Tiger Rag (6 page)

Like what?

Like he give me jack to get it back.

Staulz’s eyes widened
. You want to squeeze Bolden?

He’s got jack to spare.

What about Zahn?

Zahn is nothin’.

Listen to me,
Dusen said
. Bolden’s got some rough boys owe him down on South Rampart. They could take you apart.

They’re plenty rough,
Staulz added
. Louis Coe and the Ellis brothers.

Fuck ’em. I can be plenty rough. Why you keep runnin’ me down? You fuckers not my friends.

Bunk, this don’t work from any angle,
Dusen said
. Give it up.

He’s right,
Staulz said
.

Johnson stood up angrily and threw down some coins
. I’ll give it up, all right. And that piece of shit Guideau with it. And the two of you can kiss my ass.

He stormed out into the street. Dusen and Staulz watched through the window as he disappeared. Then Dusen poured them each a shot
.

He’s crazy,
Dusen said
.

Staulz shook his head
. I wouldn’t want to be that white boy.

I wouldn’t want to be Bunk. If you hear what he does next, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.

It was called Skeleton’s Bend because dead bodies floating downriver never made it past the western bank. The water there was deep, and muddy right to the surface. The bodies, some newly drowned, others bloated, carried all the way from Cairo or Memphis, sank slowly as they turned the bend, and after they came to rest the fish picked them clean, leaving the skeletons suspended upright in the currents
.

Bunk Johnson was standing on that bank in a torn shirt and muddy boots. He had a pint bottle in his back pocket. He once knew two boys who dove to see the skeletons. One came up breathless, screaming that they were there, all right, dozens of them, dancing. The other boy’s body was never found
.

Far out on the river, the lanterns on the fishing boats flickered. At night, it was the walleyes and the yellow catfish that bit. Johnson used to go night fishing with his uncle, a roofer, who one morning came home to find his wife in bed with another man, shot them both, and was hanged two months later in the prison yard in Amesville
.

Johnson was sweating. The mist off the water was more like steam. Snakes slid in and out of the mangrove roots, bats swooped through the trees. He could hear his own voice, somewhere outside himself in the darkness. He was cursing that bitch Agnes he lived with, with her big ass and sweet lips, who ran off with his money and had better be hoping he didn’t find her. And that son of a bitch Guideau who would never bother him again. And, most of all, Bolden, with his mighty airs
—King Bolden—
who was no better than him, no matter what anyone said, and one day they would all know it
.

He took a final swig from the bottle and threw it into the river, then reached into his coat and took out the Edison cylinder and flung it as far as he could, so hard that he lost his balance and slid halfway down the riverbank. He heard a splash in the darkness as he sprawled out in the mud, laughing and cursing, telling himself that the only ones who would hear that music now were dead men. Let them dance to it
.

Driving north on the interstate, as the hail turned to freezing rain and the temperature plummeted, Devon had mixed feelings about leaving Miami. Though she was jobless, behind in rent, shitlisted by the local narcs, it seemed like a bad move to embark on a road trip with her mother. Ruby might have a concrete destination, where professional business awaited her, but it still felt as if she was fuguing. And Devon was along for the ride. After years of estrangement and uneasy truces, of brief obligatory phone calls, Devon was listening to Ruby’s patter for hours on end. And this when, for the first time in memory, her mother frequently made little sense.

Her own mother’s funeral had been just as Ruby promised: short and unceremonious. She and Devon sat alone in the first of six rows of folding chairs and viewed the body in its rosewood casket. Ruby had ordered three wreaths of white carnations, and their scent was overpowering. She insisted that she
and Devon wear white, not black, and ordered dresses from Neiman Marcus, which a fitter brought to the house.

For her mother Ruby had picked out a pale blue dress, blue kerchief, and white gloves with pearl buttons. She saw Devon staring at the gloves and whispered, “Arthritis made her hands like claws. She would want them covered.”

Devon had only met Camille Broussard once, when she was thirteen. Ruby had broken with her long before that. She had come to Miami for a single day and stayed in a motel. She found Ruby’s office address in the phone book and sat in the waiting room until she arrived. It happened that Ruby had just picked up Devon at school, and Devon never forgot the expression on her mother’s face when she saw the sallow, red-haired woman in a gingham dress sitting there pensively: in a matter of seconds, it went from astonishment to anger. She calmly ordered Devon to go into her office. Assuming the old woman was a patient, Devon didn’t understand her reaction. Ten minutes later, Ruby joined her, looking pale and drawn herself, and sat down behind her desk.

“That was my mother,” she said. “Your grandmother. I explained to you last year, when I thought you were old enough to understand, why I never saw her and never wanted you to see her.”

“Because she abandoned you,” Devon said meekly.

“She did worse than that. She all but encouraged me to abandon her. That was the kicker. She couldn’t wait to be rid of me. I promised myself I would never allow her near me or my family. And I won’t.”

“She’s gone?”

“She was never here.”

Those words echoed in Devon’s ears again as she looked
down on her grandmother’s body. She didn’t recognize her. The mortician had applied plenty of makeup, making her appear younger in death. Her wrinkles were gone, her white hair neatly coiffed.

By email Ruby had placed the same obituary in the
Miami Herald
and the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
. “That was her hometown,” she explained, then read the obituary aloud from her laptop:

“What’s that quote?” Devon asked.

“Book of Joshua, 6:5. Her favorite. After her conversion, she spouted it all the time.”

“Because your father was a trumpeter?”

“Who knows?”

