Savage Beasts

by John F. D. Taff

  Kathy chuckled. “Well, if somebody was…uhhh…bangin’ on the piano, it had a pretty good beat to it.”

  Without reacting to the commentary, I knew and remembered well that there was nothing I could do about the gremlins in the magnetic locks all over this old, badly-maintained building. Satan County never fixed anything until they had to, and then Facilities Management usually put a Band-Aid on the issue and called it good.

  The lights flickered when both women swiped their ID cards through the reader at the front door. The room got so quiet I could hear Sly’s mop slopping hot wax from the bucket and spreading it thin across the tile.

  Shae and Kathy made it back as far as their offices, and the door shut behind them. They’d go out the back. They always left out the back. I remember thinking that I’d been here far too long, knowing such things off-the-cuff.

  Then my night went to Hell.

  In the brassy, immediate smoke of overheating magnetic motors, both front doors—the one in Capernaum and the one on my side—reared open with screaming sounds of protesting, grinding gears, barking like .38s. That made me half-remember something Patsy told me, something about someone getting shot here. At the moment, I was trying not to have a heart attack.

  The lights were flickering, but not like fluorescent bars do when they need to be changed out. No, this looked to me like rainwater, or some worse unidentifiable, gray-glowing substance coming into the sockets from above, making everything wavery and weird, sputtering and smearing my already terrible eyesight into a bad joke on the word security itself.

  There was no water coming in. It wasn’t even raining.

  I felt something stride past me through the front door, taking something else—like tears or a sneeze—from me as it went, striding with a great, cold footprint, striding under fluorescent bars that flickered out for good beneath the terrible wind of its passage to my right and up the ramp.

  There was no room for this in any set of post orders. There was no way I could ever, ever call this in to Patsy. Yet I heard, I heard, I heard the day-old bread racks up in Capernaum tumble down in a great, ferocious clanging and clack of steel wire and stale pumpernickel projectiles that took out several waste cans. I heard Sly stop waxing, and call out sotto voce, “You take a number like everybody else up in here.”

  The lights all came back on. I bounced to my feet, ran up the ramp and stopped dead as Sly dropped his mop and ran to the piano so fast his outlet Nikes left streaks on his nice new wax-job. Somehow, I stayed where I was. My hair didn’t turn white, my heart didn’t go. Just…

  Nothing. Just a cold kind of nothing. Openmouthed astonishment as Sly’s great strong hands returned to the keys, generating jazz. Not the pathetic smooth mainstream stool all over the radio. No, this was jazz, that restless, that roving, that great vengeance and furious anger that spun pain itself into light, spun long, late nights in the wrong spot into gold, spun heartbreak into…

  But I hadn’t gotten into that “into” yet, myself still beat and struggling for a hundred and eleven goddamn dollars a goddamn week to clean up all forms of human waste. I came back to that site after the first day to hear Sly play again. When nothing else would get me out of bed that week, the music did.

  Now his bald head gleamed as he made the action on those keys bleed, playing to the back wall, playing to only me…but not. The actual equation of camera and creator in that room was much more convoluted.

  The weirdest part for me, just then, was that Sly didn’t look like he was getting anything out, letting go of anything, transcribing or feeling or any other kind of verb at all, except…

  Like the man was in great pain, and just listening. Like Sly played with his hands, through his hands, listening to somewhere else. Listening for a still, small voice, though what the voice must have sounded like there in the former Bilderberger’s Department Store building was not in me to fathom.

  Through it all, that damn noise in the wall just kept right on, until part of me wanted to tear up the planks and let the past go through. Sly turned to look back at me for a split second, possessed as a Vodou dancer. Nothing in his face had changed, but he was feeling his blues all the way now, and chuckling, and oh god all of a sudden there was a towering, crashing glissando, and that what-all booming in the walls behind the piano, booming like an overloaded washer, and…

  Sly changed up the song to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata that Mom used to play on the old Sears stereo in our dining room. God, the left-hand part was so hard, no matter how many times I listened to the Suzuki version on the record. I always had trouble with my left hand, but then I finally got that one right at recital. I still had calluses. My hands still twitched in time with Sly’s.

