Accordion Crimes (35 page)

Wilma came with him, dressed in a red and white striped rayon tube, red wedgies. She looked good, a peppermint woman, sat at a little table next to the bandstand smoking Spuds and squinting at the dancers. The place was already packed to the walls and more people coming in, greeting and hollering at each other, the women throwing down their purses on the white oilcloth tables, reflections of cigarette lighter flames bouncing off the upright studs wrapped in aluminum foil that supported the tin ceiling, swags of dusty red crepe paper overhead and on every table a plastic rose in a cut-off beer bottle—somebody got a bottle cutter for Christmas—the windows covered with black cloth for that nighttime feeling. The floor in front of the big zinc bar gave a little under the feet where it was rotten from the years of dripping ice. A big poster in red and black was nailed to the peeling clapboards under the sign
NO MINORS ALLOWED
:

C
LIFTON
& O
CTAVE

Z
YDECO
K
INGS

A
LL
N
ITE
$1

Next to it another poster flapped in the air:

F
RIDAY
!

Z
ORDICO
K
ING
S
AMPY
AND THE
B
AD
H
ABITS

They were lined up outside and the sun was still over the horizon, tinting the heavy thunderheads coming up from the
Gulf blood red, Cato Comb taking the money at the door and inside the phone ringing off the hook and Etherine, six foot ten and red-colored hair processed to ruler straightness—“fried, dyed and laid to one side”—answering it and saying, yes, yes, well, so many people worryin me at home, and telling the caller it was Clifton and Octave, yes, two ’cordion,
frottoir
and drums, and laughing at something the caller said, huh huh
huh
huh huh. She handed a cold beer to Octave, shook her head when he asked, Clifton here yet? The tables were filling up, people three deep at the bar, rayon dresses with vines and hibiscus, pink pleats and cayenne red.

It was warm, the heat of bodies sweating up the room, the glasses and bottles clinking and in the corner a raw voice climbing over the roar of talk. The phone rang and rang. “Yas, yas, huh huh
huh
huh huh, no, no. Yeah, he here. Well, what happen? What you want me to tell ’em? Hello, hello, OK, goodbye.” Etherine hung up and looked at Octave. She could hear distant thunder, a long, irritable mutter; that tightened her up, thinking about the tornado last May that tore off the back end of the dance hall and killed a man. Octave leaning on the bar, looking at her with a questioning expression, she looked back, seeing his easy cocoa-brown face and strong neck, the mustache above the rich mouth, spider fingers, the charm of that chipped front tooth.

“You ought to take them blue-ass shades off, let the women see your
beaux yeux.
That there’s Clifton. Look like he can’t get here. They in a car wreck over Louisiana, up at Dimple. Nobody hurt but the car. He say it’s all yours, you better make ’em hot. He get here if he can but don’t count on it.” She watched him walk over to Wilma, coming down hard on the heels of the white boots, the pointed toes like arrows showing which way to go, bend down to her and talk, then sip a little
of her drink before he got up on the bandstand. That was his trouble. He come down too hard on his heels.

He stood at the mike, to the side Bo-Jack with his drums, Studder with his fork and gleaming metal breast, the faces turning toward them, a few voices hollering “where’s Clifton, where’s Mr. C.?” Studder clowned with the
frottoir
; he was wearing the funny one made with a pair of silver breasts so it looked like a blackface robot woman was scratching away under her titties with that stubby fork.

“All right, folks, Clifton just call up and say he got a breakdown and a wreck over in Dimple, Louisiana, not hurt none, say he want to hear you all jumpin and hollerin all the way to where he is at. We gon’ play zydeco, we gonna stomp and be happy and get hot and if you dead when he get here he bring you back to life, let’s GO!”

He started hot and hard, held the accordion over his head for a triplet bellows shake, rotating the corners of the bellows in a semicircular twist, rolled out like a plane flying acrobatics into diatonic clusters using every inch of the long bellows and shifting its action skillfully, swooping and diving into a rocking palm section that had the dance floor jammed tight in three minutes. He knew what to do. He screamed, “ah, ha, ha! You gonna burn! You burnin yet?” Then it was “
J’ai trois femmes
” slap-staccato bundles of notes hitting the dancers, the drum knocking their hearts, the rub board hissing and rattling like a snake,
hincha ketch a ketch a hinch.
Bright drops of sweat flew. Etherine shouted, “you sweat and stomp, you hot, you
will
be back!” The half-open door showed blue-white and with the concussion of thunder the lights flickered and he could hear the scream of wind outside. Etherine knocked back a shot of pure gin and prayed. She didn’t want to look out there and signaled Cato to shut the door.

