Done for a Dime

by David Corbett

  Now I must be honest—your family, “music,” “your future”—these are lies. They are a prison. Continue to be brave, Nadya. Be happy. From where I sit now, I believe to be brave and to be happy might well be one and the same thing.

  I will be your loyal friend forever, wherever

  Jeremy

  Toby’s father sat there with her, handing her tissues, gently rubbing her back as she finished the story. Finally, he said, “Now I understand why you’re always saying you’re sorry. I think I know what it is you feel so sorry about.” He tapped his fingertip gently against the bridge of her nose. “You’re alive.”

  Behind her, the door to the hospital room opened. The sound of a man’s voice filtered in.

  “No lie, I heard it from one of the nurses. Guy howled in here with his girlfriend, maybe two o’clock. They’d had sex, he rolls off, she says, ‘I can’t feel anything in my legs.’ He thinks she’s complaining. Then boom, lights out. Aneurism. Died in here this morning.” A snort, a murmur of disbelief. “Understand? The guy fucked his girlfriend to death. Twenty-three years old. Try getting a hard-on after that.”

  She turned away from the mirror toward the sound and came face-to-face with a tall, mournful man with rust-colored hair, dressed in a wrinkled suit. Behind him, a beefy black-haired man with a squinched face was ending his exchange with a police officer sitting just outside the door.

  “Nadya,” the first man said, “my name is Detective Murchison.” He seemed surprised to see her up and out of bed. Gesturing to the black-haired man, he added, “This is Detective Stluka. We’d like to speak with you a moment.”

  She looked up into his eyes and felt a knifing sadness. The opening bars of “Flee as a Bird to the Mountain” filtered through her mind. A spiritual, Toby had taught it to her, then showed her how Jelly Roll Morton had turned it into “Dead Man Blues.”

  “Would you please tell them to stop giving me whatever it is they’ve got me on.” She lifted her hand toward her head. “I feel like I’m going a little crazy.”

  Murchison offered his hand. “You need help getting back into bed?”

  Nadya lurched beside him while the other one glanced around the room. Stluka, she thought, a Slavic name, maybe Polish. Her grandmother always hated the Poles, a Ruthenian Catholic versus Roman Catholic contempt Nadya had never comprehended. Religion seemed the last of this detective’s concerns; he looked a merry thug. She worked herself back into the bed and covered herself.

  Murchison pulled up the room’s only chair and sat. At close range, his eyes were a large, warm, watery brown. Stluka rested his back against the wall, cracking his neck.

  “We’re working on the incident involving Mr. Carlisle.” Murchison folded his hands. They were freckled, with graying red hair. “I understand you were there, when the first officers arrived.”

  It’s not a question, she realized, and yet it felt like one. The incident. His words evoked an image, she believed it to be true, but it all seemed tagged with “could be.” If it happened, she thought, it happened to someone else. My sickly twin.

  “You were sitting on the porch.” He nodded toward her bandaged arm. “Clawing at your skin.”

  The panic came like a thunderclap, lancing through her body, more like a seizure than any kind of fear she recognized. A shudder knifed up her back. Her throat clapped shut. The air in her nostrils smelled thick, warm and coppery like blood, then greasy and sweet.

  Murchison shot up from his chair. “You all right?”

  Behind him, Stluka opened the door, telling the officer outside, “A nurse. Like now.”

  Nadya lurched upright, her lungs clenching as she tried to draw breath. Murchison hovered near her face, his eyes chasing hers. Her throat opened up to expel a racking sob. She clutched at his jacket, the wool smelling of rain and sweat and musty cologne a thousand years old. He put his hands on her arms.

  “Deep breaths.”

  A nurse appeared—middle-aged, African American, her hair bobbed, gray at the temples and parted on the side. She wore an open white hospital smock with a navy turtleneck underneath. A pair of reading glasses, hanging from a chain around her neck, bobbed on her plump chest. She moved Murchison aside, rested her haunch on the bed, and pulled Nadya toward her.

  “About time.” She stroked Nadya’s hair. “What you’ve been through, what you did, about time.”

