by A. Sparrow
“There are no lyrics. It was just music.”
“But you did have a singer. That Pakistani girl.”
“Sari’s Indian. But she sang no words, just notes … purely music.”
The detective scribbled in his book. “One of the guys who was shot. John Paciorek. Did you know him?”
“We met.”
“May I ask, how?”
“He stopped to help me once when my car broke down.”
“That’s it? No other encounters?”
“Well … he came to our show in Ithaca.”
“Well, that’s odd, don’t you think? What was that all about? I thought they didn’t like your music.”
“I have no idea.”
“Interesting. Any other encounters?”
“He helped me again when my car broke down in Ithaca, just the other day. He was passing by and stopped. He was trying to warn us. He knew something was up, but didn’t want to get in trouble with his church. John was … John was a good guy.”
“Was there anything … romantic … between you?”
“He was married.”
“I realize that, but—”
“If you’re wondering whether I was his mistress, the answer is no. I barely got to know him before ….”
He looked up and twirled his pen. “So why do you suppose he got shot?”
“Why do you think?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Probably because he was trying to help us, and his holy roller friends didn’t like that.”
“Because they thought you were Wiccans or devil worshippers or something like that?”
“Don’t ask me to guess what goes on in their brains. All I know, is that I’m no devil worshipper. I barely believe in God, never mind some scary guy with horns.”
“Did you witness any of the shootings?”
Aerie shook her head. “I was inside, dealing with the fire. Trying to rescue … those instruments. I did hear gunshots, but John was already hurt by the time I got outside.”
“So you didn’t observe any of the gun shots?”
“Nuh-uh.”
The detective licked his lips and turned a page in his notebook. He shifted in his seat and crinkled his forehead.
“What about these smoke devil things? Did you happen see any of those?”
“Smoke devils?”
“Yeah. Other witnesses said they were like some kind of whirlwind that put out part of the fire, turned the cinders white. There’s actually some evidence of that at the scene.”
Aerie kept her face stiff. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Saying any more would only complicate things.
***
They held John’s funeral in his hometown of Syracuse. Aerie had paid a fortune for a cabbie to drive her up and shuttle her around for half a day. She had him park at the Catholic church and they waited in the lot. She couldn’t bring herself to go inside for the ceremony.
Once they brought the coffin out to the hearse, she had him tail the convoy all the way to the cemetery, tagging onto the end of the procession. Even once they parked, she kept to the fringes of the mourners, out of earshot of the final rites.
John’s two little boys scampered among the tombstones as if it were a playground, their grandparents watching over them. Cindy kept her face buried in the shoulder of some tall guy in a trench coat.
Aerie attempted no contact with the families, offered no sympathies, received no consolations except from Bernard, the cab driver. Only when it was over and people had dispersed, did she dare to walk up to the grave to deliver yet another bouquet of bi-colored tulips.
Aaron’s funeral took place in Boston. Neither she nor any of the others even tried to attend; they just sent a sympathy card to Aaron’s daughter. While that seemed appropriate and sufficient, with John, for some reason, things felt left undone.
Aerie kept to herself over the next few days, healing up outside and within. But Saturday came and Hollis was playing the State Theater gig that Aaron had arranged. She stayed glued to her couch as the sun went down, skipped dinner and watched a crappy movie on pay-per-view, unable to summon the will to leave the house. Somehow, twenty minutes before show time, her muscles clicked into gear, and she swung her legs onto the floor. This was her last chance to see Hollis play, maybe forever, given how poorly the pair of them took care of their bodies and psyches.
She didn’t bother with any makeup. She just washed her face and ran her fingers through her hair to smooth out the knots. Mal said that he and Eleni would be there, but she had no desire to be with people that night. She supposed she would go and lurk somewhere in the back, incognito under the hood of her fleece.
The night was crisp and starry, but a bank of clouds encroached from the south, devouring the sky. The weather man insisted that an unseasonable warm front was on the way—hard to believe, because the air smelled like snow. For some odd reason, it conjured a memory of the December day her pet cockatiel had flown out an open door, over the tops of some hundred foot oaks, never to be seen again.
