Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  She wasn’t surprised then when Ricky Ellis appeared out of the trees, wind, and tall weeds, his eyes clear and wide. He walked up through the fields, sat down, and laid his head in Jem’s lap. He did it without speaking, and Jem let him. She didn’t let herself think about what Melvie or Fatima would say if they could see them sitting together like that. She just held very still.

  “I missed you,” he said. “I had a lot of fun driving with you that time.”

  Her fingers touched his forehead. She thought that she could look at him a long time and not know a thing about him. Distant sounds of children reached her, lapsing in and out on the back of the wind. The voices, so thinned out, sounded sweet and discordant. Then Ricky closed his eyes and began singing, his head still cradled in her lap.

  The sound was eerie, elegiac, climbing the bones of her legs back to her spine, the song bound to the rhythm of weeping. It sounded vaguely familiar to her, a lament for a dead soldier. What was most remarkable about this singing was the purity of his voice, going true to every note and giving it flight. The sound of a faun, Jem thought, or panpipes. She’d never heard anything like it before. While he was singing, she was afraid he would finish, and when he finished, she wasn’t sure if she wanted him to start again.

  He sat up then and said, “So, what do you think?”

  She opened her mouth. Before she could speak, he said, “Do I sound like Elvis?”

  “Elvis?”

  He nodded, grinning and looking down at his crossed legs and bare feet. “Stupid, I know. He’s kind of a god to me, even if he is dead and all.” He squinted up at Jem, plucking a blade of grass and leaning forward to put it between her lips. “Sometimes I like to think that Elvis was my real dad, you know?”

  WHEN FIREFLIES BEGAN to show against the dark, Ricky took Jem’s hand and kissed the inside of her wrist and the tip of each finger. He dusted off his jeans and walked back down the road, toward the haze of the gas station. Jem stayed out a while longer, listening to crickets, bullfrogs, and the deeper silence that welled up; it filled the shadows and permeated the night air. There was a lingering smell of cut grass and if she walked a bit farther, toward the creek at the edge of the trees, she knew there would be a faint odor of human waste. In the summers, she and Melvie and other Euclid kids used to wander the concrete-bottomed creek in the Otts’s fields, through stagnant water full of tadpoles and surface-skimming insects. It ran through a tunnel that cut into the earth’s slope and children would walk in as far as the light reached.

  She had sat with her mother, holding her hand through a night like this, like a span of water. Her mother’s last words were flecks of light on the surface of that water. What were they? A request for a blanket? The names of her children? Her husband? Jem held her mother’s hand, as the fever turned body and words to ashes, then cold. Jem sat through the night, stiffening, as if in step with the process of death. She was afraid that if she made a sound and broke the spell that held her mother’s silence, her father’s sleep, and her baby sister’s stare through the bars of the crib, that she would shatter something holding them together.

  When light touched the room and their father opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Jem holding her mother’s hand. He said, “Jemmy? Yabah, couldn’t you sleep?”

  That smell of dormant water and waste was in that room. Melvina, who was two, was sitting up.

  Chapter 19

  A MAN SHRIVELED AROUND his own skeleton, his face raw and red as a bone joint, came into the hospital early the next morning. He was more carried than walked in by a tall woman with big, horsey bones, all muscle and skin that was burned and peeled and burned again. She was wearing a bullwhip for a belt, her hair hung in shafts of tangerine yellow, chopped above her forehead as if by a tomahawk; the name Marvella was stenciled across her prominent sternum.

  The security guards watched on their monitors as she steered her companion out of the Emergency Room and walked him across the hospital to the Critical Care nurses’ station. Melvina saw them straggle past the glass wall of her office and sprang up.

  “You there! Halt!” Melvie said, marching toward them. Nurses and orderlies were standing around, watching the pair, but no one seemed inclined to interfere with the whip-woman. “Stop right where you are.”

  The woman stopped, hoisted the man a little higher on her shoulder as if adjusting a dress sleeve, and turned around. She squinted at Melvie and walked a few steps closer. “I don’t believe it. Hank, does that look like a human-earth-being to you? Now don’t get your hopes up, but I think it might just—”

  Hank was having trouble focusing. He nodded in Melvie’s general direction and croaked, “Hey, bay-bee.”

