Night Song

by John A. Williams

  “Thanks, daddy,” Eagle said to the forlorn altoist. Then he peered sternly around to see that the young musicians were set. He placed the borrowed horn in his mouth and raced soundlessly down the keys; then he removed it, twisted the neck a little and turned to the group.

  “Salt Peanuts,” he murmured.

  Had the young trumpeter not been quite as black as he was, he would have flushed. Nobody could play that number and play it right but Eagle and Yards. The musicians looked at one another as Eagle murmured while he tapped his foot, “… two, three, four!”

  He gazed out over the room while he and the trumpeter played the introduction in unison. Behind them, the pianist, determined to stay in, muttered “Doo, doo-dee; doo, doo-dee” and chorded heavily more to let himself know where he was than to form a foundation for the trumpeter and Eagle.

  The drummer tightened his buttocks on his stool but otherwise tried to remain as loose as possible. He was going to need all the looseness he could muster when Eagle took off. This was the man Hillary had knocked down. His friends had loosened his collar for him and now he was glad they had.

  At the conclusion of the introduction, chuckling, Eagle moved close to the mike with the nervous trumpeter.

  “Salt peanuts, salt peanuts,” they sang, Eagle clipping off his words. “Salt peanuts, salt peanuts.” At the end of the bar the drummer snapped off a tight, commanding roll and Eagle raised the ax to his mouth and moved back a step from the mike. His heavy hands bammed over the keys and the notes hurtled out. Somewhere along the way—reminding Hillary of a runner with a tight home run who barely touches the bases—the three syllables of “Salt Peanuts” echoed again and again. Eagle closed his eyes once while he chased an idea through the scales and brought it home. The pianist, head down, raced to keep up, and the drummer, mouth open, beads of sweat beginning to trickle down his face, dropped bomb after bomb, a rim shot here and there, and managed to keep up. The bass, a man not quite half as wide as his instrument, fingered the strings serenely, filling in for all of them with a solid, thumping beat.

  The trumpeter licked his lips nervously and waited for his solo.

  Even though he waited, he missed the opening notes of his chorus, and the drummer rapped sharply on the rim, the bass thumped heavily, and the piano chorded warningly. Eagle glared at the trumpeter who stepped up now and raced to catch and keep up. In desperation his mind formed one idea after another, and he built on them, went back and reworked them until, feeling confident, he looked at Eagle and Eagle nodded. The trumpeter went on. Behind him, the rhythm section, sensing what had happened, lifted and came on with new assurance. When the solo ended, Eagle clapped his hands and extended his hand toward the trumpeter. Applause rolled up as large as that Eagle himself had received.

  Now the pianist winged his way up and down the board, touching lightly here, heavily there, taking the ideas that both Eagle and the trumpeter had molded and embroidering them in his own style; after ten minutes he gave way to the drummer. Then they all came back on and the pianist set it up for the finale where Eagle and the trumpeter would again blow together.

  “Eagle,” the trumpeter shouted back into the vortex of sound.

  “Crazy,” the pianist shouted back. His leg was pumping like a bicyclist’s.

  The drummer toned down in order to slip under Eagle’s first notes.

  “What’chall doin’?” Eagle asked.

  “Mo’,” the drummer panted. “Mo’.”

  “You niggers must think I’m crazy. Stand up here and blow all night for freebee,” Eagle said. He slipped off the horn and walked offstage, smiling, because he was pleased. The trumpeter and the pianist quickly brought the number to a close and applause filled the room again.

  A young woman stepped into Eagle’s path. Eagle surveyed her briefly, said “Hello, baby,” and started around.

  “I want to sleep with you,” she said.

  “Honey, it ain’t gonna rub off.”

  “But I want to sleep with you.” She was attractive. Her eyes were fiercely made up, and her body was compact, as Eagle could see, thanks to her tight clothing. Tonight he didn’t want it, yet he couldn’t let it pass: he had to get something since she was so willing. “Do something for me, will you, baby?”

  “Anything, Eagle.”

  “Gimmee twenty-five dollas.”

