More Than You Know - rosalyn Story

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

· Prologue ·
Arkansas, 1955
         Long as you live, the woman had told the boy. Her grief-torn eyes still glowed like twin stars in the back of his mind. She handed him the baby. Long as you live, don’t you tell nobody.
         It was not yet dusk, but black clouds weighted the sky; then came the storm with locomotive force. Rogue winds blew in, danced crazily, railed and pitched their fury. Hard rains whipped shutters, shined the streets, and bullied the trees, thrashing and hollering in woman’s-pain. When the rains had retreated, fully spent, washed skies were signed with rainbows and a greening world wondered what newborn life cried in their wake.
         The little boy walked with his thin shoulders hunched, as the baby the woman had given him kicked its legs against his chest. His eyelids were pinched but allowed slits of the main street ahead: the grocery, the Handy Dandy Five and Dime, the Beauty Palace.
         A pop of thunder shot up the boy’s back like a hot spark, and forced a small cry from his throat. His shoulders shook, his eyes bucked wide; the whole world around him was cold, wet, and angry. He stepped in a puddle of water and stumbled on a broken piece of sidewalk brick.
         Don’t drop her, he told himself, whatever you do.
         He wrapped both arms around her as if his own life were the prize for holding on. He glanced back at the woman now far behind, who had found cover under an awning. Her wet dress clung, and she crossed her shivering arms, empty where the baby used to be. She nodded, egged him on with a backward flick of her hand.
         His toes squished inside muddy canvas Keds as water eddied up at doorways and curbs. But he walked faster, clutching the child, who had grown hot in his sweating hands. Rain beat his knotted hair; his head ducked over the baby’s face. He wanted to look back again, but the woman would be too far away, lost to the rain. Finally he reached the door with the only light at the end of the street.
         He reached up and knocked, then knocked again, louder, desperate.
         A plump, kind-eyed woman answered, looked out through the rain, then down at him. Her face a startled question mark. She took the child from his arms, beckoned him inside, queried him.
         Whose child is this?
         Long as you live, he remembered.
         He’d keep the promise, or so he thought. For how could he know what the coming years would bring?
         It was warm inside, so warm and dry he wanted to stay. But he waited for her to turn, and when she did, he ran back into the rain.

· ONE ·
New York, late 1990s
         While the last wedge of late September sun lights the L-shaped sky between the highrises above the city, and buses bleat like frantic trumpets and Yellow cabs blare like choruses of big-band brass, and the cacophony swells to forte beneath street lamps that spotlight the theater of midtown at dusk, L.J. Tillman watches the people. He scours the to-and-fro parade in the evening rush for a rhythm in arms, legs, or feet, a beat in the sway of shoulders and hips. He nods to the straight-legged strut of the young banking women with their fitted brown suits and briefcases, the syncopated shuffle of old men’s weary feet ambling toward the park, the swinging arms and busy swagger of busboys rushing to meet the time clocks of the uptown kitchens.
         The whole town is pulsing to a time-worn tune. Feet planted on a busy midtown corner, L.J. licks the reed of his tenor horn, searching the city for a song.
         On the other side of the sky, a quarter-moon of faded pearl rises, but he’s heard there is the slightest chance of rain. Something needs to happen soon if he expects to eat. The women are the best, he figures; whether old or young, jasmine- or rose-scented, sneaker-shod or stiletto-heeled, there’s always a rhythm, a melody carved into the curve of lipsticked smiles.
         A young black woman in long, flowing, navy blue, hair piled high above a heart-shaped face, glides by in samba time. He blows a liquid, Latin “Summertime.” She keeps walking without a glance his way.
         Sometimes a good tune is all you got, boy; your best friend, your home. Climb on into it, crawl in the corners of that tune and pull down
the blinds. It’ll make you forget what’s troubling you. Just go on inside, and the people will follow.