  “What can I do for you?” Melvie said. She hooked her clipboard against her hip like a six-shooter.

  “First tell me,” the woman said, dragging Hank back down the hall toward Melvie. “Are you a human being or a robot? ’Cause we don’t talk to robots. My friend here’s sick and I’m looking for somebody to heal him, not finish him off like the robots downstairs were trying to do.”

  Melvie stared at them. She loathed rule bending, but she never tiptoed past the truth when she heard it. She also liked the way that whip looked looped through the woman’s jeans.

  “I’m a human being,” she said to the woman. “We’re all human beings here.”

  WHEN ASKED TO describe his symptoms, Hank said, “Heat and fuzz.”

  “Heat and fuzz—” Melvina’s pencil wavered over the chart; she stared up at him. “Elaborate, please.”

  The man nodded. “I got this fuzzy heat right here.” He pointed to his solar plexus. “Heat. And fuzz. Somebody gave me something to drink; it had bubbles. I think there was something bad in it, gave me this heat, it spreads up and down and moves around—”

  Melvie noticed his fly was torn open, exposing a dark thatch of hair. He smelled of something more lethal than whiskey. “When did you drink this substance?”

  “Last week, or maybe it was a month ago.”

  Harriet, Melvie’s staff assistant, leaned forward and asked, “Honey, did you want to see someone in psych?”

  Hank stopped his drifting head for a moment and looked at her. “I’m not crazy,” he said.

  “Honey,” the whip-woman said to Harriet, “you think this is crazy, you don’t even know what crazy is.”

  “Home address,” Melvie said.

  “Just passing through.”

  “Employment.”

  “This and that, bay-bee, this and that.”

  Melvie stared at him, tapping the pencil point.

  “Well hey, hey, that’s kind of a personal question now, ain’t it?” he said. He had begun to shrink during their interview, his mouth retracting in his head as if recoiling from the effects of sobriety.

  “Next of kin.” Melvina’s eyes glittered with irritation.

  Hank’s head did a slow orbit. He looked back at the whip-woman, lounging in Melvie’s office door. “What was your name again, bay-bee?”

  THE MORNING OPENED onto a white, salt desert. Jem hovered around her desk and stared at the carpet. On the other side of Hill Cumorah, beyond the Mormons, beyond even Utah and Gilbert Sesame’s wild promises, Jem was left with Ricky Ellis, a thought like an echo. An hour after arriving, she left her desk, aiming in the direction of the rest room, and while Portia looked away, she kept right on going, out into the hospital. She was looking down corridors opening on corridors, winding entrances without exits.

  She wondered if she was in love. She marched down to the main lobby and passed the information desk. Love. The word buzzed around her head, a mosquito with a secret vessel of blood. The air around her hummed. She passed teaching classrooms, festooned with anatomy charts and mounted skeletons. The empty desks were golden in the late afternoon. Nothing was left in her mind but a single thought.

  Had she sought him out, him in particular?

  She passed medical records, housekeeping, security, where she could see the back of two
officers’ heads surrounded by the glow of their video screens.

  They had talked little, knew almost nothing of each other. She’d never seen his home. His father, he said, had never existed. He was dark as mahogany from dragging rags over windshields, flipping open gas lids; there was car oil and grime worked into his skin that wouldn’t come off under scalding showers and Ajax cleanser; the musky perfume of gasoline was in his hair.

  He had one year of junior high and spotty high school vocational BOCES repair classes to her four years of college. Jem had many relatives; he said he had none. He claimed to have been born in the automobile graveyard that moldered off the back traces of Route 31, brought about by spontaneous combustion, like the spark’s crack in a piston chamber, there in the piles of wheels, upholstery, and iron parts shedding their paint in New York air and acid rain.

  Fred Beevle hired Ricky on part-time for his expert repair work, but he wouldn’t buy Ricky a pair of coveralls for fear of letting customers know he actually worked there. Jesse, Owen, and Fergyl had beards and wild eyes and looked like they’d tumbled down from a mountain cave, but Fred was afraid that Ricky’s history of loitering would frighten customers away, make them think that Lil’ Lulu’s employed criminals.

