Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (44 page)

Spoof smiled a quick one. Then he shrugged. "Broom off, son," he said.
"Broom 'way off."

The kid turned red. He all of a sudden didn't look scared anymore. Just
mad. Mad as hell. But he didn't say anything. He went on back to his table
and then it was end of the ten.

We swung into
Basin Street,
smooth as Charley's tenor could make
it, with Lux Anderson talking it out:
Basin Street, man, it is the
street, Where the elite, well, they gather 'round to eat a little …
And we fooled around with the slow stuff for a while. Then Spoof lifted
his horn and climbed up two-and-a-half and let out his trademark, that
short high screech that sounded like something dying that wasn't too happy
about it. And we rocked some, Henry taking it, Jimmy canoodling the great
headwork that only Jimmy knows how to do, me slamming the skins—and
it was nowhere. Without Honker to keep us all on the ground, we were just
making noise. Good noise, all right, but not music. And Spoof knew it. He
broke his mouth blowing—to prove it.

And we cussed the cat that sliced our man.

Then, right away—nobody could remember when it came in—suddenly
we had us an alto-sax. Smooth and sure and snaky, that sound put a knot on
each of us and said: Bust loose now, boys, I'll pull you back down. Like
sweet-smelling glue, like oil in a machine, like—Honker.

We looked around and there was the kid, still sore, blowing like a madman,
and making fine fine music.

Spoof didn't do much. Most of all, he didn't stop the number. He just let
that horn play, listening—and when we slid over all the rough spots
and found us backed up neat as could be, the Ol' Massuh let out a grin and
a nod and a "Keep blowin', young'un!" and we knew that we were going to be
all right.

After it was over, Spoof walked up to the kid. They looked at each other,
sizing it up, taking it in.

Spoof says: "You did good."

And the kid—he was still burned—says: "You mean I did
damn
good."

And Spoof shakes his head. "No, that ain't what I mean."

And in a second one was laughing while the other one blushed. Spoof had
known all along that the kid was faking, that he'd just been lucky enough
to know our style on
Basin Street
up-down-and-across.

The Ol' Massuh waited for the kid to turn and start to slink off, then he
said: "Boy, you want to go to work?" …

Sonny learned so fast it scared you. Spoof never held back: he turned it
all over, everything it had taken us our whole lives to find out.

And—we had some good years. Charley di Lusso dropped out, and we
took on Bud Meunier-the greatest bass man of them all—and Lux threw
away his banjo for an AC-DC git-box and old C. T. Mr. "T" Green and his
trombone joined the Crew. And we kept growing and getting stronger—no
million-copies platter sales or stands at the Paramount—too
"special"—but we never ate too far down on the hog, either.

In a few years Sonny Holmes was making that sax stand on its hind legs and
jump through hoops that Honker never dreamed about. Spoof let him strictly
alone. When he got mad it wasn't ever because Sonny had white skin—Spoof
always was too busy to notice things like that—but only because The
Ol' Massuh had to get teed off at each of us every now and then. He
figured it kept us on our toes.

In fact, except right at first, there never was any real blood between
Spoof and Sonny until Rose-Ann came along.

Spoof didn't want a vocalist with the band. But the coonshouting days were
gone, alas, except for Satchmo and Calloway—who had style: none of
us had style, man, we just hollered—so when push came to shove, we
had to put out the net.

And chickens aplenty came to crow and plenty moved on fast and we were
about to give up when a dusky doll of twenty-ought stepped up and let
loose a hunk of
The Man I Love
and that's all, brothers, end of the
search.

Rose-Ann McHugh was a little like Sonny: where she came from, she didn't
know a ball of cotton from a piece of popcorn. She'd studied piano for a
flock of years with a Pennsylvania longhair, read music whipfast and had
been pointed toward the Big Steinway and the O.M.'s, Chopin and Bach and
all that jazz. And good—I mean, she could pull some very fancy noise
out of those keys. But it wasn't the Road. She'd heard a few records of
Muggsy Spanier's, a couple of Jelly Roll's—
New Orleans Bump,
Shreveport Stomp,
old
Wolverine Blues
—and she just got
took hold of. Like it happens, all the time. She knew.

