Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (43 page)

So brown Robert goes into the future,
Arthur thought.
And when
he comes back he intends to bring witnesses to see him an hour from now,
two of him, and to explain it all with his full, rich, curdled voice, and
write a paper and go to a larger university and be famous where there are
more and more young, rounded girls. Because Robert knows reality almost as
well as I do.

Arthur checked the dials and meters of the machine carefully, seeing that
they were exactly as Robert had ordered them. Arthur was a good, careful
worker, and that was why, even when Mr. Lewis' assistant had scoffed at
him, he had not been afraid of being dismissed. Everybody knew that he
always did exactly as he was told.

"Good-bye," he said. He flicked the switch and Robert disappeared.

He stepped over to the empty couch and placed his hand on the soft, worn
leather cushion, feeling its warmth from the body which had just left it.
Robert was in the future.

But he had to bring him back. He reset the machine and threw another
switch and Robert reappeared on the couch. Arthur went and stood over him
and looked for a long time at the blood flowing from his mouth and
nostrils and eyes and ears. There was a small hole torn through his right
leg, and that was beginning to bleed too. He was dead.

The gash in his leg must have been from a small meteor, Arthur decided. He
had heard about them when he'd been working in the observatory. And one
afternoon when he had been working there he had realized what would happen
to Robert when he went into the future. Of course he could travel forward
in time and reappear an hour later, but the Earth would not be there,
because the Earth moved around the sun at about eighteen and half miles a
second and for that matter the whole solar system seemed to be moving at
about twelve miles a second toward a point in the constellation Hercules.
That was what someone in the Astronomy department had told him, anyway,
and he had memorized it.

So Robert had landed an hour in the future, but somewhere out in space,
and he had died, the pressure of oxygen in his body hemorrhaging his blood
vessels and bursting his lungs before he could even suffocate. But of
course it hadn't been Arthur's fault.

Humming softly to himself, Arthur closed down the machine and washed as
much blood as he could from Robert's head. Some of it was drying already,
leaving a brownish crust on the cold skin. He rearranged Robert's clothes
and went downstairs to report what had happened.

He went directly, stopping only once to watch a young girl with a soft,
full red sweater as she struggled out of her heavy coat.

The End

© 1962. First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction,
July 1962.

Charles Beaumont

Spoof Collins blew his brains out, all right—right on out through
the top of his head. But I don't mean with a gun. I mean with a horn.
Every night: slow and easy, eight to one. And that's how he died.
Climbing, with that horn, climbing up high. For what?
"Hey, man,
Spoof-listen, you picked the tree, now come on down!"
But he couldn't
come down; he didn't know how. He just kept climbing, higher and higher.
And then he fell. Or jumped. Anyhow,
that's
the way he died.

The bullet didn't kill anything. I'm talking about the one that tore up
the top of his mouth. It didn't kill anything that wasn't dead already.
Spoof just put in an extra note, that's all.

We planted him out about four miles from town—home is where you
drop: residential district, all wood construction. Rain? You know it.
Bible type: sky like a month-old bedsheet, wind like a stepped-on cat,
cold and dark, those Forty Days, those Forty Nights! But nice and quiet
most of the time. Like Spoof: nice and quiet, with a lot underneath that
you didn't like to think about.

We planted him and watched and put what was his down into the ground with
him. His horn, battered, dented, nicked—right there in his hands,
but not just there; I mean in position, so if he wanted to do some more
climbing, all right, he could. And his music. We planted that too, because
leaving it out would have been like leaving out Spoof's arms or his heart
or his guts.