  Unable to blink, I made finger-snapping gestures of applause. The tears burned my smarting, streaming eyes like bleach. Sly raised a finger of his own without missing a stroke, but his eyes twinkled with only merriment. I strode down the ramp and into the fetid men’s room on the left, across the tiles, across the…

  Tiles. The tiles were patterns of patterns. The light in the men’s room was tired. This was the creak of the door. The creak of the door did not end

  Behind me, the Moonlight Sonata kept right on going, and I only heard a kind of silence, smelled a kind of smell-absence, and the sweat that builds up around cold, numb junkie flesh as it eats itself brain-first. But there was something else in that stall in front of me, something that smelled much worse than some mere bathwater-phobic street junkie who’d somehow nodded out in there past closing time. Oh, boy, was there something else. Something else behind that inch of stained tan tin, behind the sick gray light within that fell from the stippled, painted fire-glass of the ancient window far above, translated from the sodium streetlights outside. I saw…

  I saw the belt bounce on the floor, I saw, I saw, pulled down through the buckle and tightened to roughly the width of a skinny arm, falling from that position as it hit tile. I heard the clink when the brass buckle landed, green on the backside. I saw, I saw, I was really seeing the shoes. The shoes, two-tone wingtips, tan and black, so deeply and profoundly cool that Brother Ray himself might have worn them to his first big gig, or at least his first big score. Out in Capernaum, Sly was still playing Beethoven. I could hear it through the wall, and the shoes were gently tapping, tapping, tapping on the tile floor, only shoes and nothing more, but I saw, and I leaned forward on the toes of my own uncool-by-comparison Doc Martens and my left arm wouldn’t work so I dropped it and I, I, I…

  OPENED.

  Finally! Opened! My! Mouth!

  And I screamed what I wanted to scream. As loud. As. I. Could. And nothing came out. But then I sucked it up and caught the light from the window in my throat and held a breath and let it out and roared, “SECURITY, MOTHER FUCKER,” and kicked down the stall door.

  Then all the lights went out. But not before I saw that the stall was completely empty.

  I saw the ancient, discarded cotton ball and piece of surgical tape on the floor. And the bullet hole in the wall. And the old blood. The old, old blood. Strange keening sounds were coming from my lungs. I realized I had my flashlight brandished in my free hand. The piano had stopped. I was still standing.

  I turned on one heel and went back out and up the ramp, laying a careful trap in my head. I had to answer a few questions for myself, to my own satisfaction. I put one boot forward, the way anyone would, and began.

  * * *

  The following Sunday, I rested before the next attempted ritual in my apartment downtown, reading the only exorcism manual I could ever trust in this particular case: a Sears catalogue-sized book called Lo! by Charles Hoy Fort. The bits about psychokinesis, poltergeists and many other words that begin with P. Paranormal. Phenomenon. Possession.

  After a few cups of coffee, I gathered my things and took a taxi I couldn’t really afford down to the office, thinking. A former boss of mine once told me that the secret to being a good guard is simply knowing how to think like a criminal.
<
br />   My keycard worked on all the doors I needed. If anyone asked, I just forgot my wallet. Yeah, this wallet right here in my hand. Found it under over dere-dere. I’ll be going now. No issue. I walk away whistling.

  I knew where the candles were kept in the kitchen. My thoughts were falling into a kind of shuffle-boogie of their own accord as I drew a five-pointed star in sidewalk chalk under the piano bench, and lit some all around.

  I listen, you see. I take notes. It’s not as if I’m drowning in work at that damn lobby. Every old Vodou queen and country girl with a head full of Grandmamma’s conjur who’s ever walked through every site like that I’ve ever worked, well…

  Witchy women like to talk a lot. Most of those old wives have no idea I collect their tales like a bee collecting pollen on his legs. I already told you, I’m shit-poor. Anything that can help me survive is fair game.

  I lit the last candle and made the sign that Old Lady Two-Head up on Webster told me to make right about now. I was immediately sorry.

