Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  “She’s some singer,” Earley said again, and went on to explain that in the year since finishing high school, Billie had been trying to find work around Los Angeles, but had decided after her mother’s death to come East to find her grandfather. “She just had this feeling, goddamnedest thing, this feeling he could help her.”

  She knew nothing about her grandfather except the penned words “Jubal Rogers, Thermopylae, N.C.” on a few old 78 rpm record albums, one of them by Billie Holiday. And her mother’s story that Josh Rogers had kept the records and wanted his child named Billie because his father had been a great jazz musician. Earley Hayes pointed at the drummer. “Allen here’s had Billie over at the university music school, interviewing, and they’re going to take her in, this fall. We have a deal. She’ll try going. See how she likes it. Right, Billie?”

  “I’ll try it,” she agreed. “But all I want to do is sing. Victoria says I ought to do what I want to do. Oh, look, there’s a guy selling Popsicles; I’m going to go get one. Anybody else? Okay, be right back.” She took off in an easy run after the white pushcart.

  “Isn’t she something?” Earley asked his son.

  So many questions jumbled together in Raleigh he couldn’t even think through to an order in which to ask them; it was as if someone had poured a jigsaw puzzle of the ocean in front of him with all the pieces of the borders missing, so there were no square edges to start with. Finally, he said, “Daddy, can I talk to you a second? I’m not really sure what you’re up to. Not that that’s any news. But I came down here to put you in the hospital. You need to be in a hospital. You promised me.…What do you mean, rehearsing? Rehearsing what?”

  The old man lit another cigarette as he told his son that Allen Thornhill had arranged with a friend who owned a small club called The Cave for them to play there the next few nights, after the scheduled performers. He told Raleigh that he’d tried to find some other musicians he’d once known, to join them, but the men had died. At any rate, he couldn’t go to the hospital just yet, because he knew they’d try to stop him from playing.

  Raleigh rubbed hard at his scratchy cheeks. “You run off and come down here to play in a nightclub?! At seventy years old, you suddenly decide to be a trumpet player?!”

  Earley Hayes outrageously replied, “That’s right.”

  “After Aunt Vicky and I came all this way to try to get you to save your goddamn life!”

  “I am saving my goddamn life, Specs.”

  “What did she say about this when she found you?”

  “Vicky?” Earley grinned. “Well, the first thing she did when she found me was she hauled off and slapped me. Right in the hotel lobby. She’d been saving it up for fifty years, and, man, it knocked me back into my chair.”

  “Aunt Victoria hit you?”

  Earley was pointing at a faded scratch on his cheek when they heard a voice call, “Raleigh, Raleigh! There he is! Raleigh!”

  Hayes turned around. Mingo Sheffield, wearing his green sports jacket and carrying two large shopping bags, was trotting across the square toward them. Behind him, sun flashing on his peach suit and on the metal clasps of his saxophone case, came Toutant Kingstree.

  “Well, hi, Mr. Hayes! Boy, are we glad to see you! You remember me, Mingo Sheffield? Raleigh’s best friend? You just about drove him crazy, you know. What in the world made you run away like that? You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” The fat man hugged Raleigh’s father. “But here you are, and we made it, and boy it’s just wonderful to see you! What a beautiful day! And gollee, New Orleans! This is our friend, Toutant Kingstree? He knows your old friend Jubal, and wait till you hear him play! This is Raleigh’s daddy, Toutant. Right where he said he’d be. After all that!”

  Everyone was introduced, and Toutant Kingstree said, “Y’all playing here? This a good spot? Good tips?”

  Mingo jabbered on to Raleigh, “Guess who I saw this morning?”

  “Gates, I hope. Why didn’t he come with you?”

  “What do you play?” Earley asked Kingstree, who knelt on the pavement and took his saxophone out of its case.

  Raleigh pulled Mingo aside. He watched his father and Allen Thornhill talking with Kingstree as Mingo whispered to him, “Gates said he was asleep, but I think he’s kind of scared to come. You know, he’s kind of shy. But I told Weeper to make him come, and we’d just wait for him here with your dad. Raleigh, you must be so happy. But did you get any sleep? You sure don’t look like it. And your daddy looks awful. I didn’t want to tell him so. I saw your aunt Victoria! She was in a store right next to her hotel. St. Ann’s Hotel. Well, I got up early and I thought I’d just check by there for her before I met Toutant. And so we had some coffee. These are hers.” He held up the shopping bags.