Lux started things off with a chord from his guitar, no particular notes,
only a feeling, a sound. A Spoof Collins kind of sound. Jimmy Fritch
picked it up with his stick, and they talked a while—Lux got a real
piano out of that git-box. Then when Jimmy stopped talking and stood
there, waiting, Sonny Holmes stepped up and wiped his mouth and took the
melody on his shiny new trumpet. It wasn't Spoof, but it came close; and
it was still
The Jimjam Man,
the way Spoof wrote it back when he
used to write things down. Sonny got off with a high-squealing blast, and
no eyes came up—we knew, we remembered. The kid always had it
collared. He just never talked about it. And listen to him now! He stood
there over Spoof's grave, giving it all back to The Ol' Massuh, giving it
back right—
"Broom off, white child, you got four sides!" "I want
to learn from you, Mr. Collins. I want to play jazz, and you can teach
me." "I got things to do, I can't waste no time on a half-hipped
young'un." "Please, Mr. Collins." "You got to stop that, you got to stop
callin' me 'Mr. Collins,' hear?" "Yes, sir, yes sir."
—He put out
real sound, like he didn't remember a thing. Like he wasn't playing for
that pile of darkmeat in the ground, not at all; but for the great Spoof
Collins, for the man Who Knew and the man Who Did, who gave jazz spats and
dressed up the blues, who did things with a trumpet that a trumpet
couldn't do, and more: for the man who could blow down the walls or make a
chicken cry, without half trying—for the mighty Spoof, who'd once
walked in music like a boy in river mud, loving it, breathing it, living
it.

Then Sonny quit. He wiped his mouth again and stepped back and Mr. "T"
took it on his trombone while I beat up the tubs.

Pretty soon we had
The Jimjam Man
rocking the way it used to rock.
A little slow, maybe: it needed Bud Meunier on bass and a few trips on the
piano. But it moved.

We went through
Take It From Me
and
Night in the Blues
and
Big Gig
and
Only Us Chickens
and
Forty G's
—Sonny's
insides came out through the horn on that one, I could tell—and
Slice
City Stomp
—you remember: sharp and clean, like sliding down a
razor—and
What the Cats Dragged In
—the longs, the
shorts, all the great Spoof Collins numbers. We wrapped them up and put
them down there with him.

Then it got dark.

And it was time for the last one, the greatest one … Rose-Ann
shivered and cleared her throat; the rest of us looked around, for the
first time, at all those rows of split-wood grave markers, shining in the
rain, and the trees and the coffin, dark, wet. Out by the fence, a couple
of farmers stood watching. Just watching.

One
—Rose-Ann opens her coat, puts her hands on her hips, wets
her lips;

Two
—Freddie gets the spit out of his stick, rolls his eyes;

Three
…—Sonny puts the trumpet to his mouth;

Four
—

And we played Spoof's song, his last one, the one he wrote a long way ago,
before the music dried out his head, before he turned mean and started
climbing:
Black Country.
The song that said just a little of what
Spoof wanted to say, and couldn't.

You remember. Spider-slow chords crawling down, soft, easy, and then
bottom and silence and, suddenly, the cry of the horn, screaming in one
note all the hate and sadness and loneliness, all the want and
got-to-have; and then the note dying, quick, and Rose-Ann's voice, a
whisper, a groan, a sigh …

"Black Country is somewhere, Lord,
That I don't want to go.
Black Country is somewhere
That I never want to go.
Rain-water
drippin'
On the bed and on the floor,
Rain-water drippin'
From the ground and through the door …"

We all heard the piano, even though it wasn't there. Fingers moving down
those minor chords, those black keys, that black country …

"Well, in that old Black Country
If you ain't feelin' good,
They let you have an overcoat
That's carved right out of wood.
But way down there
It gets so dark
You never see a friend—
Black Country may not be the Most,
But, Lord! it's sure the End
…"

Bitter little laughing words, piling up, now mad, now sad; and then, an
ugly blast from the horn and Rose-Ann's voice screaming, crying:

"I never want to go there, Lord!
I never want to be,
I never
want to lay down
In that Black Country!"

And quiet, quiet, just the rain, and the wind.

"Let's go man," Freddie said.

So we turned around and left Spoof there under the ground.

Or, at least, that's what I thought we did.

Sonny took over without saying a word. He didn't have to: just who was
about to fuss? He was white, but he didn't play white, not these days; and
he learned the hard way—by unlearning. Now he could play gutbucket
and he could play blues, stomp and slide, name it, Sonny could play it.
Funny as hell to hear, too, because he looked like everything else but a
musician. Short and skinny, glasses, nose like a melted candle, head clean
as the one-ball, and white? Next to old Hushup, that café sunburn
glowed like a flashlight.

