A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  4.

  I found myself standing in a crowded nightclub staring at a yellowed photograph of a crowded nightclub. In the center of the picture there was a woman. On the back of the photo it said, “Lisa, 1923.”

  I looked around. I could feel the club, the whole world still celebrating the end of war. I could feel the year 1923. The war to end all wars had been won, and times were very good. Most people had money. Everybody had fun. Jazz was king, Gin was queen, and everyone else was royalty of some sort, at least for a night or two, until they sobered up. But most young people were full-fledged jazz babies. Jazz babies drank and danced and copulated with the frenzy of wild hares. France, for example, was a nation of 65,000 illegitimate births. Germany had nearly three times that many. Somebody should have been comparing those census statistics. If people in France had known there were that many more bastards right next door, they might have been more prepared for what was about to happen. If they’d been paying attention, they would have known that a young man named Adolf Hitler had just announced a twenty-five-point program at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich.

  Unfortunately, everybody was too busy being a jazz baby. They sang in the streets. They drank thick coffee in cafés. They guzzled wine.

  But to be specific and infinitely more personal, there I was, an idle observer in a particular place that would come to mean a great deal to my family and me. It was a Paris hot spot called Le Chat du Jazz, The Jazz Cat. A woman named Lisa owned it, but it was popular because of a great new soprano saxophone player from Chicago, an expatriate named T-Bone Morton, the grandson of former slaves.

  After hours, I observed, ghostlike, T-Bone and other assorted young people arguing far into the next morning. They talked about philosophy and religion and politics and wine and other things vital to human life.

  T-Bone gave what was obviously his favorite speech. Everyone reacted as if they’d heard it or variations of it many times before.

  “The truly virtuous turn into pure light when they die,” he opined. “They move out of this reality altogether. The merely good, they spend a little time in heaven, and then they have to return to this earth or, I suppose, other earths like this. They are shed, as rain, back to the ground, where they become plants, are eaten, become eggs in a female or sperm in a male, and are reborn. The pleasant people are reborn as great teachers and sages; the unpleasant people are reborn as pigs or slugs or something else. This keeps up until we can mend the torn places in our spirits. Those torn places are direct results of our actions on this earth. So, in conclusion, if you don’t want to be a slug in the next life, don’t act like a slug in this one.”

  Minor applause ensued.

  T-Bone added, “These are all thoughts, of course, which originated in Africa, the cradle of civilization.”

  The French woman named Lisa, the club owner, responded, “I’m all in favor of this pride you have in your African heritage. All in favor of it. But not everything started in Africa.”

  T-Bone leaned back. “Name anything that didn’t.”

  She shrugged, as only the French can, and I fell in love with her just a little. “Why not five? Without even thinking I can tell you five things that did not come from Africa: Greek theater, the Sistine Chapel, Shakespeare’s plays, Impressionist painting, and truly great wine.”

  T-Bone did not even take a breath. “All African, at least theoretically.”

  The table exploded. All manner of objection—good-natured, bad-tempered, ill-conceived, well-thought-out—flew around in the air.

  “All right, then.” T-Bone held up one hand. “I’ll concede your wine. The French beat everybody at that.”

  It was clear that he knew what he was doing. He could wear anyone down on any other subject, even where Shakespeare was concerned, but he would never win an argument with Lisa about wine. Lisa Simard was a holy terror in general, and no one could argue with her in her own club. The problem was that she loved to argue, especially about her favorite subjects: the rights of women in France, the growing horror of fascism in Europe; the best wines in the world. But she had been known to produce a small knife in the heat of such discussions, so the debates were mostly one-sided. Her customers tended to agree with her just to keep the peace. In fact, no one ever caused trouble in her café.

  Also, there were wilder rumors about Lisa: that she’d killed her own father in a drunken brawl; she’d fought as a man in the World War; she had once crushed a man’s left testicle between her thumb and first finger. That particular story was told all over Paris. An inebriated rowdy, the story went, had hoisted a glass in honor of Adolf Hitler’s twenty-five-point program recently announced at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich. Her response was to kick his chair, shove him to the ground, and crush a part of his private world before he could think of a second thing to say.

