Young Man With a Horn (3 page)

And then, when things were looking the very worst, a job fell bang in his lap. He went downstairs to Gandy’s Pool Hall, Billiards, Snooker, and Bowling, one noon to get himself a chocolate bar, and even as he chose it he saw a sign inside the showcase: Boy Wanted. He bought his bar, put it in his pocket, and walked across the room to calm down. Then he went back and said to the man behind the counter (it was Gandy himself), ‘Do you still want a boy?’

That was about all there was to it. He went right to work. All he had to do was set up tenpins in one alley while they were being knocked down in the other alley, and then set them up in the other alley while they were being knocked down in the one he’d just finished setting them up in, and repeat. The kid that had the job before Rick, Gandy told him, wasn’t paying attention to his business one day and he sort of got his leg hurt, so watch them balls, see, we’re not liable.

Nice work and two-fifty a week for it, twenty dollars for two months, forty for four, and taper off from there; quit and buy anything you like, just like finding it. Meanwhile, watch those balls.

Edward Richard Martin got along fine with his work. At least he kept his job. He set them up in the other alley very nimbly, he didn’t let himself get bowled over, and he drew his pay every Saturday night, two-fifty right in his hand. And besides that, it was at Gandy’s that he met his first friend, Smoke Jordan—his first, last, and always friend, Smoke.

Smoke Jordan worked at Gandy’s off and on; he swept out and mopped up. He had had Rick’s job, too, a long time before, but the bowling trade kept falling off and Gandy figured it out finally and ended by hiring a shorter and less deliberate pin-setter. Smoke was eighteen, easy six feet tall, and on the dark side between oxblood and midnight blue, a good deep color with fine high lights in it. He was a thoughtful boy, inclined to philosophy, and his movements were precise and slow. Gandy didn’t give him credit for being all there, but he was wrong. Smoke was slow, but he had a reason for it. The way he walked, that slow drag, might have looked offhand to be simply the gait of the shiftless, but if you’d really watch him walk, judgment suspended, you’d see that the drag had a pretty vigorous timing behind it, like very slow dancing. That’s what it was too. Smoke Jordan had rhythm in his ears all the time; sometimes he sang with it, most of the time, in fact; and sometimes he just walked the floor with it, going very slowly and barely lifting his feet. You could tell what it was if you paid any attention, because once in a while he’d hear fast rhythm and then he could get across the floor like anything. But he really liked it slow, and that’s what got Gandy mixed up.

When he pushed a broom nothing much came of it; he had developed a style of sweeping that was good to listen to from start to finish. It had its drawbacks, however, from a utilitarian standpoint; it raised an awful dust and it didn’t get anywhere.

And so he only worked off and on. Gandy fired him with a regularity which, graphically expressed, would make a periodic wave. But he rehired him almost as regularly, because Smoke was almost always around and Gandy’s eye almost always fell on him when he wanted something done. He even took a personal interest in him; he tried more than once to teach him to sweep with a utilitarian slant, all the strokes going in the same direction in such a way that when you’ve gone the length of a room with such strokes you inevitably have a pile of whatever it is, right there in front of your broom, nothing to it, try it.

And then Smoke would try it with Gandy right at his elbow counting for him like a coxswain: stroke, stroke, stroke, forward, forward, forward; no, damn it to hell, not backward; just pull it through the air on the way back so you won’t sweep the dirt the wrong direction like I told you not to, you dope. Forward, always forward, like that. But the minute Gandy had to turn away to get the dice box or a cigar for a customer, Smoke would go right back into his off-beat swishing with all the single-mindedness of the unswerving, incorruptible artist.

After Rick came to Gandy’s, Smoke knew with the instinct of a compass where his audience was, and he came to sweep almost exclusively behind the bowling alleys where there was no great need of it. And there it was that the black one taught the white one what rhythm is, and not by precept, either. By example. ‘Get this,’ he’d say before he started a new one. ‘And get this. What’d you think of that?’ He gave out examples of his work until he had Rick built up to the place where he’d laugh out spontaneously over a new and almost inextricably involved pattern, and after that anything could happen; Rick was a marked man, a lifelong sucker for syncopation.

