Coming Through Slaughter (4 page)

The ladies had come and visited them in their large brown painted apartment and their taste for women, diverse at first, became embarrassingly similar, both liking the tall brown ladies, bodies thin and long and winding, the jutting pelvis when naked. The relationships often moved over from Webb to Bolden or the other way.

Webb training in the police force, three years older, and Bolden a barber’s apprentice emphasizing his ability to be an animated listener. Later on, after he moved, he continued listening at N. Joseph’s Shaving Parlor. Here too he reacted excessively to the stories his clients in the chair told him, throwing himself into the situation, giving advice that was usually abstract and bad. The men who came into N. Joseph’s were just as much in need of confession or a sense of proportion as a shave and Bolden freely gave bizarre advice just to see what would happen. He was therefore the perfect audience to these songs and pleas. Just take the money and put it on the roosters. Days later furious men would rush in demanding to speak to Bolden (who was then only twenty-four for goodness sake) and he would have to leave his customer and
that
man’s flight of conversation, take the angered one into Joseph’s small bathroom and instead of accepting guilt quickly suggest variations. Five minutes later Bolden would be back shaving a neck and listening to other problems. He loved it. His mind became the street.

Two years later Webb once more made a silent trip to New Orleans, partly to see how his friend was doing, partly to do with a Pontchartrain man being murdered there. Amazed from a distance at the blossoming of Bolden, careful again not to meet him. He finished the case in two days trying hard to keep out of Buddy’s way for the man had died while listening to Bolden play. Two men had been standing at the bar separated by a third, a well dressed pianist. Buddy was on stage. Man A shot Man B with a gun, the pianist Ferdinand le Menthe between them leaning back just in time and disappearing before the first scream even began. Bolden seeing what happened changed to a fast tempo to keep the audience diverted which he had almost managed when the police arrived. Tiger Rag.

On his last night Webb went to hear Bolden play. Far back, by the door, he stood alone and listened for an hour. He watched him dive into the stories found in the barber shop, his whole plot of song covered with scandal and incident and change. The music was coarse and rough, immediate, dated in half an hour, was about bodies in the river, knives, lovepains, cockiness. Up there on stage he was showing all the possibilities in the middle of the story.

Among the cornet players that came after Bolden the one who was closest to him in volume and style was Freddie Keppard.

‘When Keppard was on tour with the Creole Band, the patrons in the front rows of the theatre always got up after the first number and moved back.’

He found himself on the Brewitts’ lawn. She opened the door. For a moment he looked right through her, almost forgot to recognize her. Started shaking, from his stomach up to his mouth, he could not hold his jaws together, he wanted to get the words to Robin or to Jaelin clearly. Whichever one answered the door. But it was her. Her hand wiping the hair off her face. He saw that, he saw her hand taking her hair and moving it. His hands were in his coat pockets. He wanted to burn the coat it stank so much. Can I burn this coat here? That was not what he wanted to say. Come in Buddy. That was not what he wanted to say. His whole body started to shake. He was looking at one of her eyes. But he couldn’t hold it there because of the shake. She started to move towards him he had to say it before she reached him or touched him or smelled him had to say it. Help me. Come in Buddy. Help me. Come in Buddy. Help me. He was shaking.

TWO

Back then, Webb, there was the world of the Joseph Shaving Parlor. The brown freckles suspended in the old barber-shop mirror. This is what I saw in them. Myself and the room. Nora’s plant that came as high as my shoulder. The front of the empty chair, the fake silver roller for the head to rest on. The wallpaper of Louisiana birds behind me.

The Joseph Shaving Parlor was the one cool place in the First and Liberty region. No one else within a mile could afford plants, wallpaper. The reason was good business. And the clue to good business, Joseph knew, was
ice
. Ice against the window so it fogged and suggested an exotic curtain against the heat of the street. The ice was placed on the wood shelf that sloped downwards towards the window at knee level. The ice changed shape all day before your eyes. Each morning I walked along Gravier to pick up the blocks of it and carried them into the parlor and slid them onto the slope. By 3.45 they had melted and drained through the boards into the waiting pails. At 4.00 I carried these out and threw the filthy water over the few plants to the side of the shop. The only shrubs on Liberty. The rest of the day I cut hair.

