Tiger Rag (12 page)

She walked him down the hall with the pistol in his back. She opened the front door. “Hands up, and clasp them.”

“What?”

“Squeeze your hands together, you son of a bitch!”

As he stepped outside, she raised the gun and shot him through the hands and slammed the door on his screams.

Ruby was in shock. Marielle calmly wrapped her arms around her. “I’m so sorry, honey. Did he hurt you?”

“I’m all right. You shot him.”

They could hear him howling down the street.

“I know him,” Marielle said. “His name is Fawkes. And he’s not done paying for this.”

Two days later, on a warm autumn evening, Marielle disappeared without a trace. It had been a day like any other. A man brought his sick daughter by for some herbs. Marielle visited a client in the hospital, then drove to Metairie and cast a spell to protect a woman from her ex-husband. Later, she dined alone at her favorite restaurant, Ciro’s. The waiters said she received a phone call from a man. They spoke briefly, and five minutes later she went out to the parking lot. No one heard from her after that or saw her blue Cadillac.

Theodora told Ruby that Marielle had made plenty of enemies.
In Ruby’s time with her, she had met so many of her friends and admirers that it never occurred to her that Marielle had enemies. Theodora said, “You do work like hers, you make enemies.” That’s why she had a gun, Ruby thought. Ruby mentioned Fawkes, but Theodora shook her head and said Marielle had more dangerous enemies than him. The local police chief, for example.

“Mathias Beaumont,” Ruby said.

“She told you about him?”

“She also told me that she dated his half brother.”

“That she did. For a while, Wick and Miss Marielle was tight. Then they broke off. Wick was all right at first, but then he began drinking heavy, and she don’t care for that. Later he shot himself. It was on account of his gambling debts, but the chief blamed Miss Marielle. At Wick’s funeral he said he would take her down one day. But she can watch out for herself. I’m hoping it’s like those other times.”

“What other times?” Ruby asked.

“When Miss Marielle lit out without a word about where she was going. She used to have a cabin upstate, in the Girardeau Woods, but she sold it a few years back. And after a few days, she would call to check in.”

This time there was no call. Two weeks passed. Theodora and Ruby contacted everyone they could think of who might know something. They visited the woman with whom Marielle spent the afternoon and the restaurant where she disappeared. They talked to the maître d’, the waiters, the busboys, and came up empty. They went over her calendar for that entire month, but there was nothing unusual. Going to the police, of course, was impossible.

Though Theodora remained hopeful, Ruby had the sick
feeling Marielle wasn’t going to return. She couldn’t stay in that house any longer. It was too painful. The first person who had really loved her for herself, and she was gone.

She returned to her mother in Mobile. Camille had hooked up again with Buzz. When Ruby told her what had happened with Marielle, it didn’t really register. “Oh, she’ll turn up,” her mother said, then gave Ruby a hundred dollars. “Go to Panama, honey, for your birthday.” Ruby’s birthday was two months off. There just was no room for her in that cramped apartment where Camille and Buzz and their drinking pals were chugging Gallo. Camille said she had a lady friend in Panama City who owned a hostel where Ruby could earn her keep working as a maid.

That was it for Ruby. She was desperate to escape. She hardly knew her grandmother in Miami—she and Camille hadn’t spoken in years, and her grandmother had only met Ruby once, when Camille and her first husband paid a surprise visit, drunk out of their minds. Her grandmother was disgusted by their antics in front of the child, and she and Camille had a terrible falling-out. After that, Camille remained incommunicado, which meant that Ruby, too, had no contact with her grandmother. Now when Ruby got hold of her phone number and asked if she could come live with her, her grandmother didn’t skip a beat. “Get on a Greyhound today,” she said. Ruby bought a one-way ticket and never looked back.

