Shackling Water Read online

  Tonight, he'd laughed with The Quartet and The Quartet alone at a joke Sonny Burma had made onstage—a reference to something Latif had hovered close enough to Burma to observe. Just before the hit Sonny had been talking to a woman, smiling intimately, standing close to her with his hands in the pockets of his suitpants and his jacket open and drawn back behind his arms, a pose Latif had already cribbed and practiced in his room because Sonny looked so goddamn slick when he did it. Out of nowhere, just as he was leaning close and making her laugh, some overenthusiastic clown had clapped Sonny on the back, offered him his meaty hand, introduced himself, and begun asking music questions.

  Sonny'd had no choice but to shake the cat's hand, smile, introduce him to the woman, and spend his last five pre-set minutes chatting with this cavalier, oblivious dude. When Burma took the stage, the cat offered Sonny's chick a seat at his table and she took it. Cockblocking motherfucker, Sonny muttered to Amir as he sat down. When it was time for Sonny's first solo, his new best buddy in the audience shouted out Yeah Sonny! giddy with camaraderie. Burma responded by playing a long series of block chords. Amir broke into a smile and leaned low to tell Higgins, whose laughter boomed out over his bass drum. Latif cracked up with them and noticed the people to his left and right staring at him with respect, wondering what he knew that they didn't.

  You can dig a record, Latif thought as the band played on, but you can't get it all unless you're there and in the know. If you don't see the chick who dissed the trumpet player walk into the light, you won't understand when he weaves “Get Out My Life Woman” into his solo. And unless you know the piano player remembers her for giving his bandmate some head once in a cab, you're outside the joke and busy analyzing the harmonics when he responds with just one bar of Bob James's “Theme from Taxi.”

  The band filed offstage after Van Horn and Latif followed them down the winding back corridor that led to the dressing room, hoping to overhear something of interest. He was hovering closer to the band lately, still staying unnoticed but unable to resist eavesdropping on the intimate details, the backstory behind each performance. Sonny and Amir often stopped to smoke a cigarette in the corridor before going inside, but tonight they weren't there and the locked red door of the lounge cut short Latif's pilgrimage. Bereft of other options yet unwilling to reassimilate into the audience he'd left behind, he idled dumbly. The graceful clack of heels on parquet floor dissolved his contemplation of limbo and Latif turned to face a dapper pinstriped cat and inhale a blast of noxious cheap tobacco.

  Say, brother, you looking to cop?

  The words squeezed together past and present, Boston and New York, so familiar was the tone of the refrain. It matched the automated greeting of every cornerman in Latif's neighborhood; it was a mysterious solicitation he had overheard a thousand times growing up and never dared investigate further. By the time he was tall enough for such entrepreneurs to address him as he walked the block, most of them knew Latif well enough to know better than to bother. In response to the inquiry of any street pharmacist who didn't, Latif would slow his pace slightly, shake his head once across the right shoulder, and mouth a jowled Naah, naah while walking on, as if declining a discount shopping flyer.

  Say Brother had none of the nonchalance of Boston's cornermen. Against Latif's Naah man, I'm good thanks he drew again on his cigar and leaned forward confidentially, polishing upper teeth with tongue behind closed lips and raising bushy eyebrows. Say, brother, this shit is goood, he drawled, basso profundo. Latif smiled, iterating his refusal with a headshake, and slid past the man to return to the barroom. Suit yourself, replied the dealer, head cocked like These kids today! and rapped solid on the red lounge door. Latif froze flat against the wall as the entrance swung open and was filled with Murray Higgins, an unlit cigarette like a matchstick in his leather hand. The dealer disappeared into the room, dwarfed by Higgins' arm around his shoulders, and the door clicked shut behind them. Latif gangled slowly to the bar and got a beer.

  He was still sipping it, drawing out the last drink he was budgeted for, when Say Brother cleaved a course through the thinning mingle of bodies and found the bar. He tossed Latif a wink and shouldered in beside him. A two-fingered tap on the bartop yielded a pair of whiskey shots; Say Brother raised one delicately between thumb and middle finger and beckoned Latif toward the other with his open hand. It's on me. Say Brother smiled, lifting the spirit to his lips and knocking back the drink without a shiver.

  Thank you, said Latif, and extended his hand.

