Coming Through Slaughter Read online

  Once they were sitting at the kitchen table opposite each other. To his right and to her left was a window. Furious at something he drew his right hand across his body and lashed out. Half way there at full speed he realised it was a window he would be hitting and braked. For a fraction of a second his open palm touched the glass, beginning simultaneously to draw back. The window starred and crumpled slowly two floors down. His hand miraculously uncut. It had acted exactly like a whip violating the target and still free, retreating from the outline of a star. She was delighted by the performance. Surprised he examined his fingers.

  Nara’s Song

  Dragging his bone over town. Dragging his bone over town.

  Dragging his bone over town. Dragging his

  bone over town. Dragging his bone

  over and over dragging his bone over town.

  Then and then and then and then

  dragging his bone over town

  and then

  dragging his bone home.

  Dude Botley

  Monday nights at Lincoln Park was something to see, especially when the madams and pimps brought their stables of women to hear Bolden play. Each madam had different colour girls. Ann Jackson featured mulatto, Maud Wilson featured high browns, so forth and so on. And them different stables was different colours. Just like a bouquet.

  Bolden played nearly everything in B-Flat.

  Nora Bass came home to find a man on her front step. Immaculate. Standing up as she approached, not touching her.

  Hello Webb, come on in.

  Thanks. Buddy must be out.

  She half laughed. Buddy! And then looked quizzical at him. Then shook her head.

  Yeah, you better come in Webb.

  Alcohol burning down his throat as she tells him that Buddy went, disappeared, got lost, I don’t know Webb but he’s gone.

  How long?

  5 or 6 months.

  Nora opening out the curtains so the light falls over him, the cup with the drink in front of his face, between them, shielding him from the story, gulping more down.

  Jesus why didn’t you tell me before, let me know.

  I don’t know you Webb, Buddy knows you, why didn’t he tell you.

  You should have told me.

  You’re a cop Webb.

  He’s not safe by himself, he’s gone lost, with nothing—The Cricket, the band, the kids.

  He didn’t say anything.

  He stands up and goes towards her.

  Who was he with.

  I don’t know.

  Tell me.

  He has covered her against the window, leaning very close to her, like a lover.

  You’re shaking Webb.

  He won’t last by himself Nora, he’ll fall apart. He’s not safe by himself.

  Why are you shaking?

  He needs you Nora, who was he with last?

  Crawley. Another cornet. He was playing with him in Shell Beach, north of here, never came back.

  Just like that?

  Just like that.

  I could find him. Tell me about Crawley.

  She moves his arm away holding the cloth of his sleeve and goes to the door, opens and leans against it. She is a mask, her hand against the handle, he almost doesn’t realise what she is doing, then walks to the door, angry at her coldness.

  Do you want me to?

  Looking hard at him.

  I’m not going to hire you Webb.

  Jesus I don’t want your fucking money!

  I don’t want your fucking compassion Webb. If you look for him then do it for yourself, not for me.

  I’m very fond of him.

  I know that Webb.

  He’s a great talent.

  Silence from her, lifting her hand and moving it across the small dark living room and its old wallpaper and few chairs like a tired showman.

  Most of the cash went down his throat or was given away.

  You never did find your mother either did you?

  What?… No.

  Sad laugh over her face as Webb moves past her. Webb steps backward off the doorstep with his hands in his pockets.

  Are you with anybody now?

  Long silence.

  No.

  He’ll come back Nora. When he married you, before you two went to my cabin in Pontchartrain, he phoned and we talked for over an hour, he needs you Nora, don’t worry he’ll be back soon.

  Nora closing the door more, narrow, just to the width of her face. Webb grins encouragement and walks slowly backwards down the four steps to the pavement. He has remembered the number of steps. He is wrong. Bolden will take two more years before he cruises home. Her door closes on him and he turns. Spring 1906.

