Cockfighter (11 page)

Indifferently, expertly, I played through my three numbers without a pause. The applause was generous. I put the guitar back in the case and made my exit to the dressing room. When the door closed on the last James Boy I took a pull out of the open bottle of whiskey. Lee Vernon entered the room. His face was flushed and he was laughing. He held out a hand for the bottle and, when I handed it to him, freshened the drink in his left hand.

Watching him sullenly, I took another drink out of the bottle. Vernon let loose with a wild peal of happy laughter.

“Those are the only three songs you know, aren't they?” he said.

I grinned and took another drink.

“That's wonderful, Frank,” he said sincerely. “Really wonderful!” He smiled broadly, showing his big white teeth. “Did you make them up yourself?”

I nodded.

A frown creased Vernon's flushed face, and he placed his glass down carefully on the narrow ledge in front of the mirror. He's going to fire me, I thought. The moment I put the five-dollar bill in my pocket I'm going to knock his teeth out.

“I think that's terrific, Frank. I really do. Any fool can take a few lessons and play ordinary songs on a guitar. Hell, I can play a little bit myself, and if I sing while I'm playing, I can drown out the mistakes I make. But you…” He shook his head comically. “To deliberately master the damned guitar the way you have and compose your own songs—well, I can only admire you for it.” He picked up his glass and raised it. “To Frank Mansfield! You've got a job at Chez Vernon for as long as you want to keep it!”

He drained the glass and opened the door. His shoulder hit the side of the door as he left, and he staggered slightly as he walked down the hall.

I closed the door and sat down, facing the back of the chair. If a man accepts life logically, the unexpected is actually the expected. I should have known he wouldn't fire me. A nightclub owner, by the fact that he is a nightclub owner, must necessarily accept things as they are. Vernon had accepted the situation cheerfully, like a peacetime soldier who finds himself suddenly in war. There was nothing else he could do.

I had wanted to quit, but now I was unable to quit. I was in an untenable position. I had only one alternative. Every time I played my twenty-minute stint, I would have to improvise something new. If I couldn't do it, I would have to walk away and not even collect the five dollars I had coming to me. It was unfair to keep playing the same three songs over and over.

I took another drink, a short one this time. I was beginning to feel the effects of the whiskey on top of the beers I had had earlier. I made my decision. When my turn came to play again I would improvise music and play something truly wonderful.

After Dick James announced me, I sat quietly in my chair, the guitar across my lap, a multicolored pick gripped loosely between my right thumb and forefinger. The room was filled to capacity. Under the weak, colored ceiling lights I could make out most of the faces nearest the stand. There was a hint of nervous expectancy in the room. Here is a freak, their silence said, a talented, deaf-and-dumb freak who plays music but cannot hear, who plays for applause he can only feel. This was the atmosphere of the Chez Vernon, caused in part by Lee Vernon's earlier announcement, and by my last session on the stand when the listeners had heard a different kind of music. Vernon sat at a table close to the platform, his face flushed with liquor, a knowing smile on his lips. On his left was a young man with long blond hair, dressed in a red silk dinner jacket, white ruffled shirt, and plaid bow tie. On Vernon's right, a tall pink drink before her, was a woman in a low-cut kelly green evening gown. She was in her early forties, but she was the type who could pass easily for thirty-nine for a few more years.

Her lips were wet and shiny, and her dark eyes were bright with excitement as I caught them with mine and held them. She nodded politely, put long tapering fingers to her coal black hair. The woman and the young man at Vernon's table stood out from the crowd. Most of the patrons were wearing short-sleeved sport shirts. Only the younger men with dates wore coats and ties. Lee Vernon raised his glass and winked at me.

The microphone was less than a foot away from my guitar. I tapped the pick on the box. The sound, amplified by six speakers, sounded like knocking on a wooden door. Scratching the wooden box of the Gibson produced a sound like the dry rasping of locusts. The locusts reminded me of the long summer evenings in Mansfield, Georgia, and I thought about the bright silvery moths circling the lamp on the corner, down the street from Grandma's house.

I played their sound, picking them up and flying and flickering with them about the streetlight, teasing them on the E string.

