Best African American Fiction Page 3

  Just as I see the first hint of light spilling over the water in the pool, I pack up my horn and stumble to my room. I am well and truly drunk. I wish I had at least attempted a pass at the old waitress. I don't want sex though; I just want to be held. I don't know what I want.

  On television the weatherman is announcing a scorcher when I fall asleep to the soft drone of the air- conditioning. Nina Simone singing Here Comes the Sun is, strangely, my last thought.

  Eagle- Eye Cherry is singing some kind of poppy blues on the car radio. I turn it up and yawn.

  “How can you listen to that shit?” Charlie says and makes to turn it down. I slap away his hand. He curses under his breath but leaves the radio alone. Charlie is the bass player, the leader/manager of this band I am touring with now and a sour individual, but I get to ride with him ‘cause I can't drive and no one else wants me. That happens when you play too well. I look at Charlie and start to say something but stuff a cigarette into my mouth instead. It is raining as I wind the window down and blow smoke out into the wet darkness. There is something romantic about this: the rain, the lonely stretch of road, two silent men, music on the radio, and a car speeding through it all, searching for the heart of something that can never exist. Doesn't stop me from believing though. I pass the cigarette slowly to Charlie without looking over at him. He takes it, puffs a couple of times and hands it back. His heart isn't in it. Charlie's heart isn't in the music either. There is no romance for him in this, no Camelot quest. This is work, work he does to support three hard-eating kids and a wife worn to a nag by the constant worry of money, the tiresome inventiveness of cutting corners and the endless nights by herself, waiting in the dark for a man who is never home long enough; and Charlie, forty- five, balding and playing bad gigs, squinting through windshields at night as we head for another town. That's why I'm not married. I am looking for my grail, the woman in the photo, my mother.

  “Want me to drive?” I ask him. I've been sleeping for hours in the passenger seat and I am awake and ready. He shakes his head, which really means he doesn't trust me to drive the old Volvo with the worn tires and grimy windscreen. Or maybe he knows I can't drive. Maybe I told him. I yawn and stretch, fishing in the bag at my feet for a drink. I am out. I take the Big Gulp out of the cup holder between us and down some soda, Coca- Cola I think. It tastes sweet and cold and alive. I aahh and put it back.

  “Hey, get your own fucking drink,” Charlie snarls.

  “Sure. Just pull over.”

  “Fuck you.”

  I shrug. It's been this way since the solo I played last night, my first note cutting into his solo when he was only halfway done, but he was boring the audience. I was doing him a favor, the untalented fuck. Charlie turns the radio off so hard he snaps the button off. I turn slightly and smile into the night, lighting another cigarette.

  It is too cloudy to see the North Star.

  The “er” of the sign, like an undecided drunk, can't make up its mind: flicker flicker. The parking lot in front of the diner is full, mostly of pick- ups and other trucks. The only thing marking it for Big Sur and not the south is that the trucks have roof racks and surfboards instead of rifle racks.

  “Why are we stopping?” I ask.

  “I am hungry and I need to make a phone call,” Charlie says, getting out and heading for the diner.

  “Hey, why couldn't we stop when I asked?”

  “My car, my stops,” he says, banging into the place.

  “Motherfucker,” I swear as I get out and cross the lot. Somewhere in the darkness I can hear the sea. Diners, I mutter under my breath, a dime a dozen, all the same. Damn, I've run out of clichés. Anyway, everyone knows diners make the best hash browns. I slam inside and make my way to the back, waitress trailing me, grumbling about people needing to read the sign and wait to be seated. As my ass polishes two weeks of grease from the cracked vinyl booth, I want to laugh, but the waitress looks old, fifty at least, and though she has the breasts of a sixteen- year-old, I don't like disrespecting my elders.

  “Coffee and some eggs and some hash browns,” I say, not bothering to take the menu she's holding out to me. She writes my order with a pencil stub, and then pauses. “How would you like your eggs?” she asks, but I can tell from her voice that she couldn't care less. Neither can I.

