Out in the club Silva said, “Please, Herbie, have mercy. I never did it.” There was another thump, and the clatter of an ashtray hitting the floor. I stood up off the bed as quiet as I could, picked up my shoes, and took my jacket off the nail in the wall. I tiptoed across the room, my shoes in one hand, my jacket in the other. My cornet was out in the club by the bandstand. It made me sick to think of losing that Selmer. Maybe Tommy could get it for me if I ever got out of this.
Out in the club there came a shriek. “Socks, you’re gonna break my arm.” I reached the back wall, put my jacket on the floor, and with my free hand unlatched the window. I swung it down toward me. It gave off a squeal, for it hadn’t been opened for a long time. I stopped, holding it halfway open. From out in the club there came a snapping noise. Silva shrieked. “You busted it, Socks. You busted my arm.”
I lowered the window all the way. It made a good loud squeal. I flung my shoes and jacket into the alley. From the club I heard Herbie say, “What the hell was that?” I grabbed hold of the windowsill, heaved myself up, and shoved my head and shoulders through.
“Go see what that noise was, Socks. I’ll keep an eye on Angelo.”
I pulled myself through the window and out into the alley. Behind me I heard the door to the furnace room open. A voice shouted, “Hey, you.” I grabbed my shoes and jacket and ran in my stockings down the cold dirt of the alley. I didn’t look back, but kept on running. When I hit the street I turned left, away from the club, and ran on. There were a lot of people out, and they stared at me running along the sidewalk in my stockings, carrying my shoes and jacket, but I didn’t dare stop to put them on. I prayed I wouldn’t run into a cop, for he was bound to think I’d stolen the jacket. I came to the corner, swung around it, ran on up the block, across the street and down another side street. Here, finally, I stopped, panting and soaked with sweat, and looked back.
Nobody was coming that I could see. Quickly I knelt, put on my shoes, stood up and put on my jacket, already running again while I buttoned it. As I came out onto the avenue I saw a streetcar coming along. I jumped on, had another look behind me, and then squirmed into the middle of the streetcar where the crowd was thick. I’d got away—but everything I’d worked for was lost.
I took the streetcar as far as Madison and got off. I didn’t even have to think where I was going. There was only one place, and I went there, walking along as quick as I could, scared and lonely and looking around all the time, just in case.
When I got to Tommy’s it was five of ten, according to the clock in the drugstore across the street. Tommy wasn’t even home yet. Would Herb Aronowitz figure out I was likely to go to Tommy’s? I went around the corner and leaned against a building where I could see the stoop to Tommy’s boarding house. For a good half hour I waited there, and then I saw Tommy coming slowly up the street in his old brown overcoat, his cornet case in his hand. I waited until he was nearly at the stoop and darted out. “Tommy,” I called.
He looked up. “Hey, kid. What’re you doing here?”
“I’m in real trouble. Herbie is looking for me.” I looked around.
He looked around to see what I was looking for. “What the hell for?”
“I’ll tell you. Let’s get off the street.” We went up to Tommy’s little room, with the records scattered around the floor and clothes lying on a chair. We sat side by side on the bed and I told him the whole story—about Angelo Silva getting his arm busted, and me climbing out the window just as the gangster was coming into the furnace room.
“Maybe he didn’t see you. How could he tell who was going out the window when all he could see was a couple of legs?”
“Who else would they think it was?”
“Silva knows you was sleeping in there, but how would Herbie know? It could have been some waiter, anybody as far as those guys knew.”
“I can’t take a chance on it. Herbie’s going to take over the joint. When I don’t turn up tonight they’ll know for sure it was me who overheard them. If they ended up killing Silva they’ll want to make sure I don’t squeal on them.”
Tommy didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, “Maybe I can find out something. I have to be damn careful, though. I can’t let on that I know anything.”
“What’ll you do tonight?”
“Just go in as usual and play, like I don’t know nothing about it. I’ll see what I’ll see. Who knows, maybe they just roughed Silva up a little. Maybe he’ll be by the door as usual with his arm in a sling and some story about spraining his wrist when he was cranking his car.”
