Jazz Funeral

by Smith, Julie

  I didn’t know what I was missing.

  This felt good.

  Somebody was pushing her way through the crowd, ruffling feathers, more or less making a scene. It was a tall woman, hefty, someone he’d seen before, trailed by another woman, a black one who could have been a movie star.

  He remembered. “Hey, there’s the cop.”

  Proctor said, “The black one?”

  “The big one.”

  “The fat one?”

  “That one.” She’d made it all the way to Ti-Belle.

  She held up her badge: “Police. I’m going to have to ask you all to leave.”

  Ti-Belle looked as if someone had hit her. Red spots had appeared on both her cheeks. “You can’t do that!”

  “Do you want to talk in front of everyone?”

  “Talk! What do you want to talk about now?”

  It was getting ugly and there was still an audience. Nick stepped forward. “Would everyone leave, please?”

  Ti-Belle was shocked. “Nick!”

  He wished he could signal her that it was okay, that he was still on her side. Proctor started to herd people out.

  Ti-Belle turned her fury on the cop. “What the hell are you doing here? Whatever it is, couldn’t it wait half an hour, please?”

  “I’d like you to remember that I’m a police officer and I ask you to treat me with respect.” She sounded like somebody’s mom. Somebody’s mom who’s just discovered the grades aren’t up to par, or the car’s wrecked. Nick kind of admired her style, but at the same time he wasn’t immune to it. Despite his best efforts to remain calm, his neck prickled slightly. He moved closer to Ti-Belle and slipped an arm around her waist. Held her tight so she’d know she was okay.

  “Hello, officer.”

  Now that he was there, Ti-Belle was losing it. A sound came out of her as if she had asthma, and then she turned to him, put her arms around his shoulders and hung on like a two-year-old, shaking with the effort of holding herself together.

  He bent his head and whispered for a while, but he wasn’t at all sure she heard. Her body had taken over; what was happening with her was happening somewhere he couldn’t reach. He turned his head and caught the cop’s eye.

  “You’re here about Ham?” he said.

  “I’m here to talk to Miss Thiebaud,” she said primly, in that way cops have, that smug, arrogant way that made him want to belt them.

  “She was with me that day,” he said. “We were together the whole time.”

  Ti-Belle, tight against him, kissed his neck to let him know she’d heard and she was grateful. He was glad he’d done it; it would be good for both of them.

  “Well, it’s about time somebody broke down and admitted it,” the cop said.

  Ti-Belle let go of him, turned around, astonished. “You knew all the time?”

  “I knew you two were seeing each other. Tell me—were you together all day Tuesday?”

  “Yes,” they said together.

  “There was no time at all when you were apart?”

  Ti-Belle shook her head. Nick held her tight around the waist. “No,” he said.

  It went on like that for a while, light fencing, the cop trying to pick a hole here, a thread there, and then she asked him to leave.

  Ti-Belle nodded, letting him know she’d be okay, and he knew she would be. She was strong. True, she’d been under a lot of pressure—various kinds of pressure—and she’d nearly cracked, but with his support she was fine. The minute he’d spoken, he could feel her spine straighten, feel her drawing strength from him.

  He left. Proctor, who’d been banished, was waiting for him.

  “She okay?”

  “She’s going to be fine. You think we can walk around awhile?”

  Proctor sighed. “We can give it a shot.”

  Nick didn’t perform anymore, he was practically a recluse, he did everything he could to discourage any sort of public following, and yet whenever he went out, he still got mobbed. Anywhere. He couldn’t go to the cleaners without autographing his ticket.

  “Come on, these people are cool. Let’s go get a snoball.”

  They walked in silence for a while, tense, expecting to be approached. Finally Proctor said, “What’d the cop want?”

  “Hell if I know. Had some kind of bug up her butt about Ti-Belle’s alibi. Picked a hell of a time to come, didn’t she?”

  Proctor shrugged. “I don’t know. It worked.”

  That struck Nick funny. He threw back his head and laughed like he hadn’t in a long time. “Well, you’re right about that. It did work, I guess. Now the whole world’s gonna know ‘bout me and Ms. Ti-Belle.”

