No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  Shortly afterward, Chivington rode into the fort with a force of about 700, including the Third Cavalry, and gave the garrison notice of his plans for an attack on the Indian encampment. Although he was informed that Black Kettle had already surrendered, Chivington pressed on with what he considered a perfect opportunity to further the cause of Indian extinction. On November 29, he led his troops, many of them drinking heavily, to Sand Creek and positioned them, along with their four howitzers, around the Indian camp. Black Kettle, ever-trusting, raised both the American flag and a white flag over his tepee. In response, Chivington raised his arm for the attack. With army rifles and cannons pounding them, the Indians scattered in panic. Then the soldiers charged. A few warriors managed to fight back briefly from behind the high bank of the stream, and others, including Black Kettle, escaped over the plains. But by the end of the quick and brutal massacre, as many as 200 Indians, more than half of them women and children, had died. Chivington’s policy was one of no prisoner taking, and his Colorado volunteers had been happy to oblige. Chivington was later denounced in a congressional investigation and forced to resign. Yet an after-the-fact reprimand of the colonel meant nothing to the Indians. As word of the massacre spread among them via refugees, Indians of the southern and northern plains stiffened in their resolve to resist white encroachment. Cheyenne and Arapahos stepped up their raids and, on January 7 and again on February 18, they stormed the town and freight station at Julesburg along the South Platte River, on the overland route from the Oregon Trail to Denver, forcing its abandonment. The final and most intense phase of the war for the Plains had begun. It would take another massacre at Wounded Knee a quarter of a century later to end it.

  As the sun climbed higher, Wyndell donned his sunglasses, ate a sandwich, and drank some orange juice, reducing his speed and watching the landscape grow brighter with the new day. He finished his meal and, driving as if he were racing to meet the sun head-on, he listened once again to Thelonious Monk with Milt Jackson. Kremmling, Hot Sulphur Springs, Granby, through Berthoud Pass to Idaho Springs, and then he was almost home. He opened the window on the passenger’s side of the car and breathed in, filling his lungs with cold mountain air until his chest hurt and he felt light-headed and a smile began to surface in his heart.

  After arriving home, he spent hours talking with his mother, confiding in her as he always had, trusting her and basking in her love. For several weeks he slept late and read and gained four pounds from her pampering. His father looked worried most of the time, but never once talked about career changes or any similar subjects. The day before he left again, Wyndell sat in the living room with his father and explained that he was going to New York.

  “Are you all right?” his father had asked.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. I’ve gone through it,” he said. “I know what I have to do now.”

  Whether because of his tone of voice or because indeed something had changed in Wyndell, his father smiled and suddenly the worry was gone from his face and he knew he’d made the right choice in letting his son seek a life in jazz.

  And now he was free from the life in Los Angeles and was working in New York. At first he played Monday nights in the jam sessions at Visiones, meeting different musicians and being asked to sit in, still having to earn money playing dances and weddings and every so often commercials for TV or radio (which now, with their electronic rigs, didn’t even have to use live musicians), but once in a while playing on a video and then watching it and even appearing in one, which he secretly dug doing; always going back to the music, jamming late at night with other young guys like himself, all of them committed to the music; constantly tuned into WBGO, the New York City metropolitan area’s jazz station, at all hours of the night, the station like a beacon somewhere in the darkness, the brilliance of all his heroes sending out musical rays, every one producing dazzling light to guide him. Jazz 88.

  On the lonely days and nights when he felt like returning home or seeking employment somewhere, the disk jockeys kept him company. He relied on them like close friends or even family. Rhonda Hamilton. James Browne. Gary Walker. Charlie Ventura, Jr. Alfredo Cruz on Sundays with his Latin Jazz Cruise program. Michael Bourne. Larry D’Albero. Michael Anderson. Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, and Jazz from the Archives with Dan Morgenstern, or Ed Berger from the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.

