The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (4 page)

Floyd was desperate for a cigarette. His clothes were wet and mussed and who knows how he smelled. The rain had made a muddy puddle near the bench where he and Lafayette had sat together. Gnats swarmed the bulb of the floodlight above the church door. In Lafayette’s absence the place was wilted and derelict.

I have a date with a man, Floyd thought. And he had been glad about it, overjoyed about it. But now he was alone, and it was as though a light had gone out, exactly like that, the way a child is disoriented and frightened in the dark and nothing is recognizable. For instance, what did it mean that he had felt more in three hours with Lafayette than he ever had with any of his women? That would make him … What he needed was a walk. He would go to the boardinghouse and get his horn, and from there he would find a secluded place and play until his fingers hurt and his mouth could not hold the embouchure.

He left the churchyard. The Seven Days crowd had all but dispersed. Pails of the burning stuff the boy had called myrrh, extinguished now, rolled down the middle of the street. A couple pawed each other drunkenly against a tree, the woman’s top had fallen from her shoulders. The festival had degenerated into depravity. Maybe everyone had been drinking the liquor the bluebird gave Floyd, and it had made them lusty and indiscriminate. Under the most normal circumstances Floyd was a man who liked sex more than was in his best interest; surely it was his appetites and the Seven Days that had caused this trouble with Lafayette. And trouble could be undone or ignored. He had ignored it for years, for as long as he could remember. There was no reason anything had to change now. No reason at all. Even as he lied to himself, Floyd knew that after he played the next night, he would tell Lafayette he had a gig in New Orleans, though it was not true, and if Lafayette said yes, they would drive away together in the deepest part of the night.

It was not true either that he had never considered the possibility of involvement with a man. There was Carl. Of course, Floyd was only thirteen at the time and sexually excitable—he could understand it in that way. He had, in fact, made many attempts to understand it that way. The boys were best friends. They spent winter afternoons at Carl’s house. Their last afternoon was at Carl’s. They sat on his bed with blankets around their shoulders. It was very cold and the afternoon was waning. They were doing something, drawing or playing checkers or doing homework. The boys sat very close in the chilly room, warming themselves in a narrowing shaft of sunlight that slanted in through the window. Carl put his cold hand on Floyd’s knee. At first he’d had the urge to swat it like a fly, but he didn’t say anything, and they were still for a time. Carl’s hand warmed, the half moons at the nail went from bluish to pink. He rubbed Floyd’s thigh, and everywhere he touched him, Floyd burned. The boys sat cross-legged, knee to knee, panting and trembling.

The bedroom door opened. They had not heard footsteps—how had they not heard the footsteps? Carl’s mother looked from one boy to the other, and then one to the other again. As she understood what she saw, her face twisted until it was a not a face but a rage. Floyd jumped from the bed, but she blocked the doorway. No one had ever looked at him with such revulsion; he had never done anything so terrible that it made him less than human. Get out get out get out she screamed even as her slapping and jabbing made it all but impossible for Floyd to pass her. He ran down the steps and to the front door, where he rooted through the closet for his coat. Upstairs, Carl’s mother hit him again and again; the slaps rang through the empty house.

Now Floyd ran down the emptying boulevard, as though he could outrun the memory of Carl’s beating or of the pained shock on his face. Floyd rounded the corner. His heart beat too quickly in his chest and his legs were wobbly. Amber light spilled onto the sidewalk from an open door in the middle of the block. A woman in a cotton housedress stood fanning herself just inside the doorway. The light drew him, and the butter smell of the bread baking. Another woman kneaded dough on a long table, her forearms covered in flour up to the elbow. There was dough all around her: rising in loaf pans and twisted into braids and sitting on long flat trays.

The woman in the doorway narrowed her eyes and said, “We don’t sell no kind of liquor.” A couple of Seven Days stragglers weaved down the boulevard on the opposite side of the street.

The kneading woman stepped forward. The girls were sisters, he thought, barely out of their teens. “That’s right,” she said. “Ain’t nothing here but butter rolls.”