         The old man who raised him had been good at dispensing advice that didn’t work. Because, for sure, nothing is working tonight. A half-hour on this corner—searching his mind for the one tune that  would make them stop, even pause, and give up a little change—and  nothing. Apparently, Gershwin held no favor with these folks tonight, and for that matter, neither did the Duke. He looks up and down the street with a frustrated frown: at the hospital workers leaving the day shift, the cluster of waiters on cigarette break at Gennaro’s before the  dinner hour, the going-to and coming-from bustle, but nobody stop-  ping to listen.
         He plays with his sax strap, looks down at the torn velvet lining of the bruised leather case splayed open against the bank cornerstone, empty except for the crumpled dollar he’d thrown in himself.
         The ching-chinging reggae beat of a Jamaican steel band a block away plays faintly on the air across the distance and L.J. envisions piles of money in the coffee cans beneath their drums. They always had a crowd. Figures—there are four of them, dreadlocks swinging, young and good looking, and a beat so infectious that even L.J. was tempted to put down his horn and listen. Maybe he should move a little further away, but no, this is where the crosstown buses and the IRT stop. On a good night in this very spot he’ll collect at least enough for dinner, a morning muffin, and a cup of French roast. But some nights, like this one, the going is slow.
         L.J. fingers the keys, licks the reed again, and blows air through the hollow coil of plated brass. Got to play something, they won’t pay me for standing here. There’s a night chill snapping the air with a promise of fall and around him the thick traffic crawls, the brake lights carnival-red sequins blinking stop-and-go against the twi- light gray. The jewel-blue sky is dimming to deep purple, and a soft growl in the bottom of his stomach warns him the evening rush is slipping away.
         One thing the old man did get right: Boy, if it looks like nobody gives a hoot about your horn, just close your eyes, say the hell with it, and play.
         “The hell with it.” Saying it out loud even feels good. He closes his eyes. If enough money for a hot meal falls into his case, fine. If not, so be it. Another missed meal won’t kill him. He decides on “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
         A sweet tune, a perfect melody. And who doesn’t love it? He licks the reed again, and pinches tight his eyelids to shut out the city. He warms up gently to it, starting soft and low. Then soars on the tune in the high octave. Good reed, fingers feeling good. In a minute, even with his eyes closed he can feel a presence, someone standing before him, listening.
         Finally.
         When he opens his eyes, a black man of about sixty (older than him, slightly built, and fairer of skin), is standing there. Dressed to kill in a pinstriped suit, shoes showing a slick shine. A dandy, from back in the day. Cab Calloway as Sportin’ Life comes to mind. He’s smiling approval, nodding to the beat.
         Come on man, dig down and shell out a couple of bucks.
         But the man is not reaching in his pocket, not even thinking about it. Instead he closes his eyes. His arms spread wide like eagles’ wings, mouth O-shaped to the sky. A visible sucking in of night air, and out comes a sound that takes L.J. back some forty of his fifty-two years.
         There’s a somebody I’m longing to see…
         It’s a baritone as smooth and gritty as raw silk, flowing honey- thick, a perfect mix of southern cooking and northern cocktails.
         There, in the middle of mad Manhattan comes the dewy heat of a juke joint in Tupelo. Or Biloxi, or Memphis. When he was a boy, L.J. and the old man often set out from one blues quarter to another—the old upright rattling out of tune in the back of the pickup truck—finding a place for the old man to play. The plank-floor jukes attracted the foot-stomping crowd, but now and then there’d be a voice like this man’s, an old-style crooner who made the women swoon and the men smile their envy.
I hope that she turns out to be…
Someone who’ll watch over me.
         Eckstein, Prysock, Nat King Cole. Their ghosts were smiling, hum- ming along.       
         L.J. keeps playing, weaving woolen threads around the silken tones, sliding to the bottom of his range to let the baritone float above. He wanders through the open spaces between each phrase. Takes deep breaths, and blows.
         He ends the tune holding a lusty low C and just listens as the man riffs to the cadence like a pro, up and down and circling around and finally landing on L.J.’s pitch, vibrating like a cello in a master’s hands. At the end of the tune the man nods, but neither man speaks. L.J. lifts his brows and begins “Body and Soul.” And the man joins in.
