Coming Through Slaughter

by Michael Ondaatje

  Next morning Crawley was on the beach while Bolden got into the boat, a day cruiser, bobbing on the crowded Sunday water. He began to yell something at Crawley. Crawley called back. Bolden a hundred feet out with the Brewitts. They were shouting back and forth in musical terms. Crawley knew he was saying goodbye to his friend. He was saying goodbye to his friend.

  ‘That was it … I went back into town later that afternoon, he didn’t show for the last two performances and didn’t show at the train. I went over to the Brewitts the next day and Robin said he wasn’t there. No one has seen or heard of him playing anywhere since. Shortly afterwards I heard the Brewitts had moved and haven’t been seen either. It’s been a case of everyone looking for Bolden and me saying I last saw him with the Brewitts and then people looking for the Brewitts. Nora didn’t believe that. Bolden, she said, on a boat!’

  He woke up and his mouth was parched. He didn’t know what hour it was. The previous night of drink and talk with the Brewitts had made him lose the order of time. There was sunlight over part of the bed, his arm. He got some pants on and started down the hall towards the Brewitts’ kitchen. Robin came round the corner at the other end. She was naked except for the sheet wrapped round her waist and trailing at her feet. Her long black hair on her shoulders and down her back. In each hand she was carrying a glass of orange juice, one for herself and one for Jaelin, walking back to their bedroom. She saw him and stopped, awkward, not knowing what to do. She looked at each of the glasses in her hands, then at him, and smiling shrugged. He stood still, where he was, as she walked past him, as she mouthed ‘Morning’ to him.

  Webb twenty and Bolden seventeen when they worked in funfairs along the coast. Being financially independent for the first time they spend all their money on girls, and sometimes on women. They take rooms, stock beer, and gradually paste their characters onto each other. They spend a week alone building up the apartment in Pontchartrain. It is during this time that Webb and Bolden get to know each other. Afterwards, busy with women, their friendship is a public act of repartee, bouncing jokes off each other in female company. They live together for two years.

  So Webb wanted to focus on that one week. And it was difficult for in that era, that time, it was Webb who was the public figure, Bolden the side-kick, the friend who stayed around. If others spoke of the two of them it was usually with surprise at what Webb could see in Bolden. The two of them after work busy with their own hobbies, Webb’s curiosity making him move serene among his growing collection of magnets and Bolden practising for hours, strengthening his mouth and chest as he blew violently into a belled cornet. So the constant noise in Webb’s ears was the muted howl in the other room. Till coming into Webb’s room with beer and sweating Bolden would collapse in an armchair and say ‘Tell me about magnets, Webb’. And Webb who had ten of them hanging on strings from the ceiling would explain the precision of the forces in the air and hold a giant magnet in his hands towards them so they would go frantic and twist magically with their own power and twitch and thrust up and swivel as if being thrashed jerking until sometimes the power that Webb held from across the room would break one of the strings and Webb would put his magnet at his foot and drag the smaller piece invisibly towards him or sometimes throw the magnet across the room halfway up the strings and the tied pieces of metal would leap up and jointly catch it in their smooth surfaces like a team of acrobats. Bolden would applaud and then they would drink.

  After two years Bolden had gone to New Orleans and Webb stayed in Pontchartrain. Since then it was Bolden the musician that Webb heard stories of. It was Bolden who had jumped up, who had swallowed everything Webb was. Webb left with the roots of Bolden’s character, the old addresses they passed through. A month after Bolden had moved Webb went to the city and, unseen, tracked Buddy for several days. Till the Saturday when he watched his nervous friend walk jauntily out of the crowd into the path of a parade and begin to play. So hard and beautifully that Webb didn’t even have to wait for the reactions of the people, he simply turned and walked till he no longer heard the music or the roar he imagined crowding round to suck that joy. Its power.

  *

  Frank Lewis

  It was a music that had so little wisdom you wanted to clean nearly every note he passed, passed it seemed along the way as if travelling in a car, passed before he even approached it and saw it properly. There was no control except the mood of his power … and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play on recordings. If you never heard him play some place where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes—then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded. He stayed away while others moved into wax history, electronic history, those who said later that Bolden broke the path. It was just as important to watch him stretch and wheel around on the last notes or to watch nerves jumping under the sweat of his head.

  But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn’t understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot—see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes. Listening to him was like talking to Coleman. You were both changing direction with every sentence, sometimes in the middle, using each other as a springboard through the dark. You were moving so fast it was unimportant to finish and clear everything. He would be describing something in 27 ways. There was pain and gentleness everything jammed into each number.

  Where did he come from? He was found before we knew where he had come from. Born at the age of twenty-two. Walked into a parade one day with white shoes and red shirt. Never spoke of the past. Simply about which way to go for the next 10 minutes.

  God I was at that first parade, I was playing, it was a very famous entrance you know. He walks out of the crowd, struggles through onto the street and begins playing, too loud but real and strong you couldn’t deny him, and then he went back into the crowd. Then fifteen minutes later, 300 yards down the street, he jumps through the crowd onto the street again, plays, and then goes off. After two or three times we were waiting for him and he came.

