Uptown Blues
Page 5
“You know your Mama Jones, she ain’t well,” he says, while we’re stopped at a red light and looking at the long line out in front of a chicken shop. “I’m not sure if she’s going to be alright or not. She’s taking it real hard. She might not be okay.”
The light turns green.
“Are you?” he asks me, without turning his head.
I look at him, my lower lip starting to tremble again.
“You going to have to go on and be the man of the house now, little Andre. Be strong for her.”
I can’t help it, not being strong. Someone is either strong or they aren’t, and I’m not. The tears are pushing out from somewhere that’s almost not a part of me at all. The same feeling as where the wind comes from when I blow a high C on the horn. Some of the things that come out of me just come, and I don’t call them. I can’t stop them either.
“You know when I was in Iraq, and stuff got real bad, we couldn’t have no one next to us crying and carrying on and having a breakdown. Not when things got real bad like that. Got real bad like they’re getting right now. Now is when you have to have one of those stone-faced sonofabitches right next to you. One of those people that can just push it all the way down and carry on. Do you understand what I mean, young’un?”
Maybe I do, but it doesn’t matter to me, not right now.
“Don’t start crying. You’re going to have a tough time, and you got to be tough in turn.”
But I can’t stop my lip, or the wetness leaking from my face. So, I just turn away and try to think about Louis Armstrong. I Think about his wide face smiling up at the lights, his lips pressed against the mouthpiece, his white handkerchief swinging.
“Mama Jones might be going away for a while. To the hospital. And with your daddy gone, you going to stay with me for a while in the extra bedroom. We’re going to have a good time. You can blow your horn all you want.”
He takes a corner a little too fast, and I can feel my weight shift to the side of the car.
“You going to be alright, Andre. You going to have to grow up fast, though. It is time for you to be a man now.”
A pothole makes the car bounce. We’re up into the Seventeenth Ward now, almost up onto Leonidas, where Melph lives. I get a sick feeling in my stomach. I don’t know if it’s the car ride or the different food Mr. de Valencia gave me or the trip downtown, but I don’t feel very well at all suddenly.
I notice that Melph is looking at me real close, down at my neck, at my scar.
“You remember how you got that scar, Andre?”
I shake my head.
“You don’t remember, right?”
I shake my head again, feeling the sickness come over me and not able to wait any longer.
He pulls over and I open the door and puke right out on the curb. Uncle reaches over and pats me on the back a few times before putting his hands back on the wheel.
“So, you were on the streetcar. With your daddy?” he says once I’m sitting back straight and wiping my lips with my shirtsleeve.
I nod my head.
Uncle looks far down the street and squints his eyes. His fingers are so long on the steering wheel. Huge hands, he’s got, like a piano player. But he doesn’t play an instrument.
“And you saw him, when he…” Uncle isn’t looking at me.
I’m happy the cold brass is between my fingers. I hug the horn to my chest.
“Damn…,” Uncle says and shakes his head from side to side, slapping the steering wheel lightly with those long, long hands (smack, smack).
I want to say damn.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
“You didn’t see who did it, though?” Uncle asks.
When I don’t answer, he nods his head towards the house—orange soda bungalow is how Daddy always described Melph’s place.
“Come on in and play me a tune, then, nephew,” he says.
I don’t have to wonder what Louis Armstrong might have done, if he were in my shoes right now, because I know exactly what he did. I know it because it’s right there in the books, in black and white. It has already happened. It happened so long ago that now it’s just a few lines, just a few words even, and so it seems so small when you read about it. But what’s happening to me right now doesn’t seem small, not at all. Am I going to be okay? I don’t think so. The things up ahead are invisible for me. But with Louis, you can flip the pages back and forth, and he always does the same thing. For some reason, thinking of that makes me feel safe, or safer at least. I wonder if there will ever be a book about my life and if it’s too late to change what will be written inside of it.
It’s a few hours later, and the sky has gone from blue to red to purple and now to black outside of the window. I’m in the back of the house, in the bedroom thrown together for me. It’s mostly weights back here, an exercise bike, all of it moved off into the closet now to make way for me, I guess. My futon with the broken springs has laundry piled up on it and the floor sags in one corner where all of the heavy dumbbells were kept before, a layer of dust on everything.
Mama Jones always said her brother Melph was too handsome to ever have a wife, but I think it might be because he’s too messy.
I dump out my bag. There’s the gun and my horn lying on the futon side by side. I take a few deep breaths, think for a while, and then put them both back carefully.
There’s also a big mirror in the center of the wall, and I catch my reflection in it. I stare at myself for a long, long time, listening to the music of the neighborhood around me. Dogs bark and women laugh, motorcycles churn and I can even hear the streetcar bell, only just softly. It still hurts just as much. The train by the river howls out at about seven o’clock, and things get a bit quieter after that.
Mirrors are one of my least favorite things, especially in the last year or two, but I can’t look away. My legs have gotten longer. There’s fuzzy hair on my chin. My lips are busted and there’s a small ring around my mouth just like the one that worried Louis his whole life. My hair is dirty and my eyes are red. The slim scar on my neck is pale and forked.
