Revision: "Confessions Of An Honest Man" the first chapter

 

 

 

 

Confessions Of An Honest Man

A Novel by Art Rosch

Copyright 2010

All characters in this book are either fictional or in the public domain.

 

 

         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

July, 1967.  Detroit, Michigan

          Three musicians were standing beside the club’s back door, under a canvas awning with scalloped trim.  They wore black tuxedoes, replete with cummerbunds, bow ties and shoes polished to mirror perfection.  The tallest of the three, a man in his early sixties, wore a red poppy in his lapel.  The others had white carnations.  A few people stopped to shake their hands and offer words of praise.  Someone laughed a boozy laugh.  When the people had drifted away, the older musician butted his cheroot in the sand of an ashtray.  He stepped off the concrete pad and walked towards his car.

          The other two followed casually, about fifteen seconds apart.  They got into the vehicle and quietly closed the door 

          Soon they were engrossed in the ritual of the pipe: lighting, inhaling, holding their breath, exhaling. It was cozy in the Continental’s plush interior.  Air came through the upholstery’s leather seams, as if the vehicle sighed.  The men were settling down, recharging their nerves for the next set, the last set.  It was one o’clock in the morning.

          BANG!  A sound like a bomb shocked the trio with sudden terror.  They ducked, and their hands flew to cover their heads.  Their bodies reacted before their brains registered the sound. 

          The car lurched as a man dove across the hood, holding a pistol in his right hand.  His legs swam wildly as he fought to stop his momentum.  Whatever tactic he had in mind, it wasn’t working.  The car’s sheen and finish turned the hood into a sliding board.

          In the back seat, Aaron Kantro cursed without thought.  "Jesus fucking Christ!”  He had never before heard a gun shot.  In spite of this fact, he recognized the sound.  It was rounder, weightier, and more final than the sound of a firecracker. 

          The man on the car's hood waved the pistol frantically.  Slithering to get his balance, he clutched at the windshield wipers and missed.  Gravity and car wax slid him across the polished metal until he landed on the ground.  The pistol fired as he hit the gravel.  The bullet penetrated a tire with a loud hiss.

          The man sprang up and disappeared among the ordered rows of vehicles in the parking lot.

          Zoot Prestige held a finger to his mouth and curled low in the passenger seat. The musicians were already breaking the law.  Zoot didn’t want to be a witness.  Zoot didn’t want questions.  Zoot didn’t want any dealings with the Poe-Leece! 

          Aaron scrunched onto the floor of the back seat until his arm rested on the hump of the drive shaft.  Tyrone, on the other side, was hoping to disappear via the flawed logic of an ostrich.  He was pulling his little pork-pie hat over his eyes.

          A voice shouted, "I'LL KILL YOU MOTHERFUCKER!” 

          Two more shots were fired from the opposite corner of the lot.  Two ovoid muzzle flashes lit up the windshields of Cadillacs and Thunderbirds.  A man’s face appeared, pressed to the window of Zoot’s car.  His cheek was distorted against the glass, with an eye like a panicked horse.  His breath steamed the window only inches from Zoot's face.  With a slight turn to the right, Zoot became a virtual nose-to-nose mirror image of the man with the gun. 

          The enraged shooter didn’t see the human being an inch from his face.  He raised a snubby revolver over the top of the vehicle, fired twice, and ran to cover behind a black Eldorado.  The wind had changed.  The shots were barely audible.

          "Sheee-it!” Zoot grumbled, “I hope nobody messes up my short.  I paid three hundred bucks for this custom paint job.”  The immaculately polished car was long and sleek as a submarine.

          A voice shouted, "HEY LOOK HE'S OVER THERE!" 

          Bang bang bang! Flashes lit up the musician's faces.  Guns were all over the place.  Aaron looked at Tyrone.  The pianist had twitched and spilled a pipe full of burning marijuana into his lap.  He brushed and patted frantically to prevent embers from smoldering through his pants.  Thrusting his hands into his pockets he made a basket to prevent sparks from spreading onto the seat.  Aaron produced a handkerchief and helped contain the disaster.  Tyrone was feeling little stings of fire burning their way into his palms.  He was tossing the embers back and forth as he jumped and wriggled all over the tiny space behind the driver’s seat.  When the young musicians’ eyes met they realized that Tyrone had forgotten to exhale. 

          They began to giggle.  Tyrone managed to empty his lungs without breaking into a loud hacking cough.  The bodies of both men were convulsed with terrified hilarity.

          The musicians had sunk all the way to the maroon upholstery on the floor of the car.  Aaron's legs were crossed on the floor of the roomy back seat.  Zoot gestured with his fingers for the pipe.  Tyrone handed it to Aaron as he muffled his cough and put out the fire in his lap.  Aaron gave the pipe to Zoot through the space between the seats. 

          The parking lot was a bedlam of running, screaming people.

          Two men, fingers snarled in each other’s sport coats, rolled across the hood of Zoot’s car.  The metal on the Continental went ‘scroich! bunk!’.  Zoot winced and hid his face behind his hands.  The men vanished somewhere in the gravel of the lot, grunting and cursing.  A grey fedora with a black band lay on the hood for a moment, before a stiff breeze carried it away.  Zoot elevated his head a few inches and tried to inspect his hood for damage.  It was impossible.  The windows were now opaque with steam.