Ruby was lucky to have been with Marielle, and luckier still to end up with her grandmother. Her grandmother saved her. Her name was Theresa Cardillo. She had given up the name Broussard after her husband died. “We were only married six years,” she explained, “we weren’t happy, and when it was over, I wanted to put it behind me. I wanted my name back.”
Ruby wanted to put things behind her, too. She also gave up Broussard and legally took her grandmother’s name. They lived at 6591 Hyacinth Drive, a long street lined with stucco houses and coconut palms. It was the first place Ruby ever lived for more than a year. A safe neighborhood. Girls could go out alone at night. Kids played in the street. They had a cat named Tuxedo, rescued from a fire, who lived to be eighteen. No dog or cat had ever survived long with Camille. Therese Cardillo was a seamstress who saved enough to start her dry cleaning business. She put in twelve-hour days, six days a week. Her Spanish was better than her English, but she pushed Ruby to study, got her to school, paid for whatever her scholarships didn’t cover. She lived to see her graduate from college and medical school. She traveled to New York for Ruby’s wedding.

“When she died the next year, after you were born, a part of me went with her,” Ruby said to Devon, who, even after her eyes had adjusted, was glad to have heard all this in the darkness. The only other sound to reach her in the late-night stillness was the occasional rush of snowflakes against the window. “I felt lost. Another part of me had gone with Marielle, and somehow that was worse. I knew Grandma would never come back, but I kept hoping Marielle would. And she never did.

“Meanwhile, soon after I arrived in Miami, Buzz went down with liver failure. My mother moved to Tulsa and started waitressing at a barbecue joint. She bleached her hair and wore a red dress with longhorns stitched on the back. Another waitress took her to a Seventh Day Adventist congregation. She joined and quit drinking, cold turkey. She started phoning me
all the time. She spouted a lot of bullshit, no better than her drunken bullshit, including a plea for forgiveness: ‘For the worst thing I ever did.’ Meaning, sending me away. But that wasn’t the worst thing she did.” Ruby shook her head. “You want to know the worst thing my mother did to me? She lied about the kind of man my father was.”

After his wife’s second miscarriage in as many years, Oscar Zahn moved her and their four-year-old daughter out of New Orleans. He had come there to make his fortune, but they were three months behind in rent and a week from eviction when they slipped out of their house in Algiers in the middle of the night. Because Zahn was an honest man, he left the landlord half his remaining cash—twenty-one dollars. He packed what little they owned, including his recording equipment and three boxes of Edison cylinders, into a hired truck whose owner, a mechanic, drove them north to Baton Rouge on the dirt turnpike named after Jefferson Davis. Zahn’s brother Gerald lived on a farm east of the city with his wife and three children. They grew corn and rye and cured the tobacco their sharecroppers picked. They invited Oscar and his family to stay on as long as they liked. Zahn stored his equipment in their barn and bought himself a third-class ticket for Kansas City on the Southern
Railroad. He checked in to a cheap hotel, ate one meal a day, and set out to find a job so he could send for his family
.

He had gone broke in the second year of the National Phonograph–Indestructible lawsuit. For a while he recorded more cylinders—of Manuel Perez and Lorenzo Tio, among others—but was unable to distribute them. He kept hoping the suit would be settled, but finally he couldn’t afford to rent an office or book a recording space or pay the assistant who had succeeded Myron Guideau
.

Guideau himself had dropped out of sight one week after the recording session with the Bolden Band. Zahn hadn’t believed Guideau’s story of how the first cylinder disappeared, but all he could do was threaten to fire Guideau if it didn’t turn up. Outside the Mix Saloon on Perdido Street, they had an argument so heated that a policeman interceded. Zahn never saw Guideau again after that night, and he never recovered the first cylinder
.

In Kansas City Oscar Zahn wasn’t thinking about the cylinders. Or Buddy Bolden. Or Bunk Johnson. Or anyone else in New Orleans. He was eating a crab apple on a park bench, down to his last dollar and with time running out on him. He had been walking the streets in ninety-degree heat. His feet were calloused. His head was pounding. It had taken him eight days to hit bottom. First he had gone to the Mirabell recording studio, where they didn’t need another engineer; then the
Kansas City Mirror,
where he tried talking his way into a typesetter’s job; then a clerical position at McKay’s department store, for which he was deemed overqualified. And so on, until he lowered his sights to night watchman, factory packing clerk, waiter, and finally assistant janitor at the gas company, where the foreman told him to come back in a week
.

But that night he caught a break. He was in a crowded saloon near his hotel where there was no cover charge, listening to a ragtime band. The band played staples like “Hyacinth Rag” and “Pine Apple Rag.” They were terrible. The rags sounded like dirges—or maybe it was just him, Zahn thought, nursing the one beer he could afford. He was about to leave when a short, stout black man in a top hat and bow tie sat down beside him at the bar
.

