“That guy is really good,” Sandy said. “That guy is something else.”
“Yeah, that's the Piano Prince. He's an addict. He plays to get his fix. He's the best. He's so popular now he doesn't come here often anymore. Oh, shit, look out there.” He pointed out the window to where a big green Mercedes Benz was pulling up beside the curb. “That's the Lady Jane coming after Finley. Oh, yes, it's her and who the hell is that she's got with her?” A short busy-looking woman in a white tennis dress got out of the car and came in the door with a determined look on her face. Right behind her, in her wake as it were, was a taller, thinner woman with long red hair. They moved like an armada into the bar and took up a determined position near the cash register. “Is Finley here?” the woman asked the bartender. “Tell me the truth, Charles Joseph. Have you seen him?”
“He was here a while ago,” the bartender answered, “but now he's out.”
“Well, I have to find him. Where did he go?”
“What do you need Finley for?” the Jazz Poet put in. “It's nice to see you, Janey. Who's this with you?”
“Allison Carter, the painter. You know her work. I had that show for her, remember? Allison, this is Dickey Madison. Hayes Madison, Junior. His daddy's the district attorney. He's our Jazz Poet. You ought to hear him sometime. Have you seen Finley, Hayes? We really need to find him. It's about
The Ouachita
.
“He was in here a while ago. What's the problem?”
“We have to see the printer. The printer won't fix the typos. It's a mess. We took it to that place on Marengo and they promised they'd have it by last week and now it isn't finished and they won't fix the typos. Your poem looks great.”
“She has a poetry magazine,” the Jazz Poet explained to Sandy. “She revived an old one called
The Ouachita
. He knows Francis Alter, Jane. He's going up there to visit him.”
“You know Francis Alter?” The woman turned her attention to Sandy. “Where did you know him?”
“He taught at a school I went to. He told me I could come and see him anytime I wanted to.”
“What school?”
“Down in Texas. You wouldn't of heard of it. It's really small.”
“Oh, okay. Well, if you see him tell him we'd really like to publish some of his stuff. What did you say your name was?”
“Sandy. Sandy Wade.”
“This is Allison Carter, Sandy. She's a painter. She's great. She's going to do our cover. So, do you think Finley's coming back?”
“He might be back tonight,” the bartender said. “He said he wanted to come hear the band. Johnnie Vidocavitch is going to sit in, and⦔
“Tell him to call me,” Jane said. “Tell him I'm looking for him. Look, could we have a Diet Coke? I really need something to drink.” The bartender got two not particularly clean glasses down from a shelf and put some less clean ice in them with his not very clean hands and filled them from a hose that led God knows where, to some subterranean Diet Coke well. Lady Jane shuddered and reached in her purse and took out five dollars and laid it on the counter. She held the dirty germ-filled Diet Coke at a distance from her tennis dress.
“So,” she said. “You know Francis Alter? That's amazing. I've been trying to meet him for years. I'd give anything to be in his class.”
“Are you a poet too?” Sandy asked.
“Well, sort of. I mean, I haven't published anything yet but I'm learning. I've been so busy getting this magazine published I don't have time to write. Well, come on, Allison. Let's get out of here. Jesus, it's so hot in here. It's so hot everywhere. You really need some air conditioning in this place.” She put the untouched drink down on the counter and left the change beside it and took her friend's arm and left the way that she had come, in a hurry, and went out and into the car, which she had left running with the air conditioner on.
“Who was that?” Sandy asked.
“That's why Finley can't answer the telephone.”
At nine o'clock that night they were all back at the bar. The band was filing in, beginning to warm up. The regular drummer was at the bar, drinking water and talking to the new bass player. Sandy had been home and showered and changed and put on his best white Mexican wedding shirt and his earring. The Jazz Poet had gone home and collected his lady, the ex-lesbian minimalist poet, Kathleen Danelle. Finley had sobered up and washed his face and hands and put on his painted Mirò tie. The Piano Prince had had another fix. The sun was all the way down behind the levee and now it was only ninety-two degrees in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the big fan that blew the air around the Raintree Street Bar and Washerteria could make some headway in its work to make the poets and other patrons more comfortable in their progress through the month of June, nineteen hundred and seventy-nine. The pinnacle year of poets in New Orleans. The year the ladies loved the poets. The year the poets got all the pussy and the preachers got none. Those were the days, the people from the Raintree would say later. Those were the years.