  “Hers? Where is she?”

  “She’s coming in a minute. She just ducked into that little shop right over there.” He pointed through the row of magnolia trees. “Oh, there’s Billie! Billie!” Sheffield called to Billie Rogers, strolling back with an Eskimo Pie.

  “You met her already?” Raleigh asked.

  “Billie? Oh, yeah. This morning. With Vicky. Hey, Billie. Vicky says she’ll be here in a second. Then she wants you to come back to the hotel and try this stuff on.” He shook the shopping bags.

  “Oh, hi, Mingo. Hey, great, let me see.” The girl ran up to them, took the bags, and ran back to the fountain, where she sat down and began pulling dresses out of tissue paper.

  Mingo pointed at her. “Isn’t it just amazing, Raleigh! It makes me want to give God a great big hug, I swear it does. Everybody all together, and it all working out this way? I mean your aunt Vicky and Billie finding each other, after so many broken hearts, and your dad, and now, oh look at that.” His moony face bobbed at the three musicians. Toutant Kingstree had assembled his saxophone; now he strapped it on and began playing scales.

  Raleigh squeezed his friend’s wrist. “Broken hearts? What the hell is everybody talking about?”

  “Why, finding Billie!” Sheffield looked hard at Raleigh. “Oh, gollee, your daddy didn’t tell you yet?…Uh oh. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but I mean, gosh, Vicky told me when we had our coffee. She’s so happy, Raleigh, when I started in crying, she just started in crying too.…Oh, Billie, I like that dress! Hold it up! Can I see?”

  At that moment Raleigh saw his favorite aunt hurrying briskly down the wide stone steps into the square. She wore her blue traveling suit and carried two more shopping bags. He had started toward her, he had seen her notice him, when behind him he heard Mingo saying, “Billie, I just have to tell you this. I mean maybe you don’t believe Vicky yet. Maybe you don’t even want to believe her. But I sure hope you’re going to give her a chance. You know what? You and your grandmother are about the two bravest people I ever met. I mean that, as God is my witness.”

  Raleigh Hayes heard these words, and like a man who’s been shot, he walked on for ten more feet before his knee buckled. Even then, he simply kept moving straight ahead until he reached his aunt Victoria.

  “Well, Raleigh, you finally got here. Why in the world didn’t you get a decent night’s sleep, why didn’t you shower and shave? Look at yourself. There’s no reason to look like a slovenly mess no matter how crazy the world’s gotten.”

  Hayes stared furiously at the square-jawed woman. “Aunt Victoria. You owe me an apology and an explanation.”

  The spectacles were pulled slowly down the sharp nose, and the ice-blue eyes looked at him calmly. “I don’t owe you any such thing.”

  “You used me.”

  “Used you?” She pinched her earlobe. “I see. You think I knew what Earley was up to all along? Well, I certainly didn’t. You think that idiot bothered to tell me he’d found Billie? Or even that he was looking for Jubal? Of course he didn’t. He just took off like a sneak thief in a Hong Kong alley. And you didn’t bother to call and tell me either. Aura told me you found Jubal. Aura. Sit down on that bench. You’ve got the shakes.” She nudged her nephew wi
th her elbow to the black wrought-iron bench, pushed him back onto it, and, placing her shopping bags beside him, stood facing him. “I swear I’m going to kill Earley. I told him not to just drop this on you like he does everything.”

  Raleigh stared at her. “Did I just hear, overhear, Mingo Sheffield imply that that girl, that Billie Rogers is, is…related to you?”

  She stared back at him for a while. Then she nodded. “She’s my granddaughter.”

  “I thought she was Jubal Rogers’s granddaughter.”

  “She is.”

  Raleigh kept shaking his head. “I don’t believe this. I goddamn don’t believe it. It can’t be true.”

  Victoria’s white watch-spring curls stirred in the soft breeze. She patted them back in place. “Why’s that, Raleigh?”