         I can’t believe it, it’s hard to conceive it, that you’d take away romance… The two stand there facing each other, music flowing back and forth between them like charged ions. And a full ten minutes pass before they even notice the swarm of people circling them in. They start another tune and another, without a word.
         Money rises in heaps on the worn felt—quarters, ones, and fives. A couple of people leave tens or twenties, leaning over to make change.          They yell out their favorites. “Sunday Kind of Love,” an older bearded man in a Paul Bunyan plaid shirt yells, while a woman in a suit with a briefcase calls, “My Funny Valentine.”
         “Autumn Leaves.”
         “Love for Sale.”
         “All of Me.”
         The old tunes, the standards. A young girl in a hospital smock with an opera voice sings along softly on “Autumn Leaves,” and a man in a cowboy hat grabs her hand for a dance. They are young and old and middle-aged, slender and fat, black and white and every color in between. They are just getting off from or coming to work, dressed in Italian shoes or steel-toed boots, overalls or blue jeans, plain coats or expensive coats or no coats at all. Fingers snapping, shoulders working, feet tapping.
         At a lickety-split pace L.J. starts “All of Me,” his fingers sculpting melody while the older man scats. Skiddle dee bop, bop, do weee, do wow. The two men banter in melody and counter-tune, rapid ex- changes, flurries of scales and licks, back and forth while the crowd, now more than thirty, hums along and eggs them on.
         After an hour or so, the men, exhausted, bow to disperse the clap- ping and whistling and hooting crowd. When everyone has left, the man sticks out his hand to L.J., grinning. L.J.’s large hand engulfs the man’s small fingers.
         “Man, you are something else!” the stranger says. His smile suggests two even rows of piano keys. His dark eyes seem lantern-lit. “Whoa, man. You can play!”
         L.J. smiles too, as he squats before his case, counting money. More than he’s seen at one time in more than a year.
         “Aw, man. That was great,” he says. “You got a voice on you. Really. You got some set of pipes.”
         “Roscoe Covington,” the older man says.
         “Oh yeah, man, sorry. Tillman. L.J. Tillman. Pleased to meet you.”
         L.J.’s heart races as he gathers the money, counts it. He hands the man a fistful of bills and loose change. “OK, half of this is yours. Here’s your share, sixty-three and some change.”
         Covington waves his hand dismissively. “Oh, hey, I wasn’t doing it for no money, I just saw you standing here by your lonesome, playing the hell out of that horn, and I just felt like singing along.”
         L.J. is embarrassed. The man couldn’t know how much these few dollars mean to him. Or maybe he does. There was a time when it wouldn’t have mattered, but now he can’t imagine somebody waving off this much money with a flick of the hand.
         He shakes his head. “Man, you gotta take some of this. I was dying out here before you came along.”
         “Naw, it’s just two is better than one. Folks like a little harmony. Folks like a show.”
         “Man, please. Take some. I insist.”
         It isn’t that he doesn’t need the money, he’s playing on the street, after all. It’s just that he believes in being fair. The man worked for it, had more than earned his share.
         “Look, I tell you what. You can buy me a drink. I know a place not far from here. I got a few minutes before I got to head off.”
         The lantern-lit eyes seem to do the inviting. There’s a shred of pain behind those pupils, but if his eyes confirm a trace of it the rest of him betrays it; the straight shoulders and full head of thick black hair, the shiny wing-tip shoes and cuffed gabardine slacks, the cufflinks blinking in the streetlamp light all bespeak a good life. L.J. is sure his own trials show in every pore and fiber of skin and garment: his oily complexion, uncombed hair, sleep-matted wool, and dusty shoes. He rubs a hand along the old stain on the sleeve of his too-short blue blazer. “Uh, I’m not dressed for any of these places around here.”
         “Nothing fancy. Cup of hot coffee. Say, you ever been to French’s? Right over on Fifty-fourth. It’s just a little old place but they got the best coffee in New York, man…hey. Let’s go.”
         Covington even walks with a little bounce, a brisk strut.
         “You coming? It’s not far. Just right over here.”
         The night is chilly, the coffee will be hot. L.J. shrugs, then tugs again at his jacket, his horn case and satchel slinging against his hip as he lopes behind the man with the bouncy gait and the natty suit.