  She stood up immediately and announced, “Just like squeezing a grape.”

  The man passed into unconsciousness.

  No one ever caused trouble in Lisa’s café.

  As it happened, Lisa knew all about crushing grapes, and that was the reason no one argued with her about wine. She had been born into the Simard family of the Château Simard, purveyors of good, sometimes great, St. Emilion wines for hundreds of years. Her ancestors had spent generations learning every nuance of soil and sun, rain and dew. They knew every plant that was planted for miles around the grape vines, every sound the grapes heard, every emotion the grapes felt. Lisa could tell, most times, what a wine was like just by looking at a teaspoonful of it—before she even tasted it. When she actually tasted it, she was quite capable, she insisted, of telling the color of the vintner’s pajamas.

  She had left the delightful family business and come to Paris because, she would always explain, priorities in the city were arranged in their proper order: wine, food, love, art, music, coffee, philosophy, politics, national pride, family, architecture, gardens, work, and cemeteries. In that order.

  And of course there was the jazz. She loved it. She’d hired T-Bone Morton after she’d heard him play a single chorus of the song “Dr. Jazz.” People flocked to Le Chat du Jazz to see T-Bone, to hear his wild improvisations. Each solo would seem to everyone a frenzy of rage and fear and violence and sudden, soul-shattering redemption. Each solo was like that. T-Bone poured himself out until he was empty at every show. He took the listener on a journey, and the journey was always transcendent.

  Sometimes, when the girls were flirting with T-Bone, they would ask about the emotion in the solos. “What makes you play like that?” they would ask.

  Soft as silk, low as a sigh, T-Bone would answer. “The Universe has a lot to say. I’m trying to translate as fast as I can. See, the Universe is not just big, it’s infinite. And when it tries to say something through a finite little human body, it’s always difficult, you understand. So I struggle with it. That’s what you hear.”

  Everyone in Paris loved T-Bone Morton.

  Alas, as he and Lisa would soon discover, T-Bone was not universally loved. There was a certain man from Chicago named Chester, who figured in the story of Lisa and T-Bone quite prominently. Chester was a barely literate bundle of rage who worked in the stockyards of Chicago. He was fleshy and stooped, with only patches of hair on his pockmarked head. He always wore coveralls and a flannel shirt. He lived with his mother. They were both sick most of the time and poor all of the time. But they saved up all their money. They never spent a dime. They were planning for a trip to Paris. On instructions from his mother, Chester was going to kill T-Bone Morton.

  That is why, at the beginning of 1923, red with anger and anguish, Chester quit his job in the stockyards and signed aboard an ocean liner as an assistant to the cook. His job was to chop things—salads, pork loins, root vegetables—for the people who lived above in the sunlit cabins and sea-sprayed deck.

  For agonizing weeks Chester lived in the kitchen and rested in a dark steel bunk. He was seasick all of the time. He was hungry all of the time. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t re
ad, he couldn’t think.

  The only clear idea in his mind was that he was going to kill a man named T-Bone Morton and maybe then, at last, his mother would be at peace. Kill that man: it was his evening prayer, it was his morning ablution, it was his food and drink.

  Everyone avoided Chester. There was a palpable air of menace and disease around him like a stinking aura. One evening, while he was chopping mutton and repeating his only prayer in the kitchen, a busboy accidentally bumped into him.

  “Sorry. Gee.” The bus boy smiled shyly. “Excuse me, pal. Guess I still ain’t got my sea legs.”

  “I’ll give you sea legs,” Chester said, and without blinking cleaved off the boy’s left hand. The boy passed out. Then Chester used the cleaver to slice the boy’s legs to hamburger.

  He hauled the bleeding carcass into a janitor’s closet. Then he collected salt water from the bilge and doused the boy in it. The boy woke up.