  He went down to Franklin and bought bananas. Hungry after seeing Nora. Webb got off the bus as soon as he saw the first grocery store and bought six bananas, then a pound of nectarines. Put them in the large pocket of his raincoat and walked on downtown following the direction of the bus towards Lincoln Park. It was still about 8 in the morning. He ate watching the travel of people going both ways. For those who saw him it looked as if he had nothing to do. As it was he was trying to place himself casually in a mental position that was so high and irrelevant he hoped to stumble on the clues that were left by Bolden’s disappearance.

  It looked as if Bolden had no notion he was not coming back when he left for Shell Beach. Webb took much more seriously than others of his profession sudden actions and off hand gestures. Always found them more dangerous, more determined. Also he had discovered that Bolden had never spoken of his past. To the people here he was a musician who arrived in the city at the age of twenty-two. Webb had known him since fifteen. He could just as easily be wiping out his past again in a casual gesture, contemptuous. Landscape suicide. So perhaps the only clue to Bolden’s body was in Webb’s brain. Sleeping in childhood stories and now thrown into the future like an arrow. To be finished when they grew up. What was Bolden’s favourite story? Whose moment of terror did he want to witness, Webb thought as he began the third banana.

  Don’t go ’way nobody

  Careless love

  2.19 took my babe away

  Idaho

  Joyce 76

  Funky Butt

  Take your big leg off me

  Snake Rag

  Alligator Hop

  Pepper Rag

  If you don’t like my potatoes why do you dig so deep?

  All the whores like the way I ride

  Make me a pallet on your floor

  If you don’t shake, don’t get no cake.

  The Cricket existed between 1899 and 1905. It took in and published all the information Bolden could find. It respected stray facts, manic theories, and well-told lies. This information came from customers in the chair and from spiders among the whores and police that Bolden and his friends knew. The Cricket studied broken marriages, gossip about jazzmen, and a servant’s memoirs told everyone that a certain politician spent twenty minutes each morning deciding which shirt to wear. Bolden took all the thick facts and dropped them into his pail of sub-history.

  Looked at objectively The Cricket contained excessive reference to death. The possibilities were terrifying to Bolden and he hunted out examples obsessively as if building a wall. A boy with a fear of heights climbing slowly up a tree. There were descriptions of referees slashed to death by fighting cocks, pigs taking off the hand of a farmer, the unfortunate heart attack of the ninety year old Miss Bandeen who opened her door one night to let in her cats and let in someone’s pet iguana instead. There was the freak electrocution of Kenneth Stone who stood up in his bathtub to straighten a crooked lightbulb and was found the next morning by his brother Gordon, the first reaction of Gordon being to turn the switch off so that Kenneth fell stiff to the floor and broke his nose. Whenever a celebrated murder occurred Bolden was there at the scene drawing amateur maps. There were his dreams of his children dying. There were his dreams of his children dying. There were his dreams of his children dying. And then t
here was the first death, almost on top of him, saved by its fictional quality and nothing else.

  Bolden’s marriage to Nora Bass had been a surprise to most of his friends. Webb, in Pontchartrain, continuing his career as police detective, received a long phone call from Bolden with the news. Webb offered them his cabin which they could use during the next month, so Bolden and Nora went there. Eventually, after three weeks, Nora’s mother drove up for a visit in her Envictor, her suitcase full of whisky. Since the death of Mr Bass she had two overwhelming passions—the drawings of Audubon, and an old python she had bought second-hand, retired from a zoo. And since the death of Mr Bass all her daughters had slipped successively into the red light district. Bolden in fact had slept with each of Nora’s sisters in his time. Now he was formally married to one of them, the veil of suspicion had been removed from the mother’s eyes, and the two of them would hold great drunk conversations together. A sparky lady. She would lecture him on the world of animals while he listened morosely studying her body for betrayals of her daughter’s physical characteristics. The final stages of an evening’s drunkenness would see her reaching into her suitcase to bring out the copies of Audubon drawings. Hardly able to talk around a slur now she’d interpret the damned birds, damned, as she saw them, for she was sure John James Audubon was attracted to psychologically neurotic creatures. She showed him the drawing of the Purple Gallinule which seemed to lean over the water, its eyes closed, with thoughts of self-destruction. You don’t know that! Shut up, Buddy! She showed him the Prophet Ibis, obviously paranoid, that built its nest high up before floods came, and the Cerulean Wood Warbler drunk on Spanish Mulberry, and her favourite—the Anhinga, the Water Turkey, which she said would sit in the tree tops till disturbed and then plummet down into the river leaving hardly a ripple and swim off with just its eyes and beak cresting water—or if disturbed further would hide by submerging completely and walk along the river bottom, forgetting to breathe, and so drown. That’s how they catch water turkeys, she said, scare them under water and then net their bodies when they float up a few minutes later, did you know that? Bolden shook his head. You tell a good story Mrs Bass but I don’t believe you, you crazy woman, you’re drunk you know that—you crazy woman. A week later Mrs Bass went for a drive and never came back. After lunch Buddy and Nora set out walking. They found the Envictor two miles down the road. Mrs Bass was sitting at the wheel and had been strangled.