“I … ,” Floyd did not know how to tell them that he only wanted to step inside of the amber glow and smell the baking bread, that they seemed like nice girls and he was in need of a moment’s shelter.

“Do you all have a phone in here?” he asked. He felt his pockets for a handkerchief and, not finding one, wiped his tears with the back of his hand.

“I’ll pay a dollar if you let me make a call,” he said. He took out his wallet and held the limp dollar bills out to the girls. “Two dollars for a phone call and one of those rolls.”

The sisters glanced at one another. The one who’d been kneading shrugged, and the other said, “Come on through here.” She led him through a set of double doors into a little bakery with bright yellow walls and a vase of lavender on the counter. She pointed to a phone on the wall, and while Floyd waited for the operator to connect him, the girl set three hot to the touch rolls on the counter. She was gone before he could thank her.

He didn’t hear a ring, just crackling static and the operator telling him to hold a while longer. He bit into his roll and began to weep again. There was a click and then a voice faint on the other end.

“Mother,” Floyd said. “Mother?”

“Floyd?” Hattie said.

“I hope I didn’t … I guess I woke you up.” He hoped the crackling hid the tears in his voice.

“Is that you, Floyd? What’s the matter? Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, Mother. I’m fine. I just wanted to … I haven’t called in a while.”

“You never have called,” Hattie said in that way that would have been an accusation in anyone else’s mouth but was a simple statement of fact in hers. “Are you hurt?”

“No, Mother. I’m not hurt. I just wanted to say hello. I’m coming back in about two weeks.”

“You got some mail from this colored musician’s association,” Hattie said.

“Two weeks, Mother.”

“I heard you.” She sighed. “You’re in one piece?”

“I’m fine.”

“Fine doesn’t call before dawn.” The line buzzed between them.

“I guess I’ll hang up. I just wanted to say hello. I guess … how you keeping?”

“I’m alright, Floyd. Same as always.”

“Daddy? How’s Daddy?”

“He’s fine too. Everybody’s fine. Floyd, what’s going on?”

“I’m going to hang up now, Mother. I know it’s late. I thought … I figured you might have been sitting down there in the living room like you do.”

“I was.”

“So I didn’t wake you up.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well, I guess I’ll hang up.”

“Alright.”

“Mother?”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember Carl? What happened to Carl?”

Hattie paused a long while before answering. “I don’t know what happened to him. The family moved away.”

“But he’s alright, don’t you think? I mean, you never heard of anything bad happening to him.”

“I don’t know. I have no idea. Why are you asking me about that boy, Floyd?”

“No reason. He just came to mind is all. I’ll hang up now. It was nice talking to you, Mother. I’ll see you soon.”

“Good-bye, Floyd.”

“I’ll see you soon!”

The line died. He put the receiver back into its cradle and sniffed the butter rolls a good long time before finishing them off. Floyd put another dollar on the counter and left the bakery through the front door.

FLOYD’S CONCERT BEGAN
promptly at ten the next night, before the drunks got too loud and all the respectable women had gone home for the evening. Women were good at a gig: the more there were, the less the chances of a fight. Floyd took the stage, horn in hand. The place was packed. Cleota’s, Floyd had learned, was the only music club in three counties that allowed colored folks.

Floyd felt the weight of the audience’s expectations and of their weariness and their circumstance, which he could not ever know, not quite. Hattie referred to Georgia as, “that place.” She wouldn’t call the state by its name. Floyd didn’t know what had happened to her there. Hattie and August were refugees from the South; Floyd’s knowledge of it was comprised of their terror and nostalgia and rage. Not so infrequently, news of a lynching or a murdering white mob traveled up from “that place” and invaded the houses of Wayne Street, leaving the residents of the block hushed and grateful for their asylum in the North. Looking out at his audience, Floyd felt an irremediable gap of experience about which he was at turns defensive and at turns humble. He owed these people something, of that much he was sure. Music was the only way he could step into the current of their experience. There was some condescension in this, but he knew no other way to go about it.

