Half-Blood Blues (3 page)

One was tall and thin, a tree-branch of a man. The other, he short and thickset. With his back turned to me, I could see a fat roll of muscle at his neck.

I dropped my eyes, and like I was letting it occur to me for the first time, I looked for Hiero. He standing on over at the front door, staring at the Boots. Another kid stood at his side, Jewish I reckon, a look of terrified defiance on his face. The taller Boot was making a real show of thumbing slow through his papers, not saying nothing. Just licking his thumb, turning a page, licking his thumb, turning a page. Like that Boot could pass a summer’s day doing it. I looked at his quiet grey face. Was a face like anyone’s. Just going bout his business.

‘Foreign,’ the shorter Boot was saying, his voice so calm and soft I almost ain’t heard it. ‘Stateless person of Negro descent.’

Hiero and that Jewish kid, they stood there with their hands dangling at their sides, defiant schoolboys. It ached to watch, the both of them so helpless, their hearts going hard. With the broad pane of glass shining bright behind them I couldn’t see too clear. But even from here I could hear them. Their breathing.

The tall Boot done soften his voice, too. It was odder than odd: these Boots was so courteous, so upstage in their behaviour, they might’ve been talking bout the weather. Nothing like how they’d behaved in Berlin. There was even a weak apology in their gestures, like they was gentlemen at heart, and only rough times forced them to act this way. And this politeness, this quiet civility, it scared me more than outright violence. It seemed a newer kind of brutality.

‘Foreigners,’ said the short Boot calmly. ‘Hottentot.’

‘Stateless,’ said the other. ‘Foreigner,’ he said. Jew, he said. Negro, he said.

I wanted to close my eyes. My legs was shaking softly, I couldn’t feel nothing in my feet. Don’t you drop, boy, I told myself, don’t you damn well drop. Get you wits together, for god’s sake, and go out there.

I stood there, rooted to the spot.

Hieronymus, he stared down them Boots. When their hard gazes forced his away, he look at the tiled floor. He never once look in the direction of the toilets, and I understood. Hell.
He
, of all people, protecting
me
. I couldn’t let him do it.

But just then the Boots yanked wide the Coup’s door, its chain singing. Taking Hiero’s arm, they led him and the other boy out into the street. I stood there. Stood there with my hands hanging like strange weights against my thighs, my chest full of something like water. Stood there watching Hiero go.

The front door shut with a clatter. The lights was all still up in the café. Silence, no one talking at all.

Then that gent, the one I seen before almost smiling, he got up and walked to the bar. Counting out his francs, he stacked them on the mahogany bar. He said something in French to the barkeep.

The barkeep just swept up the damp francs and turned to put them into the register. The man skirted the tables, his heels scraping the worn floor. No one spoke, all of us watching. And then the door jangled cheerfully shut behind him.

PART TWO

Berlin 1992

C
hip called to say he was dropping in and I told him Sure, brother, anytime.

I had all the lights on in my Fells Point pad, the thick shag carpet of my narrow living room drowned in clothes and folders and trash, the detritus of a life, all of it pulled out as I tried to decide just what to pack, when I heard his sharp rapping at the door. See, we was set to fly out the next day. I headed down the hall, past its stacks of browning newsprint, its crooked, black-framed photos. Forty-four years I’d lived here. Lola’s father had bought it for us after the war, and when she died five years after our wedding, it come on down to me.

The door was like to stick now, so that I had to yank on the old brass handle till it give. And there he stood, my oldest friend, looking worn as a used mattress, his face all dry and pocked with pores.

He come in grinning. ‘Man, Sid, ain’t you ever going to clean up? You live in plain disrepair.’ He crossed my bald welcome mat, his face dark against his gleaming shirt. He got this booming voice, and when he talked it overwhelmed the air, shoved it aside like oil in a cup of water. A real feat, considering his size. Shoeless and hatless, Chip Jones stood just five feet four inches tall.

‘You a fine one to talk of disrepair, brother,’ I said, taking his soft black coat to hang on the hatstand. ‘You seen your
face
lately? You look like an old lady’s handbag.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ said Chip, rubbing his cheeks with his huge hands. ‘On my walk over here a man tried to mug me for my face.’

