The coffee clutched firmly in his hand, he headed backstage to the tiny closet they called a dressing room. He had only moments before they would be looking for him on stage. Fumbling under the counter, he dragged up his makeup kit. The mirror was dust-crusted and grimy, but Brandt had a very clear image of what he would do. The old card floated in the back of his mind, and the fool came to life, slow wash of mascara, deepening of the already deep hollows beneath his eyes . . . perpetual false smile, clueless and transcendent. He finished, meeting his own stare for a long moment, and then turned back to the bar. Something was in the air, rippling along his nerve-endings, but he couldn’t place it.
Brandt didn’t tune. The guitar had been in perfect tune the night before, and he knew if he engrossed himself in that ritual now, it would be over. He would fuck it up completely, be unable to get the pitch, and it would be bad. Better to be a half-note off from the start and compensate. His life was all about compensation.
Behind him he heard the soft shimmer of cymbals as Dexter determined the moment and the mood was right. They always let Dexter choose the moment. His timing extended beyond the drums to the surreal. Besides, it was easier to follow, flowing into the beat, than to anticipate it.
Brandt closed his eyes and let his fingers fall naturally to the strings. It was a slow number, slow and heavy, lots of sultry, hip-swinging beat for Syn to sync up on, but not too much for the rest of them right off the bat. Blues—it was all the blues, in one form or another, but this was pure. The melody was from a converted Hank Williams ballad, dissected, devoid of twang, but filled with deep, resonating tones and a heavy, slippery back beat. It was an arrangement that Brandt himself had come up with in a rare lucid moment, and he silently thanked Dexter for realizing it would draw him in. He had to get in quick, into sync, into the beat and the rhythm, into the sound, or he was lost.
He wasn’t certain when he first became aware of the presence at his shoulder. He felt the moist-hot brush of fetid breath, caught the scent of dusty roads and sweat-stained clothing and in that instant, he heard the voice.
“You keep playin’, boy,” the old man whispered hoarsely, insinuating the rhythm of his words into the song. “You forget what you see, you forget what you know, but you don’ forget to keep them fingers dancin’.”
Brandt shivered and closed his eyes tighter, but he did not stop playing. There was a resonance to his notes, a fluidity that he had only felt small glimpses of in the past. Memories sifted up through his thoughts, memories he’d buried and left for dead. He shook his head, trying to concentrate on the music, to drive the invasion of pain away—failing. Phantom videos of all that had hurt him most deeply strobed before his eyes and drew the pain from him one note at a time, white-hot threads pulled through heart and skin in a long, slow, unraveling sound as tears flowed freely down his cheeks.
The song shifted subtly. Brandt no longer heard Dexter’s drums, or Syn’s bass, though he felt the rhythm shivering up from the floor to vibrate through his nerves. Softly at first, then with growing insistence, the voice of a second instrument rose. Brandt thought instantly of the old man’s harmonica, but as quickly realized it was different. The sound trembled with emotion and vibrato, shivered with elegance. Violin. It was a single violin, the sound rippling against, then through Brandt’s guitar, harmonizing, then stealing the center of the melody, then slipping up and away in a sublime shimmer of sound.
A tight, cold talon squeezed Brandt’s heart. An old man stepped from the shadows, white hair billowing about his head, glowing nimbus wreath wrapped tightly about the very image of tragedy. Pain owned those features, rippled beneath wrinkled skin and forced expression after expression to play in a kaleidoscopic slideshow of angst. Brandt gasped. His eyes were still clamped tightly shut, but he could not erase the sight, could not look away from the sound as it wove around and through his notes. Brandt did not stop playing, but the tears rolled in soft trickles off and away, wetting his shirt.
The visions that tore at his nerve endings shifted. He played, but the club no longer existed. His chair sat in the center of a dusty crossroad. The violin played in the background, but he could not see the violinist. The buildings that surrounded him were low to the ground and dingy, nothing distinguishing one from the next. There were few windows, and he saw no movement beyond them. The music took a subtle shift from the straight twelve-bar blues rhythm to a slow, torturous march. His fingers made the transition and the phantom violin slipped to a staccato beat, pounding through the notes and matching them to Brandt’s suddenly speeding heartbeat.
