Half-Blood Blues (30 page)

I shrugged bitterly. I just ain’t able to start in on it.

She come on over, wrestle me out of my old coat. She led me over to the window seat, sat me down in all that white sunshine, run a finger light over my temple like she brushing away cobwebs. ‘It can’t have been that bad,’ she murmured. ‘Come on. It can’t have been like that. How was Hiero?’

I frowned, leaned away from her. ‘Hiero? Hell.’

She pull back then. ‘Sid. What happened?’

‘It was bad.’

‘What was bad? You were bad?’

‘I wasn’t bad, girl. I was
awful
.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘You ain’t seen their faces, Lilah. Chip – he look
ashamed
.’

She arched a eyebrow.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘But you goin to. You goin say somethin that’ll make me mad, girl. I know it.’

She stood up.

‘Where you goin?’

She snorted. ‘When you’re done feeling sorry for yourself, then we can talk.’ But she stopped by the vanity, and turning to me, give me a long careful look. ‘Well? Are you done?’

I sort of picked at my old calloused fingerpads. Shrugged.

‘Good.’ She sat back down, took a breath like she got something to say. But then she just put her hand on my wrist. It felt cool, soft. ‘I know Louis,’ she said at last. ‘He can spot a gate like no one I ever met. He’ll know how good you are, Sid.’

‘I wasn’t good, Lilah. It was like I was steeped in the rot.’

‘But you
can
be good.’

I shook my damn head like it wasn’t of no consequence.

‘Did Louis say you weren’t going to be on the record?’

‘No.’

‘Then stop with all this,’ she said, but gentle-like. She pulled my fingers towards her top button, slipped it real leisurely through its eyelet. ‘Now
I
need
your
help with something,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘Something I
know
you’re good at.’

‘Aw, Lilah,’ I said, ‘I ain’t in the mood, girl.’

But she was already undoing her blouse, slipping my hand inside it.

Louis ain’t said nothing more bout the record. Not to no one. Weeks bled by, soon the light in the alleys begun failing, and then we was crunching through a crust of snow on the cobblestones of them same dark streets. It was damn near November. The trees along the Seine gone to glass, shining white and delicate. And I got to thinking, maybe I had a chance yet. Maybe he like to forget what I’d sounded like.

The months, they felt like nothing. All Paris seemed drunk and sleeping it off, that slow false war that was like no damn war at all. The Frogs was still camped behind the Maginot. Their soldiers, pencil-moustached, natty in fatigues, had taken to playing football and breeding roses hardy enough to shake off the cold. Soldiers on leave drifted through the streets in the morning haze, shivering and grim like poets out of wine. Sometimes we seen them sleeping on park benches, huddled figures in the grey light. We slept like the dead those days.

Wasn’t no word from Poland. It was blanketed in darkness. I supposed the Krauts was devouring the west but we ain’t heard of no savagery. A cold wind was coming out of the east, and soon we was all shivering when we come in, huddling up together on the couches. The kid looked sort of haunted these days, hollow in the cheeks, his eyes yellow with weariness. Chip and me laughed uneasily, or not at all. We was all of us stretched too damn tight with nerves. And still Louis ain’t said nothing.

When word come over the wireless of a Russian assault in Finland, Hiero just shake his sorrowful head. ‘It winter,’ Chip said with a scowl, ‘they all like to be slaughtered.’ All of us huddled over the fireplace, its soft popping heat, our fists shoved up in our armpits, the wireless spitting and crackling in the corner like a second fire. And Delilah, with her beautiful head in my lap. None of it seemed real.

Then Louis, at last, was calling up his gates.

I sat at a table on the Bug’s patio, tearing off the crusts of a day-old twist, brooding over whether I ought to start in on the gin or the rot, when Chip come striding up out of the afternoon crowds.

He looked agitated. ‘
There
you are,’ he said, out of breath. He got this feverish glint in his eye. ‘I was just bout to give up on you.’

‘What you on about?’

‘We got to go, brother. Louis just phoned. He wants to talk bout the record.’

I felt something surge in my chest. ‘What – now?’

‘Aw, not if it
inconvenient
for you,’ he said, smiling.

I was already standing, counting out some damn francs. I had a foolish smile on my face. ‘And he ask for me? He said I was still in?’

‘Why wouldn’t you be in?’