  Jem looked out one of the corridor windows and saw the sprinklers dashing water across the hospital lawn. Inside, the hospital was a vacuum; the walls curved toward the floors, all dull edges. The faces of the people she passed, too, were dulled, marked by their proximity to illness and sterile procedures and the attempt to contain pain.

  He hadn’t given her anything, not a flower, bonbon, nor promise, only his company, his greasy jeans and torn-up sneakers beside her in the car. Then on the lawn. She thought of his skin, his coarse shave, and his eyes that seemed to want everything, ask nothing. Over the years he had sometimes appeared in her thoughts at night, without warning, in the way she’d sometimes seen kestrels suddenly soar from the tree line, splitting the twilight along their wings, claiming the sky. Her heart did a loop at the sight of him. They were almost too shy to speak; they barely knew each other, and she was afraid of strange men.

  An elderly male patient in pink flannel pajamas stopped her outside the psych ward, taking her hand and saying, “When I see people like you, I think to myself, ‘O brave new world, that has such people in’t!’ Do you know what that’s from?”

  She stopped, then said, “Well, there’s that book—”

  “Aha!” the man said happily. “Aha! You think you know, but you don’t know.” He started to stroll away, back down the corridor. “It’s The Tempest, my dear! The Tempest.”

  She watched the patient wander away, laughing to himself.

  When Ricky had turned away from her that evening, she wondered, did he forget? Perhaps Ricky would only take in so much of her, the sight of her knees, or the measure of her movement, and then forget, their visits spilling down the sides of his memory, like water from an overfilled glass. She knew little about Ricky’s life outside the ring of the station and the round bulbs of the gas pumps. If she were to go looking into his private life, lived in a world of weeds and swamps, in Euclid’s sad houses, what would she find?

  She punched out early and headed for the bar.

  WHEN MELVINA ENTERED Hank Bovine’s file in the computer bank it brought his name up with a string of others trailing after like tails on a kite:

  Hank Bovine, also see: Perry Pensch, also see: Mandingo Fred, also see—and this stopped her and stuck in her head and went on to bother her for the rest of the day—Jupiter Ellis.

  Her mind, Melvie liked to say, was a steel trap; no important fact or figure worked around the teeth of it. Somewhere inside its jaws, the name Jupiter Ellis went pinging off the sides. Later, at the Won Ton à Go-Go, she stared at her sister across the table, until Jem turned to Melvina and said, “What is it?”

  Melvie looked away, pulling the bar window’s curtain back with one finger. The Syracuse sky was full of milkweed seeds, blurring in the heat. “I don’t know exactly.” A bird, black-winged, tail tipped white, wheeled and dove. No one was in the streets; the heat had put everyone to sleep. “I have a patient I think might interest you.”

  THE NAME ON the bedchart said Hank Bovine, but written in, in pencil, was Jupiter Ellis.

  Jem had heard the name from the Broom kids, from Peachy Otts, and from Larry Fasco. It was the name of the man the kids on the bus said had blown himself up, the man Hilma Otts was “saving” herself for, and the man Ricky swore had never really existed.

  He slept in a fetal curl under the sheets; his body looked soft, his shut eyes and lips downy. He sighed as he breathed, a weathered, battered sleep, as if tumbling through his dreams. The two sisters watched him. Beyond the bedside window the clouds were radiant. Jem looked away from the bed. She remembered that, on more than one occasion, this man had bagged groceries for her at the Bumble Bee.

  “Ricky’s father,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

  The man opened his eyes at the sound of her voice. The eyes were mild; they were Ricky’s eyes, ocean-pale.

  “Hey, hey, hello there,” he said, lips moving numbly over each other, his voice lifting from sleep. It was motor deep and a wreck, but could, possibly, have once sounded like Ricky’s. “Nurse,” he said to Melvina. “I’m parched, darlin’—could you fix me—could you—”

  “There’s a water squeeze-mug on your bedstand, Mr. Bovine,” Melvie said, towing Jem from the room. They walked to the end of the hall where they stopped.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Jem asked.