         At French’s, a tiny diner with red swivel stools along a Formica counter and faux-leather booths along the wall of plate glass looking out on the busy street, they walk toward a booth in the back.
         “Hey French! Couple of coffees over here!” Covington yells to a bald, middle-aged, olive-skinned man behind the counter.
         When the coffees arrive, Covington takes a sip. L.J. warms his fingers around the cup. He blows ripples across the smoking surface, empties
in half a pack of sugar and a pack of cream, then takes a drink, long and slow, letting the hot nutty flavor settle on his tongue. He closes his eyes and lets the steam warm his nose. He sighs and smiles.
         “You’re right, man. This is the best.”
         “Didn’t I tell you?” He pushes up his sleeve and looks at a gold- trimmed watch on his wrist. “Got a gig to get to in a little bit. Ever hear of a place called the Baby Grand? Uptown. East eighties. I been there a few years. Nice place.”
         L.J. nods. Who hadn’t heard of the Baby Grand? “Yeah. Nice place, I hear.”
         “Nicest place I ever worked at, that’s for sure. Back in Cleveland we didn’t have nothing like that. Not for jazz, anyway. And the tips, man. On a good night…” He shakes his head and takes another sip.
         L.J. listens while the older man talks about living in Cleveland where he was the singer for a downtown hotel lounge band that played together for twenty years. How he moved to New York after his wife died, just because he’d always wanted to, and she hadn’t. How he had dreams of making it big, recording, the whole thing, but settled for a gig in a top-drawer club where the customers, and even the waiters and waitresses, think he hung the moon.
“That was seven years ago. I been there ever since. It’s a nice little gig, you know. Pays all right. I give up on trying to make it big-time a while ago. I thought as soon as I got up here, agents would be breaking down my door. Thought I was gonna be Bobby Short. You know how that is. But I do get a couple of jingles and a TV voice-over now and then. You ever hear of Toasty Wheat Crackers?”
         L.J.’s eyebrows arch up. That’s where he’s heard the voice. He’d even tried the crackers one time; they reminded him of salted cardboard. “You’re the guy in the Toasty Wheat commercials?”
         Toasty wheat, toasty wheat, when you want a tasty treat, Covington cups his hand to his ear studio-style and sings in a rich, deep bass.
“Man, that’s you?”
         “That’s me,” he says, nodding, grinning, sipping.
         L.J. spoons more sugar in his coffee and stirs. “Hey, that’s a good commercial. But you know, I didn’t like the crackers all that much.”
         “Me neither, at first.” Covington winks. “But after eight years, them funny tasting little crackers bought me a nice little time-share down in Florida. They taste a whole lot better, now.”
         They both laugh, take another sip, and lean back.
         Covington looks up at L.J., his face changed now, the smile settling into a questioning look. He lowers his voice, drums his knuckles on the table, and leans forward. “What I want to know is, man, how come you playing out here? You’re better than half the dudes I’ve played with in this town. Cleveland, too.”
         L.J. smiles wryly, shrugs, and stares down into his coffee before absently taking another sip.
         The older man fills in the silence. “You read music? You do, I can tell. Why don’t you come up to the club sometime, sit in? All I got’s a trio behind me. Be nice to hear your horn backing me up.”
         L.J. studies the backs of his hands. ‘I’ve told you my story so what’s yours?’ is what he hears in the silence. And for a minute he wonders if the man doesn’t know. Doesn’t he, L.J., look like every other homeless brother on the street? Sure, he’s cleaner than most—he keeps his hair trimmed with cheap scissors, his armpits sticky with Old Spice roll- on. Washes his clothes in pre-dawn fountains a piece at a time. But he’s seen in others—not just the ones in doorways huddled up against their own madness or warming themselves by the trash-barrel flames, but also the ones who just walk the streets without aim—something dull in their eyes. This city has a way of stamping its human jetsam with an indelible brand. And if he’s seen it in others, surely this man can see it in him.
         L.J. leans forward, his voice low. “Man, look, I’m not even sure what I’m doing here myself.”
