Of Song and Water (7 page)

He continues: “Crystal got married young. Her husband, a drummer, managed their band and booked gigs all over Chicago. Then Brian was born. He listened to his mother in church. He said she praised God and railed against sin. But the preacher didn't like it that two members of his congregation were ‘prostituting their God-given talent.' So the preacher started talking to Crystal. He wanted to make himself the band's new manager – that's what Brian always said.”

He sips his hot chocolate. “I could tell you a different story.”

“No. This one's fine,” says Heather.

“It isn't really about Brian. You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“All right,” he says, not entirely convinced. “Crystal went on singing and trying to explain things to the preacher. She sang until a new baby began to show, until the crowded clubs and the late hours made her sick. She ran a high fever and went to a doctor too late. When the fever spiked, she lost the child. The preacher said afterward that her loss was a punishment for wasting her God-given talent – ‘for singing sinful songs in houses of sin!'”

“How old is Brian?” says Heather.

“Close to my age,” he says. “If he isn't fifty already, he will be soon enough.”

He watches Heather's face as she rubs the bones and joints of his hand. He hates that his fingers are crooked, almost swollen.

“After the miscarriage,” he says, “she figured the Lord was speaking to her through the preacher, ordering her to sing only in church. When she told her husband, he picked up a lamp and threw it across the room.”

He stops but Heather nods, urging him to finish. He says, “The band went for a while without a singer, but they eventually split up, and Brian's father drifted away, taking his drums and the family car. Crystal James sang only in church after that. By the time I met Brian, she no longer sang at all.”

“Is that true?” says Heather.

“There it is – always the same question. Don't you believe my stories? Do you think I make them up?”

She giggles. “What about the Black & White Club?”

“What do you mean? What happens there is true.” He smiles. “Well, maybe not all of it.”

“Why are your stories always so sad?”

“Sad stories are easy to remember,” he says.

“My life isn't like that,” says Heather.

“That's a good thing. Do you want more hot chocolate?”

“No thanks. I want you to play a song.”

He looks at the black case in the corner of the room. “Not today,” he says. “The strings need changing.”

“That's a crummy excuse. Next you'll say you don't know where you put the amplifier.”

“I know where it is. But it hasn't been fired up in a long time.”

“Well, let's find out if it still works.”

Heather hurries across the room. She sees a thick layer of dust on the case. She grabs it and swings it around, steps between the couch and the chair, pushes a stack of magazines on the floor, and lays it on the coffee table. She opens the case.

She recognizes the guitar: the pear-shaped body with f-holes and a venetian cutaway at the top, the sunburst finish, a dark edge that bleeds to red and then yellow, and the gold-plated pickups. “It's beautiful,” she says. “Even more than I remember.”

He disappears down the hall and returns with a small amplifier. He slips off the cover and plugs in the power line. He pulls the guitar out of its case and rests it on his leg. “Open that compartment,” he says, “and grab me a cord.” He checks the action. The strings feel all right. He rearranges the extra pillows on his end of the couch, positions the amp and the coffee table so that the space feels uncluttered, and then flips the power switch and gives the tubes a minute to warm up.

He turns up the volume and starts tuning, making faces when the strings won't cooperate. Having come this far, he feels exhausted. The guitar sits heavy on his thigh and the neck is cold.

“How are your fingers?” says Heather.

“Okay,” he says, wishing for a moment that she didn't know the truth. He shakes out his left hand like a wet rag. “What should I play?”

“An old song,” she says. “Something you and Brian used to do.”

He lets out a deep breath. He starts with three notes that to Heather sound almost uncertain, though afterward she'll think of them as leaves falling. Then he plays the first chords, a sound so rich that later when she learns the title, “September Song,” she'll say that somehow she could picture the colors of autumn – bright reds and yellows, the warmth of gold becoming brown. But for now, she listens, hearing him sing a few words under his breath, watching his face for any sign of pain.

The song keeps him from thinking.
Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December.
He moves by instinct, hearing what his fingers produce in the second before he plays it. The only time is the beat, the temporal quality of the measure that he now seems to shorten or lengthen, phrasing and rephrasing the melody as the mood demands.
Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few . . .

As the final notes fade, he glances at Heather. He sees her curled up on the other end of the couch, her eyes closed.

The amplifier pops when he shuts it off.

“Don't stop,” she says. “I'm not sleeping.”

He rubs his left hand. “Did I pass the audition?”

Heather opens her eyes. “You always pass the audition,” she says.

“Jesus – ”

“What's wrong?” she says.

“That's what Brian said. More than once.”

“Isn't it good to pass an audition?”

“Not always,” he says.

“Why not?” says Heather.

“Forget it.” He unplugs the guitar and puts the cord away. He wipes the neck and the fingerboard with a soft cloth. He lays the guitar in the case, flips the top down, and snaps the latches closed.

HAVELOCK MOORE, drawn irresistibly to the radio, turns up the volume. He recognizes the tune, “Stardust,” and finds himself speaking the words under his breath.
The melody . . . haunts my reverie, and I am once again with you . . .

The music buoys him up. It carries him forward and back. He floats in time, returning to the river, the silver Detroit River, a luminous streak that inspires him, even at this juncture, to dream.

He stares at the gold dial.

He tries to stop thinking. He concentrates, hoping for a steady calm, but the borders in his mind give way. Now, no matter the effort, none of it can be forgotten, not the Great War or the wars that followed, not the crossings or the tricks of navigation, and certainly not the lies, expedient though they were, or the grim betrayals, the costs, the necessities of doing business.

Be smart, he thinks, hold fast to a line – but the song and the river run . . .

HE TAKES up the planks and lowers the first case into the bilge.

