Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  “Y’all arrive last night? Together?” asked the manager, as a tiny Jewish man joined them and asked directions to a beauty salon, a book store, a delicatessen, and a travel agency.

  “That’s right,” smiled Mingo. “There’re two more of us, but they’re in the hospital.”

  Sheffield and Kingstree walked around Montgomery most of the day. At lunch they read about themselves in the Atlanta newspaper. They weren’t of course mentioned by name. The article, “Drug Gangs War at Stone Mountain,” emphasized police optimism that a break was coming their way soon on the cocaine-trafficking racket. There was clear evidence of internecine battling between rival rings in the Atlanta area. On Monday afternoon at Stone Mountain Park, factions had apparently crossed paths, and violence had erupted. The police had captured two men—one on top of the mountain, the second in a helicopter; both unconscious, the second wounded in the hand—who had presumably fired on one another after a chase involving stolen park vehicles. Both men had known connections to local financier John G. Neill, long-suspected head of a big Colombiabased cocaine refinery. Moreover, on the scene was an abandoned motorcycle registered to a man recently found murdered in Myrtle Beach, North Carolina; a man who also had connections to John G. Neill. Other men appeared to have been participants in the gang war episode at Stone Mountain Park, including, possibly, an escaped convict named Simon “The Weeper” Berg, who’d been rescued, after his capture by park security, by a man impersonating an FBI agent known as Whitmore. There followed a very unflattering description of Raleigh given by the young security guard.

  “I thought Gates owned that motorcycle,” pondered Mingo.

  “I thought we were going straight to New Orleans to cut some records,” Kingstree sighed.

  After lunch, the two men visited the brass star embedded on the spot outside the capitol where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated (and where Varina was not wearing the necklace Gates had sold C. P. Calhoun); afterward, they visited the Baptist church on Dexter Avenue where Martin Luther King, Jr. had organized the Montgomery bus boycott. They were on a bus themselves, returning to the Dogwood Motel, when Mingo said, “I couldn’t believe it when I heard they’d shot Reverend King. Could you?”

  “I didn’t have a bit of trouble,” Kingstree replied.

  “Well, we know a guy named Kettell, Raleigh and I do, and he was celebrating it. The assassination. Raleigh got right up and walked out of the restaurant! I was always sorry I didn’t do it, too.” Sheffield turned pink. “I was too shy to stand up. I just sat there and said, ‘I hate you, Mingo Sheffield, you fat stupid chicken.’ ” He squeezed over closer to the window to give his companion a little more room on the seat. “Because, Toutant, I’ll tell you a secret. I sometimes used to think, well, maybe Martin Luther King was really Jesus come back, you know, to see if he couldn’t fix things.” The fat face crumpled. “And here I was, just sitting there at the Lotus House letting Nemours Kettell make fun of him and laugh at his getting murdered, just like the Romans did. I went in the bathroom and cried. Did you ever think that?”

  “Think what?”

  “That he was Jesus.”

  “Nope.” The black man stretched his long legs out in the aisle and rubbed the toe of his beige shoe against the back of a peach pants leg. Then he pointed up and down the bus. “I think King fixed it so blacks could sit anywhere we wanted to on this bus…Soon as we did, white people quit riding buses.” He leaned down and brushed a speck of dirt from his shoe. “That’s my own personal opinion. Soon as we could live anywhere in town we wanted to, white people picked up and moved to the suburbs. Soon as we could get in the booths to vote Democrat, white people signed up with the Republicans. There’s no catching white people. But King was good. I don’t deny it. Ring that bell cord; here’s our stop.”

  Mingo was thoughtful as they ambled slowly down the block toward the Dogwood Motel. Finally, he said, “In Thermopylae, my home town? A rich girl in junior high with me had a dance at the hotel. We have this old hotel that’s got a ballroom. Anyhow, she didn’t ask me. I guess I wasn’t very popular, I guess. I was, you know, fu…fu…fat, and I got teased and sort of laughed at, except Raleigh never did. But I just wanted to see what this dance looked like, so I went to the hotel anyhow. And they had a black band? And this band had to come in from the back through the kitchen. They couldn’t even walk through the lobby. So well, what I mean is, I was telling my momma, and she said, ‘Baby, if you feel left out and all hurt inside, ’magine how colored folks feel.’ ”

  “Like fat white people?”