“What should I do, Tommy?”
He was quiet again. Then he said, “Maybe you should go home.”
“How can I do that? Once Herbie sees I’m not working at the club anymore, he’s bound to go around to Pa’s house to see if I’m there.”
“I thought your pa was a pal of Herb’s. Couldn’t he put in a good word?”
I remembered the way they’d pushed Pa around. “He’s not that much of a pal.”
“I still think you ought to go home, kid. Let your pa work it out somehow. Maybe send you out of town for a while. You got relatives downstate, ain’t you?”
“Please, Tommy. See what you can find out tonight.”
“Okay. I’ll try.” He shook his head. “I always figured I had ‘em beat for getting myself in messes, but you take the cake. You better hole up here tonight.”
“What if they come looking for me?”
It ain’t likely. I’ll lock you in when I go out. Better go out and get yourself a couple of sandwiches to tide you over.”
So I went around the corner to the greasy spoon, ate a ham sandwich even though I wasn’t hungry, and brought another one home. Tommy was already asleep when I got back. I snuggled down in his beat-up easy chair and went to sleep myself. I slept through to the middle of the afternoon, and woke up feeling nervous and queasy in my stomach. I wished I dared go for a walk so as not to feel so nervous, but I didn’t. Finally Tommy woke up. We chewed the fat for a little while. Then he said he had a date and was going to the steam baths to clean up first. “If anyone knocks, climb out the window and go down the fire escape.” Then he left. I heard the key turn in the lock.
After that there was nothing to do but wait. I sat on the floor playing records for a while, until I remembered that anybody out in the hall could hear the music and would know somebody was there. My heart wasn’t in it, anyway. I read a couple of old dime westerns Tommy had lying around and finally, around ten o’clock, I turned off the lights and lay down on Tommy’s bed. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, for I’d gotten used to staying up late; but by and by I dozed off, and slept through until Tommy came in at eight o’clock, carrying coffee and pastrami sandwiches.
“Well, you was right, kid. Herbie thinks it was you in there.”
“What did he say? Is he taking over the club?”
“Looks like it,” Tommy said. “Silva wasn’t nowhere to be seen. Herb said Silva had an accident and asked Herb to cover for him at the club. Everything was to go on normal.”
“Do you think they killed him?”
He thought about it. “Probably not. They didn’t have to. Probably just busted him up enough so’s he’d be out of circulation for a while.”
“And he knows it was me who was going out the window.”
“Yeah, I guess he does. He came around after the second set and said, ‘Where’s the kid?’ I said I didn’t know, but that Silva told me he caught you stealing liquor last week and was going to can you. I don’t know as he believed it.”
“Why wouldn’t he believe it?”
“He saw your cornet case sitting there. He said, ‘Isn’t that the kid’s horn?’ I said, ‘No, it’s mine, I was lending it to the kid.’ He said, ‘Well leave it sit there for a while.’ “
“Boy, am I in a mess.”
Tommy didn’t say anything for a bit, but chewed off a bite of the pastrami sandwich. Finally he said, “Kid, I hate to tell
you this, but you got worse trouble than you think. Herbie thinks your pa had something to do with it.”
“Pa? He thinks that? Why would Pa have anything to do with it?”
“He told me that once, a while back, your pa sent you around to that other club where we was playing, with some cock-and-bull story about looking for a wrench. He said, “Frankie Horvath is up to something. If you see the kid, tell him I want to talk to him.”
“Pa didn’t have anything to do with it,” I cried. “I made that whole story up myself so’s to get in there and hear you guys.”