Cut hair. Above me revolving slowly is the tin-bladed fan, turning like a giant knife all day above my head. So you can never relax and stretch up. The cut hair falls to the floor and is swept by this thick almost liquid wind, which tosses it to the outskirts of the room.

I blow my nose every hour and get the hair-flecks out of it. I cough them up first thing in the morning. I spit out the black fragments onto the pavement as I walk home with Nora from work. I find pieces all over my clothes even in my underwear. I go through the evenings with the smell of shaving soap up to my elbows. It is there in my fingers as I play. The layers of soap all day long have made another skin over me. The cleanest in town. I can look at a face and tell how long ago it was shaved. I work with the vanity of others.

I see them watch their own faces for the twenty minutes they sit below me. Men hate to see themselves change. They laugh nervously. This is the power I live in. I manipulate their looks. They trust me with the cold razor at the vein under their ears. They trust me with liquid soap cupped in my palms as I pass by their eyes and massage it into their hair. Dreams of the neck. Gushing onto the floor and my white apron. The men stumbling with no more sight to the door and feeling even through their pain the waves of heat as they go through the door into the real climate of Liberty and First, leaving this ice, wallpaper and sweet smell and gracious conversation, mirrors, my slavery here.

So many murders of his own body. From the slammed fingernail to the sweat draining through his hair eventually bleeding brown into the neck of his shirt. That and Nora’s habit of biting the collars of his shirt made him eventually buy them collarless. There was a strange lack of care regarding his fingers, even in spite of his ultimate nightmare of having hands cut off at the wrists. His nails chewed down and indistinguishable from the callouses of his fingers. He could hardly feel his lady properly anymore. Suicide of the hands. So many varieties of murder. After his child died in his dream it was his wrist he attacked.

I need a picture.

Thought you knew him.

I need it to show around.

Still—
shit
man who has pictures taken.

Bolden did, he mentioned one. Perhaps with the band.

You’ll have to ask them. Ask Cornish.

But Cornish didn’t have one though he said a picture had been taken, by a crip that Buddy knew who photographed whores. Bellock or something.

Bellocq.

He went down to the station and looked in the files for Bellocq’s place. They knew Bellocq. He was often picked up as a suspect. Whenever a whore was chopped they brought him in and questioned him, when had he last seen her? But Bellocq never said anything and they always let him go.

Bellocq was out so he broke in and searched the place for the picture. Hundreds of pictures of whores in the cabinets. Naked and clothed, with pets or alone. Sad stuff. To Webb the only difference between these and morgue files was the others were dead. But there was nothing of Bolden. He sat down in the one comfortable armchair and eventually fell asleep. Buddy what the hell are you doing out there. You don’t know what you’re doing do ya. Hope Bellocq has the picture. I can’t even remember what you look like too well. I’d recognize you but in my mind you’re just an outline and music. Just your bright shirts that have no collars are there. Something sharp.

Something sharp was at his heart. Pressing. As he opened his eyes it pushed deeper and he jerked back into the chair. Bellocq was peering into his face out of the darkness. It must have been around two in the morning. Bellocq was still holding the camera case with his left hand and with the right hand the tripod, leaning his own chest against it so the three iron points were hard against Webb’s body. Watch out man. Bellocq pressed harder.

What do you want. I’ve got no money.

I need a photograph.

None for sale.

Do you remember Bolden. He disappeared. I’m a friend. Trying to find him. Cornish told me you took a picture of the band.

Why don’t you leave him, he’s a good man.

I know I told you he was a friend. Can you take that hook off me and turn a light on in here. I’d like to talk to you.

Bellocq swung the tripod to his side in an arc. He didn’t touch the lights or sit down but leaned against the tripod as if it were a crutch. You’ve got a nerve coming in here like this. Just like a cop.