Spoof hired her after the first song. And we could see things in her eyes
for The Ol' Massuh right away, fast. Bad to watch: I mean to say, she was
chicken dinner, but what made it ugly was, you could tell she hadn't been
in the oven very long.

Anyway, most of us could tell. Sonny, for instance.

But Spoof played tough to begin. He gave her the treatment, all the way.
To see if she'd hold up. Because, above everything else, there was the
Crew, the Unit, the Group. It was right, it had to stay right.

"Gal, forget your hands—that's for the cats out front. Leave 'em
alone. And pay attention to the music, hear?"

"You ain't got a 'voice,' you got an instrument. And you ain't even
started
to learn how to play on it. Get some sound, bring it on out."

"Stop that throat stuff—you singin' with the Crew now. From the
belly, gal, from the belly. That's where music comes from, hear?"

And she loved it, like Sonny did. She was with The Ol' Massuh, she knew
what he was talking about.

Pretty soon she fit just fine. And when she did, and everybody knew she
did, Spoof eased up and waited and watched the old machine click right
along, one-two, one-two.

That's when he began to change. Right then, with the Crew growed up and in
long pants at last. Like we didn't need him anymore to wash our face and
comb our hair and switch our behinds for being bad.

Spoof began to change. He beat out time and blew his riffs, but things
were different and there wasn't anybody who didn't know that for a fact.

In a hurry, all at once, he wrote down all his great arrangements, quick
as he could. One right after the other. And we wondered why—we'd
played them a million times.

Then he grabbed up Sonny.
"White Boy, listen. You want to learn how to
play trumpet?"

And the blood started between them. Spoof rode on Sonny's back twenty-four
hours, showing him lip, showing him breath.
"This ain't a saxophone,
boy, it's a trumpet, a music-horn. Get it right—do it again—that's
lousy—do it again—that was nowhere—do it again—do
it again!"
All the time.

Sonny worked hard. Anybody else, they would have told The Ol' Massuh where
he could put that little old horn. But the kid knew something was being
given to him—he didn't know why, nobody did, but for a reason—something
that Spoof wouldn't have given anybody else. And he was grateful. So he
worked. And he didn't ask any how-comes, either.

Pretty soon he started to handle things right. 'Way down the road from
great, but coming along. The sax had given him a hard set of lips and he
had plenty of wind; most of all, he had the spirit—the thing that
you can beat up your chops about it for two weeks straight and never say
what it is, but if it isn't there, buddy-ghee, you may get to be President
but you'll never play music.

Lord, Lord, Spoof worked that boy like a two-ton jockey on a ten-ounce
horse.
"Do it again—that ain't right—goddamn it, do it
again! Now one more time!"

When Sonny knew enough to sit in with the horn on a few easy ones, Ol'
Massuh would tense up and follow the kid with his eyes—I mean it got
real crawly. What for? Why was he pushing it like that?

Then it quit. Spoof didn't say anything. He just grunted and quit all of a
sudden, like he'd done with us, and Sonny went back on sax and that was
that.

Which is when the real blood started.

The Lord says every man has got to love something, sometimes, somewhere.
First choice is a chick, but there's other choices. Spoof's was a horn. He
was married to a piece of brass, just as married as a man can get. Got up
with it in the morning, talked with it all day long, loved it at night
like no chick I ever heard of got loved. And I don't mean one-two-three: I
mean the slow-building kind. He'd kiss it and hold it and watch out for
it. Once a cat full of tea tried to put the snatch on Spoof's horn, for
laughs: when Spoof caught up with him, that cat gave up laughing for life.

Sonny knew this. It's why he never blew his stack at all the riding.
Spoof's teaching him to play trumpet—
the
trumpet—was
like as if The Ol' Massuh had said:
"You want to take my wife for a few
nights? You do? Then here, let me show you how to do it right. She likes
it done right."

For Rose-Ann, though, it was the worst. Every day she got that look deeper
in, and in a while we turned around and, man!
Where
is little
Rosie? She was gone. That young half-fried chicken had flew the roost. And
in her place was a doll that wasn't dead, a big bunch of curves and skin
like a brand-new penny. Overnight, almost. Sonny noticed. Freddie and Lux
and even old Mr. "T" noticed.
I
had eyes in my head. But Spoof
didn't notice. He was already in love; there wasn't any more room.