  Nadya clung to her, embarrassed at the need, the two detectives watching. It seemed an eternity. What I did, she thought, confused. Her throat went raw, sandpaper again. The nurse reached for a Kleenex dispenser and pushed tissues into Nadya’s hand, one after the other, as she wiped her face and blew her nose and said, “I’m sorry,” over and over, to which the nurse murmured, “No sorries required, dear, none whatsoever.”

  In time the nurse looked over her shoulder at Murchison and Stluka. “She’s crying.” Said to a pair of dopes. “You call in a nurse, like she’s popped an artery. She’s crying.” She shook her head and turned back to Nadya. “Ain’t that the way.”

  “She couldn’t breathe,” Murchison said, a little testily. “She said the meds are driving her nuts.”

  Stluka said nothing.

  “Breathing all right now, aren’t you, dear?” The nurse’s voice was warm, like the sound from a sleeping cat. Holding Nadya at arm’s length, she inspected her eyes, felt for the pulse in her carotid artery, then her wrist. She ran her hand along Nadya’s bandaged arm, checking to see that the adhesive was secure. “I do believe, little one, that you are going to live.” She took Nadya’s hands. “These two rough-tough crime-fighting-type fellas need to ask some questions. Could get sloppy. You up for that, or you still need a little time?”

  “These meds—”

  “You’re on Xanax and Valium, dear, nothing more. You just got it intravenously, so it feels a bit more personal. We can slide back a little now, if you want. Nothing else in your system, really, except some antibiotics, for your arm. Pretty tore up, it was. Took a bit of needlework.”

  Nadya stared at the bandage, feeling another wave of dread, but gentler now, with the nurse there. “I don’t remember.”

  “No surprise there, dear. You’re gonna find your memory shooting around on skates for a while.”

  Murchison made a face. The nurse ignored him and got up, moving with a droll sashay toward the door. “If she needs anything else—a coif, pedicure, some chilled white wine—you gents just holler. Holler good. We’ll come a-runnin’, oh my yes, God a’mighty.” She opened the door and said to the officer stationed outside, “You gonna move sometime today, or shall I get the girls from Housekeeping to drop by and water you?”

  Once the door closed, Murchison returned to his chair. He nodded toward Nadya’s arm. “That seems to bother you.”

  She followed his gaze. It was as though they were both standing a little off, regarding her arm. It made her feel ashamed.

  “I don’t remember anything about it.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you do remember.”

  Nadya looked up from her arm and saw Stluka against the wall, his eyes fixed on her.

  “It’s all in pieces.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I have these emotions—they’re, they’re very raw, very intense—but there’s no picture. Or, if I do see something, it just flickers by. Never connects to anything.”

  “What’s the last thing that doesn’t feel like that? That feels whole.”

  She gave it thought. “I was at the piano.”

  “The one in the living room?”

  “Yes.” She closed her eyes, trying for a mental picture—stomach tight, heart thumping, but she tried—unsure if she was remembering or imagining. Music echoed faintly in her mind, one of the Hungarian dances again, but not the fifth this time, the eleventh. No cartoon associations with the eleventh: elegiac, in A minor. Poco andante.

  “I was playing, waiting for Mr. Carlisle to come home. I got thi
s sense that he was outside. I don’t know, just a feeling. Then I heard the gate. I got up to see—”

  “See what?” It was Stluka.

  Her head felt light and she found words failing her. Again, an eternity passing. “I heard the gate.”

  “You told us that.”

  “I mean a second time.” She looked at Stluka, then Murchison. “I heard the gate a second time. That’s when the shots—” Her pores opened up and sweat beaded on her skin, but she was cold. She felt so cold.

  “You want us to call the nurse back?” Murchison said.

  “I was confused, I just sat there.” Drawing breath, it felt like sucking air through a long, thin tube. “I’ve never heard a gun go off before. And for a moment, I didn’t know, or couldn’t believe, what it was. The shots, they were so close, just outside. So loud. I remember thinking that I should get down, on the floor. One bullet, I think, hit the house. But I couldn’t move.”

  “That’s not so strange.”

  “But you did get up finally.” It was the other one, Stluka. “Go to the window.”

  Her head began pounding again. “I should have gotten up right away, I know. Done something.”