  “Over easy,” I say.

  When she gets back, Charlie has found his way to the table.

  “What do you want?” she asks him as she pours me a coffee, reaches into her apron pocket and fishes out a handful of sweeteners and some cream in the little plastic cups. She spills them on the table in the off-handed-crap-shoot-manner I've seen drug dealers on TV use. Charlie orders the chili. I am tempted to say something about not ordering chili in an unknown diner, but I think, what the heck, the guy is a prick, so I don't. Charlie looks like he is about to cry and as I stir cream into my coffee, I say: “What's up Charlie Brown.”

  “Fuck you,” he says, and the look he gives me tells me this is a sore point or should I say, these are sore points: whatever he is going through plus being called Charlie Brown.

  “Anytime baby,” I say, and blow him a kiss because I know that Charlie is pretty uptight. He makes a face but says nothing as the waitress sets his coffee down. She says nothing about our orders. I don't want to ask; I am afraid she'll spit in my food.

  As we eat, a woman in a red dress sitting at the counter laughing a little too loudly catches my attention. Something about her makes me think of Janis, and I rub my wallet through my clothes, pretending to stroke her face. I would like to take out her photo and compare it to the red-dress-woman, but I don't want Charlie shitting on my dream. The photo is important, not only because it is of Janis, but also because I had to steal it from my father's wallet after he died. That was all he left me, the cheap bastard, and the trumpet of course. Like so many times before, I try to imagine where my parents met, what my father had said to my mother to make her fall in love with him, even if only for a while. I look up. Charlie is staring at me pointedly and I think it is because I am stroking my pocket, but I realize that the check has come and he wants me to pay my share. What kind of cheap fucking manager can't even buy you some hash browns and eggs? I fish for some cash in my back pocket and pay. I follow him out.

  Sometimes the only thing that can fill the despair of a night sky bereft of stars is the lone call of an instrument, stark against it all like a bone flayed of skin: bare. There is nothing like a cello rumbling under a railway arch in the rain to unstitch you. Or a muted trumpet; and the player feeling his way along the scales with an urgency so tight it holds him up on each note, like stones across a set of rapids, each one the death rattle of melancholy. Though I haven't said any of this aloud, Charlie turns in the dark car to look at me, his expression in the dim glow of the instrument cluster says: you are so full of shit. I look away and stare out of the window. Sometimes silence can be a heavy blow.

  We pull over, the car barely balanced on the dirt edge of the cliff road that falls away into the sea. Charlie gets out to hurl again, his body shaking from the effort. I should have told him not to eat that chili, I think, chuckling under my breath as I light up: we still have a gig to play. I step from the car, feeling the night air coming off the ocean chilly against my skin. I unzip and piss into the edge between the road and night. Shaking more than I need to, I zip up, pull a half bottle of scotch from my back pocket and take a swig. Charlie joins me, reaching wordlessly for the scotch. I pass it. There are tears running down his face. What the fuck is this? I think. It's a lonely stretch of road, one of those places on the Pacific highway where the sky unrolls from the sea and spreads itself like a meadow across the world and you feel like you are in God's fishbowl. Why did people like Charlie always have breakdowns in beautiful places like this? With strangers like me who don't really give a fuck, but who invariably have to pretend we understand, as though caught in the sensitive sub- plot of a clichéd movie? Drink, I want to say to him, take drugs, play your soul
out of your fucking instrument, but don't lay your shit on me. I turn back to the night sky.

  I have seen a sky like this only once before. A sempiternal sky so full of sea you feel like you are drowning. Long ago I sat in a Greyhound making my way across the Marfa plateau in Texas, headed for El Paso. It was eerie, haunting, like a place you know something other than man has walked, some higher being. All along that drive I kept hearing Leo Sayer's Endless Flight in my head, even though my Walkman was going full blast, spooling out Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. If Charlie were there, or if I told him he would say, why do you listen to that shit? Because my mother left me as a baby, I would say, even though I doubt that your mother leaving you is a credible reason for bad taste in music. The thing is, in spite of it all, in spite of everything, the profound moments of my life, if measured out like beads on a rosary, would be one pop song after the other. In the end, and apologies to Gloria Estefan and The Miami Sound Machine, the schmaltz is going to get you.

