Coming Through Slaughter Read online

  Something sharp was at his heart. Pressing. As he opened his eyes it pushed deeper and he jerked back into the chair. Bellocq was peering into his face out of the darkness. It must have been around two in the morning. Bellocq was still holding the camera case with his left hand and with the right hand the tripod, leaning his own chest against it so the three iron points were hard against Webb’s body. Watch out man. Bellocq pressed harder.

  What do you want. I’ve got no money.

  I need a photograph.

  None for sale.

  Do you remember Bolden. He disappeared. I’m a friend. Trying to find him. Cornish told me you took a picture of the band.

  Why don’t you leave him, he’s a good man.

  I know I told you he was a friend. Can you take that hook off me and turn a light on in here. I’d like to talk to you.

  Bellocq swung the tripod to his side in an arc. He didn’t touch the lights or sit down but leaned against the tripod as if it were a crutch. You’ve got a nerve coming in here like this. Just like a cop.

  Webb wanted Bellocq to talk. Bellocq began to walk around the room. He could hardly see the features on the small figure as it moved around him. There was something wrong with his legs and the tripod was now his cane. He had put the camera away carefully on a shelf. He walked round Webb several times expecting him to talk but the other was silent.

  Cornish? He used to be in Bolden’s band?

  Yes.

  Shitty picture.

  Doesn’t matter. I just need a picture with him in it.

  I wouldn’t want it getting around. Coughing over his tripod.

  How’d you get to take it?

  Long story. He knew some of the girls I used to do. He used to screw a lot and being famous they let him in. He used some of them to get stories for The Cricket. He paid them for that but not for the fucking. He was a kind man. He didn’t treat you like a crip or anything. We’d talk a lot. It was him who got the girls to let me photograph them. They didn’t like the idea at first. What was his real name?

  Charlie.

  Yeah. Charlie … So I took the picture but I was using old film and it’s no good.

  Can I see it?

  Don’t have a print.

  Make me one will you.

  Ten minutes later he bent over the sink with Bellocq, watching the paper weave in the acid tray. As if the search for his friend was finally ending. In the thick red light the little man tapped the paper with his delicate fingers so it would be uniformly printed, and while waiting cleaned the soakboard in a fussy clinical way. The two of them watching the pink rectangle as it slowly began to grow black shapes, coming fast now. Then the sudden vertical lines which rose out of the pregnant white paper which were the outlines of the six men and their formally held instruments. The dark clothes coming first, leaving the space that was the shirt. Then the faces. Frank Lewis looking slightly to the left. All serious except for the smile on Bolden. Watching their friend float into the page smiling at them, the friend who in reality had reversed the process and gone back into white, who in this bad film seemed to have already half-receded with that smile which may not have been a smile at all, which may have been his mad dignity.

  That’s the best I can get. Keep the print.

  Bellocq dried his hand of the acid by brushing it through his hair. Habit. From the window he watched the man who had just left waving the print to dry it as he walked. He hadn’t asked him to stay longer. Lot of work tonight. He turned to the sink. He made one more print of the group and shelved it and then one of just Bolden this time, taking him out of the company. Then he dropped the negative into the acid tray and watched it bleach out to grey. Goodbye. Hope he don’t find you.

  He brought out the new film and proceeded to make about ten prints until they were all leaning against the counter, watching him. He hadn’t told the man that much about Bolden. Hadn’t told him he had pictures of Nora before she and Buddy were married. He looked in the files and found a picture of Nora Bass, five years younger. He hadn’t seen her since the wedding—though it was no real wedding, just a party marriage. Buddy, who had given him free haircuts at Joseph’s when there was no one there to disturb their talking. Sometimes late into the night, when he wasn’t playing, Bolden would pull the blinds down and turn on the light of the shop so no one could look in and would warn him always about the acid in his hair. Except for cops this person tonight had been the first one here since Buddy. Not even Nora had come. He dropped her into the acid. No more questions. Watching the mist spill into her serious face.

  The photographs of Bellocq. H Y D R O C E P H A L I C. 89 glass plates survive. Look at the pictures. Imagine the mis-shapen man who moved round the room, his grace as he swivelled round his tripod, the casual shot of the dresser that holds the photograph of the whore’s baby that she gave away, the plaster Christ on the wall. Compare Christ’s hands holding the metal spikes to the badly sewn appendix scar of the thirty year old naked woman he photographed when she returned to the room—unaware that he had already photographed her baby and her dresser and her crucifix and her rug. She now offering grotesque poses for an extra dollar and Bellocq grim and quiet saying No, just stand there against the wall there that one, no keep the petticoat on this time. One snap to quickly catch her scorning him and then waiting, waiting for minutes so she would become self-conscious towards him and the camera and her status, embarrassed at just her naked arms and neck and remembers for the first time in a long while the roads she imagined she could take as a child. And he photographed that.

  What you see in his pictures is her mind jumping that far back to when she would dare to imagine the future, parading with love or money on a beautiful anonymous cloth arm. Remembering all that as she is photographed by the cripple who is hardly taller than his camera stand. Then he paid her, packed, and she had lost her grace. The picture is just a figure against a wall.