Octave was bending at the knees now to drive the intense
nervous energy up into his hands. His fingers raced and hit, trills and violent tremolo, the notes vibrating with the force of his upward lunges, a left-hand trill going on and on and the heel of his right hand knocking hard and quick against a mass of buttons, a jam of close notes, discord that pulled yells from the dancers and then a sudden stop leaving everybody panting and laughing, and then—it’s a trick, folks—right back into it again, wringing and twisting out modal harmonies, the dancers shaking snake hips and pop-locking, off to the side a couple jerking their pelvises in the Boody Green. But under the hard dancing he could feel their reserve; they were holding back from him, longing for Clifton and his big glittering piano instrument.

“I don’t put you too cold, do I,” he bellowed. “Come on, here we are, like they say, too French to be black, too black to be French,” and made an accordion joke with an old Cajun two-step reheated on high and time doubled and syncopated, notes blued and broken and the whole tune moving in a fast sad tangle that was mockery and sympathy. “Go on, go on, go on, go on,” he called and one couple, old and muscular, smooth as wet silk, cut a wedge in the music. The other dancers moved out of the way to watch them execute the old zydeco jump and wheel, swift and beautiful. Cato Comb stepped in from the rain, wet clothes plastered to his long body. The wind was roaring outside and a bristle of hail ran across the roof. Octave leaned into the mike, his lips grazing it, his breath filling the room.

“You all remember what this come out of, know what I’m sayin? You remember it all come from what we go back to, LaLa, remember that old LaLa, we all done that. Make you feel at home. Don’t nobody cross they feet, now.” They were hot but he felt their coolness.

Plates of food were being passed down the tables, gumbo
and chicken, and over the room hung a heavy pall of smoke, the glowing ends of cigarettes shining in the darkness of the room. The heat was tremendous and the dancers’ clothes were soaked with sweat, their slippery hands unable to grasp, and dancers slipped from each other, ricocheted against others but kept dancing, rubbing their wet palms down their thighs. Overhead the big fan turned the smoke. The storm was passing. Somebody yelled for Clifton’s “
Eh, ’tite fille
” and he gave it to them, jamming in the blue notes and running the triplets like the strong man, setting the dancers’ backs quivering with tremolo.

“God darn it, sound better here than anywhere!” screamed a white dancer moving in a flat-footed, spraddle-legged way, one of five or six who came slumming down to Frenchtown. A black woman answered him. “That’s right. It’s pure Louisiana.” But women called from the floor in discontented voices. “When Mr. C. get here? Bring me Clifton, y’hear? He play pianna AND button, what he want. You good, boy, but you ain’ no Mr. C.”

An old man danced with a young woman. He wore yellow patent-leather cowboy boots with chrome toes, an orange leather jacket with a pinch waist and flared skirt like an old-time gunfighter, a blue shirt and a bolo tie held by a gold death’s-head with ruby eyes. Nobody on the floor could dance like this man, the smooth glide, the trapezoid back that rippled like a snake shedding skin, the twisting hands scratching air, the yellow boots winking and tapping across the waxy boards, the long muscled legs bending and dipping, swiveling hip sockets, fragments of a hundred dance steps echoing, the buzzard lope, Texas tommy, the grind, funky butt, the fishtail, the twist, the Georgia hutch, the Charleston, the shimmy, the shout, the crazed turkey.

“Give him a glass a water,” somebody shouted, for he was a known balancer and an end-man dancer who could spin and leap, balancing a glass of water on his head steady.

“Thamon! You a baaad man on the floor.” He was seventy-three, his body as pliant as a child’s.

Octave’s eyes were red with smoke and his throat was like a furnace duct at the end of the hour and he shouted “Rest time” and sat with Wilma, mopping his neck and face, signaled Etherine for beer and cigarettes, for a whiskey and another beer and another, and then into the second hour with “Don’t Let a Dead Man Shake Your Hand,” buttons clicking, the bellows sucking in breath and jetting it out in puffs, distorting the tones by swinging the accordion over his head, slamming into swells and then choking it down, scratching and rubbing and rattling the backs of his fingernails along the ridges of the bellows. Cato Comb opened the door wide and let the sweet rain-washed air cool them off, the night sky fluttering with lightning to the north of them now, but Etherine frowned—it was her experience that people liked to be good and hot, wringing with sweat, hearts pounding, lungs demanding air.

