Accordion Crimes (4 page)

Roll’m! Roll’m! Roll’m!

All I wants is my regular right!

Two square meal and my rest at night!

Roll! Roll’m, boy! Roll!

The din of commerce sounded in a hellish roar made up of the clatter of hooves and the hollow mumble of wheel rims on plank, the scream of whistles and huffing of engines, hissing steam boilers and hammering and rumbling, shouting foremen and the musical call and response of work gangs and the sellers of gumbo and paper cones of crawfish and sticky clotted pralines, the creaking of the timber wagons and the low cries of the ship provisioners’ cartmen urging their animals forward, all blended into a loud, narcotic drone.

Of all of these, the swaggering screwmen were the kings of the docks, earned six dollars a day. In gangs of five they threw down their half-smoked cigars and descended into ships’ holds with their jackscrews, waited for the longshoremen to winch up the bales of cotton from the dock and lower them down into the hold, one at a time. The screwmen seized the bales, stacked them high and tight, forced them into impossibly cramped spaces, odd crannies and corners, through the use of boards and their expanding jackscrews, until the ship nearly split; yet the cargo was perfectly balanced, the ship unsinkable.

In the late afternoon one day the word flew from man to
man: a board had snapped under pressure and shot a splinter into the throat of a black screwman named Treasure. The accordion maker heard cries from an adjacent ship, joined the gathering crowd. He moved slowly, watching, saw a limp body raised from the hold, carried away, the blood pattering on the deck, the ramp, the dock.

“Move a d’banan’, sonamagogna!” shouted the foreman, driving the Sicilians back to the fruit.

On Saturday night, while Silvano gawped through the mosquito-stitched streets, listening to the American jabber and making up his mind to steal a sweet, drawn this way and that by the cries of vendors of pots and pans, clothes, lemonade, “
gelati, gelati,
” candies and kitchen implements, but stopping before a man who sold enchanting toy cats of spotted tin that squeaked when their sides were pressed, the accordion maker went with Cannamele, first to Viget’s Oyster Saloon, hot and smoky, where Cannamele swallowed four dozen with lime juice, then to a barrelhouse in the next street packed with ruffians where they drank union beer, ate the stale eggs and firefanged cheese and vinegary pigs’ feet, and the accordion maker wished for the harsh village
rosso.
But both of them blackened many bottles’ eyes and the accordion maker treated himself to a two-for-a-nickel cigar from a box of fat Rajah torpedoes. A bowlegged Italian sang “
Scrivenno a Mamma
” in a weeping voice, stopped singing and blubbered.

“He who saves, saves for dogs,” cried Cannamele, signaling for American whiskey.

“Heart’s-ease, you grape-jumper,” shouted an Irishman.

In and out went Cannamele through the scores of dives,
tonks and jooks and barrelhouse joints that lined these streets, the accordion maker lurching after him through the musical din of drums and ringing banjos, shouters, pianos clinking away, squealing fiddles and trumpets and other brass snorting and wailing from every interior, and sometimes a string quartet sawing crazily. On the streets children watched and fought for discarded stogie butts, black street musicians and white played for coins, singing improvised songs of insult at those who failed to toss a whirling coin.

Bow-leg

Curl-shoe

Stingy one

Bad luck on you.

An apron of sound lapped out of each dive. Inside, chairs scraped on the floor, loud music and talk tangled with roaring laughter, there was endless traffic toward and from the back where little rooms lined the hall and young black girls took customers until their flesh was raw, the rasp of matches, the slap of cards and the clink of bottles on glass, the clack of glasses on tables, the creak of table legs on the floor, the thudding feet of dancers doing the slow drag, the itch, the squat, the grind. Dice doctors with their loaded ivories, drinkers and cockers with feathers stuck to the bloody soles of their boots crowded the rooms, and the street din entered with each customer. And often there was a
faito,
with grunts and snorts and curses and smack of flesh on flesh, a scream, then a tenor roaring “
O dolce baci
…”

The accordion maker had a pistol now and carried it in the waistband of his trousers. Silvano had a staghorn-handled knife with three blades and threatened with it when the gangs closed around him. He had stolen it from a lolling drunk,
practiced his first American sentence on a one-eyed dog scavenging for orts.

