Kansas City Lightning (20 page)

He opened the door to their room, which contained a big brass bed, a light oak dresser against the right wall, and an adjustable mirror with tie racks on either side. In the center of the room was a potbellied stove, small but strong enough to heat the room. When it was winter, the head of the bed was pointed south, toward the stove, but in spring, summer, and fall it was pointed north. Rebecca, whom he also called Suggie, was lying on the bed and looking out the window at the sun, which was still heating the pleasant breezes of April. He crossed the room and lay his body next to hers, but with his head at the foot of the bed.

“Suggie?”

“Yes, Charlie.”

“You know all of the men I work with have children. I'm the only one who doesn't have children. Give me a son.”

“Well, I haven't had any yet. Maybe we can't have any children.”

“Ma knows. Ma knows how,” he said, and left the room.

He returned shortly, holding a white-capped bottle with an orange label. It was Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. “A baby in every bottle,” as the old people said. When the cap was removed, a strong smell, like that of today's
vitamins, came forth. Now they were sitting next to each other on the bed with their legs crossed.

“We both have to drink this, Suggie. You want some first?”

“No, you drink it first. Then I will.”

He took a swig, winched, and passed it to her. Now that he had done it, she did the same, believing it was safe. After two swigs apiece, they placed the brown bottle with the orange label on the small night table next to the lamp. They then made love, still something of a new experience for the couple of nine months.

Later that evening, Charlie got up. He put on his dark, tailor-made J. B. Simpson's suit and suspenders, which gave him the look of a man much older than sixteen, and pushed his bad feet, with their high arches, into some slip-on shoes, his gaiters. When Rebecca woke up a few minutes later, she looked out the window and saw her husband hunched over, horn under his arm, walking with his feet splayed out, digging into the pavement for all he was worth, back for five more nights in the Ozarks.

In the beginning of May, when the Musser's gig was over, Rebecca had something to tell her husband.

“Charlie?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess you're going to have a son.”

“What? You mean a baby?” he asked, shocked as a sleeping pet doused with ice water.

“You wanted a son. I guess we're going to have a son. It's my time of the month, and I haven't seen anything.”

With that, the young saxophonist changed. The mantle of adulthood he'd been seeking to conjure through his clothing and manner got under his skin a bit when he heard he was going to be a father. Though he'd been known to lay about the house, aimless—especially in a month like May, when it often rained—now Charlie started to hit the street, looking for gigs in earnest. No longer did he seem content to float along, playing the saxophone and the part of Addie Parker's spoiled only son. Now he meant to shoulder his responsibilities, or appeared to.

In June, two months pregnant, Rebecca Parker got up and went downstairs to
the parlor. She opened the sliding doors and entered, passing the big potbellied stove, the mahogany player piano, the sliding doors that led to Addie Parker's room. Her eye took in the old-fashioned Victrola standing in the right corner, and the oversize mantel where Parkey kept her collection of knickknacks. As Rebecca stood before the picture window, she peered through the lace curtain, watching people passing on the street. Then a cab rolled up. In the backseat were three people: two men and a woman between them. One of the men was Charlie Parker, who leaned over and kissed the woman before getting out and walking up to the door.

When he entered the parlor with his horn, Charlie was surprised to see his wife.

“Hello, Rebeck.”

“Charlie, who was that woman I saw you kissing?”

“I wasn't kissing any woman.”

“Charlie, I was looking out this window and I saw you. Who was she?”

“Rebeck, I said I wasn't kissing any woman.”

“Charlie, I don't care. I told you I saw you kissing her.”

He slapped Rebecca.

“I still say you was kissing a girl.” Her cheek began to redden from the blow. Charlie picked up a pan of cool water that had been standing overnight and started patting it on his wife's face.

“Suggie, I'm so sorry,” he said, going to his knees. “Please forgive me.”

Seated now, Rebecca said, “I still don't care. Who was the girl, Charlie?”