Octave wasn’t satisfied. He was in it now but couldn’t win their hearts, couldn’t make them forget Clifton. He was giving the green accordion all he could, it was breaking out breathy sobbing roars as though from a strongman’s heaving chest, it was an instrument of sweat and that big crying voice talking to them, but even with the grille off, even with the new reeds, it wasn’t right. It didn’t have the range. He didn’t like that devil’s head and the flames painted on it. He’d paid too much for it, beguiled by the reflection of his own eyes. His mind was made up. He’d bring it to Chicago and sell it to some homesick squeezer and he’d get himself a big-key strong-back like the one Clifton played, more notes than he’d know what
to do with, the one the beautiful women threw their underwear at, wriggling out of damp scanties on the dance floor and hurling them at the big accordion which caught them in its folds and squeezed and kneaded the flimsy scraps of nylon, like Boozoo Chavis who at intermission sold extra-large panties printed
TAKE EM OFF
!
THROW EM IN THE CORNER
! That accordion fool, drunk and wild, fell off a barstool onto the floor and kept right on playing. Nobody’d ever thrown underpinnings at him, but in Chicago he was going to fly, he would smoke. It was 1960, and yes, that old Illinois Central train was waiting, don’t play no blues, we here for zydeco.

(Thiry-five years later Rockin’ Dopsie sat on a straight chair on somebody’s porch in Opelousas and remembered the night Octave tore off the roof with that green two-row, making huge sound. “He never played that good again.” But how did he know that? He recognized the single burning night that comes at the top of a life, and it’s all downhill from there, no matter what happens.)

It was a hard, hard time in the winter misery, a wind off the lake loaded with raw sleet, low on money, sleeping in a dirty room, gigs hard to find, they didn’t want no zydeco up here, they wanted weird progressive shit, nobody danced, it was all blues, blues, blues, not the old delta blues neither, not rock, not anything but electrified guitar urban blues, loud and fast and gritty and he understood why. It wasn’t like times he’d heard about after World War II when they come up from the south, thousands and thousands, trains packed full, and everyone find a job an hour after getting off the train. That hungry city, Chicago, starved for good strong-arm, start-at-the-bottom
cheap labor like there used to be in the old immigrant days, what made Chicago rich, not hogs and wheat but cheap labor to butcher the hogs and move the wheat. They were still shambling up the long route by the thousands but the work wasn’t there anymore, there was some deep kind of economic shift going down so it was sit around and wail out some black-heart music and drink, smoke, fight, fuck, listen to somebody singing J. Brim’s “Tough Times,” anything to get your mind off the problem. Some of the guitars was making it, getting recorded by those polack brothers, but nobody was rushing to get any zydeco on wax. They didn’t want to hear it up here. It was getting so he didn’t want to hear it himself, not after he telephoned Wilma long distance and wrote her a song afterward she was never going to hear.

“It rainin at your house babe, same like it rain here?” he’d said, voice bending down the wire, voice dropping low and sad. Heard a live silence, the wire breathing and crackling with the depth of miles. The silence, the hammered silence. Too much to say.

“If I could be with you,” he breathed, “to talk and love you, get
in
you. Miss you babe, so bad, so bad.” Everything he said jerked through the wire in broken fractions. Missing. Missing you. Doin it for you, babe.

And when she hung up it seemed to him she was still there, still on the line, still connected to him and still trying to say something but couldn’t, and didn’t have to because he got the message. He was gone.

He still had the green button accordion, though he’d lost the grille and thrown away the case, couldn’t sell the motherfucker. It sat on the top of the cardboard wardrobe looking at the opposite wall, the eyes always catching some blank light that made it look blind. The strap on the case had
broken a few minutes after he struggled off the train at Central Station; it had happened inside the station when he was trying not to seem awed by the arched windows and the oval echoing hall, the restless mass of people with bundles, suitcases, strings of children, and when it hit the marble floor the accordion fell out and went down some steps with a bad sound. Somebody yelled, “hey, man, you drop somethin,” and he fumbled for the instrument, cramming it into the case, furious with embarrassment, everyone gawking at the rube from the south, and he rushed out onto Twelfth Street without knowing where he was, only that he had to find Indiana Avenue. The treble end was cracked. He’d kicked the case away at the station, cursed bitterly, and carried the naked instrument through the streets. He thought Buddy Malefoot might have done something to the handle.