She walked on autopilot, vaguely aware of her surroundings, her mind abuzz about Aaron and John and the fire, and how it all could have been prevented, if they had just stayed in Ithaca, if they had only listened to John.
She didn’t find much a queue on the sidewalk outside the theater. Plenty of tickets remained available at the door and when she entered, the place was probably one third full.
So it was for a dead art like jazz in the provinces. Who, outside of Manhattan had ever heard of the Isaac Davis Quartet? Hollis’ name might ring a few bells among hardcore aficionados, but he was no headliner.
The sparse crowd made it hard to stay incognito, but Aerie managed to find a poorly lit corner in the back, and settled onto a chair, knees drawn up, arms folded in front. She spotted someone who looked like Mal way up front, but made a point not to stare lest she attract his attention. Nothing against Mal, or Eleni, if she was here. She just needed space to brood in peace.
The audience was mostly yuppies and older hippies, with a smattering of high school kids and undergrads from IC and Cornell. Aerie winced when she saw the fretted electric 5-string Alembic bass perched on a stand. Maybe she was stodgy, but to her jazz wasn’t jazz unless the bass came from a box of maple and spruce with f-holes.
The quartet came on stage without Hollis, maybe by design, to give him a grand entrance, but it was just as likely that he was late for the gig. It wouldn’t be the first time.
They started with a couple non-descript originals, more fusion than be-bop, and then Hollis barged in mid-song, looking as rumpled and distracted as usual. Though undoubtedly improvised, Hollis’s playing fit perfectly, as if his parts had been meticulously arranged. He had always been a musical chameleon.
On ‘Footprints,’ a Wayne Shorter tune, Hollis’ sax wove a tight and clinging harmony with the trumpet. He was in top form. He showed no signs of smoke inhalation. He had plenty of wind. But Aerie could not enjoy it with that twangy Alembic polluting the sound.
As the set went on, she sank into that creaky old chair feeling heavier and heavier. The listener’s envy that always plagued her when sat in an audience watching other people play, finally kicked in. The blues settled into her bones. She got up and left, giving Hollis, in the middle of a solo, one last glance as she went out the double doors.
***
Tattered gingko leaves danced at the base of a street lamp. The wind had shifted to the southeast and the sidewalk was damp from a passing shower. Turned out, the weather man was right. He had warned of a late season hurricane brushing the coast of New Jersey. Perhaps its outer fringe, a feeder band, had arrived.
Aerie turned the corner, passing the Commons, passing Moosewood, passing the turn that would take her home. She headed for Cascadilla Park, closed after dark, intending to hike the gorge path up to Collegetown.
The inside of her head was a mess. She was a kite in a windstorm, whipping with every gust
, destined for a crash. She felt ashamed for avoiding Mal, for having no desire to say goodbye to Hollis. She had a sense of things left undone.
John’s passing still haunted her. She remembered promising John that she would pray and had thus far not delivered.
But pray for what? His health? It was too late for that. Perhaps he meant his soul, but even that seemed awkward as she didn’t quite believe souls existed. Come to think of it, she would never have believed in sonants had she not seen and heard them with her own senses.
What kind of prayer would John have wanted? It had been years since she had experienced anything faintly religious. She couldn’t even remember the words to Hail Mary or even the Lord’s Prayer anymore.
She felt her way over a foot bridge and onto the gorge path, shadows obscuring the wet stone. It was crazy dark, and she would probably tumble into the creek if she kept going, but she kept going, her feet probing for each step cut into the rock, her hands pawing the air for hand rails placed strategically in the more exposed sections. At least the roar of the creek helped tell her where not to step.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven.” The words just popped into her head. “Hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done. On Earth as it is in Heaven.” It was coming back, but somehow it didn’t seem appropriate. This wasn’t what John had in mind when he had asked her to pray for him.
