The Sound of Building Coffins Read online

  “Sixty, eh? Well, that’s a mighty tempting offer, son.” Playing with the player is what Buddy had in mind. “But I’ll have to pass.”

  “Eighty?” Jim’s desperation brought Dropsy close to tears. Buddy smiled but shook his head, stroking the horn like a kitten.

  “Hunnert, then,” said Jim firmly with beaten, angry eyes. “Final offer.”

  Buddy’s expression softened with a thing approaching genuine remorse—or, more likely, pity:

  “I’ll tell ya what. I’ll give you a little blow fer free. Just so’s you can see if you like it. Playin’ horns ain’t fer everyone, y’know. Might not be fer you once you have a go.”

  “Really? I mean, ya wouldn’t mind? Ya ain’t kiddin’?”

  “Normally I’d mind plenty, sonny. But truth is you and this horn have a special history—though you was too young then to remember ’bout it now. Sang to you when you was a little baby, this horn. Put a breath in yer chest and a smile on yer mama’s face. Only seems right you should have one little blow on it. Fer old time’s sake.” Buddy, unlike Dropsy, was aware of Jim’s true history. Knew that Jim Jam Jump was a stage name invented for him by Crawfish Bob, and that his real name was Dominick Carolla, son of Sicilian immigrants in spite of fair skin and blue eyes.

  “Well, all right then.” Jim wasn’t exactly sure what Buddy was talking about, but it was true he’d felt a certain connection with this particular horn. It wasn’t just in the way that Buddy played it; there was something about the horn itself.

  Reverently, Jim took the cornet from Buddy’s outstretched hand. Dropsy suddenly realized that, until this moment, he’d never seen Buddy not holding the damn thing. The man looked surprisingly thin and vulnerable without it in his hand.

  Jim drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes, then: lips to mouthpiece.

  The sound that came out wasn’t a note of music so much as it was a toneless scream. Jim’s fingers depressed random keys, searching for the ones that might make sense to his ear, sending a trail of dissident, brassy coughs on a choppy journey through charcoal-colored air, the sound of it lightly amplified by dull mist. Finally, Jim seemed to find a note that suited him.

  The lonesome, pitiful wail of Jim’s chosen note echoed through the tenderloin. The sound went on and on without benefit of second breath. Dropsy pressed both hands against his ears to shield his mind from its brittleness, the pressure of his left hand enraging the tender ear recently punched hard by Windmill Willie.

  Buddy Bolden stood expressionless, looking at his feet, knowing certain things. Jim Jam Jump was in church. In rapture. The scar of his chest was burning, the scar in the shape of a hand.

  The ugliness of the note’s journey was something Jim recognized at his core, an unwelcome and damning thing, a primordial reflection in a forgotten mirror. This thing was undeniably his, though, and so he didn’t turn from it. He took it for what it was—and embraced it absolutely. Hearing the sound of your own soul can be an enlightening and satisfying thing, even if it isn’t a pretty sound.

  The cornet’s howl gradually tapered and finally did end, leaving perfect quiet—except for a rustling sound.

  Dropsy Morningstar: “Holy sweet Jesus, what’s that?”

  Not aware till now that he’d closed them in the first place, Jim Jam Jump let his eyes fall open.

  Twinkling red lights dotted the cobbled floor of Perdido Street through thickening mist. The lights were in pairs, and behind each pair was a dark oblong shadow ending in a thin, whipping tail. Among the smaller pairs was one much larger set of red dots with its own accompanying shadow. The tail of the bigger shadow wagged happily—the tail of a dog.

  biggest thing I ever kilt

  The sight of it put a feeling of dread in Dropsy’s stomach, a sensation of unpleasant things consumed but not yet passed—but for Jim it was a satisfying thing. It was a thing he’d made all by himself, the biggest thing he’d made yet. And it suggested to him the possibility of things bigger still.

  Jim’s face was as expressionless as Buddy’s now, something in his soul shaken loose, drifting into night. Even the cherished horn of Buddy Bolden slipped from his conscious mind—its fall from his limp hand triggering a series of hollow clickety-clacks against the alley floor.

  “Careful, dammit,” hissed Buddy, bending down to retrieve the dropped cornet, whispering, “My baby. Shhhh. Poor baby.”

