Frank had followed Davis’s meandering walk and talk for as long as he could, his head a mash of jazz, alternative, punk, postpunk, grunge, and straight-ahead rock and roll. They’d had a beer at every stop and Davis had produced a half-pint from his jacket at some point for the walk between locations. At 2:00 a.m., Frank had wandered away. He simply didn’t turn a corner when Davis had and, instead, kept walking straight ahead. He called out, he’d tried to tell Davis goodnight, but Davis was already on to the next thing, the next sound, scribbling words of detail into his composition book and sipping from a nearly empty bottle of bourbon. Frank, disoriented and half drunk, was heading in the opposite direction from his hotel.
And now Frank is on his way to breakfast at Junior’s. It seems a long way to go for eggs and bacon, but it’s really the coffee he’s after. The coffee and the company.
Oliver and Winky sit on their bench at the top of the park. It’s cold and the light is just starting to spread through the trees at the far south end, just beginning its reach into this sanctuary where animals and leaves and people are coming to life, grateful for its warmth. Winky watches a nearby squirrel and spots a rock at his own feet. He thinks maybe he can snatch up that rock and throw it before that squirrel knows what’s happening, but Oliver breaks his concentration. “You ever go to church, Winky?”
“Church?”
“Yeah, you know about church?”
“I know about church.” He shrugs and adds, “Don’t go.” The squirrel has moved on, scared away by a jogger in spandex puffing like a freight train through the frosty air.
“I used to go with my people down in Winona. Little wood building, one room, woodstove to keep us warm in winter, ladies with hand fans movin hot air around in summer. Preacher would get up on that stage and scream and dance, sing to the Lord and curse at us.”
At this revelation, Winky whips his head around to face Oliver. “Cursing? A preacher?”
“Shit yeah, cursin. God in the South is angry, boy. I was thinkin this morning about that smell, though. That smell of church I think is what I miss. Perfume and dirt from the fields, tobacco, and maybe a little hint of Saturday night’s sin.” Winky has wandered off looking for more squirrels to toss a rock at, or maybe a jogger. He’s come to learn during his mornings with Oliver that Oliver isn’t really talking to him. He doesn’t know whom it is Oliver is talking to, but it isn’t a little kid from Harlem. He’d stuck around the first couple of mornings but couldn’t make heads or tails out of what Oliver was going on about. Moonshine, dice, dancing, girls, cats, swing. None of it makes much sense to a ten-year-old boy. He just wants to learn to play the piano and he sure as shit doesn’t know what church has to do with it. So he’s let his imagination and then his feet wander, and Oliver becomes just another crazy old fool of the city, sitting on a park bench talking to himself.
“I ever tell you about my first night in New York? Winky? Where you at?”
“I’m here, Licoricehead. You never told me about it, no. When was that? Were there dinosaurs?”
“You got a mouth on you, boy. It was a cold night, colder than this. January 16, 1938. I was seventeen years old.”
“You’re the dinosaur.”
Oliver tells him about a wild ride in a New York City taxicab that takes him from the glass and steel splendor of Penn Station, he says, to the brick and soot stylings of Harlem. It was his first time inside the Savoy and his eyes were opened, he tells Winky. “And in we went, to church. You listenin? Winky?”
“You said ‘church.’ What church was it?”
Oliver tells him about churches, about a religion the boy didn’t know, that of music and heart-stopping swing with people who all feel the same way, believe in the same god. There it is again, cats and booze and girls, and Winky’s mind flies away with the pigeons.
“You ain’t even listenin,” Oliver says, disgusted with this disinterested boy. “When’s the last time you made it to church?”
“Papi’s funeral,” he says in a hushed voice as though mass has begun, and fills his cheeks with air to help hold his emotion in.
“Papi?”
“My daddy.”
“Your daddy dead?” Oliver looks down at him now and it’s as though he’s seeing this little boy for the first time.
Winky nods and wipes his nose with the back of a gloved hand.
“How he die?”
