Arleen cries out. We all edge backwards, staying even with the body as the ship moves past.
A few people stick their heads out of the door that leads to the bar, curious at first, then solemn and alarmed. They hurry toward us. Soon a panicked crowd is clustered at the railing.
“It’s Arianna!” Shocked murmurs pass through the crowd. “Where’s the captain?” A small woman hurries along the aisle that leads to the forward deck, calling for the captain.
The life preserver someone belatedly thinks to toss doesn’t do any good. Arianna’s not floundering. She’s just floating, already gone.
The captain’s call to 911 brings a police boat, speedy, and they retrieve her body. Then police are onboard, and when we reach the pier where we started we don’t go ashore till we’ve each had an interview, not with the uniform guys but with some other cops in sports jackets that come aboard. The one I talk to gives me his card at the end and says to call him if I think of anything else. I put the card on my dresser when I get home.
* * * *
Lots of things keep me awake that night: I keep seeing people’s faces, especially Karl’s, puzzlement as he leans over the railing replaced by misery when he turns away. I finally sink into that state at the edge of consciousness when the real world and the dream world swirl together in a kind of gumbo.
The set list for the gig is part of the gumbo, especially the tune Arianna never got to sing. “Fish.” An abbreviation, obviously. The set list was full of them, but I recognized the others. “Rooster” was “Little Red Rooster,” “Chicago” was “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Angel” was “Sweet Little Angel,” and so on.
But what was “Fish”?
* * * *
The next afternoon, I’m almost happy to head off along Tonnelle Avenue for my day job at Aldo’s Seafood Chalet. Taking orders for shrimp scampi and fried calamari will be a welcome distraction, not to mention gazing at the cowboy-themed murals left over from the restaurant’s past as a barbecue joint.
I’m still in kind of a daze though.
“Hello-o-o?” The solitary woman hogging a table for four has craned her wrinkled neck to catch my eye.
I shake my head a few times to pull myself back to the present. And I notice Aldo bearing down on me, a disgusted expression twisting his mouth under his silly mustache.
“I asked you if the red snapper was fresh,” the woman says.
Before I can answer, Aldo chimes in. “It was swimming just this morning, ma’am. I can assure you it couldn’t be fresher.” His disgusted expression has turned into a smarmy smile, but directed at her, not at me. He pulls me away for a lecture about daydreaming on the job.
I hardly listen. The red snapper was swimming just this morning. Fish swim, of course. Fish got to swim, like in the first line of “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine.” That’s the tune Arianna was going to sing after the break. It’s the perfect tune for a bride to sing to her husband on their wedding day.
Arianna had sung it to other guys before, even to Josh, though that romance had subsided into friendship long ago, which is how he got the wedding gig. And she’d sung it sitting in with my band at the Hot Spot. All the while, the satisfied expression on her face suggested she was counting the guys in the audience who looked like they wished she couldn’t help loving them. No evil of the dead and all that, but Arianna was a shameless flirt. Only a guy as rich and self-confident as Karl would even have a chance to tame her.
Remembering that night at the Hot Spot triggers something—a vague thought that gradually takes form. A thought about something that happened at the wedding gig. A thought about something fishy.
* * * *
When I get back to my apartment at eleven p.m., I go through my usual homecoming ritual. The first step is to get rid of the fancy pushup bra. It’s not the most comfortable bra in the world and I’m happy to take it off at the end of the day. But without it I wouldn’t have a figure anybody would look twice at. Then I pull on my Red Bank Blues Festival T-shirt and a pair of biking shorts. Finally I grab a can of Bud out of the refrigerator. But tonight, before I put on a Big Mama Thornton CD and sag into the big chair, I dig out my copy of the Fake Book. It’s the indispensable band reference, especially for jazz, filled with unofficial transcriptions of almost any tune you can name. I check one little detail then I set it by the door and get the Big Mama Thornton CD going.