There were footsteps as well. Marching. A small group of men rounded the corner. Brandt shrank back, melting to the chair as he recognized what he saw, nearly crying out in negation before the scene shifted again. He knew the uniforms, the black, over-polished boots. The distinctive, high-reaching steps.
Now he sat in the center of a different crossroads, gaze locked to a different set of doors. A line of people moved slowly and reluctantly through them. He felt their fear, their uncertainty and the voice of the violin pounded it deeper, made him part of it. A single set of eyes captured his and he trembled as the old man glared at him. The violin was nowhere to be seen, but Brandt knew who played. The musician shifted through the crowd, blended with the crush of bodies, and disappeared between the doors. There was a sickening ripple as he felt a part of himself torn free and dragged along, scenes shifting to shadows and confusion.
People crowded on all sides, too close, too many, all terrified, and there were men moving among them, barking out commands in a language that meant nothing to Brandt. Those surrounding him wore crude blue and white striped shirts—men, women, children—all the same. Brandt was jostled, and then shoved hard. He dropped painfully to knees that he knew were too thin, too arthritic to be his own. He tried to break the fall, failed, and fought to regain his footing.
Those around him stared mutely through humiliated, pain-soaked eyes at the invading soldiers, and terror so deep and dark it melted from them and dripped to the floor, filling the room and flooding Brandt’s heart. They were stripping. Each of them, women, men, boys and girls, faces flushed in shame, peeling off their clothing as the men in their dark uniforms continued to command, and shove, and move from person to person without the slightest indication that they saw what happened around them. The clothing was grabbed, tossed, gathered, and gone, so quickly the moment was a blur. The terror that had been buried deep in the eyes of those surrounding Brandt seeped through his thoughts, imbedded itself in his mind and drove icy spikes into his spine.
Men were herded one way, no other word for it, moved like so many animals as the women split to the other side. The words were no clearer to Brandt, but seemed to calm the others slightly. The next thing he saw was a concrete room with walls lined in nozzles. Showers? They crowded in, too many, no way to be directly in the path of any particular spray. The shower nozzles themselves were strange, and then the soft hiss of something escaping from the nozzles, something less powerful than steam, more insidious.
The doors closed behind them with finality—with the essence of death. The room was immersed in a sudden dark, repressive fear. Breathing became difficult and those near to Brandt panicked, moving toward the entrance, and the exit, opposite sides of the dark, empty room, equally sealed. They pounded at the doors, more and more frantic with each passing moment. Nails broke as they scratched and dug at strong wood with fragile flesh, digging into grooves already worn in the surface, and Brandt slid down . . . deep inside . . . away . . . he felt the chair beneath him again, heard the notes of the violin so dark and empty and yet full of emotion, tearing at his world and shredding it.
Brandt’s fingers moved of their own accord, ten-digit puppet controlled by the images, images controlled by the pain, beyond and behind it the song. Brandt’s chords bent and shivered along with the lingering, trembling notes of the old violinist. He saw the man again, alone, staring with cold, empty eyes as the bow danced over cat-gut st
rings, crying its song to the night. Brandt’s eyes clouded with salty, stinging tears and he clamped them shut hard, biting his lip and dragging his fingers harder over the strings, trying to control the uncontrollable song, trying to insinuate his own lesser darkness over the oppressive voice of the violin.
He glanced up, high on the dull gray walls and saw a face, white and leering, makeup bleeding from the corners of the eyes to stain the walls, fading to stone and brightening to brilliant blood red.
The song shifted. Brandt played through the hitch in his chest that threatened his breathing, played through the white-hot pain of fingers pressing too tightly to the strings, dragging so hard into bar-chords that skin nearly parted from the pressure. The notes softened. The mournful wail of the violin shifted down to the soft tearful voice of a recorder, or a flute, wood and wind, sound and sorrow. Brandt played, eyes still so tightly closed he felt he could push away the presence of a world gone mad.
