Mighty Unclean

by Cody Goodfellow

  There were good times.

  ««—»»

  And then she came out of the lake.

  ««—»»

  It was summer, around three in the morning. There were “No Trespassing – Keep Out” signs, but there was also a six foot section of chain link fence that was down. We’d left Micah at a restaurant, soothing his junky craving for sweet with Danish and coffee with lots of sugar. It was just Breeze and me and his horn.

  It was not a beach for people. Rocks, great lumping boulders, and smaller ones, smooth here and jagged there, making walking something entirely else, an unearthly experience best appreciated when seriously high. Ahead of us, the beach curved. A long, falling-down pier stabbed into the moon-gleaming water like a giant, arthritic finger pointing your way to nowhere.

  We drifted, the two of us and the muggy quiet, our steps taking us close to the waterline. We stood on the rocks. Spray splashed our shoes. Breeze squeezed the mouthpiece between his lips. He shut his eyes, doing some key-flipping to clear the horn. Then he let a few notes slide out of the bell, full of breath, just on the verge of breaking. There was no set time to what he laid down. It was just this shaky, brute insistence to continue, like an old man marching heavy-footed to the end.

  Then he went to this riffing thing, kind of a squeak-jump-around, like the feeling you get when your arm’s tied up, you’ve got the bubbling hit, your bubbling hit, in the dropper, and you know in just one eye-blink you’ll spike that vein for the big rush.

  That was when I saw something in the water and that was when Breeze’s tune changed. Way out there, way beyond the pier, someone was swimming.

  Breeze’s horn was going slow, notes rounded with a tired moan edge, like a bad morning when you’ve got to reach for the white port to kill the pain. Sure, I knew Breeze’s stuff – knew where he was coming from and how he got there – but he was putting down a sound I had never heard before. It went way back to the beginnings, to swirling fog of wishes and visions. His sax was luring and welcoming. It was the curved Viking horn bringing the far-traveled dragonship into the bay, to safe harbor and warm greeting and balance.

  What was out there was a lady, a lady in the lake. She came swimming toward shore in rhythm to Breeze’s music. Behind her was an ever-vanishing trail in the water. From second to second, the connection from where she was to where she had been was disappearing.

  When she reached the shallows, she stood up, came walking out. She moved sure-footed on clicking pebbles, like a dance.

  Breeze lowered the horn, let it swing on the cord.

  She did not look frightened or surprised. All she looked – here’s a word so tired it sags – was beautiful.

  The moon was a halo behind her head. Her long lake-gleaming hair hung tangled like tree snakes on jungle branches. She had magic-cruel eyes and her mouth was the soft passion of a bitch-goddess.

  And I remember thinking she should have been naked. Oh, she wasn’t, had on bra and panties made translucent with wetness, but she should have been.

  She came up to us and, in the moment before she spoke, I felt it. You get tight with a dude, hang with him, do good times and bad, there are flashes when you know you’re touching just what the other cat feels. That was how it was with Breeze and me.

  She was working on Breeze, doing a real number.

  How? Cannot say. The old bluesmen sing about the hoodoo. The square heads write songs for square heads about enchanted evenings and crowded rooms. But, when it all comes down, who the hell can really say?

  “Hey, what are you guys doing here?”

  The spell – and that’s no real word for what it was – was gone. I heard the over-control in her voice that hipped me she was pretty well juiced confirmed by a heavy slash of booze on her breath.

  “We’re jazzmen,” Breeze said, like that explained everything. In a way, maybe it did.

  “Jazzmen… You know what I am?”

  “A chick.” I shrugged, always cool, even though, well, you never did feel cool around her.

  “I’m a chick who got in the car and went cruising. I was looking for something, God knows what. I don’t, not anymore, if I ever did. But you know, it seemed to make sense that I’d find it in the lake, so I went swimming. There were a couple times when I nearly reached that place where the moon was right on the water. But then it moved. It always moves just when you’re there.”

  “That’s the way it goes,” I said, thinking about drunk talk and crazy ladies, neither of which is supposed to make sense but both do if you think about it when you’re not really working at thinking.