Thursday night is band rehearsal at Feedback in Manhattan. It’s a couple nights away, but I’ll take the Fake Book to the copy place tomorrow and make some copies. The guys in my band might remember the changes to “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine”—but they might not, and I want to do a little experiment.
* * * *
Thursday night, I luck into a parking spot on Thirtieth just as a van is pulling out. The spot is big enough for my old Bonneville and just a few doors from the building housing Feedback. I follow a couple of kids with gig bags slung over their shoulders down the crowded sidewalk and into the building’s lobby. The elevator doors are closing, but one of the kids makes a dash for it and holds them with his arm. As I follow him and his friend into the elevator, I notice Josh in the corner.
“Change your schedule or what?” I ask. “I don’t usually see you here on Thursdays.”
“Belle’s feeling better and she wants to work on some new tunes.”
Josh looks more like himself tonight than he did in the fancy wedding duds. His white T-shirt sets off his swarthy skin, already tan though summer has barely started, and a pair of faded jeans skim his slender hips.
“Pretty horrible the other night,” he says. “Are you okay?” I nod. The elevator shudders a few times, groans its way up to the sixth floor, and then jolts to a stop. “Cops give you one of their cards?”
I nod again. “You?”
“Yeah. Think of anything else to tell them?”
“I’m not sure.”
* * * *
When we’re about halfway through the set list for our next Hot Spot gig, I pull out the copies I made from the Fake Book.
Michael is retuning his bass, an intense expression on his thin face, and I know better than to interrupt him when he’s concentrating. And Neil is staring straight ahead in a contented daze, probably thanks to a few tokes of marijuana in the Feedback bathroom before we got started. But Stan looks interested. And Mitzi’s new enough to the band that she comes to rehearsal like an earnest student willing to do whatever the teacher wants, even though the drummer doesn’t need to know the chord changes to play a tune. She holds out her hand for a copy.
“Oh, I remember this.” Stan shakes his shaggy hair out of his eyes as I hand him his copy. He’s wearing his favorite warm-weather outfit—a Fender Guitars T-shirt that manages to be huge even on his six and a half foot frame, and a pair of much-washed jeans with rips in the knees. “It was Arianna’s song,” he adds, his face suddenly grave. “Is that why we’re doing it? Because she’s dead?”
News travels fast through the Feedback grapevine.
“Something like that.”
I lay a copy of the song on Neil’s keyboard. He barely glances at it before his fingers get busy, improvising on the changes and coming up with something Bach might have played.
“Hang on a minute.” I hold up my hands like I’m pushing the sound back, but with a smile.
Michael plucks his low E string and listens with a satisfied nod. He takes his copy of the tune and squints at it. “It’s not really what I’d call blues.” He frowns. “You don’t want to add this to the set list do you? Because I don’t think it goes with our style.”
“No, I don’t want to add it to the set list.”
“Then why—”
“Please just humor me. I want to see something.”
“I don’t like spending time on tunes that aren’t relevant to the band’s future.”
“Please.” I grit my teeth.
“You want to do it in E flat like it says here?” Stan asks.
“N
o. Let’s try it in B flat.”
“That’s how Arianna did it,” Stan says mournfully.
“I know.”
We launch into it, Neil contributing a tasteful little intro, Mitzi pulling out a set of brushes in deference to the tune’s jazz pedigree.
But I have to stop after the first verse. B flat might have been Arianna’s key but it sure isn’t mine. We try a couple other keys till we settle on D, and I manage to get all the way through without running out of voice on either the low notes or the high ones.
“Why are we messing around with this?” Michael asks with a more intense version of the frown that’s his customary expression.
“We’re done now,” I say. “And I just learned something very important.”
Some tunes give you a certain amount of wiggle room. If the melody uses a narrow range of notes, you have a choice of keys. But if the melody goes real high or real low—or both—you have to find the key where your voice can handle all the notes. “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine” is kind of a workout. Arianna probably only had one good key for it, B flat, the key she sang it in with my band.