Winky squints up into the sunlight coming through the trees. He looks south and points, as if toward the sun. It’s cryptic, but Oliver knows.
“Towers?”
Winky nods again.
Oliver recalls that day. He was home, in the relative safety and the dark warmth of his sitting room, when he heard the commotion from outside. He looked out to see people talking on the streets, people who never would have given each other the time of day normally, all excited and pointing. Then he saw the crying and the fear on their faces. The small television on his kitchen counter told him the rest.
Over such a long lifetime, Oliver has seen pain and loss. In Winona, he’d seen a black man dragged through the street by a mob saying he stole from a white man. His own mama and daddy had to sneak around just to act like human beings. The South was long on sorrow, and Oliver and whatever band he was playing with saw plenty of it, received plenty of grief themselves. They were made to enter through service doors, eat in alleyways, and stay in motels that weren’t fit for animals—or sleep on the bus parked on the street outside a white hotel. It’s not just here, though; he’s seen wars come and go—kept out of them, thank God, because of his busted-up leg.
America can fight evil the world over, but she’s not all smiles. Oliver was in hot and humid South Carolina in 1955 when he heard about Emmett Till, poor little black boy visiting Mississippi who was murdered for, they say, flirting with a white woman. “Flirting with a white woman,” Oliver says now.
“What?”
Oliver just shakes his head as though to say “never mind.” This boy is almost the same age as Emmett Till was. Lost his father—Winky practically just a baby then—in more ugliness, more hate, all in the name of what a man thinks is right or wrong. Same hate that causes a war, same hate that leaves a little black boy to die in a ditch.
Oliver has seen too much of it. Too goddamn much in a long life. He’s lost his wife, lost his best friend in an accident that still haunts him and hurts his heart, and he’s all but lost his own children even though he can almost see his daughter from where he sits. He’d talked about it with Agnes Cassady and thinks about that young lady now, with her hurting, losing it all just the same as him. All she feels she has is the music and now that’s slipping. Maybe all Oliver ever had was the music; everything else slipped off away from his grasp. And maybe all Winky wants is some music in his life, something to fill the void of a father gone for half this boy’s life now.
“Hey,” Oliver says to Winky, who has climbed down off the bench to play at Oliver’s feet. “Hey, you tell me somethin?”
“What?”
“What is your name?”
He looks up at Oliver from where he kneels on the ground and his face reddens, embarrassed now to have to say it in front of this grown-up. Oliver has called him “Winky” since the first day they came across each other on that stoop and it feels now as though a secret is being imparted. “Pablo.”
“Pablo? Really? Named for your daddy?”
Pablo shakes his head. “For a poet from Chile, my papi said. He wrote poetry, too.”
“That right?” Oliver thinks a minute, then says, “You still wantin them piano lessons?”
Pablo nods vigorously and throws down the stick he’s been using to dig in the dirt. He climbs up on the bench and slumps down once again beside his old friend.
There are places on her wrist that are tender to the touch. It’s a dull pain like a bruise deep within, entwined among tendons and bone. T
hat pain is sent up her arm to her shoulder, into her neck, before making the short trip to her brain to become one with the pain that has made a home there for the past half-dozen years. But the thin brown fingers are gentle on her arm and her hand, and she gives herself over completely to Dr. Mundra massaging her wrist—in the exact spot where a priestess had scratched her years before and from where the ache seems to emanate—and works her hand in a circular motion as he talks with her. “How has your stay been in New York?” he says. It has nothing to do with medicine, does not hint toward the test results from her MRI that she knows are within the manila folder by his side. He has been focused on her since he entered the examining room, looking into her eyes first only with his own before taking the light from his coat pocket and shining it into her pupils to see her mind and, she felt, her soul.