  “Sea legs,” Chester mumbled.

  Then Chester locked the closet. The boy began to scream. Chester went back to work in the kitchen, covered in sheep’s guts and human blood. It was several hours before someone heard the boy screaming and took him to his bunk.

  That was Chester.

  The ship’s doctor was summoned. He didn’t know what to do. By then the boy was out of his mind.

  “I’ll never be able to fix those legs, not with the stuff we’ve got onboard ship. His muscles and nerves are all cut up. He tried to scream some more, but he couldn’t. He just kept whispering ‘sea legs.’ Now he’s in a coma. Exactly what am I supposed to do?”

  The captain decided to keep the busboy’s condition a secret from the passengers on board. Why panic paying customers?

  The boy never regained consciousness. He bled to death in his coma. He died before the ship reached shore. He was buried at sea. Under “Cause of Death” on the official document, the doctor wrote, “Unknown.”

  A week later, the ship pulled into the port of Marseilles. Chester had arrived in France. It took him several more weeks to get to Paris. He couldn’t speak French. At that point, he could barely speak any human tongue. Parisians would cross the street to avoid him even before they got a good look at his face. Chester was a snarling nightmare, a human wreck, because he was comprised almost entirely of searing vengeance. He was hoping to avenge a horrible crime that had been perpetrated on his mother. His mother had instilled that rage in her boy from the day of his birth.

  He wandered the crowded streets of Paris all night and day. He still couldn’t sleep, he hated the food, and the people in France were morons. For nearly five weeks he wandered aimlessly asking everyone the same riddle: “Where is T-Bone Morton?”

  Most people ignored him. Another drunken American. What could one do? They seemed to be simply everywhere these days. Ah, well. On to a late dinner.

  Then, early one morning in May, Chester found the object of his quest: Le Chat du Jazz. There was a sign out front that read in big, bold letters even he could recognize: T-Bone Morton. The rest of the scribbling was in French, but Chester knew he had found his prey. It was three o’clock in the morning. The stars above him were obscured by the street lamps. He checked his inside coat pocket, smiled for the first time in several years, and stumbled into the club. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust as he searched the room for any sign of someone who might be T-Bone Morton.

  At first no one noticed the demon at the door. Everyone in the club had been there since early evening, drinking, talking, taking a dinner break, drinking, dancing. There were still three couples left on the dance floor.

  Then Chester saw a man on the bandstand. The man was playing music. That man had to be T-Bone Morton. T-Bone played music. Chester grew calm and steady. He took a few staggering steps toward the bar and said loudly, “T-Bone Morton?”

  The bartender nodded, heavy-lidded. “Oui, T-Bone.”

  Chester nodded and moved slowly across the dance floor toward the bandstand. His eyes were locked on the devil’s musician. His hand moved slowly toward the inside pocket of his coat. He found his pistol, raised it, and pointed it right at T-Bone’s head.

  T-Bone saw the gun at the last minute. He didn’t stop playing. He knew that bullets were faster than musical notes, but he wanted to finish his solo.

  Then, at the exact moment Chester squeezed the trigger, Lisa appeared out of nowhere. There was a flash of something shiny, and she stabbed the man in his gun arm. Then she cut his throat. Chester’s bullet went into the ceiling of the club.

  Chester dropped to the floor like a broken elevator. Lisa’s hand moved at the speed of light, her knife was gone, back in its hiding place somewhere in her dress.

  In the chaos that ensued, several of the Frenchmen in the club hovered over Chester as he tried to talk. He managed to whisper a single word comprised of two syllables.

  “Mother.”

  Lisa heard him but she thought at the time that he was saying good-bye to his mother because he did not take another breath.

  Lisa looked at T-Bone. “Did he hurt you? What happened? What did he do to you?”

  “Nothing,” he assured her. “I think I’m okay. Man. Here’s your proof of God right here. That bullet should have killed me.”

  “This isn’t proof of God,” Lisa objected. “It’s proof of me.”

