Via Dolorosa (14 page)

“Holy crap,” Nick managed, watching the band.

“Polytonal saxophonist,” Isabella said. She had to speak louder now, over the brassy shake of the band. “This is Claxton’s signature song, by the way. It is called ‘Go, Man, Go,’ and it is out of this world.”

It was a raucous, locomotive arrangement. For a full seven minutes, Claxton’s saxophone did not sit still. Stage lights reflecting off the instrument’s bell were nearly blinding. The backup musicians, too, did not sit still. The piece’s title phrase, when shouted in chorus by the three elderly accompanists, resulted in a quick-speak jumble of words which, Nick had no doubt, suggested the origin of the jazzman’s peculiar but suddenly comprehensible moniker.

“Go, man,” Nick said. He had to shout loudly now across the table to be heard. “I get it. Goat-Man, go…”

“Genius,” Isabella said. Nick could feel the vibration of her knee thumping against the underside of the table in rhythm with the music. He was unsure if she was referring to Claxton’s genius or Nick sarcastically. “He is an apocalyptic genius,” she continued, clarifying. “It is nearly frightening. You Americans have given the world jazz, and even if that is the only good thing you have contributed to the world—and many will probably agree that it is—it is good enough for me.”

“Isabella,” he began, “I don’t—”

“
Shhhh
,” she said.

A steely bleat from Claxton’s horn…

The fermented triad chorused, in unison, “Go, man, go!”

A second raking, brilliant spark of sound from Claxton’s saxophone…

“Go, man, go!”

A third…

“Go, man, go!”

A fourth…and this time, Claxton let it bleed into the chorus, held it, let it bleed a second time, a third, bleeding out like a suicide…

“Go, man, go!”

“He’s great!” Nick shouted across the table.

“Yes, he is!” Isabella, still watching the band, shouted back.

“He’s so young!”

“Wait for the end,” she said. “Can you hear? Wait for it…wait for it…”

“I can hear…”

“Wait for the end,” she said again. “Wait for it. The whole thing is eighteen carat, man! He is too much!” The bebop slang sounded funny coming from her, spoken in her faint Spanish accent.

“What?” he shouted back.

“He is too much!” she yelled back, not taking her eyes off the stage. “Much-much-much-much-much!”

The band rattled, shook like a roller-coaster. Claxton’s horn was like the single bleating of an angel’s trumpet, sighted to burst all the hearts of humanity at once and to kill everyone dead and allow God, once again, to start anew. Nick could hear the downbeats in his head: one-two, one-two, one-two. The band thumped and beat, and Nick could feel them in their entirety reverberating in his chest now. And then, just like that, the music ceased. It hit a wall and died on impact. The sound was like cottony silence after an explosion. Then the audience erupted in cheers and applause. Many stood, still clapping. The cheering was like music unto itself. On stage, instruments clattered down. With some effort, the backup band achieved a uniform bow. Nick sat watching, rapt. Claxton dripped off the stage, some creature having just shrugged off a dead layer of scales, and was followed with almost comic obedience by the three wizened myrmidons, each with their heads down and their bald white pates reflecting the pink-orange fluorescent lights housed in the tracks along the ceiling.

“Are they done?” Nick was still shouting. His ears had heartbeats. “Is Claxton done? Is he done?”

“Mercy,” Isabella breathed. “They played that son of a bitch longhaired.”

“Is he done?”

“Hey,” Isabella said, looking at him for the first time that evening. He was taken aback by the stark, refreshed youthfulness of her features. “Do something for me.” She looked darker, deeper, more intense than he remembered her looking. “Can you stand?”

“Stand what?”

“Stand,” she said. “On your feet. Can you stand?”

“Why couldn’t I stand?”

“Because you look drunk,” Isabella said.

“Oh, no,” he said. “No. No. I, uh…no…” It seemed all he could say. He felt like an ass. “No,” he said again. Then: “What? What is it?”

Claxton’s backup band had congregated together at one table; Nick could see the old-timers smoking cigarettes and drinking pints of black petrol. Claxton lit his own cigarette at the foot of the stage. He cupped the flame in two enormous black hands, the spit of the flame reflecting orange on his face. He looked like the devil. Then he turned and vanished through a narrow, curtained archway just beyond the stage.

“Here,” Isabella said, sliding a small Ziploc bag across the table to him. It was empty.

“What’s this?”

“You’re closer than I am,” she said. “Can you stand up and go to the stage and pick up the cigarette butts that are on the floor?”

“What?”

“They’re Claxton’s cigarette butts,” she said.

“Are you serious?”

“The greatest things in history were accomplished just sheer seconds after the asking of that very question, Nicholas,” she proclaimed, and something about it sounded a bit rehearsed.

“But isn’t that sort of excessive?” he said.

Isabella fluttered her eyelids and looked away. Nick could not tell if she was being playful or if he had annoyed her with his insolence. “Principles, principles,” she half sang, confusing him further.

