I watched for a while from across the road and down the street. Then I took the winding road up behind the mansion and parked my blue hot rod in a large dirt lot along with a lot of older-model Fords, Pontiacs, and Dodges.
At the edge of the lot was a field. At the end of the field was an iron gate lit by a single flaming torch. It would have seemed magical and exciting if I was out for a good time. But instead it looked like a solitary gate to hell set out to lure unsuspecting men to their dooms.
From the top of a steep stairway I could hear the weak strains of a jazz horn. Three notes and I knew who was playing. Three notes and I remembered the first night I’d heard that tune, the woman I was with, the clothes I was wearing (or wished I was wearing), and the rhythm of my stride. That horn spoke the language of my history; traveled me back to times that I could no longer remember clearly—maybe even times that were older than I; traveling, in my blood, back to some forgotten home.
The stone stairs were slippery and narrow through dense low-hanging foliage. I found myself doing a crouching crab-walk to keep my footing.
The stairway wasn’t straight—it cut and turned, curved and went around things. I descended for almost five minutes before I got to another iron gate.
There I found Rupert.
I knew about Rupert Dodds from Jackson Blue. Rupert had been a wrestler, performing under the name the Black Destroyer, for local TV in Philadelphia before he broke Fabulous Fred Dunster’s neck in a televised wrestling match. Rupert said that the claims that Dunster was making time with his girlfriend were just publicity talk to make it seem like their bout was a blood feud. But he left the East Coast for California and got the job as bouncer for the black part of the Chantilly Club from a fellow Philadelphian, Philly Stetz.
Rupert was taller than me and wider. The muscles on his split-sleeved arms were like half-hard bags of wet cement. His dark face looked as if it had been carved from onyx—with a ball-peen hammer.
“What you want, man?” Rupert’s question said that he didn’t recognize my face.
“Blackman sent me.”
“He did?”
“Yeah.” I tried to sound tough. Why not?
“What he say?”
“He didn’t say nuthin’, man. Now let me in here. I’m s’posed t’say the words an’ then you s’posed t’open the do’.”
Rupert coughed. That was his laugh. He pulled open the gate, scraping it loudly on the stone path.
When I walked in he grabbed my upper arm, squeezing it so hard that I could feel my fingers filling up with blood.
“You doesn’t has to be smart,” he whispered. Then he pushed me down the path toward a large house.
IT WAS JUST A GUESTHOUSE for the main mansion but it was still three stories. They took my password at the front door and I walked into that long ago I’d heard at the top of the stairs. The room I came into was large, maybe forty feet by sixty; it was most of the bottom floor.
It was a room full of black people, with a number of slumming whites.
The Black Chantilly was started to entertain these wealthy white folks, Jackson had said. They liked to feel that they had some connection with real soul.
The far wall was a big window that looked down on the nighttime vista of L.A. lights. It looked as if a galaxy had been pulled down out of the skies and laid, like a sheet, across the land.
In the center of that spectacle was a boy-sized man holding on to a silver trumpet. He was playing a high staccato riff that had temporarily dampened conversation. Behind the man was a simple wooden chair. I imagined how Lips McGee would fall back into that chair after finishing a set.
There was a big fat bass man and a beret-crowned drummer behind Lips but they had run out of ways of keeping up with the old master. Their hands were down and the only beat they kept was with barely nodding heads.
Lips brought it up as high as he could and stopped. He licked his lips and took a tight breath, then he hit a note that was somewhere west of the moon. He was a coyote calling up the dead; and we were all willing to hear his desecration.
When he finished, the bass man thumped in; the drummer decided on brushes after that fine high plateau. Lips sat down and wiped his face. The room cheered him. Cheered him for all the years he’d kept us alive in northern apartments living one on top of the other. Cheered him for remembering the pain of police sticks and low pay and no face in the mirror of the times. Cheered him for his assault on the white man’s culture; his brash horn the only true heir to the European masters like Bach and Beethoven.