Clouds shuttled over the strip of sky visible over the gorge walls, sweeping past in bands that converged and split, revealing shreds of starlight, and a sliver of a moon. She climbed yet more steps carved into the shale, each cascade adding its unique timbre to the night music. Sounds carried down from unseen Cornell frat houses above the rim, some muffled hip hop and alt rock. The gorge walls rose and enveloped her, stealing more of the unsettled sky, until the hulking mass of the College Avenue bridge loomed over her and beyond it the lights of Collegetown and the gates of Cornell.
That bridge had staged the last leaps of many a desperate Cornellian for whom the prospect of another sunrise became too much to bear. Aerie could relate, and under different circumstances she might have been tempted to join them, but something had shifted inside her, and that recourse no longer seemed open to her, despite all the un-medicated turmoil in her brain.
She felt plenty depressed, but this time she lacked that helpless sensation of a bottomless pit opening up to swallow her. There was a tangible floor to her mood, an expiry date instead of some indeterminate vastness of time. For a change, suicide seemed pointless and uninspiring.
There were things to be done, obligations to fulfill, ones she had no right to abandon. It was a sensibility more than a bucket list, a desire to persist. Was it all that recent death that ignited that spark? Whatever the cause, it was clearly unquenchable.
She ascended the winding stairs up to College Avenue and emerged onto the sidewalk. She crossed the bridge, lingering over the void, feeling it call to her. But she was inured and immune to its song. She tipped her brow in respect to those who had succumbed to its call and kept on walking onto the grounds of Cornell.
She found a grassy slope below the library and the chapel and went to a place equidistant between the walkways, and lay down on the dewy ground, watching the clouds battle the stars. Far below, the wind rippled Lake Cayuga’s quicksilver fur.
After a time she sighed, rose up on her knees and clasped her hands together. “Here goes.” She took a deep breath.
“Dear God. I promised John I’d pray for him, so here I am. I’m not even sure you’re there, listening. But just in case, I’m going to keep my promise.” She took another breath, long and deep. “Please take care of John. He was a good guy. He cared about other people more than himself. He was too good for his own good that way. John, though, he never really had a chance to show his self. He got himself stuck in a back eddy and couldn’t break free until it was too late. I was just getting to know him, warming up to his ways and he was warming up to mine. So please take care of him. What’s left of him. His soul. If such a thing exists.”
She made the sign of the cross, because that’s what people did when they prayed.
“That’s all for now. I guess I should have said, Amen.”
***
It was as balmy as mid-November ever gets in upstate New York. Mal and Eleni sat on Aerie’s porch sipping peach iced tea and munching almond macaroons.
“This reminds me of the tea parties I used to have when I was little,” said Aerie. “All we need is some costumes and dolls.”
“A shame Sari couldn’t make it,” said Eleni.
“Heh. I think we’ve seen the last of her,” said Mal. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she moved back to Mumbai to get away from us.”
“Not Mumbai,” said Eleni. “Pittsburgh.”
“You’re joking,” said Aerie.
“Did you hear about Ron?” said Mal. “He wants to buy a Stratocaster with his first disability check.”
“I can’t imagine him playing electric,” said Eleni.
“He and his skater buddies are starting a band. He wants to play old school punk. And get this: he’s their lead singer.”
“No way!” said Aerie.
“Is he coming over or what?” said Eleni.
“He said he was,” said Mal.
“How’s he getting here?” said Aerie. “I thought he was supposed to stay off his feet for a month.”
“He’ll find a way,” said Mal. “Not like him to miss a tea party.”
“Whatever happened with that whole affair with Julius?” said Aerie.
“Oh … he’s all paid up.”
“How? I mean, he’s buying electric guitars.”
Mal smiled coyly. “I was able to fence a few of my diamonds. I’m the one he’s gotta worry about now.”
A whirring came from behind the neighbor’s hedge. Ron zipped around the corner and down the sidewalk in a motorized wheelchair. A pair of crutches were strapped to the back, along with his Martin, complete with a few extra more dings and singe marks.
