Читать книгу Joy - Marsha Hunt - Страница 9

If something bad really had happened to Joy, it wasn’t Christian of me to be feeling sorry for myself when I should have been on the phone giving her mama some comfort and telling my husband that our Godsent child was dead. It didn’t matter what I thought about Tammy’s brand of mothering, wasn’t a woman living that wanted to bury her own child.

So I stood Joy’s snag-a-tooth picture that I was still holding back on the mantelpiece and let the morning sun hit it, and picked up my pale green dogeared telephone file card that was laying by it. That card’s usually in my wallet, ’cause I won’t use no handbag except on Sundays which is why I never use the nice leatherbound address book that Joy give me last Christmas. I peered down at the card as I carried it to the kitchen phone, and after I took that box of Sugar Pops out the trash, I dialed the code for Richmond. Then all ’a sudden something told me to try ringing Joy’s instead which is what I did.

We got one of them fancy-ass phones that chimes out a different music tone for every digit you tap. It aggravates me every time I ring out on it, but it come with the apartment, and we ain’t suppose to change nothing. I tapped out 1-2-1-2 for New York City and traced my finger down my file card to Joy’s number which I don’t know off by heart, ’cause she changed it quite regular, and I didn’t know the new one. But I lost my confidence after it rang once and put the receiver back. ’S‘pose Rex picks up the phone?’ the devil in me said, though I hadn’t ever known it to happen during all the years Joy’d been knowing him. Spoiled as he was with secretaries and assistants and God-knows-who-all he employed to wipe his nose and his behind, he probably ain’t picked up his own phone in them twenty years. All that fame and money can affect a man like two worms boring their way through a apple and leaving it rotten to the core, so ain’t no place for it but the garbage heap. Which is what must of happened to Rex.

When he was young, I understood what Joy saw in him ’cause he was a nice looking boy, being half Comanche. That rudey color he had in his cheeks all the year round made them strange turquoise blue eyes of his stand out even though they was set way back in his deep eye sockets and seemed even more so cause of his high cheekbones. But as he got older, he got gaunt looking and the big dark circles ’round his eyes made him look sickly to me, though it seems that half the white women in the South would shout me down disagreeing.

There’s been times when I’ve seen him singing on the television wearing a cowboy hat and it’s been hard to tell that he’s past forty. But when his gray hair is showing his age is a dead giveaway, though like Joy says, he’s had some gray strands since she met him when he was twenty-five or so. But nowadays when I take a close up look with my magnifying glasses at pictures of him in the Enquirer, it shows that his skin is starting to sag around the jawline, and all the cowboy hats in Texas can’t hide that.

In the beginning I was relieved that Joy took to somebody that was as nice to her as Rex was, ’cause he was always buying her things though not expensive and had that limo of his pick her up and drop her off anytime she was with him. But like I reminded Joy at the time, don’t go falling in love with no limousine, ’cause it won’t never propose to you. But when Tammy told me not to discourage Joy from going around with Rex, I knew all Tammy was seeing was them dollar signs hanging over Rex’s head. ’Cause I agreed with my baby sister Helen who said wasn’t no white guy with that much money gonna do nothing for Joy but fill her full of baby and run off. And to tell the truth, she’d of been lucky if he’d of done that much.

Joy should have found herself a nice colored fella and been married and driving a stationwagon full of her own children. But she was always trying to appease her mama somehow, though as far as I could see Tammy didn’t try to do nothing to please Joy. Tammy didn’t want daughters, she wanted stars: somebody to make her feel important, so she could act like she was a big shot herself. I could see that soon as the girls had their hit ‘Chocolate Chip’, and all ’a sudden she was bragging about ‘my three daughters this, and my three daughters that’.

I stood looking out my kitchen window with the phone at my ear, and I was feeling both mad and numb. Looking but not seeing and listening but not hearing, and whereas the sight of folks seven stories down heading for their work usually got me raring to get into gear and start my chores, I didn’t feel up to doing nothing. It seemed like there wasn’t enough strength in me to tap out Tammy’s phone number and I was staring blank not wanting to talk or be talked to. So when I did finally ring Tammy’s, I was praying her line would be busy. But it wasn’t and I got agitated to hear a man’s voice saying, ‘Hello. O’Mara residence.’

‘Is that you Jesse?’ I asked.

‘Baby Palatine?’ I normally liked to hear Jesse’s furry Southern voice, because something about the tone reminded me of my brother Caesar’s voice. Though Caesar’s been dead sixteen years, I can still remember what he sounded like everytime I talk to Jesse.

‘Baby Palatine?’ Is that you?’ Jesse asked again, ’cause I still hadn’t answered.

I didn’t want to talk to him and had to try to think of what to say. I can’t stand for somebody I don’t know good to be giving me sympathy, and I was nervous he would say something mushy about me losing Joy.

Meaning to sound spry, like wasn’t nothing upsetting me, I said, ‘I thought Tammy said you wasn’t home?’

‘A few of us retired dudes that used to go to school together have a regular rummy game on Monday nights, and if we have a few beers, I sometimes feel like I shouldn’t get behind the wheel to drive home.’

Joy once told me that the only thing that irritated her about her mama’s husband was that he wanted to do everything by the book and never stopped being a cop. Not even at the breakfast table, ’cause the things he wanted to talk about that he spotted in the morning papers was all cop stuff. And she said he was always going on about being law-abiding and wanting his family to be. And while Joy wasn’t one to rush around breaking rules for the sake of it, she didn’t pay taxes, nor parking tickets and would speed anytime she thought she could get away with it. ’Cause she didn’t never do nothing that she wasn’t sure she could get away with.

Jesse’s voice wouldn’t quit in my ear. ‘I’d knocked back a few scotches and thought I should bed down on my buddy Edgar’s sofa which is where I was sleeping when Tammy tracked me down, so I don’t know why she made such a big deal of my not coming home like some great mystery was involved. I often don’t come home or call after the rummy game, and leave the number of whoever’s house I’m playing at on the kitchen table. Just like I did last night before I drove the car out of the garage.’

He could have rambled on talking about nothing for a hour, as long as I didn’t have to answer. For one thing, I was relieved not to have to talk to Tammy … until he explained that I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

‘I gave Tammy a sedative and put her to bed,’ he said. ‘She laid there watching the news before she finally dozed off. I think she’s expecting to hear a report about Joy dying, and I didn’t want to tell her that I think that with the girls not having a hit in ten years, it’s unlikely that anybody even remembers them. Let alone will report it on the television.’ For somebody who, according to Joy, was supposed to be quiet, I was surprised Jesse didn’t draw breath. ‘Tammy told me that you’d be phoning and that she’d managed to tell you the shocking news. Sad. So sad, when young people die.’

Tammy’s husband or not, I hadn’t never set eyes on Jesse and though I didn’t want to be mean and think on him as no stranger since him and Tammy’d been married over two years, I wasn’t ready to think on him as family neither, and definitely didn’t want him telling me the details about Joy.

So when he said, ‘I can only tell you what I know myself which is not a hell of a lot,’ I wanted to stop him, ’cause he didn’t know Joy good enough to have real feeling for her. Though Richmond ain’t far from New York City, she didn’t bother to visit him and her mama but three times in as many years. What I was wanting to say didn’t come out though, ’cause another lump was welling up in my throat so I couldn’t speak, and while I pretended to listen to Jesse mouth on, what I was actually thinking about was that he was the only man I knew of that Tammy let into her life or her bed after John Dagwood up and left her in the middle of the first year when her and the kids lived opposite me and Freddie B in Oakland. She never said as much, but a blind man could of seen that she pined and nursed her broken heart like somebody normal would nurse a coronary thrombosis. I thought it was selfish and a waste with them children needing them a nice stepdaddy … somebody decent to help her give them the extras that they had to do without unless they got ’em off me and Freddie.