  He’d subscribed during a membership drive and felt as if he owned part of the station. Even when he was just puttering around the house, he had BGO on, listening to the enthusiasm and intelligence of the programs’ hosts, their humor and humility in having accepted the responsibility as guardians of the music, and at the same time feeling the immense pride they had in their work. Once, late at night, he’d heard Pointer View and stood transfixed by his solo on “Cherokee,” not sure that that was him playing, the purity dazzling him and making him redetermine to continue making attempts to play jazz.

  From time to time he’d go to hear well-known musicians play, and he’d sit enraptured by the music and their virtuosity, knowing he could do as well, hating that he had to be patient. One night when he was wandering around downtown he walked into the Village Vanguard and listened to Larry Coryell play. Larry had looked straight at him and nodded like he knew him. Although he was familiar with and admired Coryell’s music, he had never met him. When the set was over, Coryell rested his guitar on its stand, bounded down off the stage, all gray-haired and intellectual-looking in his big tortoiseshell glasses, and, smiling, put out his hand.

  “Hey, man, how you doing? You’re Wyndell Ross, right? You play tenor.”

  “Yeah, man,” Wyndell had said. “How did you know who I was?”

  “I was in L.A. on my way back from a gig in Japan and heard you playing at Catalina’s. With Sonny Pointer if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Right. For the recording.”

  “Right, right. Pointer View. Excellent. How about a drink, amigo?”

  “A drink would be fine, man,” Wyndell replied, feeling good that a musician of Coryell’s stature had recognized him.

  They walked over to the bar. The bassist came over and Larry introduced him.

  “Wyndell, this is my good friend, Buster Williams. Buster, this is Wyndell Ross. He plays tenor. Excellently, I might add.”

  “How you doing, man?” Williams said, and with great dignity the bassist nodded and extended his hand.

  “Pretty good,” Wyndell said, smiling and nodding.

  He had to admit it. Wyndell Ross was on top of the world, especially now that he was convinced without a shred of a doubt that he was hopelessly in love with Vidamía Farrell, who, though she might well have African blood, the product of Irish and southern white folks and Puerto Ricans, looked whiter than a lot of white folks, and that could be a problem. He guessed he’d have to deal with it by and by. The thing that concerned him most was that Vidamía seemed obsessed with getting her father to play the piano again. He had yet to hear Billy Farrell play, and doubted that he could. Not only was the man disabled, but he seemed extremely distant, removed from normal life.

  38. Drums

  Vidamía came to a conclusion a few months short of graduation from high school. She had spent an entire hour thinking and looking alternately at the soft rain falling in the garden of Wyndell Ross’s apartment and at the lovely sculpted black face and naked body of this man she loved, as the song said, as he slept, beautifully, like a child, one arm tucked under his head and his body turned so that his thing lay helplessly on the sheet, dormant now and not excited and wanting to devour her, as she liked to think of it.

  He often spoke about children, sensing that she, as he did, probably thought about what their children would look like, should they have some. Once, when they passed a very pregnant woman in the street, he said he’d like to see her that way someday.

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said, because he had that look on his face like, right there, as they were walking by the planetarium in the early summe
r, before she turned eighteen, they were going to go at it. And she had no idea why, but once or twice she had thought she’d stop taking the pill and get pregnant just to see what their baby would look like. It was crazy. She always came to her senses, but it was like something inside of her was calling out for her to get pregnant. It was like standing on the edge of a cliff and knowing it wasn’t good to jump off, but also wanting to.

  “Don’t even think of it, you nut,” she said to him.

  And as he always did, he put his head down and looked shy and innocent and told her he wasn’t implying anything of the kind, and she called him a liar, and eventually he “fessed up,” like his grandma Mimi would say, and said yes, the thought had entered his mind on occasion.

  “You’d like Grandma Mimi,” he said. “Her mama was Cherokee. My great-grandma Rowena Spike. Grew up in Oklahoma on a ranch and came to Colorado following her husband on a cattle drive, my great-grandpa Ingram Ross, who also had a Cherokee grandfather and was a black cowboy.”