  She shut her eyes and it felt good, the blankness, but then Murchison, the kind one, was struggling with her, holding her by the wrist. “Stop. Stop it.”

  Nadya blinked open her eyes. Her face was damp, her whole body was wet. She glanced at the wrist Murchison was gripping. The hand was balled into a fist and throbbing.

  “Don’t hurt yourself.” Murchison loosened his hold. “There’s no need to hurt yourself. It’s not your fault.”

  Nadya unclenched her fingers. They felt like wax.

  “Tell us what you saw, Nadya. Please. All right?”

  Stluka said, “Where was he lying?”

  She glanced up. “Excuse me?”

  “In the yard, Mr. Carlisle, where was he?”

  Like a fish dying at the bottom of a boat, she thought. Eyes bulging, mouth gaping, formed around a silent No. But a human face, an arm reaching out for her.

  “Just inside the gate.” She had to swallow, breathe. “Beneath the sycamore.”

  “Anyone else there with him?” Murchison asked.

  She tried to picture herself back at the window, looking out, but when her imagined gaze tracked up his body the yard telescoped, the fence receding fast, growing small, the gate vanishing into the distance. It made her dizzy.

  “It still feels like I’m on something.” She held her head. “And my memory, it’s like it’s gone crazy, or stuck.”

  Stluka shuffled his weight from one foot to the other, then leaned back against the wall again, hands in his pockets. The look on his face said: This is worthless. This, meaning me, she thought.

  “There are times,” Murchison said, “especially when danger’s involved, or violence, or something particularly horrible has happened, when we—I mean police here—we just react. And trying after the fact to put into words or even figure out what we did can be almost impossible. It’s the way the mind works. The part that explains isn’t the part that reacts. So I think I understand how hard it is for you, trying to tell us what happened. And why.”

  “Thank you,” Nadya whispered.

  “Are you aware you called nine-one-one?” Murchison asked.

  “I did?”

  He smiled. “You didn’t say much. I listened to the call-ins before we came over. Yours was first. Pretty frantic. You dropped the phone.”

  Nadya shook her head, blinking. “I’m not helping, am I.”

  “What the paramedics think, you ran out to the yard, tried to give the victim mouth-to-mouth, got a face full of blood, and probably watched as Mr. Carlisle died right in front of you.” He reached out and gently tapped her bandaged arm with his finger. “Then you went back to the front porch and did this to yourself, until help arrived.”

  Her throat gave up on her again. The coppery scent became a taste and she felt her eyes swimming in their sockets. Neither of the detectives moved toward the door. They wouldn’t be calling for the nurse this time.

  “Your memory a blank about all that?”

  She steadied her eyes, glanced up into Murchison’s face, wanting to say, Help me.

  Behind him, in a voice like a face slap, Stluka asked, “You know a guy named Francis Templeton?”

  Murchison’s eyes went strangely blank, as though a switch had gone off.

  “Yes.” So hard to get the word out.

  “Know where he might be?”

  Murchison, gentler, added, “If he were in trouble, where would Francis go?”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “Where would he go?” Stluka asked.

  Nadya glanced from one man to the other. Something was going on between them, a competition of some sort. Or maybe she was making it up. Like everything else.

  “There was a fight at the club. In Emeryville. Three men followed us to our car. Has anyone told you that?”

  The minute they’d entered the bar, Nadya felt a pair of eyes on them. Dapper old black man, young white girl, you had to expect that. No worse lie on earth than the one you heard on right-wing radio: post-racist America. But these eyes went beyond even that. They shot out from beneath blond bangs, the boy ham-faced but hard—twenty-something with a pseudo-Celt tattoo on his neck, tiny ears, and a preciously crude haircut. He had friends with him, a foursome. One had dyed black hair and a vampire pallor, drumming his fingers on the bar as he ogled the chest on a woman three stools down. The other two faced away, each of them broad and thick-necked, with close-cropped hair.

  They were strangely out of place, given the rest of the crowd—by and large a college mix, the guys animated and smart with their first ventures into facial hair, the girls even smarter and vaguely depressed and clustered in chatty groups. Nadya’s eyes held the blond’s for several seconds, till his glance moved on. Following it, she saw that now it was Toby’s father staring back at him. In response, a smile played on the young tough’s lips. The smile did not say, Hello. It said, Any time.

