Betrayal

By Laura Mazzuca Toops

It was August, that time of year that always gave Bix the blues. Summer was coming to an end, even though it was hotter than hell, still high summer by the thermometer and the number and fierceness of the mosquitoes humming around the netting he had draped over his bed in the little yellow cottage.

There were already signs of impending fall. Leaves, dark green with their heated blood, were starting to grow delicate edgings of brown, not from the heat but from age. Nights were starting to get an edge, too, a barely noticeable chill that blew off the lake and had girls begging their boyfriends for their jackets when they walked along the open promenade of the dance hall.

There was no reason for him to hang around Hudson Lake after the show on Friday night. He couldn’t stand thinking of Joy and how he’d hurt her by being with Harriet; and he couldn’t stand thinking about how he’d promised Harriet he’d marry her when all he really wanted to do was play the horn. And then there was the threat of Jean canning him, of letting down Tram because he couldn’t sight read, of the possibility of having to go home to Davenport. He just wanted to be away from it all.

So he took the South Shore into Chicago, got off the train, walked up the steps to Michigan Avenue, and grabbed the first cab he could get to the South Side.

As he watched the streets slide by, he felt himself float free like bubbles shaken loose in a glass of beer, all the stuff that was starting to weigh him down at Hudson Lake dissipating into air. There was just him and the night and the South Side streets outside, where anything could happen. The promise of good music at the end of the cab ride--loose, unfettered music that didn’t give a damn about charts and sight-reading--made him want to bounce in his seat like a kid.

He got out of the taxi on 35th and Sunset, right in front of the Sunset Cafe, his cornet under his arm, sidewalk glittering under the streetlights, the neighborhood throbbing with sound coming from beyond the awninged walkway up to the club’s door. The doorman recognized him and grinned a welcome, holding the door open.

Inside, the patrons--black, white and every shade in between--belly rubbed on the dance floor to the sounds of a band where two big, black horn players took turns pumping a melody as hard and as high as they could, while sweating people stood on chairs, clapping and screaming for them to take it higher.

Bix was absorbed into a sea of light and smell and sound--colored spotlights, glittering women’s dresses, mingled odor of sweat, tobacco and marijuana smoke and liquor--the noise level even between sets loud enough to make him squint. The crowd closed around him like an amoeba, making him a part of it, lifting him toward the familiar bandstand he remembered from his school days at Lake Forest Academy when he and the gang would come down here to worship at the shrine.

The floorshow was just finishing up and a line of high-yellow girls, naked except for swatches of bright silk and feathers over their bobbling breasts and buttocks, took a bow and headed backstage. He sidled up to the stage, where the boys were taking a break.

Louis spotted him first. "Say, look who’s heah, fellas. Mistah Bix Beiderbecke." Bix accepted palm slaps, sweaty handshakes, claps on the back, Tangee-flavored kisses from women who smelled like Evening in Paris and Madame C.J. Walker’s hair pomade. He settled at a table in front of the bandstand.

"Man, you slept in those duds, or what?" Louis laughed, pointing at Bix’s limp linen jacket and crumpled pants. He gestured to a round-eyed chorus girl who smiled into Bix’s face and sat at the table with him, slipping her arm through his.

"How’s bidness out there with the peckerwoods in Indiana?" Carroll asked, setting a bottle and a glass in front of Bix.

Bix looked from face to face, then down at his travel-stained clothing and laughed. He took his cornet out of its black velvet bag and set it on the table next to the bottle. "What are you playing tonight?"

"Shit, man, why don’t you be a payin’ customer for once?" Louis leered at the girl who had her head on Bix’s shoulder, her hand in his lap. "Don’t you ever get tired of blowin, boy?"

Bix poured a drink and downed it in a swallow, looking around the room. "We’ve been working up some hot stuff out there," he said. "You oughta hear Tram and Pee Wee. Bet we could come down here and kick your asses."

Louis and Carroll looked at each other and screeched with laughter. "Lissen at the ofay boy!" Louis howled. "Well, you on. You welcome to come on up and kick our black asses anytime you want." He put his face up to Bix’s and grinned. "Like how about now?"

He got up on the stage with the rest of the band and the lights hit him, so warm and comfortable and familiar, the crowd, the noise, and the other musicians. "Dippermouth Blues," Louis said, and stomped off the tune. Then he finished a solo and stepped back, sweeping an arm at Bix, introducing him to the simmering crowd. Bix stepped up, the horn weighty in his hands, ready.

And then it happened.

He looked down at the cornet and didn’t recognize it. It might as well have been a musical instrument from another world, alien, exotic--mute. He turned it around, studying it, totally at a loss as to how this thing was played. It was like holding a brick or a block of wood--it would be that impossible to evoke a sound from this instrument, playable neither by breath nor touch of fingers, this convoluted tangle of brass tubing and silent valves, lying dead in his hands.

His mouth had gone dry, tongue shriveled as if in the hollow cavity of a mummified corpse. His eyes locked on a couple sitting at a table in front, their faces almost touching, drinks in hands. They looked at him, eyes heavy-lidded and blasé, waiting to see what the ofay boy could do.