Down the block, swinging to and fro on a lacy, metal porch swing, the chains creaking, complaining, a woman laughed the joyful, contented laughter of a well-bred southern woman, a mother perhaps, with two young children, a boy and a girl, and the little boy said something that amused her and she laughed and repeated what the child said to her husband sitting beside her.

I played that.

And I repeated the solid rumbling laugh of her husband, which complemented her own laughter, and then my fingers moved away from them, up the staff to pick out the solid swishing whispering smack of a lawn sprinkler and a man's tuneless humming a block away. And there came a boy in knickers down the sidewalk, walking and then running, dancing with awkward feet to avoid stepping on a crack, which would
surely
break his mother's back! He bent down and picked up a stick and scampered past a white picket fence, the stick bumping, rattling, drowning out a man's lecture to a teenaged girl on the porch of that old white house two doors down from the corner, the house with the four white columns.

And I played these things, and then the sounds of supper and the noises, the fine good clatter in the kitchen when Grandma was still alive, and Randall and I sent to wash up before dinner in the dark downstairs bathroom where the sound of water in the pipes made the whiney, sharp, unbearable spine-tingling noise and kept it up until the other tap was turned on and modulated it, turning the groaning into the surreptitious scraping of a boy's finger on the blackboard, and sure enough, we had the schoolteacher for dinner that night and she was talking with Mother, monotonously, like always, and I hated her, and the dry, flat registers of her authoritative voice would put you to sleep in the middle of a lesson if you didn't keep pinching yourself, and Daddy pulled out his watch with the loud ticks and it was suppertime, the solid ring of the good sterling silver, the tingle-tinkle of the fine crystal that pinged with a fingernail and listen to the echo! And the rich dark laughter of Aimee, our Negro cook in the kitchen, and after supper I was allowed to go to the movie but Randall wasn't because he was three years younger and had to go to bed so I played these things and what a wonderful movie it was! Young Dick Powell, handsome, in his West Point uniform, and the solid ranks of straight tall men marching in the parade and only vaguely did the old songs filter through the story,
Flirtation Walk
, and the lovely girl under the Kissing Rock, and then the movie was over but I stayed to see it again, and repeated it very quickly because nothing is ever any good the second time and I was late, it was dark, and I was running down the black narrow streets, the crickets silenced ahead of my slapping feet, and the grim and heavy shadows of the great old pecan trees on our black, forbidden block. As I reached our yard, safe at last from whatever it was that chased me, Mother was on the front porch waiting with a switch in her hand, and she intended to use it, I know, but I began to cry and a moment later she pulled me in close to her warm, wonderful, never changing smell of powder, spicy lilac and cedar and sweet, sweet lips kissing me and chiding and kissing and scolding and damned if the G string didn't break.

The pick fell from my fingers and I looked numbly at the guitar. The room was silent as death. A moment later, like an exploding dam, the room rocked with the sound of slapping hands and stomping feet. I fled into the dressing room with the guitar still clutched by the neck in my left hand. The James Boys, who had been listening by the arched, curtained doorway to the hall, followed me into the small room, and Dick handed me the bottle.

“I'll be a sonabitch, Frank,” he said warmly. “I never heard finer guitar in my life. You can be a James Boy anytime you want. Go ahead, take another snort!”

I sat down, lit a cigarette and studied my trembling fingers. My throat was dry and tight and for the first time in my life I felt lonely, really lonely, and I didn't know why. I had buried all those memories for so many years, it was frightening to know that they were still in my head.

The James Boys returned to the stand, leaving the door open, and I could hear the heated strings of their first number, “The Big D Rock.”

“Mr. Mansfield—” I looked up at the sound of Lee Vernon's voice, and got to my feet quickly as he ushered in ahead of him the young man and the woman who had been sitting at his table out front. “I want to introduce you to Mrs. Bernice Hungerford and Tommy Hungerford.” He turned and smiled at the woman. “Mr. Frank Mansfield.”

“Tommy is my nephew,” Bernice Hungerford said quickly, holding out her hand. I shook it briefly, and then shook hands with her nephew. His expression was studiedly bored, but he was slightly nervous.

