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  Night Song

  A Novel

  John A. Williams

  CHAPTER 1

  David Hillary, still half-stuporous from the bad whisky he had had that morning, stepped slowly into the pawnshop. He was hatless and his coat collar, not yet frayed, was bunched around his ears. He needed a shave, but what worried him most was the heat he felt building up inside him. He closed the door against the five-o’clock Third Avenue traffic and shuffled unsteadily to the worn wooden counter. A small man who wore a large mangled tweed cap peered solemnly at him through a heavy screen. Hillary placed the heavy gold band on the counter and edged it under the screen. He had spent an hour in his dingy room getting it off; it had cost five hundred dollars and came from Italy—one of the right things, which, at the time, had been precisely right for the Hillary family. He wiped his eyes quickly while the man picked it up. “How much?” Hillary asked hoarsely. The man screwed his eyepiece into place but removed it quickly to stare at the other person who had just entered. Satisfied, the man replaced the glass. “Yours?” he asked.

  “It cost five hundred dollars,” Hillary mumbled. Five hundred for his ring and four hundred and fifty for Angela’s; his parents had made a big point of it.

  Hillary and Angela had laughed about it; Italian wedding bands after Hillary’s father and mother had opposed, as they had for years, any traffic between their son and the traditionless Italian rabble that had moved into, taken over the town. Small farmers; onion and cabbage. Only the Hillarys had remained deep-rooted, native American Protestants; it was a thing to keep alive, if they could.

  “Tough,” the man said, glancing at the puffy white face. They all came in with their angles, their pitiful little comments hoping to get a few dollars more. It no longer worked. The man had spent too many years on Third Avenue.

  “A hundred?” Hillary asked softly so the person behind him couldn’t hear.

  “Naw,” the pawnbroker said. He took out his eyepiece and looked at the person behind Hillary. “Thirty.” He waited; there would be a plea for more money.

  “Please,” Hillary said. He blinked rapidly because the tears seemed to want to well back up in his eyes. “Fifty.”

  “I said, thirty,” the man said. He slid the ring back. Hillary returned it.

  “All right,” Hillary said. Under his breath he said, “You sonofabitch.”

  “What?” The man stopped counting the soft, worn bills.

  “Nothing.” Sadly now, Hillary stared around the place at the watches, cameras, guns, typewriters. Here and there stood a dented, tarnished trumpet or sax, a trombone. A row of banjos and guitars gathered dust on a shelf near two or three worn suitcases. The odor of the place was horribly neutral.

  “That’s right, Jimsey, cool it.” Hillary turned bitterly on the man behind him. He was dark and in a strange way familiar. The stranger clutched a saxophone in one hand. “Man, I pawn this thing maybe three, four times a week, an’ that’s like giving away my heart for a little while.”

  Hillary turned from the dark man and took his money from the pawnbroker.

  “Take your ticket, buster,” the pawnbroker said, shoving it after Hillary. Hillary took the ticket and jammed it in his pocket with the money and went out, plunging through the traffic downtown. You got more for your money there.

  He stumbled past clots of people whose dress made him think fleetingly that they should not have been down here. They seemed, these neatly dressed people, like a clutter of uncertain internes shuffling through a charity ward.

  Suddenly he knew he was being followed, and he turned. The dark man, bloated, empty-handed, hurried after him. He waved to Hillary. Hillary, seeing him, slowed but did not stop. For a moment he had a fear of being beaten and robbed, but now with a burst of speed, the dark man drew abreast of him and placed an arm across his back. “Jimsey,” he said, “Let’s get us a taste.” Before Hillary could protest, he was guided into a nearby bar, but now he didn’t mind. He had just recognized the dark man as Richie Stokes, The Eagle.

  Sulking in New York on leave rather than going home to the cloying pride of his parents, Hillary could not have known the night in 1944, when he entered the “Chicken in the Basket” that there would be a Richie Stokes sitting in a corner of the little platform together with a lean, hawk-nosed young man crouched over a bass; a blocky, arrogantly handsome kid with a trumpet; a serious, jittering young man sitting like a god among his drums; and a chubby, heavy-shouldered man at the piano. They were all there to complement Richie Stokes and his horn.