  I clear my throat. Charlie takes this as a cue to speak.

  “It's my wife,” he says. “She's leaving me, taking the kids.”

  I nod. I can't figure why he is crying though. It's not like he sees them anyway. I take the bottle back before he drinks too much and pat him on the back. He smiles as though I have just said something really fucking deep and healing, and then he leans into my palm for a second too long, seeking its open warmth.

  As we head off, gravel crunching under wheels like all the little hurts that eventually kill us, I know why he is suffering, how you can love someone with every breath in your body even though they are miles away and you never see them. Have never, in fact, seen them.

  Jazz and pain, the perfect bromide; still hurts though. It would be easier if I could be one of those degenerate musicians. A city jazzman. But I don't believe in the jazz of cities. The brooding down-and-out kind of weed growing in allotments abutted by empty- eyed tenements drowning in piss and their own misery kind of jazz. None of that for me. I'm kind of whitey–Pat Metheny out in the endless vastness of a summer night sky and a road unwinding a slow measured beat by a sea crashing like cymbals while the fast car is the horn, lonely, sporadic, and melancholic, yet driving it all forward. That's me. I know what you are going to say, that I have no pedigree, but you lie, you lie, shame is my pedigree.

  I focus on the broken white lines in the road reading them as if they were a score.

  In perfect time.

  It was a short gig, the audience at the Henry Miller Library clearly not keen to stay out too long. I am glad for it. This dark night, there is no moon in sight, and in the low glow of the tree lamps, the small stage in a clearing before the wooden cabin that houses the library looks forlorn. I wonder what Henry would have thought of all this: aging hippies holding early evening jazz concerts here, pretending that he actually lived here, and that somehow this made them cool. I can't help feeling self- pity. I walk the soft path to the back where there is nothing but pine trees rising in dark collaboration like the backdrop of a Hans Christian Andersen story. I wonder if there are wolves here, or ghosts. I light up and suck greedily on the cigarette. Exhaling, I lean against a tree. Somewhere in the darkness I think I hear my father laughing.

  “I thought you were masturbating for a minute,” a voice says, and startles me as bad as if I were. I drop my cigarette and turn to the voice. It belongs to a woman, although in the shadows that's all I can tell.

  “Who the fuck are you?” I ask.

  She laughs. It sounds like—I don't know, it sounds good.

  “Didn't meant to scare you,” she says, “Good playing tonight,” she adds.

  I don't speak, instead bending for the still glowing cigarette. I taste dirt when I put it back in my mouth. Dirt and time.

  “My husband was a trumpet player. My ex- husband,” she says. “He gave it up, though. Gave it up and sold insurance,” she continues. “Say do you have another one of those cancer sticks?” she adds.

  “Sure,” I say, more to myself, to the night, to the sea of it, like an anchor, a comma, a placeholder, and part of me wants to make her Janis. Bullshit, I swear in my head. “I know what you mean.”

  “Really?” she says, pausing in lighting the cigarette. “How?”

  “You seem like the kind of woman to be drawn to trumpet players,” I lie smoothly, pointing to my horn case. “Anyway,” I say, moving things forward. “Why do you think he gave it up?”

  “You mean other than to sell insurance?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because he was addicted to failure,” she says, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Why else?”

  Why else.

  “So where next?” she asks.

  I concentrate on the glowing tip of her cigarette.

  “Wherever the road takes me.”

  “Seems like your band is breaking up.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I heard the bass player canceling the rest of your gigs. He was crying.”

  “Shit. His wife is leaving him.”

  “Yeah, well. Happens.”

  “I have to go on, though.”

  “A one man band?”

  “No. I'll join another.”