Or maybe they were just applauding a well-made piece of music.
“Drink, mister?” She was young and doe brown. The high I got off of Lips’s music made me think that there were whispering secrets in her heart.
“Drink?” the young woman asked again.
“Yeah, I mean, no. I don’t drink.”
“Seventh-Day Adventist?” she asked.
“Naw. Just a man who’s seen one good time too many.”
She liked me. Her eyes said so. “I could get you a soda. You got to buy three drinks in here if you wanna stay. Either that or go up to the gamblin’ room. You gamble?”
“Only with my life,” I said. I guess it was the right answer because her shoulders bounced up and down telling me that she would have liked to laugh with me if she wasn’t on duty.
“You work here long?” I asked.
“’Bout a year or so.”
“You know Holland and Roman Gasteau?”
“The twins?”
“Yeah.”
“They dead.” She did something with her lips that meant she’d been through a lot in life, that she’d learned to leave the dead where they lay.
“You know ’em?”
“Not really. I seen Roman a couple’a times after work. He used t’go out wit’ some’a the guys out back after we closed up. You know we like to go out then.”
“Where you go that late?”
“Place called the Hangar,” she said. “Offa Avalon. They make scrambled eggs an’ serve it wit’ scotch if you want it.”
“That Roman owed me some money,” I said, speculating.
“You gonna need a shovel t’get it.”
“He had some partners. If I could find out who they were maybe I could collect what’s mine.”
“He owe you a lot?” Her interest in me was shifting but it was no less intent.
“To some people. I mean, maybe twenty-five hundred dollars don’t mean much to you but I could use it to fill out my pockets.”
“You got a car?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“You could come on an’ meet me up at the torch after three. I could take you on down to the Hangar. Roman’s friend Tony prob’ly be there. He works here but this his night off. He usually come down to the Hangar if he workin’ or not.”
I touched her arm and asked, “What’s your name?”
“Hannah.”
“Well, Hannah, maybe I’ll go see what’s happenin’ around here in the meanwhile.”
“I still got to get you a drink,” she said.
I laughed and ordered a glass of milk.
“An’ if you cain’t make that then melt me some ice, okay?”
Hannah liked my jokes.
THE HOUSE WAS DIVIDED into areas of interest. On the first floor was music and dancing, drinking and sweet talk. The next floor was a series of gambling rooms. Poker, blackjack, craps, and roulette. The one pool table had no line waiting because every ball cost five dollars.
Only the best played at the Black Chantilly.
The third floor was women. At the bottom of the stairs sat a man who looked like Rupert’s midget brother. He took two twenties and gave you a key ring with the number of the room attached.
I peered up the stairs, past the brawny midget, but I couldn’t think of an excuse to part with forty dollars.
“Nice up there?” I asked.
“If you got the green,” the little man answered.
<
br /> “Easy?” Her voice came from behind me.
I turned around and said, “Hey, Gracie. What you doin’ here?” I asked the question but really it seemed perfect that I’d see Grace Phillips at the Black Chantilly.
She almost smiled. The faraway look in her eye was way past alcohol.
“I’as jus’ talkin’ ’bout you t’Bertie,” she said. Her mouth gave up on each word before it was finished. “You know he likes you. ’Spects you.”
“He around here?” I asked, looking over her head down the stairs. There was a man coming up behind her but it wasn’t my boss. It was a cream-colored Negro in loose brown pants, cinched tight, and a coral shirt. Between his first two fingers was a burning cigarette; between the second and third finger was a fold of green, forty dollars I’d bet.
He popped his eyes and said, “Hi, Gracie,” as he went by. She turned away and looked uncomfortably at me, pretending to smile, until the fish-eyed man passed.
“Hey, Li’l Joe,” the customer said to the guardian. “How’s it goin’?”
Li’l Joe took the fold of green. He grimaced at the two twenties but smiled when he saw the extra two-dollar bill.
