Coming Through Slaughter (5 page)

Some of the pictures have knife slashes across the bodies. Along the ribs. Some of them neatly decapitate the head of the naked body with scratches. These exist alongside the genuine scars mentioned before, the appendix scar and others non-surgical. They reflect each other, the eye moves back and forth. The cuts add a three-dimensional quality to each work. Not just physically, though you can almost see the depth of the knife slashes, but also because you think of Bellocq wanting to enter the photographs, to leave his trace on the bodies. When this happened, being too much of a gentleman to make them pose holding or sucking his cock, the camera on a timer, when this happened he had to romance them later with a knife. You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of.

Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. Holding up her arm for the shade.

There were things Bellocq hadn’t told him. He knew for he looked up from the street and saw the photographer in the window. He continued walking, the damp picture in his hand.

The connection between Bellocq and Buddy was strange. Buddy was a social dog, talked always to three or four people at once, a racer. He had no deceit but he roamed through conversations as if they were the countryside not listening carefully just picking up moments. And what was strong in Bellocq was the slow convolution of that brain. He was self-sufficient, complete as a perpetual motion machine. What could Buddy have to do with him?

The next day Webb knew more about Bellocq. The man worked with a team of photographers for the Foundation Company—a shipbuilding firm. Each of them worked alone and they photographed sections of boats, hulls that had been damaged and so on. Job work. Photographs to help ship designers. Bellocq, with the money he made, kept a room, ate, bought equipment, and paid whores to let him photograph them. What had Bolden seen in all this? He would have had to take time and care. Bellocq seemed paralysed by suspicions. He had let Buddy so
close.

Webb walked around Bellocq for several days. Bellocq with his stoop, and his clothy hump, bent over the sprawled legs of his tripod. Not even bent over but an extension for he didn’t have to bend at all, being 4 foot 11 inches. Bellocq with hair at the back of his head down to his shoulders, the hair at the front cut in a fringe so no wisps would spoil his vision. Bellocq sleeping on trains as he went from town to town to photograph ships, the plates wrapped carefully and riding in his large coat pockets. Something about the man who carries his profession with him always, like a wife, the way Bolden carried his mouthpiece even in exile. This is the way Bellocq moved. E.J. Bellocq in his worn, crumpled suits, but uncrumpled behind the knees.

In the no-smoker carriages his face through the glass, the superimposed picture, windows of passing houses across his mouth and eyes. Looking at the close face Webb understood the head shape, the blood vessels, the quiver to the side of the lip. Face machinery,
H Y D R O C E P H A L I C
. His blood and water circulation which was of such a pattern that he knew he would be dead before forty and which made the bending of his knees difficult. To avoid the usual splay or arced walk which was the natural movement for people with this problem, he walked straight and forward. That is he went high on the toe, say of his right leg, which allowed the whole left leg enough space to move forward directly under his body like a pendulum, and so travel past the right leg. Then with the other foot. This also helped Bellocq with his height. However he did not walk that much. He never shot landscapes, mostly portraits. Webb discovered the minds of certain people through their bodies. Or through the perceptions that distinguished them. This was the stage that Bellocq’s circulation and walk had reached.

In the heat heart of the Brewitts’ bathtub his body exploded. The armour of dirt fell apart and the nerves and muscles loosened. He sank his head under the water for almost a minute bursting up showering water all over the room. Under the surface were the magnified sounds of his body against the enamel, drip, noise of the pipe. He came up and lay there not washing just letting the dirt and the sweat melt into the heat. Stood up and felt everything drain off him. Put a towel around himself and looked out into the hall. The Brewitts were out so he walked to his room lay down on the bed and slept.

When Robin came in he was on his back asleep, bedclothes and towel fallen off. She let her hair down onto his stomach. Her hair rustled against the black curls of his belly, then her mouth dropping its tongue here and here on his flesh, he slowly awake, her tongue the flesh explorer, her cool spit, his eyes watching her kneel over the bed. Then moving her face up to his mouth his shoulder.

Stay with us.

Does this change things?

Don’t you think so? Don’t you think Jaelin would think so?

I wouldn’t feel different if I was him.

I can’t do things that way Buddy.

She put her mouth at the hollow of his neck.

Your breath feels like a fly on me, about three or four of them on me.

Talk about the music, what you want to play.

You know Bellocq had a dog I’d watch for hours. It would do nothing, all day it would seem to be sitting around doing nothing, but it would be
busy.
I’d watch it and I could see in its face that it was becoming aware of an itch on its ribs, then it would get up and sit in the best position to scratch, then it would thump away, hitting the floor more often than not.

