right front tire flat. It was crabbing left and crabbing right, and this time the tires were from Stan Kenton.

The important thing is that that cat’s gun flew straight up in the air when he was hit and landed in the weeds not twenty feet from me. I had it before those cops got their car stopped. They never saw me. They were busy, then with the car, afterward with the stiff. I walked down there and talked to them. Seems these characters had been robbing gas stations and motorists. They’d already killed two. One of the cops growled about these war souvenir guns, and he’d be glad when all that foreign ammo was used up. They said they’d get the guys who’d gotten away soon enough; just a matter of time. I said sure. Then I got back in Lutch’s machine and drove away, real thoughtful. I knew I’d never have another chance like this.

The next afternoon I told Lutch I’d go in town with him. He was picking up the mail and I said I had to go to the drug store. He didn’t think anything about it. I went and got the gun and stuck it in the sleeve of my jacket, under my armpit. It stayed there fine. It was a big Belgian automatic. It had four shots left in it.

I felt all right. I thought I was doing okay until Lutch looked over
at me—he was driving—and asked me if I felt all right. Then I realized I had sweat on my upper lip. I looked in the rear view mirror. I could maybe two miles—we were out in the flats—and there wasn’t car in sight. I looked ahead. There was a truck. It passed. Then the road was cleared.

I said, “Pull over to the side, Lutch. I want to talk to you.”

He looked at me, surprised. “I can listen and drive, Fluke. Shoot.”

Shoot, he said. I almost laughed. “Pull over, Lutch.” I meant to sound normal but it came out as a hoarse whisper.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. He had that big easy open-handed way about him, Lutch had. “Go on, Fluke, get it off your chest.”

I took out the gun and kicked off the safeties and poked it into his ribs. “Pull over to the side, Lutch.”

He pulled up his arm and looked down under it at the gun. “Why, sure,” he said, and pulled over and stopped. He switched off, leaned back into the angle of the seat and the door so he half faced me, and said, “Lay it on me, Fluke. You fixing to kill me with that?” He didn’t sound scared, and that was because he wasn’t. He really wasn’t. Nothing like this had ever happened to him, so nothing ever could. He wasn’t prodding me, either. He was talking to me like at rehearsal. Lutch was a very relaxed cat.