Charlie left the parlor and went down the hall to the kitchen, looking for something to eat. Nothing more was said.

The following month, as Charlie was getting ready to go out one night, Rebecca was downstairs talking to Parkey when she heard her husband's voice.

“Suggie, come upstairs.”

When she went into their room, all the shades had been pulled down. Charlie, who hated to cross the upstairs hall to bathe, was standing next to the tin tub he used to wash up.

“Yes, Charlie?”

“Go over there and sit on the bed.”

She had no idea what Charlie was doing—was he going to give her a gift? Some kind of surprise? On the windowsill, there was a small mirror Charlie used to pick ingrown hairs from his face. Charlie was out of her line of sight, but when she looked in the mirror, she saw him put one foot up on a chair, remove one of the ties with the tight, small knots from the rack on the oak dresser, put it around his arm, and pull it tight. Then he removed a hypodermic needle from the dresser and pushed it into the crook of his arm. When Rebecca saw the blood rush up into the needle, she screamed and ran over to him.

“Charlie, what are you doing?”

He smiled, removed the needle, wiped the blood from his arm, loosened the loop, and put the tie on. Then he took his coat from the closet, looked at his wife, and kissed her on the forehead. “Suggie, I'll be seeing you,” he said, then went downstairs, got his saxophone, and was gone.

After he left, Rebecca opened the dresser drawer and found a kit with a hypodermic needle, a twisted piece of rubber, a spoon, and a small, white packet. She took it downstairs to Parkey, telling her what she'd seen and asking her if she understood it. Parkey said nothing, merely looked inside the kit and took it into her room.

The next morning, when Charlie returned, he was met by his wife and mother in the parlor.

“Charlie,” Addie Parker said to her son, “I'd rather see you dead than use that stuff.”

Charlie looked at Rebecca, set his saxophone on the piano bench, left the parlor, and went to the kitchen.

Shortly afterward, Rebecca began to notice a change in Charlie. When he got home, a shuffle of companions would come into the house and head to his room with him. When he emerged to leave for the evening, he would be aloof, distant, descending the stairs as if he owned the world, speaking to no one in the family and listening to no one. Before too long, Rebecca noticed that things were starting to go missing. All of Rebecca's good clothes disappeared, suit by suit, then her rings. Charlie started acting frantic, and as his own tailor-made suits disappeared, he began looking more and more haggard. He was in the streets almost
all the time and seemed on the verge of losing his mind—nervous, irritable, and always preoccupied. Rebecca wouldn't see him or hear from him for three days; then he would return, eat like a horse, and sleep as if dead for twenty-four full hours. One morning he came to his wife.

“Suggie,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered, looking at him and feeling a sorrow she had never felt. This wasn't her Charlie, this man who looked as if he'd slept in the street, who'd dissolved into a nightlife she knew nothing of and was now aging before her eyes; he was as much a ragged stranger as he was her husband of nearly a year.

“Why don't you get an abortion?”

“No.”

Charlie said nothing else, but that evening he borrowed Parkey's Model T Ford and took Rebecca to the movies. For that evening, at least, he seemed more like the old Charlie. He could still be fun. Maybe all this trouble would pass. She prayed it would.

One evening in the middle of August, after Charlie had left, Rebecca was cleaning up their room. While she was making up the bed, she found an envelope addressed to Charlie under the pillow. The letter had already been opened, and she sat down to read it.

It was a love note from a woman named Geraldine, and it detailed her physical experience with Charlie Parker in no uncertain terms. The letter ended with these words: “Rebecca sure is a very lucky girl. I wish I could be in her shoes.” Had she been knocked down with a bat, it might have hurt less.

She turned the letter over and found another page behind it.

Geraldine

Nobody will ever walk in Rebecca's shoes.