I break the mirror’s spell and wander around the house a bit. Uncle has gone off somewhere, and he never said where he was going or what time he’d be back. He left a few slices of pizza on the kitchen table for me, covered in a paper towel. I take a bite and chew it up a bit before starting to feel sick all over again. But I realize also how badly my body wants the pizza, even if my brain doesn’t. I haven’t eaten much in the last two days, so I force myself to finish a whole piece.
From the kitchen table I can see the door to Uncle’s bedroom, which for some reason is this very particular shade of red. There is something about that red, though I couldn’t say just what. The door is also slightly open and there’s a light left on inside, which is very mysterious looking in the way it dimly shines out just a bit onto the wall opposite. Something about the red door, the light, the pizza churning in my stomach, makes me stand up and walk over. Then I stand by the door for a long while, looking at it and just thinking.
I push it open and it whines on its hinges, walk inside until I’m standing over Uncle’s bed. There are moving boxes spilling open on the floor, like they were packed too quickly. I wonder where Uncle is moving to. There are empty bottles on his dresser, pills, condoms, and—
Something else. Something I felt like was there, though I couldn’t have said how I knew or why or what brought me in here. But then I realize.
The lipstick is a certain color, that certain shade of red, same as the door. The tube of it has been left open and sits on a tissue that’s also marked with the color. The smudge of muddy red sends a funny feeling up into my stomach and I stare for a long time.
Marsala. That’s the weird name for the weird color. Where did that word just pop into my head from? I don’t know how I remember the name, but I will never forget the color. I think because it looks like a certain kind of wine. Marsala lipstick.
Why is this here? This marsala lipstick sitting on t
he edge of Uncle Melph’s dresser, left open, left on a tissue?
I back out of the room, go and get my backpack and zip it up.
Louis Armstrong didn’t know it yet, but his whole life was about to start.
The pistol he shot into the night sky. It’s just a few lines in a book. But they sent him to become a waif, and it was the best thing that could ever have happened to him. It may have saved his life.
I take a green bandana from Uncle’s workout clothes in my room and I tie it around my head. Then I take his old army jacket from off a hook in the hall and put it on. I’ve stolen three things today already, after having gone thirteen years resisting.
But I’m a waif now. I have to do what I have to do. The jacket’s a little big for me, but I know that it’ll be cold where I’m going.
I leave. I walk right out the front door.
The street in front of me is empty and stretches all the way down to the vanishing point.
Seven
Tomás was sitting on the wide front porch, watching the evening go by on the Avenue, and hating himself with a passion.
A young man, a child really, had come to this address looking for help. A boy had fled from trauma and trusted Tomás on the worst, most difficult night of his life.
And what had Tomás done?
He had summarily sent the poor boy downtown. Turned him over to the uncouth authorities, to the state. Washed his hands of the whole matter in time for breakfast. What kind of a man would do such a thing?
His honor, quite clearly, had been sullied by this failure.
But what else was a man to do? How to again hold his head up high? He was old, burdened by this damned chair. A murder had taken place, after all. The boy was a witness. And who was Tomás to—
He should have done more, that much he was sure of.
Now he felt weak, helpless, the weight of the chair suddenly seeming so absolute and terrible. Tomás, on this troubled night, was having no luck savoring the small beauties of a moonlit avenue. He sighed into an iced tea, clearly picturing all the horrors that must lie before little Andre, the boy’s whole future flashing in terrible vividness before his imagination’s eye, all of it pivoting around that crucial moment: a moment in which Tomás had failed to summon the courage to—
“To what, exactly?” he said to the swaying crepe myrtles. “To kidnap a traumatized child for his own good? To keep a witness hostage from the detectives who need to interrogate him? To insert myself into a terrible family tragedy?”
The trees held no answer. But Tomás knew better, and now all that was left was to sit here and torture himself over this shortcoming. He must sit and wait with these damned thoughts, wait for the detectives to return with some news.
News that would surely be of the unhappy variety.
Tomás brought himself and his chair inside, looked longingly at the old gramophone that Andre had been so fond of. The Louis Armstrong record was still there. He wheeled a bit closer and stared down at the round piece of petroleum, set the needle on it and turned it on.
Halfway through the second song—the syrupy sweet and doleful “West End Blues,” which mirrored the old man’s feelings with a stirring precision—there was a knock on the door, launching Tomás out of his reverie instantly. He lifted the needle from the player, straightened his tie.
“You don’t have to knock, Felix. This is your home too, you know,” Tomás called out, his voice bouncing around the grand manor.
The young detective walked into the parlor and was followed closely behind by Melancon, who wore lines on his face even deeper than usual. Both of them collapsed on the couch.
“Tell me everything,” Tomás demanded.
Melancon shook his head. “Nothing. The boy wouldn’t say a word. Wouldn’t or…maybe couldn’t. I’m still not sure which. I still haven’t heard the kid open his mouth.”