All these thirty years, I haven’t breathed a word to nobody about the reason Dagwood disappeared or what I’d said to him to make him leave. As it was me, who didn’t have no choice but to send him packing, I felt positive all along that he wasn’t never coming back. But had I told Tammy as much she would of known that I had something to do with him leaving, and much as she was wishing him back, I was praying for him to stay away. And praying is stronger than wishing.

Like my mama warned me and Helen, ‘A pretty nigger will run you into the ground and you won’t never know what he’s up to nor who he’s up to it with.’ That was John Dagwood. Wasn’t no question that he was a real looker and wasn’t only me and Tammy that had thought it neither. Even Freddie B had to own up that he was nice looking after Freddie’d seen John Dagwood in that emergency ward the time Anndora’d cut her hand. And I had me a girlfriend back then, Tondalayah Hayes her name was, who acted like she couldn’t believe what a heavenly vision loomed before her eyes the first time she spotted Dagwood. And considering her line of work, Toni, as I nicknamed her for short, wasn’t one for falling over backwards over no man. But I recall that’s exactly what she almost did trying to sneak a peek at him from my bathroom window in Oakland after I’d told her that Tammy had taken up with somebody that even Freddie B, not one for noticing things, had said was nice looking.

While Jesse’s voice was still chatting in my ear, I was remembering that conversation I’d had with Toni that took place two weeks after Anndora’s Sunday visit to the emergency ward. Tondalayah had come for a Friday afternoon visit and I told her if she stood in my bathtub she could just about see Dagwood. So Tondalayah was bent over, peering out of the two inches I had opened for her to be able to see him out my bathroom window while he was shirtless down in the parking lot, busy scrubbing down the white walls of his tyres of that little two seater convertible he had that I hadn’t never heard of. She said ‘Nice looking, shit! That’s the understatement of the year! That nigger’s a black prince.’

‘Doggone it, Toni,’ I whispered standing behind her. ‘Keep your voice down, girl.’

‘Oh, you’re so nervous about everything, Palatine. You give yourself the jim-jam-jimmies. The man can’t hear me, and so what if he can? I haven’t said anything bad.’ As Tondalayah stepped out of the bathtub, I could see that she’d left black scuff marks from the rubber soles of her ankle boots, so I reached behind the tub to get a rag and the Dutch cleanser. It wasn’t likely that she’d think to do it herself, ’cause she claimed she had better things on her mind, miles away from housework. What with her being a stripper, I could excuse her for it.

‘He’s got black pearls for eyes and white pearls for teeth.’ She laughed high notes and threw her head back like she was about to go into one of them belly dances I used to see her do when we first met while I was cleaning a strip joint where she worked for a spell down Bakersfield way. Though some of them Sisters at my church used to turn their nose up at her when I’d drag her to First Tabernacle from time to time, me and Toni was real good friends.

‘And who said he was dark?’ She was still rampaging on about John Dagwood. ‘Black as that Turkish coffee they serve me down at the Souk’s Cafe,’ she said and sipped at her beer glass full of red wine. What I liked about her was she could hold her liquor and knew when to stop. Not like my baby sister.

‘He looks hard and supple in all the right places too,’ she said moving over to check her fake chignon bun in the mirror. ‘Body like a welterweight … Shit, Palatine, tell your husband when you see him that Miss Tondalayah Hayes said John Dagwood ain’t just nice looking. No-sirreee-Bob. That nigger is fine as a motherfucking Georgia pine, and I better not get a chance to run my fingers through that good hair, ’cause I could get dangerous.’

‘Aw shut up, Toni, he ain’t even got no hair to speak of.’ He kept it close cut so that you could practically see his scalp and it showed that his head had a perfect shape. ‘And long as them red fingernails of yours is, you’d probably draw blood if you run your fingers ’cross his head anyway.’

‘Dan-ang-ger-ooze,’ laughed Toni and popped her fingers with each syllable, before she let out a squeal and shook like somebody had walked over her grave, and got ready to stand in the bathtub again so she could take another look out the window.

‘You don’t know when to stop, do you?’ I said and closed it shut in case the sound of her voice carried and John Dagwood and everybody else in the neighborhood could hear her.

Tondalayah was so loud she reminded me of country folk which is one of the things I liked the most about her. Good looking as she was, she was down home. No airs. And the other thing I liked was that she was the most generous person I’d ever met in my life. Way more than Freddie B even, ’cause whereas he would give the shirt off his back to kin, Toni would give what she had to any ol’ body that needed it. And not just her money neither. Like the first time she come up from Bakersfield to spend the night in my apartment and my baby sister Helen was setting on the toilet so drunk that she thought she was setting on a chair. So when Toni went in there to have a pee and couldn’t get Helen to move, she run a lukewarm bath and took the trouble to get my baby sister in it. With my help, of course, but the idea was Toni’s and so was the underwear and navy blue pedal pushers that she loaned Helen to put on when we finally got her out the tub. Her and Helen was both five foot three inches and narrow hipped though Helen done put on a bunch of weight since then. Tondalayah had Helen looking like somebody else by the time she got the blue eye shadow and pale orange lipstick on her. And I couldn’t believe Helen was quiet as a lamb while it was going on till Toni went to put a comb through Helen’s hair.

‘I don’t want you combing on my hair,’ Helen told her, trying to pull away.

‘You better shut the hell up, before I beat you to death with this comb,’ said Toni which made me laugh, and made my baby sister take a swing at Toni who didn’t pay Helen no mind and kept combing ’cause no sooner Helen tried to take that swipe she passed out ’sleep.

But big hearted as Toni was, she took that thing of ‘what’s mines is yours and what’s yours is mines’ to the extreme, meaning that as far as she was concerned, it included men. Not that I was scared she wanted mine, ’cause apart from a couple spinster Sisters at the church wasn’t nobody rushing to get their hands on my husband back in them days. But from the ruckus Tondalayah was making about John Dagwood while she was standing there in my bathroom, I could tell that it wouldn’t of taken no more than a wink of his eye to have her up in his face. And Lord knows I didn’t want no argument with Tammy over Tondalayah fooling with Dagwood ’cause hardly two weeks had passed since Tammy and me’d made up after the mess over Joy’s pictures.

The Tammy-Dagwood courtship started way too fast for me, and Tammy was quick to think that the sun rose out of his behind, ’cause he had some college education and wore a clean shirt and tie every day. But I was itching to tell her that some pimps did too.

Partly what bothered me about Dagwood was that he didn’t have no job and wasn’t out looking for none, though he claimed he was waiting on a position at a insurance company or other. And though I heard Freddie B offer a couple times to take John Dagwood over to the building site where he was working, so Dagwood could pick up some cash for working as casual labor, the guy had the nerve to say flat out that he wasn’t interested.

‘Here is a list of don’t dos,’ little Joy told me she overheard him telling her mother. ‘Don’t porter, don’t garbage collect, don’t work in a hotel, and don’t get your hands dirty.’ And Joy showed me how Tammy doubled up laughing when he said it.

Dagwood … that was what Tammy’d called him for short instead of John. She said it sounded cute ’cause it was like Blondie’s husband in the Sunday funny papers. Dagwood always carried him a dark brown pigskin briefcase, but I told Freddie B that I didn’t believe that nothing was in it but a bottle of VAT 69 whiskey. That’s all he would drink which seemed way too select for a man with no job, but Tammy said that he’d told her that his grand-daddy’d left him a fourplex in Detroit and he collected enough rent off that to pay for the studio apartment he was in over by the Lake District and keep that foreign sports car of his and have extra left over for living off.