‘Ain’t you funny,’ I said, patting his back. ‘Ain’t you hilarious. You already packed, I guess.’

He shrugged. ‘A man’s got to unpack first before he can pack.’ He glanced theatrically again at the mess on the floor. ‘I guess you know that though.’

I got Chip settled into my chaotic living room and went on over to the kitchenette.

‘What you drinking?’ I called out to him. ‘Scotch?’ When he didn’t reply I leaned through the door and looked at him. ‘You want a scotch?’

He looked up. ‘What?’

‘All that drumming catching up with you, brother? You going a little deaf?’

He smiled. ‘Aw, just a little. What you say?’

‘Scotch alright with you?’

He licked his old chops. ‘I ain’t never said no to one yet.’

I was watching him there feeling awful for him. I known that the state of his face wasn’t only cause he tired. The drugs was finally taking their toll. See, he been on horse for decades, only kicked the habit about fifteen years ago. He been clean so long now I done forgot he’d used at all. I
still
couldn’t get my head around the idea. If you’d known Chip in his youth, addiction would have seemed impossible. He was
proper
proper, strait-laced, hell, almost a prude when it come to illegal substances. Anyway, it shocked me, seeing a disease long-conquered showing up now in his features. It’s like that, I guess, when the past come to collect what you owe.

I poured us two scotches neat, just the thinnest blade of ice in them. ‘You think the Hound’ll still be there?’ I said.

‘Where? You mean in Berlin?’

I smiled as I sat down.

‘Naw,’ said Chip. ‘There ain’t nothing much left of all that. You won’t recognize it.’

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I never much thought I’d go back.’

Chip held up his drink.

‘
Prost
,’ we said together, hitting thimbles.

‘You seen the picture yet?’

Chip shook his head. ‘Caspars won’t let no one see it. Not before the festival. How bad you think it can be?’

‘Oh bad, bad. How you talked me into this, brother, I don’t know.’

He grinned. ‘It just my damned charming face, I reckon.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That must be it.’

We was silent then for a time. I got to tell you how strange it was seeing Chip here. Even with his face falling apart he still hands-down the nattiest thing in my house. He wore a navy suit of such beautiful tailoring I would’ve had to mortgage my place to buy it.

Chip used to say, you don’t got blue-blood in you veins, Sid, may as well dress like you do. Confuse folks. And so even when he didn’t have the money, he stepped out in seersucker suits and shirts starched so stiff they left pressure marks on his wrists. Even onstage hitting the skins, he look like a croupier dealing cards. Only time you ever seen him untidy is after a fight, and what a sight
that
was: James Bond run through a blender. Though you known the other fella probably got off worse.

‘The scotch is excellent,’ said Chip, setting down his glass on the sun-faded table.

‘Aw, I know you used to better.’

‘It’s fine.’ Chip glanced around, clearing his throat softly. Without thought or permission (when has Chip Jones
ever
needed permission?), he whipped out a titanium cigarette case engraved with his initials. Taking out what I known could only be the finest of cigarillos, he lit up. He held the case out to me.

‘Naw. I start smoking the good stuff, I never be able to go back. Besides, got to watch my health.’

‘You ill?’

‘No, sir. Just… retirement. Gets you thinking.’

‘What’s coming is coming, Sid. It don’t do a man no good to dwell on it.’ Chip smiled. ‘I’m surprised you retired at all.
I
can’t imagine ever doing so.’

I believed it. We was old as mud, sure, but even at eighty-three Chip kept up a hectic touring schedule. As like to be in Buenos Aires or Reykjavík as Baltimore.

Not me. No, sir. I been my own boss these, oh, thirty-one years. A medical transcriptionist for a couple different doctors – a group of stuffy, high-hat gents with faces worn as dishrags. I typed out the long, complex illnesses of their patients thanking god it wasn’t me I was writing about. And despite the sickness around me I stayed hale, born under a lucky star, as my third wife liked to say with her face all screwed up. Don’t know as she was right. Try waking up alone at eighty-two and deciding to stop doing the one thing you got to do all day. It’s a job all on its own to keep the hours full. Not two weeks passed when I reckoned I’d start transcribing again. But see, something had already changed in me. I wasn’t as drawn to the body’s autumn – like I had some new awareness, some idea of my own frailty. I needed to keep it at bay. Cause once that invades you, you done for, friend.

