Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

“You just like when you moved out. I know you mad. Please don’t be mad. You like my own son. You better son than my own son.”

I turn to her. She paws her keys and shifts painfully from side to side. She opens her mouth to speak but only manages a wheeze. I raise my hand to stop her, but she tries again.

“I’m in trouble, Sonny. He got me in trouble again.”

“Manny?”

“Si.”

I wave for her to continue.

“He was doing okay. He asks me for some money to go to school. He was doing okay, so I give him a little. He gets his grades and he shows me them. I don’t ask, but he shows me them to prove he’s doing good. He says he’s going to summer school. I ask him if he needs help, but he tells me he has a job. He thinks he’ll be okay. Okay, so it’s his birthday. He’s doing so good. He comes to me and asks — he needs credit card for books and things. He says he’ll pay the bill but he needs me to cosign because he don’t make enough money. I don’t feel right. But he says he really needs it, so I say yes.”

She lowers her head and shakes it slowly. “First the phone calls and the letters. And they keep calling me. They say they gonna put a lee, li—”

“Lien.”

“A lien on this building if I don’t pay. They say they ruin my credit. They say I can lose my house. Sonny, he charge five thousand dollars. They say I have to pay it all. He never make one payment. I don’t have that kind of money.”

I wave for her to stop. She won’t.

“I promise I pay you back. Every bit. It’s a lot of money, I know, but I pay it — five dollars a month if I have to. I pay it all.”

“It’s okay.”

She peeks up at me again. “You not gonna sue me — no?”

“No, Marta. I’m not going to sue you.”

“I know it’s hard times for you, too.”

“I’ll be okay.”

She smiles again, this time with her mouth open. She has lipstick on her teeth.

“You should never have left.”

I shrug my shoulders and start to go.

“I’ll call you. . soon.”

I wave back to her without turning.

I change my guitar’s strings and play, but the new ones sound too bright, so I put the old ones back on. I play scales, moving up and down the neck. I’ve never been very good at them. My fingers aren’t precise. I blame this partly on genetics; there’s always seemed to be an interruption between hands and fingers, as though the nerve bundles were suddenly terminated at the calluses and then the builder used cheaper, less conductive wire. My hands are good for hammering, or crushing beer cans. I’ve always tried to be careful with my hands around Claire and the kids, especially their faces. They seem to disappear in them. Claire has always marveled at my hands, thought that they were beautiful — copper and ash — not hammy but far from fine. The boys have hands like mine, enormous, but they’re children’s hands, still soft, pink for X, russet for C, and they seem better integrated, more so than mine, which look like the contract between beast and man hadn’t been agreed on.

I learned when I was able to buy my own guitar and cheap electric keyboard, that there was so much to do. I had to learn how to play — a song, songs I’d heard and loved as a boy. I wanted to play and I don’t know if I sensed that my paw-hands would never move with the requisite dexterity, or if I was just lazy, but I skipped it — and then I wanted to sound the beautiful, individual note, but the older I got, the less my beast hands would learn. So I play strangely but with confidence, an odd strum-pluck, like an awkward athlete, a stumbling runner. It doesn’t look good, but I get there. I make the song happen. And there are random notes, occasional buzzes and misses, but as a whole, it becomes its own thing, and I’m not sure if it’s me, if it’s my ear that’s grown accustomed to what may be either music or discordant slop, but to me, in my private room, it sounds like something. It has a place.

I need to work out a play list. I should begin with something familiar, not obvious, but something a few in the audience will recognize, if not by name, then, at least, by tradition. Something that will situate, like an epigraph, what will follow, in a context. It has to be the blues. I want to make people sad, sad for me and sad for themselves, and then sadder still that they never realized that there are people so sad — that they have a connection to that sadness. I want to let them know what they’ve missed, to mourn it, then, in the booze-haze and their collective sorrow, have it be reborn. I want to make them happy, then have them see and feel the gap between the two emotions — have them see that the distance they assume is an illusion, a lie told to them, but not have them feel guilt or shame but celebrate the other half — the blues.

The blues— “Baby, where were you last night?” Thomas Strawberry has never had a woman fish, at least not one that I know of. He’s bright today. His fins are high and proud. His good form makes me realize how ill he must have been. It’ll be a shame to leave him. C only thinks of him in passing; X likes to empty containers of food and drop alien objects into his world. My girl is respectful, but her kisses won’t sustain him. Claire will be overwhelmed, on her own with three kids. What if she remarries — a white man? Some high-wage earner, taciturn but gentle, raising my brood, feeding my fish. The blues. I strum a chord to dispel any image that may be forming of Claire rebuilding her life with someone else.

Thomas bloops to remind me that I owe him a song. Pisci —I play music to the fish. I hear words in my head, which I sing out—“This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. .” It comes out of me strangely, with a hillbilly twang and cadence that I’m sure most purists would find ungainly. I like it. The country shuffle is a good beat for walking — plucking the bass notes to mark footsteps. “Everywhere I go, I’m gonna let it shine . .” I invest a bit more into the words, let the last of each line hang out there, bright but warbling in the gravel.

When I finish, I see Marco in the doorway. He looks ashamed. I think he wanted to slip away unnoticed.

“You sound great, man.”

“Thank you.”

“No, really, you should so something with that. Let’s take that out on the road. I’ll quit my job. I’ll be your manager.”

“I’d advise against that. Besides,” I gesture at the fish, “that was a command performance.”

He laughs for a moment, genuinely. But when he stops, there’s too much silence. He doesn’t know what to do in the doorway, so he backs out. He looks uncertain of his place in his own house. His face falls, and I realize that I’ve never seen him sad — hurt. And I can’t help but think that in an ice cream shop a quarter century ago, some wisp of a girl from another town whom he was sweet on came a breath away from calling him a wop to his face. Poor Marco— Mahr-coh! I still can’t play him a song — can’t make him forget through remembrance — not even for a friend.

“You going to coach this season?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Is Segundo going to play?”

“I don’t know.” I look at one of the pictures of his boy on the bookcase. Handsome kid. Another half-breed, but he looks all his father. I wonder what he tells him in private moments. Marco looks at me as though he thinks I’m considering his question more deeply. I need to give him more. “I don’t know if he’ll buy into the team concept.”

He snorts, shakes his head.

“Dinner?”

“No, thanks.”

“Oh, yes — messages: your wife and then some guy. . Kevin?”