Of Song and Water (16 page)

My father, he thinks, lived with blood on his hands. That's what made him move. A man can't live where he's committed a crime. And Saginaw was too close, even Port Huron or Algonac. So he hauled us downriver. He drove fast.

“Too easy,” said his father, looking at the small towns along the way. But no one knew to whom he was speaking or what he meant. He only said, “We won't go as far as Ohio.”

As it turned out, they settled on an island, Grosse Ile, part of a small archipelago in the southern reaches of the Detroit River, not far from Lake Erie. He
thinks now that he said to his father – after they'd crossed the bridge, the new house almost in sight – “Mom's the one it won't be easy for – there's water on all sides.”

 

THROWING back the boom tent and opening the cabin, the April air rushing in as if he'd opened a crypt, he thinks about the years in Boston and then Chicago, trying to capture the flow of those days, the first tours with big-name players, and the endless stream of cities and hotels. No time, he recalls, to write songs or do sessions, feeling always under the gun, always late, but enough time nonetheless to disband the trio, to cut the cord between himself and Brian James.

Then his thoughts drift again to an autumn day in an orchard of old trees, with branches that form a low canopy, a dark tunnel, where he leaves Jennifer without turning or glancing back. Stepping out of the orchard, he shields his eyes against the hard afternoon light. He squints, keeping his head down, one foot following the other, listening to the crunch of gravel as he hurries up the road.

The next morning, having returned to Wrigleyville, bending over a suitcase half filled with stage clothes, toiletries, and staff paper, he jumped, his heart pounding, when a loud knock broke the silence. Jen might've lost her key, he thought. He opened the door and expected to see her but instead found Brian with a bottle of vodka tucked under his arm.

Brian smiled and handed him the bottle – around the neck was a bow of blue ribbon.

“Thanks,” he said. “I'll pack it right now.”

“Where's Jen?” said Brian, stopping in the hall and looking at the photographs.

“I'm not sure,” he said. He didn't feel like going into it. “I came back alone.”

“You left her there?”

“I didn't plan to.”

“Did she go all right?”

“I guess.”

“Have a scene?”

“I guess.” He wanted to explain but knew that he'd feel silly and selfish if he tried to talk about what happened.

Brian leaned on the doorjamb. “You letting the place go?”

“Not now.” He pulled the zipper on the suitcase. It stuck. “Not right away.”

“Good,” said Brian. “Last night, I dreamt that I came over and all the windows were boarded up.”

He yanked on the zipper. “What a cheap-shit bag.”

Brian had picked up a framed photograph. “This is at the Mill,” he said. “And we all look good, especially Jen.”

“Take it.”

“You don't want it?”

“There's more than one.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“You should pack it,” said Brian. “You might get tired of the people you're with. You might miss it.”

“I've got plenty.”

“Do you think it's the only one?”

“Can't be.” He grabbed the suitcase, glanced around the room, and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His worried expression bothered him. “I guess that's it,” he said. “Keep Chicago like I left it.”

“I can't,” said Brian.

He looked at the picture in Brian's hand. “It's not easy to go,” he said.

“But you passed the audition,” said Brian. “You always do.”

He wanted Brian to block the door. He wanted to say things that never come easily. Instead, the silence grew deeper.

Brian slid the picture inside his jacket. “Good luck, Cole. Call me when you get a chance.”

“I will.”

 

HE SLIPS in and out – O'Hare to the apartment and back again – but he calls no one while he's in town. He blames it on fatigue, the demands of touring. He sees Brian less and less, and the things that belong to Jen eventually disappear. The lease expires but he continues to pay the rent. He likes the fact of having a place that's familiar. It's good, he thinks, to hold it in reserve, especially if the course he's chosen leads nowhere.

