Coming Through Slaughter (2 page)

N. Joseph’s Shaving Parlor. One large room with brothel wallpaper left over from Lula White’s Mahogany Hall. Two sinks with barber chairs in front of them, and along the wall several old donated armchairs where customers or more often just visitors sat talking and drinking. Pausing and tense when the alcohol ran out and drinking from the wooden coke racks until the next runner from Anderson or Dago Tony arrived, the new bottle travelling round the room including the half-shaved customer and the working Bolden, the bottle sucked empty after a couple of journeys, Bolden opening his throat muscles and taking it in so he was sometimes drunk by noon and would cut hair more flamboyantly. Close friends who needed cuts and shaves would come in early, well before noon.

In the afternoon a stray customer might be put in the chair and lathered by someone more sober and then Bolden would fight back into the room protesting loudly to his accusers that he had nerves of steel, and so cut hair once more, or whatever came in the way. Humming loud he would crouch over his sweating victim and cut and cut, offering visions of new styles to the tilted man. He persuaded men out of ten year mustaches and simultaneously offered raw steaming scandal that brought up erections in the midst of their fear. As the afternoon went on he elaborated long seductions usually culminating in the story of Miss Jessie Orloff’s famous incident in a Canadian hotel during her last vacation. So friends came early to avoid the blood hunting razors of the afternoon. At 4 o clock in any case the shop closed down and he slept.

It was a financial tragedy that sleep sobered Bolden up completely, that his mind on waking was clear as an empty road and he began to casually drink again although never hard now for he played in the evenings. He slept from 4 till 8. His day had begun at 7 when he walked the kids a mile to school buying them breakfast along the way at the fruit stands. A half hour’s walk and another 30 minutes for them to sit on the embankment and eat the huge meal of fruit. He taught them all he was thinking of or had heard, all he knew at the moment, treating them as adults, joking and teasing them with tall tales which they learned to sift down to the real. He gave himself completely to them during the walk, no barriers as they walked down the washed empty streets one on either side, their thin cool hands each holding onto a finger of his. Eventually they knew the politics of the street better than their teachers and he in turn learned the new street songs from them. By 8 they were at school and he took a bus back to Canal, then walked towards First, greeting everybody on his way to the shop.

What he did too little of was sleep and what he did too much of was drink and many interpreted his later crack-up as a morality tale of a talent that debauched itself. But his life at this time had a fine and precise balance to it, with a careful allotment of hours. A barber, publisher of
The Cricket
, a cornet player, good husband and father, and an infamous man about town. When he opened up the shop he was usually without customers for an hour or so and if there were any there they were usually ‘spiders’ with news for
The Cricket.
All the information he was given put unedited into the broadsheet. Then he cut hair till 4, then walked home and slept with Nora till 8, the two of them loving each other when they woke. And after dinner leaving for Masonic Hall or the Globe or wherever he was playing. Onto the stage.

He was the best and the loudest and most loved jazzman of his time, but never professional in the brain. Unconcerned with the crack of the lip he threw out and held immense notes, could reach a force on the first note that attacked the ear. He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last and last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like air transformed into cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour.

And so arrived amateur and accidental with the band on the stage of Masonic Hall, bursting into jazz, hurdle after hurdle. A race during which he would stop and talk to the crowd. Urging the band to play so loud the music would float down the street, saying ‘Cornish, come on, put your hands through the window’. On into the night and into blue mornings, growing louder the notes burning through and off everyone and forgotten in the body because they were swallowed by the next one after and Bolden and Lewis and Cornish and Mumford sending them forward and forth and forth till, as he could see them, their bursts of air were animals fighting in the room.

With the utmost curiosity and faith he learned all he could about Nora Bass, questioning her long into the night about her past. Her body a system of emotions and triggers he got lost in. Every hair she lost in the bath, every dead cell she rubbed off on a towel. The way she went crazy sniffing steam from a cup of coffee. He was lost in the details, he could find no exact focus towards her. And so he drew her power over himself.

Bolden could not put things in their place. What thrilled him beyond any measure was that she, for instance, believed in the sandman when putting the children to bed whereas even the children didn’t.

Quick under the covers, the sandman’s coming down the street.