  Shell Beach Station. From the end of the track he watched Crawley and the rest of the band get on the train. They were still half-looking around for him to join them from someplace, even now. He stood by a mail wagon and watched them. He watched himself getting onto the train with them, the fake anger relief on their part. He watched himself go back to the Brewitts and ask if he could stay with them. The silent ones. Post music. After ambition. As he watched Crawley lift his great weight up onto the train he could see himself live with the Brewitts for years and years. He did not have any baggage with him, just the mouthpiece in his pocket. He could step on the train or go back to the Brewitts. He was frozen. He woke to see the train disappearing away from his body like a vein. He continued to stand hiding behind the mail wagon. Help me. He was scared of everybody. He didn’t want to meet anybody he knew again, ever in his life.

  He left the station, went down to the small loin district of Shell Beach. Bought beer and listened to poor jazz in the halls. Listening hard so he was playing all the good notes in his brain his mouth flourishing whenever the players missed or avoided them. Had a dollar, less now. Enough for seven beers. Wearing his red shirt black trousers shoes. Stayed in the halls the whole day avoiding the bright afternoon sun which he could see past the open door of the bar, watching the band get replaced by others, ignoring the pick-ups who stroked his neck as they passed the tables. Dead crowd around him. He sat frozen. Then when his money was finished he went down to the shore and slept. Tried to sleep anyway, listening to the others there talk—where to hustle, the weather in Gretna. He took it in and locked it. In the morning, he stole some fruit and walked the roads. Went into a crowded barber shop and sat there comfortable but didn’t allow himself to be shaved walking out when it was his turn. Always listening, listening to the wet fluid speech with no order,
unfinished stories, badly told jokes that he sober as a spider perfected in silence.

  For two days picking up the dirt the grime from the local buses before he was thrown off, dirt off bannisters, the wet slime from toilets, grey rub of phones, the alley shit on his shoe when he crouched where others had crouched, tea leaves, beer stains off tables, piano sweat, trombone spit, someone’s smell off a towel, the air of the train station sticking to him, the dream of the wheel over his hand, legs beginning to twitch from the tired walking when he lay down. He collected and was filled by every noise as if luscious poison entering the ear like a lady’s tongue thickening it and blocking it until he couldn’t be entered anymore. A fat full king. The hawk its locked claws full of salmon going under greedy with it for the final time. Nicotine from the small smokes he found burning into his nails, the socks thick with dry sweat, the nose blowing out the day’s dirt into a newspaper. Asking for a glass of water and pouring in the free ketchup to make soup. Sank through the pavement into the music of the town of Shell Beach.

  And then finding home in the warm gust of soup smells that came through pavement grids from the subterranean kitchens which kept him in their heart, so he travelled from one to another and slept over them at night drunk with the smell of vegetables, saved from the storms that came purple over the lake while he sat in the rain. Warm as a greenhouse over the grid, the heat waves warping, disintegrating his body. The shady head playing with the perfect band.

  The ladies had come and visited them in their large brown painted apartment and their taste for women, diverse at first, became embarrassingly similar, both liking the tall brown ladies, bodies thin and long and winding, the jutting pelvis when naked. The relationships often moved over from Webb to Bolden or the other way.

  Webb training in the police force, three years older, and Bolden a barber’s apprentice emphasizing his ability to be an animated listener. Later on, after he moved, he continued listening at N. Joseph’s Shaving Parlor. Here too he reacted excessively to the stories his clients in the chair told him, throwing himself into the situation, giving advice that was usually abstract and bad. The men who came into N. Joseph’s were just as much in need of confession or a sense of proportion as a shave and Bolden freely gave bizarre advice just to see what would happen. He was therefore the perfect audience to these songs and pleas. Just take the money and put it on the roosters. Days later furious men would rush in demanding to speak to Bolden (who was then only twenty-four for goodness sake) and he would have to leave his customer and that man’s flight of conversation, take the angered one into Joseph’s small bathroom and instead of accepting guilt quickly suggest variations. Five minutes later Bolden would be back shaving a neck and listening to other problems. He loved it. His mind became the street.

  Two years later Webb once more made a silent trip to New Orleans, partly to see how his friend was doing, partly to do with a Pontchartrain man being murdered there. Amazed from a distance at the blossoming of Bolden, careful again not to meet him. He finished the case in two days trying hard to keep out of Buddy’s way for the man had died while listening to Bolden play. Two men had been standing at the bar separated by a third, a well dressed pianist. Buddy was on stage. Man A shot Man B with a gun, the pianist Ferdinand le Menthe between them leaning back just in time and disappearing before the first scream even began. Bolden seeing what happened changed to a fast tempo to keep the audience diverted which he had almost managed when the police arrived. Tiger Rag.

  On his last night Webb went to hear Bolden play. Far back, by the door, he stood alone and listened for an hour. He watched him dive into the stories found in the barber shop, his whole plot of song covered with scandal and incident and change. The music was coarse and rough, immediate, dated in half an hour, was about bodies in the river, knives, lovepains, cockiness. Up there on stage he was showing all the possibilities in the middle of the story.