Rose-Ann kept snapping the whip, but Ol' Massuh, he wasn't
about
to
make the trip. He'd started climbing, then, and he didn't treat her any
different than he treated us.

"Get away, gal, broom on off—can't you see I'm busy? Wiggle it
elsewhere, hear? Elsewhere. Shoo!"

And she just loved him more for it. Every time he kicked her, she loved
him more. Tried to find him and see him and, sometimes, when he'd stop for
breath, she'd try to help, because she knew something had crawled inside
Spoof, something that was eating from the inside out, that maybe he
couldn't get rid of alone.

Finally, one night, at a two-weeker in Dallas, it tumbled.

We'd gone through
Georgia Brown
for the tourists and things were
kind of dull, when Spoof started sweating. His eyes began to roll. And he
stood up, like a great big animal—like an ape or a bear, big and
powerful and mean-looking—and he gave us the two-finger signal.

Sky-High.
'Way before it was due, before either the audience or any
of us had got wound up.

Freddie frowned. "You think it's time, Top?"

"Listen," Spoof said, "goddamn it, who says when it's time—you, or
me?"

We went into it, cold, but things warmed up pretty fast. The dancers
grumbled and moved off the floor and the place filled up with talk.

I took my solo and beat hell out of the skins. Then Spoof swiped at his
mouth and let go with a blast and moved it up into that squeal and stopped
and started playing. It was all headwork. All new to us.

New to anybody.

I saw Sonny get a look on his face, and we sat still and listened while
Spoof made love to that horn.

Now like a scream, now like a laugh—now we're swinging in the trees,
now the white men are coming, now we're in the boat and chains are hanging
from our ankles and we're rowing, rowing—
Spoof, what is it?
—now
we're sawing wood and picking cotton and serving up those cool cool drinks
to the Colonel in his chair—
Well, blow, man!
—now we're
free, and we're struttin' down Lenox Avenue and State & Madison and
Pirate's Alley, laughing, crying—
Who said free?
—and we
want to go back and we don't want to go back—
Play it, Spoof? God,
God, tell us all about it! Talk to us!
—and we're sitting in a
cellar with a comb wrapped up in paper, with a skin-barrel and a tinklebox—
Don't
stop, Spoof! Oh Lord, please don't stop!
—and we're making
something, something, what is it? Is it jazz? Why, yes, Lord, it's jazz.
Thank you, sir, and thank you, sir, we finally got it, something that is
ours,
something great that belongs to us and to us alone, that we
made, and
that's
why it's important, and
that's
what it's
all about and—
Spoof! Spoof, you can't stop now—

But it was over, middle of the trip. And there was Spoof standing there
facing us and tears streaming out of those eyes and down over that
coaldust face, and his body shaking and shaking. It's the first we ever
saw that. It's the first we ever heard him cough, too—like a shotgun
going off every two seconds, big raking sounds that tore up from the
bottom of his belly and spilled out wet and loud.

The way it tumbled was this. Rose-Ann went over to him and tried to get
him to sit down. "Spoof, honey, what's wrong? Come on and sit down. Honey,
don't just stand there."

Spoof stopped coughing and jerked his head around. He looked at Rose-Ann
for a while, and whatever there was in his face, it didn't have a name.
The whole room was just as quiet as it could be.

Rose-Ann took his arm. "Come on, honey, Mr. Collins—"

He let out one more cough, then, and drew back his hand—that
black-topped, pink-palmed ham of a hand—and laid it, sharp, across
the girl's cheek. It sent her staggering. "Git off my back, hear? Damn it,
git off! Stay 'way from me!"

She got up crying. Then, you know what she did? She waltzed on back and
took his arm and said: "Please."

Spoof was just a lot of crazy-mad on two legs. He shouted out some words
and pulled back his hand again. "Can't you never learn? What I got to do,
goddamn little—"

Then—Sonny moved. All-the-time quiet and soft and gentle Sonny. He
moved quick across the floor and stood in front of Spoof.

"Keep your black hands off her," he said.

Ol' Massuh pushed Rose-Ann aside and planted his legs, his breath rattling
fast and loose, like a bull's. And he towered over the kid, Goliath and
David, legs far apart on the boards and fingers curled up, bowling balls
at the ends of his sleeves.