The Right To Sing the Blues (17 page)

“You sick or something?” the cabby repeated.

“Something,” Nudger mumbled. He lurched toward the cab and got the rear door open, slumped inside onto the back seat. He hit his head on the roof going in but barely felt it.

“Hospital?” the driver asked, giving him a level, appraising stare in the rearview mirror.

“Hotel Majestueux,” Nudger said, letting the cab’s soft upholstery envelope him like a mother.

“Hell, that’s right around the corner.”

“Then drive around awhile before you go there. I need a few minutes.”

“You look like you need more than that, mister. I’ll get you to a doctor.”

“There’ll be one at the hotel if I need him.”

“You’ll need him.”

“You forgot to start your meter.”

The cabby sighed and pulled the taxi away from the curb. “Left or right?” he asked at the corner as he waited for the light to turn green.

“Either,” Nudger said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Nope,” the cabby said, “I guess it don’t.”

Nudger managed to walk through the lobby without bending over from the pain in his sides. He’d run up a twenty-dollar taxi fare, but he figured it was worth it; he’d needed the time to recuperate enough to make his way to his room. When he got there, he’d take careful inventory of himself. He really might need a doctor, but he doubted it; Frick and Frack were too good at their job actually to snap or rupture something. Their stock-in-trade was internal bruises, and they were craftsmen.

There was no one else in the elevator, or in the hall, as he made his way to his room. Good. He didn’t want to attract attention. The pain was wearing him down, causing him to hunch his shoulders and bend at the waist.

He tried three times before he fumbled the key into the lock. Then he turned the knob, shoved in on the door, and staggered into the room.

It was dark, almost totally; only a tall rectangle of lighter-gray shadow that was the window. He felt around on the wall, found the light switch, and flipped it.

He drew in his breath, making a harsh sound that startled him.

Sandra Reckoner was sitting on the foot of the bed with her long legs crossed, grinning. She was holding a half-full bottle of Southern Comfort and appeared to be a little drunk, but all the way undressed. Her clothes were folded neatly on the blue chair by the desk.

Nudger tried to return her grin, but something in him seemed to shift and he groaned. He watched the smile disappear from Sandra’s long, bony face. Alarm rearranged her features. She stood up. Boy, did she stand up!

“Nudger, what’s wrong?”

“My timing,” he said, and stumbled to the bed and collapsed.

XX
I

illy Hollister’s timing was better than Nudger’s. While Nudger was floating through varying

degrees of pain, Hollister was with Ineida.

“What time is it?” she asked him. She lay huddled against him in his bed, her head resting in the crook of his lean arm. They were comfortably spent and cool, covered only by a light sheet; both of them smelled faintly of perspi
ration transformed to a musky scent by body heat, the result of their desperate coupling of only a few minutes ago.

“Almost midnight,” Hollister told her, squinting to see the luminous hands of his watch through the spray of Ineida’s dark hair. He bent his head forward and kissed her lightly on the forehead. He loved her. He was reasonably satisfied that he loved her.

“I need to get home,” she said.

“Why? You might as well stay here tonight.”

“I’m going in to the club early tomorrow morning to talk to Fat Jack about some new arrangements. Marty’s going to pick me up at eight; I don’t want to have to get up here at seven and try to get home to wait for him.”

“Why so early?” Hollister asked.

“It’s the only time Fat Jack has free tomorrow.”

Hollister knew that Fat Jack was probably humoring Ineida; new arrangements or not, she still would never bring the crowd to its feet. Polite applause, that was what Ineida would have to learn to feed on. It had never been enough for Hollister, but maybe it would be for her. He smiled faintly in the dimness of the bedroom. But what did it mat
ter? His smile widened, unseen. Should he tell her not to bother with the new arrangements? Not to waste her time?

She sat up suddenly, startling him, the curve of her back smooth and pale in the filtered light, her breasts swaying slightly from her abrupt movement. Hollister saw her fumble with something on the table by the bed. A lighter clicked, illuminating with its bluish flame her unlined face with a cigarette protruding from her compressed lips, her eyes narrowed against the smoke. She seldom smoked, but she had read and heard for a long time about the traditional cigarette after sex, and apparently she wanted to experience it. She often smoked after sex. The bedsprings creaked as Ineida settled back down and rested her head again on Hollister’s arm.

“Rather have a joint?” he asked her. “I’ve got some good Colombian.”

“No, I’ll just smoke this and then leave.”

Hollister rested his head back on the pillow, listening to her long, easy intakes and expulsions of breath as she worked on the cigarette. She was breathing mostly through her nose. He had never seen her actually take smoke into her lungs except for the few times she had smoked marijuana.

Ineida did love him, he was sure. Probably more than he loved her. It would soon be time for the pain, the way it always happened in love. His father had treated him so well after the pain of Willy’s mother’s death when Willy was only ten years old. The beatings had abruptly ceased. His father’s drinking had begun. Then, after the drinking, the eyes-rolled-back, falling-in-the-aisles religion. And his father hadn’t let them take Willy away after that incident at school with Iris Crane, take him where they could inject him with drugs and probe his mind with subtle sharp questions.