  There was much curiosity on Bolden’s part. They had been away from news for nearly a month, god knew if there was a famous murderer in the area. His mind went into theories. Eventually he decided to take the car and drive to Pontchartrain and tell Webb about it. Nora refused to be left with a strangler around. They drove with the dead Mrs Bass in the front seat settling carefully into rigor mortis. At the turns however she would sometimes fall over onto Bolden’s lap like a valuable statue, so Nora got in the front and Mrs Bass was put in the back seat. Covered with a tarp for diplomacy. Bolden parked outside the police station and asked for Webb. Nora went to a restaurant to get a meal.

  Listen we’ve got a dead body outside.

  What!

  Yeah. Nora’s mum. Strangled. We brought her in. Other cops looked round. Webb took his feet off the desk and stood up.

  Listen if you murdered her you should get rid of the body, you should’ve buried her, don’t try to bluff it out.

  Hell Webb, we didn’t kill her, I liked the old lady, but it looks suspicious, she has a lot of cash we’re gonna get, so how would it look if we buried her?

  Right, and you can’t claim the money without the body, so you’d have to bluff it.

  We didn’t do it you bastard.

  Ok Ok I believe you, where’s the body?

  In the back seat. Under the tarp.

  Ok go with Belddax here and bring it in.

  Minutes later Belddax rushed in. Webb asked where Bolden was.

  He’s running down the road, sir.

  What!

  Someone stole the car.

  This crisis deflated with investigation. Search parties went out looking for the car as well as a strangler in the Hill district. After two weeks nothing had been found. The Boldens who would have been reasonably wealthy had no chance of a will until the body was located. Advertisements were placed in The Cricket and the Pontchartrain papers for a lost Envictor and the goods therein. A year later Bolden got a letter from Webb.

  Buddy —

  I’ve solved the murder if not the disappearance. Not everyone agrees with me, and I wouldn’t have thought of it if not for last week’s newspaper. Enclosed.

  St Tropez. France

  The flamboyant and controversial ‘dancer’ Isadora Duncan died yesterday in another one of those dramatic situations that seemed to follow her all her life. Riding with a friend in his Bugatti, her silk scarf caught in the back wheel of the moving car and strangled her before the driver realised what was happening. The British Automobile Association has given out frequent warnings that this is a common danger to motorists. Miss Duncan was 49. For more of her life see ‘SCARF’ page 17.

  You see what I’m getting at don’t you. The old lady’s pet snake is near her, taking in the breeze. Its tail somehow gets caught in a rear wheel. It quickly hangs onto the one thing close to it, her neck, this strangles her. After the car comes to a halt the snake who has been stretched badly but not killed uncoils and slides away. No trace of a weapon. If the snake was human it wouldn’t get much more than manslaughter … Sometimes Bolden I think I am a genius.

  Webb

  There were his dreams of his children dying.

  The other kid came in with the news he’s dead, sobbing, and he jumped and ran in one movement and caught the boy’s shoulders WHO IS he heard himself weep out loud and being told floated into the kitchen picked up the wood handled knife with the serrated edge and pushed it again and again into his left wrist, then the open hand which was numb already, through the door and the police amazed at him his white shirt bloody looking at the cops who brought the news he’d always imagined each night—hit by a car, god. After the boy’s words he hadn’t heard a thing but his own screaming, went past the cop and leaned over the hot metal of the hood of the police truck, his face and his wet arm on it.

