Passenger(43)

Another man drops out. He, too, is sputtering and rubbing his eyeballs with the heels of his hands. Drool snakes from his gaping mouth and, just as he pushes himself away from the bar, an impressive sphere of snot bubbles from one nostril, roughly the size of a ping pong ball, before it bursts in a spray across the blouse of a meaty, rhinestone-clad woman with bad teeth and thinning bronze hair.

Maxwell clashes the cymbals as one more man falls out. This leaves only two, and they are making their way to their second saucer of Old Bay, tears wringing from their eyes, mucus spilling from their nose, their reddened cheeks quivering while their foreheads burst with sweat.

“Here we go here we go here we go here we go!” booms Timmy Donlon from behind the bar. “Here we go here we go here we go!”

“Pick it up faster, Wurl,” Maxwell Devine shouts to me over the clash of his drums. “Let’s shake the walls down, eh?”

I pick it up faster.

“Here we go here we go here we go!”

One of the contestants starts to gag. He is a burly, strong-armed fellow in a tight-fitting T-shirt and frayed jeans. His Adam’s apple jumps reflexively and his tongue lolls from his mouth. A single cough sends spittle peppering the top of the bar. Still, he’s got that straw shoved halfway up his nose and, even through the choking coughs, he’s snorting the spicy seasoning straight off the saucer. His friends are at his back now, too, and they are cheering him on. He can’t back down now. He can’t lose this.

“Here we go,” Maxwell chirps, and I follow his lead as he picks up the tempo even more. I can hang with him all night. I am that good.

Timmy Donlon’s voice sounding like a parody of Maxwell’s: “Here we go here we go here we go!”

He won’t hold it, I think, watching the sputtering man in the T-shirt struggle to stay in the game. He’s fading fast and won’t hold it.

More women: dancing on tables. The place is nothing but meaty legs and sagging breasts and big Baltimore hair. Women call me darlin’ and hon and sugar, and they step together at the foot of the stage to watch Maxwell and me motor along. They clap their hands, which are like curling acrylic talons, and their big Baltimore hair makes up the entire audience.

Inevitably, the choking, sputtering man gives up. Only he doesn’t so much give up as he sneezes and falls backward into his friends, who catch him under the armpits and try to prop him up against the bar. They push him forward, not wanting him to lose, but he has already lost and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

The crowd explodes. Timmy Donlon clangs the bell as the only remaining contestant—square-jawed, steeply-browed, mustachioed—thrusts his hands straight into the air, victorious. His T-shirt says smell my face. His friends swarm him, slapping him on the shoulders, the back, across his broad chest. There is a whip of yellow snot, like the tail of a comet, along one cheek, and the lower half of his face is peppered in the red-brown seasoning. He wins a pitcher of beer but you would think it was the goddamn state lottery.

Maxwell and I come to a crashing conclusion, the sound vibrating in the walls long after we’ve stopped. The women at the foot of the stage shriek and applaud. My ears are cottony from the noise.

I dribble off the stage, my legs wobbly, my eyesight bleary. My fingers are still numb from the playing.

“You a’right, Wurl,” Maxwell intones.

“Yes,” says a middle-aged woman with an okay face and very red lips. A second later and she’s kissing me hard on the mouth, forcing her tongue halfway down my throat. It is like licking the bottom of an ashtray.

Afterward, in the backroom, Timmy Donlon cuts us a stack of cash, which Dougie Devine counts and divvies out. My cut is not an equal cut. Dougie tells me this outright: “You ain’t a Devine and you sure as hell ain’t Johnny, so we ain’t splittin’ this three ways down the middle, you dig? You a mean piano player and you got chops, that’s straight up, but you ain’t one of us. If that’s cool with you, Wurlitzer, then we gonna do all right, the three of us. If it ain’t, then we all go our own ways from here on in. Ain’t no pain.”

I tell him it’s cool with me, that I have no intention of doing this forever, and that I certainly have no intention of replacing Johnny.

“Ain’t nobody replace Johnny,” says Maxwell from the rear of the room. He is sprawled out on a heap of empty beer kegs, trying to light a cigar. He looks sleepy and lethargic, fat with alcohol. “You a mean tick-tock, Wurl, but ain’t nobody replace Johnny.”

Dougie gives me sixty dollars. I don’t ask how much the band made as a whole. I don’t care, really.

“Clarence the Clown says you’re some kind of spy,” Dougie says, unimpressed. “Says you don’t know who you are no more.”

“Clarence the Clown,” echoes Maxwell.

“Clarence likes to tell stories,” I say.

“Know what I think?”

“What’s that?”

“That you some resurrected mother come back from the dead to play piano. How’s that? Maybe you got the spirit in you, white boy, and maybe you be carryin’ the Monk’s soul in your body. That’s what me and Maxie be thinking. Right, Maxie?”

“White boy carryin’ the Monk’s soul,” Maxwell mutters.

“How’s that, Wurlitzer?” Dougie says.

“I guess it could be true.”