Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (8 page)

"What are you kids doing hanging out back here, trying to scare the bejeezus out of this old man?" He patted his chest above his heart, then sat down where Henry had been sitting. The rumpled old man wore long trousers, held up by gray suspenders, over a wrinkled button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up. To Henry, he looked like an unmade bed.

"Sorry," Keiko offered, flattening out the wrinkles in her dress. "We were just listening to the music--we were just about to leave--"

Henry interrupted. "Is Sheldon playing with the band tonight?"

"Sheldon who? We got a lot of new faces in there tonight, son."

"He plays the saxophone."

The old man wiped his sweaty hands on his pants and lit his smoke. Hacking and coughing, he puffed away as if it were a competition and he was the losing team working toward a comeback. Henry listened as the old man caught his breath between draws.

"He's in there, doing a fine job--you a fan of his or something?"

"I'm just a friend--and I wanted to come down and hear Oscar Holden. I'm a fan of Oscar's."

"Me too," Keiko added, getting swept up in the moment, crowding close to Henry.

The old man stubbed his cigarette out on the worn heel of his shoe, then tossed the butt in the nearest garbage can. "You a fan of Oscar's, huh?" He pointed at Henry's button. "Oscar got an all-Chinese fan club these days?"

Henry covered the button with his coat. "This is just ... my father's ..."

"It's okay, kid, some days I wish I was Chinese too." The old man laughed a gravelly smoker's laugh that trailed into a cough, wheezing and spitting on the ground.

"Well, if you're friends of
Sheldon the Sax Man
and fans of
Oscar the Piano Man
, I figure Oscar probably wouldn't mind having a couple little kids from the fan club in his house tonight. Now you won't tell no one about this, will you?"

Henry looked at Keiko, unsure if the old man was kidding or not. She just kept smiling; her eager grin was larger than his. Both shook their heads no. "We won't tell a soul," Keiko promised.

"Great. I need you two fan club kids to do me a little favor if you want admittance to the club tonight."

Henry deflated a bit as he watched the old man take some slips of paper out of his shirt pocket, handing one to each of them. He compared his note with Keiko's. They were almost identical. Some sort of scribbled writing and a signature--from a doctor.

"Now you take these to the pharmacy on Weller--you tell 'em it's on our account, you bring it back, and you get in."

"I don't think I understand," Henry said. "This is medicine ..."

"It's a prescription for Jamaican Ginger--a secret ingredient around here. This is how the world works, son. With the war, everything's being rationed--sugar, gasoline, tires--
booze.
Plus, they don't let us have a liquor license in the colored clubs, so we do what
they
did a few years back, during the Prohibition. We make it and shake it, baby."

The old black man pointed to a neon sign of a martini tumbler that hung above the doorway. "For medicinal purposes, you all know--go on now."

Henry looked at Keiko, not sure what to do or what to believe. It didn't seem like that big a request. He must have gone to the drugstore a hundred times for his mother.

Besides, Henry loved to snack on dried ginger. Maybe this was something like that.

"We'll be right back." Keiko tugged at Henry's coat, leading him back out the alley and around to Jackson Street. Weller was one block over.

"Does this make us bootleggers?" Henry asked, when he saw the rows of bottles through the drugstore window. He was both nervous and excited at the prospect. He'd listened to
This Is Your FBI
on the radio as G-men busted up smuggling rings coming down from Canada. You rooted for the good guys, but when you played cops and robbers outside the next day, you always wanted to be the bad guy.

"I don't think so. It's not illegal anymore--besides, we're just running errands. Like he said, they sell it, but they can't buy from the white places, so they make it."

Henry gave up any concern about wrongdoing and headed into the Owl Drug Store, which conveniently stayed open until eight. Bootleggers don't go to pharmacies, he told himself. You can't go to jail for picking up an order, can you?

If the skinny old druggist thought it was odd for two little Asian kids each to be picking up a bottle that was 80 percent alcohol, he didn't say a word. Truth be told, by the way he squinted at the prescriptions and labels with an enormous handheld magnifying glass, he probably didn't even see much of anything. But the clerk, a young black man, just winked and flashed them a knowing smile as he slipped their bottles into separate bags. "No charge," he said.