I didn’t take Dagwood to be the sort that would steal or ponce or be hanging out on street corners in the middle of the day, but I figured him to be that sort of drifter that’s easy to come, ’specially between some woman’s legs, and easier to go. But I didn’t never say as much to Tammy, ’cause I could see she was crazy about him from the first time I run up on ’em setting together two evenings after Anndora’d got her hand sewed up. I know it was a Tuesday ’cause it was the night for putting garbage out. I’d peeped my head in the Bangs’ front door ’cause it was left ajar like Tammy said she would leave it ’case I wanted to pop in for a chat after the kids was in bed. But I got a big shock when I stepped quiet into her living room from her entrance hall, careful not to wake the kids, and found her with John Dagwood. He was setting with his stocking feet parked on the coffee table and Tammy was there on his lap smooching him with a couple of her sweater buttons undone so her white brassiere was showing. There was a fifth of whiskey, half finished, tucked between them and the arm of the sofa, and seemed like there wasn’t no place safe for me to rest my eyes.

Tammy’s little two bedroom furnished apartment didn’t have nothing in it but second hand furniture that Mr Houseman had picked up at St Vincent de Paul’s, and there wasn’t much of it, thank goodness, ’Cause with the rooms being medium size and Tammy’s brood of three with their toys and whatnot, wouldn’t of been standing room in there had Mr Houseman put more furniture in the lounge in particular. Apart from the naughahyde sofabed, there was just three hardback chairs and two lamp tables that I thought should of matched the coffee table, but Tammy said she didn’t mind they was different. But me and Freddie B’d slapped a couple fresh coats of cream paint on the walls not but a month ’fore Tammy’d rented it and with the overhead light off and the two wine bottle lamps on either side of the sofa that Tammy’d bought switched on, the living room didn’t look bad. And that evening, with the half dozen red roses stuffed in the cutglass vase Tammy’d borrowed from me soon as she got in from work, the place looked homey, even though she’d taken down the framed pictures of Jesus that I had hanging between the two lounge windows that overlooked the side street. Feeling uncomfortable, I was ready to examine every inch of every wall as I stood there and shifted from foot to foot.

‘Come on Baby Palatine. Sit and let me introduce you to Dagwood,’ Tammy said, patting at the free space on her sofa like it was either the time for me to sit or her to be introducing him.

He didn’t even make the effort to stand up when I reached to shake his hand, so right away I knew what kind of hometraining he had. ’cause any man raised right knew to stand up to greet a woman, ’specially as I was obviously older than him, though I reckoned it couldn’t of been more than ten years.

He flashed me a smile and I tried to smile back and said, ‘How d’you do,’ and got my rusty dusty out of there quick as I could, ’cause no sooner than we’d exchanged hellos, Tammy had the nerve to lay a big kiss on his cheek like I wasn’t still there. If he didn’t know no better, she did, and what with them kids right there in that apartment ’sleep, I thought it was a disgrace that they was carrying on so that anybody could walk in on ’em.

‘I’ll latch the door behind me,’ I said, hinting that they should of done as I walked out. But I don’t reckon that they heard me or knew that the door was open or cared, ’cause Tammy was a goner once Dagwood came on the scene.

It was two weeks after that that Tondalayah come visiting and spotted Dagwood down washing his car, and I’ll give her credit that she didn’t never bat her eyes at Dagwood once I’d made her swear she’d keep to herself and respect that he was Tammy property. When Tondalayah died fifteen years later from liver cancer, it nearly broke my heart, and I’ll give Tammy her due, she cried near as much as me and her girls did. Including Anndora. ’cause Toni did a lot more for them girls than Tammy ever knew about over the years, and it was Tondalayah Hayes they had to thank when time came for them to take to the stage and do things right from knowing what to wear to hip shaking.

I hated that she died with no family to mourn her. But we did the best we could, and I kept a black armband on for a whole month after she passed, I loved that woman so. Near as much as I loved Joy, but different. ’cause Toni was like my sister and Joy was like my child which is exactly why I didn’t want nobody as distant as Tammy’s husband Jesse talking to me about Joy and relating either that she was dead or how it come to pass.

But how I want things to be and how they often is, are two different kettles of fish so there I was still holding onto my telephone with Jesse’s husky voice dripping down the line. Richmond to San Francisco.

‘Tammy told me that you’d be calling, but I must admit when the phone rang I thought it was the Sante Fe police department calling me back, because I had just left a message with a fellow I know that moved to that precinct from Chicago.’

‘Why were you calling him?’ I sure do hate it when my curiosity gets the best of me and I start asking questions when I want to be quiet.

‘Because that’s where Joy fell dead from a massive heart attack on that tennis court, and I figured he might help out with dealing with all the paper work so that we can get her body back to New York without a lot of extra cost. Actually, it wasn’t in Santa Fe she died. It was Taos.’

‘Where’s that supposed to be,’ I said, asking a question I didn’t much need a answer to ’cause the ‘where’ wasn’t half as important as the ‘how’ of Joy dying.

‘In the mountains above Sante Fe, that’s why I got on to the Santa Fe police department.’

‘Now I realize that you didn’t know nothing much about Joy, but I can set you straight on one thing. She had enough energy to bury Hitler’s army, and I find it completely impossible to believe that she died from playing no tennis. She took good care of her body. Ate right … used to drive me half crazy reading them food packages before she’d eat something that wasn’t fresh. Exercised. Jogged most every day since she turned thirty, so it don’t make a blind bit of sense that she’d of dropped dead playing no tennis. I refuse to believe it, and if I had the money I’d be right on the plane to see what done happened for real.’

‘I’ve spoken to the coroner himself, and I didn’ get the impression that anything happened other than what he told me which is that Joy was having a tennis lesson, and in the middle of a serve she fell to the ground, in a way that made the tennis instructor first think she’d had a bad cramp. But when Joy didn’ get up and seemed to have a convulsion, this girl that was teaching her called for an ambulance. But Joy was dead before it got to her. Massive coronary is the verdict, and while I can understand that both you and her mother find it unbelievable, it sounded like the truth to me. Why would the coroner have a reason to lie? Joy was nothing to him.’

Just like my mind had told me from the first I heard Jesse’s voice, he wasn’t the person that should of been telling me none of this, ’cause he didn’t have no special feeling for Joy. I could hear that in his voice. It was Tammy I wanted to be speaking to and I asked him to get her.

‘I told you Baby Palatine that she’s asleep, and with that sedative that I gave her, there’s no way in the world that I could get her to come to the phone now. She couldn’t make any sense if she did anyway,’ Jesse added.

The idea that Joy was laying somewhere dead with nobody with her made me feel sick, and I wanted to talk to Tammy to find out how Rex Hightower figured in it.

‘What the hell is Tammy doing in the bed if her child is dead,’ I asked Jesse. That second I got over feeling sad ’cause the thought of Tammy laying in the bed while Joy was laying in a morgue made me so mad.

All the time I knew her, Tammy’d been so concerned with how she was feeling that she didn’t never let them girls of hers come first. Not even Anndora for all the fuss Tammy made about her. Tammy’s girls didn’t get raised. They just drug themselves up once she got to feeling sorry for herself after Dagwood left in ’56 … maybe it was ’57 … I ain’t never been good on dates, but Freddie B probably can remember exactly, ’cause it was the same year the Yankees lost the world series and he’d bet on ’em. Whatever year it was, I did what any Christian would and didn’t let them girls run wild. As Freddie B and me couldn’t have none of our own, it suited me. But like my baby sister said at the time, that wasn’t the point. True enough, it’s the mama who’s s’posed to take time to mother, but if’n it hadn’t of been for me and Freddie B ain’t no telling what would have happened to them. ’cause from the time Dagwood walked out, Tammy stopped caring about everything, and her kids was the first on the list to go.

