The Perfect Host (29 page)

I was happy about the whole thing. The chain would hold him under, that and the mud, and the catfish would make quick work of him. But if, by some fluke, the body should be found, well, the chain could be an accident, and he certainly died of drowning. In river water. The bump on the back of his neck—that was nothing.

But Lutch Crawford was hard to kill.

I don’t have to tell you about the next month or so, with the headlines and all that jive that went on. The band went right ahead; Lutch’s hand was always so light on it that his absence made almost no difference. The sides worried some about him, but it took them three days to get really panicked. By that time my mind was easy. No amount of police work and private detective shenanigans could do a thing about it. The whole band alibied me, and the hat-check girl too, with my hives. Matter of fact, no one even thought to ask me any questions, specially. No one remembered exactly what time Lutch left the club; there had been nothing to call it to anyone’s attention. A clean job.

The next thing I wanted to do was to get clear of the whole aggregation and go live by myself. I was careful, though, and made no move until someone else did it first.

It came to a head six weeks after Lutch disappeared. We’d moved on to Fort Worth, Texas. Fawn and Crispin hadn’t wanted to leave Baton Rouge, but finally decided that Lutch, wherever he was, knew our schedule as well as we did and would come back when he was ready to.

We had a big powwow in Fort Worth. Crispin took the floor. Everyone was there.

Fawn still looked bad. She’d lost a lot of weight. Skid Portly looked five years older.

Crispin came to the point as quick as Lutch used to.

“Gang,” he said, “don’t get your hopes up; I didn’t call you because I have any new ideas about Lutch or where he might be. There’s no word.

“What brings this up is that after two weeks at Brownsville and a week at Santa Monica, this tour is over. We have our pick of several offers—I’ll go over them with you later—and we’ve got to decide right now what we’re going to do. Lutch isn’t here and there’s no way of knowing when he will show. We can either take a vacation after the Santa Monica date, and hang up the fiddle until Lutch shows up, or we can go on. What do you say?”

“I could use a rest,” I said.

“We could all use a rest,” said Crispin. “But what has us tuckered out is this business of Lutch. If it wasn’t for that we wouldn’t think of a break until next summer.”

Fawn said, “What would Lutch want us to do?”

Moff—Lew Moffatt, that was, the reed man—said, “I don’t reckon there’s any doubt about that.”

There was a general mumble of agreement. Lutch would have gone on.

“Then we go on?”

Everybody said yes but me. I didn’t say. No one noticed.

Crispin nodded. “That leaves a big question. As far as performances are concerned, we can get along. But someone has to take over booking, contracts, a lot of the arranging, hotel accommodations, and so on.”

“What do you mean someone?” asked Skid. “Lutch did four men’s work.”

“I know,” said Crispin. “Well, do you think we can make it? How about the arrangements? Skid, you and Fawn used to help him the most.”

Skid nodded. Fawn said, “We can do it.”

Crispin said, “I’ll handle the business, if it’s okay with you.” It was. “Now, how about billing? We can’t phony it up; Lutch’s dis—uh—absence has had a flock of publicity, and if Lutch doesn’t come back before we start, we can’t bill him. The customers wouldn’t like it.”

They chewed that over. Finally Skid said, “Why’n’t you take it, Crisp?”

“Me? I don’t want it.”

The rest of them all started talking at once. Lutch and Crispin had worked very close together. The general idea was that they wanted him to do it.

Crispin had been lounging back against a long table. Now he stood up straight. He said,

“All right, all right. But listen. This band is Lutch Crawford’s Gone Geese, and if it’s all the same to you it’ll stay that way. We can
bill as Don Crispin and Lutch Crawford’s Gone Geese if you like; but I want it so that wherever Lutch is, he’ll know that it’s still his band. That means, too, that any new arrangement or novelty or what have you, is going to be done the way Lutch would do it, to the very best of our ability. If any one of you hears something in the band that doesn’t sound like Lutch, speak up. I want it so that when Lutch comes back—damn it, I won’t say
if
—when Lutch comes back he can pick up the baton in the middle of a number and take over from there. Are you with it?”