Mrs. Hungerford was a truly striking woman, now that I could see her under the bright lights of the dressing room. A white cashmere stole was draped over her left arm, and she clutched a gold-mesh evening bag in her left hand. Her burnt sienna eyes never left my face. I was amused by the scattering of freckles on her nose. The freckles on her face and bare shoulders belied her age sure enough.

With a straight face, Vernon said: “Mrs. Hungerford was very impressed by your concert, Mr. Mansfield. When I told her that you had studied under Segovia in Seville for ten years, she said she could tell that you had by your intricate fretwork.”

Bernice Hungerford bobbed her head up and down delightedly and shook a teasing forefinger at me. “And I recognized the tone poem, too.” She winked and flashed a bright smile. Her teeth were small but remarkably well matched and white. “You see, Mr. Mansfield,” she continued, “I know a few things about music. When I hear Bach, it doesn't make any difference if it's piano or guitar, I can recognize the style. That's what I told Mr. Vernon, didn't I, Lee?” The woman turned to the implacable Lee Vernon who was covering his drunkenness masterfully. Only the stiffness of his back gave him away.

“You certainly did, Bernice. But I had to tell her, Mr. Mansfield. She thought you were playing a Bach fugue, but it was a natural mistake. She didn't know that it was a special Albert Schweitzer composition written on a theme of Bach's. Quite a natural mistake, indeed.”

“If we don't get back to your guests, their throats will be dreadfully poached, Auntie dear,” Tommy said lazily. “We've been gone, you know, for the better part of an hour, and that's a long time just to refurbish the liquor supply.” The careless elisions of his voice were practiced, it seemed to me.

“But if we take Mr. Mansfield back with us, we'll be forgiven.” Mrs. Hungerford patted her nephew's arm.

“I'll certainly try,” he replied cheerfully.

As soon as they had gone, Vernon closed the door, leaned against it and buried his face in his arms. His shoulders shook convulsively, and for a moment I thought he crying. Then he let out a whoop of laughter, turned away from the door and sat down. Recovering, he wiped his streaming eyes with a forefinger and said, “I'm sorry, Frank, but the gag was too good to resist. When she started that talk about Bach and Segovia at the table, I had to go her one better. But it's a break for you. She has a few guests at her house, and only stopped by here to pick up some Scotch. I told her that she mustn't miss your performance, and when you came out with that tricky, weird chording and impressed her so much, I thought it might be a break for you. Anyway, the upshot is that she wants you to go home with her and play for her guests. Should be worth a twenty-dollar bill to you, at least.”

I shrugged into my corduroy jacket. All through the talk about Bach and Segovia I had thought they were attempting some kind of joke at my expense, but apparently Mrs. Hungerford actually believed I had studied under the old guitarist. Vernon had gone along with the gag, which was a break for me, although I detested the condescending sonofabitch. If she wanted to pay me twenty dollars I would accept it, play my three songs, and then get out of her house.

I had already made up my mind not to return to the Chez Vernon. A final concert for a group of rich people who could afford to pay for it and wouldn't miss the money would be a fitting end to my short, unhappy musical career.

“By the way, Frank,” Vernon said, as soon as I was ready to go, “don't get the idea that I was trying to make fun of you by falling in with the gag. If I'd been strictly sober, I might have set her straight, but basically I poured it on so you could pick up a few extra bucks. No hard feelings?”

I ignored his outstretched hand and brushed by him, carrying my instrument. Vernon followed me out into the club. As I stopped at the stand, to put the guitar in the case, he handed me a ten-dollar bill

“Hell, don't be sore about it, Frank.”

There was a black silhouette cutout of a plyboard cat at the end of the stand. I wadded the bill in my fist and shoved it into the open mouth of the kitty before crossing the dance floor and entering the inside door to the package store. If Lee Vernon had followed me into the package store, I would have knocked his teeth out, even if he was drunk. Although I wasn't the butt of the joke, I didn't like to be patronized by a man I considered an inferior. But Vernon was wise enough not to come outside, and I've never seen him since.