He felt a warm breeze on his cheeks, and slowly, very slowly, he opened his eyes again. The sound of marching feet had faded to the soft shuffle of many feet, and the barking Nazi-soldier-voices were replaced by other whispers . . . no more comprehensible, but different. The first sight that met his eyes was a trail, crossing another trail. He stood alone in the center where the two met.
They came from his left, moving in a slow, straggling procession. He saw broken faces, eyes lowered and steps that were only half the length they aspired to. To one side of the trail a small girl stood. Her gaze was locked to his, and at her lips a long, tapered flute, hand-carved of soft wood. He tried to look away, to take in the panorama before him, but he could not. She held him with the depth of her eyes and the emotion in her song. He felt his fingers comply, twisting yet again and tracing unfamiliar chords as he accompanied in muted rhythm to her lead.
Then Brandt was walking. His steps were short and his breath wheezed in labored gasps through trembling lips. He wanted to voice a negation, but he could not form a word, could not waste the breath. He staggered forward, feeling the weight of years he had never lived and the frustration of a once strong body, a once proud mind, cowed and broken. He clutched a rough scrap of cloth about his shoulders, heavy and warm, but somehow gripping at his heart like a ball and chain.
Around him, others limped, staggered, and moved in a steady stream. Those who had failed to continue were carried/dragged/tended, continuing despite their physical limitations. Brandt shook in the grip of a fever, deep and dark, festering in his body and rotting his soul. He shivered and walked and shivered again, each step seemingly the last he was capable of and all that time the flute-like tones of the girl’s song winding about him, coiling tighter and tighter. He watched bodies half-dead, long, dark hair trailing behind the wooden sleds, drawn on by hand, mule, and the occasional horse, skin red with fever and lesions, lips parted and tongues lolling, eyes wild and bright and all the while, the slow, constant movement toward . . . what?
He glanced down at the blanket, saw the crudely stamped letters “US ARMY” and dark, mirthless laughter bubbled up from deep within his soul.
The blanket weighed more heavily on his shoulders, and he felt the lingering evil that permeated the coarse material, even as he drew it more tightly about him. No way he could know, and yet he did know; the darkness of the smallpox lingered on each thread, weighed on his heart and mind and suddenly he realized, his fingers. He played the sickness, the nausea and the darkness as eyes puffed and hearts slowed, as the act of putting one foot before the next became the act of placing finger after finger on vibrating strings and the soft voice of the flute pounded through his head, feverish and full of the pain of betrayal and emptiness.
He saw the girl now. She did not stand beside the trail playing her flute, but trudged in the center of a pack of others, thin, emaciated to the point of either starvation or illness that rotted from the inside out. Her steps were not proud. They were defeated and monotonous, drawing her onward slowly and pointlessly. The voice of false promise permeated the air. The hitch in a trusting heart as sharp betrayal bit deep. Brandt played and he followed the trail of tears and notes from the girl’s heart, to the soft dusty ground, to the bodies and the pain and back to his hands, always to his hands, drawing the music from the strings. His world shifted and he clamped his eyes closed once more.
Somewhere his own pain was lost in that flow, his world and his life petty beyond comprehension in the face of it. Dying, all but a few dying, and only the music to hold that pain. Her music, his music, deep dark river of anguish rolling on like the tide. He clamped his eyes tighter, and tighter still, and the music tilted one more time on an axis of surreality. He stood this time, guitar strapped over his shoulder, swinging against him in tight, pendulous motions as he drew the notes from the strings. It was the harmonica, sharp and bitter, driving through his rhythm and forcing his feet to move, one slow step at a time. Brandt opened his eyes.