  “Why?! First of all, for God’s sake, she’s black! I mean, frankly, Aunt Victoria, how can you say, ‘Why?’ Like I should just say, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ When I’ve known you all my life, and I thought we were, well, kind of close, and well, understood each other pretty well. And you never bothered to mention once, not once, that you had a child?! Much less a grandchild?! Much less, excuse me, please, but really! A black teenaged grandchild! You never told me, nobody ever told me, you were even married, much less—”

  “I never was married.…This happened a long time before you were born, Raleigh. And I didn’t talk about it to anybody. Then or later. It was nobody’s business but mine.”

  “I don’t understand. How could you have a child and nobody know?”

  “By being a coward and listening to your father. When he was an even worse coward. I gave the baby up for adoption. And that’s the short and simple of it. I didn’t know anything about Billie until Aura told me what Earley was up to, sending you to give Jubal that message.”

  “I just, I, I, I’m…” Raleigh took off his glasses. “I’m speechless. You might as well tell me the sky was green.” Elbows on knees, Hayes put his head in his hands.

  “Well, Raleigh…” He felt her hand briefly touch his hair. “Sometimes it is. If you’d been with me in Fiji when that hurricane hit and a tree landed right on top of my bus, you’d have seen the whole sky look as green as grass. The sky can turn green, Raleigh. Now listen to me. I know you’re shocked, but I want you to calm down before Billie notices. We’ve already upset her enough as it is.”

  Raleigh looked over at the small group of musicians in the sunlit square. His father was nodding as Toutant Kingstree played his saxophone while the girl sang, “I’ll Get By.”

  After a while, Raleigh said, “What does she think of all this? Does she know?”

  “Yes. I don’t know if she believes it. I’m not sure I would have thought I had the right to tell her. Earley did.…And I’m glad.” Victoria pinched hard at her nose, then sat down beside her nephew on the bench; her back in the blue tailored jacket as straight as it had been in the WAC uniform so many years earlier. “Raleigh, I’m an old woman. I’ve been angry most of my life. Mad at the world for being so damn full of sloth and cruelty. So mad at Earley I thought I’d lose my mind. Mad at myself. Fifty years ago I said no to something. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I was right. That’s all dead now. You can’t change the past. For a long time I couldn’t forgive it either, and I couldn’t forget it. But now, look. Here comes the past again.” She rested her hand on Raleigh’s knee. “And I can say yes. At least I can buy her some decent clothes. That idiot Earley’s been dragging her all over the country dressed like a wild Indian. Just look at her.”

  Raleigh raised his head and watched his aunt looking at Billie Rogers. The two sat quietly together on the bench, listening to the girl’s voice and the saxophone singing. Then Raleigh put his hand on top of his aunt’s and left it there.

  Passersby stopped to hear “Weeping Willow Blues” or “Don’t Blame Me” or “It Had to Be You.” A few dropped bills or coins in the open saxophone case. From other parts of the square, other kinds of music faintly floated toward the bench—two middle-aged female guitarists harmonizing folk ballads, a group of young boys break-dancing to taped rock and roll. Birds and cars and vendors and dogs joined in, too.

  Raleigh had just asked his aunt how ill she thought his father was, and she had just answered, “Very.…But I’m not going to try to beat some sense into that man’s head. Earley’s stubborn. He’s spoiled.” She took an ironed handkerchief from her purse and gave her nose a sharp twist. “And he’s a sweet man, Raleigh, with the thinking capacity of a cocker spaniel. He never had more than about one-tenth of my brains and I just wish I hadn’t been such a damn idiot, it took me seventy years to figure that out.”

  They both had just laughed at this remark, when, in that peculiarly sudden way he had of appearing without anyone seeing him arrive, Simon Berg walked around from the back of their bench.

  With a tip of his homburg, the old criminal said, “So, Raleigh, forgive me butting in. And I betcha this is Aunt Victoria, about which I have heard a bundle, all of it, believe me, inclusively compliments.” He thrust his small hand at the startled Miss Hayes. “They tell me you’re a world first-class traveler. Likewise myself.”

  Raleigh stammered, “Aunt Vicky, I’d like you to meet, this is a friend, old friend of Gates, and, ah, friend of mine. He’s been traveling with us, doing some, ah, ah, art collecting. Sim—”

  Berg cut him off. “The tag’s of no consequence. Call me Syme’s fine.”

