Gods Go Begging (51 page)

Jesse reached down to the floor and found his pants. He probed a pocket for the sliver of jade, then placed in on his tongue. After a moment of immobile silence he went limp, as though the skin and features of his outer body had suddenly been deprived of its skeletal framework. His eyes squeezed shut and his lungs collapsed as something within him took leave.

A moment later he was coughing and heaving huge breaths like a drowning man who had been pulled from a deep, cold river. Calm now, and with open eyes, Jesse saw Carolina dimly, and with leaden, unresponsive hands reached out for her. He strained with all his might to touch Evie’s arm as she lay soaking in the hot bathtub.

“Thank you so much for the lemonade and the tamale pies,” he said as he seized Carolina. Then he eased her downward in soft commands, unspoken orders, kissing her eyes, her thighs. Surrendering to her breasts, he adored the fall of hair on her shoulders. All at once their pounding hearts were pressed against their ribs like quarter-notes on a treble staff.

Probing here, retreating there, Jesse, in full light, in coequal rapture and dance without strength moves, in choreography without dominion, relented finally to his own human desire, and suffered the impact—the painless penetrations—the living heat of friend liest fire.

“Biscuit Boy loved Mai with all his heart,” he whispered lovingly into the shell of her lovely ear. “In the end, Sergeant Flyer loved us all with that airstrike. He loved us all.”

Suddenly the phone rang again. Carolina let it ring thirty times before answering it. This time when she walked back into the bedroom her face was beaming. She handed the phone to Jesse.

“Biscuit Boy is alive,” Eddy said, his voice almost loud enough to be heard without benefit of a telephone. “He’s come back from the dead!”

As Eddy spoke, Jesse thought of a day so many years ago when a body bag at the edge of a landing zone had moved ever so slightly. It could have been just prop wash or a trick of the wind, but something made Jesse walk over and unsnap the bag. Somewhere in all those awful injuries there had been a pulse. Jesse always wondered where that boy was today. Were his darkest dreams encased in green plastic?

“I just talked to him at the hospital!” cried Eddy. “He says he’s never going back to the hill. Never! The homeless guy, the padre is alive, too. It’s unbelievable! The police have captured Princess Sabine. I was there when it happened. She was wearing a magenta swimsuit with matching baton and high heels.

“It was amazing! She was firing Little Reggie’s gun like a sharpshooter. I was afraid the cops were going to kill her, so I gave Inspector Normandie a small suggestion. He got on the bullhorn and announced that Princess Sabine Harp had been named Miss San Francisco County Jail. A committee of impartial judges had agreed unanimously. When she heard that, she dropped her gun and demanded to be escorted to her dressing room by only the handsomest of policemen.”

After he hung up the phone, Jesse Pasadoble buried his face in a pillow and laughed harder than he had ever laughed in his life. Biscuit was alive! Padre was alive! There were survivors on the hill. There were boys who had pulled through. Neither of them would ever go back to the hill.

At that moment, high above their bed, an Afro-Mexican deep-space probe, launched from a newly supposed world and fitted with sensitive recording devices, was searching the next star system for soundless scat and alien rhythms. One unusual section, built by Nigerian scientists, was specially designed to respond to fourth-stream music and permutations of bop, to alien melismatics and to embouchure without humanoid lips. If such were ever detected, the entire craft would pivot and go seek out the source.

Guidance rockets would roar to life at the sound of subtly dissonant bars and semi-quavers, a trumpet slurring upward to somewhere far beyond high e-flat. The sensors and gauges aboard the ship would dance at the faintest presence of countermelodies and descant lines and barely measurable traces of the Ellington effect.

Back on earth, the sliver of jade slipped from Jesse’s smiling mouth into Carolina’s. She instantly stopped moving as she saw it all. She saw the restless dead on every hill, the hellish rolling orange fire of gelatinous petroleum as it engulfed whole platoons of young men. For a timeless moment she squinted over the sights of a rifle and squeezed the trigger as Trin Adrong staggered by.

She heard the last confession of a young Chicano soldier. She witnessed battalions of Mexican and Irish infantry and cavalry invading Spain, delivering independence to the Basques of Euskady, and finally bringing a decent cuisine to the dinner tables of Madrid and Granada. Finally she heard the faint signals from an Afro-Mexican space probe.

Then she turned away from Jesse and spat the jade stone onto the hardwood floor where it shattered into a dozen pieces. Slowly the look of pained intensity that had filled her face for a dozen measures began to fade away in favor of laughter. In her ear the faint echoes of harsh commands slowly transformed into improvisations of brass and percussion; the sharp staccato of gun fire was syncopated, diminished in favor of the beat of her swelling heart.

“I just heard such wonderful things!” sighed Carolina, “ ‘All the Things You Are’ and Rachmaninoff at the same time!”

“You heard Mingus,” said Jesse, his voice filling with fatigue, “the African bass player who would have been born in Tunis. He would have brought Arabic jazz to Sicily. Did you hear him, grunting like a platoon sergeant and feeding lines to his boys, commanding them to be free, to go where the trumpet and drum kit have never gone?”

“There was a second song,” sang Carolina, “melodic and ethereal.”

“ ‘Reincarnation of a Lovebird,’ ” mumbled Jesse, now barely awake. “Sicily- would be the cultural center of the world.”

“People will dance to that new music of their own free will,” Carolina said while kissing his face and neck.
“Ecoutez-moi, mon amour,”
she said without realizing that she was speaking in an unfamiliar tongue. “The dead can sit out eight bars while the living love. Let them rest,” she said softly. “Let them rest.”

Jesse, beneath her, smiled as the weight of the world slipped from his shoulders. He tried to say something but forgot what it was. Just moments later he could barely remember his own name, but he knew that for the first time in decades he would sleep a dreamless sleep.

Up on Potrero Hill, at the homeless encampment, a dozen dusty veterans would gather to greet Vô Dahn, who was covered in bandages and still high from the medication and the botched anesthetic. Despite orders from Dr. Beckelman, the padre had put on his filthy clothing, then slipped out of the hospital through a service entrance.

Once at the homeless encampment, he hugged each soldier and bade him farewell. He then began the long walk down the hill. The homeless vets followed him as he walked down Twentieth Street and crossed Third Street, and they formed a platoon and moved closer to him as he walked toward the bay. One soldier even had enough courage to go with him as he crossed the boatyard and walked out to the end of a small, rotting pier.

“Where are you going, padre,” the soldier had asked. “Where are you going?”

All the vets would watch as Vô Dahn slipped quietly into the dark waters and, face up, began to float away. The waters would surely heal his wound. Years ago he had found Cassandra… Mai… in just this way Now he would find her again. As they had before, the waters would take him to her. They would dance together as they had in that bedroom in Hong Kong, the room on a hill where Cassandra had loved no one so very much. Cloaked in forgetful remembrance, they would love again. Thirty yards from the pier, the padre raised an arm and pointed to the dark sky overhead. A family of spider monkeys turned to listen.

“Look up,” he cried. “All of the electronics—all of the mechanics and hydraulics aboard that Mexican starship way up there…
tournent surle jazz!”
he cried out.

Homeless veterans on both sides of the bay heard him as he floated away. Some looked to the sea and saw him disappear in the swells of an outbound current. Some looked to the sky to see the lonely, rhythm-hungry spacecraft spinning by.

“Everything turns on jazz.”