Tiger Rag (9 page)

Manny said to Alice one night:
The boy is a natural—he can already hear the music in his head. I give him the rudiments, and two months later, he’s ready to teach me. Must’ve come into this world with the instrument in his hands. You would know.

Charley took his lessons in Manny’s house, down the street. It was the only house on the street that had a small porch, where Manny sat most nights, no matter the weather. Charley liked that porch. All the rooms in the house were painted blue, including Manny’s bedroom, which Charley peeked into more than once: the hard bed with the thin blanket, the low bureau, the mirror big enough to hold a man’s face, no more
.

On Manny’s cornet he practiced scales and arpeggios, learned marching songs, and then one day, from memory, played note for note the hymn “Yes, He Is on His Throne,” which he had heard at church that week. Two weeks later, he began improvising around other hymns as well as the work songs he heard from the stevedores on the levee. At which point Manny took him to Brooker’s Music Store and bought him a proper new brass cornet, better than his own
.

Manny never went to church
. I don’t believe much in sin the way they teach it,
he told Charley on the way home that afternoon, his collar dark with sweat
. For me it’s like this: there are things you do that others forgive, but you can’t never forgive them in yourself. Like being born with a special gift and not using it right. Don’t let that happen to you. And don’t listen to anyone who doesn’t have the gift himself. Just blow that horn the way you hear it in your head. Keep it pure.

That was Manny’s most important piece of advice to Charley. A month later, he was gone to Louisville, Kentucky, where his brother had opened a restaurant. It took Charley some time to grasp that he would never see Manny again. Manny hadn’t made a secret of the fact that he didn’t want to marry again, Alice or anyone else. Yet, the previous Christmas, he had given her a topaz ring—his mother’s ring—as a keepsake, and she kept it for the rest of her life. It was the closest she would come to remarrying, she told Cora, though it wasn’t really that close at all
.

Charley discovered soon enough, sooner than most, that there was a lot more to sin than what Manny had told him. But he never forgot
Keep it pure
as he brought forth an entirely new kind of music. Others would give it a name, but he wouldn’t know about that
.

Devon drove across the state line with Ruby dozing beside her in the passenger seat. She told herself she was accompanying her mother on this journey because she had grown protective of her. If that was so, why wasn’t she calling Ruby on her meltdown? Did she think her own recent history denied her credibility? Was she getting off on watching Ruby lose control? Or had she rightly concluded that Ruby’s denial was impregnable?

Trash picking eight hours a day for sixty days had focused Devon’s mind in a way peyote never could. In an orange jumpsuit she had roamed the highway shoulders with a taciturn Jamaican girl named Giselle, on probation for dealing weed, who handed her a card on her last day, imprinted with a single sentence:
INSTEAD OF TRYING TO CONTROL OTHER PEOPLE, CONTROL YOURSELF
. “Another girl give that to me in jail,” Giselle said. “I made it my motto—to maybe keep me from getting busted again.” Self-control had never been Devon’s strong suit,
but keeping her mother from running off the rails might help her gain some measure of it.

Ruby coughed and raised her head. “How long was I asleep?”

“About twenty minutes.”

“It felt like hours,” she yawned, flipping down the visor and examining her makeup in the vanity mirror. “The red meat knocked me out.”

“But you didn’t eat it.”

“Dessert, then. Meat, sugar—it’s all the same. Look at that!” She sat up suddenly and pointed at a billboard. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

It was an ad for a flashy wristwatch. A model wearing only briefs, heels, a man’s tuxedo jacket, and the watch was eating blackout cake with whipped cream. The open jacket revealed her long hair curled over her breasts.

“Overt message,” Ruby said angrily, “is somebody just fucked her. Subliminal message: somebody just fucked her. She’s fuckable, and the watch keeps perfect time.”

“Yes, Mom. Sex sells watches, cars—”

“And why is she eating?” Ruby demanded.

“Because eating is sexy.”

“Since when?”

Devon realized this was another of those instances when her mother was going to be right, no matter what. In the last week, she had learned to keep her mouth shut when Ruby went on a rant: a chance remark might ignite an entirely new grievance. Her tossing around four-letter words was also something new.