“Fine, fine, Greenwood.” He handed a key over and Greenwood sauntered and whistled his way up the stairs.
“I thought you straightened out, Gracie. Don’t you have a baby now?” I asked.
Grace smiled, accepting some imagined compliment. “They beautiful, huh, Easy? Babies the most beautiful thing in the worl’.”
Grace had on a darkish beige dress that made it down to about three inches above her bare knees. She was the kind of woman you could look at without embarrassment.
“A couple could go up there for just twenty,” she said.
“They can?”
“Uh-huh. The house only take twenty. The other twenty is for the girl.” She looked down at her chest and I did too.
Grace was a good-looking woman, and I could tell, by the way she nearly smiled, that time with her would be as far from death as a workingman could get. It would be as good as or better than Idabell’s soft embraces.
It was the thought of Mrs. Turner killed my ardor.
“I don’t think that Bert would look on it too kindly if I was to go up those steps wit’ you, Gracie,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. She smiled too.
“Why’ont we go downstairs,” I suggested.
“Could I borrah twenty dollars, Easy?” She didn’t trip on a syllable of that sentence.
“We’ll see.”
HANNAH DIDN’T APPROVE of Grace. She wouldn’t even look at me when I ordered the soda and scotch and soda for me and my friend.
“Grace, you should go home to your baby,” I said after she’d gagged on a gulp of scotch.
“I know,” she said. “I know. If you gimme twenty dollars I promise I will…. Bertie’d pay you back.”
“What’s Bert gonna do when he finds that you been out here in the streets?” I asked.
Her sneer would have dissuaded the bubonic plague.
“What he know?” she said. “Lea’me all by myself all that time. Sallie an’ all’a his friends wou’n’t say boo t’me an’ I had t’make it on my own. On my own.”
“You should go home, Grace.”
Just that fast she put me out of her mind. Her gaze swung left and then right, looking for anybody with twenty dollars in his pocket.
“You ever hear of Roman or Holland Gasteau?” I asked the back of her head.
“No.”
“If I could find out about either one of them it’d be worth twenty dollars.” I wasn’t really hurting Bert. I figured that she could do a lot worse for that twenty dollars than just talk.
“They come around,” she said, swinging back toward me. “But I heard sumpin’ happened with them. I’ont know what though.”
“You know’em?”
“Not really. Roman’s sweet to talk to. He’s nice. Holland’s kinda weird.”
“You know what kinda business they’re in?” I asked.
“Roman’s a gambler. I don’t know what Holland do.”
“They do anything together?”
She swallowed—twice—and then shook her head, no.
“You know I know where you live, Gracie,” I said.
“Then you should come by sometimes.”
“Can you tell me anything else about the Gasteaus?”
“I could ask around.” She got me with her eyes that time; almost, anyway.
But I pulled back. I hadn’t fallen that far yet.
I reached into my pocket for the money but before I came out with it I had a thought.
“You seen Bill Bartlett around anywhere lately, Grace?”
“Who?” she asked and I knew that anything else she told me would be a lie—or half of one.
“Bartlett. You heard me. The man tried to blackmail your boyfriend.”
“No. Like I said, Sallie’n his friends wouldn’t have nuthin’ to do with me after that thing wit’ you an’ Bertie.” She was looking at my pocket.
“You hear anything about’im?”
“You mean Bill Bartlett?”
“Yeah.” I let my hand rummage around in the pocket a little bit, to keep her attention.
“They said that he got a cook’s job someplace after you got him fired. I’ont know where though.”
I gave Grace two tens and she was gone from my table.
I WENT FROM THERE BACK up to the gambling rooms and dropped thirty dollars at blackjack. I asked the dealer if that was Roman’s game. He said that he’d never heard of any Gasteau. Sometimes a lie will tell you more than the truth. I took his lie and pondered it on the way downstairs.
