At first, I thought A.D. was the ticket. That he was the one. Especially after I seen what natural affinity he had in taking a song and bending it, in finding it with me out there somewheres in those backwoods spots where nobody else would go, and by changing it, and molding it to his own degree, all his work brought out the polish and shine in the thing. Until it was almost as if the old song, in its primitive state, had given birth to this new song, in its revised state, a state that he held up and paraded around and sang and that nine times out of ten you’d be singing right along with before it was even finished. And that was all because of the hook he infused in it. The catch, as he called it, when he was a bit tipsy and the whiskey had gotten the better part of him, and he sat there patting himself on the back for finding the infection of it. That sound or lyric that would worm its way into anybody that heard it and would never leave them alone, so that they’d have to like it eventually, after it wore them down and became a part of them, so to speak. So that just to be rid of it, just to shake it free, they’d have to give in to it eventually, to all its magic and rhythm. But even then it could all be called back at a moment’s notice—if the light was right, or a certain wind blew a scent of sarsaparilla or sandalwood by, or a dog barked far off and the timber of it reminded you of a particular sound, or one single lyric, or even a slight subtle breath—it would crash back in on you as an avalanche. And in that sense, I suppose it never did really leave you, but just grew inside, or slept for a time until it was called upon again to enchant you again.
The worm, he’d say, and bring his hand up wiggling his big index finger along the top of a worn down barstool, or on the edge of his paint-flecked guitar. Whenever I saw him do that, and could hear he was far away then in the echoing canyons and sound chambers of his mind, I knew he was closing in on it then, on another inflection, and I listened real tight for my chance to lend a note to it, to form an accompanying line, to give that worm the most comfortable and arable soil in which to stretch out and grow.
And that was how we worked. It had been that way since I first taught him in the Peabody, and I thought all along it was fine enough for us. That after playing in Bristol that night when Ms. Clara May appeared, and Runnymede followed us onstage, that would be it, we’d be on our way, barreling off into the fame and celebrity that music now seemed to be making of other stars before us. Like Runnymede as a perfect case. Or even Jimmie Rodgers, that odd fellow who’d been at our same audition, but who’d skyrocketed since, reaching new commercial heights with his yodeling and swaggering brakeman style. The radio had done it all. The radio was starting to hold sway over so many and was reaching further into their lives. So that even their thoughts and needs seemed prescribed by the chiming bells of the station jingles, or the slick advertiser’s voicings, and I knew when I first heard it those businesses weren’t dumb at all. Hell, they already knew how folks out there in the ridge wanted to spend their time listening and listening some more. Just to forget all the work they’d done that day, or the year past, or their whole life. Just to ease off a bit into the fantasy time the dark words and music spun for them through the night, so that it seemed natural enough to keep proceeding along this same line forever. That it would just build and build, and we’d be on our way. All we had to do was keep tracking down songs and tweaking them with A.D.’s hooks and worms and whatever else he called them—and that would be it—the world would be ours.
But then of course Ms. Clara May and Ezra Lee came into the picture, and with whatever A.D. had seen or heard in the back of that unholy house, everything seemed lost. He’d pulled back, setting down his guitar, reading with her in their high-backed chairs, playing house, and I never thought I’d see that spark again in his eyes. That sharp red flare of ambition—of greed even—that might motivate him to keep going till all was his and every mind on every corner was infected with one of his worms, burning through the world to be heard and sung and held forever. For that was how I was going to find my Annie and Lucy girl, wasn’t it? Well, wasn’t it?
I was going to be rich. Renowned. And the Hardy Family was going to play all over creation because of it, and eventually they’d hear my voice or see my smiling face on some poster somewheres, or flashing into being above some rusty bulb, and that would be it. I’d finish a last song, wipe the sweat from my brow, and look into some packed house in Omaha or Jessup or Asheville, creaking with applause and beer-stained cheer, and she’d be standing there as pretty as can be. Just hovering in one still beam of light, descendent from some lost lamp or lantern in the ether, as of a halo sent down from some impossible heaven to mark her, and she’d be watching me. Not blinking. Not breathing. Her long narrow hand raised while the other took a hold of the slender figure beside her, the one that would step toward me then from the shadows and transform herself into my little girl. My Lucy. My angel. Grown tall now for sure, but mine, and she’d be standing there as young and fresh as a dream and look on me and smile and I’d know for sure we’d never be apart again. Ever.