The crowd around them had gone into slow motion, then coagulated into stillness like flies in amber, frozen as they were thrown--mouths open, drinks poised at lips, smoke clouds solidified out of nostrils and lips. Bix’s hands trembled as he watched a bead of sweat dangle on the upper lip of a fine-boned cocoa-colored woman, her eyes open and glittering like one of those stuffed animals at the natural history museum.

The sounds in the room--laughter, breaking glass, catcalls, scraping chairs--all faded away into a strange, high-pitched buzz, like the sound of the rotary saw at the old man’s coal yard, shearing off two-by-fours. For the first time in his life there was no music behind his eyes, in his skull--just this high-pitched, droning whine, metallic, mechanical. He listened in vain over that shrill squeal for the melody, something that had always been there for him to cling to, only now it was gone. The cornet in his hands caught the lights from over the stage and glared up at him like a mocking smile.

It happened in the span of perhaps a second, an eye blink between Louis finishing his solo and Bix raising the horn to his lips. Louis looked sideways at him, his wet grin glistening in the spotlight. The band thumped relentlessly behind him, but Bix wasn’t hearing them--he felt the sound through the soles of his shoes. And in his hands was a brick, a block of wood.

It was gone just that quickly, as fast as the transition from Louis opening and closing his eyes. Bix raised the horn, blew. And sound came out, blessed sound, and he pushed it out into the smoke-stratified room and the noise of the crowd crested and broke over him like a tidal wave as the people began breathing again, moving again, tracheas closing around swallows of liquor, lungs inhaling joints, lovers’ lips mingling saliva and salt, the bead of sweat dripping off the cocoa-colored woman’s lip. And the sound was back, just that quickly.

He was so relieved and grateful that he stayed with the band all night until closing, seated back by the piano and drums, hunched over in his chair, blowing chorus after chorus of song after song. The crowd screamed, stomped, stood upon chairs and threw their heads back, howling at the mirrored ball on the ceiling like wolves under a metallic moon.

Then the doors finally closed and locked, and it was only him and Louis. Bix looked down at his shirt, which was plastered to his chest with sweat. He took it off and sat there in his undershirt, suspenders drooping at his hips, and blew some more. Only now it was the old stuff, the stuff he grew up with that Louis remembered, too--Royal Garden Blues, Sensation Rag, Tiger Rag. Their playing grew more introspective, contemplative, as they reached deeper into themselves to pull up sounds beyond the well-practiced and repeated phrases the crowds loved so well.

And then it was dawn and he slumped in the ladderback chair, arms dangling, legs splayed, sweating right down to his socks, embouchure shot and twitching from overuse. Louis sat across from him, teeth bared, eyes bloodshot, trumpet resting on a ham-sized knee.

"Yo a mess, boy," he grinned.

Bix looked around at the empty room as if coming out of a trance. "I need a drink," he said. Louis chuckled and handed him a thick white china mug redolent with the oily aroma of Chicago bourbon. He tried to get it to his lips, but his hand was shaking so hard he needed to hold the cup in both hands, like a beggar panhandling on a street corner.

The horn was on the floor at his feet, innocently mute, awaiting the sanctuary of the black velvet bag. Looking at it again made him shrivel inside as he relived the instant on the stage with the lights in his eyes when it had deserted him, when the animal had turned on him, the music had let him down, as if warning him of what could happen again, maybe next time not for a second, but forever.

He downed his drink, hissed fire through his teeth, and stood.

"Wheah you goin, boy? You come back home with me, we’ll get Lil to cook us up a mess of eggs and sausage, and ya’ll can sleep on the couch, what do ya say?"

Bix smiled a smile that felt wan and sickly. "I better get back to Indiana," he said. "We got a big show tomorrow."

"You mean today. Shit, it’s almost seven in the morning. You ain’t goin nowheah."

"Nope. Gotta go."

The black girl who had been sitting at his table was now sprawled across it, head on her arms, asleep. Bix reached around her to pull his jacket off the back of the chair and tugged his cornet bag out from under her arms. She never even opened her eyes.

Bix blinked in pain at the August sunlight glaring off the streetcar rails on 35th Street. Black people in neatly pressed clothing walked down the pavement on their way to work, some turning to stare at this wreck of a white boy crumpled in last night’s clothes.

It took him ten minutes to get a taxi. But instead of going to Randolph and Michigan and catching the South Shore train back to Hudson Lake, he directed the driver to a downtown hotel. He checked into his room, bought four quarts of gin from the bellboy, and proceeded to get so drunk that he didn’t wake up until two days later, when the hotel manager finally came hammering on the door.

The End

Betrayal; 2004 by Laura Mazzuca Toops

Laura Mazzuca Toops is a Chicago-based writer and teacher with three books in print: A Native's Guide to Chicago's Western Suburbs (Lake Claremont Press), The Latham Loop, and Slapstick (Amber Quill Press). "Betrayal" is an excerpt from her latest novel, Hudson Lake. For more information about Laura, visit her Web site at www.lauratoops.com.

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