This night, the sixth of June, nineteen hundred and seventy-nine, was the beginning of the end for the poets of New Orleans, but they didn't know it yet. So far only six people in New Orleans knew that Francis Alter was dead. A married lady named Crystal Weiss knew it and her husband, Manny, and their two children and their two best friends. They had known it since seven o'clock. They had all been out to eat to celebrate the remission of a terrible leukemia inside a child of their two best friends. A gala celebration at a famous steak house. They had feasted on steak and fried potatoes and buttered mushrooms and salad smothered in Roquefort dressing and several bottles of fine red wine. A nineteen fifty-nine Mouton Rothschild from Manny Weiss's legendary cellar. The Weisses had even let the children have a glass of wine. Drink up, they said to their children. Cancer is on the run. Man has triumphed once again.
After they had finished all the food and wine, they had gone to the Weisses' house to sit around the pool and celebrate some more. Then the phone rang. A chill of premonition went around the people at the pool. Something's wrong, everybody said. Something's happened.
Manny answered the phone. Francis is dead, the caller said. Francis shot himself.
It was unbelievable. Francis had just been in New Orleans visiting all of them, charming them to death with his beauty and poetry, charming their children, charming the sick boy, charming their parents and the people they invited to meet him, charming the maids and yardmen, charming the birds down from the trees. Then he had gone home to his meager poet's cottage and lain down upon a bed and shot himself through the heart. He had gone into a bedroom and lain down upon a bed and blown his heart to smithereens. He had decided to put an end to all his poetry and pain and the hard work it is to be alive. Besides, he believed that if he killed himself everyone would be sorry and not be able to forget him. He was right about that.
As soon as the phone call came all the people around the Weisses' pool felt guilty for being alive. The Weisses' best friends soon went home. The Weisses' children were sent to their bedrooms to watch their television sets. The Weisses started getting very drunk. Then Crystal Weiss decided it was time to drive down to the Raintree and tell the poets. “The poets should know,” she told her husband. “You stay here with the kids. I'm going to tell the poets.”
“You shouldn't drive,” he said, halfheartedly.
“It doesn't matter. I'm not drunk.”
“Okay,” he said and let her go. As soon as she left for the Raintree he went downstairs to his darkroom and began to print a roll of film he had taken when Francis was visiting them. It was a film of a Martin Luther King parade they had gone to with the poets. It began with a series of photographs of Francis eating breakfast in their dining room, smiling and charming everyone in sight. Manny cut off a negative of Francis sitting at the breakfast table and began to make a print. It was pitch-black dark in the darkroom and the face of the dead poet floated up in the developer, eyes first, then nose, then chin. “My God,” Manny cried out loud and fled from the room. “This is nuts. What am I doing mixed up with these crazy people?” He left the print in the developer and ran up the stairs and into his little four-year-old girl's room. He covered her with a blanket and took off her shoes and turned off her television set and kissed her on the head. Then he went into his fourteen-year-old stepson's room and sat down beside him on the bed. “What are you watching?” he asked.
“Nothing,” the boy said. “Is Francis really dead? Francis is dead? He said he was going to take me fishing. He said we were going camping on the White River. He said he was coming back.”
Crystal Weiss drove drunkenly in the direction of the Raintree. No one at the Raintree knew yet that Francis had killed himself. No one knew anything except that the night was young and Johnny Vidocavitch was coming to sit in with the band and they had plans for one another. Finley's plan was to get the married lady to leave him alone. Hopefully, to give him five thousand more dollars for the magazine and still leave him alone. The Jazz Poet had two plans, one, to get Finley and the rich lady to do a special issue of the magazine featuring only his poetry and, two, to get Sandy to take him up to Arkansas to meet Francis Alter.