Who was Bellocq.

He was a photographer. Pictures. That were like … windows. He was the first person I met who had absolutely no interest in my music. That sounds vain don’t it!

Yup. Sounds a bit vain.

Well it’s true. You’d play and people would grab you and grab you till you began to—you couldn’t help it—believe you were doing something important. And all you were doing was stealing chickens, nailing things to the wall. Everytime you stopped playing you became a lie. So I got so, with Bellocq, I didn’t trust any of that … any more. It was just playing games. We were furnished rooms and Bellocq was a window looking out.

Buddy —

She refused then to take off her clothes. She lay on top of him, kissing him, talking quietly to him. He could feel the material of her clothes all over his naked body, as if he were wearing them. His eyes closed. It could have been a sky not a ceiling above him.

Don’t lean on that arm. Sorry. It got broken once.

She was conscious that while they spoke his fingers had been pressing the flesh on her back as though he were plunging them into a cornet. She was sure he was quite unaware, she was sure his mind would not even remember. It was part of a conversation held with himself in his sleep. Even now as she lay against his body in her red sweater and skirt. But she was wrong. He had been improving on “Cakewalking Babies”.

Passing wet chicory that lies in the field like the sky.

She. Again in the room, now in the long brown dress. Brown and yellow, no buttons no shoes and the click of the door as she leans against the handle, snapping shut so we are closed in with each other. The snap of the lock is the last word we speak. Between us the air of the room. Thick with past and the ghosts of friends who are in other rooms. She will not move away from the door. I am sitting on the edge of the bed looking towards the mirror. With her hands behind her. I must get up and move through the bodies in the air. To the first slow kiss in the cloth of her right shoulder into the skin of her neck, blowing my nervousness against the almost cold hair for she has been walking outside. My fingers into her hair like a comb till the hair is tight against the unused nerves between my fingers. The taste the pollen in her right ear, the soft circuit of her hearing wet with my spit that I send to her like a ship and suck back and swallow. This soft moveable limb on the side of her head.

I press myself into her belly. Her breath into my white shirt. Her cool breath against my sweating forehead so I can feel the bubbles evaporate. I lift her arms and leave them empty above us and bend and pull the brown dress up to her stomach and then up into her arms. Step back and watch her against the corner of my room her hands above her holding the brown dress she has lifted over her head in a ball. Turns her back to me and leans her face now against the dress she brings down to her face. Cool brown back. Till I attack her into the wall my cock cushioned my hands at the front of the thigh pulling her at me we are hardly breathing her crazy flesh twisted into corners me slipping out from the move and our hands meet as we put it in quick
christ
quickly back in again. In. Breathing towards the final liquid of the body, the liquid snap, till we slow and slow and freeze in this corner. As if this is the last entrance of air into the room that was a vacuum that is now empty of the other histories.

Lying here. Kept warm by her dress and my shirt over us. I am dry and stuck to her thigh. Joined by the foam we made. By the door, and the light and the air from the hall comes under the door. Sniff it. She hasn’t taken one step further into my room. Dear Robin. I remember when I shook against you. The flavour of mouth. We are animals meeting an unknown breed. The reek, the size, where to find the right softness. Against this door. Coiled into each other under the brown and white cloth. Trying to come closer than that. A step past the territory.

Webb had spoken to Bellocq and discovered nothing. Had spoken to Nora, Crawley, to Cornish, had met the children—Bernadine, Charlie. Their stories were like spokes on a rimless wheel ending in air. Buddy had lived a different life with every one of them.

Webb circled, trying to understand not where Buddy was but what he was doing, quite capable of finding him but taking his time, taking almost two years, entering the character of Bolden through every voice he spoke to.

In fact Bellocq was more surprised than anyone when Buddy Bolden left. He had pushed his imagination into Buddy’s brain, had passed it awkwardly across the table and entertained him, had seen him take it in return for the company, not knowing the conversations were becoming steel in his only friend. They had talked for hours moving gradually off the edge of the social world. As Bellocq lived at the edge in any case he was at ease there and as Buddy did not he moved on past him like a naïve explorer looking for footholds. Bellocq did not expect that. Or he could have easily explained the ironies. The mystic privacy one can be so proud of has no alphabet of noise or meaning to the people outside. Bellocq knew this but never bothered applying it to himself, he did not consider himself professional. Even his photographs were more on the level of fetish, a joyless and private game. Bellocq thought of this. Aware it was him who had tempted Buddy on. Buddy who had once been enviably public. And then this small almost unnecessary friendship with Bellocq. Bellocq had always thought his friend to be the patronising one, now he discovered it was himself.

