No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  While they were eating, the chatter and banter went as always, with great raucous laughter about all their activities, Mario and Cookie, Wyndell and Vidamía, Fawn getting ready to audition for Performing Arts in the spring of 1990, Cliff and his many girlfriends and how snooty they were, which meant they were totally deficient socially, Caitlin’s upcoming sixth-birthday party in September and whether she was going to make a speech as she had last year. They had yet to figure out why Caitlin liked making speeches. They sounded like political speeches, so perhaps she was influenced by the television, although they didn’t think so, being that politicians on TV were generally subdued, so they figured she must have heard one of those neighborhood sound trucks during a political campaign, because for no apparent reason in the middle of playing with her dolls or tea sets, she’d stand up and start talking about the oppression of the bears or some weird thing. They spoke about Lurleen’s orchestra at the junior high school and the upcoming concert, and then, since they were talking about music, speculated on the chance that their father would at some point start to play with other musicians. They had finished eating, and all at once Caitlin jumped up and got a tambourine and Cliff the washboard Lurleen had brought back the last time she’d gone home to visit her mother, used now when they played Cajun music for friends. Cliff slung the washboard over his shoulders and began scratching and setting up a beat. On the required beat Caitlin hit the tambourine, her lips pursed and her head turned to one side like a real live homegirl.

  Cookie stood up, did a spin, put on a serious attitude, and went into her piano rap, which included the names of over forty piano companies. At the end Caitlin gave her critical appraisal of the composition, declaring that it didn’t sound so much like rap, but like “Dr. Zeus and Ice-T go Christmas caroling,” which cracked everybody up and earned Caitlin a mild nuggy and a wrestling match with tickling from Cookie.

  Petrof, Samick, Sängler & Söhne,

  Jasper America,

  and Shafer & Sons.

  Those are some pianos

  we played just for fun.

  Just to check them out

  for feel and for tone.

  On Sauter, on Brentwood,

  on Fandrich, on Kimball,

  on Grothrian, on Blüthner,

  on Baldwin and Schimmel.

  We sat and we played,

  like Santa was waiting

  but needed the slade.

  “Slade?” Cliff said, right on cue and with just the right amount of sarcasm, which gave Cookie the opportunity to talk “Tennessee,” as she called it, meaning a Southern accent.

  Slade’s, what I sade

  and definitely mean it.

  We tried Studios and Grands,

  and Consoles and Spinets.

  We went and we sat

  and we tested each key.

  We played us some tunes,

  using the ole do-re-mi.

  “Word, nothing’s too good for Billy Farrell,” Cliff said, putting aside the rejection of his father, which had grown since his run-in with him before Christmas, joining in the African-American-accented talk, which to them had nothing to do with black and white but with music and relaxing, which now provided Cookie with an opportunity to do a few more spins and get down on the floor and jump up again like a blond gazelle, her gold hair flying.

  And check out this shit—

  the trip was terrific.

  Cause some pianos we played

  were from the Pacific.

  Yamaha, Tadashi,

  Hyundai, and Kawai.

  Right here in New York

  and not in Hawaii.

  And so it went until she got to the last verse:

  So there you have it, Daddy,

  a beautiful piano so you’ll entertain

  and knock them all out

  like you were playing with Trane.

  We hope you’ll continue

  to play and bring hope.

  Even with just eight

  we know you can cope.

  Word.

  Everyone clapped and came over to him and hugged and kissed him. After a while, someone, he didn’t recall who, suggested that he play the piano. Even though he’d been practicing at New York University for months, he suddenly felt panic and he momentarily swooned and felt as if all the lights had dimmed and he was about to pass out. Vidamía was immediately near him, smoothing his hair and helping him to his feet.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Come on,” and she took his good hand, brought him over to the piano, and sat him down as Cookie and Lurleen removed the ribbon from it.

  The piano was breathtaking in its beauty, exuding awesome power, reminding him of a magnificent racehorse. Billy recalled the times he’d gone with his father and uncle to Aqueduct Race Track, where, holding his father’s hand, they’d gone to the stables and spoken to his uncle Charlie’s father-in-law, Mickey Finnegan, who was a horse trainer. Billy’d stood looking at the beautiful sleek animals, admiring their power and strength and their delicate legs, wondering how they could go so fast on such thin legs. Once they had been watching a race and a horse stumbled and fell, sending the rider over the railing. The horse tried to get up but couldn’t. Billy turned to his father for an explanation, but his father just shook his head. “Mickey’s gonna have to put him down,” he said. Soon there were a number of men around the horse. Billy didn’t understand. He and his father left the grandstand and went back to the stables. On the way there he heard the muffled sound of a gunshot. When they reached the track level, the horse’s body was being dragged back to the paddock. His father pointed at the shattered leg, the thin area around the ankle twisted grotesquely. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” Billy asked, hoping his father would tell him the horse was just sleeping. “Yes, he’s dead.” “Why?” he asked. “They can’t fix his leg. The body’s too big for the leg to hold the weight.” What always remained with Billy was the size of the horse’s large and dreamy eyes, the long eyelashes, making the face of the animal delicate. He recalled also how startled the animals sometimes looked. On some complex level the horses reminded him of women. He wasn’t sure whether it was their eyes or the shape of their haunches, because the curvature of that part of the equine anatomy made him think of women’s thighs and buttocks; perhaps it was both the dreamy eyes and the haunches.

