Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

Chip fumbled for a damn switch. ‘Hell, kid. Lights is out.’

‘Not just the lights,’ said Coleman. ‘The power’s been cut.’

Chip let go with a string of foul curses. I started to smile, hearing it. Then there was a sudden bang, and Chip swore again. ‘Who put the goddamn chairs in the goddamn middle of the goddamn floor?’

I wiped the rain off my face with both hands. ‘How we goin record without no electricity?’

‘It a war, brother,’ said Coleman. ‘What you goin do?’

There come the scrape of a match, then light flared up in old Hiero’s bony hand. His eyesockets deep in shadow. ‘We goin play. Ain’t nothin else to do.’

‘But we ain’t goin record nothin.’

The kid turned away.

‘Aw, it goin come back on eventually,’ said Coleman. ‘We’ll lay it down then, Sid. Don’t you worry.’

Someone had found a old candle stub and set it on a upturned glass on a chair in the middle of the studio. I got a glance round. The studio was narrow, cramped, the ceiling oddly high. The soundproofed walls looked scarred, like there been a damn gunfight. The floorboards under us been painted white, and they rattled loosely as we shifted round.

‘That goin sound just beautiful on the disc,’ said Chip, frowning.

The kid stood in the corner, staring out at us through the darkness. He looked right creepy. I couldn’t see his eyes.

I shrugged my axe down against the wall. ‘Come on then.’

I was feeling the nerves, see. I ain’t picked up a axe since that damn morning with Armstrong, in that other life. I run my fingers down the sleek strings in that flickering light, feeling sort of sad, like I been lying to myself bout something a long damn time. I thought, It don’t matter now, do it? It don’t matter if you stumble. Ain’t nothin to be proved no more.

There was a kit in the corner. Coleman started blowing out his valves. I looked at the kid, he looked at me, and then Chip was counting us in. It was that sudden, brother. Ain’t no talking at all. Just all of us clambering aboard that music like we all got the same ticket for the same damn train.

And it felt right . I just fold right back into Chip, climbing up and down the ladders of sound he lay out for me. Coleman follow us in with a bold, lurching cry on his brass. It felt full, rich, pained in some leggy way. Both bright and grave.

All a sudden Chip give me a look of surprise from his dark corner.

Kid wasn’t even hardly listening, it seemed. Handling his horn with a unexpected looseness, with a almost slack hand, he coaxed a strange little groan from his brass. Like there was this trapped panic, this barely held-in chaos, and Hiero hisself was the lid.

I pulled back some as he come in, fearing we was going to overpower him in that narrow closet. But he just soften it down with me, blur it up. Then he blast out one pure, brilliant note, and I thought, my god.

I might’ve been crying. It was the sound of something growing a crust, some watery thing finally gelling. The very sound of age, of growing older, of adolescent rage being tempered by a man’s heart. Yeah, that was it. It was the sound of the kid’s coming of age. As if he taken on some of old Armstrong’s colossal sadness.

It made even me sound solar. Hot in a simmering, otherworldly way. And all at once I understood what the kid was to me. That only playing with him was I pulled out of my own sound. Alone, I wasn’t nothing. Just a stiff line, just a regular keeper of the beat. But the kid, hell, his horn somehow push all that forward too, he shove me on up into the front sound with him. Like he was holding me in time.

Maybe I was just finally forgiving myself for it. For failing. Maybe that was the sound of forgiveness I heard in my old axe. Cause that night, swinging by candlelight in that cramped room, everything warring in me settled down.

I known without a doubt I ain’t never be involved in no greater thing in my life. This was it, this was everything.

We was all of us free, brother. For that night at least, we was free.

Next morning, we woke to a low thrum coming up through the floor, the windows rattling. I thought at first it was just the dream of all that jazz we done play. But then I woke for real, my blood thundering. I got up quick, pulled back the blackout curtains, stuck my drowsy face out into the sunlight. Streets was empty, the cobblestones dull in the light. But echoing off the buildings, through the squares, that steady rumble come clear. Boots. Thousands of boots marching on pavement.

‘Hell,’ said Chip, yawning. ‘Tell me that ain’t my head.’

‘It ain’t you head.’ I cleared my throat, spat down at the gutter. Then I leaned back into the flat. ‘Krauts.’

It was the fourteenth of June.

The kid was shivering hard in his blankets.

‘How he doin?’

Chip pulled the sheets higher on him. Kid ain’t even crack a eyelid. ‘All that damn playin last night run him down. It ain’t good, buck. What you think?’

I didn’t know. I could feel my old fingers still throbbing with the night past. I felt jumpy, a strange, thrilled feeling cutting through me. Hell. I gone over to the light switch, flicked it on. The electricity was back up.

‘Ain’t all bad then,’ Chip grunted. ‘Lights workin now that it daytime .’

‘Trust the Krauts,’ I said, extending a salute. ‘ Heil! ’

But he ain’t smiled. Not like he used to.

‘We got to get out of here, Sid,’ he said, his voice low. ‘We can’t stay. You know it.’

But I was still hopping from our session the night before. ‘We Yankees , brother. We can damn well stay. It ain’t our war.’

‘You ain’t never heard of no one gettin shot, just cause they a ass?’

‘Chip,’ I said. ‘Come on, brother. They ain’t goin hunt you down. They ain’t even known who you was back in Berlin.’

‘I said ass, brother. I wasn’t talkin bout me.’ But he wasn’t reassured. He just stared miserably out the window at the blue sky. ‘The smoke cleared off in the night.’

‘Sure. It a perfect day to invade a city.’

Delilah come out then, tying off her silk dressing gown. She stood in the doorway, studying us. Her face looked ashen. ‘They’re here,’ she said simply.

We was up then, getting dressed, slipping on our old shoes and leaving the flat, Delilah, Chip and me. Leaving the kid to sleep off some of his sickness. We made sure to bring our papers with us.

‘What we goin eat?’ said Chip as we stepped out into the still street.

I glanced at the windows across the way. I didn’t reckon anyone still living over there.

Delilah said nothing.

Chip scowled. ‘Aw, what, ain’t we goin eat nothin ? Krauts might be here but my old belly don’t know it. Come on. Least just stop in at the Bug’s.’

But we wasn’t walking that direction at all. We made our way down towards place de la Concorde. Folks dotted the street corners, a few vendors setting up their Friday stalls. We wandered past, feeling odd and lightheaded like we in a strange dream. A jane rode by on her bicycle, weeping. I heard Chip swear.

I suddenly realized I ain’t heard a single cannon firing all morning, the air still except for that thrumming under the cobblestones. We went on, past the boarded up bistros, past the shuttered pharmacies and cafés, the blue sky overhead awful in its emptiness.

We come out at place de la Concorde, onto the back of a gathering crowd. I could see a German tank, shining like it just been washed, a helmeted soldier in grey standing in the turret. Such harshness and such beauty under that June sun. There was big guns placed on the roofs of the nearer buildings. And there was thousands, brother, thousands of Boots filing past.