But it was real obvious me and this new husband of Tammy’s didn’t see eye to eye about what her duties was supposed to be, ’cause Jesse said, in answer to my question about why she was in bed, ‘There’s not a lot Tammy can do from here, Baby Palatine. Her sitting when she’s exhausted won’t bring Joy back and since Santa Fe will be shut down until nine a.m., she can’t even go ahead organizing the funeral.’

Tammy was probably the last person Joy would have wanted doing that, but how could I tell him as much.

‘You got Brenda’s number?’ I asked him, ’cause I would of rather talked to her than him, since he sounded like Tammy probably had him hoodwinked into thinking that she was suffering. She was good at that. Even I fell for it for a time after Dagwood left and Tammy took to her bed surrounded by any kind of bottle that was made – from hot water bottle to pill bottle to whiskey bottle, though I’d be lying if I said she ever became a alcoholic. But she might as well have been since she stayed in the bed for months with me waiting her hand and foot till I got fed up and stopped bringing her in food, although I kept up fixing meals for them children. Though I have to say Brenda and Joy did a lot for theyselves. And for Anndora.

‘Brenda’s phone’s been disconnected,’ Jesse said.

‘Again!’

‘Yes again,’ he sighed. ‘Her girlfriend Latrice moved to Phoenix for six months for some job training scheme with the Federal Government and Brenda’d run up a big seven hundred dollar phone bill calling her every night.’

‘Seven hundred dollars!’

Joy had told me that Brenda had taken up with a new woman but I was only half listening to her when she said it, because Brenda’d been through so many women it didn’t seem worth taking in the details about her latest at the time, since I’d had enough about Brenda and women from the first she let it out. In fact, if Brenda hadn’t started that ruckus in the papers about being a lesbian, things might have worked out real different for Bang Bang Bang. Although I reckon it was Anndora’s fault as much as Brenda’s that the group split up ’cause Anndora had a tantrum and stopped speaking to Brenda when the story about Brenda hit all the papers. ’cause they had a number one record and wasn’t nobody admitting back then that they was gay, it caused a big stir. Not like these days. Everybody in San Francisco is gay seems to me when they turn out in the thousands for them gay parades. I didn’t blame Brenda, when the fuss started, to take it upon herself to quit. Not that I hold with her laying up with women, ’cause as far as I’m concerned that’s uncalled for. But since she was the one doing all the singing and getting none of the glory, ’cause Joy and Anndora had all of it, she said she didn’t have to put up with Anndora giving her attitude.

Anndora being the youngest was used to having her way. Children born pretty as Anndora got people smiling up in their faces before they’ve earned it, so they start out thinking that life’s a pushover.

Which brought to mind that as much as I didn’t have time for Anndora, I would of rather been talking to her even than to Jesse.

‘How ’bout giving me Anndora’s number,’ I asked him.

‘Hang on, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I could put my hands on it. Tammy’s probably got it in her book somewhere, though I know Anndora’s like quicksilver the way she rushes from place to place. On planes and off planes more than Joy she was.’

I didn’t like to hear him mention Joy in the past tense. It was like he’d buried her already.

Last I’d heard, Anndora had been living in Milan, Italy, and it wouldn’t of surprised me to hear she’d shacked up with some gangster, ’cause all that ever interested her was brassy clothes and flashy cars and she didn’t care how she came by them. Joy said I didn’t give Anndora a chance, but then Joy was the main one who ruined her. When they was little, Joy used to dress Anndora up like a china doll and pull her up and down the streets in a red wagon so that folks would stop ’em to ooh and aaah. Joy wasn’t but four years older than Anndora, but once Tammy went off the rails over John Dagwood, Joy played mother. She had sense but she was too soft, so little as Anndora was, she walked all over Joy and that didn’t never change that I could see even after they got big. Kindness is one thing but you ain’t ’sposed to let people treat you like a door mat.

Helen used to say that she thought part of Anndora’s problem was that she looked too white and thought she was too good to be with coloreds, and it’s true enough that she didn’t never have no colored friends at school, not that there was many of them there to choose from, ’cause Tammy’d got her into a school out of our district and whereas Anndora should have been going to Grange Elementary two blocks away which was almost all colored, Tammy’d put her into a school over by the library, six blocks from the house where wasn’t nothing but white folks and Mexicans living then, though I hear it’s all colored now.

But when I’d go to collect Anndora out the school yard and she’d be standing with them little Mexican children that she was always making friends with, I couldn’t hardly see no difference between her and them.

I hated to think it, but Joy seemed proud that her baby sister didn’t have no color to her. Even Anndora’s fingernails and toenails was thin and brittle like white folks’.

When Bang Bang Bang was touring in Europe, all heads turned when that girl sashayed down the street with them green speckly eyes of hers and that dark reddy brown hair hanging down her back in big waves and ringlets. Them folks in Europe couldn’t believe it was hers and was always asking if she had on a wig and what country she come from. Anndora lapped it up, but over the years, she got to look way older than Joy. I expected as much, and was always telling Joy to be thankful she was brown, ’cause that light skin wrinkles up quick.

Jesse had come back to the phone. ‘Baby Palatine, either I’m not concentrating well enough or it’s actually not in Tammy’s book, because I can’t see Anndora’s number or her address. But I know she’s living in Milan, if you want me to see if I can get her telephone number from the international operator.’

‘Ain’t no need going to all that trouble,’ I told Jesse. ‘When d’you think I should phone back to speak to Tammy?’

‘Give it a few hours.’

‘A few! I’m setting in San Francisco at my wits’ end and I got to wait around a few hours to find out what’s going on?’

‘I understand how you feel, but we’re all helpless. Life takes an unexpected turn like this, and as much as we want and expect the world to stop, everything goes on. That’s something I learned working in the police department. Life goes on.’

I didn’t want no policeman’s lecture, I wanted to know what had happened and why, and I wasn’t gonna get no satisfaction out of Jesse, but I figured Rex might have some answers.

Jesse hadn’t finished talking. ‘Baby Palatine, we plan to drive to New York as soon as Tammy wakes up, because she thinks that’s the best place for us to all be. She asked me to ask you to meet us there if you phoned, and I assume you have Joy’s address.’

With Freddie B out of work two months I didn’t hardly have the money to get across the Bay Bridge on a bus, so getting to New York was gonna take some doing, but I didn’t let on to Jesse.

‘Okay, I’ll meet y’all there. I don’t know nothing about the planes and that, but I’ll get myself there.’

‘I’m sure that’s where the funeral’s going to be held,’ Jesse said, and as I was worried that he would start in talking about Joy again I hurried to get rid of him.

‘You’ve been a big help, Jesse. Thanks. And I’m looking forward to meeting you proper. Bye, now,’ I said and hung up.

Petty things can set me off, but when I got to deal with the big ones, I even surprise myself.

Dry-eyed, I opened my kitchen cupboard and took out that box of Sugar Pops and kissed it before I slung it in the trash.

I ain’t claiming I was thinking completely straight though, ’cause if I had of been, the thing I always say when anybody passes would have come to my mind which is that ‘the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away’, ’cause don’t nobody know as good as him when your train’s come to the end of the line.

But my pea brain didn’t settle on no thoughts as clear as that, ’cause it do often let me down when I’m trying to think sensible, and I needed a clear head to figure out how I was gonna get to New York when the money jar I kept for rainy days was lower than I’d seen it for donkeys’ years partly ’cause Freddie’d been putting his big hand in it to dole out money every Sunday for the organ fund at the church.

That’s the onliest bad habit Freddie B’s got which is trying to act like we can do more than he can afford to when it come to the church collection. I tell him, ‘There ain’t no shame to you being broke and out of work, and all you got to say to Deacon Penrose when they ask for our organ donation is, ‘‘I ain’t got it. Pure and simple,’’ ’cause he probably been out of work hisself and knows that if you could be out earning a wage packet, you would be.’