I stopped fidgeting with my dough. ‘What you mean. Louis ain’t asked for me?’

‘He ain’t asked for no one. He just phoned and said it was time. To get over to the damn Coup to meet the other gates.’

All at once that good feeling just drained right out of me. I squinted at Chip in the dark afternoon light. ‘But did he mean just you?’

‘Sid,’ said Chip, frowning. ‘I ain’t asked him. He ain’t said. Now you comin or what?’

‘Son of a bitch,’ I muttered.

‘Brother, he heard you on our damn records. He know how good you can play.’

‘What he say? Tell me what he say, exactly.’

Chip give me a sour look. ‘Alright. And this is a exact quote. He said,
Chip, get on over to the Coup. Oh, and be sure and tell old Sid his mama is one damn honey in the mornin
. Man, you a ass. Come if you comin.’

Then he was rushing off and I couldn’t do nothing but follow.

They was at Café Coup de Foudre, sitting in the window. Two of the damn tables been shoved together to fit them all. I seen them through the dirty glass even before we done crossed the boulevard. We punch open the glass door, wade in through all that smoke, breathing hard from the walk over.

Armstrong give us a odd look as we come in. He was waving us over. I thought,
Hell, Sid, don’t you be crazy now. That look wasn’t nothing
.

But I wasn’t crazy. It
was
a odd look.

‘Hi Sid,’ Armstrong said to me in that gravelly voice.

He turned to the gates leaning up among the tables. All of them grim-faced, etched, like gangsters in a moving picture. ‘Boys, I want you all to meet the Fifth Column. This here Chip Jones, the hide hitter. He look and sound American, sure, but he straight from Berlin. His friend is Sid Griffiths.’

‘Aw, I know some of these boys already,’ Chip said, grinning. ‘I taken their money at dice.’

‘You keep talkin, brother.’ A tall dark gate with a thin moustache laughed.

‘Bertie. How you wife? She still tired from last year?’

I ain’t joined in. My mouth like to be stuffed with dry crackers.

‘Where Little Louis?’ Armstrong asked me.

I shrugged.

‘We ain’t seen him,’ said Chip. ‘But if he get you message, he goin be here.’

One of the other gates, a short thick fellow with blond hair, muttered something in Frog to Louis. The others laughed.

‘Aw, you boys will have to excuse me,’ said Armstrong. ‘Let me introduce you. Chip, this Jacques Painlevé, the trombonist. Bertie here goin tickle the keys for us. Herve be damn hot on the licorice stick. I reckon you know Jean. He goin crack the bass for you in the back line.’

Son of a
bitch
. I felt my face flush. I look down at my hands. My fingernails was cutting into the flesh of my palm.

Chip ain’t even seem to notice. He was messing with the trombonist’s gin and the other gates leaned in, laughing. It was then that Armstrong turn to me, put a big hand on my shoulder.

‘Sid,’ he said quiet-like. ‘You goin sit this one out, if that okay. It ain’t but the first one. We got other discs to press. Jean just got the fingers I want on this one.’

I give a funny little shrug, like it ain’t no trouble.

‘Aw, it alright Louis,’ I said. ‘It alright. Sure. It alright.’

It wasn’t alright.

When I wandered back into the flat, everything felt strange, a shadow of itself, like I was seeing it all for the first time. All that dust, the shabby, dented end tables, the creaking floorboards. I trudged past chairs sheeted like corpses, past grimy windowsills. Delilah’s bathroom door stood open. I watched her lean over the basin, wet her thin fingers under its stream, reach up under her gold scarf to scratch her head. She heard my breathing and turned, alarmed.

‘Oh, Sidney Kidney, it’s you,’ she said.

‘What you doin here?’ I said. ‘Ain’t you got some place to be?’

She smiled, shrugged. ‘It gets awful hot sometimes, this helmet. Even in winter. I’m like a draft horse, I just need to be wetted down sometimes.’

‘I’m sorry you uncomfortable.’ My voice, it was hard and awkward, a right plank of wood.

She stood there staring at me, water dripping from her fingers. ‘You sound angry.’

‘Well.’

‘A well is nothing but a hole filled with water. What is it?’

But my voice, when I finally spoke, wasn’t steady. ‘I ain’t on it. Chip and the kid are on it, but I ain’t. Louis got some other gate supportin Chip.’

