The bar was a beer-and-pizza place with checker-cloth table covers and rows of fraternity steins on the shelves. The contraceptive machine in the men’s room had long since been destroyed, and young, virile Americans had punched out big, ragged holes in the fiberboard partitions. I sat at the bar and had a sandwich and a beer while Buddy played the piano for the owner and his wife, who looked exactly as Buddy had described her. (This is why I could never tell whether he was lying, fantasizing, or telling the truth.) She stared at him a few moments with those huge orbs of color behind her glasses, then began washing glasses in a tin sink.
I watched Buddy play. I had forgotten how really good he was. He started out with “I Found a New Baby,” and he played it the way Mel Powell used to at the Lighthouse in California: a slow, delicate, almost conventional entrance into the melody, then building, the bass growing louder, his right hand working on a fine counterpoint, and finally he was way inside himself and all the wild sounds around him. He didn’t even look the same when he played. A strange physical transformation took over him, the kind you see in people who are always partly out of cadence with the rest of the world until they do the one thing that they’re good at. As I looked at him, with his shoulders bent, his arms working, the eyes flat and withdrawn, I would have never made him for the Buddy I knew the rest of the time.
Later the owner bought us a beer and told Buddy to come to work the next night. He wanted to hide it, but I could see he was truly happy. He hadn’t worked as a musician since he went to jail, and that was six years ago.
“Let’s make it,” I said.
“One more beer. I have to ease the effect of joining the work force again. It really blows my self-image.”
“One, damn it, and that’s it. I’m not getting into any more of your bloody capers.”
“Oo, oo, oo, oo,” he said, his face in a feminine pout. “Dig who’s coming on about capers. The mad fire bomber of Missoula.”
“Hey, man,” I said, hoarsely.
“Anyway, I wanted to tell you this story, since it just rolled into my gourd while I was into that 1950 Lighthouse shot. I never told you about the Legend of the Gigantic Fart, did I?”
“Put the beer in a paper bag. Let’s get it on the road.”
“No, man, this story became a legend and is still told in the high schools around the county. You see, it was at the junior prom, a very big deal with hoop dresses and everybody drinking sloe gin and R.C. Cola outside in the cars. Now, this is strictly a class occasion if you live in a shitkicker town. Anyway, we’d been slopping down the beer all afternoon and eating pinto-bean salad and these greasy fried fish before we got to the dance. So it was the third number, and I took Betty Hoggenback out on the floor and was doing wonderful, tilting her back like Fred Astaire doing Ginger Rogers. Then I felt this wet fart start to grow inside me. It was like a brown rat trying to get outside. I tried to leak it off one shot at a time and keep dancing away from it, but I must have left a cloud behind that would take the varnish off the gym floor. Then one guy says, ‘Man, I don’t believe it!’ People were walking off the floor, holding their noses and saying, Tew, who cut it?’ Then the saxophone player on the bandstand threw up into the piano. Later, guys were shaking my hand and buying me drinks, and a guy on the varsity came up and said that was the greatest fart he’d ever seen. It destroyed the whole prom. The saxophone player had urp all over his summer tux, and they must have had to burn the smell out of that piano with a blowtorch.”
Buddy was laughing so hard at his own story that tears ran down his cheeks. He caught his breath, drank out of the beer glass, then started laughing again. The woman behind the bar was looking at him as though a lunatic had just walked into the normalcy of her life.
We drove back to the ranch, and later in the afternoon I walked up the gravel road to the general store on the blacktop and used the pay phone to call Beth. I told her that I had never had the mumps and couldn’t come to the house because I didn’t feel like becoming sterile; then I waited with my hand tight on the receiver during a long, heart-beating pause. She said she didn’t have anyone to stay with the boys and couldn’t leave them for any period of time anyway, and that was the end of that. So that meant another two weeks on the shelf, I thought, as I walked back down the road in the cold air between the rows of pine trees.