Had he seen his father’s hand dart out and edge his mother from the hayloft door? He couldn’t know beyond doubt. His father, surprised to see him standing by the henhouse staring at his mother’s limp body, registered nothing but numb disbelief on his rough farmer’s face. One second Willy’s mother had been standing with him, talking and looking out over the just-seeded fields, the next second she was fifty feet below on the bare ground, dead.

Hollister couldn’t be sure of what he’d seen that day. He knew that even his father probably wasn’t sure about what had happened. Hollister had expected maybe a deathbed confession twenty years later in the sterile hospital room, but his father had simply looked at him, not unlike the way he’d stared at him seconds after his mother’s plunge to death, and then turned to face the empty bed next to his and died quietly.

Hollister still wasn’t sure, not about anything, really, except his music. The fools who knew he was great could never imagine the cost of greatness. The price in pain that had to be paid. The trick was never to reach equilibrium, and to let the genuine agony of loss sing between the notes. How could anyone possibly understand the cost of that if they weren’t touched by greatness and the need? The need and the way, and the roar of pain tamed to a seductive whisper. Hollister almost laughed out loud at the way so few could see and feel the deeper, wiser blackness against the night. The precious gain in loss.

Beside him a tiny red meteor arced to the ashtray and Ineida stubbed out her cigarette. She sat up again, then twisted her body and leaned low to kiss him on the lips, his face tented softly by her dangling hair.

She asked the eternal question. “Do you love me?” she said, sitting halfway up, still bent over him. “Do you? Even now that you’ve found out—”

“That doesn’t matter to me,” Hollister interrupted. “In fact, I admit I’m pleased about it.” He ran a fingertip lightly along the soft inside of her thigh and she sucked in breath sharply and her body twitched with pleasure. “I love you more than you might imagine,” he whispered.

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as I’ve ever been of anything.”

She kissed him again, then got up and went into the bathroom. The light from the bathroom window spilled outside and illuminated the courtyard. A corner of the garden was visible through the bedroom window.

Hollister lay quietly staring at the symmetrical dark row of rosebushes. The roses would bloom soon, he knew.

XXI
I

od, you’re pissing blood.” Sandra Reckoner, shy thing that she was, had stayed after helping Nudger into the bathroom. She stood now near the door, nude and unafraid of what the harsh morning light might reveal about her long body. She had no reason to be afraid; the few stretch marks and the slightly pendulous angle of her breasts somehow seemed only to add to her attractiveness by making her real and sensuous in a way no mere centerfold candidate could approach.

“It’s from being punched in the kidneys,” Nudger told her, leaning with one hand flat against the wall.

“Don’t you think you should see a doctor?”

“No.” He pushed away from the wall and turned toward the washbasin.

“Why not?”

“Doctors are like mechanics and a number of other peo
ple who charge too much for their services. If you go to them, they’ll find all sorts of things wrong.”

“That’s a stupid attitude.”

“It probably is at my age; there could really be all sorts of things wrong with me.”

“Doesn’t it frighten you, seeing blood in your urine”

“Sure. But it scared me worse the first time, after I’d been kicked in the kidneys a few years ago. But I know now it will eventually take care of itself; the people who did this to me knew just how far to go.” He washed his hands, splashed cold water over his face.

“You sound as if you admire their professionalism,” Sandra said.

“I don’t admire it,” Nudger told her, “but I’m counting on it instead of my medical insurance.” Insurance which, it occurred to him, might have lapsed. Had he paid that last premium? That was something he’d better remember to check on.

“Do you know who beat you up? And why?”

“Yes and yes,” Nudger said. “It was two very large primeval types who were underlining a message they’d delivered to me earlier.”

“There’s such a thing as the police, you know,” Sandra said. “Have you called them?”

“No.”

“You should. You were assaulted. I understand there’s a city ordinance against beating up out-of-towners. And maybe you could use police protection.”

“I’m not so sure, in this instance.”

Sandra looked at him curiously. “You weren’t in any shape to talk about it last night,” she said. “Would it help you to talk about it now?”

“No,” Nudger told her, “I don’t even want to think about it.”

She knew when not to pursue a subject. She stepped around him, bent over and turned on the taps in the bath
tub, then pulled the chrome lever that got the shower going. “Wait for the water to get warm,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She sidestepped around his listing form again and left the bathroom.

Nudger stood remembering his night with her. She had comforted him, held his head close between her bare breasts, as he drifted in and out of sleep, in and out of pain. Several times she had suggested calling the hotel doctor; each time Nudge had refused. In the coolness of the air-conditioned room, it was the heat of her long body that he wanted, the warmth of her limitless compassion. Sex, of course, had been out of the question; Nudger was having enough difficulty simply breathing. But she had stayed with him and given him what at that moment he so badly needed.

Nudger smiled briefly. He had kept his pledge of fidelity to Claudia. He felt rather smug about that.

Sandra returned to the bathroom, wearing her panties and bra. She reached in behind the plastic shower curtain to test the temperature of the hissing water.

“Are you ready for this?” she asked.

Nudger nodded.

She helped him step over the edge of the bathtub; he looked down as he did this and saw that his body showed only a few faintly purple bruises and was almost unmarked by one of the worst beatings he’d ever endured.