Via Dolorosa Read online

  Abruptly, he did not want to think about Iraq, about Myles Granger. Turning away from the bar and looking behind him, he could see the night beyond the wall of windows. With the veil of trees blocking out the moon, it was the darkest night he could remember seeing. Still, in his head, he could see Myles Granger, dying Myles Granger. “Is the island still dead?”

  “Dead?”

  “The power,” he said. “It’s still out?”

  “We’re still on the backup generators,” Roger told him, “but I came back from taking my boat up the beach about an hour ago and I could see lights further up the shore.”

  He teased his drink, not truly, heartily, dedicatedly drinking it, but just tasting it enough to know what it was and to know that to truly, heartily, dedicatedly drink it would be to do so quickly, feeling the smoky burn of the scotch and hoping that he could just stop his mind from thinking for a minute. Just a minute. Was that asking too much? But he didn’t drink the scotch quickly at all, knowing damn well the scotch itself was the real tease, and that there was no magic bullet to forget and to stop thinking. Instead, he set the drink down on another handbill for the Club Potemkin that someone had left on the bar, and looked out over the restaurant. A young couple was seated at a table, the man talking severely with his dark, full eyebrows knitted together and his hands placed palms-down on the tabletop. Across from him sat a young woman. She looked diet-trim and amphetamine-nervous. Both her legs bounced beneath the table as she listened to the man, rapt, and watched him with intensity, as if to do so in any other fashion would equate to some sort of personal surrender. She had both her palms pressed flat against the knobby white bulbs of her kneecaps. She was like a bird. Sitting across from her, watching her, Nick could almost imagine her heartbeat—racing, fluttering, thumping blindly behind her narrow ribcage like a hummingbird caught in an aluminum mailbox.

  “Another,” he told Roger as the bartender made a second pass to collect his empty scotch glass.

  “Pushers,” Roger said, half smirking. “We get you hooked, don’t we?”

  “Forget it. I changed my mind.”

  “I’m just giving you a hard time. We do that in Milwaukee, too, you know…”

  “Sure,” Nick said. “But I’m all right.”

  “You sure, man?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “What?” Roger said. Nick’s face was telling.

  “You think you can call me a cab?”

  —Chapter VI—

  Outside, the air was soggy, uncomfortable. The taxicab came and shuttled him through the island’s wet, sodden streets. The whole night was black. Feeling his hand throb against his leg, he could not shake the rethinking of what had happened in Iraq. It occurred to him that tonight, in front of Roger at the bar, was the first time he had told anyone what had happened in Iraq aside from his military superiors and the medical review board. The telling of it made it impossible to escape it. Granger, too, made it impossible: he was relative to what had happened, so it made sense that he could not be fully clear of it all while around Granger, and around the hotel. It had been Granger who, as a form of gratuity, had gotten Nick the job painting the mural. And that had come about because of his son, Myles, and how he, Nick, had tried to save his life. Sure, he thought. I’m a regular goddamn hero. A true American. He had accepted the gratuity because he thought it would be disrespectful not to accept it and, anyway, his own life had been disrupted and he needed to start over somewhere, and on a new page. He and Emma quickly married and he had agreed to work at the hotel for the summer. He could paint during their honeymoon and attempt to recapture whatever the war had seen fit to terminate within him. An island getaway—how bad could that really be? At the time of his decision, however, it had not occurred to him that his stay on the island and at the hotel would not be a turning of the page; in fact, if anything, it was only managing to prolong everything he was so anxious to try and forget. Granger reminded him, the talk of Myles reminded him, the mural and his goddamn hand reminded him. There was no escape. Again with escape, he thought to himself. Good luck with all that garbage.

  They were all just lost souls, broken and weak and unsalvageable. He knew what it was like to be told to fight and kill—ordered to fight and kill—and how the anticipation of that charge carried with it a hot and hungry anxiety: something you knew you were ill prepared to do, no matter how well prepared you were, and that, deep down in your black guts, you knew it was as base and as wrong as you have ever been told anything was wrong. Killing was as base as a drunken brawl, and just as self-serving and unfulfilling as anything else perpetrated by tempted adolescents and, in the scope of all things, it was equally as clumsy and ultimately embarrassing.