"Man, who skinned you?"

"Who dropped you in the flour barrel?"

But he got closer to Spoof than any of the rest of us did. He knew what to
do, and why. Just like a school teacher all the time: "That's good, Lux,
that's awful good—now let's play some music." "Get off it, C.T.—what's
Lenox Avenue doing in the middle of Lexington?" "Come on, boys, hang on to
the sound, hang on to it!" Always using words like "flavor" and
"authentic" and "blood," peering over those glasses, pounding his feet
right through the floor: STOMP! STOMP! "That's it, we've got it now—oh,
listen! It's true, it's clean!" STOMP! STOMP!

Not the easiest to dig him. Nobody broke all the way through.

"How come, boy? What for?" and every time the same answer:

"I want to play jazz."

Like he'd joined the Church and didn't want to argue about it.

Spoof was still Spoof when Sonny started coming around. Not a lot of
people with us then, but a few, enough—the longhairs and critics and
connoisseurs—and some real ears, too—enough to fill a club
every night, and who needs more? It was COLLINS AND HIS CREW, tight and
neat, never a performance, always a session. Lot of music, lot of fun. And
a line-up that some won't forget: Jimmy Fritch on clarinet, Honker Reese
on alto-sax, Charles di Lusso on tenor, Spoof on trumpet, Henry Walker on
piano, Lux Anderson on banjo, and myself—Hushup Paige—on
drums. Newmown hay, all right, I know—I remember, I've heard the
records we cut—but, the Road was there.

Sonny used to hang around the old Continental Club on State Street in
Chicago, every night, listening. Eight o'clock roll 'round, and there he'd
be—a little different: younger, skinnier—listening hard, over
in a corner all to himself, eyes closed like he was asleep. Once in a
while he put in a request—
Darktown Strutter's Ball
was one he
liked, and some of Jelly Roll's numbers—but mostly he just sat
there, taking it all in. For real.

And it kept up like this for two or three weeks, regular as 2/4.

Now Spoof was mean in those days—don't think he wasn't—but not
blood-mean. Even so, the white boy in the corner bugged Ol' Massuh after a
while and he got to making dirty cracks with his horn: WAAAAA!
Git your
ass out of here.
WAAAAA!
You only think you're with it!
WAAAAA!
There's a little white child sittin' in a chair, there's a little white
child losin' all his hair …

It got to the kid, too, every bit of it. And that made Spoof even madder.
But what can you do?

Came Honker's trip to Slice City along about then: our saxman got a neck
all full of the sharpest kind of steel. So we were out one horn. And you
could tell: we played a little bit too rough, and the head-arrangements
Collins and His Crew grew up to, they needed Honker's grease in the worst
way. But we'd been together for five years or more, and a new man just
didn't play somehow. We were this one solid thing, like a unit, and
somebody had cut off a piece of us and we couldn't grow the piece back so
we just tried to get along anyway, bleeding every night, bleeding from
that wound.

Then one night it bust. We'd gone through some slow-walking stuff, some
tricky stuff and some loud stuff—still covering up—when this
kid, this white boy, got up from his chair and ankled over and tapped
Spoof on the shoulder. It was break-time and Spoof was brought down about
Honker, about how bad we were sounding, sitting there sweating, those
pounds of man, black as coaldust soaked in oil—he was the
blackest
man!—and those eyes, beady white and small as agates.

"Excuse me, Mr. Collins, I wonder if I might have a word with you?" He
wondered if he might have a word with Mr. Collins!

Spoof swiveled in his chair and clapped a look around the kid. "Hnff?"

"I notice that you don't have a sax man anymore."

"You don't mean to tell me?"

"Yes, sir. I thought—I mean, I was wondering if—"

"Talk up, boy. I can't hear you."

The kid looked scared. Lord, he looked scared—and he was white to
begin with.

"Well, sir, I was just wondering if—if you needed a saxophone."

"You know somebody plays sax?"

"Yes, sir, I do."

"And who might that be?"

"Me."

"You."

"Yes, sir."