Black Elvis (6 page)

"This area burned in the early eighties," Elizabeth said. "I read about it in my book. That's part of what makes it such a beautiful hike. You can see all around you."

It took an hour to hike to the lake, and they made small talk as they went. She was originally from New Jersey. She'd once thought she'd like to be a dancer. She loved dogs, especially big ones. Her favorite movie star was Vincent Price, her favorite movie,
Theater of Blood
. They found a spot to sit. "I brought cheese and an apple," she said, poking in her bag. "And these." She held up two brown and beige items about six inches in length. It took Kaufman a moment to recognize them as shoe inserts. "Orthotics," she said. "I snuck them out of his shoes last night. He's out wandering the town right now looking for a present for his kid, and I'll bet his feet are killing him. Funny, huh?" She made a strange sound in the back of her throat and her eyes filled with tears. "This is what I'm reduced to. Stealing people's orthotics."

"Look," Kaufman said. He arranged her apple and the piece of cheese on top of the rock beside them.

"At work, I'm known as the funny one. I did tell you I cry a lot. What is that, a still life?"

"Ever paint one?"

"I'm not what you'd call artistic. I'm funny." She sniffed.

"Look at the apple." He moved over so that he was right beside her. The light was coming from a slight angle. "What colors do you see?"

"Red," she said.

"Anything else?"

"I don't know. Darker red? Some brown where there's that spot."

"Good. How about underneath, just above the rock?"

She sniffed again. "Purple, maybe."

"Something close to that. It's the reflection of the rock itself. I think it's more a blue gray. But you're right."

"Are you going someplace with this?"

He wasn't sure. He only knew that he needed to keep her attention. "Being able to recognize colors is the key. That shadow, that's going to mostly be cerulean blue. Our red on the apple is going to range quite a bit. I see at least five different shades there, not counting what's reflecting up from the rock. The colors are in the light, you know, not the object. They travel in waves. Opposite colors—yellow and violet, for instance—actually seem to tremble when they're next to each other, because our eyes can't adjust for both at the same time."

She picked up the apple and took a bite, then held it out to him. "They're actually called
orthoses
. That's what he calls them.
Orthoses
. It sounds like calling dibs on birth control pills."

Kaufman took a bite of the apple and chewed.

"See, I told you I was funny." She got up. "You want to head back?"

He didn't move. He shouldn't have started lecturing her about colors. People didn't care about colors. Most people didn't. It occurred to him that he might never have a normal interaction with the world again. All those days he'd come into his class waving the
New York Times
, saying, "Who can tell me one thing about Liberia?" or "West Bank! West Bank of what?" That person seemed someone he'd dreamed.

"Wait," she said, and turned around. "Come stand behind me. Close."

He did this, almost touching her. She reached back and took his hands, bringing them up under her shirt, placing them on her breasts. "Just hold me," she said.

He looked out at the flat lake, its surface reflecting the blue sky, but darker. They stood that way for a minute, and he closed his eyes and it was Jackie's breasts that he touched, though she had never let him—not again, after her diagnosis. After a few months, she'd moved out to be with her family, down in Virginia, which was where she'd finished up, spending her last days designing gardens in a small sketchbook. He'd gone down, of course, taking sick days, vacation days. But he'd missed the very end—she'd just slipped away one night while he was putting together a lesson plan. Her mother asked for her photograph albums; her brother wanted her books. The house he'd bought the following year had a small garden, but he'd never done anything with it, just let it grow wilder and full of leaves.

They took a different route back to town, one that brought them close to the burning mountainside. Kaufman had almost forgotten the smoke after this afternoon in the relatively clean air at the lake, but now he found it irritating to his eyes. On the news, they heard that the fire was 20 percent contained, which didn't sound all that promising. From various points on the road, they could see it pluming thickly off the mountainside into the sky. He thought again of those train cars stuck in the tunnel, glowing white with heat.

When they got back to the hotel, her rental car, a green Dodge Neon, had been decorated with shaving cream,
Just Married
spelled out across the back window in thick, white letters.

"You could admit it," said Kaufman. "I'm sure she'd let you keep the room."

"Never," said Elizabeth Moore.