They were. After the fuss had died down Koko deCamp, the hot trumpet man, spoke up sort of timid. “Crispin,” he said, “I don’t want to cause any hard feelings, but I have a standing offer with the King combo. My contract with Lutch is up at the end of this tour, and I think I could do myself more good with the King. That’s only—” he added quickly, “if Lutch don’t come back.”

Crispin frowned and scratched his head. He looked over at Fawn. She said again, “What would Lutch want him to do?”

Crispin said, “There it is. Lutch would let you do whatever you thought you wanted. He never stopped anyone who wanted to leave.”

I could of told him. I didn’t.

Crispin went on, “There’s the code word, kizd, ‘What would Lutch want?’ Start from there. Anyone else want out? There’ll be no hard feelings.”

The bass man—we’d only had him a couple of months—said he thought he’d go. Then I spoke up.

Fawn said, “Oh, no!”

“Why, Fluke?” asked Crispin. They all stared at me.

I spread my hands. “I want out, that’s all. Do I have to fill out a questionnaire?”

“There won’t be any ‘Gone Geese’ without Fluke,” said Skid.

He was so right. The way they billed it was “Don Crispin and the Lutch Crawford Orchestra.” Crispin and Fawn did their best to make me stay with it, but no. Oh no. I was over, out and clear. I think Fawn figured that it hurt me to stay close to the band, after Lutch had been so good to me. Hell. I wanted to laugh, that was all, and I couldn’t do that where the band could see me.

We broke up at Santa Monica after the date there. I thought I’d take it easy for a year or so and look around, but what should drop into my lap but a gold-plated offer from a radio station in Seattle, for a night record-jockey stand. That was made to order. My voice and delivery and savvy of the sharps and the flats were perfect for it, and best of all, I could work where people didn’t have to look at my face. Sometimes I think if I had been in radio from the start, I wouldn’t of—I might not have become the kind of cat who—ah, that’s useless chatter now.

I got twenty-six weeks with options and could have upped the ante if I’d wanted to argue, which I didn’t. Crispin and the rest of Lutch’s sidemen went all out for me, sending me telegrams during my show, giving me personal appearances, and plugging me in their clubs. Seemed like, dead or alive, Lutch kept on being kind. I didn’t let it get me. I’d lived long enough to know you can’t break clean from any close contact with a human being. Quit a job, get a divorce, leave a home town, it drags on in shreds and tatters that haunt you. I held tight to laughing. Lutch was dead.

Then one night I got that advance shipment of Mecca records. Six sides of Crispin-Crawford.

I gave it a big hello in the old Fluke style: “Aha, lil kizd—a clump of jump for bacon to crisp-in; Crispin and Crawford, and six new plates for gates. Just like old times for Fluke the Juke.… This spinner’s a winner: old
Deep Purple
in the Crispin crunchy style.”

I played it off. I hadn’t heard any of these plates yet, though they were cleared for broadcast; they’d been delivered just before air time.
Deep Purple
was the old bandstand arrangement that Lutch had done himself. Moff was playing Lutch’s clarinet, and there wasn’t enough difference to matter. In the double-time ride in the third chorus, Skid slipped in a lick on guitar that I hadn’t heard before, but it was well inside the Crawford tradition. The other platters showed up the same way; Crispin took a long drum solo in
Lady Be Good
that was new, but strictly Crawford. I held out the two new ones until last.

I mean new. There was a blow-top novelty called
One Foot in the Groove
that I had never heard; the by-line was Moff and Skid Portly. The other one was an arrangement of
Tuxedo Junction
. We’d
always used a stock arrangement for that one; this was something totally new. In the first place it let in some bop sequences, and in the second place it really exploited an echo chamber—the first that had been done on a Crawford record. I listened to it bug-eyed.

It was good. It was
very
good. But the thing that tore me all apart was that it was Lutch Crawford, through and through. Lutch had never used an echo before. But he would—he
would
, because it was a new trend. Just like the be-bop continuities. I could imagine the powwow before the recording session, and Fawn saying “What would Lutch want?”

