Something boomed in the wall behind us, just once.
“Okay, now, Willie.” Sly roared, looking at me apologetically. “I keep him. He can’t go from here until his time is up. He still…he still don’t quite understand what happened to him.”
“Jesus.” I digested that. “So…”
But Sly was nowhere near done. “Right, right. I got to train you how to talk to Willie. That right there was yes. Two bumps, by theyself, is no. Where you goin’?”
“To get my notebook,” I replied quickly, “I wanna get this right the first time.”
* * *
CODA:
Patsy set my journal down, smirking briefly at the big black letters that read SECURITY across the stained green cover. She didn’t smirk long.
“You have him,” she whispered. “You have him right here.”
I’d blacked out everything I didn’t want her to see, but the parts about Sly were highlighted. Copies had been made of the originals, by full permission of senior staff.
“If there was anything you could have done about it, you would have done it,” she told me shortly. “Quit kicking your own ass.”
At that, Patsy took the very small obituary from me and squinted at it again. “Says here it was a blood clot got him, in the middle of a frickin’ root canal. A whatchamacallit, like an embolism. Those little bastards like to sit up in your blood vessels and hide, and wait for the worst time to come out. Nobody coulda seen it comin’. You have to understand that.”
“I can’t believe it took three weeks for the news to get to us, though,” I groused. “Security’s always the last to know anything.”
Patsy wagged her finger at me. “Careful, piano man. You don’t work here no more.”
I grinned a mile of battered yellow ivory. “This ain’t workin’.” My eyes looked worse than any junkie’s, but I was sober and out of uniform. I was volunteering at Capernaum, when I wasn’t playing Merlin’s proverbial reel right into the tip pitcher that the owner put out for me on top of that balky old Steinway grand that takes up half the back stage at the Long Goodbye.
Me. Yeah, me, goddamn it. Me, with the dead junkie whine of my new gunnery sergeant off the air in my ears, not like he would be if I was in front of the Casio at home with those ten...god…damn…books of classical music arranged by the late, great Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, and the vinyls and the MP4s, and the…
And the chance. And the shining chance when I put on those candles, smoked the corners off that last chunk of hash, and let Willie break on through to my side of the house.
People love to teach, I’ve found, and the dead have just as much to impart. I just never thought that one of them could impart spatulated fingertips and sore wrists, dark circles under the eyes and the cough that won’t go away, though I haven’t tasted one of those delicious Pall Malls in almost a year.
No, Willie never came out with me to the club. He couldn’t, you see, just like Sly said. But I brought them back digital audio tape that couldn’t be faked, either. Mack said no one could play like Willie. That was the first time I ever saw a Great Jazz Drummer cry.
* * *
“Sly…” I swallowed the continent in my throat, looking my former stuporvisor openly in the eyes. “His timing was just…impeccable. Like he was…”
“Training you?” Patsy filled in instantly. “I swear, everyone around here hides their light under a bushel. You know that one guy with the goiters can sing like Al Green? I never even imagined…”
I listened for a while, and wept for a while longer, but I knew that wouldn’t last. Sure enough, like clockwork, around twenty after four…
WHACK.
Something boomed in the wall, skipping through the heavy air like a stone, glancing off my face. I looked up. My left hand had no idea what my right hand was playing. I was back at the piano and Patsy was looking at me like…
Like it was all okay. All Code 4. And that she’d pieced together the whole issue and arrived at that conclusion, by simply listening.
* * *
The week before, Eli decided he’d had enough after twelve years, and moved on. I, on the other hand, now know that I can clock off any time I want to from this site. But I can never, ever leave.
That day, Willie, Sly and I—humble votary between now and then, blues and jazz, ebony and ivory—got through “Roun’ Midnight” all the way. I so desperately wanted to let Sly come through me for Patsy, and speak.
But it ain’t about that, Security. Only in song. I pay my respects every day, whether or not we three have a gig. This debt is to be paid in private, without a marquee out front announcing who all’s really on the bill.