  “A black cowboy?” Vidamía said, as they entered Central Park. “Stop putting me on.”

  “No kidding,” he said. “I’m not putting you on, girl.”

  “Yes, you are, you big faker,” she said, spinning away from him and leaping in the air, feeling beautiful and light and then coming back to leap at him so that he caught her and put his hands around her waist, which he said was the smallest of any girl in the entire United States and therefore gave her an even more magnificent bunky. He lifted her up in the air and on the way down she wrapped her legs around him and unashamedly kissed him, enjoying with enormous delight the taste of him and the way she melted inside from his touching her lips with his tongue, feeling her nipples stiffening against his body and letting go because, as she told Cookie, she would have gone off right there in the park, with her clothes on and everything. “You’re putting me on about your cowboy grandpa, right?”

  “No way, Vee,” he said. “Maybe I ought to take you to Denver next time I go home. You can see for yourself. Right there in my dad’s den you can see all the pictures you want. And he’s got the saddles, ropes, chaps, and hats. He’s even got Great-grandpa’s guns.”

  “Guns?” Vidamía said, opening her eyes. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really,” Wyndell said. “Guns. Pearl-handled, silver-plated forty-fours in their tooled Spanish-leather holsters, everything shiny, but with a few cracks from age. There’s a picture of Grandpa Ross with a big mustache, big hat and guns, standing by a buckboard.”

  Vidamía couldn’t help laughing. He was too much. A black cowboy great-grandpa.

  “I guess I have to believe you,” she said. “Otherwise you’re going to kidnap me, take me to Colorado and subject me to all sorts of western sexual indignities, right?”

  “Only if you’re good,” he said and ducked back as she aimed a punch at him.

  Perhaps Wyndell was right. As she did with all matters of logic, Vidamía wondered if she was indeed denying that part of herself which was black. All this cerebral activity and speculation concerning her racial makeup was based on his vague assumption that her background was somehow connected to the continent of Africa. The idea excited her. She also felt trepidation because if her mother ever found out that he was black and was six years older than she was, she would have a heart attack. More to the point, if she knew the things they did when they were alone she would have two heart attacks. As if her mother hadn’t, when she was younger, done the same things with her father, Billy Farrell.

  And then she was recalling that first time she saw Wyndell up on the bandstand, so proud and dignified, his eyes closed and the tenor saxophone emitting those beautiful sounds, low and sweet, playing his interpretation of the song and in the middle of it opening his eyes and looking straight at her as she was sipping from her Perrier and without missing a beat playing a quote from another song, which he later said was: “You Go to My Head,” singing the words in this little-boy’s voice which was the loveliest thing she’d ever heard any human being do so that it made her giggle because she was absolutely charmed by this big moreno, as Becky Polanco, her sister Cookie’s Puerto Rican girlfriend from Avenue D, had called him at the party, not hiding her disdain for blacks. You go to my head … Like the bubbles in a glass of champagne.

  But it hadn’t mattered what Becky said because it was at that party, in late July, right after her seventeenth birthday, as she was standing out on the penthouse terrace of Dina Wilton’s father’s apartment overlooking Central Park, talking to Cookie and Dina, who were best friends at Performing Arts and who had invited her and Becky Polanco, who also went to PA and was in the dance department, that she had met Wyndell. The crowd was college age and older, like Dina’s brother, Ken, who had gone to Harvard and was working down on Wall Street.

  Ken Wilton was by far the handsomest of the young men at the party, so handsome in fact that Cookie later told Vidamía that she strongly considered being unfaithful to Mario Wong when they walked in and he greeted them. She was quickly dissuaded from attempting such a move when Dina, observing Cookie’s predatory glances, revealed to them that her brother was gay even though he had played club hockey in school. That was when Ken, accompanied by a tall, elegantly dressed, handsome young black man, came out on the terrace. Both Vidamía and Cookie assumed he was also gay.