  “I guess you mean I could have lost weight?”

  “Maybe.” Kingstree rumbled into song. “ ‘Them that’s got shall get, them that’s not shall lose. So the Bible says, and it sure ain’t news.’…You know that song?”

  Sheffield had begun humming. He stopped and shook his head. “No. But the thing is, if I hear something, somehow I can always sing it back, I guess. Or, you know, play it on the piano. I mean, not like you. I just mostly sing and play for my church. You’re professional.”

  “I sure am.” Kingstree nodded at the door and told Sheffield to meet him back in the bar.

  It was Happy Hour in the Alabama Room at the motel, but there was no one in the room to be happy except the bartender. As long as his guests drank, this man had no objection at all to their using the piano or even playing their own saxophones. His theory was that even bad live music was bound to be more interesting than watching a Little House on the Prairie episode for the fifth time.

  Fastening the brass horn over his pleated peach jacket, Toutant Kingstree said to Sheffield, “Sit down. Okay, now listen.” He played quietly, bent over by the piano bench.

  “Oh, ‘Stormy Weather’! I know that.” Mingo’s fat pink fingers stretched over the keys and began moving.

  “Well. Okay. That’s okay.” The black man rubbed his hair, then his nose, then his mouthpiece. Then he nodded. “Now listen.” He played the melody of “St. James Infirmary.” “You know it?”

  Mingo shook his head. Kingstree played it again, slowly. Mingo played it back. “That’s a sad tune.” Mingo sighed.

  “Right.” The saxophonist reached over the fat man’s shoulder; his long fingers jumped from single notes to chords in the bass. “Do that.” Mingo did it. “Listen up. Da BUM puh da da BUM. Hear the skip? Don’t push it, lean behind it. Lean back. Lean back. Good. All right. Now listen.” He raised the saxophone.

  Mingo slapped his hands. “ ‘Honeysuckle Rose!’ I always thought it was a fast song.”

  “Let’s us go slow.” Kingstree nodded the beat at him with the horn and soon Sheffield joined in with his skipping chords, stopping for corrections and instructions along the way. Then they played “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” Then they played “See See Rider.” Sheffield, his face flushed, his arms glistening, leaped up from the bench to try to hug the other man. “Boy boy boy! You are so good!”

  Toutant Kingstree smiled. His gold tooth sparkled. “You’re not as bad as I figured on. Now, pay attention. We’ll do a local tune. ‘Alabama Bound.’ You know it? Right, that’s right. You keep playing that melody. That’s good. Now, listen to what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna play around, you stick on that tune, okay? Okay. Here we go.” His fingers floated over the stops.

  As soon as Kingstree signaled Mingo to a final chord, they were both startled by people clapping: the bartender, two couples who’d wandered in from the lobby, and, near the door, Simon Berg. Beside Berg were shopping bags and he was dressed in a new black overcoat with a black homburg. He walked over. “So, Sheffield, you said you were a piano player.” He tapped the fat man’s back. “You’re a piano player. Anywise, I’m impressed. I’m talking human beings, of course. Toutant here is…” Weeper thought a moment. “Toots is chthonic.”

  “Whatever grabs you, Berg. Where’ve you been, anyhow?” asked Kingstree as the three gathered chairs around a table. “You steal your new rags off an undertaker?”

  Mingo squatted down
to stare in Berg’s face. “Weeper! You didn’t used to have brown eyes! And you didn’t used to be so tan either. I swear you used to have green eyes, didn’t you? Gollee. You look like an Indian.”

  “Brazilian, maybe?” Berg replied.

  “You seen the brothers?” Kingstree asked. “They still at the hospital?”

  “Nah, I just called. They let the kid go. With him already, who could know if his skull was cracked or not? And where I’ve been is walking my lousy dogs off looking for a kosher deli in this town.” The little man pulled off his homburg, revealing further radical changes in his appearance. His formerly gray straight hair was now black and curly, and atop it was a yarmulke.

  Mingo pointed at the black skullcap. “And I didn’t know you were religious! I wish you’d told me you were going to a synagogue; I’ve never been to one.”