  The piano possessed some of the same qualities, its color and curves resembling racehorses, and therefore women, and suddenly he was alive and saw his hands move to the keys and without knowing what action the keys had he hit a chord with his two hands and let his right hand slide easily over the melody as he had relearned it. Without thinking, he was into “Thanks for the Memory,” playing with ease the introduction, the melody, the bridge, and then a simple improvisation that gave him an opportunity to test the middle six octaves of the piano.

  No more than two minutes elapsed before his left hand was actively working and there was a definite swing to the music, so that before the end of his next chorus he heard behind him Cliff, perfectly on key, blowing a series of extremely well-placed and harmonious blasts from the trombone, signaling that he’d like to join in. Billy nodded, played once more the basic chord structure, and heard plainly his son’s unmistakable virtuosity. Eventually, Fawn was on her drums and set up a nice little rhythm. Cookie came in beneath the chording part of the melody on her tenor saxophone, Lurleen on the fiddle, and Vidamía on the tub bass, instinctively creating enough harmony to fit in with the rest, although she had never heard the tune.

  As he played he recalled going with Pop Butterworth to a loft in Brooklyn for a jam session. The two piano players they were expecting hadn’t arrived and everybody was beginning to grow impatient when Pop pointed to Billy and told the musicians that here was a pianist. He wasn’t as scared as he’d been that first time with Miles, so he sat down, and John Coltrane asked him if he knew “Body and Soul” or “April in Paris” or maybe “I Cover the Waterfront,” and he said, “What key?” and all the musicians, who were bla
ck, laughed and slapped hands and Trane had said, “Right. ‘Waterfront’ in F,” and counted and Billy took the intro and off they went, and then one of the other pianists came in and John Coltrane thanked Billy, but he couldn’t stop grinning and shaking his head. That was in 1966 when he was sixteen. The following year, just before he turned seventeen, Butterworth called the house and told him John Coltrane had died. He was forty. Next year, Billy thought now, he’d be forty.

  He and Lurleen and the children went through ten or twelve tunes, even taking a shot at John Coltrane’s rendition of “My Favorite Things,” one of Billy’s favorite tunes, with Cookie on her soprano sax, which, admittedly, would have made Trane turn over in his grave—but “Knowing him,” Pop Butterworth had said later when Billy told him about it, “Trane probably would have laughed and said, ‘Yeah, something like that.’”

  Billy had been at it over a year, at first secretly resenting Vidamía’s insistence that he had to play again. She had made him listen to a tape Butterworth had given her. It was him playing solo down at the Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue. One night, after Kenny Barron—or Cedar Walton, he couldn’t remember who—finished performing and all the musicians had left and the place was being swept, Billy’d sat at the piano at Butterworth’s urging and played a lugubrious “Darn That Dream,” followed by “My Funny Valentine” and a few other ballads, each of them measured in their melancholy so that he felt whole, and from the darkness he heard applause. It was Max Gordon, the owner. He stopped playing, said he was sorry, but Mr. Gordon told him to keep going, that he sounded real good. Butterworth had been carrying a large, reel-to-reel tape recorder, had plugged it in, and was taping him. And now he’d gone and transferred the large tape to a cassette and given it to Vidamía. Deep in his heart Billy felt the sadness of the past, accepting unquestioningly just how fused he was to the dead.

  Unconsciously, the tribulation of his spirit served as a background to his best memories, so that his father remained alive, his face bright, his blue eyes smiling and friendly, making Billy feel innocent and small again, wishing to kiss his ruddy cheek and muss up his da’s sandy hair as his father had done to him, wanting to be just like him. And he wondered if he was having the same effect on his children and then, realizing that he must be, he sat up and, as if a large electric shock had been shot into him, he came suddenly awake and decided that whatever it was the children and Lurleen wanted him to do, he would do it. He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Back then he thought it was right to go into the Marines, but it hadn’t turned out right. He should have listened more closely to his heart. Maybe if he listened to his heart he would be okay now. And yet he was much better off than he had been in a long time and for that at least he was grateful.

  But there were times when his memories attacked him and, no matter what he played or thought about, the feeling overwhelmed him and he knew that nothing he could do would ease his mind, because Joey’s death had definitely been his fault. The obsession would not leave him. He recalled once again walking on the edge of the rice field, knowing they shouldn’t have gone in that direction, but reassuring Joey that they could get back easily enough, and in any case they were close to the base and the perimeter had been secure now for two weeks, the Cong driven from the area.

  What had they been talking about? Baseball? Music? Most likely music, since Joey was always talking about Latin music. Machito, Charlie and Eddie Palmieri, the Fania All Stars, and Joe Cuba. It had to be music but he couldn’t recall the tune or the group they were talking about. It didn’t matter. One minute they were walking and the next there was the sound of automatic fire, punctuated by the explosion of a grenade. Joey had turned to go in the direction they had come from but Billy had called him back and then the two of them were running for the cover of the trees, knowing that once there they could return to the base safely. But it had been the wrong move. As soon as they began running they knew it was a mistake.