“Get outta, I killa you.”

The accordion maker disliked the music that the black men played, confused music, the melody, if there was one, deliberately hidden in braided skeins of rhythm. He was contemptuous of their instruments—a horn, a broken piano, a fiddle, the wiry curls of its strings twisting out of the neck like morning glory vines, the banjo. He recognized one of the players from the docks, as black as a horse’s hoof, a man with an eye patch and a latticework of scars from the corner of his eye to his jaw that made his face rigid and expressionless on one side. They called him Pollo—what, “Chicken”? thought the accordion maker, but it seemed the creature’s name was Apollo, someone’s sardonic joke—flailing at a—what was it?—a corrugated surface, somehow familiar, set in a gaudily painted wooden frame, a thing that made a raspy, scratching sound like a treeful of cicadas, and singing “
shootin don’t make it, no, no, no.
” It was a quarter of an hour before he recognized the object—a washboard, a thing women used to rub the dirt from wet clothes—and saw the metal thimbles on the man’s fingers. Pollo put away the rub-board and pulled a pair of spoons from his back pocket, making a clatter like heavy castanets. And the other one, Fish Man, scraping a knife over his guitar strings to make a wobbling shrill. What wandering imprecision! What kitchen music! And the words, the accordion maker could not catch one, but understood the singer’s salacious tone and low, hot laugh. Fish Man twirled his old guitar with a scarred back, sang:

On my table there a blood dish,

Dish with drop a blood,

Somebody butcher my old cow,

Tell me it really good,

It really good—

I don’t have to milk her no more.

Soon enough the accordion maker was distracted when Cannamele, cock-a-hoop, shoved a black woman against him, a dirty puzzle with running eyes, put his wet mouth to the accordion maker’s ear and said she would change his luck.

“The man who holds back risks tuberculosis and worse. The bodily system weakens. Go ahead, mine some coal.” (Although the accordion maker contracted syphilis from these adventures, he never knew it.)

In a Sicilian village, the right eye of a woman no longer paralyzed itched with great ferocity.

In the weeks that followed, the accordion maker recognized many dockworkers among the musicians of the barrelhouses. There were no accordions to be heard until a band of gypsies camped outside the city on a bit of high ground with their tinkers’ tools, horses and fortunes; two of the men played accordions. They stayed a week, another week, a month, mending pots and pans. Sometimes at night passersby heard their private music, a slow, sad wailing, saw the shimmer of sequined bodies dancing. He went to their camp one evening with Cannamele to hear what was to be heard. The music was boisterous and wailing at the same time and five or six men danced a fight with sticks. He was interested in their accordions but could not make the men understand that he wished to examine one. Their language was incomprehensible
and they turned away as soon as money changed hands. True outsiders, he thought, people without even a home, lost in the wild world. One day they were gone, leaving trampled earth.

“Moon men,” said Cannamele, winking his bad eye.

At first the accordion maker was afraid to bring his instrument into the sweating, dangerous dives where men fought and bled and overturned the tables. He played it only in the room he shared with Silvano and Nove, forty years old and half deaf, who came in many nights streaming blood from knife fights, would wake from midsleep and shout hoarsely, “Listen! Somebody knocking!” But the knocking was in his head and in a few minutes he would lie down and sleep again in his rumpled, stained clothes.

The accordion maker found his own music calming and beautiful after the wailing, thumping, rattling music of the joints. That slangy music was not suited to the accordion, although its morbid voice might fit the style, but it was impossible to loosen and bend the notes. An accordion would have to play the drone, to be satisfied with the back of the music rather than the front.