  For a moment the girl stared. This was not at all what she wanted. But if she didn’t give it to him …? She went into her bag, suddenly conscious of the eyes upon them. She hadn’t minded so much when it was the other thing, but the money was something else. She handed it to him.

  Eagle kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be here tomorrow at two. Meet you at the bar.”

  The woman nodded slowly. She would be here twenty-four hours hence, but instinct told her that Eagle would not be. She would come the night after and the night after that. But Eagle wouldn’t unless there was no one else and there was always someone else, willing and better looking.

  Well, she would wait.

  Eagle went to the back, got Hillary, paused at the bar for another drink. “Rotten little bitch,” Eagle said. “I’m supposed to lay her just because she’s white. I’m supposed to be dying for her. Shit,” he sneered.

  And again Hillary felt hatred surrounding him.

  CHAPTER 7

  Keel walked from Della’s apartment in the lower Murray Hill section crosstown along 23rd Street to his own West Village place. He didn’t mind the cold. In two hours with Della, utter exhaustion had seized him, an exhaustion of the mind which had nothing to do with his having been up the entire day. Now he walked alone between the great concrete walls of buildings which rose on either side of the wide street. Here the wind had free play, speeding from river to river unchecked, swinging signs and throwing small clinkers of debris against windows.

  All the store windows had been darkened at this hour—four in the morning. Even had it been Christmas or Easter, those seasons when store windows brim with color and light above 23rd Street, this section would have remained stark. It was a limbo—until daybreak when busses and subways loosed their hordes of persons, many of whom worked in the mass of non-profit organizations centered along this street. But now: nothing.

  Keel plodded westward, foolishly conscious of the mechanism of his legs and feet. Once he felt he was marching and broke step with a curse, yet soon resumed it. Once more flecks of snow spewed down upon the walks, and he exulted in the clean smell.

  Tonight, walking along with the snow stinging his face, Keel felt lost Yet he knew New York. He had been born here, had gone to school here and had explored it damned near as much as Meyer Berger, or so he liked to think in more pleasant moments. Unlike many Harlem Negroes he had learned what was in the city below 125th Street, why it was and where it was, though they too, more and more, were striking out beyond the areas where they worked. Keel knew how the Negro ghetto, which once had been around the corner from his shop, had moved to the Pennsylvania Station area and then uptown to Harlem, once the wooded heights of the well-to-do. Prejudice and discrimination being what they were—tied inextricably first to economics, though economics was really the least important—the old buildings up there still maintained their sometimes exquisite, sometimes cumbersome, rococo frescoes and stone ornaments, since it would have been too costly, the landlords said, to remove them. Now the largest ghetto in the world was the one place in New York City where vestiges of the meaningful architectural work of the last century remained. Elsewhere, the new buildings were sleek, almost prefabricated structures with window upon window, air conditioner above air conditioner, unguarded by gargoyle or angel, untrimmed except by a modest layer of colored brick.

  The buildings Keel was now passing were smutty and flat-walled; they appeared gutted. They had been built solely for office space, perhaps a hundred or seventy-five years before, and he knew, though he couldn’t see, that the upper façades bore the name of the owner and the date of the erection of each building in brick bas-rel
ief. Now Keel turned south, then west again at 10th Street and walked slowly over to his building near the West-side Highway and the railroad tracks. He dragged himself slowly upstairs and into his apartment where he began climbing out of his clothes as soon as he had closed the door behind him. A shower and a cigarette were enough to send him staggering, completely without strength, to bed.

  It seemed a million years later—when he started in the darkness at the sound of his doorbell and came to. Della, his mind raced. The window of his room was filled with a sheen of silver-gray. The bell rang again, and once more his mind registered: Della. Then: no.

  She would not come like this. She had done it twice before, and each time it had been an awkward situation. He paused to light a cigarette and on the first draw decided it must be Eagle. Nude, he walked to the door, took off the latch and pulled it open.

  “Damn,” Eagle said, brushing past him, “I thought you was going to leave us out there in that goddamn cold.”

