The Jazz Palace (17 page)

Benny ignored him. He took Napoleon by the arm. He was so
heavy Benny could barely take a step. He'd seen a shingle for a doctor around the corner and he dragged Napoleon there. Benny banged on the door. Sleepily the doctor opened it, but when he looked at the cuts that crisscrossed Napoleon's face, he said, “I can't help you. No one will touch this.” Benny had been naïve once, but he didn't need this explained to him now.

Benny thought for a moment. “Tell me how to stitch it up.” Napoleon groaned as blood splattered down his creamy silk shirt. “Tell me what to do.”

“You have to match the edge of the vermilion border. Where the pink meets the black. Start there. Then sew up and down. Tiny stitches.” And the doctor closed the door.

With Napoleon moaning, Benny stood wondering where to go next. Then suddenly he knew. “Stay here,” he said, and he pushed Napoleon behind a pile of trash. “I don't want anyone to see you.” Benny went to the corner and flagged down a taxi. When the taxi stopped, he motioned for Napoleon to get in. “I'm not taking any…” The driver didn't finish his sentence.

“You'll get a good tip. Head towards Cicero.” The driver looked back with an angry gaze. “Just drive,” Benny said. He hoped he could remember how to get to where he was going. He'd been there only once before. The driver, mad because he had a black man with bleeding lips in his backseat, grumbled but followed Benny's hand motions, wove his way through the streets, heading west. “No,” Benny said as Napoleon groaned beside him, “it's farther west.” They passed vacant lots, trash-lined streets, packing houses.

He saw two or three buildings that he thought were right, but then he told the driver to keep going. “No, not here.”

The driver shook a glance behind him as Napoleon moaned, a bloody handkerchief pressed to his lips. “Don't you dare mess up my cab, buddy,” he said.

“Just keep driving,” Benny said. He wasn't sure if he'd remember, but he did. He spotted the building with the large, empty lot stretching before it. He saw the crumbling façade, the boarded-up ground floors, and he told the driver to stop. He tossed him five bucks, a whole week's salary, which the man snatched, then screeched his
tires as he drove away. Benny led Napoleon up the dreary staircase. He knocked once. Waited. Then knocked three more times. An old woman in bathrobe and slippers opened it, startled to find a white boy in a fedora and a black man with blood drizzling down his chin. Benny told her whom he wanted, and the woman pointed upstairs. He had counted the landings wrong. Napoleon struggled to climb. Tears poured down his face.

On the fifth landing Benny knocked again—once, then three times. The girl in a gray nightie opened the door. She was skinny and frail with dark circles under her eyes. Her tiny nipples budded out from the gown. “I've been here before,” Benny told her, but he could see that she had no idea who he was. “Is your mother home?” The girl called out as she let them in.

When Marta came to the door, she stared at him, then at the black man. Her face had hardened and she seemed older. Her fingers were thick and gnarled. She had a shawl around her shoulders. Benny could still see the wide shape of her hips, her ample breasts, but he was long past hiding in his mother's sewing room and tossing bits of scrap cloth out the window that he had moistened with thoughts of her.

Marta held up her finger and told Benny to wait. When she came back, she had on a robe and her hair was brushed. She motioned them inside. The girl was already asleep on the cot in the kitchen behind the curtain. She looked as small as he remembered, and her breathing was so heavy that he could hear it. Benny explained what he wanted done. “He's a trumpeter,” Benny said. “He needs his lips.”

She looked at the gash, then gave Napoleon cloth soaked in whiskey, which he sucked as if it were a mouthpiece. She woke a neighbor who had a block of ice. After Napoleon finished the whiskey and lay still, Marta held the ice to his lips. While she pressed it, the child coughed. Marta got up, motioning for Napoleon to hold the ice himself. She went to the child, put her hand on her forehead, then pulled the covers up and tucked her in.

Then Marta returned to Napoleon, keeping the ice there until his lips were numb. With a tiny needle and the thinnest black thread, she matched the edge of the vermilion border as Benny told her to
do. She stitched up, then down. Napoleon twitched under her needle, but he didn't cry out. Benny held his hand and Napoleon squeezed hard, but not so hard as to hurt Benny's fingers, while Marta made the tiniest, quickest stitches Benny had ever seen.

When she was done, Napoleon's lips looked like a narrow fault line, a crack running through them. Benny rubbed his finger over it until he was satisfied that the suture was smooth and would hold. All night Marta kept ice pressed against his mouth. As Napoleon slept in a drunken stupor, she held the ice until the light of morning seeped in.

When Napoleon arrived at the Jazz Palace with a ragged scar on his lips and a white boy on his arm, Pearl was surprised. It had been weeks since she'd seen him and she'd begun to wonder if he was ever coming back. She worried that something might have happened and she didn't know where he lived. She was beginning to think about going down to the South Side and look for him when he showed up maimed and with a honky, as Napoleon would say, she'd never seen. She pointed to his lips, but he waved her away.

“Cut myself shaving,” he said as he led his companion into the saloon. Napoleon had shown up in the past with other musicians, but they were all black men who jammed with him. And they'd all had come up from the South. “Any black man who's been in a town that's seen a lynching is going to get on a train heading north,” he told Pearl one night when she asked why so many were coming to Chicago. He'd never shown up with a white boy before.

As they walked in, Pearl was rinsing glasses at the bar. She was holding one up to the light to make sure it was squeaky clean. She rubbed out the smudges with a cloth. Through the refracted light, she saw Benny, but not all at once. He came to her in pieces. Four eyes, an enlarged nose. She put the glass down and he reassembled himself. He had a shy, quiet face and mud-colored eyes she could
barely see because of the cap he pulled over them, and a big laugh that came from somewhere deep inside.

