A Little Night Music Read Free Page B

gotten it all out.”
    The sun’s rays penetrated his skin. For the first time in two weeks, he welcomed the heat, as if it were thawing something too-long frozen. “Yeah. I guess I did.”
    “Dad says music does that.” Elephant lowered her voice an exaggerated octave to channel a man—no doubt her father, very mid-range Louis Armstrong—for the next bit, “Puts space in life so you can breathe,” before returning to her own voice. “Whatever that means.”
    Jon wanted to comment on the wisdom of such a man, but the little girl’s expression had fallen. He wondered if her sweat beads were tears, too.
    With no further words, without even a loose expression of goodbye, the girl plucked the cluster of tiny white flowers from her hair, slipped it into Jon’s t-shirt pocket, and scrambled down the fire escape, out of sight.
     
                                                             ****              
     
     
    Jon arrived at The Lotus as the sun begged forgiveness for the day behind the eclectic cluster of building fronts and balconies that lined the Jazz District. New Orleans was a hot, sticky, dirty city—never more evident than in the relaxed pre-opening moments, when most members of the Seems Like Old Times band took a smoke break near the kitchen dumpster. Never Mongo. He filled the red velvet stool at his piano as if the eighty-eight keys ruled the valves of his overburdened heart. When he spotted Jon, he waved him closer.
    Ladder-back chair reversed, Jon settled beside him.
    “Lookin’ sharp tonight, Madison Avenue.”
    “I told you, Mongo. Chicago, not New York.”
    “Alls the same to us here.”
    “At least you don’t hold it against me.”
    “Not unless it comes through that bell there.” Mongo indicated the trumpet case resting beside Jon’s boots.
    “Dezi never said ‘don’t come back,’ so I’m here.”
    “Aww, Dezi, he blowin’ steam, you know. Never heard your Madison-Avenue playin’ before. Gotsta have an appreciation for it, you know. You’ll get it, you’ll get it. Just gotsta feel the music.” Mongo stretched the word feel and looked up as if his advice were a kite, loosely tethered in reality.
    Jon glanced up, wished he could see it.
    “Yeah, well, I haven’t felt anything, not for a while.”
    “Aww, now. That’s a lie, Pretty Boy. That last solo last night? Um-um-um. A man don’t reach down to play like that unless it’s the fault of a woman.”
    Jon remembered Elli’s welcoming hand, those blue-gray eyes, an intimate interpretation of a tune that never grew old. His heart slipped like a trombone slide. He dragged himself from the lusty precipice, his head clearly lost in unwelcome kite territory.
    “Nah, man. No women. Too brutal.”
    “Strange power, women,” mused Mongo.
    Jon opened his trumpet case, attempting to pack away the subject of women, as if snapping the buckles on one would carry a case-closed finality to the other. The moment his thumb grazed the instrument’s lead pipe, a tingling jolt radiated up his arm. He released the cool brass. The sensation fizzled out. He touched the bell. Again, the strange undercurrent stirred beneath his skin. When he took the assembled instrument fully in-hand, the needling warmth was unlike anything he had ever felt.
    Almost anything.
    Those eyes, at the back of The Lotus , fixed on only him, charged from his short-term memory and branded the warmth as though the two had always and would forever be intertwined.
    “Mongo?”
    The pianist was stirring some drink on the rocks with his index finger, crowded with gold rings. “Hmm?”
    “Do you believe an instrument can be…” Jon searched for a word that didn’t make him sound drunk or insane. Or both. “Can have baggage? Something attached to it?”
    “Aww…now you’re talkin’ somethin’...”
    “Crazy?”
    “Real. Anything that touches the soul leaves a mark.”
    “And if it gets in the