  Say Brother clasped it between his own two and slid down off the barstool with a winking Don't mention it, snaked smoothly through the parting crowd and put his hand on the doorhandle. He stopped and turned, knowing Latif's eyes were still on him; It's on me, he mouthed again, tapping his chest, and pulled out his pantspocket with a stagey armsweep. Latif reached instinctively inside his own pocket and started when he felt a small tinfoil square. He looked up in puzzlement for explanation, but Say Brother was already in the wind.

  It's on me looped echo circles in his mind as Latif strolled to the men's room to flush what he assumed was now in his possession. The dealer's scam was textbook corny—the freebie turn-on guaranteed to make a believer out of you—and Latif resented the distraction. Still, it was titillating to know he had a dimebag of jazz history in his pocket; whole lotta cats' lives had been tied off at the elbow and he'd always wondered why. But shit, this wasn't nineteen motherfucking fifty. Nobody thought some skag was gonna make them play like Bird. Latif wondered if anybody even fucked around with this stuff anymore. He wouldn't be up in here if they didn't, he answered himself, then wondered about Higgins. The ocean god himself?

  The toilet stall was locked, so Latif stood at a urinal to guardedly unwrap the parcel Say Brother had passed off on him. Latif opened the tinfoil slowly at waist height and watched the fine white powder intently, as if it might burst into flame. This shit was supposed to make you fly. It was the magic carpet ride that kept heads nodding in sloppy no-music rhythm out front of Giant Liquor Mart in Roxbury around the corner from his mother's house—kept fullgrown men pissy high, limpid, and fragile, wispy tendrils of human flesh buck-and-shuffle scavenging for change.

  And it made Say Brother fly, fly enough to bypass the line and stroll the players' lounge with lavish confidence. Yellow tubelights hummed like drunken bumblebees as Latif played absentminded games with the portion of skag, letting it conjure back Say Brother as he slipped into the red room, to and fro through the crowd, on and off the barstool. When he finally became conscious of being watched, Latif didn't know whether he had stood in seance for ten seconds or ten minutes. He merely felt hard eyes cornerchecking him and turned his head to answer their overcuriosity.

  The man piping glances Latif's way stood at the adjacent urinal, sizing him up as he waited to be acknowledged. He zipped his fly and smoothed imaginary wrinkles from his suit with nonchalance, granting Latif an equal chance to take his stock. Openness glinted in his mellow eyes, the hint of satisfaction that hangs on a man when he stands yards away from recognition in any direction he might choose to turn. Before the echoes of his first gestures had dissipated, Sonny Burma saw a flashbulb-pop of recognition in Latif's eyes, and he turned and came quickly to his point of interest.

  You look like maybe you don't want that, Burma said politely, pointing to the foil. I happen to have just missed my connection. Only minutes before, Latif had watched the same graceful hands coax and conjure rain from Dutchman's old piano, warm spring aromatic drops that tinkled daintily at first, then swelled and crackled into floods and thunderstorms, pounding at the earth with syncopated Old Testament calamity. Sweat had beaded on Burma's brow and he had funneled small blasts of coolbreath up from his lower lip to dry it, playing on. Burma, Higgins, and Abdul connected in a pyramid of studious intersubjectivity, bulging and collapsing as Van Horn transversed the stage. They rummaged ancient catacombs, brought pharaohs back to life.

  Sonny Burma, who flipped sarcophagi li
ke seersucker mattresses, stood at the next urinal down adjusting his dick and waiting on Latif: You look like maybe you don't want that. The red lounge door swung open in Latif's mind as he handed the foil to the pianist. Making friends is making friends, he thought, torn between exhilaration at talking to Sonny and embarrassment that after a month of undetected observation he should meet Van Horn's pianist in the men's room over a dime of smack.

  Here. You can have it.

  Good lookin out, Burma tossed off, taking the foil and jowling his cheeks in quick product appraisal. He slid it in his wool pantspocket and the same hand reemerged, scissoring a tenspot in the first and middle fingers toward Latif, who shook his head.

  No, really, it's on me; I moved to the city just to hear you cats play. It's an honor to meet you, Mr. Burma.

  Burma chuckled friendly from the gut, a rumbled three notes of amusement, and gave Latif his hand with vigor.