During the next week I helped Mr. Riordan feed the birds in the aviary and start work on a new barn, but I couldn’t go to sleep at night, even though I was physically exhausted, until I had sat at the kitchen table alone for two hours with a botde of Jim Beam. I was back with the band on the weekend, and one night I went into town with Buddy to the pizza place and called Beth again in a beer fog, hoping that she would say, Yes yes yes. Check into the Florence. I’ll be there in a few minutes. However, like most drunken wishes, it didn’t have much to do with reality. I liked to hear Buddy play, but I couldn’t sit long in the middle of that college crowd.
I don’t know why they bothered me. It wasn’t their loud and bullish behavior that came after three beers, or even their curiosity about my foreign presence, which was like the appearance of a dinosaur among them. They reached down and touched something else in me that I couldn’t articulate. Maybe it was just the fact that they were young and still standing on first base with all the confidence and expectation of stealing second. There was no such thing as a clock in the universe, and all of them knew that they would never die. I walked down the street to the Oxford in the light snow and sat on one of the high wood chairs in the side room and watched the strange collection of late-night characters play cards until Buddy got off.
Monday afternoon we caught part of a storm that blew over the mountains from Idaho, and my hands got so cold hammering nails into the side of the barn that I could hardly feel the blow when I missed once and came down on my thumb. My ears felt like iron inside the hood of my coat, and when the light started to fail, I waited for Mr. Riordan to stick his hammer through the loop of his overall
s; but instead he kicked a bunch of scrap boards into a pile, poured gasoline over it, paused long enough to relight his cigarette in his cupped hands, and dropped the match into the pile. We finished the side frame in the light of the fire, which flared into a cone of flame and then flattened into a white circle of heat each time the wind sucked under the boards.
When we got back to the cabin, Buddy took off his clothes, dropped them on the floor, and turned the hot water on in the tin shower just long enough to bring the feeling back into his body. He stood naked by the wood stove and dried himself with a towel. His ribs drew tight against his sides each time he breathed. There was a tattoo of a pair of dice showing a six and a five inside one thigh.
“Wow, I’m tired,” he said, rubbing the towel into his face and hair. “And I’m late, and my fingers feel like balloons, and I didn’t press a shirt this morning, and I don’t feel like making that gig, Zeno.”
“Do it,” I said. I sat at the table, with my wet clothes dripping on the floor and a damp cigarette in my fingers. I had poured a glass of neat whiskey, but I hadn’t had the strength yet to pick it up.
“That’s very cool. While I entertain these college cats, you’ll be sitting home by the fire digging on some whiskey dream about southern freight trains. So I have a suggestion. Why don’t you zip on my Uncle Zeno suit and try filling in for me. If you think playing for a bunch of shitkickers is a zoo scene, do a shot with the junior lettermen that ask you to play ‘Happy Birthday’ for a chick they’re going to assault in the backseat that night.”
“Go to work, Buddy.”
He went into his bedroom and came back with his suit on the hanger, his underwear, and the soiled shirt that he had worn last night. He dressed by the stove, his body thin and yellow in the light of the electric bulb overhead. I took a drink out of the whiskey, and I felt the first warmth come back into my lungs.
“Where did you get that tattoo?” I said.
“Before I got nailed, I used to live with this mulatto girl that played sometimes at Pat o’Brien’s. I sat down at the piano once with her, and she thought I was her Mister Cool, the best thing since Brubeck, Monk, Mel Powell, or anybody. Except she liked shooting craps better than playing jazz. She made me take her to a couple of those upstairs games on Rampart, and she’d fade every bet on the board. When we got cleaned out, she’d bust up the apartment and call up some Baptist preacher in Mississippi and promise never to hang around white musicians again.”
“How did you get the tattoo?”
“I just told you.”
“Buddy, you are a dislodged madman. I think the hacks were right. That glue got to you a long time ago.”
“That’s because you got all your wiring tuned in to another radio set,” he said. “And speaking of that, while your high-rolling daddy is about to move it down the road and do his act for the sweater girls and their Howdy Doody boyfriends, let me click on the radio so we can listen to that fine jazz station in Spokane and dig on Shorty’s flügelhorn.”
Buddy turned on the radio that was set in the kitchen window, his trousers unzippered, one-half of his shirt hanging off his back. The tubes warmed in the old plastic box, the static cracked, and when the sound sharpened through the speaker, Shorty Rogers and Shelly Mann were actually playing.