No Charlie Parker. That was what Shad found hard to adjust to. No John Coltrane. No Miles Davis. Dizzy Gillespie fronted something called the Fort Wayne People's Folk Orchestra and blew some good licks, but it wasn't anywhere near the same.
In the hospital he'd claimed amnesia-he just couldn't remember who he was or why he'd been shot or why he was dressed in a Halloween costume. The police hadn't believed him-strip-searched him at gunpoint right in the emergency room in fact, with the doctor and nurses protesting-but his fingerprints didn't turn up in the Central Criminal Computer Registry in Maryland (the computer search took three days with the wretched equipment they had), and they had nothing to hold him on. They concluded he was an illegal immigrant, but by the time the authorities arrived to deport he'd already slipped out into the night, clumsy in his arm-and-shoulder cast, and within twenty-four hours he got himself a job maintaining the awful sound equipment in an illegal samba club on the East Side. The stuff still had tubes, and it needed all the help it could get.
Illegal samba club… and it wasn't the club that was illegal, it was the music. Samba was against the law-Latin music was considered subversive because South America wasn't in the Socialist bloc but allied with Imperial Japan. But despite the law, there were illegal samba clubs parked on half the street corners in Harlem and all down the East Side-this was, after all, the Big Apple, and in the Apple you could find everything. If people couldn't have rock and roll, they had to have something. And some of the club's biggest patrons were the sons and daughters of high FarmerLabor party members, so the place was pretty safe.
Shad spent his free hours looking for Chalktalk. She'd disappeared the second she got him into the E-room. When he asked the hospital personnel, no one could remember seeing her.
He still didn't know why she'd been following him. He didn't know why she helped or whether she'd somehow plotted the whole thing.
The attitudes toward him were different here, and it took him a while on the street before he finally figured it out. In his own New York, white people looked at him like he was a criminal, or anyway a potential criminal. There were some jewelry stores that wouldn't even unlock their doors for him, even after he waved fistfuls of money through the window. But the crime and homicide rates for blacks weren't particularly high here, and people looked at him differently-the Protected Negro Minority was a historically oppressed race struggling to elevate itself toward an equality that, despite everyone's best efforts, they seemed not to have reached.
In short, white people treated him as if he were mildly retarded-good-hearted and deserving of sympathy, but a little slow. It wasn't his fault if he needed a little extra help, of course-Forces of History were responsible, after all, not peoples-but all that meant was that nobody expected much from him.
After he figured out what was going on, Shad fit in well enough. He liked being patronized a lot less than. he liked being feared, but he was still himself inside, whoever that was. The masks he wore were different, but they were still masks.
He still wore the night's mask best of all. He went for long walks after the club closed, quartering the parts of the city that, in another reality, were Jokertown. Music ran through his head, music that didn't even exist here, and pictures rolled through his memory, images of that portable concentration camp set up in the brownstone warehouse, the joker in the necktie with his head blown off, the hard con-boss look in Lisa Traeger's eyes, crates of gold and drugs, Nelson Dixon and Blaise exchanging high fives on the boardroom table…
The green hills of someplace he'd probably never see again.
Hanging them from lampposts, he figured, was too good for them.
He knew exactly where he wanted to go once he got home. And what he was going to do there.
On the long four A. M. walks, he plotted everything out, step by step. Impossible as it seemed.
And then one warm August night it became possible. There she was, sketching on the sidewalk with her baseball cap on the concrete next to her. Chalktalk. It happened too suddenly, too normally, for him to be surprised. So he crossed the street and put a Nikolai Bukharin five-dollar coin in her cap. Her picture was a daylight street scene with a gold-plated Empire State Building in the background. She glanced up with bright green eyes and gave him a strange little grin. "Remember me?" he said. "I want to go home now" She gave a weird little giggle that sent a chill up his spine. 'The she put her chalk in a little belt pouch, put her cap on her tangled dark hair, stood up suddenly, and grabbed his hand. Ignoring the little coin that rang in the gutter, she hauled him out of his crouch and down the next alleyway at a half run. Then she rudely pushed him into the wall and put her arms around him. A little keening sound came from her throat. Her hands pawed at him urgently. She started grinding her hips against his crotch like an old whore running on autopilot.
The smell of decaying garbage crawled down the back of Shad's throat. "Hey," Shad said, "are you serious, or what?" Her lips drew back in a snarl. One hand clamped on his crotch, the other crooked in front of his face. Distant streetlights gleamed on sharp mother-of-pearl claws. Shad's balls tried to tunnel up to his eye sockets.
"Okay," Shad said. "Whatever you want. You mind if we get up in some fresh air? This garbage smell is gonna make me puke."
She didn't seem to care one way or the other, so he picked her up in his arms and walked up the wall to the roof. The action amused her, and she stroked his cock through his ill-made proletarian pants. Once atop the roof, he took off his black-market quilted jacket from Manchukuo and laid it down. The street artist dragged her Levi's off over her work boots, lay down on the jacket, and gave her strange little giggle again. He took off his shoes and pants, and dropped to his knees between her legs. The scent of rut reached him, and he felt a tide of blood flush his skin, blast through the roof of his skull, and carry him away to someplace else.
What followed was fast and brutal, and by the time the act was over, his clothes were in shreds, and there were a couple dozen cuts on his back. Panting for breath and faintly sick to his stomach, he felt as if he'd been hit by a truck loaded with pheremones.
Shad got painfully to his feet and started dragging his clothes on. The girl looked up at him gleefully and started rolling around on the roof, skinny pale legs and buttocks contrasting with the heavy coat shed never taken off. He picked up his Manchukuoian jacket and shrugged it on. He felt a chill and stole a little heat from the still autumn night, his cloud of darkness rising above the building as he drank in scarce photons.
He wondered if this was what she'd had in mind all along, if this was why she'd been following him around. Maybe she had a crush on him.
Funny way to show a crush, though.
The street artist came up behind him, put her arms around his waist. She pressed herself very close behind him and began rocking back and forth, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. Her hands rubbed lower, pressing over his cock.
"I have an apartment near here," he said. "You mind if we go there, or does this have to happen out of doors?" She didn't appear to care one way or another. Shad picked her up, covered them both with darkness, and went straightline, up and over buildings, till he came to his own illegal loft. He snapped on the light for which he stole electricity from Peoples' Edison. The street artist was already on the bed, legs parted, arms stretched out.
Shad looked down at the naked vulva and the skinny legs in their heavy boots. Little stones from the flat tar roof were still clinging to her skin. "Not much time for romance in your life, huh?" he said. He bent down, began undoing bootlaces. "Let's at least get these off, okay?"
The second act was only a little less frenzied than the first, and afterward Shad lay facedown on the bed while she carefully licked the blood from the wounds she'd clawed into him. It had become obvious by now that she didn't bathe very often. He got her into his shower and scrubbed her down while she made little bubbling sounds and did a kind of dance, arms over her head, spinning around and around on her toes while the warm water splashed down around her.