  A voice broke through the crowd noise: “Strong Carlisle. Am I right?”

  The man sailed in from out of nowhere. He was tall and good-looking, with pale blue eyes and thick brown hair combed straight back. Even his stubble looked well considered. He offered his hand. “Grady Bradshaw.”

  Wary, Toby’s father practically sniffed the air. “Do I know—”

  “I saw The Mighty Firefly play a Juneteenth gig on Lake Merritt last year. Or no, two years ago. Two years. That’s right.”

  Toby’s father finally accepted the outstretched hand and shook it politely.

  “That was a hell of a show.” The man’s voice was full of good graces, but his eyes remained strangely cool. “Nobody blows like that anymore.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  “I still remember you counting off those tunes.”

  He recited songs he remembered from the Mighty Firefly playlist—Joe Morris’s “Weasel Walk,” Arnett Cobb’s “Mr. Pogo,” King Curtis’s “Honeydripper”—rattling them off so fast it was like listening to Willie Dixon’s “Song Title Jive.” When he got to “Okie Dokie Stomp,” Toby’s father cut in.

  “You know your tunes. Either you’re a freak for fifties big band blues or you’re in the business.”

  “Promotion. I’m an indie. Carmen DiCarlo, she’s one of my acts.”

  The look in Toby’s father’s eye said, Aha. The enemy. “This that new brand of payola you hear so much about?”

  The promoter’s smile faltered just a bit. “It’s nothing like that, really.”

  “That’s good to hear. Really. Back to the tunes you were running down, ‘Okie Dokie Stomp,’ yeah, that was our flag-waver. Cornell Dupree number. Original had Seldon Powell on the baritone. That’s my horn.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “We did a Mingus number, too. ‘Moanin’.’ Everybody got to stretch out on that one, even me. Crowd went crazy. Maybe you recall.”


  The younger man’s eyes jittered with face-saving calculation. Despite herself, Nadya made a nervous little chirp at mention of the Mingus tune.

  “And who is this?” The man seemed thankful for something else to talk about. His face recovered its blank good humor.

  “This is Nadya, my son’s young lady.”

  Offering his hand, Grady Bradshaw eyed her up and down. She’d changed into a cowl neck sweater, a short pleated skirt, black hose. He seemed taken by the outfit. Nadya half expected his fingers to slither up her arm.

  “Your son,” Grady said, his eyes returning to Toby’s father. “I’d have thought he’d be playing with you in The Mighty Firefly.”

  Nadya couldn’t tell whether this was a compliment or a dare. Toby’s father answered back with a wicked smile, “Toby needs about five more years of practice, and forty more years of being screwed by the music business, to earn a chair in The Mighty Firefly.”

  The man laughed too quickly. Too loud. As though quoting his favorite bumper sticker, he said, “Gotta pay your dues, you wanna play the blues.”

  Inwardly Nadya cringed. What would you know about it, she thought. To save them all, she said, “I think the band’s starting.”

  At the bar, the four hoods continued their haul at the tap. The same meaty blond sat watching them.

  Toby’s father extended his hand. “I thank you for flattering a vain old man.”

  “Not at all.”

  Grady Bradshaw melted back into the crowd. Once he was gone, Toby’s father said, “You didn’t like that fella.”

  It was embarrassing sometimes how little slipped by him. “Yes, well, you didn’t, either.”

  “If there was a game show for guys who bragged about getting laid anytime they wanted, he’d be the host.” He gestured for her to lead the way back to the dance floor. “Don’t think I didn’t see the way he looked at you. I mean, girl, you gotta admit, that skirt you’re in—barely covers your home life. Any shorter, it’d be a hat.”

  They came out from the bar to find Toby’s band assembled onstage at the far end of the echoing room, beneath the lights. The music started—Booker Ervin’s “East Dallas Special.” The song cried out for dancers, but only a handful moved forward in the dark. Mostly the crowd, larger now, preferred to wander the vast dance floor, chatting, drinking.