         Covington nods slowly, takes a long drink of coffee, folds his hands.
         L.J. rubs his brow. He is not often given to openness; most of what
he feels or thinks he simply blows through the bell of his horn. But partly out of gratitude and partly because he’s never spoken it out loud before, he begins. Maybe telling it will help sort out the mess of last year—order the loose puzzle pieces scattered across his mind.
         He clears his throat. “My wife,” he starts. “We were married twenty- four years. And one night about a year ago, she…well…put me out.”
         Covington shakes his head. “Oh, man, that’s tough.”         L.J. nods. He hadn’t expected his confession to ring with such finality. He also hadn’t expected it to sound like such a boring cliché, the same old man/woman thing played out a thousand other times. But no, this is different.
         It was almost a year ago, he recalls. One minute he was standing in the kitchen of his green-shuttered two-story in Kansas City, smelling mustard greens and a peach pie in the oven, getting ready for work, watching his pretty wife humming into steaming pots. The next min- ute, all hell broke loose.
         “I…we argued. It was something I did a long time ago, it was all my fault. She got mad and told me to leave.”
         Told him? She’d screamed for him to leave. Get out and don’t ever come back were her exact words, each one exploding like flint meeting flame. He could still feel the singe of their heat. Even the food recoiled; the mustard greens turned black and crisp, the pie bubbled over and smoke-blackened the oven. He had just looked at her, perfect skin flushed with anger and kitchen heat, her red-eyed stare clashing with the delicate purple in the flowers of her dress.
         He’d searched for words to explain, but he knew an army of them could not defend him. Instead he opened the door quietly and the wind grabbed it and slammed it shut. He drove to the club—his gig five nights a week at Jimmy’s, in the old part of Kansas City. Jimmy’s was where he played his way through whatever bothered him, let the blue notes salve the wounded spirit he brought in the door. But the club was quiet, dim. Chairs on tabletops, the quartet sidemen—Ace, Conny, and Walt—sitting with elbows resting on their knees, staring at their shoes. The club was belly-up, after twelve years.
         L.J. takes a long swallow, sets down the cup and stares at the table, then looks up to see Covington’s shaking head, thick eyebrows fur- rowed in sympathy.
         “I felt like I’d lost everything. My wife…” he clears his throat. He hasn’t used those words in over a year, and the tear in his voice behind them is a shock to him. He massages the tightening muscle at the back of his neck. “My wife, my twelve-year gig. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been much of a drinker, but I grabbed a bottle of Jack and left. Sat in the car outside the club and drank for an hour. Just thinking about everything, feeling sorry. Then I did something really crazy, I still don’t know what got into me.”
         He drove wildly, out of control, mind spinning, wondering how it , this is different. was that a life could turn on a dime, that the life you had when you woke up that morning could vanish like a shadow beneath a cloud before the night was done. He hadn’t realized his speed, and the liquor loosened his grip on the wheel. Before he knew it, he’d landed in the middle of the river, flailing for his life.
         “It had been raining; the river was high,” he says. “My car was going down faster than I could think. I thought I was a dead man; maybe I wanted to be, for a hot minute. But, funny how stuff like that works, no matter how much you feel like dying, when that water starts to rising around you, all you can think about is living. I mean I never been much of a praying man—oh, I went to church with my wife now and then, when I could get myself out of bed on time—but you’d a thought I was one of those TV evangelists. I got myself on top of the car, the hood, some kind of way. I don’t even remember doing it. Then I flung my horn far as I could—landed on some railroad ties. Then I swam, crawled, whatever, got myself to the bank.”
         He rolls the coffee cup between his palms. “I sat on the bank for a while. It was cold but I was so wasted I couldn’t feel a thing. Then I heard the train.”
         The Union Pacific. How would things have been different if it hadn’t pulled into view, its noisy bulk of freight cars heaving, smoking, wailing, bugle-calling him to hop aboard and move? He hadn’t thought of actually going anywhere, just getting on and moving. The heaviness of his sopping clothes and shoes hadn’t stuttered his step as he sloshed through grass and mud—his wet shoes slipping on beds of stone and coal along the track—and pulled himself aboard.