  Proctor let a beat pass. Finally he said, “Her show was good, I thought.”

  Nick couldn’t tell if he was changing the subject or not. “Yeah, she was hot,” he said, going along with it. Then he said what he wanted to say: “I’m crazy ‘bout that little Cajun.”

  His friend didn’t answer.

  Nick wanted to know why, but didn’t know how to ask. He said, “She’s a great girl, isn’t she?”

  “Seems to be,” said Proctor, and he shrugged again, as if getting rid of something. His voice sounded vague.

  Nick said, “I think I’m gon’ get married again.”

  “Oh, lord, Anglime, what does it take? You got a houseful of ex-wives, and fifty-seven varieties of gurus, and not one shrink, I just noticed. Don’t you think you ought to get one? When in the hell are you gonna learn your lesson?”

  Nick grinned. He’d said it. He’d surprised even himself, hadn’t really known until he’d spoken it, and now that he had, he liked it. “I’m not kiddin’. She’s the one.”

  They were in the snoball line now, but these lines were always the slowest. Proctor said, “I’m not going to say how many times I’ve heard that one.”

  “Well, it was always true. You know anybody else who’s so friendly with all his exes?”

  “Nick, baby, this is costing you. It costs money to get married, in case you’ve forgotten. I mean, I know you’re feeling all romantic and all, but get real—we both know the expensive part’s at the other end. And anyway, you can have anything you want—I mean anyone you want doing anything you want any time you want. Why go through all that crap?”

  “I like bein’ married. That way you’ve got a deal. See, if you don’t get married, they just get pregnant and make you support them and the kids and you never have any say about it and it still costs you but you don’t have anyone to watch movies with.”

  “Chocolate snoball,” said Proctor to the vendor, and when he got it, he said, “You know it’s all I can do not to smash this thing on top of your pointy head?”

  That was the second thing that day that struck Nick as funny. He laughed like a loon once more and thought how good it was to be in love. He hardly ever laughed.

  “Hey, I mean it, Anglime. You’re the craziest dude I ever met.”

  Nick now had his own coconut concoction. “Let’s go hear some zydeco.”

  They headed toward the fais do-do stage. Proctor said, “You sure about Ti-Belle?”

  “Surer’n shootin’.” He laughed again. “And I’ve done a lot of that in my time.” He was having the time of his life; it wasn’t every day he made puns.

  “She just doesn’t seem like that kind of girl—the midnight movie type.”

  “What do you mean? Ti-Belle loves movies.”

  “I’ll bet she’d rather act in them than watch them.”

  Nick considered. “Well, she is ambitious. But hey, bro’, that’s fine with me—somebody in the family’s got to be. Sure ain’t me, now is it?”

  He was having so much fun, and Proctor’s mood was so serious. Dark, almost. “I worry,” he muttered. “I just worry, that’s all.”

  “Okay, spit it out. What are you so worried about?”

  “She wants a career, Nick. She wants it worse than air. She’s good, but she needs something and she knows it.” Proctor punched him
in the chest with his index finger. “You, Nick. You know what I think she really wants? She wants to get you working again—with her. She needs you to perform with her.”

  “So you heard us singin’ last night.”

  “How was I going to miss it?”

  “Wasn’t bad, was it?”

  Proctor raised an eyebrow, forebore to answer.

  “Well, it wasn’t now, was it?”

  “How was it going to be bad? You’re good, she’s good—and you’ve got chemistry. Of course it wasn’t bad.”

  “Know what? I kind of like the idea.”

  “You what?”

  “I mean it. I do.”

  “Is this Nick Anglime speaking? The same Nick Anglime who swore five years ago he’d never work again even if ordered to at gunpoint? Remember what you said? ‘They can kill me, I don’t care. I’m not doin’ it one more time.’”

  “I was tired at the time.”

  “Man, you are somethin’.”

  “Well, that little gal’s somethin’. I want her and I’m gon’ do whatever it takes.”

  “What about your spiritual life? How’re you’re going to spend the rest of your life meditating and studying?”