I’m not the player, either, you see. Just an old song, a lead and a harmony on an only slightly-used piano, one with enough action left in the keys for one pupil and two of the wisest teachers that Portland ever produced.
I come here to do my time and take my wounds from it gladly. I come to give back. I think I’m finally beginning to understand what that means.
I come to sit in with the dead, and accept their invitation to the blues.
This story is for Erin Laroue, and Stanley.
Edward Morris
Musical Inspiration for “To Soothe the Savage Beast”
I used to labor under a curse. I'd get a horrid job to support my horrid ex, who wanted me to quit writing and support her career. I'd write a horror story about how badly the job sucked, usually finding a real anecdote from the job site to work from. I'd lose the job. Blessing/curse, I guess.
The DHS office this story was drawn from was a bit of a Pickman's Model in that way. It is in an old department store that is still built-out like one, in a slightly different location. Anyone who's been through the Alberta area in Portland has seen it, and it's not the swanky new one on Webster.
We had a lot of junkies, a poltergeist in the building that people were really scared of, and a volunteer named Stanley who really could play like Monk. The actual poltergeist was a lot less charismatic and liked to make gun sounds. A lot.
All of those things kind of went together in little ways, I just put them together in a big way when I gave the ghost a story. And my heart kept going further up in my throat when I realized that I wanted to play, too.
Hayden and me, we’re driving out of dawn.
“Once you get used to country life,” he says, “you’ll never want to go back.”
We’re travelling down the highway with the city vanishing behind us, its silhouette already a jagged black line splicing the rear-view mirror. The car smells like cigarettes and cheap coffee, the floor at my feet a gore of crushed Styrofoam cups, twisted napkins, snapped plastic spoons. Normally, at this hour, I’d still be in bed, lazily kicking at the empty space beside me as Hayden, always the early riser, shuffles around our apartment. Exhaustion threads through me; I’m trying to focus on words, trying not to drift too deep into the smooth, monotone buzz of his voice.
“The city, you know…” He takes a hand off the wheel to gesture to the sky. “It has no soul, no personality. In the backwoods, in places like where I come from, it’s like it owns you. It waits for you, calls you back, whether you want it to or not.”
Though he goes back often, his home is a place I’ve not yet seen.
The car is crammed with bags, mostly mine, stuffed with more wardrobe options than I’d usually wear in a month. I’ve got jeans and skirts, blouses and halter necks. I’ve got hiking boots and pumps. I’ve even got an evening dress packed.
“But what are you bringing it for?” Hayden asked me when he saw me laying it out on the bed.
“My romantic imagination,” I told him.
The evening dress, of course, is symbolic. It’s something my mother would want me to wear. She of the gold leather shoes, the perpetually smeared lipstick, the sloppy hauteur. In this way, I guess I’m sometimes like her.
My mother will be arriving the day after us. It was hard enough convincing her to come and she, I know, will aim hig
h. She doesn’t approve of Hayden and thinks it gives her permission to sniff down the end of her nose at him if she’s three inches higher and swathed in something that smells like French perfume.
Two years ago when I took Hayden to meet my mother in the place she still wants me to call home, I gave him a tour. I led him through the seaside mansion, showing him the swimming pool and brass dinner gong, the Persian rugs littering the hardwood floors. I showed him the Jacuzzi, the gazebo, the rose garden. I watched his eyes narrow as he stepped through the rooms, searching every corner, absorbing all.
He was beautifully displaced in his battered leather boots and faded t-shirt.
I knew that he was trying to imagine me in this place, trying to see it as I did. Not wealth: wounds. Not comfort: cages. The cold mirrors braced with bronze hanging in every hall, reflecting rooms with high ceilings that swallow up the air. Furniture you’re not supposed to sit on, display cabinets full of things you’re not supposed to touch. Everything in that house trapped in enamel or porcelain or bronze or silk. Guarded with the decrees of don’t you dare, you’d better not, don’t even dream of. Add verb, add valuable object. Add my name.