Listening to it, I saw Lutch, wide shoulders, long hands, pushing the brass this way, that way, reaching up and over to haul the sound of the drums up and then crush them down, down to a whispering cymbal. I could see him hold it down there with his right hand flat in the air in front of him as if he had it on a table, long enough for him to catch his lower lip between his teeth and pull it loose, and suddenly, then, like a flash-bulb going off, dazzle the people with an explosion of scream-trumpet and high volume guitar.

The turntable beside me went quietly about its work, with the sound-head pulsing a little like a blood-pressure gauge. It hypnotized me, I guess. Next thing I knew my engineer was waving frantically at me through the plate glass, giving me a ‘dead-air’ sign, and I realized that the record had been finished for seconds. I drew a thick rattling breath and said the only thing in the world that there was—a thing bigger than me, clearer than my scriptsheets or the mike in front of me or anything else. I said stupidly, “That was Lutch. That was Lutch Crawford. He isn’t dead.
He isn’t dead
.…”

Something in front of my eyes began bobbing up and down. It was the engineer again, signalling. I had been staring straight at him without seeing him. I was seeing Lutch. The engineer pointed downward, waggled his finger round and round. That meant a record. I nodded and put on a Crosby plate, and sat back as if I’d been lanced in the gut with a vaulting pole.

My phone light flashed. I took calls on the show; the phones were equipped with lights instead of bells so they wouldn’t crowd the mike. I picked up the receiver, saying automatically, “Fluke the Juke.”

“One moment please.” An operator. Then, “Fluke? Oh, Fluke …” Fawn. It was Fawn Amory.

“Fluke,” she said, her words tumbling over each other the way notes did on her keyboard, “Oh Fluke, darling, we heard you, we all heard you. We’re in Denver. We cut a date to catch your show. Fluke honey, you said it, Fluke, you said it!”

“Fawn—”

“You said he isn’t dead. We know that, Fluke—we all do. But the way you said it; you don’t know how much that means to us! We did it, you see?
Tuxedo Junction
—we worked and worked—something that would be new and would be Lutch too. Lutch can’t die as long as we can do that, don’t you see?”

“But I—”

“We’re going to do more, Fluke. More Lutch, more real Lutch Crawford. Will you come back, Fluke? We want to do more ‘Gone Geese’ records and we can’t without you. Won’t you please, Fluke? We
need
you!” There was a murmuring in her background. Then,

“Fluke? This is Crispin. I want to double that, boy. Come on back.”

“Not me, Crispin. I’m done,” I managed to say.

“I know how you feel,” said Crispin quickly. He knew I was about to hang up on him. “I won’t push you, hipster. But think it over, will you? We’re going to keep on, whatever happens, and wherever Lutch is, alive or—wherever he is, he’ll have a band, and as long as he has a band, he’s here.”

“You’re doing fine,” I croaked.

“Just think it over. We can do twice as well if you’ll come back. Keep in touch. Here’s Fawn again.”

I hung up.

I’ll never know how I got through that show. I know why I did. I did because I was going to make my own way. That was why I had wanted to kill Lutch. Come sick, come ça, as the man said, this was my kick—making my own way without Lutch Crawford.

Six o’clock was closing time for me, and I imagine I got through the routines all right; no one said anything to me about it. And if didn’t answer the phone, and ignored requests, and played all the
long stuff I could get my hands on so I wouldn’t have to talk, well, they took it the way any outfit will take guff from a guy they pay too highly.

I walked, I don’t know where. I suppose I frightened a lot of kids on their way to school with that face of mine, and got a lot of queer looks from women scrubbing their porch steps. I wouldn’t know.
Lutch isn’t dead
was the only thing that made. I can’t tell you all the things I went through; there was a time of fear, when I thought Lutch was after me for what I’d done, and a time of calm, when I thought it couldn’t matter less—I could just go on minding my own business and let Lutch die altogether, the way everybody has to. And there was a time of cold fury, when I heard that new
Tuxedo Junction
with the echoing guitar, and knew that Crispin would keep turning new Lutch out—real Lutch, that no one else in the music business could imitate. Lutch, he was talented like three or four people, and there happened to be three or four people with just those talents in his band. Anyway, it’s all a haze.