“I'm happy,” he said.
She may have known what he meant. He thought she knew: her eyes were moist as she bent to him for the final time, and kissed him.
There were flames and heat as great as a nova and then there was nothing but ash that floated freely in the nimbus.
When they came to the suite of the sensu programmer, none of them knew they were looking at the last days of men. Only Keltin, the Designer, seemed to understand, in some deep racial way, and he said nothing.
But he smiled in expectation as the moonstone ship sailed away into the eternal night.
Palatine, Illinois; Los Angeles, California/1972
PAULIE CHARMED THE SLEEPING WOMAN
“She'll be listening, Paulie, you can bet on that,” I said to him, touching him lightly on the shoulder. “She ain't dead, Paulie, nobody like her could ever really die.” But he didn't care, Paulie didn't. All he knew was that one fine listener, that girl he'd dug and loved and spent so many notes on, she was gone. Some bad thing had happened and Ginny was dead, in her family's crypt out in the boneyard, and they wouldn't even allow Paulie to come to the funeral. Rich parents, Ginny's parents, and they was bugged at her first for having left the family and the old escutcheon, and second for having taken up with what they called “a broken down wastrel jazz musician.”
Which was flat-out not true. Paulie was the best.
People like that have no idea what it's like, hearing a horn like Paulie. Bright as a penny, and soft and quick and full of tiny things being said close into your ear…that was Paulie. You can know Miles, and you can remember Brownie, and you can talk it up that Diz uses a fine axe, and still not take it away from Paulie. He's what Chet Baker might have become, if he hadn't turned himself inside out and lost it all, or (and Hentoff called me a whack one night when I said this to him) if Bix had lived and gone through swing and bop and funk and cool and soul crap. But that's just my feeling, falling down on the way Paulie phrases, and his soft blue stuff, and the airy changes. That's just my bag, so forget it; has nothin' to do with Paulie and Ginny, except I wanted to make it clear that Paulie was good. Maybe great, even. No one can tag great, I'm hip, but Paulie was as close to it as I'll ever care to go.
So Ginny's folks had no truth in their put-down. He was not only the finest trumpet I've ever blown guitar with, but after that axe of his, he loved Ginny more than his eyes, even. So when she died, and they took her away-and her snotty sonofabitch brother Karl, or whatever the hell that fruit's name was, spit on Paulie-and put her in their creepy tomb, Paulie bust up pretty bad. And I said to him:
“Paulie, you got to listen, man, because Ginny'll always be with you. She loved to hear you play, Paulie, she really loved to hear you play, and wherever she is now, she's hearing you. So you got to get back with it, because if you let it lay there, then she won't hear a thing, ever.”
But it didn't take until later. Then Paulie got pretty smashed. He couldn't hold his liquor in the first place, and when he had to blow five sets a night, without her happy, loving round moony-face down there in front, it made him want to get plowed even more. So he got completely corked out of his nut, and he came to me while I was packing up the Gibson, and he said, “Johnnie, I gotta go play for her.”
Marshall, and Norman Skeets, both of them were halfway out the door of the club when Paulie laid it on me. They paused on the steps going up to the street, and they waited for me to talk him out of it and take him home to the sack, so they could go back to their respective broads and wife. So I launched into it and tried to calm him, but he was stuck on the idea.
“I'm goin' over to that thing they stuck her into, Johnnie, and I'm gonna charm her outta there. I'm gonna play so good she'll wake up and cry and come back to me, Johnnie.” He meant it. The kook really meant it. He wanted to go find that uppity creepy cemetery where Ginny's blue-blood parents had stuck her body, and blow trumpet for the dead. It was all at once laughable and pitiable and creepy. Like a double-talker giving you the business with the frammis on the fortestan, and you standing there wondering what the hell is happening.
I tried to get him to sit down, but he had the horn in his mitt, and he was yanking away from me, walking a helluva lot straighter and truer than a drunk had any right to be walking. Right for the stairs and the outside.
Well. To make it short, we tried everything short of decking him, but he was set on it, so we came around to thinking maybe it would snap him out of it, that maybe he was acting nutty this way because he hadn't been allowed to attend the funeral and he felt guilty, though God knows Paulie hadn't had anything to do with the taxi that had run Ginny down in the street outside that Detroit club where Paulie and the rest of us had been booked.
So we figured it might straighten him out, like I say, and we got him to promise that if he blew for Ginny he'd come home and go to sleep.
So we piled into Marshall's Falcon and we drove out to the Island-and Long Island late at night is much creepier than Spanish Harlem-and finally found the cemetery. It was surrounded by a big iron fence, but Paulie made Marshall drive up close, and then we all got out, and with Marshall yelling that we'd dent his top, and Skeets telling him to shut up before we got pinched, we climbed on the car and over the fence.
Into the tombstones. Dark and foggy and Christ it was just like a horror flick, except there went Paulie, like some kind of a nut, all through the tall grass where the graves hadn't been dug yet, past the piles of ready dirt, around a gang of tombs, and down this line of stones like he knew exactly where he was going.
As it turned out, he didn't have no more idea of where the hell he was going than we did. But we tagged along, and after we'd been circling and careening around there for ten or fifteen minutes, Marshall went hssst! and we dug him pointing to a big black shape with two dark angels hovering on one foot each, like gargoyles or something.
We called Paulie back (wondering where the caretaker was, if they had one, and why he hadn't heard us bumbling around in there). He came tottering over, and when he saw the legend on the bronze plate beside the door of that tomb, he sank down on his knees and we heard him making little talking noises to the ground, or to himself, maybe, but very sad and lonely and wanting.
It said:
And the other three of us just stood there quietly, remembering her, the way she had been before that stupid taxi had sent her through a florist's window. We remembered how she'd sit with one Scotch and two dozen cigarettes, a whole night, digging Paulie on the bandstand and just loving him with her eyes. We remembered it, and none of us felt it was wrong for Paulie to be here. I was glad I was with him. He was a good guy, and he didn't deserve all this pain.
Then Paulie got up, and he started to blow.
He put the horn to his mouth, and the little hard muscle-ridges of his upper lip stood out, and he started to blow something low and soft and new. It was a strange sound, all minor key and repetitive, with a wistful, searching thread in it. I'd never heard it before, and I knew damned well no one else had ever heard it, either.
It was like a million black birds with white wings sailing into the night sky. Like a sheet of coolness being drawn down over a fire. Like Paulie hungry and crying and asking her, charming her, calling her, out of that crypt, out into the night to hear him playing.