Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

  13

  BITTER SAYS Grady died peacefully in his sleep—though apparently he was sleeping in a vacant lot at the time. Drunk in the middle of the day.

  “Doc says liver failure.” Bitter rubs his eyes. “Well. It ain’t like we didn’t see it coming.”

  Like your heart? I nearly ask.

  “I on’y wish he coulda been comfy in the mud-dauber shack. Got word ‘bout an hour after you’d left for Huntsville. Tried to call Ariyeh on that fancy new phone you give me, but I couldn’t figure out the buttons.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle.”

  “Regulars down at Etta’s pitching in to give him a proper burying. Can you take me to the coffin shop?”

  The funeral home is on Navigation Boulevard, next to a Mexican restaurant. With its sandy stones of various brown shades and a tall chimney, it looks like a spotted giraffe. A sign by its entrance says the place specializes in shipping deceased immigrants back to Mexico, Europe, and Asia.

  Inside, a tape of soft, slow harpsichord music augmented by a recording of water, wind, and birdsong competes with a loud air-conditioner in the front window. Dim lights in cheap tin frames—imitation gaslamps—cast a jaundiced glow from the white walls onto a deep red carpet. By the door, a small window has been covered with Saran Wrap poorly dyed to resemble stained glass.

  A thin man in a dark brown suit greets us. His head is as smooth as a jelly bean.

  “Are you the undertaker?” Bitter says.

  The man blanches. “I’m the funeral director. The memorial counselor. Anthony Crespi. How do you do? You’re here on behalf of—?”

  “Grady.”

  “Ah yes. I’m terribly sorry for your loss, sir. But we’ll create a beautiful Memory Picture for you. Shall we step into the display room?” He leads us into a spacious, red-carpeted chamber. Through a hidden speaker, a bird chirps over turgid organ chords. The coffins, arrayed in neat rows—wooden, metal, gleaming, dark—look like sleek catamarans ready to cross an ocean.

  “Let me introduce you to our Classic Royal,” says Mr. Crespi, waving his hand. This guy doesn’t waste any time. “Based on contemporary European models, equipped with a fully satin-lined interior, a fine mahogany gloss.” He steps to his right. “This is the Classic Regal, very popular, with a wider shape, you’ll notice. Wonderful craftsmanship. Very versatile.”

  Versatile? He won’t be drag racing in it. Oh, these vultures! They know how to nail you. Who ever value-shops for the grave? I can get you a much better deal across town, with power steering, whitewalls, AM/FM radio, tinted windows—in case, you know, God’s face is too bright.

  Naturally, most people will choose the more expensive models. Cutting costs might indicate, to family and friends, disrespect for the dead.

  “The White Pearl. One of my favorites,” says Mr. Crespi, his bald pate dewy with sweat. Waterfalls shush through ceiling speakers. “I can also show you the relative advantages of the Valley Forge by Batesville, possibly the most respected casket-maker in the world, or the Keystone by York, another fine establishment.”

  I flash on coming back here soon, making arrangements for Bitter; flash on Mama’s north Dallas grave. My knees wobble. Bile rises in my throat. Bitter touches one of the lids. “What’s this for?” he asks, tracing a rubber lip like the lining of a Ziploc bag. His mouth is tight. He’s barely holding himself together.

  Mr. Crespi smiles. “Protective caskets—”

  “Why does a dead man need protection?”

  “To prevent, uh … alien and foreign objects from—”

  “Maggots and things?” Bitter says.

  “Well, yes, uh … in the past, protective caskets designed to keep out … critters … used impermeable gaskets as sealing devices. Unfortunately, in an air-tight atmosphere …” He clasps his hands behind his back. His eyes plead with Bitter to say he’s heard enough.

  “Yeah?”

  “In an air-tight atmosphere, methane gases tend to build. A byproduct of anaerobic bacteria, which, as the pressure builds—”

  Bitter laughs, a mean little sound with no pleasure in it. “Are you saying the coffin could explode?”

  Mr. Crespi clears his throat. “That wasn’t unheard of. But now, happily, we have these permeable rubber linings, which allow caskets to burp, as it were, preventing dangerous buildup.”

  The wind and water grow louder.

  Bitter says, “The whole cost, everything—embalming, the box, the hearse—” Each word appears to injure Crespi. He’s wincing. “What are we looking at?”