Floyd rubbed the bowl of his trumpet, for luck and in homage to the songs he was going to play. Cleota’s was too poor for proper house lights, so the proprietor turned off a few of the overheads in the back, but Floyd could still see the people. The piano man played and the drummer tapped the snare, easy, just enough to prime the crowd. Darla was in the back in a dress as red as a drop of blood. Floyd hadn’t seen her since the night before. He waited. Lafayette was not in the club. The piano man grew impatient with dragging out his intro. Floyd told himself it wasn’t the boy’s arrival he was waiting for. Still, it was not until a moment later when Lafayette slipped into the crowd that Floyd lifted the horn to his lips.

Now the piano man played in earnest and the drummer pixied the cymbals with the drum brush. The crowd leaned forward. Floyd’s horn flashed in the light. He blew “’Round Midnight.” A man in the front called out, “Goddamn!” Floyd made the horn stutter, then played it smooth. It keened and it wailed. It asked the people what their troubles were and blew them back to them. Floyd got out of the way and let his horn carry him out to the edges of himself. There wasn’t anything that horn couldn’t say. “Not in this world or the next!” shouted the man in front.

In the midst of their ecstasies, a ruckus in the center of the crowd. Floyd looked over the bowl of his trumpet to see a motorcar of a man swaying drunkenly on his heels in the center of the confusion. He shoved Lafayette mightily with one fat arm. Lafayette stumbled backward but did not fall. He regained his footing—he was quick—and advanced on the man, fists up. The pianist stopped playing, as did the drummer. Only Floyd went on blowing one endless note, his chest tightening.

The drunken man swung and missed, the force of his wild punch destabilizing him. Lafayette was on him in an instant, jabbing at him double time, a punch to the gut and another to the throat. He would have kept hitting him had a couple of guys not grabbed him from either side and held his arms behind his back. The big man was bent over with the wind knocked out of him. He pointed at Lafayette and tried to say something. The men who’d intervened muscled Lafayette toward the door.

It was not the fat man they’d decided to remove but Lafayette. No one protested. Floyd held his horn at his side. Some of the people in the crowd jeered as Lafayette passed them. Most did nothing, but Floyd couldn’t find any sympathy in their faces. Even if it had been worse, if the big man had beat Lafayette bloody, the people would not have protected him. In this place, or in New Orleans, or wherever they might go, now and always, Lafayette would be a thing too awful to be tolerated.

He wrenched himself free from his captors long enough to spin on his heels and fix Floyd with that flinty gaze from the night before. Floyd almost jumped down from the stage. He’d punch his way through the crowd and bash the men with his trumpet until they released Lafayette. Floyd stepped to the edge of the stage. Lafayette scuffled at the door with the two men. The audience, no longer interested in the disturbance, looked up at Floyd expectantly. He nodded to the piano man and lifted the horn to his mouth once again.

The crowd loved him. He played three encores. The band that went onstage after Floyd invited him to share their last set. When the show was over, the man in front, who’d hooped like he was in church, wouldn’t be denied the chance to buy Floyd a whiskey, and then another and then a third. Darla came to the bar too but was soon whisked off to the dance floor. The whiskies made Floyd nauseous. He didn’t take his eyes from the door. As if Lafayette would come back after Floyd had denied him. The hooping man said, “That’s some mess they started in the middle of your song. That boy ought to know better than to come in here.”

Floyd sat on the barstool surrounded by admirers. All at once, his cowardice and his heartbreak caught up to him. He steadied himself against the onslaught, though he felt like crying, and tried to finish his drink. The glass slipped from his hand. The men who were huddled around him slapped him on the back and ordered shots, “Little glass, easy to hold on to!” the hooping man said. Floyd laughed louder than anybody and then put back four shots so fast the bartender could barely keep up. When he careened from his barstool and stumbled outside, his group of fans must have thought he’d gone to vomit.