Mister Zahn? I’m Cyrus Picou. Buy you a real drink? You probably don’t remember me from New Orleans.

The man had the largest head Zahn had ever seen. His four front teeth were gold and he wore a hoop earring in his left ear
.

I was there, back room at Gabriel Hall, when you recorded my brother Alphonse.

Zahn remembered that Alphonse Picou had brought a bunch of people along when the Onward Brass Band cut two cylinders. They treated the session like a party. Even bringing their own bartender, a case of rye, and two kegs
.

Sure,
Zahn said
, I remember you.

Cyrus Picou smiled and the gold teeth shone
. I can see you don’t, but good enough. There is no proper studio in New Orleans. Is that why you left?

One reason.

Whiskey?
Picou signaled the waiter
. I thought I seen you the other day at the Mirabell studio. My band, the Moonlight Brass, cut a cylinder of “High and Low” there. I’m the bass man. I used to play trombone, but I lost my teeth, and that was the end of that. You still be lookin’ for a job?

I am.

I need someone.

Zahn’s face lit up
. To record you?

To run this saloon. Not the bar, the music.

What?

I own this place. Didn’t you see the sign?

He hadn’t. It was called Cyrus’ Place
.

The waiter brought a bottle and two shot glasses
. Your health,
Picou said, throwing back his
. I need someone to book bands, good bands, someone that knows music.

Zahn sipped the whiskey and watched the band launch into “Syncopation Rag,” then looked at Picou
.

You can say it,
Picou grimaced
. They’re shit. My band and I been up in Chicago, making some real money, and my brother-in-law’s been watching over the place. That’s fine, except he’s been bringing in the bands and he don’t know jack shit about music. It’s embarrassing, me being a musician myself. So, you be interested?

I am,
Zahn replied without hesitation
.

Ten dollars a week. Starting tomorrow.

They shook on it
.

Picou advanced him a week’s pay, and Zahn found an apartment and bought himself a new suit. He sent for his wife and daughter. His wife brought along most of their personal possessions. They gave his brother the Kaiser Wilhelm chest, but the boxes of Edison cylinders Oscar Zahn recorded in New Orleans were placed in a storeroom adjoining the barn. Zahn would never see them again
.

On the outskirts of Philadelphia, negotiating an icy cloverleaf, Ruby turned to Devon and said, “I want to go by the medical school.”

“What?”

“Where I met your father. Just for a minute.”

The storm had abated. It was 18 degrees. In Maryland, beneath a bright sun, the fields and forests had been uniformly white. Ruby had slipped on her mirrored sunglasses even before she blow-dried her hair. Though she had slept for four hours—longer than usual—she was subdued as they checked out of the Hay-Adams. Her outfit du jour was anything but: red slacks, magenta sweater, purple scarf, and white boots. At first, she switched on the car’s air conditioner so she could wear her electric-blue faux fur coat, but within a few blocks, Devon, in her customary jeans and turtleneck, insisted she take off the coat and turn up the heat.

Devon had gotten even less sleep. After Ruby’s bedside visit, she kept going over what she had heard about her mother’s youth. It gave her a new understanding of her mother’s ambivalence about her own musical career. Ruby was proud of the talent Devon showed in her music lessons as a child. But when Devon began hanging out with other musicians and jamming at clubs as a teenager, Ruby discouraged her, suggesting she focus on a viable profession. “So you never have to depend on anyone.” Devon had assumed this was a simple matter of Ruby’s oppressive practicality. Now she realized it must have been anything but simple for Ruby to see her only child become a jazz pianist. It would have horrified her that Devon would follow in her own father’s footsteps.

But what truly stunned Devon the previous night was the extent to which Ruby had kept the New Orleans chapter of her life under wraps.

“You never heard from your aunt Marielle again?” Devon asked, as they entered Philadelphia.

“No one else did, either, as far as I know. My mother didn’t care one way or the other.” She opened her window and the icy air blew against her face. “It hurt. It still hurts. If it hadn’t been for my grandmother, I might’ve killed myself. Oh yeah, another few years with my mother and I would’ve been drinking right alongside her and screwing the kind of guys she was screwing.”