  Her eyes did three beats on me, then triple that on Breeze; she was deciding something. “Jazzmen,” she said. “I want you to come with me.”

  Maybe this is just “years later” wisdom talking, but I think I was a little afraid. But hell, cool means you go the way it goes and you flow the way it flows.

  She’d left her clothing under the pier. Without any attempt to dry off, she slipped into a beige dress, and then we followed her to her car, parked not too far away. She had a dark blue Lincoln.

  We went to an apartment building on the Gold Coast. The doorman lamped Breeze and me with a look that said it wasn’t his business what kind of whatevers rich people hung with but that didn’t mean he had to dig us.

  She lived so way up there in the ozone that she could have gone next door to borrow a cup of flour from God. Massive furniture that made you feel like you’d disappeared when you sat down. Windows providing a view of the city that half-convinced you everything was all right down below. And the bar at the end of the living room was a juice head’s dream of heaven.

  The three of us, two jazzmen and a crazy lady, sat sipping wine, and on the hi-fi set – she had a solid classical collection – was Respighi’s Pines of Rome. And then the mood, whatever it was, was broken by the click-click of the closing grooves of the record. The crazy lady smiled and said, “Which one of you is going to bed with me? Or is to going to be both?”

  I shook my head. Sorry, lady, but even before H kills your ability, it knocks out your interest. But Breeze nodded and he went off down the hall with her, leaving his sax on the sofa.

  I drank more wine. I put Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the turn-table. I listened to that fine baroque sound from that time when music and the world were tight and structured and I heard something else. Breeze and the crazy lady were definitely getting it on, the old push-rub-tickle.

  Weird, huh, because, like I said, dope is guaranteed to un-do your ability to do. All I could figure was that the chick had really gotten to Breeze and that no chemical negativity could out-do what she had done to him.

  Think enchantment or conjure or sex magic or as Screamin’ Jay has it, put a spell on you.

  The solid truth? The emmis?

  In the end, it doesn’t much matter.

  ««—»»

  Who was she?

  Some of this I picked up pretty quick and other stuff I only fell onto later.

  Name: Lanna Borland. Heiress of a family that made many, many coins mainlining their chocolate bars into America’s super-sweet tooth.

  Occupation: Full time fun-seeker, liver of the good life, from Port-au-Prince to the Riviera. Three divorces. Notch the bedpost to kindling with all the affairs. A bullfighter in Madrid, a member of the Dutch royal family, a sometime starving charcoal artist in New Orleans, a Hollywood alleged actor who never did figure out if he dug women, men, or both.

  Goals in life: Something new. Something different. Kicks.

  Philosophy of life: Get what you want.

  Call it the classic poor little rich girl riff: You get everything, you get it all, and none of it really does it to you, nothing ever quite manages to knock you out, to wig you, zonk you, and knock you over and so, maybe after a while, nothing means anything and you just keep on looking for something.

  This time around, figures me, Lanna Borland’s something was A Jazzman.

  And, man, she had him. Righteously. Br
eeze was solid gone on the crazy lady. Dead solid gone.

  She just started being there, being there all the time. She was a bringdown and a hangup to the music. Breeze and Micah and I trying to work up new charts, she was there. While we were blowing on-stage at the Fickle Finger, she was there at a stage side table, those eyes lamping and vamping, doing a back beat on Breeze and his style. And when Micah and I tried to put it back together, to get it right and tight and true like it had been – sometimes – just the three of us grooving to the sounds inside we used to share, uh-uh, it wasn’t three of us – it was four.

  No. Not four. Split that. It was two and two. Micah and I. Breeze and Lanna.

  She had Mr. B, one hundred and two percent, had him so that she was it – and there was nothing else.

  There are women like that.

  And sometimes I’d get into this off-the-wall mind shpritz about her, how she came out of the lake, and how, oh yeah, every little kid knows it before you teach him otherwise, way, way out in the water, way deep in the water, that’s where the real monsters live.

