Sci Fiction Classics Volume 4 (46 page)

But why kid? We'd seen that trumpet a million times.

It was Spoof's.

Rose-Ann was trembling. Just like me, she remembered how we'd buried the
horn with Spoof. And she remembered how quiet it had been in Sonny's room
last night …

I started to think real hophead thoughts, like—where did Sonny get
hold of a shovel that late? And how could he expect a horn to play that's
been under the ground for two years? And—

That blast got into our ears like long knives.

Spoof's own trademark!

Sonny looked caught, like he didn't know what to do at first, like he was
hypnotized, scared, almighty scared. But as the sound came out, rolling
out, sharp and clean and clear—new-trumpet sound—his
expression changed. His eyes changed: they danced a little and opened
wide.

Then he closed them, and blew that horn. Lord God of the Fishes, how he
blew it! How he loved it and caressed it and pushed it up, higher and
higher and higher. High C? Bottom of the barrel. He took off, and he
walked all over the rules and stamped them flat.

The melody got lost, first off. Everything got lost, then, while that horn
flew. It wasn't only jazz; it was the heart of jazz, and the insides,
pulled out with the roots and held up for everybody to see; it was blues
that told the story of all the lonely cats and all the ugly whores who
ever lived, blues that spoke up for the loser lamping sunshine out of
iron-gray bars and every hophead hooked and gone, for the bindlestiffs and
the city slickers, for the country boys in Georgia shacks and the High
Yellow hipsters in Chicago slums and the bootblacks on the corners and the
fruits in New Orleans, a blues that spoke for all the lonely, sad, and
anxious downers who could never speak themselves …

And then, when it had said all this, it stopped, and there was a quiet so
quiet that Sonny could have shouted:

"It's okay, Spoof. It's all right now. You'll get it said, all of it—I'll
help you. God, Spoof, you showed me how, you planned it—I'll do my
best!"

And he laid back his head and fastened the horn and pulled in air and blew
some more. Not sad, now, not blues—but not anything else you could
call by a name. Except … jazz. It was jazz.

Hate blew out of that horn, then. Hate and fury and mad and fight, like
screams and snarls, like little razors shooting at you, millions of them,
cutting, cutting deep …

And Sonny only stopping to wipe his lip and whisper in the silent room
full of people: "You're saying it, Spoof! You are!"

God Almighty Himself must have heard that trumpet, then; slapping and
hitting and hurting with notes that don't exist and never existed. Man!
Life took a real beating! Life got groined and sliced and belly-punched,
and the horn, it didn't stop until everything had all spilled out, every
bit of the hate and mad that's built up in a man's heart.

Rose-Ann walked over to me and dug her nails into my hand as she listened
to Sonny …

"Come on now, Spoof! Come on! We can do it! Let's play the rest and play
it right. You know it's got to be said, you know it does. Come on, you and
me together!"

And the horn took off with a big yellow blast and started to laugh. I mean
it laughed! Hooted and hollered and jumped around, dancing, singing,
strutting through those notes that never were there. Happy music? Joyful
music? It was chicken dinner and an empty stomach; it was big-butted women
and big white beds; it was country walking and windy days and fresh-born
crying and—Oh, there just doesn't happen to be any happiness that
didn't come out of that horn.

Sonny hit the last high note—the Spoof blast—but so high you
could just barely hear it.

Then Sonny dropped the horn. It fell onto the floor and bounced and lay
still.

And nobody breathed. For a long, long time.

Rose-Ann let go of my hand, at last. She walked across the platform,
slowly, and picked up the trumpet and handed it to Sonny.

He knew what she meant.

We all did. It was over now, over and done …

Lux plucked out the intro. Jimmy Fritch picked it up and kept the melody.

Then we all joined in, slow and quiet, quiet as we could. With Sonny—I'm
talking about
Sonny
—putting out the kind of sound he'd always
wanted to.

And Rose-Ann sang it, clear as a mountain wind—not just from her
heart, but from her belly and her guts and every living part of her.

For The Ol' Massuh, just for him. Spoof's own song:

Black Country.

The End

© 1954 by Charles Beaumont. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon
Associates, Inc. Originally published in
Playboy Magazine
,
September 1954.