On their way out, Henry and Keiko didn't even pause to moon over the jars of penny candy. Instead they looked at each other in mock nonchalance, each feeling a little bit older, striding across the street with ten-ounce bottles of liquor swinging at their sides.

Small victors in a grown-up scavenger hunt.

"What do they do with this stuff, drink it?" Henry asked, looking at his bottle.

"My papa told me how people used to use it to make bathtub gin."

Henry pictured the sailors who were known to stagger down the street and cause fights late at night. Stumbling around like their legs belonged to someone else. "Jake-legged," people called it--from bad gin. Sailors and soldiers from Paine Army Air Field were banned from certain uptown clubs for fighting, so they wandered into the jazz alleys of South Jackson, or even into Chinatown on occasion, looking for a bar that would serve them. Henry couldn't believe people still drank this stuff But when he saw the crowds that gathered outside the Black Elks Club, he knew they were here for the same thing he was. They were here to partake of something lush, intoxicating, and almost forbidden--they were here for the music. And tonight, at the front of the building, where latecomers lined up to get in, some were even being turned away. A huge crowd for a weeknight.

Oscar sure packed them in.

In the alley, behind the club, Henry could hear musicians tuning up for their next set. He thought he heard Sheldon, tweaking his saxophone.

On the back step, a younger man dressed in a white apron and black bow tie was waiting for them. He opened the screen door and rushed them through a makeshift service kitchen, where they put their bottles of Jamaican Ginger in a tub of ice with other odd-shaped bottles of mysterious properties.

Out in the main room, near a worn wooden dance floor, their escort pointed at some chairs beside the kitchen door, next to where a busboy was folding a pile of cloth napkins into perfect little white triangles. "You sit over there and stay out of trouble, and I'll go see if Oscar is ready," he told them. Henry and Keiko gazed in awe through the dark, smoky lounge, speckled with tall glasses on burgundy tablecloths and jewelry that sparkled on the patrons huddled around the small candlelit tables.

The chatter dimmed as an old man found his way to the bar, where he poured himself a tall glass of ice water, wiping the sweat from his brow. It was the old man from behind the club, the one who'd been smoking in the alley. Henry's jaw dropped as the old man headed onstage, flexed his wrists, and popped his knuckles before sitting down at the upright piano in front of a large jazz ensemble. Sheldon was perched behind a bandbox with the rest of the horn section.

The old man shucked his suspenders from his shoulders, giving his upper body room to roam, and slid his fingers across the keyboard as the rest of the band fell into rhythm. To Henry, the crowd appeared to be holding their breath. The old man at the piano spoke as he started playing an intro. "This is for my two new friends--it's called

'Alley Cats.' It's a little different, but I think you gonna like it."

Henry had listened to Woody Herman and Count Basie once or twice on the radio, but to hear a twelve-piece orchestra
live
was unlike anything he'd ever experienced.

Most of the music he heard vicariously spilling out of the clubs up and down South Jackson was of the small-ensemble variety, with simple, broken beats. A few musicians playing freestyle. This was a speeding freight train by comparison. The double bass and drums drove the tune while magically cutting away all at once to allow Oscar to take the spotlight with his featured piano solos.

Henry turned to Keiko, who had opened up her sketchbook and was doing her best to pencil in the scene. "It's swing jazz," she said. "This is what my parents listen to.

My mom says they don't play it like this at the white clubs; it's too crazy for some people."

When Keiko mentioned her parents, Henry began noticing the makeup of the crowd. Nearly all were black, some sitting and swaying while others strutted on the floor, dancing spontaneously to the frenetic pace of the band. Standing out in the crowd were several Japanese couples, drinking and soaking in the music, like flowers turned toward the sun. Henry looked for Chinese faces. There were none.

Keiko pointed to one of the small tables where three Japanese couples sat, sipping their drinks and laughing. "That's Mr. Toyama. He was my English composition teacher at the Japanese school for one quarter. That must be his wife. I think the other two are teachers as well."