  Call me Sonny, bruh, shaking Latif's hand, and you are?

  Latif James-Pearson, from Roxbury.

  Latif James-Pearson from Roxbury. Good to meet you. I got some family in Mattapan myself, cousin and her kids. I used to play at Ramshackles—piano bar down there before it got closed down. Latif nodded that he knew it though he didn't. Now listen here, Latif, you take this money. You're new in town. A man's gotta make a living somehow. Gotta be a businessman about it, am I right? Sonny cocked his head rhetorically, palms upturned at his shoulders in expectation of agreement.

  Latif smiled. You got a point there, Sonny. He plucked the folded bill and placed it in his shirtpocket.

  There you go, said Burma, with an intonation flavor that was Wess Gates all the way. The kinetic mantra was the teacher's clearest signal of approval, surprise, royal badness, and the phrase set Latif at ease when Sonny said it, wrapped him warmly in the coils of tradition.

  You play, Teef?

  Latif felt that Sonny Burma knew he did, Yessir tenor, as if the force of his long consciousness of them had somehow rumbled tremors in their own. As if they'd watched him watching them.

  Well, bring your horn down here sometime. We been talkin about opening the last set up. Meantime, maybe I'll catch you for a drink between these hits.

  I'd like that, said Latif. Sonny saluted him, spun on his heel with mock-military crispness, and was out.

  When the next set crashed to an end Latif staked out a place on the receiving line, watching Burma handshake and flirt expertly as he made his way from the piano to the lounge. Latif's words, devised and revised during the set, were planted firmly in his mind. They were friendly but casual: As a businessman, I'm gonna have to hold you to that drink you mentioned, Sonny. But when Burma took his hand he leaned in close before Latif could speak: Hey partner, can you help me with another you-know-what?

  Latif opened his mouth in silent mute surprise and Sonny read the answer from his face and just like that Latif was gone, wiped from Sonny's good graces; he watched it as it happened. Sonny pressed together his lips, nodded in disappointment and moved on, face blanking for a moment before he reanimated to greet the next person in line. Latif could not accept the setback; he felt that he would do whatever he could to please Sonny again, and so he jostled himself into position further down the line and when Sonny reached him Latif whispered Give me forty-five minutes.

  My man! Sonny grinned and slapped him five. That's what I'm talking about. And Latif was right back in it. He jogged the stairs and hailed a cab, a firecracker of nervousness exploding in his chest as he lifted his arm like a New Yorker. He told the driver his boardinghouse's address and hoped the cornermen who'd hawked their wares as he'd walked past them to the train earlier that evening were still there, leaning up against the payphones next to Kennedy Chicken 'N' Biscuits. They were: two cats posted nonchalant in kicks straight out the box, white Jordans and black Paytons, rocking fitted Yankee caps on top of doo rags and eyesurfing the block like wary lion cubs. Latif told the cab to wait, hopped out wondering what the hell he was doing, and threw a quick chin-up headbob at the brother who caught his eye. The cat head-beckoned Teef to follow him and they walked halfway up the block, into the shadows where Latif was spending so much time lately.

  You the musician from 2B, right? Latif shook off shock at this easy peeling of his anonymity veneer: It was their job to know who folks were. He nodded reluctantly, feeling suddenly that everybody knew more about something than he did about anything.

  We can hear you on the street. Sound pretty good. You was killin' a few days ago. Played some shit the Darkside Crooks used.

  Teef nodded. It's called “St. Thomas.” Bad tune, right?

  No doubt. The cat smiled and Teef noticed his babyface. They were probably the same age, although Latif had passed for older since he'd hit six-one at sixteen. He started to scat the head and the dealer joined him on the tune's four note tag.

  Yeah. The dude nodded. I could rip shit off a beat like that. So whatchu need, yo—Redman, Clapton, or Cobain? Dimes up to Susan B's.

  From the Holy Land to Babylon in ten minutes, Latif thought, glancing to make sure the cab was still idling cornerside and noticing his own dark window longingly. The neighborhood had never seemed so menacing, and Latif realized he'd hardly been here between evening and dawn. Before Latif could stop it, his mind churned out a ghetto Halloween menagerie of crack babies, welfare queens, and Staggerlee street pimps, all lurching toward him with blank eyes and outstretched zombie arms. He shook clear his head, embarrassed.