He got up the courage to bring it to one of the barrelhouses. It was noisy enough as usual. He sat off by himself—the bartender complained of his “Italian perfume,” the smell of garlic—and after a while, when the piano man left for the whorehouse, began to play. No one noticed until he lifted his high, strangling voice and a silence fell, heads turned toward this sound. He sang an ancient grape harvest song that had stamping and shouts. But after two or three songs the din of the place rose again, calling, laughing, talking, shouting, drowning him out. Only the Sicilians pressed closer, hungry to hear the lost music that brought with it the scent of thyme and the tinkle of goat bells, and they called out for certain melodies that made them contort their faces with grief.

Late in the evening Pollo came toward him, forcing his way through the crowd, smiling around his blond cigar. Up close he was the strange red-black color of furniture, of a mahogany table. He said something, pointing at the accordion.

“He want to know what you call it,” said Cannamele and answered in a loud voice as if speaking to a deaf man: “Accordion. Accordion.”

The black man said something more, reached for the accordion, looked at it, hoisted it, feeling its lightness, held it to his body as he had seen the accordion maker do and squeezed the bellows gently.
Anh. Onh. Anh. Onh.
He said something. Cannamele laughed.

“He say it sound like his woman.”

Pollo bent over the instrument, pressing the buttons and getting it, getting the feel of it and its sound, and in a few minutes, foot beating, the accordion huffing in an unaccustomed way between bursts of words and
um-hm
sounds, a rough little song came out. Cannamele screamed with pleasure.

“He’s the man, the singing is the man, and he’s doing it to a woman and the accordion is the woman!” The accordion maker blushed as the instrument moaned against the black man’s voice.

How you like
—Anh

My sweet corn, baby
—Onh

Plenty buttah
—Anh

Anh—
make you crazy
—Onh.

He handed the accordion back, grinning violently.

The next day the accordion maker saw the black man, Pollo, sitting on a bollard, graceful, smoking a long blond
cigar, on his feet St. Louis flats, heelless shoes with mirrors pasted on the toes, a dreaming expression on his face, but alert enough to spy the accordion maker, catch his eye and make squeezing motions as though playing an accordion or pressing a fat woman’s breasts.

By early October the cotton crop poured onto the docks and the levees swarmed with workers loading night and day. The accordion maker was making and saving money—despite his excursions with Cannamele. One morning when he and Silvano came out of the boardinghouse Pollo was in the street waiting for him. He said something, a question the accordion maker did not get. Silvano understood, could already mangle his way along in American.

“He wants to buy your accordion. He will give you ten dollars!”

The accordion maker smiled pityingly. “Tell him it is not for sale. It is my showing accordion. But tell him I can make one similar in every way. Tell him the cost is thirty dollars, not ten. Tell him it will take four months’ time.” He had figured out what he must charge.

Pollo spoke, ticking off items on his long, pale-fronted fingers. He was describing or listing. Silvano translated.

“He wants it red—this green is not good for him. He wants his name, Apollo, on it, here. And on the folding part paint a picture, the
Alice Adams
with a head of steam up.”

“Tell him nothing could be simpler. But on Saturday he must give me five dollars as surety and for the materials.” He was excited. His success was beginning.

That night he set up a tiny worktable in the corner of their
room, sat on a box which he kept under the bed when he was not working on the instrument, rose before daylight to glue and fit, saw and sand; he worked a few minutes at night as long as he could afford the candle, could stay awake, and worked all day Sunday—for he did not go to mass in this godless new country—was drawn into the spell of precise craftsmanship as another might be charmed by words or incantations. He was fortunate to have the room—many slept on the streets and docks and every morning lifeless forms were carried away, throats slit and pockets turned inside out, even young children. All around him were men who had to piss in the nettles.

For weeks he stopped going to the saloons except on Saturday night, despite the allure of the music and the black women, but reduced his life to work, the accordion, a little sleep. He was getting the Italian look—thin and ragged, eyes very hard and watchful.