But Freddie B thinks it ain’t Christian not to give when we get asked.

‘Shoot,’ I tell him. ‘What kind of a mean so-and-so do you think God is, if he held it against a man that worked hard all his life for being a bit short on the church collection from time to time. Anyway, the organ ain’t for God, it’s for Deacon Penrose who claims that organ music is so important for lifting up our souls. A guitar and a tambourine would do just as well, and he knows it good as I do! Like when Brenda and Joy was singing up at First Tabernacle and all we had was that jangly ol’ upright that Sister Fletcher’s sister bequeathed to the church. Brenda still sang good and won them gospel contests, and wasn’t nobody jumping up to the pulpit in the middle of her solos to say, ‘‘She ain’t got the spirit ’cause we ain’t got no organ’’.’

But I can talk to Freddie B sometimes till I’m blue in the face and he don’t listen. So his hands been in my money jar so many Sundays that there was nothing left in it but sixty dollars. Which ain’t nothing, so I tried to think on who I could call and borrow some money off and not leave them short, and the onliest person who came to mind was Sebastian Egerton.

Much as I harped on that Joy would of been better off to stay with her own kind and leave them white boys alone, I would have been more than happy if she’d of settled with Sebastian, ’cause if a man loves a woman crazy, like Sebastian did Joy, that’s who you put down roots with. Don’t matter what color he is. Like me turning up with Freddie B. I didn’t take a mind to marry him ’cause he was either smart nor cute nor light with his lanky self. I married him ’cause he was plum loco about me and with him heading out for the war, I figured I wasn’t gonna find nobody living or dead that loved me as much as Freddie B did. And thank God I did the right thing. Which is more than I can say for how wrong Joy did by shining Sebastian on. She said he was too tall and thin to be sexy.

‘What’s that got to do with anything,’ I tried to say, but even my countrified eyes could see Sebastian didn’t have nothing but a young boy’s body though he must of been twenty-two at least. And though that was six years younger than what Joy was, I reminded her that Freddie’s younger than me by two years but that didn’t stop us from getting hitched up.

‘Here comes Mister Too-Lean-to-be-Seen,’ Brenda used to holler at Sebastian when he climbed on stage with them other three musicians that played back-up for Bang Bang Bang. And Sebastian would just laugh with that shy way he had and pop a toffee in his mouth and walk on over to his keyboards. I hadn’t never seen nobody but my brother Caesar eat as much candy as Sebastian and have a full set of healthy looking teeth and still be the size of a rail. It gave the impression that he was way taller than six foot one inch and what with him being long limbed as well, in body he reminded me of Freddie B when we was young. But that’s where the similarities stopped.

Sebastian was always pushing that flop of blond heavy hair of his back, ’cause it was always falling in his eyes, and from where his hair separated into a natural parting, I could see it was his natural color though Joy was always teasing him that he got that perfect straw color out a peroxide bottle. There’s no denying Joy sure knew her blonds, and when we was all working down in LA for the first promotion tour, Joy said she preferred them tan, blond surfer boys to Sebastian ’cause they had some meat on their bones. It was a shame that she said that in front of Sebastian, ’cause even though he would laugh like he saw the joke in it, I know it probably hurt his feelings with him being so gone on Joy.

Brenda said there was two things that put Joy off him. The first being that he was too crazy about her and the second being that he didn’t have nothing but the wages he made off playing for the Bang sisters. But with that said, I could see he didn’t love nothing living better than a black Bechstein he got to play when we was recording in the LA studio and a silver and brass trumpet he carted everywhere like it was his only child. He’d named it Sunshine and kept the silver and brass on it gleaming better than I could.

Seeing him around them Southern California boys, Joy said you could tell right off that Sebastian was foreign. And it was true. He didn’t even have to open his mouth for you to hear that English accent of his that I liked so much. Though Freddie B thought he talked like a fairy. But like I said to Freddie B to put him straight, them English soldiers that Freddie said he met when he was fighting overseas during the war must of sounded just like Sebastian, and Freddie had told me when he come home how brave he thought they was for white boys. They wasn’t no sissies. And neither was David Niven that Sebastian sounded just like to me.

Sebastian had him a college education. In fact he explained to me one night when he was setting in my room waiting on Joy that he had him two college educations, ’cause he’d been picked out special from all the people at his music college to get him a degree from a university at the same time he was taking a special musician’s course. I didn’t get all the gist of it, and I had a hard time trying to picture him being at two different schools at the same time, but I believed him, ’cause even though he was a atheist, I could tell he wasn’t no liar, and in spite of him throwing cuss words around all the time, even when he wasn’t mad, you could kinda tell he was real smart and from good people. He would just cuss for the sake of it, and like other folks would say good morning, with Sebastian it was always ‘F’ this and ‘F’ that.

It put me off him at first, but Joy told me not to take no notice ’cause he didn’t mean nothing by it, no more than them other musicians did. But I didn’t never cotton to it. But seeing as he wasn’t no child of mine, wasn’t nothing much I could say to him. He was nice enough otherwise and had a gentle way about him that I liked.

Seeing Joy standing with him reminded me of the first time I saw her walk out swinging Bernie Finkelstein’s arm when we was living on Grange. Her and Sebastian looked made for each other, and the few times I saw her let him put his arms ’round her, I could see that he didn’t want nobody else in the world but Joy. He’d kiss her on the cheek with his lips just about grazing that rouge she wore to go with her fire engine red lipstick that was all the rage then. His lips would just barely touch her like he thought she was too delicate to kiss harder which used to make me want to laugh, ’cause delicate was one of them things Joy wasn’t. And sometimes when we’d be waiting, the whole crowd of us, the girls, the musicians and the roadies, waiting to check into some hotel where we was staying on tour, I’d see Sebastian stand just close enough to Joy for their shoulders to touch, but he wasn’t never bold enough to put his arms ’round her unless she put her arms ’round him first which she didn’t do unless she wanted something off him.

Joy charmed Sebastian into loving her when he first started working with the girls. But I think it was ’cause she was antsy, with Rex off touring in Europe. She said she was bored and needed a diversion.

‘A diversion! Sebastian Egerton ain’t no road re-route. He’s a man, Joy, and you can’t get him all excited about you if you don’t mean to do right by him, ’cause that stuff comes back on you.’ And sure enough she got the same treatment from Rex Hightower.

I know Joy had Sebastian in her room all night for two nights once. But I didn’t hear no sounds like they was having no sex. ’Cause with me always in the room by hers and thin as some of them walls was in them hotels and motels we stayed in while we was traveling, I could hear if she had somebody in there and was actually doing something with all that noise she liked to make. Whooping it up like a mule on the run or a hog getting murdered. A few times I got up out the bed and took a shoe to the wall. Not that I was bothered to hear her having sex since she was grown and what she did with her body was her business, but she was s’posed to be a star. Folks got to recognizing the girls in them hotels and I didn’t think all that noise was dignified and didn’t want nobody putting it out that Joy was fast, ’cause Anndora had that reputation and deserved it.

It was Anndora said Sebastian’s dick was too small for him to be any use to her or Joy and I wanted so bad to slap her face not only for talking dirty, but for knowing in the first place what he had between his legs. I reckon she only got in the bed with him to spite Joy, and whereas Joy said after she caught ’em together that it didn’t bother her one way or t’other, I felt Sebastian had a chance with Joy before that. Anndora didn’t care where she put herself and I never thought I’d see the day when I met a woman that I felt took advantage of men when it come to sex. But there came Anndora to prove that it was possible.