  “Depends.”

  “Roughly?”

  “Insurance?”

  “No, hell no. Grady couldn’t afford nothing like that.”

  “All right, well, with a medium-sized casket—”

  “One that burps?”

  “Right. Say, two thousand. Refrigeration and preparation, another four hundred. Escorting your friend to the religious service I estimate at anywhere from three to five hundred.”

  “You make out okay, don’t you?” Bitter says.

  “I’m pleased to provide a valuable community service.”

  “I’ll bet you are. Give us the cheapest, burpingest box you got.”

  “Very well, sir. This weekend, then—say, by two o’clock Sunday afternoon—your friend Grady will be waiting for you here in the Slumber Room.”

  Etta has laid her hands on some primo barbacoa: ribs, goat’s heads, cow’s heads (“eighteen-pounders!”), cheek and tongue (“cachete y lengua,” she calls them), potato salad, lima beans. “Let me sweat you up some meat!” She stands behind the bar doling out unseasoned brisket. “Seasoning kills the true flavor, darling—it’s like smothering a kitten in a blanket.”

  We’re all lined up with paper plates. Out back, over a pit filled with tender mesquite, more meat sizzles. Earlier, Etta had passed around a collection bowl for Grady’s funeral expenses. She was the biggest contributor—the only person here with a steady business. Her arm shakes. Sauce dribbles from her ladle to the floor.

  “Used to fish with some white folks down in Galveston,” a friend of Bitter’s says. “Sometimes they’d invite me home for supper. You ever dine in a white man’s house? Shit. Ever get asked, don’t take no chances. Eat before you go.”

  I choose a chair in a corner, by the Coors crates. My back aches. Sleeping on Bitter’s hard couch is catching up with me—not just the physical discomfort, but the frustration of watching him do nothing about his frailties. I’ve had my eye on an apartment building a couple of blocks away that advertises daily and weekly rates. I’m thinking about this when Bitter joins me. “How you doing, Uncle?”

  He nods and grins wanly, but his eyes are moist. One of his buddies says, “I’m getting ass-over-tea-kettle snockered tonight. For Grady.”

  I reach for a Hen Dog. The drummer raps a rim-shot. Earl chants, “I’ve got no home in this world!”

  While the band plays I reread a letter that came for me this afternoon at Bitter’s house. I didn’t have time to study it before and just stuffed it into my pocket. It’s been opened—inspected?—and badly resealed: Elias apologizing for his “crud behavior” during my prison visit.

  “In here, they want to make you into a monster,” he writes. “Sleep in the cold, the dark. In ad seg, you get no education. And there’s no respect. The old cons, they just want to do their bids and be left alone. You can live with them. But these young lunkheads in here now, they yelling all the time, showing off, like they up on stage. It’s like sleeping with seals—seals what puke all the time and go around sticking shanks in other seals.”

  I sip my drink. Earl closes his eyes, moaning a slow spiritual.

  “Anyway, I wanted to say I’ve lost it all,” Elias goes on. “Too many years of busthead, I guess. The truth is, I don’t remember your daddy. I don’t remember much of anything. A few big dreams when I was young. I remember making bombs in the desert. My coworkers at the nuke plant, they was all Christians. Figured they was helping God’s plan. Co
mes the end of the world, you know, Jesus’d show up in His chariot, they said. I always pictured Him in a low rider, with a little plastic statue of His mama hanging from the rearview on a string of black pearls. I remember a few faces over the years. My poor wife.

  “The thing is, whatever made your daddy run, it probably wasn’t you. Money. Or booze. Or a woman. Your mama, maybe. But not you. That’s all. I hope it helps.”

  I cram the paper back inside my pocket. Snockered. Damn straight. Here’s to Grady. My eyes fill. I brush the water away. For tonight, at least, yesterday can take care of itself.

  The scarecrow pats Bitter’s shoulder. The next casualty, I think. “Laplie tombe, wawaron chante,” Bitter says. The man nods and wanders off. I raise my eyebrows. “‘When the rain is coming,’” Uncle sighs, “‘the bullfrogs sing.’”