          Zoot relaxed.  He sat with his face level with the knobs on the dashboard.  His wrists were on his knees and his hands hung loose in the shadow beneath the glove box.  He loaded the pipe and handed it to Aaron through the crack. 

          “Don’t strike no match!” he said, “use that thing.”  He pointed to the black knob of the cigarette lighter.  Each door had an ashtray and each ashtray had its own lighter.

          Zoot sniffed the air inside the car.  “I smell somethin’ burning,” he said.  “You cats makin’ barbecue back there?”  His voice was good natured and mocking. 

          Observing Zoot's total poise, Aaron and Tyrone hissed through their lips with suppressed giggles.  It was impossible to tell which part of the moment was funny and which part was terrifying.  The giggles and spluttering had equal components of panic and the hysterical disbelief of pot-heads in a bizarre situation.

          Several big cars roared to life and raced from the lot in clouds of gravel and fumes.  Sirens dopplered past, right on their tails, red lights whizzing through the intersection.  Crimson slashes of reflection lit up the Continental’s glass. 

          Then there was silence.  Several people stealthily emerged from cover, crunch-crunching across the gravel.  They ran for shelter inside the club.  The musicians straightened their bodies with the slowness of clock hands moving.  Soon they were sitting normally on the seats.  Zoot loaded the pipe, lit, inhaled.  He held his breath for a long time, then exhaled an almost transparent cloud.  He replaced the pipe in a leather pouch, concealed the stash under the seat, and twisted his head from left to right and back again, loosening his neck muscles.  He was sixty-two, and a tenor saxophone had hung from his shoulders for more than fifty years.

          "Should we go back in and play?"  There was a squeak in Aaron's voice.  He made a few mock rolls with invisible drumsticks.

          Zoot looked at Aaron with a bare vapor of a smile, tolerant of his drummer’s naïveté.            "Why would we NOT go back in and play?"  The marquee lights of Mickey Tucker's Diamond Club glowed on half of Zoot's face, shadowing the other half.  This gave his eye a demonic glitter.  He wet his thumb and forefinger with his tongue and smoothed the hairs of his pencil moustache. 

          "Let me point out something to you, babe,” said Zoot.  “We're professional jazz musicians.  We play music, and we get paid.  Rather nicely, I might add."  Opening the door, Zoot brushed a tiny flake of ash from his tuxedo pants with a dapper gesture, and corkscrewed his six foot three inch frame upright.  The saxophonist made a quick but careful scrutiny of his vehicle.  He circled it, running the flat of his hand along its sculpted façade. There were no bullet holes that he could detect, no scratches.  The hood had resumed its normal shape.

          Tyrone and Aaron squeezed themselves out of the car.  Aaron closed the door delicately, with the barest of clicks, as if he feared the automobile would fall to pieces if he so much as breathed wrong.

            The world flickered.  The young musicians’ hearts raced, their nerves tingled.  They were playing a jazz gig with a famous saxophone player!  Zoot Prestige had apprenticed with Duke Ellington, he’d played with Charlie Parker.  He was a legend.

          Zoot straightened his lapels and moved his shoulders inside his jacket so the garment settled more squarely on his body.

          "That's right,” he added.  “We're hipsters, babe, we stay cool.  We got a paying gig, we play until somebody asks us to stop or it’s two a.m."   Zoot's voice was like velvet and sand, Scotch whisky and smoke. “Long as the drummer doesn’t get shot.  Gotta draw the line somewhere.  Last drummer I lost was Bobby Beffords, in ’65.  And before that I had a good run, only lost two drummers in six years.  Course, I never had a white drummer before.  That’s got a few people upset.” 

          He aimed a gentle look at Aaron, to check that he wasn’t being taken seriously.  His smile was full of irony and play.  He brushed a bit of ash from Aaron’s tuxedo jacket.  It was a tender, paternal gesture.     

          Fourteen drummers had come to audition when Zoot was putting together the band for this tour.  Thirteen of them were black.  Aaron was the third drummer to play.  As soon as he finished the tune, Zoot sent the other drummers home.

          He knew he would take a lot of heat for hiring a white drummer.  Fuck ‘em.  The kid was worth it.

          “Ain’t nothin’ unusual happening here, babe”, said Zoot.  “It’s just another gig, somebody’s old lady got too friendly with somebody else’s old man and things got ugly.”  The tall man shepherded his two young friends toward the door of the nightclub.  “It’s human nature.  Why don’t we go inside and play some music to soothe the savage breast, hmm? Let’s lay down some Recalcitrant Funk-itis."

          Zoot had just coined another of his classic nonsense terms: Recalcitrant Funk-itis now joined the lexicon along with Groove-matic Ubiquity, Heliocentric Hot Sauce and other such crazed locutions.

          Tyrone pulled at his cummberbund to conceal the holes in the crotch of his pants.  The young men followed the urbane figure of their mentor back into the humid noise of Mickey Tucker's Diamond Club.