On that visit, Hayden gave my mother one of his clay figurines. A piece of his art. He cuts lumps of modelling clay, and shapes them with knives, needles, fingers. He has the skill to do this—change things from formless earth to exactly detailed, perfectly proportioned figures. His forte is anthropomorphic farm animals. Cows with straw hats and cigars hanging out their mouths. Ducks on rocking chairs with newspapers rolled up beside them. Cats in sunhats, pulling out weeds. What my mother would call tacky. She wouldn’t think to look closely; she would never notice that the colours he paints the cows, the dogs, is clean splattered with mud and filth. The hooves are carefully caked in excrement. Sometimes, the animals are missing eyes, ears, paws. Maimed. None of his humanised creatures are ever smiling.
“What I’m trying to show,” he once explained, “is the idea of quaint country living juxtaposed against the harshness of its realities.”
The piece he gave my mother was of a cow. It sits on its haunches, head down, wearing sunglasses. You might miss this at first glance, but it has a plug in its side. Common practice in battery farming, with the real cows. The plug opens to a hole to the stomach, so the farmer can stick his hand in there whenever he wants. To check the digestion or something, I think. But no kidding, animals have plugs put in them these days.
On our subsequent courtesy visits I’ve seen the piece neatly placed in the display cabinet in the hall. When my mother’s not looking, I open it and take it out. Beneath that one figurine there’s always a fine layer of dust.
“I want you to know,” he says to me now, taking his hand off the wheel to give my knee a quick squeeze, “that whatever happens when we get to my mother’s house, it’ll be okay.”
He thinks I’m afraid, but I’m not. He thinks the differences in our upbringing have left him jaded, and me spoiled. He thinks there’ll be trouble trying to bridge this gap.
While I grew up in a crystal cage, Hayden was living with his mother in the middle of nowhere. The setting: rural, ramshackle. What I know my own mother will sneeringly call quaint when she arrives to meet us there tomorrow.
But while Hayden was living hand to mouth, my mother was fobbing me off to housekeepers and boarding schools. I’ve tried to explain this to him, that there are horrors there, too.
* * *
The girl that was me lived in places that pretend, places that scold. Places that compare the soul with the value of a dress, the title of a father, the outer veneer. She had few friends, this girl I once was. To her, friendships existed only on the surface. Light shining on dark water, never fully absorbed. What would be the point when they are so easily broken, so easily lost?
Her father travelled, moved around the world. He passed in and out. His smile was wide, stretched. A twist of moving muscles. Her mother had three houses, no responsibilities. She had hobbies. Horse riding, silversmithing. Nothing lasted.
At fourteen, the girl that was me went to her mother’s beach house for the summer holidays. It was a particularly hot summer, and the mother walked around every day in a sleek, black bathing suit. It was shiny, the fabric gauzy and thin. It had silver links down the back. It was seldom worn for swimming. In the house, with mother and daughter, there was another woman. A guest. Grace. She was chunky, older. She wore swimming trunks with a neon pink bikini, the colour shuddering against the brown leather of her skin. The two women spent every day lying on deckchairs by the pool, emptying out the liquor cabinet, calling in orders for more. They dozed on their stomachs by the pool, fingers playing down each other’s backs, oiling the skin until it shone the colour of glazed ham. When they were drunk they got up, put music on, danced on the deck. Swaying, stumbling on their steps. They were clumsy like this. Wine glasses and whisky tumblers dropping, smashing. They giggled at the spreading glitter scattered across the tile in needle shards. Twice, when bringing them trays and towels, the girl punctured her feet.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” the mother said, dabbing the girl’s blood with the edge of her towel.
Grace’s eyes widened, black-stubbed lashes spread. She said, “I didn’t realise kids were such hard work.”
Said it over the girl, at the girl, flinging the words into the space above her head.