Elizabeth A. Lynn

The straps across her shoulders were cutting through the thin cloth gown.
I'm cold, she thought. "Okay, Louise, time to wake up now," said a voice
warm as honey—but I am awake, Luisa thought, and wondered why she
could not see the light that she could feel falling on her eyes.

"Baby, I'll move you into the sun while I change those dirty sheets. You
messed the bed again, Louise. I know you can't help it, but I sure wish
you wouldn't do it." At least I can hear, Luisa thought. She heard the
voice, and a crying sound, quite close. The sheets were clammy under her.
She smelled a stale and sour smell. The straps fell away. Something lifted
her.

She was afraid.

She was set in a hard chair. The straps came back. The chair was metal and
cold. Now she was sitting in the sunlight. She wanted to say
thank you
but her mouth would not move. The close crying sound increased. It was
herself; she was crying. The stale sour scent was her own. Helen. Day
shift. Every day began like this, except the days when it rained. Helen
still came, then, to change her bedclothes, wash her, feed her, shove
pills down her shriveled throat; but there was no sunlight to sit in when
it rained, and they would never open the windows so that she could smell
the rain. All she smelled was her own melting flesh. In Lord Byron there
was a fat man crying to get out, and in me there is a skeleton wailing for
release.

"Baby, why you screwing up your face like that? Are you too hot?" No,
Luisa wanted to scream, no, but Helen's inexorable hands pulled her out of
the warmth and dumped her into her cold, barren bed. "Breakfast in a
while, Louise. You just put your head back into the pillow and dream,
now."

Even dreams are dreams, Luisa thought.
Y los sueños, sueños
son.
Dreams no longer meant sleep, and what good was sleep when she
had to wake from it again? Sleep just meant the night shift, and then the
day shift, the sun looking through the windows,
busy old fool, unruly
sun.
Breakfast, she thought with loathing. They fed her with a tube
down her throat. Sometimes they put a tube like an arm into her and pumped
air through her, making her breathe. She hated tubes. Is that Freudian,
she wondered, to hate tubes? She wanted to be back in the sunlight, in the
warm. She began to cry again, a cat-mewl of sound. Helen might hear it;
Helen listened, sometimes, and might understand; and might put her back
into the sun.

"They just like babies," Helen said. "They're over ninety, most of them,
and they can't hardly talk, but they can cry. If you watch their eyes you
can figure out what it is they want—I can, anyways. You'll get the
hang of it."

I don't give a damn, thought Mark Wald. But he nodded. The odors of feces
and ammonia fought in the halls. He hated the geriatrics homes, but it was
the only place he could get work anymore; the hospitals wouldn't hire him.
The best thing about this place is that the lockers are in the basement
and I can go down there to do my drinking in private, the way a man should
drink. Unhurried snorts. He would read—he had the latest paperback
thriller in his locker now—and drink, slowly, decently. No one would
notice on the graveyard shift. During the day there were five aides, three
orderlies, two RNs on duty. Graveyard shift there were two orderlies, two
aides, one RN, no baths to give or beds to make or people to feed. Stay up
all night riding herd on a bunch of whimpering zombies—then go home
and sleep till way past noon. Helen was still talking about the patients
as if it mattered what they had once done or been. They were zombies now.
This one had been a doctor. This one a lawyer. He pretended to listen as
she stuck her head into every room.

"Honey, what is it?"

The old lady in the bed had a blind, wrinkled face like a sun-struck
turtle. She whimpered. "You wet? No, you not wet. Straps too tight?" She
loosened the posey straps that held the thin gawk of a woman in bed. "This
is Louise; she was a teacher in a college." The sounds went on. Helen laid
a broad black hand on the woman's forehead and reached for her pulse with
the other. "Your pulse's okay. You cold? I could put you back in the sun."

The crying stopped.

"That's it, right? Okay, baby, we'll put you in the chair. This is Mark,
here, he's a new night shift worker." She was taking off the cloth
restraints as she talked. Mark pulled the wheelchair over to the bed.
Together they let down the high sides of the bed, helped Luisa to a
sitting position, picked her up, and put her in the chair. Her long
fingernails scratched lightly against Mark's neck. He shuddered.

I won't get old, he thought. Blind, half-dead, a piece of meat in a bed
for others to haul around. I'll die decently. Pills, or gas, or maybe I'll
jump off the bridge. The alcohol will do it for me. He saw himself in an
alcoholic stupor, staggering along the road … getting hit by a car
and dying instantly, no pain, no bedpans or tubes up his arms and in his
ass and down his throat.