And as A.D. put the car into gear after pulling out from a filling station near Carlisle that next week, I thought about it and replayed it a hundred times in my mind as we drove. Until I couldn’t even remember standing in the studio when Mr. Ralph Peer raised his hand to me as technicians and assistants scurried about our feet, arranging chords and switches and microphones for us to sing.
Stringing together my medley of notes was as easy as a dream then, and as airy, for I suspect we were all sort of just drifting on the high sweet sound of Ms. Clara May’s voice, for it seemed to take all of a second to get another single recorded. (Though I can’t rightly say, as there was some trouble afterward with our reservation at the Camden Wilshire.) So that Benjamin Marks had to huff and puff himself up with the manager because I was colored and that changed things and would set us back another $50 bill. Instead it had him shouting down the place and driving us clear up to Trenton for another room in a place as bright and opulent as what he thought we deserved. But then there was something the matter with the dinner there, as we hadn’t the proper coats or ties, and anyways A.D. didn’t like the place to begin with as he just sat there and seemed calculating something far off in his mind. Reciting a litany of names. Figuring miles and train schedules to boot, because Ms. Clara May had said something dark and furtive in his ear over the appetizers, and then touched my hand as A.D. stood up.
After, he said to her, and then mumbled something else, blinking his eyes as he stalked off. But all I could feel was my wife and baby girl, even as Ms. Clara May held onto me with her cold quivering hand as she watched him leave (so that maybe I wasn’t the best help for her as more drinks were poured and passed around, as more plans and hopes were made and toasted). All I could see was them at the edge of my dream, standing in the clearing of all our hard work and fame. I could see them. And the more I drank the more they stepped toward me, winnowing through the crowd as if parted from the swarm of people and years—my little Lucy girl and Annie returned to me. They came striding across that smoke-strewn room and reached out to me as if across the years, and the tears came to my eyes as I imagined it all, for I never in my life thought reaching for someone across an abyss of heartache and loss could be so easy. But there they were, and I knew I’d hold onto them forever now. That it would be easy. That it was how it was meant to be.
But then all of my dreams blew out as quickly as they’d appeared. In an instant, the thunder echoed overhead and Annie and Lucy seemed pulled back from me as if tied to the wrong end of a string. I knew we were moving then, because the bar and hotel changed around me to a train track and tunnel— while in place of my little Lucy girl and Annie—Ms. Clara May and Benjamin appeared at the end of my trembling arm. They were saying something to me with a harsh edict and forceful gaze. I was meant to appease them, she said. I was meant to right whatever wrong he’d already caused. But before I could ask her about it, they were gone, walking through a long dark corridor that seemed to disperse into a plume of smok
e and mud-colored puddles. They had left me alone then to chase after something I could not see. To seek something that I could not know. To stalk those city streets as a last yellow taxicab went streaming past and a lone lamppost blinked on and off above me in that vast canyon of steel and abandonment, as I leaned up to see New York City ebb and flow into its endless lines of brick and granite indifference.
A.D. was on the run again.
XX
The open palm of his hand ~ Parting waves of darkness and shadow ~ The Duke in there tonight ~ After the Cotton ~ The true arbiter of movement ~ A side door swung open ~ The saddest number ever ~ Runnymede returns ~ The face ~ The ceiling ~ A bridge ~ On singing the last song
YOU CAN’T GO THAT WAY, BOSS. Ain’t nobody go that way but performers and the few white folks don’t want nobody to know they come down here in the first place.