It’s a light she’s become familiar with. The church preaches that a light is saving, that when you die there will be a great light. The light of day is redeeming. Agnes’s parents would often sing aloud about “skipping the light fandango.” But no doctors have ever seen anything with their lights. Not anything that will help, at least. She’d first gone to New Orleans for the Tulane University School of Medicine and Medical Center and the work being done there with neurological disorders in adolescents. Her parents had taken a whole week off work, a week that was nothing like a vacation, though none of them had ever been to the city. They stayed in a hotel at the end of St. Charles, far from the Quarter and the river, and ate in the hotel room most nights or at a nearby diner that catered to transients. Agnes felt weak and tired, drained from the days of tests and answering questions. One night near the end of the week, though, her father, frustrated with the lack of answers and saddened by the pallid look of his daughter with gray circles going to black beneath her eyes, rallied his family.
“We’re going out!” he said, standing in their small room with a queen bed and roll-away cot.
“Not those crappy burgers again, Daddy.”
“We’re going to the Quarter,” he said, jumping onto the bed to the delight of the women. “We’re going to eat gumbo and jambalaya, shrimp and oysters. Your mother’s going to drink a beer. I’m going to drink two. And we’ll hear some music, Agnes, some beautiful brass jazz like they make only down here.”
And they did. And it was one of the best nights Agnes can recall, listening to the music pouring from small bars and grand rooms, taking each other’s pictures in front of Preservation Hall, eating anything and everything, and watching her parents dance in the middle of a cobblestone street to a lone saxophonist. Agnes was barely eighteen and she thought she’d never see anything that made her happier if she lived to be a hundred. She didn’t yet know that she wouldn’t make it down but a quarter of that road.
While sitting at a table outside a café on Royal, an old friend of Agnes’s walked by on the arm of a boy and left him to run up to the Cassadys’ table. Terron had just moved to New Orleans to attend Loyola and was living in a nearby apartment. She invited Agnes to go out with her, but Agnes declined, saying she was there with her parents and would only be in town one more day. Agnes’s parents insisted she go out with her friend—they wouldn’t hear of her refusal. The need to know their daughter was having fun and laughing was as medicinal as anything a doctor could prescribe.
The two young women went back out to the Quarter, Terron’s escort sent on his way, and they saw things Agnes never would have seen with her parents. They were hit on countless times by men and women sober and not-so, they ate more and drank much more, and Agnes was even persuaded to show her little titties for a few pearly beads to some lovesick sailors on leave. And through it all, both with her parents and alone with Terron, there was a nagging in her ear, a buzzing that she couldn’t quite place when in a crowd. Once they moved to a quieter side street, though, she could hear the music more clearly. It was everywhere—piano, trumpet, sax, drums, bass. It reminded her of the cicadas back home during the previous summer, a sound so thick and present that she felt it could lift her off her feet and carry her into the black night. This sound, though, this music, did lift her off her feet. They were the same tunes, the same theory, as what her father played, even her piano teacher’s same notes, but there was something else; it was something intangible. It was creation. She was in the cradle of music’s uncivilization, walking on the same fertile ground as Buddy Bolden, Freddie Keppard, and Joe Oliver. She had the sense she might round the next corner and run directly into Louis Armstrong. She was in the birthplace and that birth was all around her, all over her. She felt more alive than she had in years.
They visited a voodoo priestess, one of the kitschy tourist traps sandwiched between a walk-up daiquiri bar and a sex-toy shop on Bourbon. They’d had enough to drink that the prospect of a palm reading was laughable, and Terron snickered at Agnes’s shoulder as the wrinkled woman, dressed in scarves and mirrored sunglasses perched on the hook nose of her coffee-colored face, took Agnes’s hand and looked upon it. The reflection of lines and fingers shone in duplicate from her silver bug eyes as she watched and shook her head, consulted some cards, and from a leather cup rolled an object that looked like matted string and smelled like week-old pork. She shook her head some more, grunted, and took a small piece of charcoal from a canvas bag around her neck. With it, she scratched hash marks on Agnes’s thin wrist—a set of two and a set of five.
“Seven?” Agnes said. Terron tittered behind her.
“Twenty-five. You will not live to see twenty-five, sugar. I am sorry.”