  The sound of Buddy’s whisper brought Jim round, his eyes suddenly fluttering with twitchy double-blinks. He turned to Dropsy with flushed cheeks, “Guess I’ll see you ’round tomorrow, pardna. How’s about ten o’clock at our regular spot? Tomorrow be a bigger day, my friend. Bigger.”

  Turning to leave, Jim strolled casual as you please down the dead center of Perdido Street, red twinkles and tiny shadows following westward.

  “Hold up, Jim,” said Dropsy. “Wait for me.”

  Jim didn’t seem to hear, so Dropsy took a step forward.

  Buddy placed a hand on Dropsy’s shoulder, said quietly: “No. Let him go.”

  Dropsy and Buddy watched in silence as Jim disappeared from view, followed by twinkly red.

  Dropsy stood blinking, single blinks, not double: “Damn, Buddy. What just happened?”

  “Nature happened, kiddo.” Ever-expressionless.

  “Nature?”

  “Listen, up, cuz.” Buddy was unprepared to venture into this conversational territory at that moment (or ever)—especially with an idiot like Dropsy Morningstar—and so changed the subject. “I want you to give yer sister a little message.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tell her I ain’t given up on her yet. Ain’t given up on my little boy, neither.”

  Buddy Bolden turned away before Dropsy could think to reply. Swallowed up by the backdoor of the Eagle Saloon, off to play out the fifth set of the night.

  Nighttime could be an endless thing for musicians in the tenderloin.

  Chapter thirty-one

  Night Whisperer

  Beauregard Church had long been aware of the long, muddy trail that stretched from behind the prison to the Old Basin Canal and up to the bayou’s heart, had known about it since the days of his tenure at Orleans Parish Prison when he’d often used it to deposit the unwanted remains of prisoners who’d died bereft of other arrangements. The dark path had felt haunted to him even then, and he remembered imagining the sounds of the loveless dead wandering its length in search of last reward. But now the trail was his alone to haunt, and he haunted it well.

  Ghosts were plentiful enough at Parish Prison, so it was no shock to guards or inmates when Beauregard’s huge, creaking form began appearing in its halls. The presence of shadowy figures—gliding, stumbling, sometimes flashing—through the walkways of the compound hardly raised an eyebrow in a place so wrought with terrible things, inmates and guards alike often trading ghost stories just to pass the time. Beauregard rather enjoyed being in a position to inspire such tales—and was quite pleased to have once heard an old friend identify him as “The Ghost of Beauregard Church.” The recognition gave him a sense of place.

  Beauregard’s excursions to the prison had supplied the Morningstar Family with many happy dawn-time surprises over the years; various foodstuffs, tools, coal, and blankets to name a few—but more recently the prison had supplied a thing of value to Beauregard himself. After many years of paying penance, Beauregard had recently discovered himself unwelcome and unforgiven in the eyes of Typhus Morningstar—the son of the man he killed—and so decided such penance was a thing that could never be paid in full. The prison’s ready supply of morphine tablets provided something of an answer—or at least an escape from the prison of his own guilty heart.

  The first tablet brought Beauregard near bliss—but along with this comfort came a hollow feeling at the center of his chest. The warm light of morphine gave him a sensation of untainted conscience, but guilt cut through bliss as a separation of body and spirit, and with this separation came an understanding that peace and emptiness may
really be one and the same. He sat at the edge of orange-tinted swamp water pondering such circular thoughts as his eyes followed the lance-shaped leaves and small white flowers of alligator weed that floated at its surface. A voice broke the uneasy silence, his own:

  “Got no business feelin’ good ’bout nothin’,” he reassured himself. “This morphine like ta test ya is all. Want to make sure you can keep a hold of yer own pain, Beauregard Church. Pain’s all ya got left, old man. Gotta hang onto that. Pain is yer only reason for bein’. Don’t forget that, now.”

  Tugging at his hair and beard with trembling fingers, he focused hard on the task of recapturing his heart’s former heaviness. Gradually, his conscience refilled with regretful memory, but the god of morphine insists on extremes, and so the burden of his soul grew rapidly past capacity, a physical thing now, his heart swelling painfully under the pressure. The bubble of remorse pressed outward against his ribs, causing tears to fill his eyes that failed to blur, the jagged spines of alligator weed only sharpening in focus.