  T-Bone smiled with an overflowing heart. “Well, it certainly proves the rumor that nobody causes trouble in your club.”

  “Exactement!” She nodded curtly.

  “Yes, ma’am,” T-Bone said.

  Lisa looked down at the man bleeding on her floor. “Who was he?”

  “This guy?” T-Bone stared. “I don’t know him.”

  “You never saw him before?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t think so. Maybe in the war. I knew a lot of guys in the war.”

  “Maybe in the war.” She nodded. “Let’s look at his wallet. See who he was.”

  His name was Chester Echo. He was from Chicago, where T-Bone had lived before coming to fight in the war. There were seven American dollars and fifty francs in the wallet, but there was no clue whatsoever as to why he would want to kill T-Bone.

  “That’s it.” Lisa made a decision. “This man was out of his mind.”

  No one disagreed. The police were summoned. They pronounced the dead man dead. They asked everyone what had happened.

  Lisa told a very simple lie. Two men, the dead one and someone else, had been sitting and drinking, arguing about a woman all night. Finally, in the wee hours, one of the men rose up and stabbed the other, then ran away from the club.

  The police were satisfied. It was an affaire de coeur. What could one do? Ah, well. On to an early breakfast. That was that.

  Lisa closed the club just around sunrise. T-Bone helped her. They didn’t talk, but T-Bone went home with Lisa for the first time. They were both filled with life, holding hands. Everything on the walk to Lisa’s flat was wonderful. The sky was glorious, the buildings were heavenly, and a certain bridge was filled with rapture. They were young and alive and in love. It was Paris in the twenties.

  After they made love, T-Bone lay awake listening to the ticking of the clock on Lisa’s mantel. He was too happy to sleep. In the late morning light, he could see several dozen blackbirds on the clotheslines strung in between the buildings outside of the window. He nudged Lisa.

  “Look,” he said.

  “What?” She wasn’t asleep either.

  “Those birds. Out there on the clotheslines?”

  “I see them.” She sat up to see. “What about them?”

  “Imagine that the clotheslines make a music staff.” He stared at them. “Doesn’t that look like sheet music? Aren’t the blackbirds musical notes?”

  “Ah.” She cocked her head and looked again. “Yes they are. Well?”

  “Well what?” he asked.

  “What’s the melody that they are making?”

  “Oh.” He squinted. “That’s a good idea.”

  Soft
ly, he began to whistle the melody made by the birds on the wires. It was unexpectedly melodic. In fact, as it went on, it was mesmerizingly complex, looping, repeating, strange, filled with mystery, and altogether remarkable.

  “There,” he said when he was done.

  “Beautiful.” She closed her eyes.

  “See,” he said, “that’s a melody that God assembled just for us, just for you and me in this moment. No one else in the world has ever heard that.”

  Lisa took in a breath because she knew at that moment that she was in love with T-Bone. “You should use that melody.”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I don’t like to steal from other composers.”

  “Idiot,” she whispered, folding herself into his arms. “Who do you think composes everything anyway? Who do you think gives you all your fantastic solos when you play? You don’t think He’s giving you that melody now?”

  “I knew it,” T-Bone said, holding her tighter. “You do believe in God. The way you argue about the subject, I really didn’t know until this moment.”

  “I’m Catholic,” she told him, as if that were the perfect explanation. “You’d better write down that song before you forget it.”

  “Good point.” T-Bone took another look at the birds and nodded slowly. “I’d better write this down.”

  He threw his legs over the side of the bed to get a pencil and a piece of paper. Just as he did, the birds flew away. He was already beginning to forget how the melody went.

  “Gone,” he said softly.

  “Well, there you have it,” she said, getting up to make coffee.

  “What?” he asked, standing naked in front of the window and staring out at the empty clotheslines.

  “That is proof of God.” She reached for a cigarette. “Not somebody shooting somebody in a nightclub.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Last night,” she reasoned, striking a match, “you said that the bullet missing you was proof of God.”

  “Yes,” he prompted.