  In the kitchen, a whole row of what sounded like those big institutional cans of pudding exploded against the cinderblock walls in a daisy chain I was glad I couldn’t see.

  I was in uniform, even then, just in case the wrong people came knocking. With my heart in my throat, I knew that having to explain the issue that was currently coming toward me like Sherman took Atlanta was beyond my power.

  Coming toward me. Without a shape. Coalescing in the air, pure percussive power unleashed in that room, blowing the candles out, dropping the chain on the metal portcullis gate that slammed shut in the middle of the wheelchair ramp, sealing off my one unlocked point of exit.

  “Fuck.” But then I remembered something else and got to my feet, suddenly unafraid, undaunted, un-anything except fed up, snapping, letting the side down all the way, for all to see. “Goddamn you!” I shrieked in the general direction of the noise. “Enough of this cat-and-mouse shit. In the name of Jesus, Mary and Joseph; in the name of Damballah, Ayida and Simbi, what are you after? What do you want?”

  In my hand, my phone suddenly rang with a tune I never programmed into it, a beat I knew from John Lee Hooker. A beat that sounded like a whole band. I looked up and around fearfully, but not a shadow was out of place. The gate was still down, but all the lights were on for the moment. The area was reasonably Code 4, as we called it on the radio. All was well.

  Self-conscious and uncertain, I muttered a brief prayer to anyone listening, and hit GO.

  From: Undisclosed Recipient

  I want

  t

  o

  PLAY!

  My left arm didn’t work. The phone clattered to the floor. I felt…

  Fucked-up, to be quite honest; like, chemically fucked-up, except this numbness froze my extremities, and made me itch, and itch, and itch, like a lizard shedding its skin. It made my body want to vomit out the fear of missing its next appearance, its next cold-seeking mouth to open somewhere on my skin, my thigh, the inside of my foot…

  Oh, hell no. This was somewhere I had never traveled, by choice. I’m just a garden-variety alcoholic, but the whole rainbow of awful sensations inside and out were making me walk and twitch and scratch the insides of my forearms, like a…

  “Like a junkie,” I whispered, all my raw nerves right there. Did anyone deserve this demonic possession, this chemical parasite and opioid genocide mill on every corner, on every block, in every SRO hotel? They were the zombie I saw in the mirror in dreams I couldn’t admit. We were all their parents and original. We gave them bodies.

  I leaned behind me and vomited on the tile, vomited and vomited until nothing would come up except this phosphorescent gray crap that worried me a little bit. No blood, though. After I couldn’t even cough up any more of the gray stuff, I hunted around for something to wipe my mouth.

  Sly had left a handkerchief on the piano, an unused one, blue, folded into a tricorn shape. I made my shaky way over and sat down at the piano bench, gratefully daubing the unearthly puke from my face. I sat down. At the piano bench, and when I was done, I…

  Was done, and turned around, the cold, sick sweat gone from every pore. My black SECURITY cap was back on my head.

  One boot was still on the LOUD pedal. I removed it guiltily, like I was shooting up in the bathroom or something. My fingertips were red and felt like they’d been flattened with very small hammers, about the size of…

  Piano keys. The piano was still humming, the strings inside cycling out the waves of a song I hadn’t been around to hear. I’d been shoved up into the corner of my eye, no more in my body than…

  A thought occurred to me. I bit my lip.

  The lessons are free.

  * * *

  On the morning of the eighth day, I thought I understood the real offering I was supposed to bring for Willie. I thought I knew Jack Shit. But Jack just left town.

  “Sly.” I was totally at a loss, wishing I hadn’t just quit smoking. I held up the printout of that morning’s email. “Mack Blue at the Long Goodbye, you know, over on Eleventh in the Northwest, he wants you to come sit in on keys.” I wasn’t looking at Sly’s face. “I told him you were the only reason I come to work, anymore, just to hear you play. He says he wants to hear, too, and he’s been in the industry forty years.”

  Sly stopped me with one word. “No.”

  “B-but, but…”

  I wanted to tell him that it took a lot of chutzpah to put my hat in my hand and beg Mr. Blue for an audience. Though he seemed like a nice enough guy, from the few times I’d seen him play out. The great jazz drummer was just that, a Great Jazz Drummer. I did everything but put my forehead to the floor when I wrote to him. He had that kind of respect coming. As did Sly.