  A dime of Kurt, Latif said, and absorbed the powdered-over look of shock on the kid's grill. Hardly appropriate for a hustler. It's for a friend, he added lamely.

  The kid was busy whistling to his junior partner, who disappeared around the opposite corner of the block, then sauntered back into view and over to them, made the handoff to his man, and jogged back into first position by the payphones.

  Anything you need, my name is Spliff, the kid said, giving Teef a product-exchange soulshake. He glanced up at the 2B window. I'ma listen at you. Spliff walked back toward Kennedy and Latif jumped in the cab, worrying that he now represented a source of future income in this brother's mind.

  Let's make it a round trip, Latif directed, and the taxi shot downtown. He handed Sonny the package and accepted a shoulder-bang embrace and a second tenspot with three seconds left in the allotted time frame.

  SWING LOW | REFLECTIONS | SAY BRO

  Latif picked up a redrimmed shaving mirror at a cornerstore between Dutchman's and the train that night, doublesided with standard and distorted magnifying panes. His room had no looking glass, and the windows were too grimecaked to hold his image right. He could not trust his reflection to the plateglass shopwindows he passed nor be satisfied in catching transitory optics on the fly while swifting by. Without a way to meet his own eyes in judgment and privacy, Latif thought as he paced the sedate subway station on dead legs, he might forget himself. The mathematics of hustling demanded a rigid and cross-referenced knowledge of self; before he could calculate the prism angles of the game, Latif had to understand his own trajectory, know what he was capable of doing.

  The iron horse dropped him uptown and Teef walked slowly home, improvising an unconscious transformation ceremony on the empty street. He flexed his hands and cracked his knuckles, repeating his rationale like push-ups until his mind was swollen with belief: I gotta make some money without sacrificing any of my time, he told himself. I gotta work while I study and this is how to do that. Already he felt some of the gentler rainbow arcs of his persona stiffening and straightening, shaving themselves into taut wires. Or he imagined that he did.

  Spliff was still hugging the block at this late hour, alone now, a twenty-four-hour walk-up convenience mart for crack monsters, boom fiends, and junkies. Latif picked out his shape against the streetlight and wondered what that lifestyle took and if he had it in him. Almost reflexively, he told himself he did: He could be hard and quick, unflinching. He knew how to talk and think and improvise.

  Still wo
rking? Latif smiled when he was close enough.

  Spliff's head snapped fast and body tensed, but he relaxed when he saw who it was. He's probably got a gun, Latif mused. He'd be a fool not to.

  Not really. A crackhead who hasn't scraped together five bucks yet ain't gonna find it at this hour. Spliff balanced his heels on the curb's edge. I should crash so I can get up and serve the weedhead moms who wanna wake-and-bake before they take they kids to school, but I dig this time of night. Only time the block is peaceful. Where you coming from? Some jazz club?

  Yeah.

  Must be hard being a jazz nigga in a hip hop world. Latif laughed, digging how the night carried the sound. Y'all cats don't make no money, do you? asked Spliff.

  Not unless you're Kenny G. Or Wynton. And that ain't Puffy money either. Far from it.

  Apparently jazz cats still using smack.

  Apparently, said Teef. He paused, wondering whether to iterate that his purchase had been an errand for a friend, a onetime thing, and gave a mental shrug. It didn't seem necessary anymore.

  Spliff rubbed his cheek with a palm. Rap niggas just smoke weed.

  You feelin rap these days? asked Teef, curious whether his own boredom with the music of his youth was epidemic.

  Spliff's head rolled listless from one shoulder to the other. Few niggas is flipping some new flavor, but mostly it's the same old tired bullshit.

  Same with jazz, Latif admitted. Cats been playing the same tunes for thirty, forty, fifty years. And playin em the same way, too.

  Seems to me like jazz is fooling itself, said Spliff.

  How you mean?

  You know, cats up on TV acting like jazz some noble refined shit and everything else just dirty nigger music. I'm like, come on. I'm pretty sure some of these cats step off the bandstand, suited down clean, dignified, and playing some beautiful and complex shit no doubt, then snort some shit and smack they bitch up. At least hip hop admits it. Jazz keeps that shit off the books.