  At first Antonio’s ghost had been no more than a wisp floating up from the bog like a blue ball of lightning, speaking in throatless, unintelligible whispers. The Cajuns called this kind of light un feu follet—meaning “a spirit always moving.” Beauregard had heard people refer to the lights by many names over the years, including foxfire, will o’ the wisp, marfa lights, corpse lights, St. Elmo’s fire, night whispers, Jenny burnt-tail, hunky punky, irrbloss, les eclaireux, and ignis fatuus. There was even a poem about the lights by the Acadian writer Annie Campbell Huestis. Beauregard liked the poem because, in contrast to most mythology surrounding the lights, Miss Huestis’s poem told of longing, not dread:

  Flit, flit, with the hurrying hours,

  In shadow and mist and dew

  Will-o’-the-Wisp, O Will-o’-the-Wisp,

  I could I would follow you,

  With your elfin light for a lantern bright

  The bogs and the marshes through

  Will-o’-the-Wisp, O Will-o’-the-Wisp,

  I could I would follow you

  Now there was a whistle of breeze where there was no breeze, the voice of the night whisperer. A dry whistling coming up from the orange water, solidifying and stretching from tin to brass. Music of some kind, vaguely familiar.

  “Just the morphine is all,” he said aloud. “It’ll pass soon enough.”

  “Mister Beauregard, can you hear me?” A voice not his own brushed past his ear. Like the music: familiar.

  “Just the morphine,” answered Beauregard, unable to believe anything save for the terrible weight in his chest.

  “Step down, old friend. Into the water.” Antonio’s voice was clear now, no longer a whisper. “Step down. It’ll be all right. I have something to show you.”

  Beauregard placed a foot in the water. Something at the back of his mind warned of quicksand, told him not to go too far and be damn careful if he did—the wispy roots of alligator weed would not keep him from being sucked down and in if he faltered. He took three steps and stopped, lowering himself to his hands and knees to distribute his weight, to avoid sinking. Quiet. Nothing. Then:

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Antonio.

  The left hand of Antonio Carolla shot up and out of the water with a splash, hooking firmly behind Beauregard’s neck, pulling him down, under. Beauregard struggled; slapped at the hand, pulled at it, writhed in the water—uselessly.

  “Open them,” Antonio whispered into Beauregard’s ear. Beauregard’s thrashes lessened as he pondered the instruction—wondering what might be closed that could be opened. Snatching the thought from Beauregard’s mind, Antonio amended:

  “Your eyes. Open your eyes.”

  Chapter thirty-two

  Two Seconds Past Now

  With the opening of eyes, there is change. The change is not in raw perception; optic, tactile, or other. It is dark with eyes closed, but darker still when truly opened.

  There is no hand hooked behind Beauregard’s neck. No sound of splashing, no feeling of panic in his heart, no water, no need to hold breath, nothing left to struggle against. He is kneeling on a hard surface, a stone floor. There’s a terrible odor in his nostrils, a smell rushing forward from his personal history, a familiar smell. He pulls himself to his feet, takes a single step forward, hands groping before him in the dark. On the third step his left shin knocks painfully into something hard, angular.

  “Goddamn,” he complains aloud, reaching down to rub his leg. The pain is a small miracle, taking his mind off larger concerns in the now. But now exits too quickly, strange new reality rushing forward two seconds past now.

  “’Tonio!” he bellows loudly, irritated. “What the hell, man? What’s going on?” No response, not even an echo. He draws down a hand to investigate the hard object that knocked his shin. Hard edges, soft on top. He places both hands on it. Leans on it. Its voice is a creak. The sound of rusty springs.

  Cot.

  The meaning of the smell reveals itself:

  Bucket.

  His hands trace the walls around him, measuring their distance from one to the other. Eight feet from here to there. Four feet from there to here. He reaches upwards, touches finger to ceiling. Seven feet from floor to ceiling, give or take.

  Standard.

  “’Tonio!” he shouts once more. Then: “AN-TOE-KNEE-OH!” for good measure. No response.