Nick stood, grabbing the Ziploc bag off the table. “You must be a huge fan,” he said, and moved toward the stage. There were perhaps half a dozen little white twists of tobacco-filled paper scattered constellation-like around the pulpit. Opening the bag, he proceeded to peck at them with his fingers, jabbing at them like a bird would crumbs of bread on the sidewalk, and stuffing them into the plastic Ziploc bag. Once, he glanced over his shoulder, anticipating security or Claxton himself at his back wondering just what the hell he was doing, but there was no one there. In fact, no one in the club—with the exception of Isabella Rosales—was paying any attention to him. He grinned and executed a half-nod at her. Maybe the alcohol was taking its hold after all. She lifted something from her lap—a camera—and snapped a succession of photographs. He lifted his left hand to block the flash from his eyes. Still no one looked in his direction. He was invisible.

When he finished collecting Claxton’s cigarette butts from the stage floor, he turned to see Isabella rising from her table and moving across the club. She paused against one wall, very close to the curtained doorway through which Claxton had just recently vanished. Nick went over to her.

“Your souvenirs, madam,” he said, handing her the Ziploc baggie.

“
Muchas
gracias,”
she said, and stuffed the baggie down into the cleavage of her dress. There was much cleavage, Nick noted.

“Are you working tonight?” he asked her.

“We are shooting after the gig, yes,” she said.

“He’s very good. I don’t know anything about jazz, but he’s good. How does he…?” And he brought his hands up and feigned fingering an invisible saxophone.

“Two notes at once?” Isabella said. “That’s his big secret. That’s what makes him supernatural. His music is real good, and that’s what makes him real good. The way he blows, though—that’s what makes him sublime.”

“Are you shooting here in the club?”

Isabella said, “Shouldn’t you be with your wife, Nicky-Nicholas?”

Against the wall, the curtain shushed open. A hard-faced, beer-gutted Hispanic stood on the other side of the doorway, his eyes dark and too close together in his skull. To Isabella he said, “His chops is hurting. Said to wait an hour.”

“Tell him to go to the site when he’s ready. I’ll wait there.”

“He knows the site?”

“Just tell him to go,” Isabella said, and walked away while the
hardfaced
Hispanic continued to stare at her. He seemed content, though, to watch her walk away. Then he turned to Nick. “You press?”

“Press?”

“Press,” the man said again, tone unchanged.

“I’m with her,” he said quickly, nodding to the place against the wall where Isabella had been standing just a moment ago.

The man laughed. Or coughed or growled or something: it was an action yet to be catalogued by the human condition. Nick could smell his breath, too, and it smelled like the stuffing in an old recliner. “Yeah, crumb,” the man said. “Shit, yeah.
Ever’body
with her.”

Isabella had relocated to the bar. She ordered a gin and tonic as Nick approached, and did not look at him. She had her elbows resting on the bar and her arms crossed over one another. With some intensity, she watched the bartender fix her drink.

 
“I was working in Pamplona two years ago,” she said from nowhere. “I was at a fairly famous café that doubles as an even more famous nightclub and occasional discotheque at night and on the weekends. It was an after-hours shoot. It was me, the band, the club’s—what is the word?—the club’s bouncer, and the man tending bar and cleaning up the bar counter. I remember watching him pull stacks of money from under the counter and run his fat, brown fingers through the stacks, then push the stacks into his pants. I remember wishing I’d taken a picture of him stuffing the money in his pants like that because it just looked so honest. We all continued drinking very late into the night. The bartender, or someone else, maybe, put something into my drink, Nicholas, and I don’t remember much after that. I woke up in the rectory of a Catholic church at the far end of town, half-undressed, with the inside of my mouth tasting like artichokes and cigarette ash and the lower half of my body feeling as if it had been laid out on smoldering coals while I slept. Luckily, my equipment hadn’t been stolen—someone had stashed it under a pew. I do not know why they left it, but they did. And for a while I had no inkling as to what had happened to me while I was unconscious. And for a brief time, I was thankful I could not remember. Then I developed the film in my camera, and it was all right there and there could be no mistaking any of it.”

The bartender set her drink down in front of her.

“Pamplona is a wonderful place,” she said, and downed half her drink in a single gulp. “I suppose in my own way I have run with my share of the bulls.”

“Where’s the site?” he asked.

“What site?”

“The site of the shoot. Where are you shooting tonight?”

“You do not even like jazz, Nicholas,” she said.

“No,” he said, “I like it fine. Really. I said I didn’t
know
it, but now that I know it, I like it a lot.”

“
Ahhh
,” Isabella said. “Now that you
know
it.”

“Well, I could learn it.”

“Oh,” she said, smiling, “yes. Oh, yes. I can see that.”

“I even have some Glenn Miller albums at home.”

She laughed at him.

“What?” Her smile forced a smile on him, too.

“What, what?” she said, mocking him.
“Como?”
Then: “Nothing. Just—nothing.
Nada.
It is only that you are just like a man.”

“How’s that?”