A tall colored man stood by the side of an alley. I’d turned down it after spotting a small crack of light beneath a painted door, and thought it was where I’d been directed to go by someone I’d asked a block back. But as he waved a steady hand my way, I stopped and turned to him and had to laugh to think of the route I’d taken to get here. I’d come up (or down or over) from Pennsylvania Station and been turned around so many times, asking folks where the nearest blues club was—getting not a few lean looks in the process—from folks who didn’t want to be seen speaking to me anyways, a thin, colored yokel right off the turnip truck. That when I did get some information about a place not too far from where I figured A.D. might have gone, as he was in such a thirst again for songs—for songs and stories and such—I thought it was only natural to sneak in as I’d watched the last few people do. Even if I didn’t realize they were carrying beat up cases for trumpets and clarinets, and weren’t regular folks at all, but musicians probably getting ready to go on. It’s easy, I finally said, and stepped toward him.
What’s easy, boss?
To forget I ain’t playing. I’m a guitarist, I said, and held up my hand to show the calluses on the ends of my fingers. But I don’t think he was impressed.
Well, they ain’t too many guitarists down here neither, and he clanged open a gate so I could step inside the sunken doorway smelling of piss and trash and gin. I eyed him slow and steady, for I noticed something peculiar about him as I passed. He was holding out the palm of his hand. He held it there motionless and his sad brown eyes glanced at it and then at me, as if I was meant to know something that I hadn’t seen in all of Virginia or Baltimore before—and never between blacks.
A tip, he finally said. (I guess he wasn’t taking any chances on me mistaking what it was supposed to mean, his hand, this arrangement, this courtesy.)
For what?
For services rendered, I guess is what they say.
For opening a rusty gate? I kicked the black iron rungs and could hear from the end of a sloping walkway glasses clinking, and the soft murmur of a saxophone parting waves of darkness and smoky shadow. It sounded like a tugboat to me then, drifting through all that formlessness. It was something to wrap your dreams up in, was what it was, sounding so content and mellow, I just had to hear more of it. For just then underneath it, a soft tinkling piano spread out its reach and it was as if it was just rising up then like water for the tugboat to drift on. All the formlessness was made real and elegant and smooth, and the choppiness I’d imagined before, swirling across the sea, eased out and was silent and sweet again. I had to breathe deep to be so close to it, and yet bound up in it already, and was tearful and moved. So I looked up at the small snatch of sky high up and fenced in by some great steel towers so this fellow wouldn’t see me cry.
All I could see then was a vast grayness above me. Something vague and electric glittered above all those buildings and clustered signs. It was all so real and immense, it left me dumbstruck—the lights of the buildings and sucked-away sky—that when I turned and touched my head to comprehend it, and to know I was allowed live beneath it and in it—I felt awed again for a moment, and didn’t know whether I was here now or not, or what time I’d stumbled into. But I guess I didn’t care much neither, as it was all so perfect and true, the music. It took me away from my mind for a moment, taking me away from any care or worry, and that old boy seemed to sense the contentment in me just then. He let me rock there a moment longer on my heels, swaying back and forth, before he touched me, steadying my shoulders. (He’d already smelled the whiskey on me from all those drinks back in Trenton, for he let out a long sigh sniffing me.) But then he just chortled as if we were together in this contentment forever, that we’d always been in on it, standing there for years and years just listening as the world wound around us and then away into its vastness.
You lucky, he said.
Me?
The Duke in there tonight.
The Duke?
Well, sure. The one and only. He come down after the Cotton because he knows we for real down here.
For real for what?
Well, for what he plays, he said, for his voice. His true voice. The one they don’t let him play up there at all. Shit, what the hell you think they let him play? And he shook his head pinching his narrow eyes shut to think on it. Ain’t nothing but jungle music and dark tribal shit. Because they sure don’t want to hear his real voice. Not the one that would make them feel. Never have. Anyways, they only let whites in there to hear, and the whites only want what they already got made up in their minds to begin with. Ain’t that right?