“Did you see the televisions in that restaurant—and not just in the bar,” Ruby said. “Four flatscreens. You can’t get away from them anymore, on airplanes, in terminals, even in taxis.
The other doctors in my wing all have them in their waiting rooms. The other day I was crossing the street and there was a kid wearing a T-shirt that read what the fuck. He was telling passersby, ‘Everybody’s putting thoughts out into the world. So I try to put out good ones.’ Is there a preacher or guru on the planet who can top that? But none of us can compete with the daily avalanche of bullshit. Are you ready for me to take the wheel, dear? You must be tired.”

“I really haven’t been driving long.” Devon flipped open her cellphone. “I think I’ll try this guy Browne again.”

“Who?”

“Emmett Browne. The music dealer.”

This time a man answered on the second ring. He had a clipped, precise voice that occasionally wavered, as if he were catching his breath.

“Mr. Browne?”

“This is Emmett Browne.”

“My name is Devon Sheresky. My grandmother, Camille Broussard, passed away this month. We found your letter.”

There was a long silence. “We?” he said finally.

“My mother and I.”

“Your mother the doctor.”

Devon was surprised. “That’s right.”

“My condolences for your grandmother.”

“Thank you. Did she respond to you?”

“No, she never did.”

“Well, I’m curious about your letter.”

“I can appreciate that. Your call is very unexpected.”

“I’m actually driving to New York right now.”

Another silence. “Even more unexpected.”

“My mother has business there.”

“I see.”

“Can you tell me what the letter is about?”

“I’d suggest we meet to discuss it. This is very fortuitous. When will you arrive in New York?”

“In a couple of days.”

“Can you come by my office then?”

“I’d like to.”

“Good.”

“You said it was something important.”

“It is. Thank you for calling. Call again when you get into town.” And he hung up.

“Pretty strange,” Devon said.

“What did he say?”

“He knew you were a doctor. How would he know anything about you?”

“My mother must’ve told him.”

“He said he never spoke to her.”

“Who knows?” Ruby said impatiently.

“He wouldn’t say what the letter was about.”

“My god, why all the mystery? He’s probably just some creep who was mixed up with my father. You’re still going to meet with him?”

“I want to know what this is about.”

Ruby turned away and gazed out the window as a horse farm—thoroughbreds snorting mist, stables, a barn—slid by. “I said I’d go with you. And I will.”

When King Bolden made his last public appearance, Willie Cornish was playing beside him. The Labor Day parade, 1906. The Bolden Band used to lead this parade. Now they were nine bands back, second from last. And that was only because the band behind them, the Plaquemine Brass Band, had shown up without a bass player or a clarinetist. Except for Cornish and Frank Lewis, the Bolden Band had experienced a complete turnover: Mumford, Warner, Johnson, and Tillman either quit or were fired. Frankie Dusen, a fast-talking trombonist who doubled on clarinet and had ingratiated himself with Bolden, was in fact running the band: setting rehearsal times, booking engagements. Cornish thought him dishonest and dirty. To his face he called Dusen a chiseler. “Four-fingered” Henry Zeno was playing drums, and the second clarinetist was a little fellow named Mack Jones whom Cornish had never heard of
.
Bolden had enlisted him the previous night in a dive on South Ramsay Street, without ever hearing him play
.

You didn’t hear him play because he can’t play,
Cornish said to Bolden after listening to Jones tune up at Elks Place that morning. But it didn’t matter anymore. None of it mattered. Bolden hadn’t even remembered who Mack Jones was when Jones showed up in a horseblanket suit, smelling of bourbon. Bolden himself was wearing a rumpled brown suit and a derby. The silk vests were gone, and the bright shirts. For a pair of hobnailed boots he had traded the pocket watch engraved with a mermaid that Nora had given him. He wandered the streets at night, often all night, and the boots were good for that. He would go as far as the city limits, sometimes north, to Spanish Fort, where he gazed at Lake Pontchartrain, a dull green even in the dark. The roads there, around the big houses and hotels, were paved with crushed oyster shells that crackled underfoot—as if he was stepping on firecrackers. Most nights he headed south and rode a ferry across the river, to Gretna, where he had once played before packed houses at the Palm Grove. Sometimes he returned on the ferry, hunched alone in the stern, always looking back to land; sometimes he stayed on that side of the river and found a bench in Marais Park, never sleeping, just staring up at the elm branches swaying
.