  As the taxicab trundled along and he could feel his hand, it occurred to him that he would forever be stuck with this hand—or, rather, what remained of it—and that, he knew, would be his constant reminder of it all. The Paradis d’Hôtel would not be a part of him forever; Granger, either, for that matter. His marriage had become a misalliance, but perhaps, given time, and in some way or another, that would also be something that would someday be nonexistent for him. Yet his hand would always exist, and he would go to sleep with it every night and would awake to it every morning, and that was God’s cruel joke, God’s satisfaction that justice—however skewed—had been served.

  He no longer believed in God. He did not believe in God as fact and did not believe in God as theory—as concept—either, and he did not know which was worse. It was not, however, difficult to acknowledge the actual, physical existence of Christ; although, Nick surmised, the acceptance of such a belief did not necessarily impart upon Jesus the Man—Jesus the Deity—the preternatural, superhuman powers borne by Almighty God as is translated through established Christian religions. Simply, Jesus Christ could have been a man, just a man—terrorist; zealot; consulate; politician; con artist; human icon; history’s first celebrity of sorts; it was all just as plausible as anything else, in truth—whose story had, over time and with the benefit of popular perpetuation, been blown out of proportion. In that sense, Jesus Christ could have been no different than, say, Davy Crockett, that backwoods revolutionary, magistrate, congressman, drunkard, cheater—the lying rogue who ran out on his wife and children only to be crucified, for the sake of analogy and in a manner of pretense, on a crumbling and futile Texas rood. The King of kings was really no different than the King of the Wild Frontier. How easily truth turns heroes and martyrs into historical degenerates. He’d believed in God once. Now, here, in the taxicab, in the dark, he was not so sure.

  The taxicab arrived at a darkened roundabout at the end of a beached roadway. The Club Potemkin—swarthy and wholly eclipsed by the endless shadows of palms—stood like a forgotten relic washed up at the foot of the ocean. The taxicab jolted to a stop. Nick paid the driver and stepped out. He was accosted by the smell of the sea. The alkaline, oceanic sting was furious in his nostrils. Borne on the air, he could hear the faint stammer of live music, heavy on the bass, from within the club. When the cab left, it became clear to him that he was left in total darkness. He attempted to approach the club’s entrance, but, after several moments, realized he had gotten lost and confused, trundling along through the green and swollen hedges of palm. Pausing to catch his breath, he watched the reflection of the moon down on the sea, rippling and unsteady, like something from a dream. I’ve seen this before, Nick thought.

  He paid no mind to his surroundings and stepped into the club.

  The music rushed him. It was a small room—claustrophobic, oppressive— and poorly lighted. There were walls, but they were suspended from the ceiling, fixed by pulleys and cords, and capable of being repositioned. There was a bar, Nick could see, against one wall, and a gathering of tables, seven-pointed-starred at the center of the room, all occupied by middle-aged socialites. There was a breathing vein of cigarette smoke, chalky and like skin, filtering about the room. The air smelled of sweat, Panama Red, and the heady accretion of wh
at Nick could only identify as female genitalia. Stepping in, he stopped and stared across the room at the stage, and at the performing band. He knew nothing of jazz—knew, really, nothing of music—yet he could tell immediately that he was in the presence of an honest, ritualistic, powerful sound. The audience, too, was enthralled: no one looked at him as he entered; all eyes were on the four-piece stage band. It was Russell “Goat-Man” Claxton, and three surprisingly old white men backing him up on bass, piano, drums.

  Nick went directly to the bar.

  “Dewar’s and water. Clean cubes.”

  The bartender was an automaton; the drink was presented without pause, as if it had been hidden and waiting beneath the bar for him all evening.

