Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

It was dark inside. I started up the short steps, blinking and peering about. The driver sat at his huge steering wheel, looking scarred and rough. I couldn’t see his eyes. Through the shadows I nodded hello. He looked away.

‘Ain’t he going to take our tickets?’ I asked Chip as we sat down.

Chip shrugged.

My eyes was starting to adjust. It was yellow as a toilet inside, the seats foamless and reeking of old piss. There was others huddled in the chill with us, pale and grim and avoiding eye contact. I shivered a little. Folks with strange bundles gripped in their hands, scarves and hoods pulled down low. Their faces blurred and indistinct. A woman was coughing in some row farther back.

Was like they been waiting for us. No sooner had we sat down than the driver got out, banged shut all the baggage doors, and come back on board glowering. He yelled some words in Polish, but no one seemed to pay no attention. Then he sat down, pulled out some levers, started the old engine with a roar, snapped his dusty window open. The brakes groaned, the axles hissing under us like asps.

And then there was a sound like an enormous pressure releasing, and that huge rusted bus started shuddering on its big tires, rolling slowly out into the dead road.

……….

We pulled out through the gloomy streets of Stettin, passing grey façades of chipped concrete, shuttered windows, folks dressed in dark coats carrying bags of groceries. The street-lights was on even though it couldn’t be much past noon. The roads looked windswept, bare, as if readying for winter.

We wasn’t but ten minutes out when the bus slowed to a stop. An old man lumbered up the aisle and, climbing down, started walking out into the dark fields. He carried a sack of onions over one shoulder and I watched him trudge off into the gloam and disappear.

We pulled away again. The asphalt on these roads was bad and the old bus shuddered and crunched and banged its way onward. The city was now far behind and we was driving through the blasted countryside, past desolate fields, long swathes of dark forest. I started thinking all this was real. Hell. I ain’t quite believed it and then I was sure I ain’t believed it and then I didn’t care if I believed it or not. But here I was, no longer really doubting Hiero would be where Chip said he was.

‘ Half Blood Blues ,’ Chip said suddenly. He was rubbing the stubble on his cheeks like he sharpening his old fingers. ‘You know I always figured it was about himself.’

‘Don’t start, Chip. Let’s just leave it for a bit.’

‘But it ain’t. I reckon he named it for Delilah.’

I closed my eyes. Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about none of it, not now, not later.

‘We should’ve brought him something,’ said Chip. ‘A gift.’

I snorted. ‘Like what. Wine? A keychain?’

‘I don’t know. Something. It ain’t never good showing up empty-handed.’

My eyes was still closed. Now I opened them, gave him a look. ‘That’s what you worried about? Not having a gift for him?’

Chip seemed unruffled, though. ‘Doesn’t hurt to be polite, Sid. That’s all I’m saying,’

The hours passed. After a time Chip slept. I slept and woke. Glanced over at him, dead as winter beside me. His face looked real smooth there, the wrinkles slipping back like water so that you almost seen the purity of bone beneath, his essence.

But then Chip cracked one eye open, his lean wet lips drawn down. ‘Hey.’

I gave him a sleepy old look.

‘Hey,’ he said again. ‘Sid.’

‘What?’

‘Hey, you remember Panther Brownstone?’

‘Mmm.’

‘That old gate who give me my first go at the skins?’

I grimaced. ‘First go at the skins is right. What was that gal’s name?’

‘Shit.’ Chip smiled a little, but thoughtful-like. He sat up, started grinning for real. ‘I forgot about that. Hell. Yours had a chassis made you want to buy the whole damn car.’

‘She was my first love, that girl,’ I said.

‘Best damn trombonist you like to meet.’

I chuckled. ‘Anyway, what brought back that memory?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. All this, I guess.’ He gestured at the strange greyness passing us by. The long wide stretches of field and farmland. ‘Something about it gets you to thinking.’

I nodded. ‘What about him?’ I said after a minute.

‘Who?’

‘Panther Brownstone. What about him?’

‘Nothing. I was thinking he seemed like a son of a bitch, but he wasn’t.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

But he was a son of a bitch. I remembered it clear. A rainy Tuesday, Baltimore all sultry and stinking of piss. I was shaking like crazy, following Chip down into that club. I ain’t never seen nothing like it. Thirteen years old. That joint stinking of rubbing alcohol, dark as my shirt, with cheap wood tables set crazily over the checkered floor in the shadows. And Panther Brownstone, lean and bony as a broom, got up from a table in the back and stepped up onstage, winking at old Chip.

‘We got a special guest tonight,’ he announced. ‘Ladies and gents, just in from the Heights, put your skin together for Charles C. Jones!’

‘Chip,’ I remember hissing at him. ‘What’s going on?’

But he just gave me that old grin. ‘Lower your pipes and mind me,’ he said.

Then he’d bounded onstage, shaking out his legs and arms as if trying to get the rain from his clothes. I tell you, I almost hit the floor.

He sat himself down at the kit. Couple of folks laughed from somewhere in the smoke, he seemed so crazy, so coltish. But with a nod from Panther, he hit his sticks together, and they kicked off into the set.

Hell. I known he played the drums a bit, but nothing like this . I watched in awe as Chip skipped gently on the cymbals, worked his skinny thigh into a rhythm on the bass. Holy hell, my boy could wail . Limbs all twitching, his very skin seemed to peel back on the harder hits. Was one of those moments someone comes unclothed, you see this whole other life in them. I was trampled flat.

After the set, the audience was like to tear off their clothes, they so damn delighted. They roared and slapped the tables, ladies flapped their stained drink napkins. When Chip come down off the stage, I flung my arms so hard around him he damn near fell down.

‘How you learn to play like that, Chip man?’ I yelled. ‘Where you learn?’

Panther come up then, in his plum three-piece suit, and put one big hand on Chip’s shoulder. He wore a big gold watch on his skinny wrist, and his nails was perfectly manicured. And so damn clean . I ain’t never seen such clean hands on a grown man before.

‘Boys,’ he said smoothly, ‘I’d like to stand you a drink.’

I was in love. Pure and simple. This place, with its stink of sweat and medicine and perfume; these folks, all gussied up never mind the weather — this, this was life to me. Forget Sunday school and girls in white frocks. Forget stealing from corner stores. This was it, these dames swaying their hips in shimmering dresses, these chaps drinking gutbucket hooch. The gorgeous speakeasy slang. I’d found what my life was meant for.

Panther Brownstone, he led us to a corner table he emptied just by his presence. Man, I thought, that’s power. We sat at the knifed-up chairs, while he snapped a tan handkerchief out of his front pocket and whisked the nutshells and cigarette butts to the floor. His eyes glistened like beetles.

‘A scotch, neat,’ he said to the barmaid when she come over. ‘Two lemonades for the boys here.’

She smiled at us, looking like my mama’s sister. Hell.

‘I’d stand you boys some real drinks,’ he said smoothly, ‘but I ain’t no Socrates. I don’t corrupt no kids. Just everyone else.’