As he stepped past the black mourning ribbons that dangled from the doorway, he took off his cap, revealing a shock of wavy black hair. He wore a strange bag around his neck that emitted the pungent odor of stale tea. As he walked across the room, he bumped into a table. At the bar his gangly arms knocked over an empty glass. His hands shook as he fumbled to pick it up and his eyes darted around the room. Pearl had no idea why Napoleon had brought him here.

Benny was wondering as well. He'd been happy playing off-hours in the South Side juke joints and honky-tonks, picking up sessions work here and there. But Napoleon had insisted. “You don't want to be the best-kept secret in town, do you? White folks should hear you play.” Napoleon told him he needed to play at the Jazz Palace.

Except for the thin pink scar that divided his mouth in two, Napoleon's lips were healed;
healed but not sealed
is what he liked to say. His embouchure was restored, and he was grateful to Benny. When he found he could blow again, Napoleon had draped the gris-gris bag his grandmother had given him around Benny's neck. “You saved my life, Moon,” Napoleon told him. “Here's John the Conqueror. The trickster for when you need him.”

“I saved your lips,” Benny replied.

“I don't know the difference. From now on you're a brother to me.”

As he was listening to the all-black band jamming, Benny fondled the bag. Often he found himself touching it. It seemed to calm him down. He never took it off except to bathe. The group was playing loud and fast, New Orleans style, and the place was jumping, but on their break, Jonah urged him to play. “Go ahead,” Jonah said. He assumed this boy was a musician. Why else would Napoleon have brought him? “Let's see what you can do.” Benny looked around to be sure it was all right. Most people had never seen a white boy playing with black men, but this didn't bother Jonah. “It's okay. You can sit in here.”

The bass player and drummer wandered back in as Napoleon took out his horn and Benny sat down on the bench. Pearl rolled her
eyes and thought,
This better be good
. Napoleon nodded. “What'll you drink?” she called.

Napoleon shouted back, “Give me a whiskey, but this boy won't touch nothing.”

“I'll take a cream soda,” he said, pulling his cap back over his eyes. Pearl shrugged. She'd never known a musician to refuse a drink before, but she sent Opal into the candy shop for a cold cream soda, and she returned, wide-eyed, hands trembling as she placed the drink on the piano. Opal gazed at Benny who stared back at the girl with the golden hair and pale-blue eyes. He hunched over the keys. He curled deep so that his neck disappeared into his shoulders like a snail. He ran some scales and nodded, declaring the piano good. Then his feet started tapping and Napoleon was snapping his fingers. Benny improvised on a jaunty intro while the musicians nodded. Napoleon whispered, “That's it, Moon. You show them how it's done.”

Benny nodded and kept playing until he came up for air, and Napoleon picked up his horn. They played a little “Avalon” and “Bugle Boogey,” songs anyone would know. And when Benny saw that the crowd was warmed up, he slowed it down and switched to an odd little tune he'd been thinking about. It had come to Benny one day as he watched people dragging their feet, going to work. Not wanting to go anywhere. He watched them on the trolley as he headed to and from his father's caps factory. And as he stood on the street, hesitating before he went inside. He assumed that the rest of the world hesitated too in front of the factories and tailors and retail shops and laundries and butchers. Places where you left a little piece of yourself outside the door. Then in the early evening he watched them coming home, dragging their feet back to cold-water flats and crying babies and wives who wanted more or husbands who wanted less.

“State Street Shuffle” was what he called it. It started out slow, hushed as a secret, and the customers who had been chatting leaned in to listen. Sadness in the notes hung in the air like bad news. No one wanted to be reminded of a cold wind off the lake, a bill you couldn't pay. Or someone who'd be coming home late. Or not at all. Then the melody picked up and the drum came in. People got up
and started taking a spin on the dance floor or sipping a glass of gin. The bass picked up the beat as Napoleon waited to come in.

Pearl, who was wiping the mahogany counter, cocked her head. She was listening. And looking. It wasn't so much the music, though she was listening to that as well. She was trying to place him. There was something about his hunched-over shoulders and the way his long fingers moved. The jitters of his arms and legs. She'd seen him before, though she had no idea when or where. He brought with him his melancholy eyes, his tapping feet, and a memory of disaster that overwhelmed her. His apelike arms dangled toward the floor, and his hands were the size of catchers' gloves. She wondered if he was from the neighborhood or had gone to her school. He was too old to be in her grade. Had he been a friend of her brothers who'd drowned? But wouldn't he have said so?

Pearl was trying to remember as he sped the music up. He'd grown weary of the past as he picked up steam. His hands moved faster, the left hand churning like a hamster in a wheel. He hit the pedal, pounding the beat with his foot as his fingers glided up and down. Napoleon came in blasting and the drummer was laughing and hitting his skins. He turned his “State Street Shuffle” into Dixieland and soon feet were pumping, hands clapping.

Opal grabbed up her long gray skirt and clicked her heels in the middle of the floor. Her blond tresses tumbled down while Pearl kept the beat with her palms on the mahogany bar. Benny's hands skipped across the keys. He had dozens of tunes in him and he played them all, leaping from one to the next. He kept going and going and the band stayed with him until he dropped his head down again and as the room grew still, Pearl caught her breath. “It's so strange.” She turned to Jonah who stood beside her, beaming at the bar.

“What? The way he plays?” Even Jonah was swaying to the beat.

“No, it's not that. I can't explain it.” She stared at Benny, shaking her head. “I feel as if I've known him my whole life.”

“What do you mean?” Jonah stared at her, surprised.

“I don't know,” Pearl said as Benny hit the keys with a laugh and brought back the beat. “I just do.”