Where where show us.

He’s just stopped to get a drink. And the children groaned inwardly but went to bed anyway. For three years a whore before she married Bolden she had managed to save delicate rules and ceremonies for herself.

But his own mind was helpless against every moment’s headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so that eventually he was almost completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and windows glass doors in fury at her certain answers.

Once they were sitting at the kitchen table opposite each other. To his right and to her left was a window. Furious at something he drew his right hand across his body and lashed out. Half way there at full speed he realised it was a window he would be hitting and braked. For a fraction of a second his open palm touched the glass, beginning simultaneously to draw back. The window starred and crumpled slowly two floors down. His hand miraculously uncut. It had acted exactly like a whip violating the target and still free, retreating from the outline of a star. She was delighted by the performance. Surprised he examined his fingers.

Nara’s Song

Dragging his bone over town. Dragging his bone over town.

Dragging his bone over town. Dragging his

bone over town. Dragging his bone

over and over dragging his bone over town.

Then and then and then and then

dragging his bone over town

and then

dragging his bone home.

Dude Botley

Monday nights at Lincoln Park was something to see, especially when the madams and pimps brought their stables of women to hear Bolden play. Each madam had different colour girls. Ann Jackson featured mulatto, Maud Wilson featured high browns, so forth and so on. And them different stables was different colours. Just like a bouquet.

Bolden played nearly everything in B-Flat.

Nora Bass came home to find a man on her front step. Immaculate. Standing up as she approached, not touching her.

Hello Webb, come on in.

Thanks. Buddy must be out.

She half laughed. Buddy! And then looked quizzical at him. Then shook her head.

Yeah, you better come in Webb.

Alcohol burning down his throat as she tells him that Buddy went, disappeared, got lost, I don’t know Webb but he’s gone.

How long?

5 or 6 months.

Nora opening out the curtains so the light falls over him, the cup with the drink in front of his face, between them, shielding him from the story, gulping more down.

Jesus why didn’t you tell me before, let me know.

I don’t know you Webb, Buddy knows you, why didn’t
he
tell you.

You should have told me.

You’re a cop Webb.

He’s not safe by himself, he’s gone lost, with nothing—
The Cricket
, the band, the kids.

He didn’t say anything.

He stands up and goes towards her.

Who was he with.

I don’t know.

Tell me.

He has covered her against the window, leaning very close to her, like a lover.

You’re shaking Webb.

He won’t last by himself Nora, he’ll fall apart. He’s not safe by himself.

Why are you shaking?

He needs you Nora, who was he with last?

Crawley. Another cornet. He was playing with him in Shell Beach, north of here, never came back.

Just like that?

Just like that.

I could find him. Tell me about Crawley.

She moves his arm away holding the cloth of his sleeve and goes to the door, opens and leans against it. She is a mask, her hand against the handle, he almost doesn’t realise what she is doing, then walks to the door, angry at her coldness.

Do you want me to?

Looking hard at him.

I’m not going to hire you Webb.

Jesus I don’t want your fucking money!

I don’t want your fucking compassion Webb. If you look for him then do it for yourself, not for me.

I’m very fond of him.

I know that Webb.

He’s a great talent.

Silence from her, lifting her hand and moving it across the small dark living room and its old wallpaper and few chairs like a tired showman.

Most of the cash went down his throat or was given away.

You never did find your mother either did you?

What?… No.

Sad laugh over her face as Webb moves past her. Webb steps backward off the doorstep with his hands in his pockets.

Are you with anybody now?

Long silence.

No.

He’ll come back Nora. When he married you, before you two went to my cabin in Pontchartrain, he phoned and we talked for over an hour, he needs you Nora, don’t worry he’ll be back soon.

Nora closing the door more, narrow, just to the width of her face. Webb grins encouragement and walks slowly backwards down the four steps to the pavement. He has remembered the number of steps. He is wrong. Bolden will take two more years before he cruises home. Her door closes on him and he turns. Spring 1906.