The air is thick with humidity. A cold sweat streams down his face. He wears leather gloves and lifts one case at a time. He feels grateful for the weather: clouds, no wind, and a deep, impenetrable darkness.

It is 1932. He's made the crossing without trouble. Stepping off the boat, he turns and looks at Detroit.

He does most of his work after midnight. He starts from the Detroit shore and travels less than a mile without running lights to the Windsor shore, where he moors at an unlit pier and loads the waiting cargo. He moves with rehearsed precision and keeps noise to an absolute minimum.

 

WHEN the work requires silence, he thinks of his mother mending a tear in his shirt or trousers and wanting him to stay with her in the hush of their apartment, only the two of them, his father dead before the War. He sees with the clarity of a picture the peeling brown door, its dead bolt thrown, the gap between the door and the threshold stuffed with a thin rug to keep out the winter draft. Then he sees his mother's long hair swept to one side, and her thick hands pushing and pulling a needle through coarse fabric, drawing and cinching the thread, the hypnotic rhythm of a woman stitching sails. And again, like a recurring dream, her breathing, the silence spun by her steady hands, and the longed-for peace of the living room vanish with the creaking of wooden steps, with footfalls that approach and finally stop at the peeling door. His mother looks up.

 

HE STARTS the boat and shoves off. The water stretches in every direction like a black sky. He aims for his favorite light, a street lamp that stands taller and burns brighter than the rest.

When necessary, he tells people that he operates a shipping business and
hauls merchandise for J.L. Hudson. He never considers himself a rumrunner, a name he finds distasteful. Instead, he calls himself a ferryman, an old boatman, exploiting the unruly freedom of the Detroit River, defying Prohibition with a pirate's guile.

In daylight, he appreciates the river as a guiding force, an instrument of fate, oddly attractive with its factories, sewage, and scows. But in darkness, without comfort of moon or familiar stars, the finite certainties of time and distance fall away, a condition made worse by his state of mind, by weather or fatigue.

His last crossing felt clumsy, as if he'd taken on too much. He kept hearing faint, inexplicable sounds. He wanted to push the throttle, skim across the water like a flat stone, but he held his course and struggled against the current. I may go under, he thought, believing then that the shoreline had somehow disappeared.

In his spare time, planning to outwit or outmaneuver any opposition, he explores the river from north to south, a thirty-two-mile stretch that rushes from Windmill Point to Lake Erie, an open border between Canada and the United States – a boon to free commerce, or so he likes to say.

He cuts the motor and drifts in deep channels to mark the shifting current. He sees slag heaps, stone fields, and rough-hewn wire that make a strange, but unmistakable, symmetry. A pile driver hisses and pounds. He floats past the sluiceway of a steel plant, the river roiling and steaming and turning bright red. He starts the engine.

When he reaches clean water, he reduces speed and floats slowly into the shallows. After a while, passing gingerly over rocks and debris, he finds what he always needs, a wharf where creosote and pigweed thrive, a deserted place where the launch can be moored and kept secret.

He wants the river for himself, a private resource, but there's no way to hinder or shut out the competition. When layoffs come or factories close down, rumrunners rise up like seaweed. They find cover in the coves and inlets, most
of them outfitting old boats – schemes of dark paint, insulation, and bogus tanks.

Crossing to Canada, they fill the tanks with whiskey or gin. Sometimes they wrap special cargo with heavy line and lash it beneath their hulls. When a crackdown begins, they use submerged cables and metal drums, dragging the booze from Peche Island to the foot of Alter Road. Finally, in winter, with the river locked up, frozen by a subzero blow, they resort to carts and sleds, risking dim tunnels or the shifting ice.

He was cocky and green when he took his first job on the waterfront – learning the ins and outs, trying to steer clear of losers and thugs. By the next season, with a launch of his own, he began making runs as a freelancer, a supplier, servicing some of the blind pigs in Rivertown.

These days his setup is clean and predictable: Hiram Walker provides the whiskey and the Purple Gang launders the cash. When things get messy, he improvises. More often than not, he receives orders and collects his take from nameless go-betweens. He likes being one man removed.

 

A PEELING brown door, its dead bolt thrown, stands in his mind. It offers no safety or consolation. It fails to keep out the rising thump, the echo of someone entering the building and climbing the steps.

Footfalls stop on the landing. His mother looks up.

He imagines leather boots, the snow and slush melting, puddles forming on the doormat. No knock for now, but he believes he can hear a man breathing in the same way that he heard men breathe in the trenches, a shallow and cautious sound.

When did this begin? Was it after I shipped out? Why does he collect in person? He wants to ask his mother these questions, but since he's been home they talk less and less.

His mother stares at the door and holds her breath. Her silence is a strange comfort.

AFTER HE docks, secures the boat, and feels the safety of solid ground, he walks to the corner of Orleans and Franklin and stops at the Jackpot, an establishment that caters to raconteurs, cardsharps, and con men of all persuasions.

He recognizes the bartender who greets him with a booming voice and a handshake. He stands at the bar and the man next to him, a gambler in a silk shirt, takes a sudden interest in his name.

The gambler's never heard anything so high sounding and strange. He repeats the name to everyone within earshot. “Did your mama and daddy dislike you?” he says, laughing so much that he spills his beer.

He buys the gambler a whiskey and tells the bartender to leave the bottle.

“Don't mind if I do,” says the gambler. “I'll drink to your highfalutin name. I've never once met a man named Havelock.” He raises his voice. “If anyone here's ever heard the name HAV-E-LOCK, his drink's on me.”

He turns and smiles at the gambler. Then he grabs the whiskey bottle by the neck, swings it in a perfect arc, and shatters the man's jaw.

Everyone in the Jackpot freezes.

He puts on his hat and straightens his coat before dragging the gambler across the floor and sitting him in a chair. “You can call me H.M.,” he says.