  “Think,” he insists of himself. A sob creeps slowly up his throat. “This is the morphine,” is the only answer he can imagine. “Just the morphine. Took too much is all. I just have to sleep it off. When I wake up, I’ll be back in my swamp. With a big, fat headache maybe, but back in my swamp. My bayou, my beautiful, beautiful bayou.” He sits on the cot and rubs roughly at the wetness of his eyes.

  Upon lifting hands from eyes, Beauregard Church sees the familiar starburst patterns that every human being sees after rubbing his or her eyes in the dark. Pinpricks of light poking tiny holes through internal darkness, exposing little bits of artificial white, dancing grains of electric salt. But the pinpricks are not all white; there are grays and colors among them. The white is not artificial: there is purpose, there is revelation, they are stripping away blackness a crumb at a time. They fade, disappear—too soon, too soon. He rubs his eyes once more, pinpricks resurrected. This time they don’t fade. This time they widen and multiply rapidly, eating away at darkness like a cancer, tearing away blackness, stripping its skin. There is meaning in the grays and the colors. They are combining to form the figure of a man.

  The cell is now illuminated with bright, sourceless light. Beauregard examines his naked feet. He’d never imagined how godawful the inside of these cells might be in bright light. He decides utter darkness had been a mercy for the prisoners after all. He looks up.

  The figure revealed is Antonio Carolla. Antonio stands by the bucket, leaning against the far wall of the small cell. His eyes meet Beauregard’s.

  “You can see me?” Antonio asks calmly.

  “Yeah. Yeah, Antonio. I can see you just fine.”

  “Sorry about the trouble, old friend,” the ghost of Antonio Carolla says with soulful eyes. “Being born can be as painful for the child as for the mother. Well, not born so much as reborn. Or rebirthed, as the Mulatto kid says.” Antonio is smiling. “Kid thinks he’s an orphan.” Antonio is laughing. The Sicilian’s words mean nothing, but his smile puts Beauregard at ease.

  “Guess so,” says Beauregard, without the slightest idea of what Antonio is talking about, feeling suddenly exhausted. “Antonio, I think I need to sleep.”

  “You are asleep, old man.” Antonio steps forwards, sits next to him on the cot. Puts his arm around him, the arm minus a hand. “Listen, Mister Beauregard.” Beauregard prefers it when Antonio calls him Bo-Bo, “Mr. Beauregard” being what the prisoners used to call him. “I know this is hard for you to take in. It was hard for me too at first. But listen to the song; it’s a familiar tune, a good tune.”

  “I don’t under
stand,” he replies, but he does hear music. It’s not so much a sound as a feeling.

  “You don’t need to. Not yet. You just need to understand that you’ve lived for a reason, and now you’re moving on for a reason. You need to fix some hearts, make things right.”

  “I’m dead?”

  “Bo-Bo, I’m worried about my boy. He grew up bad, but through no fault of his own.” Antonio pauses then says in a low voice, “My wife, she tries, but she is weak and he is strong-willed. She can’t control him.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ of your boy, Antonio. I been in the swamp since that demon got pulled out of him. Since I killed that man. Since I made those kids orphans.”

  “He grew up bad,” repeats the Sicilian, ignoring Beauregard’s confession. “His heart struggles with demons. My own hand struggles within his heart. It burns. And Typhus is no orphan. Didn’t you know that?”

  Beauregard’s head is swimming, unable to understand, and so he cuts to the chase: “What do you want me to do, Antonio? What can I do?”

  “There’s a woman who brought a destructive thing into the world, and into my little Dominick. She’s not a bad person, this woman. She did this thing through misguided love, would like to send it back but doesn’t know how. She sees you in her dreams, but doesn’t understand why. She thinks you are Coco Robicheaux. She fears you because she doesn’t realize your destiny is to bring her peace. You must bring her this peace, though she may resist.”

  “You want me to kill this person?”

  “I want you to bring her peace. She has ghosts.”

  Chapter thirty-three

  Deliverance

  The short legs of the mulatto man peddled the rickety bicycle northwesterly down the cobbled edge of the Storyville District. An empty burlap bag (most recently having held the body of a child; rebirthed, matured, and found again—then, finally, returned to its mother in the form of a meal) did not bounce at the center of the homemade chicken-wire basket tied between the bike’s handlebars.