Shadowbahn(60)

“—just between the two of us, I cannot resist a taste now and then, like the reformed drunk who has to have a nip of whisky now and then, like the confessed fornicator who cannot resist now and then a strange woman’s comfort. I cannot resist just the smallest taste of Bird or Her Majesty the Queen, Miss Dinah Washington. ‘Teach Me Tonight.’ ‘Blue Gardenia.’ ‘Big Long Slidin’ Thing’ . . . just”—Jesse hears him laugh low in the dark—“a little taste.”

“Well,” says Jesse, “you must like this record to play it over and over.”

“No. No.” Something about the other man’s voice changes. “No. I just . . . it has a secret,” he says, “it has a shadow.”

“You think you’re going to figure that out by playing it over and over?”

“No. I play it every time hoping the secret remains unrevealed. I play it every time for the relief at the end, the relief of glimpsing and feeling as little of the shadow as I did at the beginning.”

“Sir,” says Jesse solemnly, “I have come to kill American song.”

“Yes,” answers the voice in the dark, “what you’re looking for is down among the eucalyptuses. You’ll know it when you see it.”





the tattered song


Beyond the eucalyptuses, on the shredded remnants of a mast’s sail, the insignia is faded beyond recognition to anyone who doesn’t know it as well as Jesse: the worn image of him side by side with his brother, each with six-gun drawn from a holster as though in a Western gunfight. No cowboy hat, long-sleeve buttoned shirt, and boots and jeans double-belted with holster slung low on the right hip; together the twins look not square into the camera but ever so slightly off. The door of the boat’s cabin, beneath the sail’s slightly fluttering tatters, is open and black.

? ? ?

Striding through, Jesse descends the ship’s spiraling steps and continues far deeper than he would have thought a boat’s hull could go, his confusion only compounded when he reaches the bottom and a door with light behind it. He pushes the door open, trying to determine what surprises him more than the light—the old man, or the wraparound window behind his desk, through which can be seen the unrolling of a bustling city boulevard and a college in the distance, the lattice of winter-woven trees before an Atlantic that surely seems the wrong ocean altogether.





lunacy


The old man glances up. “Oh,” he says, nodding at Jesse. “For a moment,” he explains, “I thought you were One Nation Under—”

“I’m Jesse,” says Jesse.

“I see now.”

“This is Luna Recordings?”

“Recording.”

“What? Sir,” Jesse says with no small impatience, “I should tell you I’ve been scorching my way across this here nation in order to find Luna Recordings.”

? ? ?

The old man appears exhausted. He is unshaven and what he still has of his hair has gone white. “Well,” he says, “here you are.”

Jesse says, “I should warn you that I mean no good whatsoever, searching out and destroying every one of these hellacious hunks of tarnation I can find”—he holds up the naked 45 in his hand—“or everywhere that might carry such a one on its premises or in its possession. And I don’t mean to stop now.”





the singular song


Jesse gazes at the chamber around him. The furniture is topsy-turvy, an armoire pushed to where it doesn’t belong. “If this is Luna Recordings,” he asks, “where are all the recordings?”

“Recording.”

“What?”

“I’m not trying to annoy you,” the old man says, “but I believe if you look at the label, it says, ‘Recording.’ Singular.”

“Singular?” Jesse looks at the 45. Picking his way through his thoughts, he finally says, “You trying to tell me that Luna Recordings, or Recording, has made only one record?”

“It would seem.”

“Well then,” Jesse shakes his head, “where are the other copies?”

The old man nods at the 45 in Jesse’s hand. “Like I said. Singular.”

? ? ?

Jesse stares hard at the world’s most obscure author and says, as evenly as he can manage, “Are you telling me that the whole of Luna Recording is one single copy of one single record?” He gazes around him again, eyes hovering for a while on the bustling lights outside the window. Slowly he reaches down for one of the overturned chairs on the floor and sets it upright, sitting. For what seems a longer time than it is, the two don’t converse again, until Jesse finally says quietly, “I do believe that this here life has made a damn fool of me.”

“I know,” the old man says as quietly. “Me too.”

“I was the wrong one.”

“I’m sorry.”

Jesse tosses to the side the 45 that has brought him thousands of hours and miles. “Well, I wonder what now, sir.”

From his own chair, the author unbends himself. “Let me show you,” he says.





paternity


Parker and Zema were not in their father’s life long before he knew he wouldn’t want to be in any life without them. The moment of dying is banal unless you’ve been dying long enough to watch death approach and give it meaning; the moment of loss is banal unless you’ve been losing long enough to feel what slips away and to calibrate its retreat. Whether or not Parker and Zema’s father might be old enough to say he lived with death daily, he long grasped, psychologically if not emotionally, existence’s precariousness.