Jaelin and Robin. Jaelin and Robin. Jaelin and Robin and Bolden. Robin and Bolden. There was this story between them. There was this deceit and then there was this honour between them. He wanted to tell that to Webb later.

The silence of Jaelin Brewitt understood them all. His minimal stepping out the door saying he would be back the next day. And he would be back not before the next day. All three of them talking for hours about things like the machinery of the piano, fishing, stars. This year, he told Bolden, there is a new star, the Wolf Ryat star. It should be the Wolf Star Bolden said it sounds better. It sounds better yes but that’s not its real name. There were two people who found it. Someone called Wolf and someone called Ryat, Jaelin Brewitt said. There was that story between them. Later both of them realised they had been talking about Robin.

*

There is only one photograph that exists today of Bolden and the band. This is what you see.

As a photograph it is not good or precise, partly because the print was found after the fire. The picture, waterlogged by climbing hoses, stayed in the possession of Willy Cornish for several years.

*

The fire begins with Bellocq positioning his chairs all the way round the room. 17 chairs. Some of which he has borrowed. The chairs being placed this way the room, 20′ by 20′, looks like it has a balcony running all the way around it. Then he takes the taper, lights it, stands on a chair, and sets fire to the wallpaper half way up to the ceiling, walks along the path of chairs to continue the flame until he has made a full circle of the room. With great difficulty he steps down and comes back to the centre of the room. The noise is great. Planks cracking beneath the wallpaper in this heat as he stands there silent, as still as possible, trying to formally breathe in the remaining oxygen. And then breathing in the smoke. He is covered, surrounded by whiteness, it looks as if a cloud has stuffed itself into the room.

Horror of noise. And then the break when he cannot breathe calm and he vomits out smoke and throws himself against the red furniture, against the chairs on fire and he crashes finally into the wall, only there is no wall any more only a fire curtain and he disappears into and through it as if diving through a wave and emerging red on the other side. In an incredible angle. He has expected the wall to be there and his body has prepared itself and his mind has prepared itself so his shape is constricted against an imaginary force looking as if he has come up against an invisible structure in the air.

Then he falls, dissolving out of his pose. Everything has gone wrong. The wall is not there to catch or hide him. Nothing is there to clasp him into a certainty.

Under the sunlight. I am the only object between water and sky. There can be either the narrow focus of the eye or the crazy chaos of white, that is the eyes wide, wishing to burn them out till they are stones.

In the late afternoon I walk back along the shore to the small house and it is against me dark and shaded. Robin and her friends. I am full of the white privacy. Collisions around me. Eyes clogged with people. Yesterday Robin in the midst of an argument flicked some cream on my face. Without thinking I jumped up grabbing the first thing, a jug full of milk, and threw it all over her. She stood by the kitchen door half laughing half crying at what I had done. She stood there frozen in a hunch she took on as she saw the milk coming at her. Milk all over her soft lost beautiful brown face. I stood watching her, the lip of the jug dribbling the rest onto the floor.

Jaelin and the others in the room silent. I very gently placed the jug on the table, such a careful gesture for I wanted her to see I was empty of all the tension. Then getting one of the big towels and placing it over her wet shirt. And then like a wise coward leaving the house till late evening when they had all gone to bed. When I got back she was still in the living room, almost asleep in the armchair.

Let’s go for a swim. I want to get the milk out of my hair.

I’m sorry, try and forget it.

No I won’t forget it, Buddy, but I know you’re sorry.

Well it’s just as well it happened.

Yeah, you’ll be better for a few days. But which window are you going to break next, which chair.

Don’t talk Robin.

You expect to come back and for me to say nothing? With Jaelin here?

Look you’re either Jaelin’s wife or my wife.

I’m Jaelin’s wife and I’m in love with you, there’s nothing simple.

Well it should be.

How do you think he feels. He said nothing, even when you went out. Do you really expect me to say nothing.

Yes. I’m sorry, you know that.

Ok … let’s swim Buddy.

She grins. And there is my grin which is my loudest scream ever.

In the water like soft glass. We slide in slowly leaving our clothes by the large stone. Heads skimming along the surface.

As long as I don’t hurt you or Jaelin.

As long as I don’t hurt you or Jaelin she mimics. Then beginning to imitate loons and swimming deeper, her head sliding away from me. Below our heads all the evil dark swimming creatures are waiting to brush us into nightmare into heart attack to suck us under into the darkness into the complications. Her loon laugh. The dull star of white water under each of us. Swimming towards the sound of madness.