A woman was crooning “I Cover the Waterfront.” Lips was seated at the window behind her.
His hands were on his thighs; his eyes were on the moon.
“Hey, Lips.”
“Easy.” His long-drawn-out voice was the human counterpart of his horn.
“How you doin’, man?” I’d known Lips since I was a boy in Houston.
“Oh,” he mused, “gettin’ kinda slow, man. Gettin’ kinda slow.”
“You sure sound good.”
“I did?” The orange in his brown skin was fading. His long hair had been so processed over the years that it wouldn’t lay down or stand up.
He sighed. “Used t’be I liked t’play, Easy. Get high, get me a girl for the night. But that’s all over now. My mouth ain’t right no mo’ but even if it was there ain’t nuthin’ new t’play. All people wanna hear is songs an’ they ain’t no jazz voice out there. They all wanna shout. They all wanna boogie-woogie. Shit.”
I felt for him but I had my own problems that night.
“What can you tell me about the Gasteau brothers?”
“That they dead. That Roman was all right. Yeah, he was okay. But you know Holland was a crusher, man. He always want the light on him. One night he even tried to get up here with me.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Got out his guitar an’ come up to play next to me. Shit. I had to sit down an’ wait till Rupert come.”
“Could he play?”
“Maybe, if he turn the motherfucker over an’ beat it wit’ a stick.”
I laughed so hard that tears sprouted from my eyes.
I waved at Hannah and pointed at Lips. She went to get his drink.
“Anything else about ’em?”
“Roman rode a big white horse into town.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. He was talk’ ’bout a herd.”
Hannah came up with his drink. She gave me a hard look and then made to move away.
“Hannah,” I said before she could go.
“Yeah?”
“You know Lips, right?”
“I don’t know him,” she said, slightly shy. “But I like his music all right.”
“Thank ye,” my old friend said.
I touched Hannah’s elbow. “I’ll still see you later, right?”
She smiled, forgiving me for Grace.
When Hannah left I asked Lips, “You gettin’ too old for that?”
“Easy,” he said with a wisdom I hope never to attain, “I ain’t even int’rested in po’k chops. Food don’t even mean nuthin’ to me no more.”
After that he got up to play a long sad number called “Alabama Midnight.” He blew one sad song after another for the rest of a long set. I listened to as much as I could take and then wandered out to the torch.
I STOOD AT THE END of the field looking down over the dark trees and shrubs that gathered on the edges of L.A.
I used to live on the edge. I used to move in darkness.
I was excited about Hannah coming out and taking me to her late-night haunt. She liked my jokes and my promise of wealth. I wondered why I had ever left such a simple and honest life.
Behind me people were leaving the club. I heard them laughing and joking, kissing and slamming car doors. A young couple were making love in the backseat of an old Buick. Her sighs pierced the night like the cries of a dying bird.
I wondered if there was a place for me that could be like this and still allow me to hear children’s laughter in the morning.
The crunch of gravel seemed closer than other footsteps leading toward the lot.
Hannah, I thought, and then a heavy weight came down on the back of my head. The moon broke into several sections and my mind tried to go sideways, looking for a way to keep conscious.
CHAPTER 26
WAKE UP,” my mother said. It was Sunday morning and she wanted me to get ready for church. She shook my shoulder and I knew that she was smiling even though my eyes were closed. She had grits with redeye gravy on the table—I could smell it.
“Wake up!” She slapped me hard across the face and I cried out because she was so unfair to hit me in my sleep.
Rupert was standing there with Li’l Joe.
“He’s comin’ to, Mr. Beam,” Rupert said to someone behind him.
Out from between the two ugly wrestlers came a middle-sized white man. He had a large pitted nose and eyes that only laughed at pain.
“Who are you?” he asked me.
I felt a slight swoon and decided to go with it. I let my head fall forward and Rupert slapped me again. The blow jerked my head up. My eyes opened for a moment but then I played back into the swoon.
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