The bartender, Charles Joseph, had a plan to write a novel about the whole bunch of them, using their real names and then taking them out later so they couldn't sue him. Maybe also change the name of the street and get his dad to edit it since his dad was a sober man who worked hard and taught school as well as being a poet. His dad was extremely worried about Charles Joseph wasting his youth tending bar. He'd be glad to edit a novel Charles Joseph wrote so he'd have a chance to get rich and make something of himself. If I could get a million dollars for a book I'd be in high cotton, Charles Joseph was thinking. I'd go off to the islands and never come back. I'd drink all day and play cards and get all that island pussy. What a lovely deal. Charles Joseph rubbed his rag across the bar, fixed drinks, opened beers, rang up charges on the cash register, whistling to himself, lost in island dreams, singing along with the music on the juke box.
Iko, Iko ⦠Iko, Iko, Ole. Laissez les bons temps roule. Oh, those lonely, lonely nights. Oh, those lonely, lonely nights
.
About nine-thirty the rich lady, Jane Monroe, and her girlfriend, Allison, and her mother, Big Jane, who was even richer than her daughter, came breezing in the door. They stopped at the cash register to talk to Charles Joseph. “I don't know whether to get a table on the dance floor or the other room,” Jane asked. “What do you think?”
“The dance floor,” Charles Joseph said. “Johnny Vidocavitch is sitting in. It might be the last time he ever plays here.”
“This is so exciting,” Big Jane said. “This reminds me of the south of France.”
“Get a table, Momma,” Jane said. “I've got to talk to Finley.” She had spied him at the end of the bar talking to Sandy.
“What do you guys want to drink?” Charles Joseph asked.
“A martini,” Big Jane answered. “Make it a double.” She smiled a curved smile through her third face-lift, wrinkled what was left of the skin around her eyes. “I love martinis. And load it up with olives.”
“Coming up.” Charles Joseph smiled back, thinking about her tons of money, thinking about the story he had heard about her dancing naked on the bar at Lu and Charlie's. “Now that would be something to see,” he said out loud.
“What?” Big Jane asked. “I don't understand.”
“I heard you were a great dancer,” he said. “I heard you could dance like everything.”
“We'll try it later,” she answered. The smile had straightened back out. She moved in. “Come try me out.” She took the martini he offered her. “You look like your daddy,” she added. “I knew him when he was young.”
“Go to the table, Momma,” Lady Jane said. “I'm going to talk to Finley. Come on, Allison.” She pulled her guest down to the end of the bar where Sandy was telling stories of the great poet.
“He's the most beautiful man I ever knew,” Sandy was saying. “He makes everything seem important. He read us poems, Yeats, Rilke, Rimbaud.”
“Oh, my God,” Jane said. “I'd give anything to hear him read. He won't give readings. Tulane offered him two thousand dollars and he wouldn't come. And here he is, down in Texas, reading to a bunch of kids. Oh, God, that's just like poetry.”
“He made poetry seem the most wonderful thing in the world. I'm going up there to see him. I'm going to help him run some lines.”
“I'm going too,” the Jazz Poet put in. “He's going to call and ask if I can come. I worship Francis Alter. I worship at his shrine.”
“He steals from black people,” Finley muttered. “He steals everything he writes from them.”
“Oh, sure,” Jane said. It was her chance to pay him back for all the times he had never called her up. “Oh, sure, you're not jealous or anything, are you, Finley? You're so great, of course. Why would you be?”
“What are you doing here, Jane?” he answered. “What do you want with me?”
Crystal Weiss came into the Raintree and stood beside the cash register for a moment watching the dancers in the adjoining room. Big Jane was jitterbugging with a martini glass in her hand. The wife of the owner of a steamship line was dancing with a tall skinny poet who taught at UNO. A fat poet was seated at a table with glasses all around him looking wise and cynical. He was the Fat Cynical Poet. Many people were afraid of him. Johnny Vidocavitch had shown up and was playing the drums like all hell had broken loose. The Piano Prince was playing standing up. I hate to tell them, Crystal thought. I don't know if I want to be the one to spread this. Of course she was dying to be the one to tell, dying to be known as the first one who knew, dying to be remembered as the great poet's friend. She arranged her face into a mask of sadness and mystery and despair and walked down the bar to where Finley was sitting between Jane Monroe and Sandy. “Can I talk to you?” she said. “I have to tell you something private.” Jane Monroe flinched. Sandy admired the blonde intruder's long white dress and long white hair. Finley got up off the stool and walked with Crystal to the hall.