Chip was looking uneasy at me, and I known he got something touchy on his mind. ‘So what is it, Jones?’ I said. ‘Talk already.’

He laughed all high up in his throat. ‘You such an old maid lately, Sid. I so much as pick my teeth and you got to ascribe ten meanings to it.’

‘Your false teeth, maybe,’ I said.

He leaned forward in his chair, and picking up his scotch, downed it in one sound gulp. He got oddly thin lips, and with the drink still glistening on them, they looked like oysters.

‘I
am
right, though, ain’t I? You got something on your mind?’

Looking irked, Chip cleared his throat. He stared me plain in the eye. ‘Sidney Griffiths,’ he said.

I kind of half-laughed. Old Chip here, he full of it.

‘Sidney Griffiths,’ he said again. He held the cigarillo close to his lips but didn’t smoke it. I watched the end burning down. ‘What I got to tell you I don’t want to tell you. Cause you ain’t going to believe me.’

Chip reckons he’s charming as hell, and who am I to poke holes in his theory. But what that means is that sometimes lies leave his mouth dressed like truth. He just can’t help it.

‘Sidney Griffiths,’ he said a third time, and then I known I was in for something. ‘You remember back to when the Wall fell? How I had to force you to put down the phone and go check the goddamn TV? This is like that, boy. Except bigger.’

I laughed, irritated. It’s true. I
hadn’t
believed the Wall had fallen. He’d had to force me to seek out the TV in my bedroom. That old den had seen me through three other brides after Lola, all of them still alive and none as beloved as her. I remember it’d still been filled with my final wife’s decor, polyester curtains and ugly knickknacks from her Roanoke childhood. I guess she hadn’t collected them all yet. She’s got them now, thank the good lord.

I’d sat on the bed and turned on the ancient TV. Hadn’t been on more than ten seconds when I already thought, god strike me down. Cause what I seen, it ain’t seemed real. How on earth. Folks with pickaxes hacked away at the Berlin Wall, that awful concrete with its rash of graffiti. Sprays of champagne flying. Screams and tears and cameras flashing like gun flare in the dark as people poured through cracks. Some went on foot, in worn shoes and speckled jeans. Some was in those toy-like cars, Trabbis, the crowds buckling the roofs with their banging. I’d sat there like some monk locked in prayer, disbelieving. It wasn’t no city we ever set foot in. Not that Berlin.

Now Chip sat forward in his seat, hitting with his big toe the empty scotch glass he’d placed on the floor. ‘You know what I mean, brother. You refuse to live in the world.’

‘Go on. Baltimore ain’t in the world?’ I shook my head. ‘And I’m going to Berlin, ain’t I? Berlin don’t count?’

Chip chuckled. He took pride in being the wiliest SOB this side the Atlantic. Always has, even when we was kids. He’s just got this madness in him, this rash hot need to be contrary.

I told him so. Cause, see, I’d made
sacrifices
. On
his
account.

‘See, now that’s what I mean,’ he said. ‘Take this trip to Berlin. This documentary. That ain’t something you done on my account. Least I hope not. You done it for Hiero. You done it for the history of jazz. You done it for
yourself
.’

I lifted an eyebrow at him. ‘Remind me to send myself a bill.’

Cause they was real. These sacrifices I’d made to please Chip, they was damned real. See, about a year ago, he approached me excited as all hell over some documentary. Fellow by the name of Kurt Caspars – a half-Finn half-Kraut filmmaker famous for an exposé on white slavery in Holland – he been commissioned by a German TV station to make the first full-scale film on Hieronymus Falk. Caspars was the natural choice, Chip had explained – his hatchet-fast visuals had a lot in common with the kid’s playing. But like any artist, Caspars needed raw material to build his pictures out of. And we, my friend, was to be that brick and mortar.