  The decision had been instantaneous and irreversible. In a matter of seconds the water around him was exploding with death, the air alive with flying steel, as if it were raining, except this rain was coming from unexpected directions. He’d lost consciousness, everything going black, and didn’t know how much time had transpired between the explosion and his waking to the dull pain in his head. He looked for his wristwatch to ascertain the time and saw the damaged wristband, the glass on the face of the watch shattered, the watch itself twisted on his wrist. He then reached with his right hand to straighten the timepiece and saw his bloody fingers, not comprehending at first that his middle and pinkie fingers were missing; thinking only how strange his hand would look in a glove, or gripping a bat when he played softball; the notion that he might never again play music not yet entering his mind.

  Instead a sudden, terrible panic hit him when he thought about Joey, calling him and turning around as he sat in the rice paddy; his eyes finally seeing Joey’s helmet behind him and his body half-submerged; going to the place and not bothering to retrieve his own helmet; calling Joey’s name and hoping that, like himself, Joey had simply been knocked out by the blast; knowing, even as he splashed toward him that it would be useless since Joey was facedown in the water.

  When he got there he stood looking at the bloodstained water and the wound below Joey’s left shoulder, the slight wound creating in him some hope that death hadn’t intruded so personally into his life again. Kneeling in the rice paddy, he turned Joey Santiago’s body over and after the water poured away he saw the intestines, red and blue, trail the body, noting that the entire front of Joey’s body, from sternum to pubic area, was torn open, exposed, and inside his torso, like a sloppily put together display in a butcher shop, his organs lay in spectacular disorganization, everything raw and seemingly without life. Somehow Joey was still alive and recognized him, and the fact that he was dying. The scene caused Billy no repugnance. Instinctively he grabbed the limp body and, in spite of his own shock, or perhaps because of it, hastily scooped everything that could be salvaged of Joey’s visceral disorganization and replaced it inside the body cavity and, ripping off his fatigue shirt, he hopelessly packed the wound as if with patches from a medical kit, and then he sat in that rice paddy.

  He imagined later that from the time of the attack until he turned Joey over it couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds since Joey was still alive. He wished it had been longer, because then Joey would’ve drowned and wouldn’t have had to go through the torture of however long it took him to die. After packing the abdomen with his shirt, Billy Farrell then took his friend in his arms and rocked him as he would a sleepless child, in the way his father had held him, and in the same manner that he would one day hold his own children, as Joey drifted in and out of delirium, still barely alive, until at the end, like a wisp of smoke from a burnt-out match, Joey’s life disappeared into the ether of memory. Why hadn’t he called for the medic? Why hadn’t he returned fire? At times he thought that he had called out, “Doc, Doc, we’ve been hit! Hit bad, Doc!” Other times he was certain that he hadn’t called for help and wondered why.

  Shortly before the medevac helicopter landed, the platoon had arrived at the edge of the woods and laid down a blanket of fire and mortar shells at the grassland beyond the rice paddy, a few of the soldiers skirting the perimeter of the area and patrolling where they thought the attack had come from, but they found no activity and everyone was puzzled by this. All around Billy and Joey Santiago, now dead, bullets were flying and Billy could hear the voices of the fellows in the platoon that had come out of the woods, aiming their weapons across the rice paddy, the automatic fire sounding odd, as if they were shooting at ghosts. McKenzie, Florio, and Tony Fuentes, the medic, were the first ones to get there, and beyond them Hitchcock, Palucci, and Bobby Miranda, staring at him hard like they always did with everybody, the mistrust a result of their running a little dope operation.

  Maybe the fellas in the group at the VA were right and he ought to talk about the whole thing.
The idea that he was responsible for Joey’s death had lingered far too long, and Rogers, who was a psychologist, suggested that maybe it was just a cover-up for something else. If Billy understood him correctly, Rogers was saying that Billy was afraid of something deeper and so was focusing on Joey’s death so that he wouldn’t have to face this other thing. Now that Wyndell had set up the gig and asked him to play, he’d have to face whatever it was that was making him relive his life in Nam every day. The gig was in five weeks. Maybe the fear would surface again. He suspected that, just like twenty years ago, it was the feeling that he had no business aspiring to play jazz, now less than ever.

  He’d gotten the piano last year and his birthday was coming up again and perhaps after all this time he could put the nightmare of the past twenty years behind him. He thought of his father’s friend Mike Cunningham who had hit a man with a baseball bat. The man died. Mike was nineteen at the time. The man had been making lewd remarks to Mike’s girlfriend, Peggy Lyons, at a softball game in Central Park. Mike was playing for an insurance company where he worked as a clerk. He had been making plans to take the test to go into the police force, and they sent him to jail for fifteen years. After he did his time, Mike Cunningham had come to their house, looking for Billy’s father. His mother had opened the door.

  “Hi, Maud,” Mike said. “I just got out and came over to see Kevin.”

  “Kevin died five years ago, Michael,” his mother had said.