  Crawley was losing weight and looking pale. He was fasting and the lines in his face were exaggerated. He sat in his chair drinking distilled water from a large bottle while Webb sat on the edge of the bed trying to get information. Now 10 A.M. He had got to him just before he started practising.

  Give me half an hour. I’ll be out by 10.30.

  Who you?

  I’ve just come from Nora. We’re trying to find Buddy.

  He tried offering Crawley a banana.

  Banana, hell, I’m dieting. Just this special water.

  Go on, take one, you look sick.

  I can’t. Jesus I’d like to. Do you know I haven’t had a shit for a week?

  How’s your energy?

  Slow … this time I’m aiming for the tail of shit.

  The tail of shit.

  Yeah … got to it once before. If you don’t eat you see you finally stop shitting, naturally. And then about two weeks after that you have this fantastic shit, it comes out like a tornado. It’s all the crap right at the bottom of your bowels, all the packed in stuff that never comes out, that always gets left behind.

  Yeah? When did you last see Bolden?

  Like someone removing a poker that’s been up your arse all your life. It’s fantastic. Then you can start eating again—is that a nectarine? I’ll have a nectarine.

  What was he doing when you last saw him?

  He was on a boat.

  Shit man, Bolden hated boats.

  Listen, he was on a boat.

  While Webb is talking to Crawley, this is what Bolden sees:

  The woman is cutting carrots. Each carrot is split into 6 or 7 pieces. The knife slides through and hits the wood table that they will eat off later. He is watching the coincid
ence of her fingers and the carrots. It began with the colour of the fingers and then the slight veins on the carrot magnified themselves to his eyes. In this area of sight the fingers have separated themselves from her body and move in a unity of their own that stops at the sleeve and bangle. As with all skills he watches for it to fail. If she thinks what she is doing she will lose control. He knows that the only way to catch a fly for instance is to move the hand without the brain telling it to move fast, interfering. The silver knife curves calm and fast against carrots and fingers. Onto the cuts in the table’s brown flesh.

  ‘The only thing I can tell you Webb is about the last time I saw him. Last fall. He had never been on a boat before. Though god knows he’s lived against the river all his life. But he was never on it. Anyway, the two of us and a couple of others went up to Shell Beach. We were supposed to play for three nights there. Usually we didn’t play together but we liked each other’s way and got on. There was very little money in the Shell Beach thing and each of the band was billeted with organisers. Bolden was to stay with a couple called the Brewitts—a pianist and his wife. You may have heard of him, Jaelin Brewitt, he used to be popular about five years ago …’

  Spanish Fort, Shell Beach, Lake Pontchartrain, Milneburg, Algiers, Gretna.

  — All considered New Orleans suburbs.

  [Milenburg Joys!]

  Bolden lost himself then. Jaelin’s wife, Robin, was very much part of the Shell Beach music world too, small enough in itself, but they got good musicians in and often. When he saw her he nearly fainted. After a party he went home with the Brewitts and pretended he was hungry so they wouldn’t go to bed. Bolden was never much of an eater but he lied that he hadn’t eaten for two days and so they sat there for three hours and he forced himself to eat and eat, taking twenty minutes with an egg squashed in a bowl and a drink in the hand. They sat till all tiredness was gone, the three of them, and about five in the morning they stood and groaned and went to bed. Then Bolden did a merciless thing. For the first time he used his cornet as jewelry. After the couple had closed their door, he slipped in a mouthpiece, and walked out the kitchen door which led to an open porch. Cold outside. He wore just his dark trousers and a collarless white shirt. With every sweet stylised gesture that he knew no one could see he aimed for the gentlest music he knew. So softly it was a siren twenty blocks away. He played till his body was frozen and all that was alive and warm were the few inches from where his stomach forced the air up through his chest and head into the instrument. Music for the three of them, the other two in bed, not saying a word.