As it turns out, he keeps the apartment for two years. He never lives there or sleeps in the unmade bed. Instead, he visits for an hour or two whenever he can. He checks the mailbox. He walks through the unfilled rooms, turns on the faucets until the water runs clear. Sometimes he brings a bottle, sits at the kitchen table, and pours himself a drink. He listens to the refrigerator, the clicking and groaning. He ignores the thickening dust. He tells himself that there's nothing unusual about hanging on to the place, that it's no different than clinging to an old coat or a favorite pair of shoes. Finally, the landlord calls him crazy. “I don't like ghosts in the building,” he says. “If you send another check, I'll tear it up. And I'm fixing it so your old key won't work.”

After being locked out of the apartment, he takes more bookings, more time on the road. He lives like a man without a country. Mail rarely finds him, not even warnings from the IRS.

From one motel room to the next, he watches old movies and short bursts of MTV. He eats carryout. He tries to write but finds no inspiration in the stolid routine. Managers and promoters come to the clubs and shake their
heads. They make excuses or deliver proclamations. “Jazz is dead,” they say. “We thought it was dead years ago, but that was a false alarm. This time we're sure.”

 

JAZZ is dead. He remembers first hearing the idea from Otis, who liked to go off on philosophers and critics who were in the business of declaring this or that thing deceased, particularly music, books, theater, small towns, newspapers, public education, motherhood, empathy, justice, hope, even God. “Tell me this,” said Otis. “When I pick up my guitar and play, even if I'm alone in my house, is jazz dead?”

Given the opportunity, Otis would riff on what he called “premature burials.” He'd point at a headline and say, “There they go again, ready to stack bodies in the street. What they're really up to is killing dreams, any dream, especially if it's one they don't quite understand. Sometimes they succeed, of course. Sometimes they have to go so far as to commit murder, maybe an accident or an assassination, but then sometimes the whole thing backfires and the dream gets bigger.”

Otis often talked with his guitar in hand and played licks between the words. It came off as some sort of musical essay, an extemporaneous lecture with a soundtrack. “Those boys who chase you around,” he said, pausing to play a short run, “they won't come back, now that they know I've got a gun. Nobody in this town sanctions a black man with firearms, especially foulmouthed white boys.” He stopped and played another phrase. “They see their fathers with rifles resting on their laps, serious men trying to keep the rust off their weapons – each of them rubbing a dark barrel with a white cloth. And the boys think of the day when they'll own their own guns and do with them whatever it is they like.”

When Otis ran out of things to say, he'd return to the notes and phrases that
he'd left hanging in the air, and he'd start to collect them and string them together, searching for a new idea. He could go on for hours like that. It was easy to listen to.

 

HE TRIED to remember what Otis played and what he said, the patterns and the lectures, but as time passed it became more and more difficult to keep everything straight. In the days after Chicago, exhausted by travel, he felt the weight of his loneliness and doubt and wondered if he should ditch the whole game, walk away from performing, stop in some out-of-the-way city and open a guitar shop or a record store. Drinking too much, he told himself that he needed a break. And when a long national tour finally fell apart, he decided to quit, fed up with cancellations, thin crowds, and humiliating pay. Whatever Otis had taught him about commitment didn't seem to matter. He told the faithful, “Playing guitar is a job like any other. Music is ungrateful. It's no better than a pimp.”

Off the road, he found himself south of Detroit, flipping channels on a black-and-white TV, sleeping in his old room in the house on Grosse Ile. On the first morning of his visit, his mother put English muffins in the toaster. “The tulips are late,” she said. His father shook his hand and went off to the yacht club. He watched him drive away.

He took pity on the dog that seemed a bit senile after a long and brutal winter. Walking the animal for the third time in one day, he met a tall and commanding redhead, Maureen, who said she was house-sitting and managing her brother's rottweiler.

He hated music when he met her, hated the managers, the club owners, and the record execs, hated that he had no choice but to continue playing. Maureen started with a couple of questions. He answered briefly. Then he asked a few things about her. The dogs raised their tails and sniffed. Maureen
showed no curiosity about music or his life as a musician. He fell in love with her lack of interest, with the possibility of change.