The thing grew fast. Rick began to sing the songs that Smoke sang; they’d come into his head when Smoke had gone. He’d find himself whistling the tunes, and then the words would begin to spin themselves out automatically, with Smoke’s accents and interpretation, as if from under a phonograph needle. Rick had, right off to begin with, a repertory of some fifteen songs that he’d soaked up in the first month of knowing Smoke. They were blues, mostly; somewhat more self-conscious and city-dwelling than the pure-strain, deep-south, negro blues, but born of a common melancholic parent by a younger and possibly white sire. The blues that Smoke, and then Rick, sang—‘Memphis Blues,’ ‘Beale Street Mamma,’ ‘Stackolee Blues,’ ‘Wang Wang Blues,’ ‘St. Louis Blues,’ all those—inherited from their elder parent a primitive dignity of phrasing for stories that are eternally the sad stories—poverty, the slow death of love, the awful fact of infidelity, the need to get out and go some place where it will never happen again, to pack your bag and make your getaway. Very sad stories in very sad words that meant no more to Rick Martin than the words of ‘In the Sweet Bye-and-Bye,’ just so many jugs to carry the tune. The tune was the thing that held Rick to the songs, and what held Smoke was the firm, strict beat, the unfailing four-in-one, that he knew how to send in who knows how many directions.

Smoke revealed himself, finally, for what he was, a professional drummer with amateur standing, and with amateur standing only because he had never been able, what with Gandy firing him so often and the family demands on him when he was in the comparative money, to get himself a union card. There was the further matter of his not having had a bass drum since the time his kid sister, Bluebelle, fell off the sink and went spang through one side of the drum and sort of loosened up the other. It was a peculiar accident; Smoke never did find out exactly what happened. He had the drum down on its side putting adhesive tape on a place that had got scratched almost through; he thought he heard somebody at the front door, so he went and it was Mrs. Johnson, and he just barely let her in when he heard an awful howl from the kitchen, and he ran back and found Bluebelle clean through one side of the drum. Nothing he could do about it; Bluebelle couldn’t tell him how it happened because she was too little to talk at the time, and now that she’d learned to talk some she couldn’t seem to remember anything about it.

Since that time all Smoke had for a bass drum was a big old suitcase his brother Henry had one time when he was selling jersey knits. It sounded pretty good when you kicked it right in the middle, but it was next to impossible to make the thing stay in one place. You’d have to keep moving around after it all the time, because every time you’d kick it, it would move a little bit. And if you’d set it against the wall it didn’t sound so good; seemed like it needed to be out in the open to sound deep the way you want it.

Smoke was the first person Rick ever talked to, the first one he ever had anything to say to. He scarcely knew his aunt and uncle, and during his library book period he’d got along without friends. But now here was Smoke, a coon, no getting around that, with a face that shone like a nigger’s heel, and a mouthful of white, white teeth that flashed out like so many lighthouses whenever he opened his mouth, and a clean round skull covered with close-lying, pencil-width rows of tight black curls. He was African by nature, too, slow and easy. He talked more and more to Rick; and Rick, warmed for the first time by the feeling of being sought out and showed off for, came back with a few personal revelations—revelations in kind, about his need to make of himself a musician of amateur or any other standing. He told Smoke about the All Souls’ fracas and admitted that he had been on the high-road to piano virtuosity when the upset came. Smoke gave him the kind of sympathy he had a right to expect. Since the trouble he’d had, himself, with Bluebelle and his bass drum, Smoke’s heart went out to anyone forced, like him, to suffer interruptions in his chosen career. He could, of course, play his snare and kick his brother Henry’s suitcase, he wasn’t quite so bad off as Rick; but on the other hand Rick had a good steady job, he wasn’t always getting himself canned, he didn’t have to hand over everything he had to his pap every Saturday night, and sooner or later he’d have money enough to buy a piano. No, not a piano, Rick said, a horn of some kind, like a cornet, something you could keep around with you, so you could pick your own time to play it.

‘Piano’s nice, though,’ Smoke said, and Rick, who had been lying awake nights for close to two months thinking how nice a piano is, was the first to agree with him.

‘Yes,’ Smoke said, ‘a piano’s mighty pretty when it’s played right. Nice slow and nice fast.’

