Bluebottle Read Free Page B

moment she stood. Began tucking things in. Breast, hair, slip. Her sadness.
    "Have to go, Lew. Late enough start as it is."
    "If it's as hot as you say it is, things'll be slow on the street."
    "You never know. Sometimes heat just brings the beast out."
    "Take care " She was almost to the door. "Verne?"
    A pause. "Yeah, Lew."
    "Is it dark outside?"
    That's what bothered me most. Where things were, the shapes of rooms, finding my way to toilet and lavatory—all minor problems.
     But being suspended in time, out of the gather and release of the day, was something else entirely, an immeasurable loss.
    "Almost," she said.
    "A clear night?"
    "Pinpricks of stars in the upper window. Moon will be full in another day or two."
    "And city lights stretched out below us."
    "Yes."
    "Diminutivefires of the planet, Neruda called them."
    "Sure he did. See you tomorrow, hon."
    I remembered lines from a Langston Hughes poem: Night comes slowly, black like me. Once LaVerne was gone, I nudged tape into
     player. Sure enough, Hughes's poem was there, right after one about a lynching. Further along was another, by LeRoi Jones/Amira
     Baraka, that would haunt me for years.
    Son singin
    fount some
    words. Son
    singin
    in that other
    language
    talkin bout "bay
    bee, why you
    leave me
    here," talkin bout
    "up under de sun
    cotton in my hand." Son
    singing, think he bad
    cause he
    can speak
    they language, talkin bout
    "dark was the night
    the ocean deep
    white eyes cut through me
    made me weep."
    Son singin
    fount some words. Think
    he bad. Speak
    they
    language.
    'sawright
    I say
    'sawright
    wit me
    look like
    yeh, we gon be here
    a taste.
    I think that may have been the first time I thought about all these different languages we use. Danny Barker used to talk
     about that, how with this group of musicians he'd talk one way, that way with another one, uptown and downtown talk, and still
     he'd have this private language he'd use at home, among friends. We all do that. To survive, our forebears learned dissimulation
     and mimickry, learned never to say what they truly thought. They knew they were gon be here a taste. That same masking remains
     in many of us, in their children's blood, a slow poison. So many of us no longer know who, or what, we are.

2
    H er hair had come out of a botde. So had courage, gait and gestures. But somehow it was all of a piece; it worked.
    "Hope you don't mind if I tell you you're a good-looking man," she said as she sat down beside me. She'd successfully crossed
     troubled seas between her seat at the bar and my table, listing but slighdy starboard. Now here was this new challenge: a
     fair distance (as my father would have said) from up there to down here. Heroically she made it.
    Matter of fact, I didn't mind at all. A lot of my own life was coming out of a bottle those days. This white woman made her
     hobby drinking bad whiskey and picking up bad company in cheap bars, what business was it of mine. Lord knows I'd fished often
     enough in her pond.
    Never question what Providence spills in your lap.
    She wanted Scotch and got it. Sat swirling it around in her glass the way stone drinkers do that first hit or two, savoring
     color, body, bouquet, legs, letting those first sips roll across the back of her tongue, equal parts anticipation and relief.
     Before long she'd be slamming it back. Not tasting it at all, just letting it take her where she needed to be. Before long,
     too, her conversation would start to narrow, go round and round in circles like someone lost in the woods. I knew. But for
     the time being she lay warm and safe in the bosom of that wonderland alcohol grants its acolytes, a zone where, for a short
     time at least, everything fell back into place, everything made some kind of sense.
    When I was a kid my mom would drape these pinned-together cutout paper patterns for clothes she was sewing us over the kitchen
     table. She only did that when I was very young and soon gave it up—just as she gave up