  “What the hell you doin’ out of bed?” Keel asked wearily. One could always assume that Richie Stokes would do little to save himself. “Whatcha let him up for?” Keel asked Hillary, knowing full well that a hundred men like himself and Hillary couldn’t keep Eagle in bed once he had made up his mind to get up. Keel didn’t wait for Hillary’s answer.

  “Della here?” Eagle whispered slyly.

  “No, she isn’t here. C’mon in the bedroom. I’m cold.”

  They returned to the bedroom and sat on the bed after Keel had got back in. He closed his eyes and asked, “What’s happenin’?”

  “Me and Prof. Just walkin’ around,” Eagle said.

  “Makin’ connections?”

  “How you sound, man?” Eagle jeered, but admitted nothing.

  “You tryin’ to get Prof in trouble, bastard? Let him stay clean, for Christ’s sake!”

  For the first time Eagle looked sheepish. “Look, man, can we take off our things and get some grease?”

  “Go the hell on,” Keel said, turning away from them and pulling the sheets above his head.

  Hillary had been tired all day, but with the coming of night he had moved into a tranquil stage, where things happened and were absorbed without shock, without feeling. Now, with the cold gray of morning nudging in through the window and the sounds of traffic on the nearby highway growing louder every minute, he sat in the neat kitchen and absent-mindedly watched Eagle, his fat, dark face sagging with tiredness, fix breakfast.

  “I enjoyed all of it,” Hillary said.

  “Wasn’t nothin’ to enjoy,” Eagle muttered.

  “Wrong word,” Hillary said. He passed a hand over his forehead. “I wanted to say, I learned. Sometimes that can be an enjoyment.”

  “Depends,” Eagle said, shifting the skillet with the eggs in it above the fire, “on what you’re learning.”

  “Lots of things,” Hillary said, feeling suddenly, even as dazed as he was, self-conscious.

  “Like what?” Eagle insisted. He turned the flame up under the coffee.

  “Nothing, man.” How could you tell a man like Eagle what you were learning from him, from his world, his friends and his enemies—that even if you wanted to lie down and die you had to fight for the right and sometimes, fighting for that right, you discovered that you wanted to live?

  It was not that Hillary underestimated Eagle’s ability to understand; he had already learned that the man’s understanding was almost without limit. What made for Hillary’s hesitation was the code of this world. How did one speak with meaning of things of the heart? Things that welled up in a man’s throat and made him eager to turn away, so that if his eyes should water it would not be seen? He had not yet seen obvious tenderness, though tenderness there was, brief, fleeting, jocular, not to be lingered over when the battle for existence and dignity took up all the time. Hillary felt this keenly.

  But he also felt that he could not admit to these feelings and something within him nagged that, regardless, he was an outsider, was better than they—would be better off at least, once rid of the guilt of Angela’s death.

  He fingered Eagle’s hundred dollar bill and thought: Crap!—how could he be better, living off their handouts? They would have been the first in their brutal manner to call a handout a handout. But he knew they would also have said that misfortune gets a turn with everyone. They seemed to understand that—damn them—better than any people he had ever known.

  Eagle had shrugged off Hillary’s reply and correctly diagnosed the problem. The guy was quiet enough and he wasn’t always layin’ on you with hippy-dip talk the way so many white studs did in trying to prove that “Man, I am one of you!” He could duke too, and Eagle smiled seeing again how the drummer had moved into the path of that waiting right.

  “You know many colored guys before you came down here, Prof?” Eagle asked on a hunch.

  “No. I grew up with a guy, though. Name was Borden.”

  They pulled up their chairs and bent to their meal. “What was he like?” Eagle asked, mouth filled with bread, coffee, and eggs.

  “A good kid,” Hillary answered briefly.

  “What happened?” Eagle insisted. Yes, he wanted to hear it again. He asked it whenever he had the chance, hoping that one of those childhood friendships would not have dissolved at thirteen or fourteen.

  “We grew up,” Hillary said.

  “He taught you how to box?”

  Hillary reddened. “We used to box out in the fields.” Hillary smiled. “He whipped my ass every day.” He knew it would bring a smile to Eagle’s face. It did.