And the mother, her smile tightened. “You don’t know the half of it.”
One afternoon the clouds rolled in. Storm winds blew stinging pelts of warm rain onto the deck. The women took a bottle of Cinzano with them and disappeared somewhere up in the house. The girl that was me, she wandered through the house. She felt lost, disconnected. She felt forgotten in this place. She walked the halls and corridors, sliding her fingers along the silk wallpaper. One door stood open. The sounds coming from the room were soft, secret, wet. Breaths and sighs and semi-whispers.
She looked in.
The mother was kneeling on the bed, with Grace splayed on her back before her, legs spread. The mother seemed somehow contorted, the knots of her spine and bars of her ribs rolling up against her skin as she hunched over. Grace, a rolling slab of sunburned flesh with spiked, black hair, churned beneath her. The mother’s fingers padded at the soft, pink flesh between Grace’s glazed ham legs. Peeling at the hair-lined edges of the flushed, wet thing that nestled there. The mother’s tongue emerged, wide and pink. Just before she bent, she heard the girl gasp from the doorway. She looked up. Her eyes bloodshot, her hair in dishevelled snarls. Her gaze turned panicked, also furious. Her whole body tensed, jolted. For a moment she was inhuman in this twisted pose, with this bestial glare. She raised her arm, swiping the air as she yelled, “Go to bed!”
It was four in the afternoon.
Later, months after Grace had gone, the mother tried to explain that she’d never wanted a child, that she’d never wanted to marry, that it had all just happened.
“You wish I’d never been born,” said the girl that was me. The ground beneath her feet, never completely solid, seemed to waver, as if about to break open and swallow her.
The mother sighed, leaning back in her chair, looking away from her daughter, gazing into the space above her head. “Does it really matter,” the mother said, “if I still kept you?”
The girl that was me wondered if she was supposed to be grateful.
I’m not that girl anymore.
* * *
Beside me, Hayden is lighting his eighth cigarette of the morning, aiming the smoke out the cracked window. An inch of fresh air, hissing in.
He turns and asks, “If you could be any kind of animal, which one would you be?”
“A parrot,” I say. “So that I can still talk, still fly, and still be beautiful.”
He grins. “And your mother? What animal would she be?”
“A cow, of course!”
He didn’t give my mother that cow figurine for nothing.
He laughs, sudden, short. But I know that t
one, and I watch his face as the smile freezes, hardens, then drifts. “My mother,” he says, “is a pig.”
* * *
I’ve seen one picture of Hayden’s mother. It’s a holiday shot, maybe taken at a beach somewhere, and it shows a large woman wearing a floral print dress matched with cheap sunglasses. The line of her chin is soft, loose skin filled with fat. From her upper arms hang folds of smooth sag. Her face is unreadable, blank, contrasted by a soft, generous mouth, half-open and wet with red lipstick. A mouth used to feeding.
She was fat then, but not too far into obese. I can imagine how that floral dress expanded, swelled. The printed flowers on the fabric spreading tighter over breasts, thighs, hips. Yanking the straight line of the zipper at the back into strained zigzags.
“My mother,” Hayden says. “My mother.”
His eyes are hard on the road. I want to touch him because I know he’s remembering something, thinking about something he’s afraid to share. I put my hand on his knee so that he feels me here. I lean my head against the window. We pass telephone poles, a service station, hills.
Hayden suddenly twists in his seat, starts pounding the steering wheel with hard hands. I watch his face, wait for an instant of stillness to touch his arm. The second I do he flinches, then relaxes. His face contorts.
“Just pull over baby,” I say softly to him.
We glide off the edge and get out of the car. We walk around the front, meet, and I put my arms around him.
His arms tighten, crushing me. There is the power of honesty, of truth in his grip. I link my hands behind him, pressing a fingertip to the sharp edge of the stone on my ring finger.
* * *
If you could be any kind of animal, which one would you be?
Savage Beasts Page 3