Willow weep for me in the still of the night when the world was young …
That was it. But not all of it. Men who had done their living without mamas and without papas, in a half-light legend of junk and sound. These were the things they said:
I don’t sleep nights; I hear the rhythms.
There ain’t no good women for me because they don’t see me, they see an image, a jazz musician and that’s a false bit. I’m lonely, where’s a good broad in all this?
You got to have roots to sink, a place to go. I’m thirty-seven, man, and it’s been a long time since I had a place to lay my head.
Take this from me and I’m hollow.
If I had a son, I’d want him to be a horn man, it’s God right in the stomach, the way to go.
This is my truth, all of it. All I want. All I need.
That was what they played, and that was what they said. So Porky listened, and knew what they wanted. They did not want him to stop pushing, because they would only need it from someone else. They did not want to hurt him for denying Tómas, because that had been the kid’s gig, and not Porky’s. But they wanted him to know It wasn’t the punishment, or whether anything happened, it was merely being aware, of knowing what was reality, and what was blindness.
How long can you live in that thatch hut without windows, without cracks of light at the foot of the mountains of blindness? How long? Forever, unless you’re shown.
He was trapped, and they were trapped, one by the other — him by demand, and them by supply. But now he could not turn his non sequitur eyes on them, without knowing what things boiled in them. Porky listened, and they restated their theme.
The sax lifted the dusky night and slid it out on a wave of tired but struggling. Horn came up, trumpet from the sea, and with eyes closed, hunkered down into his shoulders, a man told of the freight cars left on the sidings, still rank from pig and cow, where the army blanket spread lumpy for a needed sleep. The sound of the country, of a hundred million nameless bad ones and bedouins, tramping away from Louisiana graves with a fast jog time-step funeral chant. The wails of lonely and depressed and sick and hungry and down at the socks guys who needed what was roiling and tumbling and kicking in the gut. That was the theme, softly snaggingly bang wham repeated. That was it, for all the world (who was Porky only) to hear and put down just right.
Yeah, even Lawrence Welk.
In there somewhere.
And when the sound had flown off, an almost extinct bird with plumage that crumbled to dust motes if touched too harshly, they stared down at Porky from the bandstand, their eyes cat and bird and snake intent. To see if he had seen. To hear if he had heard. To find out if they had written their primer so that even a pusher could dig.
Porky nodded his head. He still lived at the mountains of blindness, but it was different. He could not move, because home is where the home is, where you’ve been, and where you can exist, and for Porky this was the only way to make it.
But the difference was the greatest difference in the whole wide world. Now he knew.
Nothing would change.
The pyramid of hungers still existed, because it was the way the scene was run, and who changes it? Not a damned soul. Especially not the damned souls.
Porky knew and said with eyes that were mouths of sense: I’m one of you. I’m not the preying animal, I’m the preyed upon. By life, by need, by circumstance. I’m one with you, and though I can’t help you, I understand.
And that, in its own way, was the worst punishment of all.