I was there the night she dragged Sebastian to her room. They’d both been sitting with me in the bar of a hotel we was staying at one night on East Pleasant Street in Baltimore, and Anndora handed him one of her sleeping pills to pop in his mouth, ’cause he said he couldn’t rest after them shows. Next thing I knew the boy was slurring his words and spilling his Wild Turkey that he always ordered wherever he went but never drank. Them pills didn’t affect Anndora like they did other folks. They was supposed to be sleeping pills, but no sooner than she had one, she was wanting to lay on her back and throw her legs up in the air. It was Brenda that saw Anndora lead Sebastian off and told Joy when she come to set with us that Anndora’d took Sebastian up to her room. I know she just told it to stir things up. And that’s the exact results she got, ’cause Joy went and got a key from the porter claiming she was Anndora and walked straight into Anndora’s room at that ritzy hotel and caught Sebastian sleeping there in her sister’s bed. Joy said she just walked in on ’em for a joke, but I knew that in her heart she was hurt, ’cause much as she said Sebastian didn’t mean nothing to her, he had that thing about him that made you trust him and I don’t think she ever thought that he’d be one to do no dirt like mess with her sister when he claimed he had eyes for Joy.

Sebastian tried to explain what happened and him and Joy finally had a little set to about it, ’cause I heard him say to her the next night ’fore they went out on stage, ‘You’re hot and cold. Interested but not interested. I don’t know what the fuck you want and I don’t think that you do.’ She turned her back on him and he whirled her ’round to face him. ‘If I wait for you after the gigs to make sure you don’t get hassled,’ Sebastian said, ‘you’re annoyed because you say I’m hovering around too much, and now just because I passed out in your sister’s room, you’re not speaking and moody and want to give me a hard time.’ But Joy didn’t never like to be disturbed before she went out on that stage, and always wanted to go on there smiling like the world was hers, so I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t hear her answer. She was checking herself in the mirror ’cause that’s what she did last thing and she acted like he wasn’t talking to her.

Sebastian and the other musicians always went on before the girls and did a couple songs to warm theyselves up and gee the audience up, and then Sebastian would yell to them other three players ‘Jump for Joy’, which was the title of the song he wrote that they played to bring the girls out. I used to stand by and watch ’cause didn’t matter how hot it was, I enjoyed seeing them fans get excited when Bang Bang Bang hit the stage. Sebastian always had a Camel cigarette lit, perched on the edge of the electric keyboards he played, and I never knew why he bothered to light it. Maybe just to give him some honky tonk atmosphere, so he could see the smoke drift up in front of his eyes ’cause with all that dancing his fingers did ’cross them keys, there wasn’t no time for him to smoke, he had that piano burning up so. When his fingers hopped around them keys like they was hot to the touch, Brenda used to laugh and come off and say, ‘You had that piano smoking again white boy.’

It always surprised me that Sebastian’s hands wasn’t nothing special to look at. Long as the rest of his body was, his hands was smallish for a man’s, and fingers maybe even on the short side.

I agreed with Joy that I didn’t know what all them little white girls was screaming at everytime Sebastian stepped out on the stage, ’cause wasn’t nothing manly about him but his manners and them fans wasn’t to know that. He had a girl’s face and looked too soft. Except for that square chin of his that had a dimple in it, wasn’t much sign of man, and from off stage there was no way they could of seen them long black eyelashes he had that I always teased him I wanted to borrow when he finished with them.

There was two numbers that Sebastian got to play trumpet on and when he stepped from behind his keyboards and synthesizer that was always lined up in a ‘L’ shape at the far side of the band left of the drummer to walk over and take over and take centre stage with Brenda, them girls used to get theyselves in a frenzy like somebody sanctified that had caught the spirit, screaming ‘Seb! Seb! Seb-astian’ like they was calling God. I used to get to giggling till I couldn’t catch my breath at them simpleton girls acting so crazy.

Brenda said it near broke her heart to hear a white boy playing trumpet as good as Sebastian could and especially with him being so English at that. She used to say she had a good ear for trumpet solos and I believed it, since she had stayed partial to the trumpet from that time I took her and Joy to First Tabernacle and she heard Sister Hall’s brother Tommy playing. Anyway, she used to grab the mike in the middle of that second trumpet solo Sebastian played and yell, ‘The white boy’s got soul,’ and Brenda could really howl it like some preacher and get the crowd to chanting it too. And Sebastian, shy as he was, used to always flush pink and slip back behind his piano like he didn’t have them wild young white girls screaming to yank his drawers off him.

Then as part of their stage routine, he would give a loud count into the next number. ‘TWO – THREE – FOUR – JOY, JOY, JOY!’ he’d call across to them other musicians and Brenda would start in on a real pretty slow tune, sounded like a spiritual that Sebastian said he wrote special for Brenda, but any fool knew he wrote it for Miss Joy as well. And I thought he liked to play that one after his trumpet solo to show that however many of them girls in the audience that was hollering out his name, Joy was all that was on his mind. And I believe she was all that was in his heart. Yes indeedy. Sebastian Egerton was in love with the whole of Miss Joyce Clarissa Bang. Every fart. Every bruise. Every hangnail. Every period pain. Every dark mood. And I noticed she had more than a few when we was on the road … he loved her for all of what she was. Not like them boys she met down them places where the girls played who was only interested in the glamorous, smiling Joy; the one they figured had some money in the bank, which wasn’t nothing but a illusion ’cause that music business is a pot of gold with a hole in the bottom of it for most of them people struggling to get by in it. Though Sebastian, unbeknownst to Joy at the time, was one of them with better luck.

Joy said the love flowed so from Sebastian Egerton’s eyes when he looked at her, it was like staring into full beam headlights and she had to look away to keep him from blinding her. And at them rehearsals, I’d catch him sometimes staring so hard at Joy it’s wonder he didn’t bore a hole into her while her and Anndora’d be practicing their back-up steps.

One time when we was setting in a hotel bar by ourselves and there was a piano, he played me a instrumental he wrote for Joy called ‘Without You’. Way before it ever got recorded. Then later he showed me all the music that he wrote out for it. I couldn’t believe it.

‘You did this by yourself,’ I asked him. It looked as much Greek to me as them pages of Hebrew I see written in the front of Freddie B’s big Bible.

‘Yeah,’ said Sebastian holding them thirty or so music sheets like they wasn’t nothing. But every line was filled in so neat with music notes and dots and dashes and I don’t know what all. ‘It’s a concerto,’ he told me, and showed how all the parts was for different instruments, violins, violas, flutes and a harp, that he believed he would one day get to play it.

‘Child, you a genius! Did you let Joy see this here that you done?’ I asked ’cause I thought that seeing how smart he was might warm her to him a bit more.

‘No. It’s no big deal. I learned to do it at college. It passes the time,’ he said and sifted them all back in the big brown envelope they come out of. He wasn’t one to brag about nothing and the onliest time I heard him brass his buttons was the night that he come to sit in my room and told me about his two younger sisters that he raved about and who was still living in some place in England near Birmingham. He didn’t talk all that much about his folks and I didn’t get the feeling he had a lot of time for his daddy who was a retired physics professor.

I loved that boy like a son by the time we’d been out on the road a few months, ’cause I noticed he always made sure I wasn’t stuck nowhere by myself and got me anything that was handed out free. Course I realized part of it was to do with him knowing that I was closer to Joy than even Brenda and Anndora, and he probably figured that getting to me was a way of getting through to Joy. But for all that, the boy was special and I even respected him for leaving us when he did ’cause it showed he had heart.

It happened after our big show at the Buzz Club in Chicago. The next day we was driving fast out of south-side headed for a club we was playing in Rockford and our limo hit a dog. Joy told the driver to keep going which wasn’t like her ’cause she liked animals. But she liked being on time more. Then Sebastian chimed in and said he rather be late for a gig than to hit a dog and leave it in the middle of the road.