  The Slumber Room burbles with underwater sounds, squishy, squidlike: some ungodly New Age music tape. Mr. Crespi wears a blue coat that fits him as snugly as a wetsuit. “Lovely to see you again,” he says and guides Bitter and me to Grady’s coffin. “I hope you have a pleasant visit. If there’s anything I can do …”

  How good is your rouge and your paint? Your plaster of Paris? Can it cover up waste? The bones of grief? “We’re fine,” I say. “Thank you.” He withdraws.

  The casket glows, gray, in the light of six candles, each the size of a cereal box. The room smells of roses and also of rust from an old air-conditioner in the window. Three or four unruly hairs stand up on Grady’s head. Lifelessness has hardened like mud on his cheeks. Last night I dreamed of Mama in an open hole in the ground, looking natural and calm, as if she were taking a nap.

  But there’s nothing natural about Grady. If he were a manikin, I’d say he was poorly made. If we propped him up, he’d fall apart. This is a corpse. The ugliness of the word is exactly right. Whatever was human here has fled. All that’s left is inertia. A rigid and useless container.

  Bitter plucks Grady’s sleeve. “What did you do to yourself?” he whispers, shaking. A humming in the walls. The wiring. “What in the world did you do?” He starts to sink. Yes, I’ll be burying him soon, I think. Like a keepsake; tucking away all that’s left of my old life. Just a little rag and bone. My throat tightens. We lean against each other. I help him outside and back into the car.

  Crespi stands by the funeral home limo, at the Magnolia Blossom’s gate. A brackish smell—shrimp and brine—sails on the breeze from the Ship Channel. While the preacher prays over Grady’s grave, and mourners fan themselves with programs from the service, I stare across the street at Bitter’s yard, remembering muggy afternoons just like this when Ariyeh and I were kids playing “Jail.” She was the sheriff, I was the thief. She’d shut me inside a cardboard box. “You’re a bad, bad girl and I have to lock you up.”

  Of course, I thought. Look at me.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…”

  It was just a game, but each time we played it, I felt indelibly shamed.

  They want to make you into a monster.

  Near Crespi now, the white men I’d noticed before, strolling among the tombstones. With them is Rufus Bowen. I lower my shades. They watch our party for a moment—did Bowen catch me looking?—then walk half a block to a black and white Volvo.

  You’re a bad, bad girl, and you’ll never know why.

  A woman next to the reverend gives him a sultry smile as he drops wet dirt onto the casket.

  Tonight, when Bayou Slim makes his appearance at Etta’s, interrupting Grady’s wake, the room gets still. His forehead is creased like a snappy pair of slacks. His fingers shiver. He doesn’t even make it through one song. The melody’s an agony, the beat a punctured truck tire. He quits abruptly, drops his head, then rouses himself to beg a few coins. Stumbles out the door.

  Several Gulf Coast bluesmen adopted “Bayou” as part of their stage names. “Heads or Tails” is a local standard. Echoes of my father? Simple coincidence.

  But I get up to follow, glancing to make sure Bitter is okay. He’s hugging one of the brandy women, who’s wearing a Lady Day gardenia.

  I scan the parking lot. Pickups. Sun-blistered vans. Across the street the Flower Man’s house is ablaze: Christmas lights, Halloween devil lights, lanterns, candles, flashlights bolted to the wall. They shine randomly into a field snapping with little white bugs. Train wheels clatter somewhere off to the west. My daddy’s gone, my daddy’s gone, my daddy’s gone. I pull Elias’s letter from my pocket and let it drift away on the breeze.

  Then I see him in a tumbleweed snarl. He brushes his pants, tosses a bottle into the field, hoists his guitar case onto his shoulders: piggybacking a clubfooted child. “Slim?” I call. I cross the street.

  He squints at me.

  I stop a few feet from him. “I just wanted to tell you, sir …”

  “What’s that?”

  “I enjoy your music.”

  We’re face to face in the Flower Man’s pink and purple light. The glare makes the ground, our clothes, our skin seem rough, made of tarp. Slim’s brearh is rank; his eyes like Bloody Marys. “Music?” he croaks.

  “I think you’re a lot like my daddy used to be. No,” I say. “No. I think you’re exactly like him.”

  “You need a daddy?” The voice is whiskey in a cracked wooden cup. His belly rumbles.

  “No. Maybe.”