Irving Straight came by a few hours later, while Kaufman was tending bar, wearing a freshly pressed tan shirt and a bolo tie. "I was over to see a guy this afternoon, lives in the Indian Paintbrush subdivision. He has to get out of there by tonight. They're spraying all the houses with slurry in case the fire moves any further down the valley."

"Friend of yours?" asked Kaufman. It was 8:00
P.M.
Earlier he'd served two nice-looking older women who stared right through him like he was made of glass, but now it was just Straight at the bar. No sign at all of Elizabeth Moore or her not-husband. He had the
TV
on, sound off, tuned to a cooking show.

"Customer—owns three paintings. Shouldn't never have built up there in the first place," he said. "None of them. Just a matter of time. These people with money get
arrogant
."

Kaufman thought of the painting from Pompeii of a woman picking flowers. Of course, it wasn't a resident of the town, just a decoration on someone's wall, but he'd always thought of it that way, as if he were looking at one last pretty moment in a life before the sudden wave of lava swept down and stopped time.

Rhonda came in, wearing a black silk shirt, open at the collar, jeans with high heels, and some dangly, Native American-looking earrings. She touched Straight on the shoulder. "Ready?"

"I'll be there in a second."

Noticing the surprise on Kaufman's face, she smiled. "Have fun, Skip."

When she was gone, Straight looked at Kaufman and poked him in the chest with a meaty finger. "Sint Jans," he said. "
Nativity at Night
."

"I thought a classical reference might be fun," said Kaufman. "Hey, it rhymes with
Injuns
."

"It took me over an hour to make that cow back into one of
my
cows."

"Sorry," said Kaufman.

"Any references in my paintings are going to be to
Stagecoach
or
The Searchers
, not the Northern Renaissance." Straight downed the rest of his drink and smoothed his moustache. "Damn nice brushwork, though," he said.

"You think?"

But that was all the man was going to give him. "This isn't a joke," he said. "This is what I
do
."

Kaufman closed up at eleven, locking the register and hitting the lights. He made a brief, unsuccessful attempt at conversation with Shari, the Navajo girl who was working the front desk, then figured he'd go read in his room for a while before bed. Through the lobby doors, he saw Elizabeth Moore putting luggage into the trunk of her rental car.

"Number 5 check out?" he asked.

Shari flipped the page of the
People
magazine she was reading. "Not to my knowledge."

He pushed his way out into the cool night. "Howdy," said Elizabeth Moore when she saw him.

"It's late."

"Exactly. But not too late."

The air was full of tiny specks of white ash, suspended, almost weightless, nearly invisible. An owl made a noise like a distant train.

"What about what's-his-name?"

"I killed him," she said. "He's back in the room."

"Killed him how?"

"Brained him with a mandolin. I'll need to get going now so I can keep a couple steps ahead of the law."

"If they catch you, they'll hang you."

"I reckon." She shook his hand. "I want to thank you for the lesson in colors. All that time I thought they were just sitting there, and it turns out they were trembling."

Words were like bricks in his mouth; he might have been a sixth grader asking a girl to dance. "If you ever come to Baltimore," he said.

"Don't even say it. I'm not coming to Baltimore. I barely know where it is." She sniffed her shoulder. "All my clothes smell like smoke," she said. "I bet they will forever." She looked at him, smiled. "Next honeymoon, I'm going on a cruise."

After she left, Kaufman walked around the grounds. No lights were on in number 5. He sat on a carefully placed boulder at the edge of the path and imagined her driving to the airport—where else could she drive to?—perhaps sitting in the parking lot for a while, determined to make her point, whatever it was, staring up through the windshield at the same ashy sky that stretched over him now.

His colleague who died had taught biology. On April Fool's Day, his heart had simply given out. A faulty valve or whatever—there really wasn't much to say, no lesson to draw from it. He hadn't smoked, had drunk only moderately, played basketball once a week with some other faculty members. His wife had thought he was kidding around. Their children were in college—the whole next part of their lives was coming up. They'd been having a beer and peanuts together at a pub, and he'd suddenly put his head down on the table and started to snore. She thought he was making fun of the story she was telling. By the time she realized, it was already too late.