  “My, you're driven,” she said.

  I shrug.

  “Are you looking for something?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Aren't all jazz musicians in search of the perfect solo?”

  “That's some bullshit. But I am searching for something I guess. A lost love, maybe,” I say, shrugging in the dark.

  “Really? Who?” she asks, and steps forward, her face caught in a sliver of light coming from out front somewhere. Her face is not all at all what I suspect Janis will look like. Her skin is lined, her lips too full, collagen full, and her nose big, Gaelic big; and her eyes, well, they aren't green but black, like nothing. But sometimes melancholy will fuck with you and I am beginning to wonder if this can be Janis. I step back. She laughs and my knees turn to jelly.

  “I won't bite. At least not yet,” she says, her finger tracing a line down my cheek.

  I swallow, loudly.

  “So who are you looking for?”

  “I don't know,” I lie. “I just know that she has a white albatross tattooed on her butt,” I say.

  “White albatross. That's strange. I have a tattoo too, a strange one. Guess.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “An albino crow.”

  “That's unusual,” I say, and my voice sounds as if I am talking with socks in my mouth. “Where is it?”

  “You sound parched. Should we go get a drink?” she asks, already turning away. “I'll might tell you later. Let's see what old Johnny Walker thinks.”

  “Sure.”

  I begin to follow, but she stops and turns.

  “I guess we should introduce ourselves formally,” she says. “I know your name.”

  For a second I think she is onto me. A mother should know her son, right? Instinctively. Even after all this time. But then I realize she is referring to my professional name.

  “I'm Janis,” she says, putting out her hand to shake. “And don't give me any shit about my name, Miles.”

  “Of course not,” I mumble, feeling like a cretin. It is all so confusing and unsettling. To meet your mother for the first time in the shadows of a pine forest up the side of Big Sur and to plan her seduction in the dark. It's all a little much.

  “Janis,” I say, and think mother, shuddering as our hands touch.

  “Boy, you're eager,” she says, as she feels me shudder. “Patience. If you are a good boy, I'll show you my tattoo.”

  “Yes, ma'am,” I say.

  “Call me Janis. I'm not your mother,” she says.

  “Janis,” I say, and think, mother.

  “See?” she says. “Sounds good when you say it. Sensual.”

  I smile, unaccountably happy, but naturally so.

  “You don't even know me. Isn't it dange
rous picking up strange men in dark woods? Many a cautionary tale about that, I think.”

  Janis shrugs.

  “I've never been one for caution.”

  I nod though she can't see me in the dark.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure. I might not answer it though.”

  “Do I seem familiar to you?”

  She turns to look at me, black eyes piercing. I shift uncomfortably under her gaze.

  “What an odd question,” she says, finally. Then: “I can only assume you are asking whether I am drawn to you because you remind me of my ex- husband. The trumpet and all.” Pause. “Look, let's have a drink, have some fun. For now, I am just Janis and you are Miles.”

  I nod.

  “You like older women?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then say it, say my name,” she says, breathing a little harder.

  “Janis,” I say, and think,yarew.

  She laughs, softly, back in her throat, and takes my hand.

  ORB WEAVER

  Emily Raboteau

  Awoman reclined in a yellow Adirondack chair with a back like a tongue depressor, watching the sun go down over the Vermont mountains. Summer was almost done. She looked out across the fields washed in orange light and saw herself in the third person, looking out across the fields washed in orange light. She tried to think of a way to describe the sound of the insects. The writer approached her from the side. She spotted him in her periphery and straightened her posture. Her heart quickened. She had been willing this moment, writing it out in her mind already, so it didn't come as a surprise when he asked her if she'd seen the creek.

  She tried to think of a witty way to say no.

  —No.

  —Let's go, he said, handing her a peach. She bit into the fruit. It was mealy but because she liked the idea of the writer watching her eat it she pretended it was ripe. She wondered with sweet unease if her mouth would taste of peaches, if he had been with a black woman before, if she would appear in one of his stories.