“Speak of the devil,” said Mal, grinning and walking to the porch rail as Ron rolled up the front walk. “Where’d you get that thing?”
“It’s my grandma’s,” said Ron. “She won’t miss it. She’s on the couch watching soaps.” He pulled out his crutches one at a time and tucked them under his arms. Ron climbed the steps, wincing with each step. He plopped himself down on a white plastic chair.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” said Aerie.
“Fuck that,” said Ron. “I mean, I’m glad to take their checks, but … I’m no invalid.”
Aerie leaned back and let the sunlight bathe her face. “We should go to the beach.”
“Isn’t this crazy?” said Eleni. “I mean, Christ. Next week is Thanksgiving.”
“When I was a kid, we’d be playing hockey at the pond by now,” said Mal.
“You?” Eleni chortled. “Played hockey?”
A panel truck crept along Court Street, pulled ahead and stopped again. The driver seemed lost.
“Get used to it,” said Mal. “Welcome to global warming.”
“Global warming?” said Ron. “What a buncha hooey.”
Mal smirked. “You pick a day like this to argue? Look around you. It’s November. People are buying turkeys and I’m wearing a fucking T-shirt, no coat.”
“Shit happens,” said Ron. “Today’s just some freak thing. Some bubble of hot air.”
“It just ain’t right,” said Mal. “This is supposed to be the Great White North.”
“You complaining?”
“I will once the sugar maples die off and dengue fever strikes Ithaca.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You know, I was thinking,” said Mal. “These sonants. The way they make those diamonds. If we could breed them, they could sure lock up a lot of carbon.”
“Breed them?” said Aerie. “Wouldn’t you need like … millions … to make a dent?”
“Every little bit helps,” said Mal.
> “Yeah, as if people would tolerate having those freaky things in every patch of woods,” said Ron.
“They might not mind so much, if they knew about the diamonds, said Mal.”
Eleni sighed. “But then diamonds would be as common as sand.”
“And about as worthless,” said Aerie.
The panel truck turned the corner and pulled up right in front of Aerie’s apartment. The driver hopped out and approached the porch.
“I’m looking for 502b West Court Street?”
“You found it,” said Aerie, rising, her brow knitted with puzzlement.
“Aerie Walker?”
“That’s me.”
“I have a shipment from you.” He slid open the back of the truck.
“From who?” Did Koichi finally send on some of her old furniture from Japan?
Like kids at Christmas, everyone filed off the porch and milled around the back of the truck.
From among the crates and boxes, the driver pulled out a shipping carton about the size and shape of a fat man’s coffin.
“What the fuck?” said Ron. “Did Aaron will you his body?”
“Oh, my God!” said Aerie, staggering back, leaning against an old maple for support.
“What’s wrong, Aerie?” said Eleni, touching her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“It’s … it’s my Prescott.”
“Sign here, please?” said the driver. Aerie scribbled her name on the form and tore into the cardboard. The box did indeed hold a bass, cushioned by sheets of Styrofoam and yards of bubble wrap.
“Oh, my God! Oh my God!” She tore off the sheathing like an impatient lover, and lifted out her bass. Its scars were visible, the restoration not nearly as pretty as Scott LaFaro’s, but the bass was structurally sound and complete once more.
She cast a heap of white poly under-cladding onto the sidewalk and pulled the bass into her arms, the scent of resin and ancient spruce wafting into her nostrils. She tuned it by ear, picking harmonic fifths against open strings, nestled the upper bout against her bosom and plucked the E string, making it bellow like a water buffalo. She plucked the G string. It rang like bamboo bells sheathed in crackling katydids. A bittersweet bliss enveloped her.
***
Aerie sat in the back of the carpet cleaning van with Mal and Ron’s motorized wheelchair, clinging to her bass so it wouldn’t slide and knock around. Ron had insisted on driving, on the rationale that his right leg was fine. Eleni rode shotgun, picking on her mandolin.