He went down to Franklin and bought bananas. Hungry after seeing Nora. Webb got off the bus as soon as he saw the first grocery store and bought six bananas, then a pound of nectarines. Put them in the large pocket of his raincoat and walked on downtown following the direction of the bus towards Lincoln Park. It was still about 8 in the morning. He ate watching the travel of people going both ways. For those who saw him it looked as if he had nothing to do. As it was he was trying to place himself casually in a mental position that was so high and irrelevant he hoped to stumble on the clues that were left by Bolden’s disappearance.

It looked as if Bolden had no notion he was
not
coming back when he left for Shell Beach. Webb took much more seriously than others of his profession sudden actions and off hand gestures. Always found them more dangerous, more determined. Also he had discovered that Bolden had never spoken of his past. To the people here he was a musician who arrived in the city at the age of twenty-two. Webb had known him since fifteen. He could just as easily be wiping out his past again in a casual gesture, contemptuous. Landscape suicide. So perhaps the only clue to Bolden’s body was in Webb’s brain. Sleeping in childhood stories and now thrown into the future like an arrow. To be finished when they grew up. What was Bolden’s favourite story? Whose moment of terror did he want to witness, Webb thought as he began the third banana.

Don’t go ’way nobody

Careless love

2.19 took my babe away

Idaho

Joyce 76

Funky Butt

Take your big leg off me

Snake Rag

Alligator Hop

Pepper Rag

If you don’t like my potatoes why do you dig so deep?

All the whores like the way I ride

Make me a pallet on your floor

If you don’t shake, don’t get no cake.

The Cricket
existed between 1899 and 1905. It took in and published all the information Bolden could find. It respected stray facts, manic theories, and well-told lies. This information came from customers in the chair and from spiders among the whores and police that Bolden and his friends knew.
The Cricket
studied broken marriages, gossip about jazzmen, and a servant’s memoirs told everyone that a certain politician spent twenty minutes each morning deciding which shirt to wear. Bolden took all the thick facts and dropped them into his pail of sub-history.

Looked at objectively
The Cricket
contained excessive reference to death. The possibilities were terrifying to Bolden and he hunted out examples obsessively as if building a wall. A boy with a fear of heights climbing slowly up a tree. There were descriptions of referees slashed to death by fighting cocks, pigs taking off the hand of a farmer, the unfortunate heart attack of the ninety year old Miss Bandeen who opened her door one night to let in her cats and let in someone’s pet iguana instead. There was the freak electrocution of Kenneth Stone who stood up in his bathtub to straighten a crooked lightbulb and was found the next morning by his brother Gordon, the first reaction of Gordon being to turn the switch off so that Kenneth fell stiff to the floor and broke his nose. Whenever a celebrated murder occurred Bolden was there at the scene drawing amateur maps. There were his dreams of his children dying. There were his dreams of his children dying. There were his dreams of his children dying. And then there was the first death, almost on top of him, saved by its fictional quality and nothing else.

Bolden’s marriage to Nora Bass had been a surprise to most of his friends. Webb, in Pontchartrain, continuing his career as police detective, received a long phone call from Bolden with the news. Webb offered them his cabin which they could use during the next month, so Bolden and Nora went there. Eventually, after three weeks, Nora’s mother drove up for a visit in her Envictor, her suitcase full of whisky. Since the death of Mr Bass she had two overwhelming passions—the drawings of Audubon, and an old python she had bought second-hand, retired from a zoo. And since the death of Mr Bass all her daughters had slipped successively into the red light district. Bolden in fact had slept with each of Nora’s sisters in his time. Now he was formally married to one of them, the veil of suspicion had been removed from the mother’s eyes, and the two of them would hold great drunk conversations together. A sparky lady. She would lecture him on the world of animals while he listened morosely studying her body for betrayals of her daughter’s physical characteristics. The final stages of an evening’s drunkenness would see her reaching into her suitcase to bring out the copies of Audubon drawings. Hardly able to talk around a slur now she’d interpret the damned birds,
damned
, as she saw them, for she was sure John James Audubon was attracted to psychologically neurotic creatures. She showed him the drawing of the Purple Gallinule which seemed to lean over the water, its eyes closed, with thoughts of self-destruction. You don’t know that! Shut up, Buddy! She showed him the Prophet Ibis, obviously paranoid, that built its nest high up before floods came, and the Cerulean Wood Warbler drunk on Spanish Mulberry, and her favourite—the Anhinga, the Water Turkey, which she said would sit in the tree tops till disturbed and then plummet down into the river leaving hardly a ripple and swim off with just its eyes and beak cresting water—or if disturbed further would hide by submerging completely and walk along the river bottom, forgetting to breathe, and so drown. That’s how they catch water turkeys, she said, scare them under water and then net their bodies when they float up a few minutes later, did you know that? Bolden shook his head. You tell a good story Mrs Bass but I don’t believe you, you crazy woman, you’re drunk you know that—you crazy woman. A week later Mrs Bass went for a drive and never came back. After lunch Buddy and Nora set out walking. They found the Envictor two miles down the road. Mrs Bass was sitting at the wheel and had been strangled.