Devon didn’t know much about Ruby’s father except that he was a trumpeter. That had intrigued her, especially since her mother had no apparent musical talent and did not even listen to music very often. Devon wondered if her own musical inclinations had been passed down from her grandfather. His name was Valentine Owen, and according to Ruby, whose only source was her own mother, he claimed he was originally from New Jersey. That his father was a drummer. That his mother named him after Saint Valentine, patron saint of musicians. His father ran out on them. His mother took a job as cashier in
the gift shop at the Dorset Hotel. They moved into a railroad flat in Hell’s Kitchen. Owen took up the trumpet and became good enough to make money as a sideman. He dropped out of school, and for a long time, he lived out of a suitcase. It all sounded tough and romantic to Devon, but Ruby felt otherwise. “He was a guy who always watched out for Number One, and the hell with everyone else. The details don’t matter.”

Sitting before the casket, glancing sidelong at her mother, Devon couldn’t read her thoughts, nor even venture that they had anything to do with the present circumstances. A high window allowed a thin shaft of sunlight to penetrate the room. Ruby seemed to be observing the motes of dust tumbling within it. The windowpane was stained red and blue and the dust was colored accordingly. Her face looked relaxed. Only her eyes, intensely bright and unblinking, betrayed the fact that she was getting very little sleep. That and the blurring of her lip gloss in the heat.

Befitting her profession, Ruby had always worn minimal makeup, but that, too, had changed of late: she took care each morning applying eyeliner and mascara, blow-drying her hair, and touching up her nails. “Devon, my grandmother used to say: worry about your brains first, your looks second. But you don’t have to be a bimbo to get dolled up. Of course, some bimbos don’t even bother. Take the new Mrs. Sheresky. No matter the occasion, she dresses as if she’s going to a yoga class. I used to see her waiting outside the courthouse wearing a tank top and running shoes.”

Devon had encountered her father’s new wife only once, by chance, emerging from his office building, and didn’t think she possessed anything like Ruby’s natural beauty. Atop the drop-dead
body, honed in hundreds of Pilates classes, and beneath the cascade of red hair, was an unformed face. There was nothing going on behind the eyes: not intelligence or mystery, not a modicum of her mother’s allure. Her father’s blindness infuriated Devon as much as his infidelity.

As the minutes ticked by, it struck Devon that Ruby was capable of sitting there in a daze for hours. Devon signaled the funeral director hovering in the doorway. On cue, four attendants in black suits entered, lifted the casket, and carried it off.

Later, in the director’s office, Ruby was handed a bronze urn engraved with a pair of herons. Devon wondered at its symbolic significance until she discovered it was a stock item, one of a dozen in a nearby cabinet. The silver hair, the clawlike hands were a moot point now, Devon thought. That urn contained all that was left of her grandmother: roughly five pounds of powdered bone, not ashes, as Ruby informed her.

“At two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, the flesh is vaporized,” her mother explained in her clinician’s voice. “Afterward the bone fragments are removed from the furnace and pulverized in a remains processor—yes, that’s what they call it. They sift out the jewelry and dental fillings, the knee and hip replacements that have survived the flames, so the processor won’t be damaged.”

Beneath Ruby’s flat tone, her anger was palpable. Devon knew that Ruby was happy to talk about the years she lived with her grandmother—buckling down to her studies, working in her grandmother’s dry cleaning business, preparing for college and medical school—but kept to a bare minimum the details of her childhood with her mother. That was off-limits.

Once outside the funeral home, Ruby walked to her Mercedes
through the bright sunlight and placed the urn on the rear seat. She drove to North Beach on the expressway.

“I don’t want to talk right now,” she said calmly, before Devon could say a word.

After finding a space in the parking lot, Ruby headed directly for the beach, the urn tucked under her arm. Realizing with horror what she had in mind, Devon hurried after her.

“Mom, you can’t do that here.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t. There are people swimming.”

“There’s room for one more in the water.”

Sunbathers crowded the sand. In her long dress and stiletto heels, Ruby threaded them with surprising agility, leading Devon to the water’s edge.

“Mom!”

Ruby kicked off her shoes and waded into the surf. Devon didn’t follow her. She didn’t want to raise any more fuss. It was too late, though. Children were laughing at the sight of a fully clothed woman in the water. Swimmers looked on in bewilderment, and a few who realized what she was carrying shouted angrily. An old man beckoned the lifeguard perched on an elevated chair down the beach. In knee-deep water, her white dress billowing, Ruby unscrewed the top of the urn and poured out her mother’s ashes. Then she returned to shore, picked up her shoes, and made for the parking lot, sand sticking to the hem of her dress. “You’re sick!” the old man called after her as the lifeguard trotted down the beach, but by then Ruby had dropped the urn into a trash can and started her car.

“Shhh,” she said when Devon opened her mouth to speak. “You can say everything you need to say later.”

By the time they got home, Devon was too stressed out to talk. She stretched out on the living room sofa and fell asleep. Ruby threw a blanket over her.

At two
A.M
. she was awakened by loud music. She walked down the hall to the study and found Ruby at her desk, writing on a legal pad with a fountain pen. Beside her was a half-empty bottle of Veuve Clicquot and a bowl of purple jelly beans. The home page of her computer was a photograph of a lightning storm at sea. Ruby looked up and said, “You know, Devon, I’m giving a speech in New York on the twenty-third.”

“What?”

“To a group of anesthesiologists. My brothers and sisters. In September they invited me to give a speech. I have my topic, but I haven’t had a chance to write it.”

“And you’re going to go through with it?”

“Why wouldn’t I? I always meet my obligations.”