Blues for Zoey (4 page)

13

The Second Time I Saw
Her

Once Mom was all tucked in at the hospital, Nomi and I left her. She hated it
when we waited around, pining for her ey
es to open. If she caught us there when she woke up, she'd only be angry.

A streetcar came along just as we got to the stop, and w
e jumped on. We were coming up Steinway when
I spotted her again: the Girl with the Dreads. She was standing out in front of Dave Mizr
a's jewelry shop. He had closed for the night and, even though it was early evening, the whole block was deserted. All except for he
r.

Our stop was still two blocks away, so I only saw her as we rolled past. I knew it was the same girl. The same jean shorts, the same eruption of dreadlocks, the same T-shirt dripping down one arm.

She still had the cross, too, only n
ow it was propped up in front of her (in front of her face, actually, so I still couldn'
t make out her features). She had the butt end of the horizontal bar level with her mouth, almost like she was kissing it.

It was a humid night, so a bunch of the streetcar windows were tipped open. That was how I realized it wasn't a kiss. She wasn't frenching the cross, she was
playing
it. It was some sort of musical instrument.

Just as the streetcar rounded the curve at Emerson, I saw the horn, something like a bugle or a trumpet, nailed to the cr
ossbar.

The melody she played was a sad one, all in a minor key, slow and kind of beautiful. We
only heard a snatch of her music and then she
was gone, the streetcar grinding around the shallow corner
.

We got off at our stop and I tried to hurry back. I was so curious. Nomi, however, wasn't in the mood to rush.

“
I'm tired,”
she whined.

“It's just two blocks. C'mon!”

Instead, she stopped dead. “Can you carry me?”

Stupidly, I figured with Nomi on my
back, we would both go as fast as I could run.
When she climbed up, however,
I realized I hadn't carried her in a
long time. She had grown a lot since then,
and it didn't help that she started
up with a familiar complaint.

“We used to have a piano, didn't we?” she asked suddenly, speaking dir
ectly into my ear. (I wondered if this was the real reason she wanted a piggyback: to
get my undivided attention.) “Mom gave you piano lessons,
didn't she? When you were my age?”

It was tr
ue. Once upon a time, Mom had been a real professional. She gave recitals and had a great job playing with the city
orchestra. Back when I was a kid, I wo
rked pretty hard under Mom's tutelage, but I was never any good. I took after Dad
more. He was the athletic one. Mom kept t
rying, though. She never really gave up on me, at least until the somnitis started. Then it all fell apart.

Her first attack was right in the middle of an afternoon pe
rformance at Rosemount Concert Hall. Every time I hear that music, my stomach clenches.
Gymnopédie Number 1
by Erik S
atie. It was one of her favorite pieces. Halfway through the song, she slumped forwar
d on the piano and …
zzzzzzzzz
.

Nobody could wake her up. She slept for eighteen hours, and the first thing she did when she was conscious again was quit the o
rchestra. Since then, she hasn't played a single note.

When I was a kid, she always talked about how deeply music affects the human brain. Tha
t's why she stopped. She thought the illness was triggered by the music. She believed that
by playing just the right notes, in just the right sequence, she had flipped some forbidden switch inside her mind.

Now, she works part-time at the Evandale Public Library. When she
applied, she didn't tell anyone there
about her illness. Her idea is that if her work environment is quiet enough,
unmusical
enough, it'll prevent anything f
rom happening. So far, it seems to have worked.
She still has attacks—obviously—but she's never
had one while sitting behind the checkout desk. Between the money f
rom Dad's life insurance and what she earns from the library, we get by.

“Okay, yes,” I said to Nomi, “but that was back when we had room for a piano.”

“We still have the synthesizer. In the laundry room.”

This was also true. In the closet where we kept the washer and
dryer, wedged in between the machines
and the wall, there was a thoroughly outdated Casio electric piano.

“I don't even know if it still works,” I said.

“But you could teach me to play on it. I asked Mom again this week, but she said she can't remember how to do it. She says something's wrong in her head.”

“Maybe.”

When I came around
the bend, I expected to hear the girl's music,
but I didn't. The sidewalk in front
of Dave Mizra's place was empty. The girl, whoev
er she was, had vanished.