One night he went to his mother-in-law’s house on First Street. Nora was waiting tables again, working ten-hour shifts in a dive across town. She was only twenty-six, and though still pretty, looked much older after her years with Bolden. He lurched in carrying a bottle of rye. His hands were shaking, his shirt was soiled
. I want to take you to Mexico,
he said
. Get you anything you want.
She replied
, I want you gone.
He was
downing the rye like it was beer. He collapsed onto the sofa, tried to stand up, and passed out. Her mother came home and recoiled at the sight of him
. Just until morning, Mama,
Nora said
. Won’t happen again.
At two
A.M
. Bolden woke with a start, knocked over a chair, and crashed into the table. He clutched his head. His throat was on fire. The two women rushed in
. You poisoned me,
he shouted at his mother-in-law
, but I ain’t dead.
He grabbed a pitcher and threw it, grazing her temple. Nora screamed, and he bolted out the door. A policeman arrested him on Jackson Street and booked him at the House of Detention
.

When the Labor Day parade started, people were lining the sidewalk ten deep, waving sparklers, tossing confetti. The air was heavy. Mist was boiling off the river, pinpricked with lights. On poles jutting from buildings, the Stars and Stripes were flapping. Dozens of flags. Twice the band launched into “Sugar Blues” and twice Bolden veered off into jumbled scraps of hymns, the music of his childhood from the Nazareth Church. When the band reached St. Charles, he drifted away without a word, concealing his cornet beneath his coat. Cornish looked around and he was gone. The band hesitated, then kept marching. Bolden melted into the crowd, expecting people to shout
King Bolden, play for us!
But no one had shouted to him for many months, and no one did now. Men, women, and children seemed to be looking right through him—as if he were already a ghost. Maybe I am, he thought, glancing down at his hand to see if it was transparent. Then he pressed a finger to his chest, because if he was vapor maybe the finger would slide right into his heart. And if that was so, could he just disappear into the mist? Instead he found himself jostled, pressed
,
in a sea of flesh. A pounding, sweating, full-throated crowd that left him in its wake as it swarmed around the corner, following the parade to South Rampart. The music faded, the shouts died away. He was alone suddenly. All he could hear was those flags flapping. They seemed to have grown bigger than the sails on a schooner. The next morning, he woke up again in a cell in the House of Detention, his right sleeve stiff with dried blood, his pants torn. His Conn cornet was dented and the mouthpiece was missing. He sat on an iron stool staring at the cornet for an hour. When a policeman walked down the stone corridor and asked him his name and address, he replied
, I’m not from around here anymore.

Willie Cornish kept the cylinder recording of “Tiger Rag” in his wife’s Indian chest with the maharajah on the lid. Even after National Phonograph and Indestructible settled their suit and new and improved cylinders were being reproduced at the rate of one hundred a day in St. Louis and New Orleans and Chicago, Cornish didn’t think it would be right to give them Bolden’s cylinder. King Bolden had wanted a contract, cash up front and royalties, and he wasn’t in a position to get any of that now. Not in the East Louisiana State Asylum in Jackson
.

It had been one year and four months since a deputy sheriff had transported him there in a dogcart on June 4, 1907, with a commitment order signed by Judge T.W.C. Ellis. It stated that the cause of his insanity was alcohol and noted that Charles Bolden’s own mother and sister had requested his commitment
.

Cornish would not touch that cylinder until Bolden got out of that place. Maybe it would take a few months, maybe a year. But the cylinder would be waiting for him. And maybe then
Bolden could get some of that money he was due. Revive his music. Record it. Maybe they could bring him back from the dead in that house of the dead
.

In his heart Cornish wanted to believe that
.

But he knew whiskey had soaked so deep into Bolden’s brain that he was drunk even on days when he didn’t drink. And in the end there weren’t many of those. He had fallen as fast as he had risen. Even faster. And now it was over
.