  “Dina, this is my friend, Wyndell Ross,” he said. “He is an absolutely fabulous tenor saxophone player. We met at a party in Boston when I was seeing Peter Lloyd, who played piano and was studying at Berklee. Wyn, this is my sister, Dina. These are her friends—I’m sorry but I’ve forgotten your names.”

  Dina extended her hand and Wyndell. shook it gently, smiling easily at the three of them. Dina then introduced Cookie and Vidamía, pointing out that they were sisters. They talked for a while and eventually Ken was summoned inside about a lack of ice or club soda and Dina went with him. A young Wall Street type asked Cookie if she wanted to dance and off she went, the music of Madonna spilling out from the large room within. Vidamía wanted to return inside as well, but thought it would be rude to leave the young man alone out on the terrace. Gay people were rejected enough, she thought, and he was black, which meant that he probably suffered even more rejection.

  “What did you say your name was?” he said.

  “Vidamía,” she answered, smiling at him easily, never suspecting that her smile might be interpreted sexually. “Vidamía Farrell.”

  “Mine is Wyndell …”

  “Ross, right?”

  “Pretty good. Are you Spanish? The name sounds Spanish. Your first name, I mean.”

  “My mother’s Puerto Rican. She was born here, but her parents are from P.R.”

  “P.R.?”

  “Yeah, that’s what we call it. You know, the initials. Like U.S.”

  “Right, right. I follow. You always hear ‘PR.’ for ‘public relations.’ Oh, never mind. I had a friend at Berklee, you know, where I went to school, whose family was from Puerto Rico. I think her grandfather or her father, maybe both. Her last name was Feliciano. Like José Feliciano, the singer.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, beginning to grow uncomfortable.

  “C’mon baby, light my fire,” Wyndell sang.

  “What?” Vidamía said.

  “That was one of his songs,” he said. “Also ‘California Dreaming.’”

  “Oh, José Feliciano. Yeah, I know,” she said, looking out over the park, the lamps along the paths making little pockets of light.

  There was a long silence and then she asked him if he’d ever read James Baldwin. He said he had and asked her why.

  “I was just wondering,” she replied. “Did you read Giovanni’s Room?”

  “Yes, I did,” he said and then burst out laughing, understanding immediately her concern. It wasn’t a gentle laugh, but a raucous belly laugh that made her also laugh, although hers was more a laugh of nerves than mirth. “That’s funny. Wait until I tell Ken. That’s really charming.”

 
; “Well …” she said, sheepishly.

  “That’s very touching. You were actually trying to make me feel at ease, weren’t you?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Vidamía said, a bit off balance.

  He was resting his arm on the wall, looking down at her, his eyes bright and smiling, his perfect teeth matching the smile. He was cleanshaven and his skin was so smooth that she wanted to touch it. He wasn’t gay, and all of a sudden she felt ten times more uncomfortable.

  “What kind of music do you play?” she said.

  “All kinds. Rhythm and blues, rock, show tunes, TV scores. I’ll read anything.”

  “Jazz?”

  He was suddenly still and looked at her, puzzled.

  “You like jazz?”

  “Yes, the little I know about it.”

  “Well, I do play jazz,” he said. “It’s what I love doing best,” he added, openly, sincerely, so that she felt as if suddenly a barrier had been removed and they could talk more freely. He said that it was funny that she should ask him this question, since he had decided not too long ago to try and make a go of it just playing jazz, which was very difficult.

  And then she told him about the members of her family, all of whom were musicians.

  “We used to have a family band and played down in the subway.”

  He asked what she meant by “we” and she explained that they had taught her how to play the tub bass. He laughed and made a hillbilly kind of gesture, bowing his legs, hunching over and making a slapping motion against an imaginary string. She said that it was just like that and she mimicked the action. She said they no longer played but that she had gotten her father to play the piano again and explained about his disability.