  “He’s been poisoning himself,” Melvie said. “He drinks rubbing alcohol when he can’t afford whiskey, and the toxicologists tell me last week he sampled a little hydrogen peroxide. That stuff wipes out brain, liver, and stomach, to name just a few of the big ones, which is apparently the way some people like it.”

  Jem felt dizzy; she put a hand against the wall. Melvie made her sit in a lounge chair and lower her head between her knees. When she came back up for air, Melvina said, “Jupiter Ellis is listed with the police as a missing person. The entire population of Euclid talks about him as if he’d vaporized. I personally cannot tolerate that kind of mass delusion.”

  Melvina’s words rushed around Jem. She knew that Melvie was saying, we can’t afford to spare a single life.

  RICKY ELLIS LIVED in hibernation, under the lights of the gas pumps and in the blue lair of the garage, wrapped in the mist of gasoline. He shook back his long hair to look up the road at the house where Jem lived. He waited for her to come to the station again. He tried not to think about her. There was something about Jem, perhaps the light of her skin, her secretive expression, that made him know he did not belong with her. Still, the thought of her could come to him at anytime at all, little bubbles of air in his blood, desire so strong it would ache in his shoulders and arms as he bent to pump gas: the need to rise out of his life, walk up the street to where she lived, and touch her hand.

  Ricky could not understand himself. He’d had too many stepmothers; he was numbed by his father’s absence, by years of aimlessness and television. He was drawn to cement stoops, porches, garages, to any protected place where he could sit. He didn’t know quite what he looked like; he saw fragments of himself in the steel gas pumps and the chipped mirror in the men’s room. His eyes weren’t really his. They opened like screens. When he looked in the mirror, he didn’t know how to feel; something would move in his chest and he’d look away. He kept his head lowered and let his hair fall back over his eyes. Flat on his back under a car chassis looking into metal mazes, he could lose himself between the floor and the engine.

  Someday, he believed, she would wake from the house inside the trees, that house banked in bushes, weeds, and dark windows. He was afraid to call her.

  If he breathed very quietly, though, touched her with the lightest fingers, if he sang to her, he thought, she might sink deeper into her sleep, the sleep of Euclid. Perhaps she would stay with him, thou
gh he felt, deeper inside, that she would someday leave.

  Ricky felt these things without ever saying them. The words had gone with his father and mother, absorbed into his stepmother’s lost stare and into the TV sets. Instead he sang, he howled, he bayed and wailed. Sometimes he dialed Jem’s phone number and when she answered, he sang old songs, words that came to him from out of nowhere, as if he were making them up as he went along: “‘And I’ll be there in sunshine or in sorrow…’” Ricky could hear Jem breathing while he was singing, her pulse behind his voice. Then she would say, “Hello, Ricky. Do you want to come over?”

  The ugliness, the memory of his own face, would shift inside him, dark, round, a serpent’s egg that split into inky songs while he sang, then sealed again when he stopped. He always hung up.

  Chapter 20

  DOLORES WAS HAVING a great time. Her roommate Lana liked all the same shows as Dolores, and they kept the TV on from Sunrise Sermon until the national anthem. They watched as many game shows and soap operas as they could squeeze in between nurses, switching with their remote buttons as soon as a commercial came on.

  Lana had a three-foot stack of true-confessions magazines, featuring incest, rape, and Martians, at the side of her bed, and these she shared with Dolores, saying Dolores needed an education in what was “out there.” Whenever Lana’s husband or kids came to visit, they brought her a couple more. She’d been in the hospital for a month and promised to show Dolores the ropes.

  “You got to haggle with these people,” she told Dolores. “It’s the only language they understand. Nurse wants to stick you? Doc wants to look up your nose? You say, hey, you want me to cooperate, what’s in it for me?”

  Lana would have been the perfect roommate, except that she had a coffee-grinder voice and a cough like a hacksaw. She’d just had a total hysterectomy, described in blow-by-blow detail to Dolores her first day there. Sometimes Lana would lay back, close her eyes, and moan from a deep and constant pain, especially around three or four in the morning, in the space between her last pain injection and the anticipated morning hypo.