There was much curiosity on Bolden’s part. They had been away from news for nearly a month, god knew if there was a famous murderer in the area. His mind went into theories. Eventually he decided to take the car and drive to Pontchartrain and tell Webb about it. Nora refused to be left with a strangler around. They drove with the dead Mrs Bass in the front seat settling carefully into rigor mortis. At the turns however she would sometimes fall over onto Bolden’s lap like a valuable statue, so Nora got in the front and Mrs Bass was put in the back seat. Covered with a tarp for diplomacy. Bolden parked outside the police station and asked for Webb. Nora went to a restaurant to get a meal.

Listen we’ve got a dead body outside.

What!

Yeah. Nora’s mum. Strangled. We brought her in. Other cops looked round. Webb took his feet off the desk and stood up.

Listen if you murdered her you should get rid of the body, you should’ve buried her, don’t try to bluff it out.

Hell Webb, we didn’t kill her, I liked the old lady, but it looks suspicious, she has a lot of cash we’re gonna get, so how would it look if we buried her?

Right, and you can’t claim the money without the body, so you’d
have
to bluff it.

We didn’t do it you bastard.

Ok Ok I believe you, where’s the body?

In the back seat. Under the tarp.

Ok go with Belddax here and bring it in.

Minutes later Belddax rushed in. Webb asked where Bolden was.

He’s running down the road, sir.

What!

Someone stole the car.

This crisis deflated with investigation. Search parties went out looking for the car as well as a strangler in the Hill district. After two weeks nothing had been found. The Boldens who would have been reasonably wealthy had no chance of a will until the body was located. Advertisements were placed in
The Cricket
and the Pontchartrain papers for a lost Envictor and the goods therein. A year later Bolden got a letter from Webb.

Buddy —

I’ve solved the murder if not the disappearance. Not everyone agrees with me, and I wouldn’t have thought of it if not for last week’s newspaper. Enclosed.

St Tropez. France

The flamboyant and controversial ‘dancer’ Isadora Duncan died yesterday in another one of those dramatic situations that seemed to follow her all her life. Riding with a friend in his Bugatti, her silk scarf caught in the back wheel of the moving car and strangled her before the driver realised what was happening. The British Automobile Association has given out frequent warnings that this is a common danger to motorists. Miss Duncan was 49. For more of her life see ‘
SCARF
’ page 17.

You see what I’m getting at don’t you. The old lady’s pet snake is near her, taking in the breeze. Its tail somehow gets caught in a rear wheel. It quickly hangs onto the one thing close to it, her neck, this strangles her. After the car comes to a halt the snake who has been stretched badly but not killed uncoils and slides away. No trace of a weapon. If the snake was human it wouldn’t get much more than manslaughter … Sometimes Bolden I think I am a genius.

Webb

There were his dreams of his children dying.

The other kid came in with the news he’s dead, sobbing, and he jumped and ran in one movement and caught the boy’s shoulders
WHO IS
he heard himself weep out loud and being told floated into the kitchen picked up the wood handled knife with the serrated edge and pushed it again and again into his left wrist, then the open hand which was numb already, through the door and the police amazed at him his white shirt bloody looking at the cops who brought the news he’d always imagined each night—hit by a car, god. After the boy’s words he hadn’t heard a thing but his own screaming, went past the cop and leaned over the hot metal of the hood of the police truck, his face and his wet arm on it.