Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [22]
Bolden imagined it all, the wet deceit as she hunched over him and knelt down under him or drank him in complex kisses. The trouble was you could see all the way through Pickett’s mind, and so the moment he had said he had been fucking Nora Bolden believed him. In the very minute he was screening his laughter at Pickett’s fantasies he believed him. Tom Pickett didn’t have the brain to have fantasies.
He called Cornish. Everybody’s ear. Made him drink and listen to him. LISTEN! Drinking so much the rhetoric of fury at everyone disintegrated into repetition and lies and fantasies. He dreamt up morning encounters between Nora and the whole band. Towards 4 o clock in the morning both of them were frozen with drinks in their hands, unable to move. Bolden was lying across three chairs muttering up to the ceiling.
Well I got to go Charlie.
NO! Don’t go just tell me what you think of the bitch.
Well you don’t know that, she’s a beautiful lady Charlie.
Well what the hell—he mimicked—I’m a beautiful. Bursting into peals of laughter and sliding arms first onto the floor in order to laugh more fully. And then as Cornish had finally reached the door, Bolden on the floor saying, You know … in spite of everything that happens, we still think a helluva lot of ourselves! And more laughter till Cornish was gone and his chest and his throat were tired from it.
He lay there crucified and drunk. Brought his left wrist to his teeth and bit hard and harder for several seconds then lost his nerve. Flopped it back outstretched. Going to sleep while feeling his vein tingling at the near chance it had of almost going free. Ecstasy before death. It marched through him while he slept.
For a while after that Frankie Dusen the trombonist took over some of Bolden’s players. They called themselves the Eagle Band. Bunk Johnson, seventeen years old, took his place. And Bolden arrived at Lincoln Park and saw him playing there, up front centre, and just turned around and walked back through the crowd who stepped aside to let him pass. Dude Botley followed him and tells this story which some believe and which others don’t believe at all.
‘He steps out of the park like a rooster ignoring everybody, everything and goes up Canal. I trail him back to the barber shop. There’s wood planks all over the broken glass window and he just rips one out and climbs in, steps off the ice-shelf onto the floor and paces around his arms out to the side like he’s doing a cakewalk. I watch from across the street and soon he’s just sitting there in one of the chairs looking into a mirror. Pretty dark there, not much light. There’s light in the back of the shop and it pours in all over the floor of the shaving parlor and Bolden is restless as a dog in the chair. He shouldn’t be there because he don’t work there any more. This is about eight at night and I’m on the other side of the road shuffling to keep warm because it’s cold and I should be dancing. I can even hear Lincoln Park over the streets.
I see him walk to the back of the parlor where the light is and he come back with a bottle and the cornet. He try first to drink but he begin crying and he put the bottle in the sink. The tears came to my eyes too. I got to thinking of all the men that dance to him and the women that idolize him as he used to strut up and down the streets. Where are they now I say to myself. Then I hear Bolden’s cornet, very quiet, and I move across the street, closer. There he is, relaxed back in a chair blowing that silver softly, just above a whisper and I see he’s got the hat over the bell of the horn … Thought I knew his blues before, and the hymns at funerals, but what he is playing now is real strange and I listen careful for he’s playing something that sounds like both. I cannot make out the tune and then I catch on. He’s mixing them up. He’s playing the blues and