  Berg began pulling groceries, paper cartons, and paper plates from his shopping bags. “With friends such as yourselves, let me be honest. I stepped in, a few measly minutes, for my brother Nate who personally never missed a Shabbat himself once in his life.” Unwrapping his packages, the convict gave a long sad sigh, then blinked his watering eyes. “Nate always used to say to me, ‘Simon, Simon, it would kill you to come to synagogue? Frogs and lice and locusts, et cetera, et cetera, would land on your rotten head if once in a blue moon for Pesach you should come sit down at a Seder with your own family? You can’t be bothered to read a few lousy pages of the Haggadah before our mother dies?’” Berg set a jar of horseradish on the table. “He always said, ‘So, every Passover the Bergs have to sit with two empty chairs? One for Elijah the Prophet, one for Simon the criminal bum?’ He did not mince words, my brother Nate.” Next Berg shook out two short white candles from a box with a Star of David on it. “Twenty years ago today Nate dies from overwork selling women’s lousy underwear. So may they all rest in peace.” He lit the candles and stuck each one in an ashtray. Then he ordered glasses and a bottle of red wine from the intrigued bartender, who was unabashedly staring at the group.

  As Berg’s small, freshly tanned hands arranged five paper plates around the circular table, his sad voice kept talking. “From overwork and virtue, Nate dies, and Simon the bum walks free as air. I said to God, ‘So what is this? Last week you hang Tampa Freddie. This week you snuff my brother Nate. This is Passover? This is when the angel of crummy death’s supposed to pass over the houses of the good Jews? So instead he nips in and snatches my brother Nate, a better Jew you’ll never meet since Abraham?’ ”

  Mingo picked up a box of matzo crackers. “Oh, it’s Passover! Is that when you smeared the blood of the lamb on the door?”

  Berg shrugged. “This we forgot to do. So God had to grab Nate, he’s such a stickler for details?”

  “I mean, in the old days.” Sheffield patted his friend’s arm. “I’m sorry about your brother. I didn’t know today was Passover. You know, Jesus went to Jerusalem on Passover. For His Last Supper.”

  “Not a wise decision, I hear,” Berg said, as he carefully arranged a piece of parsley and a hard-boiled egg on each paper plate.

  “No, really, His Last Supper was actually a Passover meal. Remember? When He breaks the bread and says, ‘This is my body.’ ”

  Berg poured red wine in the glasses. “You’re telling me Christ turned himself into a matzo ball?”

  Kingstree’s laughter crackled like foil. “Berg. What the hell are you doing, man? What is all this stuff?”

  The convict sighed again, then looked across the table at them. “Spare me a minute. For Pesach, a man should be in the presence of pals. Do me the civility, will yah?” He raised his glass, and so they raised theirs. “So, Nate,” said Berg to the cork ceiling, “Hag Sameath, a good Yom Tov. Next year in Jerusalem, right? Olov hashalom.”

  When Raleigh and Gates Hayes finally located their friends in the Dogwood Room, they found the three men, the bartender, and a young house-hunting couple from Birmingham, all crowded together at a round candlelit table near the piano. They were all drinking red wine and eating big crackers with sardines on them.

  “No,” Mingo happily explained. “It’s gefilte fish. And this is parsley for spring.” He bit off a sprig. “And this is the bitter horseradish of slavery. Sit down, Raleigh. Boy, Gates, do you look a lot better! And these eggs are for, you know, new hope. And the matzo crackers are the bread of the poor, because the Jews didn’t have a chance to put in any leaven when they were in a hurry to escape from the pharaohs and we’re all supposed to remember what it’s like to be in bondage and hope that everybody can get set free.”

  “Right on,” said Toutant Kingstree and poured the bartender another glass of wine. There were three empty bottles on the table.

  “And the wine, well, the first glass you call maror…no, that’s wrong. It’s kiddush, and it’s the day of deliverance. Is that right, Weeper? Gosh, you should tell the story.”

  “Why me? You’re a regular rabbi, you’re a tsadik with your midrash yet. A bona fide Solomon in the temple.”

  Gates, wearing his own skullcap of white bandages, pulled over a chair. “You’re looking good, Weep. Snappy outfit. You tan quick, too. Hey, is this a party?”