That poor limo driver that come with the car we was renting for that day didn’t know what to do when Sebastian pulled back the window separating driver from passengers and told the man to stop after Joy’d just told the man to keep going.

Only Sebastian, me and Joy was in the car, ’cause the rest of ’em had gone in another car with Danny Lagerfield who was managing the girls.

‘Stop the fucking car,’ Sebastian said like he wasn’t in no temper but was about to be. ‘I’ll get out and take care of the fucking dog and you can stuff your fucking gigs, Joy. See how well they’ll play tonight without me, you cold-hearted bitch, because I couldn’t play anyway if I had to think about that poor fucking animal we left in the road.’

Joy was used to having her way with him, and I was kinda glad to see him putting his foot down, ’cause I thought he was right and it was the Christian thing to do, although his cussing and name calling wasn’t necessary.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Joy said in that sweet way that had him wrapped ’round her finger. ‘We haven’t got time to stop, Seb, and as hard as we hit it, he’s probably dead anyway.’ Sometimes she could be as good as Tammy at making sense out of nonsense.

Sebastian wasn’t listening to her. ‘Stop the car,’ he said again to the driver. ‘I’m out of here!’

I didn’t think he had it in him, ’cause he was always so easy going which I forget and mistake for weakness.

Wasn’t no way in the world that we could of got through a show that night without that boy, and Joy knew it good as he did, ’cause he was band leader and apart from that, he had made a name for hisself working for Bang Bang Bang, and a lot of them girls come just to see him.

Joy didn’t never let herself get mad if she didn’t figure being mad was the best way ’round a situation. Otherwise, I guess she would of told him where to go then and there, ’cause I saw the thought flash through her eyes. Her lips was pursed tight like they always was when she was thinking hard, though she let common sense guide her, and I let out a sigh of relief.

‘Please turn around and pick up the dog,’ she said to the driver like the idea’d been hers all along. But I knew she was already steaming and scheming which is how she did if she thought somebody got the best of her. She was setting quiet in that limo planning vengeance, and I think she knew I knew it. ’Cause I knew her good.

I used to always try and tell her when she was growing up not to forget that vengeance was the Lord’s. It was in Joy’s right ear and out her left.

That poor cocker spaniel was still laying out there in a pool of his blood and whining though it didn’t look like there was much left of it to be conscious, and Sebastian lifted it careful up in his arms like it was his sick child and he couldn’t see the blood. Then when he climbed back in the car with it, he insisted on sitting up in the front with the driver so we didn’t have to look at it, and made the driver circle slow round that slum till we found a kid on a bike who knew where there was a vet. Sebastian paid the boy five dollars to have the kid lead us there on his two wheeler, but all that boy was interested in was getting Joy’s autograph and since we had a few records of ‘Chocolate Chip’ we gave the child that as well as the money.

Though Joy got to smiling and acting friendly, she was still in a heat, I could tell from her pursed lips, which meant that even if it didn’t look like nothing was eating her, she was actually setting there figuring out a way to get back at Sebastian. It was pitiful to see her wanting vengeance, ’cause her mind would get set on that one track and she couldn’t hardly think of nothing else. That was her only big weakness and I couldn’t train her out of it from when she was a kid.

Even though Sebastian was in the right that afternoon, I could tell that Joy wasn’t gonna let him get away with backing her in a corner and wasn’t but a week later that she convinced Danny, the girls’ manager, that Sebastian had too much to say in things and made sure she’d found a replacement before Danny fired Sebastian.

I was sure sorry to see Sebastian have to leave and he took the guitar player, little Jimmy Fraser, with him which Brenda said was to be expected as him and Jimmy was best friends and it was Sebastian that had introduced little Jimmy to Bang Bang Bang in the first place. I didn’t let Joy know that I got ’em both a going away present and when I give Sebastian the ashtray I got for him, I told him that I knew good as he did why he was really getting fired. He squeezed my hand, but didn’t say nothing.

No sooner they was gone, they put their own group together … I think it was called Margarine. No. Maybe it was called Butter, I can’t remember but it was something that you could spread on bread, and whatever the name of it was they had a great big ol’ hit with the song Sebastian wrote called ‘Too Old to Boogey, Too Young to Die’. Couldn’t hear nothing else on the radio. They put it out after Bang Bang Bang broke up over that mess about Brenda being a lesbian. And since Joy knew I liked Sebastian a whole lot she made me a tape with that song on it and the one that was on the flip side which had that instrumental on it Sebastian’d wrote for Joy, ‘Without You’. It was beautiful, and I didn’t dare tell her that I knew he’d wrote it for her. ’Cause whereas on the one hand she was thoughtful enough to tape it for me, Sebastian didn’t never get mentioned again after he got fired. She’d erased him which wasn’t easy to do seeing how big that band of his and Jimmy’s got. Hit after hit they had and got way bigger than Rex Hightower ever thought to be.

Sebastian rang me a few years later when he was getting ready to go on a solo tour of Japan and asked if I would tag along with him to look after the back-up singers that he was taking. I was wanting to ’cause he was offering me a lot of money and Freddie B was out of work, but I felt that Joy would have been upset with me if I had of gone, ’cause she was used to me siding with her over everything. Including her firing Sebastian Egerton like she did. When he asked on the phone about Joy, I reckoned he wasn’t over her ’cause he was so salty when I said that she was on the road with Rex. Sebastian said, ‘What’s she still doing wasting her time with that fucking no-talent coke head?’ I took coke to mean Coca-Cola, naive as I was, and thought that Sebastian was smarting over Joy choosing Rex over him. But I should of listened. Sebastian give me different numbers I could ring if I wanted to change my mind and go out touring with him, and though I scratched them down in pencil in the back of Freddie’s Bible, I didn’t reckon I’d ever put them to use.

But Sebastian Egerton was the onliest person I knew of in the record business that would of cared as much as I did about how Joy got buried and I toyed with the idea of calling him to see if he could help me get to New York. Out of all them rich folk that Joy claimed she knew including ‘Lord this’ and the ‘Earl of that’ she met over in England, if any of them would mourn her passing, it was him.

And Freddie B of course who was still laying sleep and none the wiser …

I peered out my kitchen window again down to the San Francisco streets and wondered why everything hadn’t stopped, but like Jesse had said, life goes on. And though I wanted to stick my head out that window and let out a long roar over San Francisco to raise the spirits of my mama, and brother Caesar, and Tondalayah Hayes that I had lost to death, and beg them to stand together and wait on my Joy who was coming, I didn’t. I just cried.

Fifteen minutes later I had wiped so many tears away on the hem of my nightgown that it was near to sopping wet. I decided to get dressed and to pull myself together for my husband’s sake.

I thought I should put on something cheerful, so I would look bright even if I didn’t feel it. ’Least it would make me feel better when I caught myself passing the hall mirror. So I went and stared into the hall cupboard where I kept my good clothes and wondered what was gonna be right for me to wear to tell Freddie B that Joy was dead.

Pink ain’t what I call my color, but Joy once surprised me when she said I looked my best in baby pink ’cause dark as I was, it lifted my complexion, and Freddie B sat there with a lump of snuff in his mouth agreeing with her. At the time, I didn’t know they was conniving me and that what was really about to happen was that Joy was planning to buy me a pink silk trouser suit as a Easter present. It was made in France, ’cause she didn’t bother with nothing made in America if she could help it, and Freddie B loved that it had a floppy long buttoned down shirt that hung over the baggy pants to hide my backside.

I pulled that suit off the hanger and took it in the bathroom to put it on, trying all the while not to let myself get to crying again ’cause it seemed like I’d lost control of them tears and they was starting and stopping when they felt like it. Like I myself didn’t have a bit of say in it.