* * * *
Tony is manning the desk out front. His homely face creases into a smile when he sees me emerge from the long hall that leads to the rehearsal rooms.
“What room does Josh Bergman have tonight?” I ask him.
“G, I think.” He crinkles his forehead and consults a schedule book on the counter in front of him, running a stubby finger down a page smudged with penciled notations of bands, rooms, and hours. “Yep.” He looks up. “G it is.”
I hate to interrupt Josh while he’s practicing, but this is important. I can hear the music as I approach Studio G, and I recognize Josh’s elegant blues lines, playful and intense at the same time. I tug open the outer door then push at the inner door. The double doors are supposed to make things soundproof but sound leaks out anyway. You can always hear what everybody else is doing unless your band is playing too, in which case you drown them out.
Belle is singing, caught up in the tune and looking almost like I remembered her, except she’s so thin she looks frail. When they catch sight of me, Josh signals Robby to stop, and “Night Train” winds down, ending with a few hesitant taps on the snare.
“Glad you’re better.” I give Belle a quick hug, and then tug Josh toward the door.
“Sorry to bother you,” I say when we’re out in the hall, a version of “My Funny Valentine” leaking from the door to our left and some death-metal thing leaking from the door to our right.
“What’s going on?”
“How did Tom end up at that gig the other night? He’s not a usual member of your band, is he?”
Josh wipes his hand over his forehead. His skin is gleaming with a fine sheen of sweat. “He called me—out of nowhere. I hadn’t seen the guy for months, even though he and Belle were living together till recently. Said he could use some work that paid better than bar gigs and asked me to keep him in mind. I’d just been talking to Arianna about the wedding gig, so I thought, okay—I’ll throw it his way. He’s a great harp player.”
“That’s the other thing I wanted to ask you. Do you know if he ever played “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine” with Arianna?”
Josh blows out a little puff of breath. “Probably. At one time he was the man she couldn’t help lovin’.”
“I thought that was you.”
“I recovered,” he says with a grin. “I figured Tom had too, even though he took it hard when Arianna left him. I told him that’s whose wedding it was going to be, but he said he was cool with it. It really knocked Belle low when he took off, but what goes around comes around. He didn’t manage to hang on to Arianna very long. Karl’s got money and money talks. Arianna may have thought it was fun to hang out with musicians, but deep down she knew what she really wanted.”
What Josh just told me about Tom and Arianna confirms a rumor I’d heard, and it ties in with what I’m beginning to suspect. I go on. “Did you let that cop in on this stuff?”
“That Tom and Arianna were once an item?” Josh says. “No.” He draws the word out and shakes his head. “I’d have had to admit she snared me once too . . . not to mention half the other guys on that boat.”
“At the wedding gig, we wanted to do a tune in B flat to warm up,” I say. “But Tom didn’t have the right harmonica.” Josh nods. “Arianna was going to do ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine’ when she sat in with the band after the break—that’s what the abbreviation ‘Fish’ meant in the set list. Right?”
“Right.”
“Is Tom usually the kind of guy who keeps track of who does what tune in which key?”
Josh laughs. “I’ve been in bands with him where he was practically the band historian. Why?”
“Arianna did that tune with my band at the Hot Spot last year, and she did it in B flat. If Tom’s played it with her before and he’s so good at keeping track of things, how come he didn’t bring the harmonica he’d need for a tune in B flat?”
Josh shrugs.
“Unless he knew she wouldn’t be alive to sing it when the time came.”
“She wouldn’t be alive to sing it because he had something else in mind . . .”
The death-metal band behind the door to our right launches into a new tune and the barrage of howling guitars makes it hard to talk for a few minutes. Then the guitars give way to a foreboding bass riff.
“Do you have that cop’s card on you?” I say. “I left mine at home.”