  Nick tasted the drink, leaned against the bar, and looked out upon the crowd. Oddly, the crowd was comprised primarily of senior citizens interested in and hungry for the music. There were a few younger people around some of the tables closest to the bar, vague men and vaguer women, and all their faces looked faintly familiar, like the faces of people he had once glimpsed in a magazine. He scanned the faces almost unconsciously. And paused. Looking across the floor, he saw dead Myles Granger seated with some other young men casually smoking, one small, white hand holding a snifter of brandy, his black hair greased and perfectly parted and making him look too young (as he had always looked), his eyes watching him through the cigarette smoke and from across the room. Nick felt his bowels freeze. Their eyes would not unlock. Myles Granger—it was him, the boy, the dead boy. Except the expression was different. Myles Granger had always looked partially occupied; at triage, young Granger had taken on the appearance of a charcoal etching, thumb-smeared by his creator, there but not fully there at the same time. In two brief days just before he died, the boy’s skin had faded to jaundiced parchment, the corneas of his eyes clouding over like soured milk, his lips dry and splitting and flaking apart. It had seemed death had dawned upon him while he was still alive—that both Myles Granger’s soul and the black cloud of death had, for at least a brief time, shared the same husk, the same solid body, and that they took turns peering out from the young dying boy’s eyes. But now, watching Nick from across the smoke-filled, darkened room, his expression was set, determined, and nearly caught in some sort of reflection—

  If I bend down and look under his table, will his legs be mangled and ruined? Nick wondered.

  Myles—

  But it wasn’t Myles Granger, not at all. The kid looked something like him, sure, and in the darkness it was easy to mistake him…but it was not him. And how could it be? Still, the chill remained with Nick for longer than he liked, and he finally forced himself to turn away from the doppelganger.

  Too much stress. Too much bullshit stress.

  Closest to the stage, at a table by herself, Nick spotted Isabella Rosales, the diagnostic photographer, eyes glued to the stage—to Russell “Goat-Man” Claxton—and seemingly oblivious of her surroundings. In the gloom of the club it was difficult to make out details, but Nick could see she was wearing a tight-fitting black dress and not much else. Her feet, he could see, were bare beneath her table. Drawn to her, Nick anxiously took a long sip of his scotch and water and stepped around to the farthest wall of the club. He moved back to lean against the wall, but it pulled away from him, swinging lethargically from giant nylon cords hanging from the ceiling. An overhead support beam groaned. Nick righted himself and did not move. From there, he could stand and watch the band without interruption…

  The unfettered, wistful face—the soft-lidded eyes—the casual gesticulation of the tight, black fingers—the too-small cotton tee-shirt with the faded boar’s head logo and form-fitting black dungarees, one leg offhandedly cuffed a half-dozen inches above a neon orange forester’s boot: all of this presented Russell “Goat-Man” Claxton as surprisingly young and, from all that Nick understood, very un-jazz. Yet the acumen and feral intensity exhibited in both his music and in his personal articulation of sound contested any perception of youth, demonstrating the jazzman as ageless, timeless, indeterminable. Solemnized by his trio of elderly white relics, wizened and clean-scalped and argyle-shirted and in overall opposition to both their surroundings and that of the angular, denuded, raw-boned melodies their instruments somehow produced (yet each triplicate impressively agile on stage and in the exercising of their respective instruments), Claxton played as if he were the only living soul in the club, and his eyes never opened.

  A few older couples got up from their tables and sashayed across the dance floor. They danced fluidly, as old couples will, and did so with an air of honest exhibition, knowing they were forever young and admirable only when they danced now, and that was something powerful and good.

  Nick lit a cigarette and watched the band.