While I washed and slipped on my things, I was practicing the best way to tell Freddie B about Joy but however I put them words together they didn’t come out no easier and said the same pitiful thing. Our God-sent child was dead.

First off I thought I’d say, ‘Listen, Freddie B, why don’t you have you something to eat ’fore I tell you something bad that’s happened.’ But he didn’t like me beating about the bush over nothing important so I thought he’d better have the direct approach. ‘Listen Freddie,’ I said out loud, ‘ain’t no use me mincing words, ’cause Joy is dead and I might as well let you have it straight.’ But that seemed too mean, so I was thinking I’d say something soothing with it, so I said, ‘I can stay home and keep you company watching the wrestling on Sunday night like you like, ’cause Joy’s dead and I won’t be going to Reno.’ But that didn’t sound like I was telling him no more than that he had pork chops for dinner. Then I figured that the nicest way to tell him was by taking him a mug of coffee and setting at the end of the bed to say ‘I got sorriful news Freddie B from Tammy that you ain’t gonna want to hear no more than I did …’

But all the while I was practicing and dressing, them tears flowed so I couldn’t believe I had fluid in my body for no more, and I was wiping them and blowing my nose when Freddie B popped his head ’round the bathroom door to say, ‘Wife, I done told you about talking to yourself all the time. Next thing you know them men in white’ll be knocking on our door to take you out of here.’ He’s always in a good mood from the minute he gets up and it took me off my guard him sounding so perky, which got me to boo-hooing out loud.

‘Hey now, girl, I was only joshing. You keep talking to yourself if’n it makes you happy. Ain’t nobody gonna come in pass me and drag you out of here,’ he said trying to be nice.

He ain’t one for cuddling but he come and stood by me and took my left hand in his ’fore he slipped off my spectacles and pulled some toilet paper off the roll to wipe my face.

For all that practicing I did, wouldn’t nothing come out my mouth but a croaky whisper.

‘Our God-sent child is on her way to heaven, Freddie B.’

‘Well, if that was what was meant to be, Palatine, it’s wrong for you to be crying like you mad about what God done willed. Joy’ll be all right. Least off she ain’t gonna get no rheumatism like I’m getting and no lumbago like you got. So calm yourself and let’s give thanks that you had her for as long as you did.’

‘You mean ‘‘we’’ ’cause she was yours too,’ I said reminding him.

‘Joy was everybody’s,’ he said steering me by my shoulders into the kitchen. ‘Let me heat you some coffee.’

Freddie B believes you got to live and let live, die and let die, and whereas I was worried that he would take Joy’s dying as hard as I did, seemed like as if he was expecting it. Which is just what he was like when his mama passed though it was unexpected ’fore we moved West from Louisiana. At the time, I was scared I had married somebody who didn’t have no natural feelings, ’cause he didn’t show none, but he told me standing by him at his mother’s grave, ‘’Cause you don’t see no tears on the outside, don’t mean I ain’t got none flowing in.’

He ain’t easy to figure, as easy as he is by nature.

‘Who’s taking charge of Joy’s funeral?’ Freddie B asked after I watched him fix two mugs of coffee and head back to the kitchen doorway where he stopped and beckoned me to follow with a jerk of his head. I trailed behind him to the living room like his old mutt.

‘Tammy’s s’posed to be,’ I said as I set myself down opposite him at the table, ‘but from the sounds of it, she done gone to bed … again!’

I added that again ’cause when Dagwood left her she took to her bed with nothing but a bitty temperature which she used as her excuse not to get up afterwards for months. And while I didn’t expect for a minute that losing Joy would affect her near as much as losing Dagwood, I didn’t know what to expect from her and was worried about what I could do with no money, if Tammy took a mind to play at being sick ’fore she got Joy buried proper.

Freddie B asked, ‘You spoke to Tammy?’

Of course the half truth was yes. But all a’ sudden I didn’t want to tell my husband nothing but the whole truth about that and a lot of other things that I’d kept from him for years ’cause of Joy. They had piled up. And setting there at the table with him, I felt guilty about all that I had kept back. So I tried to answer his question honest as I could though I knew he wasn’t gonna be happy about what I said.

‘When Tammy phoned I didn’t want to believe something bad could’a happened to Joy. But then, by the time I was up to hearing about it and phoned her back, Jesse picked up and I didn’t want to get the story off him.’

Freddie B looked over at me blank. Like I knew he would. Not able to understand why I didn’t cotton to Jesse telling me about how Joy died. And he give me a man’s answer. Like I knew he would. ‘Jesse ain’t no stranger. He married to Tammy and treats her fair too from what we done heard off Joy.’

‘Heard from Joy, Freddie B.’ I try to correct him, but it don’t do no good, and sometimes I just have to throw my hands up in the air and give up on him.

‘Heard off her or heard from her … it amounts to the same thing which is that the man is married to Joy’s mama and he got just as much right to talk about Joy dead or alive as anybody, I reckon. I betcha it’ll be him that’ll have to pay for the funeral come to that, ’cause Tammy ain’t worked in years and don’t have no money of her own.’

‘If she’s working or not, or if Jesse is or not ain’t the point. Rex Hightower ought to be paying for Joy’s funeral. And giving her eulogy as well. That’s exactly why I wanted to have words with Tammy and tell her to make sure that the man does something for Joy now, ’cause she been doing for him all these years. Running after him. And waiting for him to marry her when she could of done something with her life.’

‘He wasn’t holding no gun at her head, now wife.’

‘But Freddie B it ain’t fair that that Rex with his ooh-boo-coos of money don’t do nothing for Joy.’

‘Well he ain’t never been doing for her that I can see, so it’s late to expect him to start up now. Zebras don’t change stripes. A man born stingy’ll die stingy.’

Sometimes there wasn’t no getting sense out of Freddie B. He saw things like a man, so I decided not to say nothing else to him ’fore he made me mad about Rex. My nerves was too worn out to be disagreeing with anybody about anything. And what really had me on edge was the worry as to how I was gonna get the fare to New York which is why I was ready to fuss with my husband. He’s always nearest at hand for me to pick on when I get niggly, poor man.

So I tried to think of something nice to say, something that would shift some of the money worry off of him, ’cause no doubt it come to Freddie’s mind quick as it come to mine that a funeral meant money. ‘’Member that English kid I told you about? Sebastian Egerton? I’m thinking on calling him to see if he’ll lend us the fare to get us to New York where Tammy told Jesse she wants us all to meet up at Joy’s.’

Freddie B is funny about borrowing and though he’s quick to lend, I ain’t never known him borrow off nobody but his eldest brother Harold who had a chicken farm in Louisiana and did not bad and loaned us the money in ’49 to get to California. So it didn’t surprise me all that much when Freddie give me a funny look over the top of his spectacles like he do when he’s fixing to lay into me about something. But first he stuck a pinch of snuff in his bottom lip and hawked a big spit in that aluminum can I keep for him down by the table leg, since he always takes him a wad of snuff in the morning. My baby sister’s the same.

‘After all these years of paying my dues on time,’ Freddie B said, ‘I figure I can borrow some off the union. Maybe not enough to get us both back East, but sure enough they’ll lend me fare for one, ’cause this is a emergency.’ That was his way of telling me that I wasn’t calling no Sebastian Egerton, and slow as Freddie B is to getting things said most times, the words spill out his mouth quick when he ain’t in the mood to be disagreed with.

With my husband creeping through his whole life like a snail, I used to ponder how he managed to keep up at work. But my brother Caesar once told me that Freddie B had him a fine reputation on a industrial site Freddie’d got Caesar some work at one time. Caesar said Freddie was known not for fast bricklaying but for bricking sure, so’s when he did something, that foreman didn’t never need somebody to follow behind to rebrick a second time.