  “It’s a Passover party,” Mingo explained, and popped an entire hard-boiled egg in his mouth. “How ’bout another bottle, Bobby?” The bartender headed toward the counter at a tilt.

  “Well,” rumbled Kingstree, “long as where we’re passing over to is New Orleans.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Raleigh Hayes, and squeezed his chair into the circle.

  Simon Berg, pouring out wine for the Hayes brothers, surprisingly said, “Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech haolam borei p’ri ha-gafen.”

  “That’s real Hebrew,” Mingo Sheffield informed them. “It means, ‘Thank God for the wine.’ ”

  “Hey hey,” Gates raised his glass. “L’chaim!”

  By midnight, the Passover party was, in Toutant Kingstree’s phrase, “socking and rocking.” He and Mingo played one request after another for the customers who kept drifting into the Dogwood Room, drawn by the music. The young house-hunting woman from Birmingham said she could still play the clarinet a little and it was too bad she didn’t still have one. “I’ve got one in my suitcase,” Mingo exclaimed, and galloped off to get it. The three then played “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Sweet Georgia Brown” and, for Gates, “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man.” Then Mingo sang “Wichita Lineman” for Bobby the bartender, and Mingo and Toutant harmonized especially for Weeper Berg, “Go down Moses, way down in Egypt land. Tell old Pharaoh to let my people go”—which was not exactly an orthodox Hallel song, but did tell the same story. At any rate, either the gospel tune or his new brown contact lenses brought on such an attack of tears that Berg had to leave the bar. When he returned, he was struggling with his enormous bass fiddle. He dragged it over to the piano, stood on the edge of the dais, rested the bottom of the bass on the floor, and joined the trio, then in the middle of Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” His enthusiasm dragged them pretty quickly to a flat halt.

  “Ummm.” Kingstree shook his head. “I like you, Simon. I like you a lot. I don’t mean to heavy up on you, but…you’re not so good.”

  The now-swarthy convict leaned on his fiddle’s neck and scratched his new black curls. “Will yah give me a break? From a lousy paperback I had twelve lessons.”

  Mingo said, “I think that’s wonderful.”

  “With the Glory Bound baboons, all we played was ‘Amazing Grace’ except when we played ‘Rock of Ages,’ you know what I mean?”

  Ten minutes later, Kingstree had reduced Berg’s contribution to a simple, repetitive picking pattern, and stationed the convict beside Mingo so the fat man could call out his chord changes. Then they played “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,” with Simon weeping from start to finish, either from pleasure or eye irritation, or both.

  “Dammit,” sighed Gates back at the table. “You know, Lovie kept telling me I was
going to be sorry I skipped out of those piano lessons. What a loser. Listen, Raleigh, let me go get Daddy’s trumpet and you play with them. You were good, remember?”

  But Hayes shook his head and crossed his arms and said, “No. I’m not going to make a fool of myself voluntarily. I’ve had too many compulsory opportunities in the last couple of weeks.”

  “Aww, give it a shot.”

  “Gates, I’d as soon dance naked in the streets.” Raleigh stood up. “Look, let’s get going early in the morning, okay?”

  “Stop worrying about Daddy. He’s fine.”

  “That’s what you said about Roxanne.” Raleigh told his brother not to stay up late, not to drink any more, and not to fiddle with his bandage. He left the bar as the now fairly sizable crowd applauded Toutant Kingstree’s theme song, “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans.”

  Raleigh was worried, and worrying more the closer he drew in space and time to Jackson Square, noon, March 31. The date had seemed, when he’d opened that infuriating note in Starry Haven, so far away, so long to wait, so ridiculous to propose. Now he was in Alabama, and it was Tuesday the twenty-ninth; no, it was already Wednesday. Back in his motel room, he tried for the third time that day to call his aunt Victoria. Yes, the St. Ann’s Hotel was still certain that she’d checked in late Sunday night. They were still certain she was not in her room. Raleigh left his number. He took a shower, checked his bruises and cuts in the mirror. Then in his bathrobe he sat on the bed, pulled over Gates’s leather bag, and took their father’s trumpet out. For a long time he held it, fingering the stops without looking. Finally he took his towel, spit on it, and rubbed at the tarnish. Then he started to play.

  After a while, he put the horn back and called Aura and apologized for waking her up.