And on this subject—‘speaking of piano’—he brought up the case of his friend Jeff Williams, who played piano in his own band at a place in Vernon called the Cotton Club (and not to be confused with Frank Sebastian’s Cotton Club: this one was just a plain cotton club). There were five men in Jeff’s band—a tenor sax, a trombone, a trumpet, traps, and a piano—all of them good enough for a medal any place, but, baby, you ought to hear this Jeff Williams. He knew what he was doing. The kind of piano player Jeff was, the guys in the band tried to keep him playing the piano all night, after the dance was over. Not always, of course; they were all good and they liked to cut loose after hours themselves, but every so often they’d just sit around the piano and listen to Jeff and not give two whoops if he ever quit. And when you get a bunch of fellows, all of them good, that want to put up their horns and listen to another guy play piano all night, you can be pretty sure it isn’t just any old piano playing.

Jeff’s folks lived just down the street from the Jordans, and it seemed like any time you’d go past there was always some kind of music coming out of the Williams’s front door. Jeff was a natural piano player; he just picked it up by himself. He got a piano at a fire sale when he was about twelve years old. They gave him four bits to haul it away and he hauled it home. Pretty good piano, too, after he built a new front and one side for it and got a guy to work it over on the inside. It was still at Williams’s; you ought to see it, not a half bad piano, only they had it painted a funny-colored blue right now. It looked much better white the way they had it before, but you know how women are, always wanting to fix the house over, change this, change that. Same way at Jordan’s, Smoke said; he and Henry and Nathan and Bud would no sooner get their room fixed up so they knew where they were at and could get comfortable in it than Mrs. Jordan would decide that that would make a better room for Marie and Josephine and Bluebelle, and vice versa, and they’d have to get settled all over again. But it was no skin off Jeff what color his old lady painted the piano; he could play it just as good one color as another.

The more Rick heard, the sadder it made him. He began to think how satisfactory it would be to sleep in the same room with three brothers—all of them good guys—and have three sisters sleeping somewhere in the same house, and a pap to give your money to, and a mother to wake you up for breakfast with the family. And then he’d remember they were just a bunch of coons, but it wouldn’t last long; the glow would come back and he’d know, from knowing their boy Smoke, what a fine family the Jordans must be. And then he’d think how it would be to walk past the Williams’s and hear music coming out of their front door, and go in and say, ‘How are you, Jeff, boy?’ and stick around and listen to him play that blue piano until it was time to go home and go to bed with all your brothers and sisters again. The good life, even if they were coons. Much better than peanut butter and crackers by yourself all the time, or a can of spaghetti, even if you were white, and no place to go except to Gandy’s to work and practically pray that Smoke would show up and start talking.

It went that way all the time. Rick couldn’t think about anything but Smoke in those days; he was scared to death Smoke would lose interest in him because he really didn’t know much to say, himself; he couldn’t tell about his family because he didn’t know anything to tell; he couldn’t talk about school because that was a subject he didn’t care to go into; all he could ever say was that he certainly did want to learn how to play some kind of a musical instrument. That was his single point of contact with Smoke, and the only definite thing he had to say to him. For the rest, he confined himself to questions that very subtly flattered Smoke—questions like what did he think of this and that—and then he listened all-ears while Smoke told him. It was a nice new thing for Smoke, you don’t get listened to all-ears in a family of seven, not counting the mother and father. They know all you have to say, or think they do. Smoke would rather any time go down to Gandy’s—even when he was fired—and talk to Rick, who looked like high-class white with new pants and his hair combed with water and his fingernails clean, and who, despite all this, hung on his words. Smoke couldn’t quite believe it; he came of a race that isn’t used to having its words hung on, and he kept a wary eye on the line that can’t be crossed. There couldn’t be friendship, but there could be talk.

Rick didn’t know there was a line. He forgot in no time at all that there was such a word as coon. His one concern was to have Smoke like him, or at least bear with him until he grew up a little and got some ideas of his own. And in the interim his plan was to spar for time, to keep Smoke with him by hook or crook until the day when he would have something definite to offer him, until he could show him somehow that he, Richard Martin, was as worthy of a friend’s respect as, oh, say Jeff Williams, to put it strongly. He felt himself shaping up inside with the conviction that give him time and he was going to be a great guy one way or another—something like a drunk who gets the idea that he’s on the point of having the answer to life and death and thought, only he can’t quite, at the moment, put it into words, but give him a minute because he’s almost got it.