  Some of the pictures have knife slashes across the bodies. Along the ribs. Some of them neatly decapitate the head of the naked body with scratches. These exist alongside the genuine scars mentioned before, the appendix scar and others non-surgical. They reflect each other, the eye moves back and forth. The cuts add a three-dimensional quality to each work. Not just physically, though you can almost see the depth of the knife slashes, but also because you think of Bellocq wanting to enter the photographs, to leave his trace on the bodies. When this happened, being too much of a gentleman to make them pose holding or sucking his cock, the camera on a timer, when this happened he had to romance them later with a knife. You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of.

  Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. Holding up her arm for the shade.

  There were things Bellocq hadn’t told him. He knew for he looked up from the street and saw the photographer in the window. He continued walking, the damp picture in his hand.

  The connection between Bellocq and Buddy was strange. Buddy was a social dog, talked always to three or four people at once, a racer. He had no deceit but he roamed through conversations as if they were the countryside not listening carefully just picking up moments. And what was strong in Bellocq was the slow convolution of that brain. He was self-sufficient, complete as a perpetual motion machine. What could Buddy have to do with him?

  The next day Webb knew more about Bellocq. The man worked with a team of photographers for the Foundation Company—a shipbuilding firm. Each of them worked alone and they photographed sections of boats, hulls that had been damaged and so on. Job work. Photographs to help ship designers. Bellocq, with the money he made, kept a room, ate, bought equipment, and paid whores
to let him photograph them. What had Bolden seen in all this? He would have had to take time and care. Bellocq seemed paralysed by suspicions. He had let Buddy so close.

  Webb walked around Bellocq for several days. Bellocq with his stoop, and his clothy hump, bent over the sprawled legs of his tripod. Not even bent over but an extension for he didn’t have to bend at all, being 4 foot 11 inches. Bellocq with hair at the back of his head down to his shoulders, the hair at the front cut in a fringe so no wisps would spoil his vision. Bellocq sleeping on trains as he went from town to town to photograph ships, the plates wrapped carefully and riding in his large coat pockets. Something about the man who carries his profession with him always, like a wife, the way Bolden carried his mouthpiece even in exile. This is the way Bellocq moved. E.J. Bellocq in his worn, crumpled suits, but uncrumpled behind the knees.

  In the no-smoker carriages his face through the glass, the superimposed picture, windows of passing houses across his mouth and eyes. Looking at the close face Webb understood the head shape, the blood vessels, the quiver to the side of the lip. Face machinery, H Y D R O C E P H A L I C. His blood and water circulation which was of such a pattern that he knew he would be dead before forty and which made the bending of his knees difficult. To avoid the usual splay or arced walk which was the natural movement for people with this problem, he walked straight and forward. That is he went high on the toe, say of his right leg, which allowed the whole left leg enough space to move forward directly under his body like a pendulum, and so travel past the right leg. Then with the other foot. This also helped Bellocq with his height. However he did not walk that much. He never shot landscapes, mostly portraits. Webb discovered the minds of certain people through their bodies. Or through the perceptions that distinguished them. This was the stage that Bellocq’s circulation and walk had reached.

  In the heat heart of the Brewitts’ bathtub his body exploded. The armour of dirt fell apart and the nerves and muscles loosened. He sank his head under the water for almost a minute bursting up showering water all over the room. Under the surface were the magnified sounds of his body against the enamel, drip, noise of the pipe. He came up and lay there not washing just letting the dirt and the sweat melt into the heat. Stood up and felt everything drain off him. Put a towel around himself and looked out into the hall. The Brewitts were out so he walked to his room lay down on the bed and slept.

  When Robin came in he was on his back asleep, bedclothes and towel fallen off. She let her hair down onto his stomach. Her hair rustled against the black curls of his belly, then her mouth dropping its tongue here and here on his flesh, he slowly awake, her tongue the flesh explorer, her cool spit, his eyes watching her kneel over the bed. Then moving her face up to his mouth his shoulder.

  Stay with us.

  Does this change things?

  Don’t you think so? Don’t you think Jaelin would think so?

  I wouldn’t feel different if I was him.

  I can’t do things that way Buddy.

  She put her mouth at the hollow of his neck.

  Your breath feels like a fly on me, about three or four of them on me.

  Talk about the music, what you want to play.

  You know Bellocq had a dog I’d watch for hours. It would do nothing, all day it would seem to be sitting around doing nothing, but it would be busy. I’d watch it and I could see in its face that it was becoming aware of an itch on its ribs, then it would get up and sit in the best position to scratch, then it would thump away, hitting the floor more often than not.

  Who was Bellocq.

  He was a photographer. Pictures. That were like … windows. He was the first person I met who had absolutely no interest in my music. That sounds vain don’t it!

  Yup. Sounds a bit vain.