From within, Kaufman heard the muted, tinny sound of mandolin strings being tuned. One of them kept slipping; there was the gentle climb toward unison, a moment where all was right, then a quick falling away. Probably, something was wrong with the tuning pegs, and yet the guy kept patiently at it. Kaufman could see how that sort of thing could drive you nuts.

I went to this new hotel downtown to hear my guitar teacher play. My girlfriend, Lorna, came along, although she doesn't care much about jazz—she plays classical piano. From the lobby, we made a left and passed along red halls with chandeliers lighting them, heading toward the hotel restaurant until we heard music. It was just a trio, upright bass and drums and my teacher, whose name is Arthur. They were set up outside of the eating area, in an open space between the entrance to the restaurant and a nice-looking bar about fifteen feet away, lots of burnished dark wood and brass fittings, which was completely empty. We took seats at the bar and listened.

"They aren't very loud," said Lorna. "I'll bet those people eating dinner don't even know there is a band."

It was a new hotel, like I said, and it smelled that way. New carpet, new paint, new everything. It made me a little headachy. So we sat at this new bar and listened for a while, waiting for someone to take our orders. After a while, a man came. He had a moustache, a thin one, and the badge on his suit jacket read "Manager."

"I'm sorry," he told us, "but you can't sit here."

"Why?" I asked. "We came to hear the music."

"I understand," he said. "But this isn't a bar."

"It isn't?" I turned and looked again. There were cabinets filled with liquor bottles, whiskey, vodka, various flavored liqueurs. There was a cash register, with one of those computer screens. Sprouting up from the center of the long, impeccably polished bar were beer taps with the usual brand names on them.

"I know it looks like a bar," he said. "But it's not."

"We're sitting here," I said. "Everything seems good to go. All we need is for someone to bring us drinks."

"It's for show," he said. "There's another bar, a real one, in the Chesapeake Room, if you'd like to go sit there. It's just at the end of the hallway."

I looked at Lorna, who looked back at me. She'd put on lipstick for this, and a pretty flowered skirt. We didn't get out all that much. "But there's no band in the Chesapeake Room," I said to the man. "We came for the band."

"I'm sorry."

"Really?"

He nodded. I could see the situation wasn't something he was proud of. "Look," he said. "I'll tell you what. Seeing as how you're here specifically for the band, you can sit here."

"Can we get a drink?"

He thought for a moment. "Yes, of course. I'll have to bring it from the other bar. What would you like?"

"A beer," said Lorna. "Rocky Oyster Pale Ale."

"And I'll have a Beefeater martini," I said. "Olives."

He was gone a long time. We sat, listening to the music. I held Lorna's hand for a while. We could see into the restaurant, and it was just us paying attention. There were a lot of mirrors in there, to make the place look bigger, and some tasteful little holiday lights had been wrapped around the fluted columns.

"My mind keeps drifting," Lorna said. "I'm barely here." She took off her glasses and smoothed her eyebrows, then put them back on. "I think it's the improvisation."

Between songs, I went up and said hi to Arthur, who seemed pleased to see me. He had on a white shirt and a gray sweater-vest, and looked more like an elementary school teacher than a jazz cat. "You should turn up," I said. "We can barely hear you."

"We started louder," he explained. "The restaurant manager came and told us to turn down."

"Strange gig," I said.

"You know it, man."

Our drinks arrived, the manager carrying them on a tray from down the long hall, so I rejoined Lorna. "Thanks," I said, and he nodded, then disappeared. We clinked glasses and listened to the next song. They were good, these guys—as good as you'd hear anyplace. It was pretty much a secret that they were working so hard; over in the restaurant, you probably got the impression of piped-in Muzak, or something.

The martini was solid—very cold. I was munching on the second olive when a scraggly-looking kid in an army jacket came and sat on the next stool. He waved to Arthur, and Arthur acknowledged him with a big smile, without breaking rhythm or losing his place in what he was doing, which was playing three different things at once: bass line, little two-note chords popping on and off like Christmas lights, and an improvised melody line on top. The guy was some kind of genius, and his fingers were extralong, slender, pale, and tapered. I didn't recognize the song, but that was hardly the point.