  Hillary knew sax men: Chu Berry, Hawk, Dash, and Bascombe, Pres, Harry, Johnny, Benny, Willie—all the sax men a provincial youth might know through talk, Down Beat, Metronome, records, and occasional dances. He had stood by the bar that night, his starched khakis whispering whenever he moved, drinking beer, trying to nod to the rhythm of the music; but it had been an impossible thing to do though there had been rhythm. Hillary had quit trying to nod to the music. He was an outsider as it was. Why be an awkward one? In his stillness, then, with another bottle of beer to dull and cool the harsh, New York summer night, he had watched Richie Stokes and known his music was in some way—different, possibly a conglomeration, a consolidation of all that Hillary had heard before. Hillary could not then know why he felt this.

  With a thick tongue he was telling Eagle this in the second bar they stopped in. Now Hillary was high enough to look directly in the black, bloated face upon which some intense evil seemed to have traced its course. The once even teeth were stained, some of them gone. The hair, which Hillary recalled having had the image of Richie Stokes’ neatness impressed somewhere upon his mind, seemed to have worn off like the fur from some decrepit animal.

  And the man was not yet thirty-five.

  They were on the street again, Hillary scurrying along to keep up with Eagle’s crouching, threatening walk. Once, Eagle pulled up short and said to Hillary, “Wait here, I’m going to touch this cat. Watch me, Jimsey, an’ you’ll never need to starve.”

  Eagle did an obscene shuffle toward a well-dressed couple. Hillary saw them recoil, and then the man, after getting a hasty look from the woman, reached briskly into his pocket and gave Eagle some money.

  “See that?” Eagle growled when he returned. “They’re too weak to tell you to go to hell, or they’re too guilty to tell you to kiss their asses. They pay for their guilt and their weakness and then tell themselves that they paid to keep you the hell away.” They started walking again, Hillary in his half-run and Eagle in that crouch in which one shoulder seemed pushed around in front of his body to ward off any blows that might come in his direction. “Me,” he said, “I take it all; bread, man, that’s your only friend. It don’t put you on; it don’t lean on you none; it don’t try to make your old lady. If you got it an’ need it, it’s there, and it screams when there’s enough of it.”

  The bitterness rolled out of Richie Stokes like a persistent low bank of fog, and the only way Hillary could escape it was to continue—drinking. Again on the street, between bars, Eagle suggested getting a bottle before the stores closed.

  “What will you do about your horn?” Hillary asked, as they stood beneath the statue of Peter Cooper, passing the bottle back and forth.

  “Worry about it tomorrow,” Eagle answered.

  They staggered down the street past the Salvation Army chapel with its lighted cross. Eagle crossed himself mockingly, and that was all Hillary remembered until the flurries of snow hit him in the face. He tried to ward them off as if they were blows.
Towering over them, for Eagle was there too, on his behind, his arms draped over his knees and his head nodding patiently downward, stood a cop, a black-suited bulk against the snow and gray sky. The cop kicked at them. Another figure, dark like Eagle, appeared. The second man, saying he’d take care of Eagle, was arguing with the cop, but as he pulled, Eagle said, “There’s Jimsey too. Got to take care of Jimsey. Been lookin’ out for him all night.”

  “Let the mother take care of himself, Eagle,” the man said.

  “C’mon, move,” said the cop.

  Eagle said, “Jimsey too.”

  “All right, for crissakes,” the man said, and Hillary felt a stab of fear. Why didn’t this man like him? They struggled up, and as they passed down the street, a weaving, sodden clump, Hillary looked once at the man who was glaring back at him.

  Hillary had a feeling when he woke that it was late afternoon. He stared around the unkempt room. The walls, once white, were now urine yellow and splotched with dirt and dust. Stiff plastic drapes hung from the small window. The furniture had seen better times in many other surroundings. But the bed was clean.