14

Fire & Ice

The next morning,
Mom was still in the hospital. I had the early shift at work, so Nomi came down to the laundromat with me. She brought
pillows and a blanket and curled up on one of
the benches near the counter. By the time I
'd put out the pressed clothes for morning pickup, she was snoozing soundly. About a minute after I had flipped the
OPEN
sign, Dave Mizra came jogging ac
ross the street. Dave lived directly above his je
welry store, Mizra's Fire
& Ice. Like half the other businesses on the block, the name was a pun.

Fire = gold.

Ice = diamonds.

Ha ha
.

Yes, it's lame, but it's hard to talk when you work at a laundromat called the Sit 'n' Spin.

“Kaz-o-matic 3000! Good morning, good morning!” he shouted at me.

I put my finger to my lips and pointed to Nomi.

“Ah, sorry.”

Kaz-o-matic 3000 was the nickname Dave
Mizra had given me. It was a mash-up of
the name on my driver's license (
Kazuo
, which in Japanese means “harmonious man” and which I almost never reveal to anyone)
and the fact that every washer at the S
it 'n' Spin was stencilled with the name
Lav-o-Matic
3000
.

He had given himself a nickname too. His real name was Dodi, but he went by Da
ve because, as he explained once, in English
Dodi
sounds too much like a child's toy. Like
Lego
.

“I am afraid I have only shirts for you today,” he said, laying a pile on the counter.

“Premium Service for Delicates?” I asked.

“Of course!
A
lways
Premium.”

“Just these?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, suddenly
more solemn than usual. “This is all.”

I was surprised. Dave Mizra was kn
own around Evandale for having extravagant taste. He drove a fancy car (an old Mercedes);
he wore swanky clothes; he spent tons of money
on hair pomade.

It was his clothes, however, that stood out the most. Dave Mizra strutted around the neighborhood in suits that ranged f
rom shark-blue gangster pinstripes to colorful patchworks
of hippie suede, complete with tassels swishing from the arms. This was the reason I knew him so well: his entire wardrobe was dry clean only.
So it struck me as odd to see him come in with so small a bundle of clothes.

“Is everything okay?”

He glanced out into the street. “Oh, yes-yes.
Everything is perfect.”

Dave Mizra is the
only person who thinks Evandale is a paradise. He never told me why he left Algeria, but my impression is that it had something to do with a civil war they had in that country back in the nineties.

“I left, and because I speak
French,” he once told me, “I moved to Paris. Over there, the immigration people said I must become a welder. Either that or dri
ve a taxi.
A welder!
Yes, I work with metal, but I am an artist! So I come here, instead. And I
followed my dreams.” Whenever he mentioned his dreams, he always pointed ac
ross the street.

It was debatable whether or not Dave Mizra was an artist. He designed a
few pieces of his own jewelry,
sure, but he also had a massive placard out in front of Fire &
Ice that read:
WE BUY YOUR GOLD!!!
It wasn't the sort of thing that made you think of Picass
o.

The only thing missing from Dave Mizr
a's paradise was his wife, who was still back in Algeria. A few years ago, they had met here and gotten married, but even though they were hitched, ther
e was some problem with the immigration papers and on their way back from a visit
home she was stopped at the border. That was almost
two years ago. Dave Mizra had been t
rying to bring her back ever since.

Of all the things that were interesting and eccentric about Dave Mizra,
the oddest thing about him wasn't his clothes, his car, his p
retensions of being an artist, or his crazy idea that Evandale was a paradise. No, the most surprising thing about Dave Mizra was his deep, abiding, seemingly bottomless love of se
venties punk rock and glam. Seriously.

Everything I knew about the Ramones, the Clash, David Bowie,
Slade, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, T. R
ex, the Jim Carroll Band, and so many others, I had learned, improbably, from Da
ve Mizra. In order to educate me musically, he was always bringing over CDs from his cherished personal collection.

“I have brought you something special today,” he said now, obviously trying to shift the topic from whatever had distracted him outside. He slid a CD jewel case out of his man-purse and clapped it between his hands, holding it like he was praying. “I think you are finally ready for this.”

“Who is it this time?” I reached out for his hands, but he pulled away.

“How do I know you are ready?”

“It would help if I knew what I was supposed to be ready for.”

He nodded as if my wisdom had impressed him. “Of course. There is no way to prepare.”