She froze, her hands half-lifted to her head, her face turned toward me. ‘Oh, Sidney. Oh, I’m so sorry. I am.’

I said nothing.

‘What’re you going to do?’ she said quietly.

I shrugged. ‘There ain’t nothin else. This was it. This was my shot at doin somethin real. There ain’t nothin else.’

‘Oh, Sid.’

‘Don’t look at me like that. I mean it.’

‘Sid, I’m sorry. I’m sure it isn’t you, I’m sure there’s some other reason Louis skipped over you.’

I give a sharp laugh. ‘It don’t matter. Kid’s on it, ain’t that all that matters?’

‘No, Sid, it isn’t. Though I’m glad for him.’

‘Of course you glad for him.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You need me to say it? You wink and tease and flirt with the kid like you got designs or somethin.’ I ain’t looked at her, glancing instead at the sink’s rusted gullet, the clean water thrumming against it. I ain’t believed a word of what I was saying. But I ain’t cared. Felt like everything being torn from me.

I said, ‘You keep on like this, kid goin to get ideas. Like you mean it or somethin.’

Silence, filled with the drumming of water on steel. She turned off the tap.

‘Like I mean
what
or something?’

I felt a twinge then, like I should just shut my damn mouth. But seeing her stubborn face, its righteous frown, hell, the heat just rose up in me.

‘Way you carryin on, girl, it ain’t right. It ain’t goddamned right.
I
know you just teasin,
I
know you wouldn’t never do nothin. But other folks, what
they
goin think? And Hiero hisself – you can see he half in love with you. It cruel, makin him think you love him back.’

Slowly, Delilah wrapped her fingers round the back of a wrought-iron chair. Her face darkening. She drawn back the chair and sat.

I stood there staring, the skin hot all along my hairline. I watched her watching her hands. What a face she got, smooth as the surface of milk.

‘Delilah?’ I finally said.

She raised her hand like to say stop. Let it fall in her lap. After a minute, she look up at me, her green eyes filled with some strange subterranean feeling.

‘If I have made him think I love him,’ she begun, then broke off. ‘I hope to god I have. I’ve tried. I’ve tried everything I could think of. Someone has to. Have you even seen that kid out there, Sid? Have you taken one goddamn look? He’s a sunk little boy. Lost as a stray cat. You’re always so worried about you, so damn worried about yourself. He’s just a
child
. And he’s got no one.’

She was staring at me from a cold, unnerving distance. The light in her eyes gone out. ‘You have some very sick ideas in that head of yours.’ She paused, raised her face. ‘Hiero’s like a little brother to me.’

I known that. Course I known that. I done said the words myself to Chip months and months ago. I felt a heaviness in my gut made me want to curl up and clutch my ribs. Man, the
shame
. My jaw started twitching as I stared down into her face, its utter emptiness. And I seen clearly and sharply just how much she did not love me.

‘Lilah,’ I said.

‘Close the door on your way out.’

I watched her face. Nothing, no water on her eyes – nothing.

I turned to go. Even as I shut the door with a click, I was listening for her voice, thinking she might call me back.

She ain’t.

Did that scrawny Kraut bastard mean to take
everything
from me – the band, Armstrong, the recording, even Delilah? Ain’t he like to leave me
no
scraps? Is that what genius does – entitles a gate to claim whatever pieces of others’ lives he want?

Cause I admit it. He got genius, he got genius in spades. Cut him in half, he still worth three of me. It ain’t fair. It ain’t fair that I struggle and struggle to sound just second-rate, and the damn kid just wake up, spit through his horn, and it sing like nightingales. It ain’t
fair
. Gifts is divided so damn unevenly. Like God just left his damn sack of talents in a ditch somewhere and said,
Go help youselves, ladies and gents. Them’s that get there first can help themselves to the biggest ones.
In every other walk of life, a jack can
work
to get what he want. But ain’t no amount of toil going get you a lick more talent than you born with. Geniuses ain’t made, brother, they just
is
. And I just was
not
.

I was drinking alone at one of the red tables in the tobacconist’s down near the flat when Hiero ankled in. The tobacconist leaned out over the counter, her shirtsleeves turned up, one scrawny arm propped under either cheek. We called her the Bug cause of her thin, masticating face, her bulging eyeballs.

She come over here from Switzerland after the first war. ‘What’ll it be, Hiero?’ she called out in that cracked German the Swiss talk.