I was still drifting on the tide of that tinkling piano. Because he’d caught it, the Duke. I could tell. The spirit of that sound was substance and direction and everything and nothing in an instant. But then it was built up again into a bluster at the touch of a chord, and was made bigger when he wanted it to be bigger, and hotter when he wanted it to be hotter, and it made you follow along close in your mind because of the nuance and nature of it. You had to follow it just to watch it hover there with what it could tell you about yourself. With all the secrets it held. And the mystery. And maybe because of it, I found a question I wanted to ask about all the words he’d used describing us vs them just now, when all I cared about was the music and nothing else, for I knew color didn’t have nothing to do with all that, not at all. What do you mean, what they got made up?
When I said it, he sniffed me up and down again, just in case I thought we were on the edge of Andromeda or something, instead of the planet Earth, where any ordinary nigger would have cared about race and sides and such. But I didn’t. At least not then. Not with that music going strong. How’d you get down here anyway? he said. This place ain’t known by many.
Fella told me, and I shook my thumb back to the street. But it was bare and as we turned to look, the city smoke sifted down like another cold layer of crumbled leaves, and I shook my collar to feel the late winter like a fine metal grit on my skin.
He looked me over again and took a silver flask from his pocket. Care for some?
I swayed watching him. The distance between us and that brown liquor was all I could see. Hell, it was all I could feel besides the anticipation of standing in the swollen beauty of that sound, even if I knew A.D. probably wasn’t even inside. (It was funny, I never did ask the man about A.D. or anyone like him. The sound was just too much for me. It was all I wanted to be. It was all I wanted to know. At that moment, I couldn’t have cared less about where A.D. was, or where the Duke played before this or what they wanted his sound to be like, for we were here now, and that was enough. It was all that mattered. Anyway, wasn’t that what the music wanted to assure us—that we were here? That we’d made it? That we’d somehow survived? And we could never forget it.) Sure, I said and put the flask to my lips. Thanks, and after handing it back, I slapped a crisp dollar bill into his smooth leathery hand and he chuckled low and lean and sung something I didn’t know the words to, some spell or incantation as I stepped along the walkway toward the sound.
THE CLUB WAS SMALL AND CRAMPED AND THE PIANO took up one whole wall o
f it. The Duke sat there as wide and proud as could be, swaying behind his strong dark hands as they pounded the keys till the sound of water pouring out of them was all anyone could hear. There wasn’t anything else to hear. The back of the Duke’s neck glistened with sweat and shined from the one red bulb swinging from the dusty rafters. Occasionally, the lone waitress would step out from behind the roughhewn plank they’d strung from chains to the brick wall and move from overturned barrel to barrel, touching half-drunk glasses, or picking up errant napkins and murky ashtrays. There wasn’t any talking to speak of. Most everyone was already transfixed, watching without hardly breathing, racing inside without hardly moving. Or maybe they had their eyes closed instead, and stared into the dreamy nightscape of their minds. The one the Duke had set to motion and was opening up with all the sad notes he strung together as the other players—on the drums, bass, and trumpet—all seemed to dissolve into grayness as each of us fell into the single enchantment the Duke’s music wove.
O we were already lost in the reverie of it by then—the sound—that sad mysterious sound that seemed to rise up from the well of his soul and pour out with its story of loss and forgiveness and truth. So that each of us could craft it then alone and shape it ourselves as he turned and twisted it before us without doing anything more than moving his strong shifting hands back and forth above the keys. Each note seemed a shimmering step unfolding in a world that only we could touch. A world only we could see. Individual was what it was, the effect, but somehow larger, if that’s possible. As if each note was a universe set swirling into creation that only we could pluck from the air and hold to our hearts. I know, I know. It sounds crazy. And maybe it was. But I’ve heard since then that he was only like that there, or in other such hole-in-the-wall clubs, where his voice was free to wander wherever he felt it needed to go, far from the spotlight of his fame and success and the echoing refrain of that other voice of his that gave everything else away. To the people. But this here sound was his alone, and the more I think on it and recover that night, the more I believe every last note from him was as good as any gospel I ever read, or any sunset I ever saw. And maybe better.
Purchase Page 16