  Lanna drained Breeze. She zombified him. And she slipped this dream into his head and blood to take the place of everything that was meant to be there. “Lanna’s Song.” He was going to write a tune for her. His mind was exploding with it, that’s what he said, but that song didn’t happen for a long time, and for sure not then.

  Breeze tried, tried like hell. And sometimes he thought he had it, asked me to do a minor slide-and-drift thing behind him. Then he’d shut his eyes and lay down a few notes. But those notes were never part of a song. They were always unconnected and alone.

  Fact: The music went to hell. We fell into routines, repeating ourselves, re-tracing paths we had already worn out. When jazz is making it, it’s as real an exploration as what Christopher Colombo pulled off; it’s a voyage to a new world. But when you are not making it, uh-uh, you’ve got a nowhere trip on the city bus.

  It was wrong. It was wrong for Breeze and Micah and me.

  And naturally, Micah and I wanted Lanna Borland G-O-N-E – Gone. We did not hate her or anything like that. When you’re cool, you do not hate.

  Gone was just the way it had to be for her and for her to be gone was cool, okay?

  ««—»»

  Take it to the starting days of cold autumn. It was a Saturday afternoon, the kind of dragging-slow time when you don’t feel alive because most of you isn’t. We were at the pad Breeze and I still shared but where he was spending less and less time.

  We were there.

  Micah and I.

  Breeze and Lanna.

  She was next to Breeze on the Salvation Army reject sofa. She wasn’t wearing makeup and she had on jeans and a black turtleneck. Maybe she thought she was a beatnik.

  “Look,” Micah was saying, “we’ve got to get it set, and get it down, and soon.” He was moving jerky all around the room, staccato steps and twitching. He wasn’t long for needing to fix.

  “Okay, man,” Breeze said. “Stay cool, okay?”

  “Cool is cool and fool is fool,” Micah said. A junky will say something like that and another junky will take it for profound.

  The A and R man at BACA Records had been riding us for a while, pressing to get us into the studio to lay down some new sides. This time around, looked like there’d be real distribution, thanks to a push we got from a critic at Metronome.

  But Breeze was making bad kibosh on recording. We had to be ready. We wouldn’t be ready, so sayeth the Breeze, until we had “Lanna’s Song.”

  “Go slow, go slow,” Breeze said. He stayed cool, but Lanna came on mucho cooler. She was turned toward him, knees up on the couch, and she was eyeballing him like the Amazing Kreskin.

  “Go slow,” Micah said. Indubitably.

  “Hey,” Breeze said softly, “you’re like some strung out. Why don’t you unlax yourself?”

  It was a good idea. Micah looked as though he were ready for the crawly-shakes. He was in need of a calm-down, slow-down trip to the no-nerves-a-jangling Beyond.

  Micah nodded. “Yeah.”

  He said to me. “I’m carrying but I’ll need your works.”

  Call me your Eagle Scout with a merit badge in Heroin: I was prepared. He started to follow me into the bedroom, but Lanna said, “I want to watch.” There was something pretty wild working in her face. It was more than curiosity. Maybe it was hope.

  Sure, she had known all along that the three of us were in the life. That’s not a number you can hide from someone who’s always there. But she had never seen any of us fix.

  You see, it was different then. The needle and you, that was a private thing, your time of prayer with your private god.

  Breeze shrugged and said, “So she sees. So?”

  So she saw. And dug what she was seeing, you could tell.

  Micah was one smooth and careful user. He did the cooking slow, the tip of the flame caressing the bowl of the spoon. Dr. Kildare couldn’t have been more precise drawing up the junk through the thin, sterilized needle.

  Micah had me tie up his arm with my belt. He worked his fist to pump up the vein. I kept glancing at Lanna. The princess watching Rumpelstiltskin spin straw into gold.

  “There we go. Nice one,” Micah said when a clean and fat vein popped up, ready. He dabbed the inside of his elbow with an alcohol wet cotton swab. He raised the needle. He hit perfect the first time, and the fiery good news was on the way.

  He didn’t even have the needle out when it hit him.

  “Christ,” Micah said. “Beau-ti-ful.” And you could see the transfiguration.