Charlie

Charlie's wife put everything back under the pillow where she'd found it. Knowing the condition Charlie was in, she decided not to cross him, not to ask him about it. But why would he leave letters like that under the pillow? Was he toying with her? Was it his way of apologizing for kissing
another woman right outside the house? She didn't know. There was so much she didn't know about Charlie. Even Parkey, who used to have so much influence on her boy, couldn't get him to stop what he was doing. And Parkey was starting to seem tired, as if she was giving up trying to win back the control she'd had over her son for so many years. Out there in the Kansas City night, Charlie Parker was doing whatever the hell he wanted to do.

A few weeks later, in early September, Rebecca was downstairs talking with Parkey when Charlie called her from upstairs. She went to him—she always did—but this time she wondered,
What will it be now?
When she opened the door, Charlie stood before her, aloof, clearly full of that stuff. He seemed as if he were all the way across the street, even though he was right in her face. His eyes empty, he spoke to her in a dark and imperial fashion.

“Go sit on the trunk and look out the window.”

She did. She heard a click; cold metal was pressed against her temple.
Oh, my God
, she thought.

“Rebeck, where is the letter?”

“Charlie, I don't have the letter.”

“Rebeck, where is the letter?”

“Look in the drawer,” she answered, not knowing why.

As he removed what must have been Parkey's pistol and turned away, Rebecca reached for a flatiron that was on the floor. Sensing something, Charlie slipped through the door just as she threw it, barely missing his head. The flatiron hit the door. She picked it up, pulled open the door, and threw it at him, missing his head again, and this time sending the iron through one of the long, slender windows flanking the front door.

At the bottom of the stairs, Charlie turned and stared up at her.

“The next time you pull a gun on me,” Rebecca cried, “you best to kill me!”

“What's the matter, dearie?” asked Parkey from the parlor.

Charlie said nothing, but a sudden calm came over the house. In a moment he was himself again, as if nothing had happened. But Rebecca would never forget.

The difference between fact and fiction was now more than superficially important to Rebecca and Charlie. She was being punished for standing up to a falsehood, instead of letting it pass—a decision that was not always available to
her community.

Charlie Parker and his young wife had grown up in circumstances where
all
Negroes were presumed to conform to a false portrait—that primitive image that had dominated print and stage depictions for more than a century. They were presented as simple beings, never humanly complex—except perhaps in newsreel snippets, one of the main ways Charlie and Rebecca would have learned about the larger world. Those newsreels brought them stories of world leaders and national criminals, tragic fires and startling floods; they featured film shot on faraway grounds that were soon visually familiar: royalty in Europe, merchants in Asia, Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics. None of whom the conspiratorial couple, or most others in the theater, could likely have imagined alone. It was surely a smaller world, now; looking up at those giant bodies and giant faces—some of them exotic figures with wild makeup and strange tattoos, with wooden discs or metal rings stretching their bodies in surprising and unaccustomed ways—it became easier to imagine the world beyond Kansas City, as Charlie had been doing ever since his days sitting on the steps at the Crispus Attucks library, reading about foreign people and odd ideas. The cinematic images made available by technology told truths that made viewers more sophisticated, more curious, more skilled at facing problems.

Not long before, in 1934, the Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas had put a determined, if fanciful, image to the dreams Charlie Parker was already starting to have. One of the figures in his landmark triptych
Aspects of Negro Life
was the silhouette of a black man standing athwart the skyscrapers of the city with no more armor than a saxophone held to the sky, radiating light, a beacon but also a weapon. Like Billy Eckstine, younger Negroes such as Douglas were starting to reach beyond the injustices of minstrelsy, which scandalized their names so casually and consistently.

Yet back at 1516 Olive it was Charlie Parker who was doing the scandalizing, threatening Rebecca for calling him on the deceitful life he was living right before her eyes. That gun to her head was no movie gun; it was not filled with blanks, not as far as she knew. That was the injustice Rebecca was struggling against, and she was ready to go down for the truth. She could only wish that her husband would somehow return to the way he'd been not too long ago, when the
two of them were conspiring to deceive her mother and sneak down to the movies to get acquainted with the larger world.