Via Dolorosa (16 page)

“What are you doing?”

“Just stand for a minute,” she said. “Why do you always require an explanation? Just do it.” She had emptied the cigarette butts into the palm of her hand. From her purse she produced a fresh swatch of rolling paper. Nick stood in front of her, feeling the wind from the ocean at his back, strong and determined and chilling the sweat down his spine, and watched as she unraveled the cigarette butts and packed the tobacco into the fresh slip of rolling paper. She rolled one, licked the flap, and twisted the ends tight. It was not tobacco at all, Nick realized…and Isabella Rosales was not an eccentric fan collecting discarded cigarette butts from her favorite jazz musician. She fished a Zippo from her purse next, lit the end of the joint, inhaled deeply.

“Okay, okay. You don’t have to keep standing there,” she said to him. He was right in front of her, looking down at her hidden now behind a pall of sweet smoke. She held the joint out to him, referred to it as a
muggle
, and told him to take a puff. He refused. He could smell it and it smelled angry and bittersweet and he refused to touch it. Isabella pushed the joint back between her lips—poked it between her lips—and stood from the ground, brushing the dampness from her legs.

“Tell me more about the war, Nicholas.”

“No.”

“Nicholas…”

“No more,” he insisted. The stink of the marijuana was making his head spin. “Tell me something about photography instead,” he said because he suddenly could not think of anything else to say.

“You are such a man,” she told him, “with all your lines.”

“My lines?”

“Your fancy pickup lines.”

“No lines,” he said. “Just talk.”

“Photography fools your mind,” she said without missing a beat. “You can take any reality and make it better, if you want. Or worse, too, I suppose. How did you frig up your arm, my Nicholas?”

“A wall fell on it.”

“And it broke the bone?”

“In six places. Crushed my hand, too.”

“So they operated? There was surgery?”

“Several surgeries. There are metal plates and screws in the bone.”

“That is fantastic. You’re half robot. You’re, like—what is the word? You are, like, bionic.”

“Well, no, not exactly.”

“Bionic is the word?”

“No, I’m not bionic.”

“It hurts?”

“Sometimes, yes. But I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Talking about it doesn’t make you a hero.”

“I don’t care about that…”

“You do,” she said. “I can tell. You hate to be the hero. What the hell is that all about, anyway?”

“I just don’t want to talk about it,” he said.

“Malcontent,” she said back.

Sometime later, Goat-Man Claxton appeared as a dark shape on the horizon, strutting up the incline of the hillside and backlit by the sodium lights of the Club Potemkin. He looked like someone ambling out of a dream. The CD player was going through the last track of
Mephistopheles:
a number, Isabella had at one point enlisted Nick to know, titled “Slippage” which concerned itself with Claxton’s nearly fatal addiction to heroin—what Isabella called
junk
—when he was just twelve years old. Sounding like a schizophrenic’s cocaine nightmare, there were a lot of horns and a lot of drums and not much else.

Isabella had already set up her equipment. She hadn’t turned on any of the lights, though; like Stonehenge, they had been erected in a semicircle where they stood, like flowers thinly-stalked and top heavy. Claxton arrived on the wind, smelling vaguely of alcohol and cigarette smoke. Out from beneath the stage lights, he looked even younger than he had originally appeared. Nick wondered if he was even eighteen years old.

“Hey, you were really terrific tonight, man,” Nick said hurriedly.

Claxton eyed him—cold-stared him. He had deep, black eyes, both physically and spiritually.

“Who the crumb?” Claxton said to Isabella, his eyes still on Nick.

“My assistant.”

“We ain’t talked ’bout no assistant,” Claxton said. “He the boogie man?”

“He’s going to help me with the lighting,” Isabella said. “Nicholas,” she said, louder. “Nicholas, come here and hook these lights together.”

Nick stepped around the cords and plugged the lights together. The power switch was on the back housing of one of the lamps, but he did not turn it on. He watched Claxton, cool in his loose-fitting shirt and tight-fitting jeans, meander over to the portable CD player, hover just briefly above it in an exercise of incredible balance…then drop a single finger on it, turning it off.

“Ain’t no boundaries wit’ jazz,” Claxton said, talking to the portable CD player. “You get it sexed, do it all so fine and good, then do it even better till y’all feel just ’bout good’s y’all ever
goan
feel. You dig?”

Claxton stood, thin black arms akimbo, long-fingered hands on his hips. He turned and stared at Nick.

“You dig?” the jazzman repeated.

“Sure,” Nick said.

“You
goan
be kind to the Goat, boogie man? You
goan
write me up real nice? I fractured the whole scene tonight, boogie man. You catch that?”