Tommy nodded. “Knowing you, I can believe it. It’s just the thing you’d do. But that ain’t the way Herbie sees it. You got to remember, these here gangsters don’t trust nobody or nothing. They see some old pooch sniffing around the place, they take it for a cop. That’s what it’s like being a gangster. You sit with your back to the wall all the time, sleep with one eye open and a machine gun for a pillow. A guy like Herb Aronowitz has got more money than most banks, and nobody messes with him. But I wouldn’t want to be him for all the tea in China. He can’t take a woman out to dinner without worrying she’s going to double-cross him to the cops, he can’t take his dog for a walk after dinner without worrying there’s somebody down behind every bush drawing a bead on him. It don’t take very much to get him suspicious of somebody.”
“What do you think he might try to do to Pa?”
Tommy shrugged and finished off his sandwich. “I couldn’t even guess.”
“But Pa didn’t have anything to do with any of it.”
“It ain’t no use telling me that,” Tommy said. “I already believe you.”
I sat there thinking. “What am I going to do, Tommy?”
“Well, like I said, hide out for a while. Go visit your people downstate for a few months. These things blow over. In a few months Herb’ll have six other people he’s suspicious of and will have forgotten all about you.”
“What about Pa?”
“That’s something you got to decide for yourself, kid.”
“What a mess,” I said. “How did I manage to get myself so messed up, Tommy?”
He sat there thinking and licking the grease off his fingers for a while. Then he said, “Well, I’ll tell you, kid, I done the same thing myself a few times. What it comes out of is thinking you just got to have a certain thing, no matter what. You won’t let nothing stand in your way and you go barreling after it, without seeing how it might go wrong. It comes over you so hot it doesn’t matter what you have to do to get it. Lie, cheat, steal—it all seems okay in your mind. Next thing you know you got a lion by the tail.”
“I never stole,” I said.
“Sure you did. You borrowed that seventy-five cents off your brother and never had no intention of paying it back.”
“I paid it back.” But I couldn’t remember if I had or not.
“Now mind you,” Tommy said, “I ain’t blaming you. I did all the same stuff myself. Worse. I stole the first decent cornet I ever owned.”
“You stole it?”
“Out of a pawnshop. It was in the window, new and shiny. I don’t doubt but what it was stole in the first place. I was playing an old beat-up piece of tin I rented from school. Leaked like a sieve. You could hear the air coming out of the valves every time you blew it. St. Peter hisself couldn’t of played it in tune. That cornet in the pawnshop window drove me crazy. I used to go around there every day, just to look at it. Just stand for a half an hour and look at it. One night I heaved a rock through the window, snatched the horn out of there and ran like the wind. Well, naturally the guy in the pawnshop knew in a minute who stole it. If I’d had any brains I’d of taken some other stuff, too, but when he saw it was only the cornet, he went around the neighborhood looking for me. I wasn’t hard to find, for everybody knew who the damn kid was who kept them awake tootling that horn at all hours. The cops caught me at home red-handed. The judge said it was either reform school, or a hundred-dollar fine. That was the time Pa couldn’t work because of his bad leg, and we needed the money I was making. Sis went out and got the hundred bucks. I don’t know where she got it, and I never asked. And on top of it, I was back playing that leaky piece of tin all over again. That’s the way it is when you get so stuck on something you can’t see anything else—you ain’t the only one who gets hurt.”
“So you think I did wrong right from the beginning?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t say that. It ain’t up to me to say if anybody’s right or wrong. You got to settle that out for yourself.”
I hung my head down and sat there thinking. Outside horns honked faintly, and trucks ground down the street. Finally Tommy said, “I got to get some sleep, kid.”
GETTING MYSELF TO admit that they were right and I was wrong was about the hardest thing I ever did. I didn’t want to admit it—I hated having to do that, and for a long time I sat there in Tommy’s chair while he snoozed in bed, thinking of all the arguments on my side of it. Why was it my fault that Herbie Aronowitz had got suspicious of Pa for no reason? Why was it my fault I fell in love with some kind of music Ma and Pa hated? Why should Pa have the say about how I lived my life—that I had to spend my days in the plumbing business and no choice left to me? What was right about that?