Terron and Agnes laughed off the prediction for the rest of the night, coming back to it as an inside joke and toasting to Agnes’s relative old age. Yet Agnes scrubbed her wrist later, feeling as though she couldn’t get it to come clean, and she slept fitfully that night with dreams of mirrors and her own dirty wrist invading her head.
She stayed with Terron overnight, and the next morning at breakfast, before meeting her parents at Tulane for one last round of question and answer with the doctors, Terron proposed to Agnes that she move to New Orleans. Agnes dismissed it. Then she considered it on the trolley ride to the hospital, and as the doctor there, a New Englander with a grating nasal accent, shined his penlight into her eye, something snapped. In that light she saw a glinting off brass and could hear the night’s music wafting past the manicured lawn, through the automatic doors, past the nurses’ station, and down the antiseptic hallways to her ears. Carried in on that music as well was the scratchy, aged voice whispering “twenty-five . . . twenty-five” in her ear. It was silly, she knew, but still . . . she should live right now. Agnes knew that her life wasn’t like others’ and probably wouldn’t last as long; this was a fact that no doctor had told her, no doctor could tell her, nor could any voodoo witch. It was as though she were born with only a scant number of years to live and was informed of this in the womb, only to be reminded on the musical streets of New Orleans and not in the whitened rooms of any hospital.
“When do you go?” Mundra asks now in the tiny examination room of Mount Sinai, massaging her wrist again, having put his penlight back into his pocket amid pens, tongue depressors, and a small notebook. She blinks back the black spots the light leaves in her vision. He wears a salmon-colored turban today and Agnes remarks on it, saying she likes it, though she doesn’t, and suggesting he get a coat to match.
“My wife would never let me out of the house in a pink coat,” he says. His smile is warm; it’s the same calming, caring smile she’s seen on doctors’ faces for years. It’s something for which she’s always been grateful.
“You’re married?”
“Four years.” He reaches for the folder.
“Kids?”
“One. A son, only six months old.”
“That’s nice.”
The most difficult part of her decision was telling her father. She was quiet on the trip home; there were no answers from doctors packed in their scuffed and a
ged luggage in the back of her daddy’s truck, and she waited until they were all on familiar territory to broach the subject. She also wanted to see if she still felt the same way while sitting on their porch in Tipton County and watching her mother sketch the scenery in a Moleskine notebook. She did. She had a taste of life there in New Orleans and was scared of losing her own. Though there was nothing definite in her blood labs and bone scans, nothing to read the future by any better than a Bourbon Street fortune-teller, she had a sense that she needed to capture some magic in a bottle before it was too late. An ordinary eighteen-year-old has no grasp of too late; death is an abstract, something that happens on the news and to other people, unless something has taken hold of her body to make it do things she doesn’t tell it. Then death becomes tangible, somewhat breathtaking on those nights when she lies alone in bed and listens to the darkness thick with a sound that comes around only every thirteen years. Will I hear the cicada again? Will the sky and trees and grass outside my window ever hum twice like this in my lifetime?
She didn’t take any of this to her parents. She was certain they were more scared than she, so Agnes went to her father with the one thing they shared: the music. Sitting next to him on the piano bench, listening to him improvise something soft and thoughtful, they talked about the music they’d heard on their vacation (that’s what they’d all agreed to call it). His fingers were smudged with grease from the day’s work and left the evidence behind on the white keys. She put her head on his shoulder and told him she wanted more than just a week of that sort of musical immersion. She told him that she wanted to live the notes and melodies and be a part of that energy. She lied and told him she felt better on the sodden streets of New Orleans than she’d felt in a long time and she knew it was because of the sounds and the history. He told her he felt it, too, and she took over on the keys, picking up on his tune while he sat beside her like a child. She told him about Terron’s suggestion that she move, about plans to come home often and visits he and her mother could make. They talked, for the first time since the tremors and blackouts and pain had begun, about life. And he told her to go.
Five Night Stand: A Novel Page 18