“I don’t…” Nick began. He glanced in Isabella’s direction, but she was busy with her camera now and was not interested in looking at him.

“You catch how I fractured that whole scene, boogie man?”

“I don’t un—”

“Question is, crumb: you dig the Goat-Man for real-like, or you jus’ posturing? You dig the voice of the
claxophone
, or you jus’ some out-to-lunch cat in it
fo
’ the scratch?”

“He thinks you’re with the press, writing a review,” Isabella said finally.

“I’m not the press,” he told Claxton, recalling what the large Hispanic man back at the Club Potemkin had said to him.

“You ain’t come to see the Goat-Man
thinkin
’ you
goan
see no sugar band. That
yo
’ fault, not the Goat’s. You dig? That
fo
’ sure.”

“I’m not the press,” he said again.

“Yeah, you the assistant. I heard. Right on.”

Nick started to laugh. Isabella looked up sharply, first at Nick then at Russell “Goat-Man” Claxton, then at Nick again. He could not stop laughing. Claxton had been playing with him and he could not stop laughing. Claxton himself only stared at him as well, those intense little eyes unmoving and unfeeling…and then he, too, broke into a wide,
toothy grin, and started to laugh. The sound of Claxton’s laughter was
not unlike the sound of his music: steady, confident, yet too rambunctious
to settle on any particular straightaway for an extended amount of
time. It was up-and-down, a seismograph printout in C-major.

“Hey,” Nick said, “how do you play those two notes at the same
time like that?”

Claxton stopped laughing. Isabella continued watching them, her eyes volleying back and forth between the two.

“What?” Nick said. “What?”

“You down,” Claxton said to him, nodding, then pulled his tee-shirt
up over his head. His chest was birdlike and hairless and black as
night. His nipples were tiny charcoal discs, the texture of which resembled
the coagulated film atop day-old pudding. Claxton tossed his shirt
in a ball on the ground. He kicked off his boots then, too, and each one
thumped on the wet grass. Squatting, Claxton pressed both his hands
flat on the wet earth, tilted his head slightly back on his neck, gingerly
closed his eyes. It appeared as though the jazzman was smiling—though
if he was, it was such a subtle gesture that it could hardly be catalogued
as one. With his eyes still closed, he began moving his hands slowly overtop
the wet grass. His fingers splayed, each one moving independently
and machinelike, he drummed a soundless beat into the grass. Then
he paused, his eyes still closed, the ghost-like smile still haunting his
lips, and he pressed two long, tar-colored fingers straight into the earth.
He pushed them down easily enough, as the soil was still wet from the
storm, and pushed them down straight to the final knuckles. Nick found
himself mesmerized. Claxton’s face was the most unconcerned face he
had ever looked upon. He tried to imagine Claxton in Iraq—Claxton
in war—and found such an image was impossible to conjure. Claxton
would never find himself in war; at any such prompt, he would simply
dematerialize into nothingness, leaving a streak of vertical heat-waves in
his wake never to be seen from again.

Claxton withdrew his fingers from the soil. Nick noted something
white and wriggling in the jazzman’s hand—something he had pulled
from the earth. It was a cicada, he realized, albino and not fully ripe.
Roughly the size of a human thumb, the insect thrummed and buzzed
between Claxton’s fingers, its collection of whitish legs stirring the air.
Nick was close enough to see its beady red eyes.

“I can feel the music,” Claxton mused as the critter buzzed between
his dark fingers. “Yeah…yeah…yeah…oh, yeah…”

“That’s amazing,” Nick heard himself say. His own voice sounded
very far away.

“All music amazing, crumb,” said Claxton. “Right on.” And he lifted
the cicada up to his face. For one horrific moment, Nick thought the
jazzman was going to ingest the creature—but at the last second, Claxton,
cocking his head back on his neck again, placed the insect directly
on the surface of his wide-bridged nose. Slowly, as if not to frighten the
insect, Claxton pulled his hand away. It was like watching a balancing
act of sorts.

A succession of snapshots exploded behind Nick; he whirled
around and was partially blinded by an attacking flashbulb. Isabella, behind
the camera, started laughing. She opened her mouth wide when she
laughed.

“I should move,” Nick said, stepping out of the semicircle of erected
lights. “I should get out of the way.”

“You could never be in the way, Nicholas,” Isabella said. She snapped
a single photograph of him. Silver magnolias bloomed before his eyes.
“Oh, my broken Nicholas…”

He retreated into darkness. When his eyes fell again on Claxton,
the cicada was gone. So were Claxton’s pants. The jazzman had removed
all his clothing and stood, now stark naked and as black as a midnight oil
slick, across from Nick and half hidden under the darkness of night. The
sight jarred Nick; he could only stare and not look away.

All he could say was, “Oh—”