  They ate in silence, finishing the eggs and the entire pot of coffee. Eagle strained back in his chair expansively and said, “Listen, let me lecture to one of your classes when you go back. On jazz.”

  Hillary looked up at him but didn’t reply.

  “Ain’t you goin’ back?” Eagle said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “This ain’t no life for an intelligent man,” Eagle mused. “You ain’t got to do it. You white.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Hillary asked angrily. These people based everything on black and white; every goddamn time they opened their mouths it was “you white.”

  “Everythang,” Eagle said, accentuating the “thang.” “I spent a whole lot of years telling myself that it didn’t matter, and I was gettin’ hung up every other day. Finally I was able to see it: see the way it was an’ I feel better now. I know where I’m at. Which don’t make me not want to get my damned gun sometimes and blow this motherin’ town and every other dump in this country right off the map.…

  “Tell me about jazz and American art and how us niggers did it. Sheeeeeeeeeet!” Eagle leaned across the table. “This is my business. This is all I know, man. I ain’t makin’ a quota.” He was saying quarter, but he dragged it out, lingering on the first syllable so that it sounded both hip and southern. “Ain’t no spade critics. All the spade deejays, they playin’ rock ’n’ roll, ain’t but a few spade joints that can pay my way—Sheeeeeeeeet! Paddy boys pick up a horn and go boo-bip, and right away, man they’re playing’ jazz. Now ain’t that some shit?”

  Eagle had spoken rapidly, fiercely, with his eyes sparking and his shoulders hunched forward, his words coming in smooth, cleverly enunciated rhythms. Now he nodded his head to his next words: “Do you dig, frig? Now do you understand? You white. It’s your world. You won’t let me make it in it and you can’t. Now ain’t that a bitch?”

  Eagle climbed heavily to his feet and without another word retrieved his coat and went out.

  In his room, in his bed, Keel dreamed, unmindful that Eagle had left, and that an hour later, Hillary too had gone, his face grim, his lips tight, to buy some clothes and get some stationery and stamps.

  In his dream, Keel knocked the woman down. She had been beating him with a whip. (Alice?) Then he found some money, a lot of it. It made him feel good and he slipped it in his pocket. A man and a woman approached him through the shadows. They asked if he
had found any money. He lied and said he hadn’t. He felt good about the lying. He felt so good he started to run, the way he used to when he was a kid, loping along in the pace of the half-miler. But he couldn’t seem to get up on his toes; he was running awkwardly, flatfootedly, and he was distressed. But suddenly he was with someone (a woman?) near an airfield; then more suddenly still he was in a plane, a plane like the Corsairs that used to scream between the rows of cocoanut trees on Tulgai. Another plane was bearing down on him. A crash was imminent, and it came, the other plane smashing into his own—doubling him up with a snap, but by some herculean effort, he braced himself and pushed all the wreckage away.

  The dream had ended. Keel twisted quickly onto one elbow and lit a cigarette. He stared at the clear, cold daylight that flooded his room. He thought: All right, Joseph, you with your sharp-assed coat of many colors, what does it mean? Tagore, you tell me. Jesus, speak out and say what it means; or you, Mohammed. Sigmund, with your ratty-assed couch, how about you?

  The silence in the room was deadening. The man and the woman … the man and the woman? Why couldn’t he run? And the money. This reminded him that he had to see about money today.

  In disgust he crushed out his cigarette. There was little doubt that the dream concerned himself and Della. He glanced at the phone near the bed. Deeply troubled, he climbed slowly out of bed and made his way through the kitchen, where he observed the mess Eagle and Hillary had made, into the bathroom. He turned on the shower and went out to check the coffee pot. It was empty and he made some more. He was grateful for the sudden train noises on the tracks a block away. He was about to step into the shower when he remembered he had had one earlier so he shut it off and returned to the kitchen. The train noises had stopped and the world outside was empty again, as it was inside too. The deep whistle of a ship’s first warning sounded, echoing and re-echoing down the river.