Henry watched the Japanese couples and thought about his own parents. His mother busy with her housework or community service at the Bing Kung Benevolent Association, where she'd trade in her gasoline coupons for ration stamps--red stamps for meat, lard, and oil, and blue stamps for beans, rice, and canned goods. His father with his ear tuned to the radio, listening for the latest news about the war in Russia. The war in the Pacific. The war in China. Spending his day leading fund-raising drives to support the Kuomintang--the nationalist army fighting the Japanese in the northern provinces of China. He was even ready to fight the war here, having volunteered as a block warden for the Chinatown area. He was one of the few civilians issued a gas mask as a precaution against the impending Japanese invasion.

The war affected everyone. Even here at the Black Elks Club, the blackout curtains were drawn, making the mood feel secretive to Henry. Like a place hidden from the troubles of the world. Maybe that was why they all came here. To escape--running away with a martini made from Jamaican Ginger, chasing it with Oscar Holden's rendition of "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good."

Henry could have stayed all night. Keiko too, probably. But when he peeked behind the heavy curtain, the sun was setting over Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains in the distance. He looked out the window as teenagers, older than he and Keiko, ran up and down the sidewalk shouting, "Put out your lights! Put out your lights!"

Inside, Oscar took another break.

"It's almost dark, time to go," Henry said.

Keiko looked at Henry like he'd woken her from a wonderful dream.

They waved at Sheldon, who finally saw them and waved back, looking happy and surprised to see them. He met them by the kitchen door.

"Henry! And this must be ..." Sheldon looked at him with eyes wide. Henry saw the expression; he looked more impressed than surprised.

"This is Keiko. She's my friend from school. She's on scholarship too."

Keiko shook Sheldon's hand. "Nice to meet you. It was Henry's idea, we hung out back and then--"

"And then Oscar put you to work, that's how it happened, isn't it? He's like that, always looking out for his club. Looking out for his band. What'd you think?"

"The best. He should put out a record," Keiko gushed.

"Now, now, we gotta walk before we can run--bills to pay, you know. Okay, we're about to light it up again for the eight o'clock session, so you two better run along now.

It's almost dark, and I don't know about you, miss, but I
know
Henry can't be out that late.

Little man ain't got no brother, so
I'm
his big brother, gotta look out for him. In fact, we look alike, don't we?" Sheldon put his face next to Henry's. "That's the only reason he wears that button, so they don't confuse the two of us."

Keiko smiled and laughed; she touched Sheldon's cheek with the palm of her hand, her eyes lighting up as they met Henry's.

"How long are you playing here?" Henry asked.

"Just through the weekend, then Oscar said
we'd talk.
"

"Knock 'em dead," Henry said as he and Keiko headed through the swinging kitchen door.

Sheldon smiled and held up his sax. "Thank you, sir, you have a fine day now."

Henry and Keiko threaded their way through the kitchen, between a large butcher block on wheels and racks of dishes, glasses, and silverware. A few of the kitchen staff looked puzzled as the two of them smiled and walked on by, heading for the back landing in the alley.

The evening had been incredible. Henry wished he could tell his parents about it.

Maybe he would, at breakfast tomorrow, in English.

The door leading to the alley had been closed and locked. It was almost blackout time. When Henry opened the heavy wooden sway lurching in the doorway were two white faces in plain black suits that blotted out what little light remained in the dusky twilight. Henry stopped breathing, frozen, as he heard for the first time the cold metal tumble of a revolver being cocked. Each man gripped a fistful of gun-metal. Short, piercing barrels pointed directly at his smallish twelve-year-old frame as he broke his paralysis to step in front of Keiko, shielding her the best he could. On their suit coats hung badges. They were federal agents. Music inside the Black Elks Club clattered to a halt. The only sounds Henry heard were his own racing heartbeat and men everywhere shouting,
"FBI."

Henry knew it. They were being busted up for bootlegging. For hauling bottles of Jamaican Ginger to some speakeasy where they'd get fingered for making bathtub gin.

But as shocked as he was, stunned was more like it, Keiko looked terrified.

Henry felt the heavy hands of the two FBI men as they escorted them both back through the kitchen, ignoring workers in the pantry, who Henry saw were busy pouring bottles of whiskey and gin down the drain. The agents ignored them.
It doesn't make
sense
, Henry thought.