Tomás, usually the type to listen more than he spoke, could scarcely hold his tongue. He had so many questions.
“Imagine, the only witness to a murder case, unable to talk,” Melancon said.
Tomás looked at the ceiling, trying to recall exactly what he’d been told upon taking the boy under his wing a few months earlier. He wanted to get it right.
“I’m no psychologist,” Tomás finally began, “but I believe it’s not that he is unable to talk to people. His words to me have been single ones. He will smile and say ‘good’ or ‘nice’ after a song. So, he clearly has the ability to speak. In fact, I think it might be appropriate to simply say that he is just a very quiet person. Tell me, how was he received at the station? Were they kind?”
Felix poured himself some of the tea from the pitcher on the coffee table, leaned back into the couch and downed it in one gulp. “Just quiet?” he asked, smacking his lips a bit. “I thought maybe that scar on his neck was from some sort of surgery, that it had maybe wrecked his cords. You said you’d heard him say a few words, though?”
“After some time,” Tomás replied, “mostly in response to the gramophone. I believe he therefore has no physical limitations on his speech, but that he speaks only when thoroughly comfortable, and even then, he remains a boy of few words. Due to the current situation, the stresses placed on him, the trauma, I doubt if he will speak for some time. Though I am sure that he could speak at length if he wished to. He is a very fast learner and has always seemed to me to be highly, highly intelligent. He has a deep appreciation for music, and to hear him blow that horn of his, Dios mío. Now tell me, how did you leave it with the police?”
“A strange kid,” Melancon said absently.
Tomás shook his head. “I’m just beside myself, gentlemen. Tell me what happened precisely, and tell me this instant! I feel a great deal of guilt and sadness, and I feel as if I have brought a great dishonor onto our house. He is a fine young man, and now to be without a father, to come to us for help only to be turned away.”
“It gets worse,” Melancon said. He and Felix exchanged a long look of despair. Felix turned his palms up and cocked his head, the way he always did before issuing an apology. His shoulders drooped and he looked Tomás in the eye.
“Kid’s mother was…well, she was obviously very upset with the whole thing. Apparently, she may be…institutionalized.”
“Stepmama?”
“Oh, right.”
“Where is his real mother?”
Melancon shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
“So, what happened? With the stepmom? Mrs. Jones?” Tomás pressed.
“Well, she was refusing to leave the house to identify her husband’s body. When they tried to make her leave, apparently, she went a little nutso. I was told there were a few dishes thrown. Maybe understandable, given her condition. But it looks like Child Protective Services may be getting involved. For now, the kid has been released into the custody of an uncle.”
Tomás quietly bowed his head while he turned all of this over in his mind. With one hand he gently rocked his wheelchair forward and back. With the other he worried his hairy chin, his substantial eyebrows scrunched into the center of his forehead.
“Well…I suppose you would have already told me if there was news regarding the killer of Andre’s father?” he asked flatly.
“All we know is that it was a bullet,” Melancon said, leaning forward. “There were only a few people on the streetcar, and none of them have come forward yet as witnesses. Downtown says the security footage is worthless. And other than that, zilch. Except for the boy, of course.”
“He saw everything?” Tomás asked.
“Only he knows the answer to that question, and nobody is sure how to get it out of him.”
Tomás deflated. “So young, to see such a thing. I wish I could have helped him more. But I am old. I am in this damned chair.” He slapped the metal seat beneath him, gnashing his teeth a bit as he did so.
“There’s nothing for it, old friend,” Felix said. Melancon nodded, taking his hat in his hands and standing up from the couch.
The two detectives stuck around for another cup of coffee, all three men trying to delicately avoid the subject so clearly troubling their minds, taking comfort in each other’s company. They let the Armstrong record play quietly from the corner.
Just as Tomás was about to broach the subject of supper, a strange sound.
It was not unlike the bleating of a trumpet, only muffled somehow. Not the real thing, but some kind of a recording, and a hampered one at that. They could only just hear it below the record. It sounded something like a horn with a sock stuffed in it coming from three feet underground. At first, all three men simply stood up and looked about. Melancon killed the record. Eyebrows were raised and necks turned this way and that.
“The hell is that?” Felix finally said.
Two minutes went by and none of them could locate the source of the strange sound. It would stop and then start anew, just loud enough to keep them looking, but just faint enough so that its source refused to be pinpointed. They looked behind potted plants and the framed photographs on the shelves. Felix bent under furniture, finally finding the rattling thing underneath the fluffy cushion of the round-armed sofa with the floral pattern.
A phone. It buzzed and again, the long peal of a trumpet solo now unmistakable as the ring tone. They all looked at it. Felix held it out in front of himself like it was a foreign relic before he was jogged by his ever-curious partner.
“Well, answer it,” Melancon said.
Felix did so, sliding his pointer finger across the screen and pressing the button that engaged the speakerphone.
“Hello,” he said.
A rough but musical voice answered. “Who is this?” it demanded.
“Felix Herbert.”
A silence.