  There was a rattling at the door and it flew open as Eagle burst into the room. Without bothering to shake the snow from his clothes or remove his hat and coat, he placed the horn he carried to his lips and began running up and down the scale. Satisfied, he smiled and removed his hat. A night in hock hadn’t disturbed the tone. Now ribbons of notes, punctuated by haunting pauses, floated out of the horn. Hillary heard snatches of familiar tunes, but they vanished as quickly as they had come. He dozed then and woke and dozed again. When he woke once more he saw Eagle, now with his coat off, holding the horn as though it were the thigh of a beautiful, compliant, golden girl. Eagle, Hillary thought, must be warm; he was. He was perspiring and his body had become weightless. At a distance, he heard Eagle’s voice, filled with devious curses, coming from behind a pleased smile and eyes which leaped with the laughter of a small boy. “Hey, Jimsey, how you feel? Get up, take you home, Jimsey.”

  Hillary could not move and, as if in a dream, watched Eagle approach, saw the forehead knot with sudden concern though the laughter was not quite gone. Eagle thrust his face close to Hillary’s, and Hillary saw again the ugliness of the bloat upon the face, the lines of it, the whiskers emerging from it. A hand, heavy in appearance but light in its touch, rested against his cheek. Now, there it was: the dark face, all concern; and Hillary felt pleased.

  “Hey, Keel,” Eagle shouted. “This mother’s dyin’ a fever. Gall a doctor.”

  Hillary thought about the word, but minutes later, with Keel, the other Negro, at his side too, the harshness of it was belied by their tenderness, their almost comical impatience with one another to undress and clean him. When he was settled they stared at a thermometer Keel had found.

  “Where does it go?” Eagle asked, shaking it down with a professional air.

  “Up his ass,” Keel said, and he exchanged glances with Hillary.

  “Is this the ass kind or the mouth kind?”

  “What difference does it make? Just give it to him. Anywhere you want.”

  Hillary reached out with a shaking hand, took the thermometer and placed it under his tongue. He closed his eyes and allowed the heat to envelop his body.

  He was fully awake after the doctor’s second visit the next day and took the soup Eagle fed him. Then he sank again into a listless sleep, hearing only faintly the horn Eagle blew softly from time to time. It would have been nice, Hillary thought, to die; he didn’t care anymore about living, but when Eagle was not there, Keel was. “Don’t die here, you sonofabitch,” Keel said once, with a shadow of a smile on his face.

  “Go to hell,” Hillary remembered panting. He remembered too that Keel seemed to have smiled more broadly and patted his shoulder and eased him back down into the bed.

  Another night had passed and a part of a day when Hillary woke again and looked at Keel sitting on the bed. “Eagle told the doctor your name was Jimsey, but he calls everyone that and believes that because he does it should stick. What’s your name?”

  “Dave Hillary.”

  “Hillary,” Keel mused. “Nice. I like that.” He smiled and Hillary, oddly, found that he liked the smile. “You been downtown long?” Keel asked.

  Hillary paused a moment, and then he knew that in the context the question of his being there could only mean: how long had he been a bum? “Not long,” Hillary finally answered.

  “It happens. You either stay downtown or make it out. Lots of cats make it down here.” Keel took a deep breath and let it out. “I could tell by your threads that you were new here. Teacher, aren’t you?”

  Hillary involuntarily looked at his clothes draped over the back of a chair. His wallet had been in his pants.

  “Had to pay the doctor, man,” Keel said. A little smile played around his mouth. “Went through your billfold and saw your card there.” Keel rose slowly from the bed and stretched. “You get some more sleep.”

  Two days later, when the pneumonia had almost ebbed away and Eagle sat playing, eyes closed, cheeks puffed, an open bottle near him, Hillary said, “Play ‘April in Paris.’”

  Eagle smiled. “Okay, Jimsey. Feelin’ better eh? Want a taste?” He stood and poured out a drink. “Good for you.” He watched Hillary drink it, then poured another and waited for Hillary to finish that. “You been to Paris, man?”

  “Yeah. Twice.”

  Eagle was waiting.