__________
Peggy Ehrhart is a former English professor with a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature. She is the author of the Maxx Maxwell mysteries, published by Five Star/Gale/Cengage and featuring blues-singer sleuth Elizabeth “Maxx” Maxwell. The audio version of the first Maxx Maxwell mystery, Sweet Man Is Gone, is available from Books in Motion as Blue Murder. Visit her at PeggyEhrhart.com.
THE TRUCK CONTEST, by Kaye George
The first time I saw it I assumed it was an accident. Assumed some poor schmuck had left a truck out on the ice just a little too late. Every morning on the way to work, I drove the winding road around Lake Minnetonka and followed the progress of the yellow pickup, sinking lower and lower as the early spring sun picked up strength.
That first winter in Minnesota, I had noticed right away how Lake Minnetonka becomes a huge playground. The natives use it for snowmobiling, ice skating, and ice fishing. They cavort outside in frigid weather as if it were summertime. I was most fascinated by the ice fishing, though. My dad had never taken me fishing when I was a boy. Hell, he’d never taken me anywhere, except to the track.
I’d done a lot of hard outdoor work in a hot climate recently and had no desire to repeat that sweaty experience. The cold weather did take some adjustment, but I had the Minnesotans’ example to follow. And anything was better than being locked up. I bought a lot of new winter clothes, that helped me keep warm.
At the beginning of that first winter, I observed people driving their pickups onto the frozen lake. They unloaded dozens of one-room wooden fishing shacks, mostly homemade, and created a temporary village between Excelsior and Big Island. At work they told me it was called Ice Town. Some of the guys in shipping were avid ice fishers.
The little shacks really did look like a town out there on the frozen lake, with narrow streets laid out where guys drove back and forth to their houses. Some of them even spent the nights there. They hauled in carpeting, huge coolers full of beer, and satellite dishes to give them some of the comforts of home. It was mostly a guy thing—I never saw more than a couple of women. It looked like fun and I thought about giving it a go the next year.
When spring approached, the natives hauled off their fish houses and drove their trucks home. One lone pickup remained, however, that yellow one, parked in a widening puddle on the thinning ice. It was obviously too dangerous to go out and get it. I shook my head every time I saw it and felt sorry for the slob who had left his truck to sink
into the lake.
One morning, I lingered on the way to work, watching that damn truck, and arrived a couple minutes late, not unusual for me. So why did Karen, my chubby little boss, give me the evil eye?
Get used to it, I thought. Some people don’t live for this sorry job. Who would want to? I inhabited a cubicle, an invention of the devil himself, I’m sure, and processed orders for imported junk. Little plastic bracelets and gifts bags, shit they sold at the Dollar Store. I was as far from my previous address as I could get, and the company didn’t do background checks. That’s why I worked there. Karen as my boss lady I could handle. I even flirted with her some when I started there. The one who got to me, though, was Clark.
That day, in the break room, Clark mentioned the Truck Contest.
“What’s that?” I asked, waiting for him to quit fiddling with the sugar packets so I could get some for my coffee.
Clark cleared his throat wetly, one of his least obnoxious mannerisms, raised his superior eyebrows almost up to his wig, a toupee that might have been a squirrel in its former life, and informed me that bets were placed on when the truck would sink.
“So that yellow pickup doesn’t belong to some poor sap who just procrastinated too long?”
“Hell no. What a stupid thing to think.” He picked his nose, stirred a small mountain of sugar in his Styrofoam coffee cup, and strolled off to his cube, the one next to mine.
Clark was not a desirable cubicle neighbor. Most mornings his radio blared stock market reports, and in the afternoon he listened to, as far as I could tell, the worst music ever recorded, big band and polkas. Where did he find those stations? My protests would prompt him to lower the volume for half a day, then he would twist the dial back up and dare me to say something. I decided I had to start raising my issues with Karen.
Fish Tales: The Guppy Anthology Page 13