See Tom Pickett.

Why?

Cos he, cos Buddy cut him up.

Why Pickett?

Go ask him.

Where’ll I find him?

Don’t know.

Tell me
, Cornish.

Try Chinatown. Opium.

Was that why?

No.

Ok I’ll find him.

Then as Webb is almost out of the door, Cornish saying

Listen what he’ll tell you is true. I saw his face afterwards. You won’t believe it but it’s true.

Thanks Willy.

After a day he found Pickett in the room of flies. The air damp and thick. He had to practically sweep the flies off his face and hair.

Don’t kill one you bastard or you’ll be out, in fact get out’f here, willya.

What the fuck is all this. Not the dope but this mess. The flies.

I invite them in, ok? If you don’t like it get out.

Cornish wouldn’t know about this or Cornish would have told him. Cornish would never come here. Webb could hardly breathe without one going in his nose or into his mouth. Early evening and the windows closed, no breeze, just Tom Pickett and open food on plates around the room.

You’re the first to come here since I started. Don’t tell others.

I came to talk about Buddy.

I guessed. That’s what everyone wants to talk about.

Pickett lying on the floor bed while Webb stood over him.

He did this.
Pickett clapped his hands near his face so the flies left it for a moment and then settled back. Five or six scars cut into his cheeks. Pickett had been one of the great hustlers, one of the most beautiful men in the District.

Did they try to arrest him, is that why he went?

No.

Why did he go?

Don’t know. I don’t think it was this you see, he accepted what he did, he could do this and forgive himself. Shame wasn’t serious to him.

How did it happen?

The flies moved over the roads on his face.

Nine o clock. Storm rain outside.
Cricket
work finished. Don’t want to think. The kid has been around with the bottle and I haven’t opened it yet. I watch the wall behind me in the mirror. Alone. Want to think.

Tom Pickett walks in. Black trousers and white shirt, the thunderstorm making it stick to his skin. Got time for a good haircut, Buddy? I think he said that, something like that. I was looking at the shirt speckled with long water drops, making it brown there. I get up and give him a small towel to dry his hair, unscrew the top and hand the bottle to him. Jesus it hasn’t been touched, you sick? Shrug and point to the chair for him to sit in. Tells me, as always, exactly what he wants. Beautiful people are very conservative. And puts his feet up on the sink as usual. I lay the towel over his shirt and knot it at the back of his neck. He passes the bottle to me and I put it away.

‘I started talking about his mood which was so quiet you know so fuckin strange for him and he still wouldn’t say much. I guess if you want to find out what happened you should find out why he was like that. After a while I threw in a few cracks about the band playing too much and he didn’t say much about that either. He was cutting the hair then, he was doing what I told him. But he was … tense, you know. I started telling him this joke about, jesus I still remember what it was, aint that something? It was about the guy who is feeling good but everybody he meets tells him he looks terrible, well anyway he just said he’d heard it, so I shut up. I could see him in the mirror all the time. Then we started talking, I wasn’t pushing him now. About my pimping. We always did that. That was our one real connection. Usually it was good talk cos even though he wasn’t involved with the money he was a great hustler. I don’t know if you knew that.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well he always had a sense of humour about it. He didn’t come on like a preacher. So I was going on casual about trade, he’d done the left side of my head, and then he starts shouting at me, I mean real filth. So I thought it was a game right and I joked back. I thought he was joking. I started to heckle him about Nora and me, smiling at him in the mirror all the time and then he slips the towel round behind my neck and pulls back, pulls my neck back over the chair. He got his left arm under my chin—like this—then he opens the razor with his other hand, flicks it open in a movement like he was throwing it away and puts it in my shirt and slits it open in a couple of places. Once the shirt’s open he starts shaving me up and down my front taking the hairs off. I wasn’t moving or saying anything. Thought I’d keep still. Then he slices off my nipple. I don’t think he meant to, was probably an accident. But that got me shouting. Then he lets go my neck and starts shaving my face very fast now small cuts now I was crying from the pain and the tears were going into the cuts, then I got my thumb into the wrist with the razor and got free, that’s when I got really badly cut on the face, this one here. But I got loose and took a small chair against him.’