They were all good arguments. But they weren’t good enough. It was the way Tommy said. I’d gone steaming off on my own without looking down the road to see what might come of it, and I’d got Pa in trouble. It didn’t matter that I had a right to steam off on my own; what mattered was that Pa was in trouble for something I’d done. What was going to happen to my music? I didn’t know; I’d have to worry about that later.
Had Herbie Aronowitz already gone looking for Pa? There was no telling. How much of a chance did I have of persuading Herb that Pa didn’t have anything to do with it? No telling about that, either. But I’d got Pa into it, and it was up to me to get him out. Oh, that was a mighty scary idea, for there was no telling what Herbie might do to me, either. But I had to try.
The safest thing, I figured, was to go over to the Charleston a little before midnight. Normally I would have been there earlier, but I figured Herbie wouldn’t know that. I’d walk in like everything was normal, and maybe it would be. Maybe Herbie would have cooled down a little and turned his mind to something else. But if he hadn’t, by midnight the waiters would already be there. I figured Herbie wouldn’t get rough with me with the waiters around.
I killed some time at a movie, but it didn’t help much, for I couldn’t concentrate on the picture. All I could think was, why me? How come it was me who had got into this mess? Why wasn’t it happening to somebody else? I knew that what Tommy had said was right—I’d plunged ahead towards what I wanted, and ended up running off a cliff. Still, the words kept going through my head: Why me? Why wasn’t it happening to somebody else?
At ten to twelve I left the movie theater and walked over to the Charleston, wishing I was going anywhere else. I just kept putting one foot in front of the next, and by and by I was there. For a minute I stood outside, hoping that something would happen to save me. But it didn’t. I took a deep breath and went on in.
One of the waiters was sweeping the floor, and the other was in the kitchen washing glasses, for of course I hadn’t been there to clean the place up that morning. The one sweeping gave me a look when I came in. “Where the hell was you?” he said.
Herbie Aronowitz was sitting at a table with a cashbox in front of him, counting money. When the waiter spoke, he looked up. “Well. The kid.”
“I’m sorry I let you down the last couple of nights, Mr. Aronowitz,” I said. “My Grampa’s mighty sick and I went over to see him.”
“Yeah? Tommy tell you I wanted to see you?”
“I haven’t seen Tommy for a couple of days. I was over at my Grampa’s. They don’t think he’ll last.”
“Oh yeah?” Herbie said. “Well give your ma my condolences.”
“Grampa hasn’t died yet.”<
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He looked back at the cashbox. “Give ‘em to her anyway.” He started counting money again, laying it out in neat piles of bills. I headed for the kitchen to get a mop. “Hold up a minute, kid,” Herbie said. “I wanna talk to you. Go out back and wait for me.”
For a couple of seconds I thought of making a dash for the front door, but of course that wasn’t the point of the whole thing. So I turned, went out into the furnace room, shut the door behind me, and sat down on the cot. Sweat was dripping out of my armpits and rolling in cold drops down my side, and my stomach was like ice. I just went on sitting there. By and by I heard a scale run down the piano. In a couple of minutes a bass drum thumped: the drummer was tightening the skin and testing the sound. Finally there came that old familiar warm-up phrase on the cornet, the one I first heard in that cold cellar—was it really two years ago? And in a moment they were playing “Whispering,” a tune Tommy liked to open with, for it was easy and a hit with people.
Then the door to the furnace room opened. Herbie came in. He’d been waiting until the music started so as to cover sounds from the furnace room. He shut the door behind him, and stood there in that same blue suit, no tie, looking at me. There was no expression on his face; he just stared. Then he said, “C’mere, kid.” I stood up off the cot and took a couple of steps toward him, still far enough away so he couldn’t reach me.
“Kid, you’re getting too big for your britches. You and your pa.”
Out in the club the piano was soloing. “Pa didn’t have anything to do with it. Honest. I made up that whole story about the wrench myself, so I could get in to hear the band. I wanted Tommy to give me lessons.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to hear nothing about no lessons. What’s your game, kid?” He squinted at me. “What’re you and your pa up to?”
The Jazz Kid Page 14