  “Well, I am. I’ll just do it between gigs and makin’ love to my wife. You don’t get this, do you, buddy?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “The spiritual stuff is about being afraid I’ll live my whole life and miss out on what’s really important. Do you get that much?”

  “Most people would kill for your life, but so far as a normal human being can get it, I get it.”

  “Ti-Belle’s what’s important. It’s that simple.” He looked straight ahead, certainly not at his friend to say what he had to say, and spread his arms. “Love, baby. Love’s it. The whole ball of wax.”

  “Nick, you’ve been in love before.”

  Nick had used Proctor to think the situation through, and he didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking. Proctor’s voice was starting to take on a carping note.

  “Lighten up, would you? Let’s go find some young ladies to dance with.”

  They’d arrived at the fais do-do stage, where two ancient black men who looked and sounded as if they came from a bayou where English wasn’t spoken played the harmonica and the washboard. Their voices were fine and sweet, and they were as good as seventy-five percent of the artists at the festival. Nick figured they probably had a combined income of $15,000 a year, and wondered how he could help them. For now, he just wanted to enjoy their music.

  All around the stage couples twirled gracefully to the charming old tunes. Cajun dancing had become popular, but you had to go out in public to learn it. It had never occurred to Nick to do that.

  He realized now that he could have hired a dance instructor to come to his house—hell, maybe he could have gotten Ti-Belle to teach him, she was a Cajun, wasn’t she? But then where could you go dancing if you were Nick Anglime? You couldn’t just hop over to the Maple Leaf like you lived in the neighborhood. This was the first time he’d been to a public place where it was happening. It was a deliciously anachronistic sight—everyone, men and women alike, in shorts and baseball caps, Reeboks on their feet, going through a set of motions from another era, a softer, sweeter time when “fais do-do” was more than a quaint old phrase. It was from “faire dormir,” Ti-Belle had told him—you brought the babies to the party and let them sleep while you danced.

  He wanted to do it—and Nick Anglime was a person who got what he wanted. There was a girl on the sidelines in black shorts and a black T-shirt, with tiny, multicolored musical instruments on it. She was a little fat, too much makeup, hair a little too high and sprayed too stiff—the kind of girl Uptown New Orleanians called a “charmer” (pronounced “chawama” in imitation of the blue-collar whites they called yats). But she was tapping her foot and looking like she was just dying to dance. She was way too young to know who he was.

  He tapped her on the shoulder. “Do you know how to do this?”

  She turned to look at him, eyes bland and a little blissed out—he loved the way women here were relaxed, didn’t get bent out of shape when a stranger approached. Suddenly she gasped, and he half expected her eyes to roll back in her head; but she turned red instead of white and yelled, “Christie! Omigod! Christie!”

  A dancing yat couple, the woman in white shorts and dainty white sandals, the man, spare tire barely covered and then only sometimes by a T-shirt that kept riding up, stared at her, startled. The woman yelled, “Audrey! What is it?” Then saw Nick. Her jaw dropped.

  The sight of a dropping jaw was something Nick had seen enough times to last him several lifetimes. In fact, he sometimes thought he had open-mouth karma. Maybe he’d been a dentist once.

  It wasn’t a pretty sight. It was a truly ugly sight.

  “Holy shit!” said Christie’s dancing partner, and Christie squealed, “Nick Anglime!”

  Nick was pissed. He said, “Audrey, why the hell did you do that? Did I do something you didn’t like?”

  But Proctor was pulling at his elbow. “Nick, we got to get out of here.”

  He was right, oh so right; and they were just a bit too late. He should never have stopped to tell Audrey off. She grabbed his sleeve as he turned to go. And other people, having heard Christie’s squeal, turned toward him.

  Audrey said, “I’m sorry. Hey, listen, I’m really sorry. Were you going to ask me to dance? Did I blow that? Just tell me—did I blow it?”

  He couldn’t deny who he was. That would make him look churlish. The best thing, he’d learned by experience, was to be polite, Britishly polite, polite to a fault, but keep moving. “Audrey,” he said, “I think you’re a delightful girl and it’s been lovely meeting you.”