  “How do you do?” Victoria murmured, extracting her hand as soon as possible from the one vigorously shaking it. The man did not look healthy to her. He was wearing a black overcoat on a balmy spring day. His skin was very splotchy: in some places, bluish-white; in others, burnt umber. Moreover, his eyes—the left one brown, the right one pale green—gave the impression of an unbalanced personality.

  “So, Raleigh, your paternal over there with Toots, he’s a regular bucolic Louis Armstrong. Also, I like the chanteuse; a voice strictly from the angels direct. You know what I mean?…I brought the kid. Look. Back behind the fountain. Nah, to the left, under that fat waxy tree.”

  Standing up, Hayes followed the direction of Weeper’s arm. Yes, there beneath a large magnolia tree stood—or rather, swung, his hands looped over a low twisting bough—his brother, Gates, dressed in an apparently new white linen suit.

  “Is that Gates?” Victoria asked, shading her eyes. “Behaving like a chimpanzee?”

  “The kid spooks.” Berg sadly shook his head. “I leave him there twenty, thirty minutes ago, he’s heading to say hi to his dad. I do a little business. I come back. Cheesh, he’s still casing the joint. He’s a lousy statue. He’s comatose with anxiety: how they had this big blowout way back when; how your dad’s got no use for him; how this is your show, and he oughta just take a powder, et cetera, et cetera. Go, Raleigh, will yah? Drag him out.”

  Hayes started forward, but then he stopped. “No.” He rubbed his cheek. “I don’t think so. No. Let him take his own time.”

  “Maybe a wise decision,” Berg nodded. “Likewise, from Time we could all drop dead. So, then, I’ll rest my dogs here a sec and shoot the breeze with your aunt—if congenial, of course—then I gotta scram.” He sat down on the bench beside Victoria, crossed a leg, pulled off a shoe, and rubbed at his foot through a black sock so large it hung off his toes and bunched around his tiny white ankle. “Getting to know these guys has been an automatic pleasure, miss. But for even the best of friends, like the poet says, the days dwindle down to a precious few. I’m shipping out at midnight. Caracas.”

  So Raleigh Hayes waited, watching his brother across the square, hidden in the sun-shadowed trees; while on the bench Simon Berg and Victoria Hayes (looking at first somewhat pinched in the mouth) shot the breeze.

  “You know Venezuela, Victoria? Mind if I call you Victoria? A beautiful name, and fits you like a glove, you’ll pardon the familiarity.”

  “No, South America’s about the only place I don’t know. I covered the Far East for thirty years. Are you traveling w
ith Mingo Sheffield? He was going to South America, too. Tell me why, and we’ll both know.”

  “Fatty? Nah. He’s pulling your leg.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. Why are you going?”

  Simon Berg sighed, holding open his hands. “Why not? I got no home. No family, unlike yourself. So, I travel. That’s what Jews do. They wander. You travel, maybe you learn. Weed?”

  “I don’t smoke, Mr. Syme, and at your age, you certainly shouldn’t either.”

  He shrugged. “At my age, I might as well. Thirty years on the road, hunh? A beautiful lady like yourself.…Homesick a lot?”

  “No. Thermopylae, North Carolina, never felt like home.”

  “You’re right. Anywise, what’s a home? You nail your planks. They burn them down. You lay your bricks. They blow them up.” Berg waved away the smoke from his cigarette. “You bury your dead. Sand covers the names. Such is the crummy world we live in, Victoria. Am I right?”

  She turned to him on the bench, pulled her glasses down on her nose, and looked at him a moment. “Nine times out of ten,” she replied.

  “True.” He nodded. They sat awhile, watching Raleigh watch Gates. Then Berg said, “So, the Far East, hunh? Singapore?”

  “At the start of the war, yes.”

  “Not a good time.”

  “No.”

  “Perchance you ever frequented a bar in Singapore, very classy joint called the Gold Dragon? I had the close personal acquaintance of the owner at a later date. Name of Duke Songkhla, also called Sing-Sing?”

  “I don’t drink,” she replied.

  “With my guts in their condition, I also abstain. So, how’d you like this town, Singapore?”

  “If you’d spent the night with a rat crawling over your legs on the floor of a jail there, you wouldn’t bother to ask, Mr. Syme.”

  He nodded sympathetically. “What’d they pull you in for?”

  Raleigh turned to stare at his aunt as she straightened the crisp white collar of her blouse. “Trading smuggled cigarettes on the black market for penicillin.”