  He touches my arm. I start to touch him back, but he coughs, “Got a buck?”

  “Sure.” I laugh. “Sure I do.” But I don’t. I’ve left my purse in the gut bucket.

  “Thank you,” he says, though I’ve given him nothing. He weaves away through the weeds.

  14

  SOME OTHER TIME/ROOMS/DAILY, WEEKLY RATES, says the sign. Six stories. Wood and brick. Peeling tan paint. The rooms are furnished—bed, table, chest of drawers—and they’re only fifty dollars a week. I nod hello to the man behind the lobby desk as I carry my case to the stairs. He’s wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, eating a plum, watching an old Star Trek episode on a portable black-and-white TV. He doesn’t offer to help me. The plum leaks on the scarred oak countertop.

  The stairs are dark and narrow, littered with Sprite cans, crumpled Camel packs, want ads, broken glass. Sour fried food. I emerge onto the third floor’s radish-colored carpet. Loud voices, thumping from behind closed doors. Peanut shells line the baseboards. Earwigs sift among them. I’m beginning to have second thoughts—I’d noticed the squalor before, when I’d checked the place out, but it didn’t seem this depressing.

  My room reassures me. Large. Wide windows. I flop my suitcase onto the creaky spring bed. Torn strips of dark blue wallpaper curl like the petals of an iris. The closet smells of men’s suits: sweat, watery cologne. An old rubber doll’s head lies on its ear in a corner. A single coat hanger.

  An empty Lipitor bottle sits in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror in the bathroom. Someone has painted a twisting vine around the hot water knob in the shower. Part of a Stephen King paperback lies shredded on the toilet tank. Of course the faucet drips.

  Cooing sounds next door, through the wall: an elderly man and woman consoling each other. The windows overlook an abandoned freight yard, flatcars loaded with late morning light. A yellowed mattress curls in a field of sunflowers and weeds. Grime sprinkles the windowsill.

  For the first time ever I have my own place in Houston. My birth city. My home. I try to imagine living here, driving to work, hanging out with Ariyeh.

  Bitter wasn’t happy I left his house, though I assured him I was only two blocks away and I’d eat with him every night. He wore three nutmegs tied in a rag around his neck and sipped tea steeped with anise seed and corn shucks: bad blood medicine. “If I’m sick as you say I am, Seam, how can you leave me?”

  “I’m not leaving… so you admit you’re sick?”

  “Nothing my spells won’t cure. I’m talking ‘bout you. How you feel.”

  “You won’t let me be a nurse, will you? Will you? No. You’re determined to end up like Grady.”r />
  “That’s low, Seam.”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle, but it’s true. You heard what the doctor said. Your symptoms are severe enough to warrant more tests. Yet you sit here doing nothing. It’s like my stepdad when Mama was sick, smiling all the time—’Everything’s hunky-dory!’ Anyway. It’s better this way. You’ll get your space back, I’ll have some privacy, and maybe my spine will loosen up. Keep your cell phone handy. You’ve got the number of the pay phone over at my place, right?”

  “Mayor’s girl.” He sniffed. “Come and go when she please. Too good for my couch, is what it is.”

  “That’s not what it is. I’ve told you what it is.”

  When I pulled away this morning, he was sitting on his porch gazing off into the graveyard trees, singing mournfully,

  Mo pas connin queque quichause

  Qu appe tourmenter moin la.

  Now, I sit here feeling homesick. Not for Dallas or my job. I’m sure of that. What, then? My fish and birds? How long can I stay away? What are my plans?

  I lock the door and head downstairs, meeting, on his way up, a middle-aged man carrying cabbages. In his slender hands they look like skulls. He asks me how long I’ll be around, warns me about several broken steps if I go past the fifth floor. He laughs and says the building is haunted. A soldier is said to appear at night in one or another room, his uniform hard to place, asking, “Are you with us or against us?” He wishes me a pleasant stay.

  The desk clerk watches Mr. Spock subdue a rubbery beast. Outside, cottonwood fuzz fills the air. An Arco gas truck grinds its gears past the railroad tracks. The phone booth door won’t shut all the way. I punch Shirley’s number and cover my ear with my palm.

  A man answers. I ask for my friend.

  “Telisha?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?” Though I know right away who it is. My fingers tingle.