He opened his hands and rev
ealed a CD. The plastic case was scratched and worn, but the
cover was clear enough. It was a white square printed with something like a Rorschach test, one of those random ink blots a psychiatrist uses to r
eveal whether you want to have sex with your auntie or just torture rodents.

The blot itself resembled a spider, ex
cept each of the eight legs weren't hairy or insect-like. Instead, each one was the bare leg of a woman,
complete with eight pointy stilettos. Sprouting from the
legs was not one but two naked torsos. What you ended up
with was the silhouette of a twin-stripper-slash-eight-legged beast. In heels.

The only words we
re at the top, printed in a tiny font like something clanked out of a broken typewriter:

Shain Cope
Freu
dian Slap

“Kaz-o-matic 3000, it is my pleasure to introduce you to the genius of Mr. Shain Cope.”

“
Who?
”

Unlike the other CDs that had come to me via Dave Mizra—all of which had rung vague bells somewhe
re in the back of my head—I was certain I had never heard of Shain Cope before.

“‘
Who
,' he says!” Da
ve Mizra was clearly disgusted. “In every age, there is a—what
do you call it? A maverick. But in those
days—
oh
! Everyone was a maverick!
That's what made Shain Cope special. Here you have the maverick of the mavericks
.” He leaned over his pile of shirts and pressed the CD into my hand with
both of his. (Dave Mizra is the so
rt of guy who'll
never, never, never
discover d
ownloads. He's too much of an old-school fetishist for the tattered little booklets that come with CDs.)

I did what I always do when he brings me new music. I turned it over and read the names of the songs, not that the name tells you much.

“‘Colt's-
Tooth Blues,'” I said. It was the first song on the album. I liked how the consonants bumped rhythmically over my lips. The words kind of forced y
ou to hold the vowels a bit longer, almost as if you were singing. So maybe I was wrong. Maybe y
ou
could
tell something about a song just from its name.

“
Yes
! A classic!” Dave Mizra hummed a bar from a tune I almost recogniz
ed. “Do you know this? You must ha
ve heard it!” It was the same incredulous question he asked every time he came over with a CD.

I flipped it over again, e
yeing the lurid ink blot. Just as I did, Mr. Rodolfo pounded up from
the basement. I hadn't even known he was down there.

“What the hell is that?” he asked
, looking over my shoulder at the C
D case. Before I could answer,
he reached over and plucked it
out of my hands. After looking a
t it for a second, he frowned a
t Dave Mizra. “What're you
putting in this kid's head?”

“An education.”

“More like insect porn.”

Dave Mizra rolled his eyes. “Philistine.”

“Wrong,”
said Mr. Rodolfo. “I'm Portuguese.”

Dave Mizra scoffed again and Mr. Rodolfo stalked off to check on the machines. (Whenever he was in a bad mood, he either tidied up or tinkered with Ol'
Betty.)

In general, Mr. Rodolfo and Dave Mizra had never really gotten
along, but a few weeks earlier, things
had hit a new low. The
Evandale Chronicler
published a sto
ry about how the lead singer from Wild Blue Bounce had stopped
in at Dave Mizra's shop. I wasn't r
eally into the band, but I definitely understood it was a big deal for Veronica Heller to sample your wares.

Dave Mizra had the article posted in the f
ront window of Fire & Ice, which of course
made Mr. Rodolfo dead jealous. As I'm sure
my boss would say, having a minor celebrity visit
your store was nothing if not
good
for business.

“Just listen to it,” Dave Mizra told me. “This is music like nothing else.
”

When he said that—
music like nothing else
—I thought of the girl I had seen.

“Can I ask you something? Have you seen a girl with, like, weird dreadlocks? Hanging around your corner?”

“Of course,” he said. “She's my angel.”

“Your angel?”

“My
ma
verick
angel.” He really liked that word.

“So you've met her?”

“Not
really. But it's like I said.
” With one hand, he waved a little flourish in the air. “She plays like an angel!”

“Kind of a weird instrument, though.”

“That is what makes her a maverick.”

When Dave Mizra left, M
r. Rodolfo gave up his tinkering and came to the front of the laundromat. I was tagging Dave Mizra's
shirts, and when Mr. Rodolfo saw what I
was doing, he shook his head.

According to him, Premium Service for Delicates was exclusively for women's wear. So when he read the tags, he said the same thing he had been saying ever since that article had been published in the
Chronicler
.

“Faggot.”

Then he thumped back down into the basement.