  “During the war and on my honeymoon.”

  “I been there too. It’s a crazy place for a colored man.” Eagle returned to his chair and began to play.

  The whisky nudged its way through Hillary’s mind as he lay listening, thinking. Angela had always wanted to be in Paris in April. Hillary thought how they had been together on their honeymoon there, hand in hand, walking, riding, or just standing, and how her eyes had shone and sparkled when he looked at her. There had been nothing for them to say: to be was enough, sometimes too much, because the soft nights with their almost purple skies and his new wife at his fingertips had caught Hillary foolishly, almost painfully, in the chest. They had planned to return to Paris, but it could never happen now. The thought turned memory sour within him.

  What made this man, Richie Stokes, play the music he did the way he did? Hillary wondered.

  “Shit,” Eagle said. He spoke it softly, as a child might say “nuts” or “shoot,” and unhooked the strap from around his neck and placed the horn on the table. “That’s enough for old Eagle today,” he said. He poured himself another drink and with difficulty crossed one leg over his paunch. “Guess you like music,” he said.

  He hadn’t remembered the other night, Hillary thought. He closed his eyes, then opened them. Eagle kept humming something, repeating it, halting at the same point. But now he had it and grunted and hummed and stamped his foot, passing the point he had stopped at before, moving on into some intricate improvisation and then back into the theme which Hillary recognized as “April in Paris” again.

  Keel entered the room, studied Eagle for a moment and said, “Mother, don’t wear out the goddamn floor.”

  Eagle clapped his hands together and laughed. Hillary watched Keel smile at this and could not help smiling himself.

  “How you doin’ Professor?” Keel asked.

  “All right,” Hillary answered with a certain watchfulness.

  “Play some of my sides for the man,” Eagle said, rising. “I got to make it.”

  “Where to?” Keel asked.

  “You know better than that.” Eagle avoided looking at Keel.

  “You know I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Later,” Eagle said. Still not looking at Keel, he went to the closet and brought out some records. Sorting through them quickly, he selected a few and placed them on the record player. “I got to go,” he said. “Be cool, Jimsey.” He slammed the door after him.

  “Quite a cat,” Hillary said.

  “Yeah.” Keel stared down at
the record player.

  “He should be worth a lot of money,” Hillary said.

  Keel looked at him and said nothing. The sound of “Ke-Ke,” harsh in chorus, a little studied, whirled around the room. Hillary felt uneasy at Keel’s silence.

  Finally, as if he hadn’t heard Hillary’s last remark, Keel said, “Eagle was change in music. He pulled all the pieces together. He was great; shit, he’s still great when he wants to be. But in his music there’s no bread, not for a spade. Only enough to get junk and kill it—all the frustrations—and sometimes there’s not enough money for that. He’s just out there.”

  An answer, Hillary thought, to what I said. He lay deep in his pillow and pondered this man Keel.

  The memory of their first meeting had never left him. For there had been real hate in Keel’s glance, which in subsequent meetings and talks had not been there; it had given place to a cautious reserve, like, Hillary thought, the left jab of a boxer pawing air, measuring, testing.

  “Why aren’t you making it, fella?” Keel asked suddenly.

  Hillary recoiled. “What do you mean?”

  “Why are you a nothin’?”

  Hillary wanted to protest. But he was in a bed not his own, eating food he had not paid for and still barely able to make his body respond. Besides, he knew instinctively that what Keel wanted to know was what had brought him here, what single or collective acts. He would tell him.

  “I killed my wife,” he said. He watched Keel for a reaction, but there was none, which left him mildly disappointed. He wondered why it was that he wanted a reaction from Keel.

  “You hot?”

  “No. Car accident.”

  “When?”

  “Last year.”

  “Kids?”

  “No.”

  “You have a job, some place to go?”

  “No. But I’ll make out.”

  Keel nodded to the beat of the music for a couple of bars, then said, “I don’t understand why a white man can’t make it in his society. You know, it bugs me sometimes.”

  “That’s a pretty narrow view,” Hillary said angrily.