  Claxton’s style of music could not be defined. Nick, who knew very little about contemporary jazz, could not decide whether he was tempted, enthralled, impressed, or frightened by both the music and the performance. The uniqueness of Claxton’s set was characterized by a mix of cool, mid-tempo, breathy ballads interrupted without warning or provocation by sudden, ferocious, wholly libidinous eruptions of majored fifths and minored thirds and loose, extemporized rants, like the symphonic equivalent of an urban street riot. Having heard music described as such in the past, yet never fully understanding, he suddenly knew what it meant to say music was a living, breathing, soul-bearing thing. It was sexual. Despite their complexity, too, each individual number was performed with such overt precision that they were all as accessible and familiar to the untrained ear as someone spouting off the alphabet. Also, something about Claxton himself summoned in Nick’s mind the image of the Pied Piper. Too easily he could imagine Claxton, ever-smooth and way cool in his too-small tee-shirt and steel-toed orange forester’s boots, piping down a cobblestone promenade, having seduced a procession of young children into following him, blindly, wherever he might lead them.

  As if unconsciously, Nick moved his way down the wall toward the front of the stage. There were a few elderly couples dancing here, too; he avoided them agilely, almost respectfully, while holding his half-empty glass of scotch above his head. Cigarette sticking from his mouth, he claimed the empty seat beside Isabella Rosales.

  “Well, hello, Nicholas D’Nofrio,” she said, but she did not look at him; she would not take her eyes away from the stage, from Goat-Man Claxton. In fact, he did not even know how she had recognized it was him. “Hello, hello, hello…”

  “I want to buy you a drink,” Nick said quickly.

  “Then do it.”

  “Well,” he said, instituting a slight pause, “I’m still considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  He said, “Never mind. I don’t know.” He looked around.

  “Raise your hand,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Raise your hand, Nicky, and the waiter will come over to take your drink order.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Don’t call you what?”

  “Nicky,” he said. “Don’t call me Nicky.”

  “Isn’t that what your wife calls you?” And still, she hadn’t looked at him yet.

  “I don’t like it,” he said simply.

  “Stop,” Isabella said from nowhere. “Stop, Nicholas. Watch. This is it. This is the moment.”

  Delicately, Claxton lifted one booted foot just an inch off the bandstand. He kept it there, hovering, defying gravity. Saxophone poised away from his body, the gooseneck crook of the mouthpiece remaining firm between Claxton’s strong, brown, determined lips, Nick watched as the jazzman elicited a single soaring note from the horn, held it…let it simmer like boiling water evaporating in the air. Behind him, the backup band faded out until they died completely away. Claxton held the note—babied it, secured its voice, added strength to it until it became the loudest and strongest thing in the world.

  “That’s—” Nick began, but Isabella quickly shushed him.

  Just as the single note s
eemed to crescendo, a second note, a few steps higher in pitch, emanated from the smooth, golden bell of the saxophone. Together, the dual notes hung in the air, sustained, distinct yet blended, harmonizing until the sound was very much like the hum of electricity through a live circuit.

  A tight roll on the snare drum, from fade to zenith in just three seconds, brought the entire band back into the game, and Claxton spilled his dual note hold into a waterfall cascade of staccato blasts and wailing scales. The audience erupted with applause. People shouted, crooned, whistled, stomped their feet.

  “Holy crap,” Nick managed, watching the band.

  “Polytonal saxophonist,” Isabella said. She had to speak louder now, over the brassy shake of the band. “This is Claxton’s signature song, by the way. It is called ‘Go, Man, Go,’ and it is out of this world.”

  It was a raucous, locomotive arrangement. For a full seven minutes, Claxton’s saxophone did not sit still. Stage lights reflecting off the instrument’s bell were nearly blinding. The backup musicians, too, did not sit still. The piece’s title phrase, when shouted in chorus by the three elderly accompanists, resulted in a quick-speak jumble of words which, Nick had no doubt, suggested the origin of the jazzman’s peculiar but suddenly comprehensible moniker.

  “Go, man,” Nick said. He had to shout loudly now across the table to be heard. “I get it. Goat-Man, go…”

  “Genius,” Isabella said. Nick could feel the vibration of her knee thumping against the underside of the table in rhythm with the music. He was unsure if she was referring to Claxton’s genius or Nick sarcastically. “He is an apocalyptic genius,” she continued, clarifying. “It is nearly frightening. You Americans have given the world jazz, and even if that is the only good thing you have contributed to the world—and many will probably agree that it is—it is good enough for me.”