It was an old vision. Usually it waited till he was decently asleep. It
was always night or early morning in the dream, and the car was always a
red car. "Excuse me," he said to Helen. He ran downstairs. Let her think
he had to piss. He twirled the dial of the combination lock on his locker,
got it wrong, did it again, got it right, uncapped the bottle, and took a
swallow. The bourbon eased down warmly—that was better. Sometimes he
felt it was the only warm thing in the world. He screwed the cap on the
bottle, locked it up, and sauntered up the stairs. They would know, of
course. That Helen would smell it on him. What the hell, they wouldn't
fire him unless he made a mistake. He wouldn't make a mistake.

Helen was waiting for him at the nursing station. "Let's hope he doesn't
end up like Harold," he heard her say. Who the hell was Harold? The nurse
at the desk was old and stringy, on her way to looking like that senile
crock down the hall.

"Hi," he said, smiling. "I'm Mark Wald, the new night shift orderly."

Graveyard shift was a breeze. The old crocks wheezed and cried and slept.
The aides took turns sleeping in the bed in the back room. Mark read
paperbacks and sucked on his bottle of bourbon. The other night orderly
was an old fag named Morton. He liked playing cards. Mark preferred to
read. Morton sulked and played solitaire at the nursing station desk.

"Who was Harold?"

Morton looked up from putting a red queen on a black king. "Oh, it's you."

"Who the hell else would it be?"

"Harold was the dude before you. Black and built. Younger than you."

"He was a fag, too?"

"The word is faggot, sweetie. No. Straight as they come, if you'll excuse
the phrase."

"What happened to him—he get tired of this dump?"

Morton looked up again. "No, sweetie. He ripped off dope from the
narcotics box and OD'd on it. Morphine, I think."

Now why should that Helen even think he would be like some blood who
needled himself to death? He hated drugs.

"Su-i-cide, they called it," said Morton.

"Huh."

"They come and go. I've been working here five years, you know that? Only
Helen's been here longer than I have." His hands kept placing the cards.
He had soft, pudgy hands.

"Helen said this place is a rich people's dump."

"It is. Look at the equipment we got! Monitors, crash carts. Those things
are for hospitals. The nurses all have standing orders, so that if someone
goes Code Red they can give the drugs without calling the doctor on the
phone. Ever try to find a doctor at dinnertime? Forget it. All these old
bags have money, and their sons and daughters have guilt complexes waiting
for them to die."

"It's still a dump," Mark said. His knee brushed the table and all the
cards slewed sideways off their piles. "Sorry."

Morton bent down. "Sure you are, sweetie," he said. "Sure you are."

Mark went down to his locker again. He sat with the bottle in his hand.
The basement walls were dirty gray and nubby, like the stubble of old
men's beards. He checked his watch. Near 4
A.M.
,
time for somebody to die. It was true they often died at 4
A.M.
They had had one respiratory failure
that night already, the old lady in 209. Maybe she would die.

As if his thought had done it, a blinker over the basement door started
flashing frantic red. Code Red, cardiac arrest. He stuck the bottle in the
locker hastily and went up the stairs.

When he got to the room they were all in there. The EKG was jumping like a
scalded mouse and the nurse was using the defibrillator. They all stood
clear of the metal bedframe. The body on the bed jerked. Damn, Mark
thought, in a nursing home they were supposed to let you die in peace.

"Call St. Francis's admitting," the RN said. "This one has to be in CCU."

Morton went to do that. Waste of time and money, Mark thought. Why can't
they just let the bastards die?

It is a sophism to imagine that there is any strict dividing line
between the waking world and the world of dreams. Prospero's Cell,
by
Lawrence Durrell, Luisa thought. Today she was feeling strong, almost
strong enough to tongue the respirator tube out of her throat. They would
never let her do that. She had been to Greece, though not to Durrell's
Corcyra.
Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins.
That was the book's first line. She tried to remember the blue and white,
all the colors, the scent of lemon trees … "Hi, baby. They told us
at report you had a bad night! What'd you want to stop breathing for, huh?
You know they won't let you do that around here." Helen was moving closer
to the bed. "It was busy here last night. That Friedman in 211, he
arrested last night. They took him to St. Francis."