  Among the cornet players that came after Bolden the one who was closest to him in volume and style was Freddie Keppard.

  ‘When Keppard was on tour with the Creole Band, the patrons in the front rows of the theatre always got up after the first number and moved back.’

  He found himself on the Brewitts’ lawn. She opened the door. For a moment he looked right through her, almost forgot to recognize her. Started shaking, from his stomach up to his mouth, he could not hold his jaws together, he wanted to get the words to Robin or to Jaelin clearly. Whichever one answered the door. But it was her. Her hand wiping the hair off her face. He saw that, he saw her hand taking her hair and moving it. His hands were in his coat pockets. He wanted to burn the coat it stank so much. Can I burn this coat here? That was not what he wanted to say. Come in Buddy. That was not what he wanted to say. His whole body started to shake. He was looking at one of her eyes. But he couldn’t hold it there because of the shake. She started to move towards him he had to say it before she reached him or touched him or smelled him had to say it. Help me. Come in Buddy. Help me. Come in Buddy. Help me. He was shaking.

  TWO

  Back then, Webb, there was the world of the Joseph Shaving Parlor. The brown freckles suspended in the old barber-shop mirror. This is what I saw in them. Myself and the room. Nora’s plant that came as high as my shoulder. The front of the empty chair, the fake silver roller for the head to rest on. The wallpaper of Louisiana birds behind me.

  The Joseph Shaving Parlor was the one cool place in the First and Liberty region. No one else within a mile could afford plants, wallpaper. The reason was good business. And the clue to good business, Joseph knew, was ice. Ice against the window so it fogged and suggested an exotic curtain against the heat of the street. The ice was placed on the wood shelf that sloped downwards towards the window at knee level. The ice changed shape all day before your eyes. Each morning I walked along Gravier to pick up the blocks of it and carried them into the parlor and slid them onto the slope. By 3.45 they had melted and drained through the boards into the waiting pails. At 4.00 I carried these out and threw the filthy water over the few plants to the side of the shop. The only shrubs on Liberty. The rest of the day I cut hair.

  Cut hair. Above me revolving slowly is the tin-bladed fan, turning like a giant knife all day above my head. So you can never relax and stretch up. The cut hair falls to the floor and is swept by this thick almost liquid wind, which tosses it to the outskirts of the room.

  I blow my nose every hour and get the hair-flecks out of it. I cough them up first thing in the morning. I spit out the black fragments onto the pavement as I walk home with Nora from work. I find pieces all over my clothes even in my underwear. I go through the evenings with the smell of shaving soap up to my elbows. It is there in my fingers as I play. The layers of soap all day long have made another skin over me. The cleanest in town. I can look at a face and tell how long ago it was shaved. I work with the vanity of others.

  I see them watch their own faces for the twenty minutes they sit below me. Men hate to see themselves change. They laugh nervously. This is the power I live in. I manipulate their looks. They trust me with the cold razor at the vein under their ears. They trust me with liquid soap cupped in my palms as I pass by their eyes and massage it into their hair. Dreams of the neck. Gushing onto the floor and my white apron. The men stumbling with no more sight to the door and feeling even through their pain the waves of heat as they go through the door into the real climate of Liberty and First, leaving this ice, wallpaper and sweet smell and gracious conversation, mirrors, my slavery here.

  So many murders of his own body. From the slammed fingernail to the sweat draining through his hair eventually bleeding brown into the neck of his shirt. That and Nora’s habit of biting the collars of his shirt made him eventually buy them collarless. There was a strange lack of care regarding his fingers, even in spite of his ultimate nightmare of having hands cut off at the wrists. His nails chewed down and indistinguishable from the callouses of his fingers. He could hardly feel his lady properly anymore. Suicide of the h
ands. So many varieties of murder. After his child died in his dream it was his wrist he attacked.

  I need a picture.

  Thought you knew him.

  I need it to show around.

  Still—shit man who has pictures taken.

  Bolden did, he mentioned one. Perhaps with the band.

  You’ll have to ask them. Ask Cornish.

  But Cornish didn’t have one though he said a picture had been taken, by a crip that Buddy knew who photographed whores. Bellock or something.

  Bellocq.

  He went down to the station and looked in the files for Bellocq’s place. They knew Bellocq. He was often picked up as a suspect. Whenever a whore was chopped they brought him in and questioned him, when had he last seen her? But Bellocq never said anything and they always let him go.

  Bellocq was out so he broke in and searched the place for the picture. Hundreds of pictures of whores in the cabinets. Naked and clothed, with pets or alone. Sad stuff. To Webb the only difference between these and morgue files was the others were dead. But there was nothing of Bolden. He sat down in the one comfortable armchair and eventually fell asleep. Buddy what the hell are you doing out there. You don’t know what you’re doing do ya. Hope Bellocq has the picture. I can’t even remember what you look like too well. I’d recognize you but in my mind you’re just an outline and music. Just your bright shirts that have no collars are there. Something sharp.