Then he closed them, and blew that horn. Lord God of the Fishes, how he blew it! How he loved it and caressed it and pushed it up, higher and higher and higher. High C? Bottom of the barrel. He took off, and he walked all over the rules and stamped them flat.
The melody got lost, first off. Everything got lost, then, while that horn flew. It wasn’t only jazz; it was the heart of jazz, and the insides, pulled out with the roots and held up for everybody to see; it was blues that told the story of all the lonely cats and all the ugly whores who ever lived, blues that spoke up for the loser lamping sunshine out of iron-gray bars and every hophead hooked and gone, for the bindlestiffs and the city slicers, for the country boys in Georgia shacks and the High Yellow hipsters in Chicago slums and the bootblacks on the corners and the fruits in New Orleans, a blues that spoke for all the lonely, sad and anxious downers who could never speak themselves. . . .
And then, when it had said all this, it stopped and there was a quiet so quiet that Sonny could have shouted:
“It’s okay, Spoof. It’s all right now. You’ll get it said, all of it—I’ll help you. God, Spoof, you showed me how, you planned it—I’ll do my best!”
And he laid back his head and fastened the horn and pulled in air and blew some more. Not sad, now, not blues—but not anything else you could call by a name. Except . . . jazz. It was jazz.
Hate blew out of that horn, then. Hate and fury and mad and fight, like screams and snarls, like little razors shooting at you, millions of them, cutting, cutting deep. . . .
And Sonny only stopping to wipe his lip and whisper in the silent room full of people: “You’re saying it, Spoof! You are!”
God Almighty Himself must have heard that trumpet, then; slapping and hitting and hurting with notes that don’t exist and never existed. Man! Life took a real beating! Life got groined and sliced and belly-punched and the horn, it didn’t stop until everything had all spilled out, every bit of the hate and mad that’s built up in a man’s heart.
Rose-Ann walked over to me and dug her nails into my hand as she listened to Sonny. . . .
“Come on now, Spoof! Come on! We can do it! Let’s play the rest and play it right. You know it’s got to be said, you know it does. Come on, you and me together!”
And the horn took off with a big yellow blast and started to laugh. I mean it laughed! Hooted and hollered and jumped around, dancing, singing, strutting through those notes that never were there. Happy music? Joyful music? It was chicken dinner and an empty stomach; it was big-butted women and big white beds; it was country walking and windy days and fresh-born crying and—Oh, there just doesn’t happen to be any happiness that didn’t come out of that horn.
Sonny hit the last high note—the Spoof blast—but so high you could just barely hear it.
Then Sonny dropped the horn. It fell onto the floor and bounced and lay still.
And nobody breathed. For a long, long time.
Rose-Ann let go of my hand, at last. She walked across the platform, slowly, and picked up the trumpet and handed it to Sonny.
He knew what she meant.
We all did. It was over now, over and done. . . .
Lux plucked out the intro. Jimmy Fritch picked it up and kept the melody.
Then we all joined in, slow and quiet, quiet as we could. With Sonny—I’m talking about Sonny—putting out the kind of sound he’d always wanted to.
And Rose-Ann sang it, clear as a mountain wind—not just from her heart, but from her belly and her guts and every living part of her.
For The Ol’ Massuh, just for him. Spoof’s own song:
Black Country.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charles Beaumont was born Charles Leroy Nutt in Chicago in 1929. He dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and worked at a number of jobs before selling his first story to Amazing Stories in 1950. In 1954 his “Black Country” became the first work of short fiction to appear in Playboy, and his classic tale “The Crooked Man” was featured in the same magazine the following year. Beaumont published numerous other short stories in the 1950s, both in mainstream periodicals like Playboy and Esquire and in science fiction and fantasy magazines.
His first story collection, The Hunger and Other Stories, was published in 1957 to immediate acclaim and was followed by two further collections, Yonder (1958) and Night Ride and Other Journeys (1960). He also published two novels, Run from the Hunter (1957, pseudonymously, with John E. Tomerlin), and The Intruder (1959).
Beaumont is perhaps best remembered for his work in television, particularly his screenplays for The Twilight Zone, for which he wrote several of the most famous episodes. His other screenwriting credits include the scripts for films such as The Premature Burial (1962), Burn, Witch, Burn (1962), The Haunted Palace (1963), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964).
When Beaumont was 34, he began to suffer from ill health and developed a baffling and still unexplained condition that caused him to age at a greatly increased rate, such that at the time of his death at age 38 in 1967, he had the physical appearance of a 95-year-old man. Beaumont was survived by his wife Helen, two daughters, and two sons, one of whom, Christopher, is also a writer.
Beaumont’s work was much respected by his colleagues, and he counted Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, and Roger Corman among his friends and admirers. His work is in the process of being rediscovered with three new editions recently appearing from Centipede Press and this new edition of The Hunger from Valancourt Books.
The Hunger and Other Stories Page 23