Webb wanted Bellocq to talk. Bellocq began to walk around the room. He could hardly see the features on the small figure as it moved around him. There was something wrong with his legs and the tripod was now his cane. He had put the camera away carefully on a shelf. He walked round Webb several times expecting him to talk but the other was silent.

Cornish? He used to be in Bolden’s band?

Yes.

Shitty picture.

Doesn’t matter. I just need a picture with him in it.

I wouldn’t want it getting around. Coughing over his tripod.

How’d you get to take it?

Long story. He knew some of the girls I used to do. He used to screw a lot and being famous they let him in. He used some of them to get stories for
The Cricket.
He paid them for that but not for the fucking. He was a kind man. He didn’t treat you like a crip or anything. We’d talk a lot. It was him who got the girls to let me photograph them. They didn’t like the idea at first. What was his real name?

Charlie.

Yeah. Charlie … So I took the picture but I was using old film and it’s no good.

Can I see it?

Don’t have a print.

Make me one will you.

Ten minutes later he bent over the sink with Bellocq, watching the paper weave in the acid tray. As if the search for his friend was finally ending. In the thick red light the little man tapped the paper with his delicate fingers so it would be uniformly printed, and while waiting cleaned the soakboard in a fussy clinical way. The two of them watching the pink rectangle as it slowly began to grow black shapes, coming fast now. Then the sudden vertical lines which rose out of the pregnant white paper which were the outlines of the six men and their formally held instruments. The dark clothes coming first, leaving the space that was the shirt. Then the faces. Frank Lewis looking slightly to the left. All serious except for the smile on Bolden. Watching their friend float into the page smiling at them, the friend who in reality had reversed the process and gone back into white, who in this bad film seemed to have already half-receded with that smile which may not have been a smile at all, which may have been his mad dignity.

That’s the best I can get. Keep the print.

Bellocq dried his hand of the acid by brushing it through his hair. Habit. From the window he watched the man who had just left waving the print to dry it as he walked. He hadn’t asked him to stay longer. Lot of work tonight. He turned to the sink. He made one more print of the group and shelved it and then one of just Bolden this time, taking him out of the company. Then he dropped the negative into the acid tray and watched it bleach out to grey. Goodbye. Hope he don’t find you.

He brought out the new film and proceeded to make about ten prints until they were all leaning against the counter, watching him. He hadn’t told the man that much about Bolden. Hadn’t told him he had pictures of Nora before she and Buddy were married. He looked in the files and found a picture of Nora Bass, five years younger. He hadn’t seen her since the wedding—though it was no real wedding, just a party marriage. Buddy, who had given him free haircuts at Joseph’s when there was no one there to disturb their talking. Sometimes late into the night, when he wasn’t playing, Bolden would pull the blinds down and turn on the light of the shop so no one could look in and would warn him always about the acid in his hair. Except for cops this person tonight had been the first one here since Buddy. Not even Nora had come. He dropped her into the acid. No more questions. Watching the mist spill into her serious face.

The photographs of Bellocq.
H Y D R O C E P H A L I C.
89 glass plates survive. Look at the pictures. Imagine the mis-shapen man who moved round the room, his grace as he swivelled round his tripod, the casual shot of the dresser that holds the photograph of the whore’s baby that she gave away, the plaster Christ on the wall. Compare Christ’s hands holding the metal spikes to the badly sewn appendix scar of the thirty year old naked woman he photographed when she returned to the room—unaware that he had already photographed her baby and her dresser and her crucifix and her rug. She now offering grotesque poses for an extra dollar and Bellocq grim and quiet saying No, just stand there against the wall there that one, no keep the petticoat on this time. One snap to quickly catch her scorning him and then waiting, waiting for minutes so she would become self-conscious towards him and the camera and her status, embarrassed at just her naked arms and neck and remembers for the first time in a long while the roads she imagined she could take as a child. And he photographed that.

What you see in his pictures is her mind jumping that far back to when she would dare to imagine the future, parading with love or money on a beautiful anonymous cloth arm. Remembering all that as she is photographed by the cripple who is hardly taller than his camera stand. Then he paid her, packed, and she had lost her grace. The picture is just a figure against a wall.