  Well it’s true. You’d play and people would grab you and grab you till you began to—you couldn’t help it—believe you were doing something important. And all you were doing was stealing chickens, nailing things to the wall. Everytime you stopped playing you became a lie. So I got so, with Bellocq, I didn’t trust any of that … any more. It was just playing games. We were furnished rooms and Bellocq was a window looking out.

  Buddy —

  She refused then to take off her clothes. She lay on top of him, kissing him, talking quietly to him. He could feel the material of her clothes all over his naked body, as if he were wearing them. His eyes closed. It could have been a sky not a ceiling above him.

  Don’t lean on that arm. Sorry. It got broken once.

  She was conscious that while they spoke his fingers had been pressing the flesh on her back as though he were plunging them into a cornet. She was sure he was quite unaware, she was sure his mind would not even remember. It was part of a conversation held with himself in his sleep. Even now as she lay against his body in her red sweater and skirt. But she was wrong. He had been improving on “Cakewalking Babies”.

  Passing wet chicory that lies in the field like the sky.

  She. Again in the room, now in the long brown dress. Brown and yellow, no buttons no shoes and the click of the door as she leans against the handle, snapping shut so we are closed in with each other. The snap of the lock is the last word we speak. Between us the air of the room. Thick with past and the ghosts of friends who are in other rooms. She will not move away from the door. I am sitting on the edge of the bed looking towards the mirror. With her hands behind her. I must get up and move through the bodies in the air. To the first slow kiss in the cloth of her right shoulder into the skin of her neck, blowing my nervousness against the almost cold hair for she has been walking outside. My fingers into her hair like a comb till the hair is tight against the unused nerves between my fingers. The taste the pollen in her right ear, the soft circuit of her hearing wet with my spit that I send to her like a ship and suck back and swallow. This soft moveable limb on the side of her head.

  I press myself into her belly. Her breath into my white shirt. Her cool breath against my sweating forehead so I can feel the bubbles evaporate. I lift her arms and leave them empty above us and bend and pull the brown dress up to her stomach and then up into her arms. Step back and watch her against the corner of my room her hands above her holding the brown dress she has lifted over her head in a ball. Turns her back to me and leans her face now against the dress she brings down to her face. Cool brown back. Till I attack her into the wall my cock cushioned my hands at the front of the thigh pulling her at me we are hardly breathing her crazy flesh twisted into corners me slipping out from the move and our hands meet as we put it in quick christ quickly back in again. In. Breathing towards the final liquid of the body, the liquid snap, till we slow and slow and freeze in this corner. As if this is the last entrance of air into the room that was a vacuum that is now empty of the other histories.

  Lying here. Kept warm by her dress and my shirt over us. I am dry and stuck to her thigh. Joined by the foam we made. By the door, and the light and the air from the hall comes under the door. Sniff it. She hasn’t taken one step further into my room. Dear Robin. I remember when I shook against you. The flavour of mouth. We are animals meeting an unknown breed. The reek, the size, where to find the right softness. Against this door. Coiled into each other under the brown and white cloth. Trying to come closer than that. A step past the territory.

  Webb had spoken to Bellocq and discovered nothing. Had spoken to Nora, Crawley, to Cornish, had met the children—Bernadine, Charlie. Their stories were like spokes on a rimless wheel ending in air. Buddy had lived a different life with every one of them.

  Webb circled, trying to understand not where Buddy was but what he was doing, quite capable of finding him but taking his time, taking almost two years, entering the character of Bolden through every voice he spoke to.

  In fact Bellocq was more surprised than anyone when Buddy Bolden left. He had pushed his imagination into Buddy’s brain, had passed it awkwardly across the table and entertained him, had seen him take it in return for the company, not kn
owing the conversations were becoming steel in his only friend. They had talked for hours moving gradually off the edge of the social world. As Bellocq lived at the edge in any case he was at ease there and as Buddy did not he moved on past him like a naïve explorer looking for footholds. Bellocq did not expect that. Or he could have easily explained the ironies. The mystic privacy one can be so proud of has no alphabet of noise or meaning to the people outside. Bellocq knew this but never bothered applying it to himself, he did not consider himself professional. Even his photographs were more on the level of fetish, a joyless and private game. Bellocq thought of this. Aware it was him who had tempted Buddy on. Buddy who had once been enviably public. And then this small almost unnecessary friendship with Bellocq. Bellocq had always thought his friend to be the patronising one, now he discovered it was himself.

  Jaelin and Robin. Jaelin and Robin. Jaelin and Robin and Bolden. Robin and Bolden. There was this story between them. There was this deceit and then there was this honour between them. He wanted to tell that to Webb later.

  The silence of Jaelin Brewitt understood them all. His minimal stepping out the door saying he would be back the next day. And he would be back not before the next day. All three of them talking for hours about things like the machinery of the piano, fishing, stars. This year, he told Bolden, there is a new star, the Wolf Ryat star. It should be the Wolf Star Bolden said it sounds better. It sounds better yes but that’s not its real name. There were two people who found it. Someone called Wolf and someone called Ryat, Jaelin Brewitt said. There was that story between them. Later both of them realised they had been talking about Robin.