 

HE STANDS in the cockpit, massages the pain in his hand, and tries to decide what to do next. He smiles about the dogs and his conviction to give up music. He smiles about the honeymoon.

The infatuation, he remembers, went on for almost a year, but then he sensed from Maureen a growing boredom, a frustration with his hopes and desires, his apparent lack of practicality. At that moment, the phone rang. A voice offered a gig and good money. It seemed that doing the road again might shore up his sinking marriage, but the notion was dishonest, a denial of everything he knew about touring. He accepted the offer and, as Maureen had suspected, it made matters worse.

He soon found it easier, less painful, to stay out several weeks at a time. He even missed the birth of his daughter, calling Maureen from a club in Pittsburgh, using a pay phone near the bathrooms, a crush of voices echoing in the narrow hall.

He pictures himself on stage tuning his guitar while a woman sitting down in front and wearing an open blouse leans forward to hand the waitress some money. The woman smiles.

“Don't be messin' with that,” says a voice from behind the piano. “You gotta keep yourself occupied.”

He shifts his gaze. Sitting next to the woman is a man with thin arms and drooping shoulders. He looks again at the open blouse.

 

HE RUBS his left hand.

He stays occupied these days driving a truck, negotiating the stiff clutch and the creaking transmission, the wide turns and the low-hanging wires. Going
back and forth across the Detroit River, hauling Canadian beer from Windsor to Detroit, he feels at times like the ghost of H.M., though he works regular hours – no midnight runs. If the police stop him, it's usually for a burned-out brake light. The owners of liquor stores and convenience stores never say much when he makes a delivery. He discourages what little conversation they offer and collects the necessary signature and leaves a copy of the invoice.

Making deliveries, particularly in winter, takes a toll on his back. He wears a brace and never hurries, even when he's running late. He drives a straight diesel with a hydraulic lift. He uses a heavy-duty hand truck with oversize wheels.

Each day that he drives, he thinks about how he got here, about the fat man who examined his application and his license, offered him the job with a reluctant handshake, and then died of obesity a year or two later. “You're old,” the fat man said, smiling an unfriendly smile. “Why should I hire an old guy with banged-up hands?”

“My hands'll be okay, I swear.”

“Make sure of it,” said the fat man.

He chooses the bridge or the tunnel depending on the time of day. He wonders what H.M. would say about his truck, about carrying beer that's legal. A road, like a river, provides direction – destination. Maybe that's why H.M. left the river, he thinks. It was the lake he wanted, the promise of unfettered movement. He pictures H.M. on the shores of Lake Huron, a blue infinity, face-to-face with absolute freedom, ready to strike out without worry or fear. It's better driving a truck, he thinks. I know the roads. New routes aren't much of a problem. It's a matter of staying alert, watching the turns so you can find your way back.

He knows his truck and listens for anything odd. He keeps a close eye on the dashboard gauges and the dummy lights. If necessary, he fills out a maintenance
order at the end of the day. He wishes he could do the same for the boat, just report what ails her to someone at Humbug. He thinks of spring commissioning and his father's excitement, all the fuss and expense, the tedious list of chores.

 

HE CHECKS the masthead fittings and spreaders, finds some minor crazing on the cabin house and a shallow groove in the gel coat, as if someone had scored the surface with a box cutter. He remembers seeing a can opener in the galley. If it isn't rusty, he can use it to begin the repair, widen the groove and bevel the edges, following his father's example, before taping it off and patching it.

He goes belowdecks. He forgot to buy bilge cleaner and a new brush, although both are on his list of supplies. He'll do the scrubbing and flushing next time, and then he'll test the bilge pump and the float switch. For now, he opens and closes each seacock, lubricating the ones that seem stiff. He hooks up the water hoses, connects the freshwater pump, and fills the tank. The pump cycles on and off. Must be a leak, he thinks. Nothing's open, but I can hear the damn thing running.