Right on my head. But I still have the razor and we stand looking at each other. The blood drooling off his chin onto the wet shredded shirt. He takes a quick look at himself in the mirror and the tears just rush out of his face. I am exhausted, sorry for him. Got no anger at him now. I’m finished I’m empty but I can’t tell him. What the hell is wrong with me? And Pickett’s face is hard waiting to come for me, looking around the room. With the chair he got me on the head with, he moves sideways to the sink. With the other hand he lifts the leather strop that has the metal hook on the end of it. He sways it out to the left and then sends it back slowly to the right and lands the hook in the centre of the mirror. $45. It falls onto the towel he has placed in the sink before. In large pieces which is what he wanted. I stand with the razor at the back of the room.

He picks up a large piece of mirror and skims it hard across the room at me. It hits the wall to the left of my shoulder but it came really fast and it scares me. I know he will slice me. He takes the next piece and jerks it at me twenty feet away and it comes straight for me. My neck. Is coming for me I’m dead I can’t. Move. And then catches on a muscle of air and tilts up crashing above my head. Door opens near me. Nora. What! Stay back. And I run to him before he can get more and wave him from the sink with the razor. He holds me back with the chair in his left hand, with the right he swings the strop gets me hard on the left elbow. Broken. Just like that, no pain yet but I know it is broken. He swings the chair but it is too heavy for speed and I avoid it. Swings the strop and gets me on the knee. Numb but I can move it. Next time he swings the chair I drop the razor and wrestle it from him and push him backwards now able to keep the strop off but my left hand still dead. See Nora in another mirror. The parlor is totally empty except for the two of us and Nora shouting in a corner at the back screaming to us that we’re crazy we’re crazy.

Pickett’s face swelled now, he cannot see too well over the puffs. Balance. His strop and my chair. I won’t swing the chair. If I go off balance he will go for the head. My knee is stumbling, pain coming through. Can’t feel my arm. Pickett swings and the strop tangles in the chair. I push hard hard he goes back the wood almost against his face that he doesn’t want me to touch. Push again and he goes over the ice through the front window. A great creak as the thing folds over him like a spider web, he goes through, the hook of the strop pulls the chair and me frantic I won’t let go and I come through too over the ice and glass and empty frame. And we are on the street.

Liberty. Grey with thick ropes of rain bouncing on the broken glass, Pickett on the pavement and now me too falling on the bad arm he kicks but there is no pain it could be metal. We scramble apart. Three feet between us, still joined by strop and chair, the rain thick and hard. His shirt which was red in the parlor now bloated and pink, the spreading cherry at his nipple. Exhausted. Silent. Battle of rain all around us. Nora screaming through the open window stop stop then climbs out herself and runs to the rack of empty coke bottles and starts throwing them between us. Smash Smash Smash. And some which don’t break but roll away loud and we still don’t move. Then she aims them at Pickett. Hits him on the foot and he steps back unconcerned still watching me then hits him on the side of the head and he gasps for she has hit a cut, the blood down his face. Shakes himself and drops the strop, moves backwards his hand over his eye, and then lopes down the street shouting out I tried to kill him.

So he leaves me Tom Pickett. Goes to tell my friends I have gone mad. Nora walking to me slowly to tell me I am mad. I put the chair down and I sit in it. Tired. The rain coming into my head. Nora into my head. Tom Pickett at the end of Liberty shouts at me shaking his arms, waving at me, my wife’s ex-lover, ex-pimp, sit facing Tom Pickett who was beautiful. Nora strokes my arm, don’t tell her I can’t feel her fingers. Her anger or her pity. The rain like so many little windows going down around us.

Brock Mumford

‘He was impossible during that time, before he went. I had a room on the fourth floor. Room 119A, where we were yesterday. I was avoiding people. A lot of fuss about Buddy at this time. Band was breaking up and I was being used as the go-between, made to decide who was being unfair
this
time
that
time. So I just stopped going out during the day cos I’d be sure to run into one of them. Buddy was always shouting. In any argument he’d try to overpower you with yelling.

The last time I saw him … The door downstairs was locked. Bell rang, I didn’t want to answer and I just lay on the mattress smoking. Then minutes later he is tapping on the window, he had walked along the roof. In fact it was quite easy to do though he seemed so proud of himself I didn’t tell him that. You took anything away from him in those days and he’d either start shouting or would go into a silent temper. He was a child really—though most of the time, and this is important, he was right. A lot of people wanted to knock him down at that time. The Pickett incident had made him unpopular. Buddy didn’t leave at the peak of his glory you know. No one does. Whatever they say no one does. If you are at the peak you don’t have time to think about stopping you just build up and up and up. It’s only a few months later when it wears off—usually before anyone else realises it has worn off—that you start to go, if you are the kind that goes. But he was still playing fine.…