         With the river’s roar still in his ears and without a sensible thought crossing his mind, he’d hopped another train, then at a weigh station in Pennsylvania hooked up with a trucker bound for Newark. After all that had happened, the mix of strong drink, river water and the whistle of an eastbound train were too heady for him to stay put. He’d always been curious about New York—he was a jazz man. So he rode on, high on the smell of ripe cattle and the rank odor of his river- washed clothes that dried and shrank while his mind sobered.
         “By the time I got up here, I wondered what the hell I had done, felt like I had lost my mind or something. I’d never done anything that stupid in my life. I started to go right back. But I damn sure wasn’t going to go back the way I came. Didn’t have no money. And then I didn’t know what I would say, anyway, how I would handle things. How I could make things right between us. I still don’t know.”
         He takes a sip of coffee, then takes an empty sugar packet, wads it
up and rolls it between his fingers.
         “So here I am.”
         Covington says nothing, just looks at L.J.’s hands as the sax player rubs them together. After a moment, Covington signals to French and points two fingers at the empty coffee cups. French brings a smoking pot to the table and fills them up.
         Covington blows on his coffee, sets it down and strokes his chin.
“After my wife died, I felt lost,” he says quietly. “It took a while, but I got it together. But one thing I learned.”
         “What’s that?”
         “Anything you got to say to somebody, say it. Say it whenever you can, don’t let the time get too short before you make it right.”
         Sympathy softens the man’s eyes. Behind the counter of the restaurant smoke rises from a greasy grill, and a queasiness rises in L.J.’s empty stomach. He doesn’t know if it’s the smell of frying meat that causes it or the thought of actually doing what the man suggests.
         “I know,” L.J. says. “A whole year up here in this crazy place, and the strangest thing about being here is not seeing her. I miss her like…I don’t know. It’s strange. You’re with somebody every day for twenty- four years, and then you’re not.”
         “So how come you don’t call? Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”
         L.J. turns up his cup and finishes off the coffee. “Well. It’s a long story.”
         Covington looks down and nods. “Ain’t it always. She know you’re alive?”
         “What do you mean?”
         “I mean if they found your car, folks might think you bought the farm that night.”
         L.J. is amazed that he has never thought of this. She had told him to leave, and he did. The fact that he might be considered dead in Kansas City never occurred to him.
         “The car went down. I guess I never thought about anybody finding it. I’d messed up so bad, all I could think about was just getting away.”
Covington shrugs. “Some cars stay down, some don’t.”
         French arrives at their table with a fresh pot of coffee, but Covington covers his cup with his hand. “No, thanks, Frenchie. I got to run now.”
         “I’ll take the check,” L.J. says.
         L.J. opens the door to the humming streets, the chilling evening air that presses against the glass door. The two men shake hands.
         “Everything OK where you’re staying?” Covington asks.
         “Huh?”
         “Where you’re living. Is it decent?”
         He doesn’t know. “Oh, yeah. I’m cool. Just fine.”
         “All right, then,” Covington says. “I’ll be getting on. Sure wish you’d think about sitting in with us. It’d be a blast, man.”
         “Well, sometime, maybe. Hey, look. Thanks again. I sure appreciate your stopping by.”
         Covington’s eyes glow. “My pleasure, man.”
         After the two men walk away in opposite directions, L.J. turns to see the sprightly gait, the bouncing step, then turns away, humming the last tune they played.
         The sky is dark now, the streets quieter. No rain, good. There are even a couple of rare visible stars between the building tops as he looks over west by the river. He finds a bodega that sells microwaved lasagna for $2.95, and downs half a loaf of bread, sitting on the stoop of a West End brownstone. He walks an hour or more before he finds a bench in Riverside Park not already occupied. He stretches out on it, his jacket draped over his head, the horn case and his vinyl knapsack under his head and money bulging in his socks.
         Tomorrow, he’ll have to deal with it. Find out for sure.
         The bench is rock-hard. But he’s spent the whole day playing his horn and walking against the wind, so he sleeps like the dead man she probably believes he is.