  Or so I thought at the time. But after the next bolt of knowledge, I had a whole different kind of respect for Sly than I did for any musician who ever lived. Or almost anyone else—with a few possible exceptions throughout history.

  “I ‘preciate the thought, Security,” he replied, giving me the pounds. “Don’t trouble y’self about it.”

  One cautionary index finger swung toward me. When I looked into his eyes, I realized for myself.

  Did you ever think you had it rough? That you’d hit bottom? That you knew what Down In It looked like and could find your way around that dark country unassisted? The fuck you did. You know nothing. Now shut up and listen to him play.

  “I’d love to sit in at The Long Goodbye,” Sly said slowly, “I already know Mack. But he don’t know me here. I…” He was struggling to make me understand without saying too much.

  “No matter what, we are spirit. We are spirit beings, an’ we can’t let our day-to-day selves be controlled by no spirits other than our own. Or if we do…” He shot me a look. “We best make damn sure we got an understanding wit ’em. You feel me, Security?”

  All the light went out of Sly’s eyes. I saw, for the first time, how sad and old he really looked when he wasn’t sitting at the piano bench. “I ain’t the playa’,” he admitted. My eyes felt like they were growing as wide as the wheel covers on a Humvee. “I’m just the piano.”

  I had to sit down. Sly offered me a cigarette, making gestures at the door. I shook my head. “But thanks.”

  Sly shuffled over and rolled the piano bench back to a companionable distance in front of me. With neither prompting nor fuss of any kind, he launched in on an answer to the question I hadn’t dared to ask.

  “I had my first job here, when it was Bilderberger’s,” Sly admitted softly. “I was a stock boy. Cops caught up to a guy in here who cowboyed the Rexall up on Webster. Ran him down in the bathroom.” He gestured to the men’s room door.

  “Willie used to play piano in the lobby, for his day job, when he wasn’t out burnin’ down the juke-joints with folks like Mack Blue. He took his lunch intravenously, ya see, went in to the men’s room on break to take a fix when that kid with the zip gun come in there, and who the fuck know who shot who first, or who thought which junkie
was which? Fuck difference it make any damn way?”

  Sly’s breathing was ragged. Mine was held completely. He looked in my eyes.

  “I just came in to smoke a jay. Never got to. I held his head when he died, son. I heard the death-rattle. Cops didn’t care that Willie was the best piano player this town ever saw. He was Jump Town, man, he was live blues music in Portland, period. He was…”

  “He was a genius,” I heard myself whisper, suddenly remembering Willie’s last name and several articles I’d read in several papers at several identically hurry-up-and-wait gigs at all those DHS offices around Satan County. “Papers don’t talk about what happened to him, but…”

  All of a sudden, I couldn’t see. I felt the blues rumble through me like the worst kind of hunger that ever was, all blind lightning in the vein. I stopped talking for a moment, hearing the voice of a small-time hustler named Malcolm Little in my ears, and somehow managed to speak. “You know what a white cop calls a black genius, don’t you, Sly?”

  When Sly looked at me again, the gulf between minor and major on that particular keyboard suddenly made no difference. “Matter of fact, I do,” he croaked back. “‘Nigger.’ Hey, you all right, Security.” He reached up and gave me the pounds, but it felt different this time. He felt it too.

  “You took some of Willie with you,” he whispered. “Smart-ass white boy playin’ dumb. Hey, can you fill in for me on Tuesday? I gotta go get a tooth looked at. Willie be mad as hell if he don’t have—“

  I held up one hand. “No explanation necessary. I…I need something to do in between patrols a lot of the time, anyway. Does he…” My eyes filled up with bleach again. “Can Willie teach, as well as come through? I want…” I swallowed hard. “I always wanted to learn this one Roscoe Gordon song, 'Let's Get High.'”

  Sly frowned elaborately. “You know, I been horse to that ol’ loa since the night he died, and I never have asked him that,” he realized for the first time.