Via Dolorosa(22)
He paid no mind to his surroundings and stepped into the club.
The music rushed him. It was a small room—claustrophobic, oppressive— and poorly lighted. There were walls, but they were suspended from the ceiling, fixed by pulleys and cords, and capable of being repositioned. There was a bar, Nick could see, against one wall, and a gathering of tables, seven-pointed-starred at the center of the room, all occupied by middle-aged socialites. There was a breathing vein of cigarette smoke, chalky and like skin, filtering about the room. The air smelled of sweat, Panama Red, and the heady accretion of what Nick could only identify as female genitalia. Stepping in, he stopped and stared across the room at the stage, and at the performing band. He knew nothing of jazz—knew, really, nothing of music—yet he could tell immediately that he was in the presence of an honest, ritualistic, powerful sound. The audience, too, was enthralled: no one looked at him as he entered; all eyes were on the four-piece stage band. It was Russell “Goat-Man” Claxton, and three surprisingly old white men backing him up on bass, piano, drums.
Nick went directly to the bar.
“Dewar’s and water. Clean cubes.”
The bartender was an automaton; the drink was presented without pause, as if it had been hidden and waiting beneath the bar for him all evening.
Nick tasted the drink, leaned against the bar, and looked out upon the crowd. Oddly, the crowd was comprised primarily of senior citizens interested in and hungry for the music. There were a few younger people around some of the tables closest to the bar, vague men and vaguer women, and all their faces looked faintly familiar, like the faces of people he had once glimpsed in a magazine. He scanned the faces almost unconsciously. And paused. Looking across the floor, he saw dead Myles Granger seated with some other young men casually smoking, one small, white hand holding a snifter of brandy, his black hair greased and perfectly parted and making him look too young (as he had always looked), his eyes watching him through the cigarette smoke and from across the room. Nick felt his bowels freeze. Their eyes would not unlock. Myles Granger—it was him, the boy, the dead boy. Except the expression was different. Myles Granger had always looked partially occupied; at triage, young Granger had taken on the appearance of a charcoal etching, thumb-smeared by his creator, there but not fully there at the same time. In two brief days just before he died, the boy’s skin had faded to jaundiced parchment, the corneas of his eyes clouding over like soured milk, his lips dry and splitting and flaking apart. It had seemed death had dawned upon him while he was still alive—that both Myles Granger’s soul and the black cloud of death had, for at least a brief time, shared the same husk, the same solid body, and that they took turns peering out from the young dying boy’s eyes. But now, watching Nick from across the smoke-filled, darkened room, his expression was set, determined, and nearly caught in some sort of reflection—
If I bend down and look under his table, will his legs be mangled and ruined? Nick wondered.
Myles—
But it wasn’t Myles Granger, not at all. The kid looked something like him, sure, and in the darkness it was easy to mistake him…but it was not him. And how could it be? Still, the chill remained with Nick for longer than he liked, and he finally forced himself to turn away from the doppelganger.
Too much stress. Too much bullshit stress.
Closest to the stage, at a table by herself, Nick spotted Isabella Rosales, the diagnostic photographer, eyes glued to the stage—to Russell “Goat-Man” Claxton—and seemingly oblivious of her surroundings. In the gloom of the club it was difficult to make out details, but Nick could see she was wearing a tight-fitting black dress and not much else. Her feet, he could see, were bare beneath her table. Drawn to her, Nick anxiously took a long sip of his scotch and water and stepped around to the farthest wall of the club. He moved back to lean against the wall, but it pulled away from him, swinging lethargically from giant nylon cords hanging from the ceiling. An overhead support beam groaned. Nick righted himself and did not move. From there, he could stand and watch the band without interruption…
The unfettered, wistful face—the soft-lidded eyes—the casual gesticulation of the tight, black fingers—the too-small cotton tee-shirt with the faded boar’s head logo and form-fitting black dungarees, one leg offhandedly cuffed a half-dozen inches above a neon orange forester’s boot: all of this presented Russell “Goat-Man” Claxton as surprisingly young and, from all that Nick understood, very un-jazz. Yet the acumen and feral intensity exhibited in both his music and in his personal articulation of sound contested any perception of youth, demonstrating the jazzman as ageless, timeless, indeterminable. Solemnized by his trio of elderly white relics, wizened and clean-scalped and argyle-shirted and in overall opposition to both their surroundings and that of the angular, denuded, raw-boned melodies their instruments somehow produced (yet each triplicate impressively agile on stage and in the exercising of their respective instruments), Claxton played as if he were the only living soul in the club, and his eyes never opened.
A few older couples got up from their tables and sashayed across the dance floor. They danced fluidly, as old couples will, and did so with an air of honest exhibition, knowing they were forever young and admirable only when they danced now, and that was something powerful and good.
Nick lit a cigarette and watched the band.
Claxton’s style of music could not be defined. Nick, who knew very little about contemporary jazz, could not decide whether he was tempted, enthralled, impressed, or frightened by both the music and the performance. The uniqueness of Claxton’s set was characterized by a mix of cool, mid-tempo, breathy ballads interrupted without warning or provocation by sudden, ferocious, wholly libidinous eruptions of majored fifths and minored thirds and loose, extemporized rants, like the symphonic equivalent of an urban street riot. Having heard music described as such in the past, yet never fully understanding, he suddenly knew what it meant to say music was a living, breathing, soul-bearing thing. It was sexual. Despite their complexity, too, each individual number was performed with such overt precision that they were all as accessible and familiar to the untrained ear as someone spouting off the alphabet. Also, something about Claxton himself summoned in Nick’s mind the image of the Pied Piper. Too easily he could imagine Claxton, ever-smooth and way cool in his too-small tee-shirt and steel-toed orange forester’s boots, piping down a cobblestone promenade, having seduced a procession of young children into following him, blindly, wherever he might lead them.