The crossroads was no different from a thousand others. The trees were painted in the multi-hued colors of autumn and the wind whipped leaves about his ankles and sent them skittering across the road. In the very center, head down, the old black man, Wally, stood and played. His eyes were closed, his wrists quivered as he drew emotion in tangible threads from the small silver-metal harp. Brandt moved forward, playing the rhythm as he had never played it, feeling the bite in the voice of his instrument and bending it to support the solo. He wanted to close his own eyes and just stand and play. He wanted to let that pain flow out and through and away to some other place, to find his way back to safe notes and melodies with a trace of hope, but he could not.
His hands were numb from the effort, and his caffeine-fortified, life-ravaged system barely kept him upright, but he played. He was played. The music would not release him, and then the harp was silent, and he played alone. The old man vanished, glancing up and then sweeping away in the breeze, sifting to a wash of color that swirled among the dancing leaves and echoing deep pain in a last lamenting flurry of notes as he slipped away.
“Don’t stop yet boy, you stop, you’re on your own.”
That voice, so close, so sudden, nearly ended it. Brandt felt his fingers tighten, felt the sudden weariness tear at him, but somehow he played. He clamped his eyes shut and concentrated.
“Blues can get mighty deep, boy. Mighty deep. So deep you have to swim in them just to keep your head ‘bove it all and think. Learned it a long time ago—a’fore you was born I learned, and I played. Can’t never stop. That pain, their pain, it’s yours now. It’ll trickle into you slow-like, fill you from shoe to shaving cream a’fore you can stop it, and you just gotta play, gotta empty it back into the world where it belongs, or it’ll eat you inside to out, heart first, until there ain’t nothin’ left but a shell—‘til you wish you could go back to a happier time and share a drink with your damned drunken mom, or shoot pool with that prick you call a Papa.
“You don’t want to be a shell; I reckon you’ll play. Just remember, whatever you do remember, and don’t let it get too deep. Don’t fool yourself boy, you cain’t keep it inside . . . cain’t hold it all. You let it out.
“Crossroads, or crosshairs, all the same. No way outta the pain ‘cept t’rough da music, boy.”
And the voice was gone. Reality rested on his shoulders like the final curtain of a stage tragedy. The notes sifted slowly about in his mind, a procession of eyes passing across his mind’s stage. The old man, the children, the gas, and the violin merging with the defeated, helpless notes of the flute on that long trail of more than tears, trail of extermination and so many others, so many things that had festered in the back of Brandt’s mind, pressed aside as unimportant in his private over-all view, now rising up to fill it.
He felt a soft touch on his elbow, and at last, he stopped. The ache in his heart shivered out and down his arm and he opened his eyes, glancing at fingers so red and raw he wondered that he could move them at all. He turned, and he found that Syn stood at his left shoulder, eyes w
ide, staring down at him.
“Brandt?” she said softly.
Brandt met her gaze evenly, only half-aware of the world he’d dropped back into so suddenly, trying to figure out what he would say to them, to figure out what they had seen, and heard. The rest of the band stood in silence behind Syn, watching him. Shaver held his guitar in one hand, and the only emotion in his eyes now was that of pain, as if something had been stolen from him.
“What was that, Brandt? What the fuck was that?” Syn said, her voice never rising above a whisper.
Brandt rose slowly, the guitar neck gripped tightly in his one good hand. He turned to the audience, the hangers-on and the drifters. None spoke. The girls did not wander from table to table, delivering shots of courage and charisma to the masses. No bottles or glasses clinked and no voice rose in praise, or in anger. Nothing. He presided over a silent church of pain, white-faced harlequin entertaining them with tragedies they could no more comprehend than he could deny.
Brandt placed the guitar in its case, took the case by the handle, and moved toward the bar without a word. Syn followed, for a few steps, and Shaver looked ready to burst into tears. Brandt wondered if the boy had heard the pain, or if he only wanted the notes. Brandt stepped behind the bar and gripped a bottle of Johnny Walker in his bloody hand. The pain bit through his haze and he managed to croak out some unintelligible promise of cash. Later.
Then he walked toward the door, and the night. Somehow he knew there would be no “later” for him here. He would have to move on. Things would have to change. Brandt didn’t feel like the center of it any longer.
Deep Blue Page 3