  He put out his hand to shake. She took it in two wet, sticky paws and said, “You called me Audrey.”

  “Only because it’s your name,” he said, and extricated his hand. Proctor was clearing a path.

  He heard his own name, louder than the music, being carried on the afternoon breeze, traveling like news of war: “Nick Anglime, Nick Anglime, Nick Anglime …”

  People Magazine had once called him the most famous American, had compared his celebrity to that of Elvis if he’d lived. Elvis had probably never been out without a brace of bodyguards in his life.

  And people called him self-destructive.

  Nick had chosen not to live his life that way, had become a near-recluse instead.

  People pressed at him now, closed in, asking for autographs. Some of them, having no paper available, wanted him to sign their hands or wrists. “I’m sorry,” he’d say with a disarming grin, “I don’t sign body parts,” but he did sign some people’s programs. He and Proctor threaded their way.

  It was going okay, maybe a little slow, but they were making progress, until he felt a hand close on the flapping sleeve of his Hawaiian shirt and start to tear it.

  “Oh, shit!” He’d been here before. Things could turn nasty.

  Proctor’s hand closed on the other hand. It was a woman’s. “You let go of me,” she yelled, in that unbelievably irritating accent the yats had.

  “Okay,” said Proctor, holding on. “Okay. It’s going to be all right. You just let go of my friend’s shirt and everybody’ll be happy.”

  Instead she used the distraction to press closer to Nick, press her sweaty body next to his. She put her head down and before he could budge, bit him. Bit him on the neck.

  “Goddamn!”

  Nick’s first impulse was to turn around swinging, but he couldn’t, the woman had his sleeve and Proctor had her arm. Failing that, he sent his elbow behind him, hard. He couldn’t help it, it was pure reflex. She still had her teeth in his neck.

  “Ow!” She pulled away, releasing his neck, releasing his sleeve, but with her right fist she began to beat him, raining blows on his shoulder and the back of his head. He tried to duck, tried to get away, and Proctor tried to block th
e woman, but the crowd surged. The smell of Dixie beer was beginning to escape from people’s pores. Nick was aware of the same sick panic he’d once felt when a rock audience had rushed the stage.

  Because they all wanted a piece of him. That was what the whole autograph thing was about, the whole thing of getting him to talk to them for a minute—they wanted a piece of him metaphorically, and how much imagination did it take to extend the metaphor? Early in his career he’d had dreams of being hung up on a stick like a scarecrow, and pecked to death by tiny birds, thousands of them, that landed all over him.

  “Police! Step back, everybody. Leave the man alone.” It was a woman’s voice, a familiar voice, the voice of the big cop who’d just humiliated his woman. A few minutes ago he’d hated her, now her voice was a nightingale’s.

  “Everybody be cool. Everything’s okay, just give the man some air, that’s all. Hey, Mr. Anglime. How’s it going?”

  She walked over and put her arm through his, cool as you please, a good-looking babe in business clothes, could have been a publicist or something except for the badge she was waving with her free hand.

  “Police. Let us through, please.”

  The woman who’d bitten him had wound up to hit the cop, but she’d quickly seen she wasn’t big enough to win in a fight with that one, and stepped back. Nick wondered if she’d sue for the elbow whack he’d given her. People sued him for breathing, and had for years.

  When the biter gave up, the fight went out of the crowd. The sudden meanness that can come from too much beer had passed, and the more accustomed mellowness had slipped back home. Couples who’d stopped dancing to join the fray were starting again to twirl and two-step.

  Nick said, “First time I’ve ever been rescued by a woman.”

  The cop grinned. “It’ll cost you one autograph.”

  He couldn’t help it, he liked her. She was a nervy damn broad.

  Proctor said, “You okay, Nick?”

  “Except for a bitten neck. The skin isn’t broken, is it?”

  The cop looked, standing close yet remaining professional. He liked having her that close. He wasn’t used to big women—and she was definitely big, not just tall. There was something about it he liked—something vaguely maternal. He’d never go out with a woman that overweight, but still, there was something.