  “Yeah,” I said. I was getting a sympathetic rush off him. He began bobbing his head, drifting with music only he could hear.

  “That’s what I want,” Lanna said.

  “Uh-uh,” Breeze said.

  Micah came out of his bipping-trance scene. “What you want, baby?” he said. “Huh? You tell Papa Micah what you want.”

  She pointed at his arm where a drop of blood was a ruby on the blue river of the vein. “I want you to fix me up.”

  Nothing had to happen. I mean, there’s no script in the skies that shapes your life. Lanna Borland did not have to suddenly come up with a new want, did she?

  Or maybe she did. Maybe she had to because of the same reason she went swimming way out in the lake, trying to reach the place where the moon lay on the water. Maybe she thought the needle had that promise – and could deliver.

  Breeze got up and walked to the window. He stood with his back to us. “How about it, Breeze?” Micah said. “She’s your chick.”

  On the couch, Lanna was rolling up her sleeve. Breeze said nothing.

  “Come on,” she said.

  “Right,” Micah said. “Initiation time.” Then he said to me, “The works, if you please.”

  All the time we were getting the fix ready, there wasn’t a word from Breeze, not even a glance from him. We tied her up and watched the vein rise, bulging and ready.

  “Give it to me,” she said.

  “You got it,” Micah said. He swabbed her arm and my eyes met his.

  The thing is, I think I knew. I think I could have stopped him. Maybe.

  But the other thing, the bigger thing, is that I did not want to.

  And so he popped her. And then he said, “There you go. Now, kinda walk around and feel it.”

  She stood up and Zoop! Oh, yeah, she felt it. Her face went white. Her eyes rolled back. She dropped to her knees. She made one short sound that was not a word, and she flopped down hard on her face, and she was dead.

  Breeze had turned around by then. Mouth hanging open, he just mechanically shook his head from side to side.

  Nobody did anything for a minute, and then it was time for somebody to do something, so I did. I got Breeze seated on the sofa. It was like moving a dude with a brand new lobotomy. I told him to stay put, not to move muscle one.

  The way he was, I was sure he wouldn’t.

  And then Micah and I straightened up
. I had to fix before I could get thinking the way I had to think, but we took care of it.

  ««—»»

  Life is not Dragnet with the cops solving everything just before the last commercial. Lanna Borland was found a week later in a forest preserve near one of the city’s northwestern suburbs. It was not front page, prime-time news, not in those days. Back then, if you had money, you could buy “hush,” and so, when a chocolate bar heiress makes an OD exit, there are things happening behind the scenes to guarantee, ultra-cool, no muss, no fuss, no scandal – and what we have here is “death by misadventure.”

  Micah split for the coast.

  And Breeze and I stayed together. That is, we kept the pad. But the way Breeze was, I could have been the oily character in the turban taking care of the mummy in one of those antique Universal flicks.

  Like you might figure, music was out.

  Until one night, a few weeks later.

  The temperature had dropped, not yet winter, of course, but a promise of certain winter. It was down in the 20s and there was that knife slice of wind that is exclusively Chicago’s own.

  Breeze left our place at midnight. His horn was with him. I was with him. I don’t know if he wanted me, but there I was.

  We went to that rocky beach that belonged to the summer. With the wind doing its work on the lake, the water looked as jagged and tearing as the rocks we stood on. I kept my hands in my pockets, wished my jacket were warmer. I wondered if I’d ever be warm again. I was high. I had the feeling I knew everything that was going to happen, everything that had to happen.

  “She is out there, you know,” Breeze said. His voice and the wind were one.

  I started to say something. I didn’t.

  The moon was full. Far out there, where the world ended, the moon lay on the water. It was a place where you could maybe find monsters down deep in the lake, or maybe the exact spot on the earth where dreams died, or maybe the one point where you’d expect a crazy lady to be.

  Then Breeze had the mouthpiece between his lips and he was playing. And he played warm as your own breath when the blanket’s up over your chin. Then he turned it cold, and his cold was the midnight cold when you’re alone in the house and every tick-tick of a pipe and the slow drip of a leaky faucet remind you of that aloneness.