Excerpts
It is the time of night when more people of the town pretend to sleep than sleep. Lights downstairs are off but glow from upstairs and back windows. Shades are drawn, kisses stolen on porches or in front seats of cars. The last of the day's newspapers are shuffled together, tucked in the trash. The faint smell of someone's barbecue hangs in the air. Down alleys and long driveways and in corners behind factories where it is so dark even the seeing are made blind, a few have given in to their restlessness and they linger, lighting cigarettes for each other, waiting to be old enough for the bars along Main Street. In a few minutes they'll meander in that direction, bored tonight by thoughts of starting dumpster fires, stealing car stereos, tossing park property into Waterworks Pond. They think about heading out of town, to someplace no one knows them, to other bars or other parks, but they have no car, the town closing in on them this way, holding them close like the heavy arms of a mother who won't let go.
Like those in their beds, they hear the music of the saxophone. Theodore Thompson plays in the attic of his mother's house, quietly, he thinks, so as not to disturb the neighbors.
The saxophone wails through the rafters, into the vacuous night. It is the cry of an animal trapped. It holds neighbors to its rhythms and they blink. They turn even further into the softness of pillows and lovers but cannot block out the sound of Theodore's horn.
Tonight Theodore plays blues. No one who hears him knows the music is not his; they believe the music is his gift to the town, and for this reason no one thanks him. They're afraid if he finds out he can be heard he might stop. His music has been with them fo so long they cannot imagine it ending. Yet Theodore grows old.
Almost no one can remember now what drove Theodore into the attic with his saxophone. Many do recall the boy with the horn, the boy in the high school band, the crepe paper ribbons, ruby red punch, the jitterbug -- a full scholarship and on to college he went, a suitcase and his saxophone. He kissed his girl goodbye as if going to war, was so convincing Contessa Butler thought she would never see him again. Six months later, his instrument still wrapped carefully in its case, he came home. By then she'd married someone else.
Some say it's for love that Theodore plays. They say the mournful overtures to the night are to her, the lost one. Others know better.
Mamie Van Allen raises her scotch in a late-afternoon toast with the dark-haird, dark-eyed man in the chair matching hers. It seems early, in this prolonged sunlight, to begin drinking. Winters it's black outside by now, darkness a thorough cover for the clatter of ice in fat glasses, for the quick click of toasts. She looks at her watch, seeks reassurance in its dial, hands marking seconds and minutes even when she's not peeking. The man is watching her, she sees, when she looks up.
"You're the Mystery Man, you know," she says.
He smiles, drops his head to shake it at the gray cement slab of the porch floor. "I'm no mystery man, ma'am," he says.
"Please," she says, words fast on the heels of his, "call me Mamie. 'Ma'am' makes me feel old. Nothing worse than feeling old when you are old."
"Then you'll call me by my name and not 'son,'" he says.
They nod their agreement and smile and lift their glasses to seal it. His faded jeans are frayed to white at the knees but hint at lean legs, and his pale blue tee shirt is stretched across a muscled chest. When he lifts his glass his arms flex and tighten around his developed shoulders. She is glad that even if she must suffer old age she can stil see, can still feel desire, can still imagine. She is glad for her scotch, tries not to wonder if he would have chosen to sit with her years ago when she had so much to offer. Or, she wonders, did I have less to offer, and that's why I spent those years alone?
He crosses running shoes so tattered they look as though they are bound together by the laces and necessity alone. "Eddy," he says. "Eddy Light Sky."
Eddy stands outside the motel door but even in a town this size, with not so many lights, even here it is hard to see the stars. Like the glint in someone's eye from across the room they wink at him and they are just as fickle, teasing him, waiting for him to flinch just once so they can vanish on him. He tries to hold their stare but can't. He wishes for a cigarette but he has given the pack away to the reverend. He wishes for sleep but he has maybe given that away too, to Crescent, the girl with the legs and the dreams that should stay in her sleep.
He strolls into the parking lot, away from the lights next to the doorways that welcome no one, but the stars get no brighter, no closer. From here there was no saxophone tonight, the stretching of the town out this way to the highway too far for it, and he misses it. He wonders if this could be why he hasn't been able to sleep.
Maybe it's not the girl and her invitations at all. Maybe it's not the visions that keep coming back of the man on the cement factory floor, of the blood someone had to mop up when everyone else had gone away. Maybe it's not the reverend with his odd way of not wanting to really be a reverend. Myabe it's not the wish for a cold, cold beer like the sign in the carry-out across the road keeps saying to him.
He walks to the cyclone fence around the pool that sits unfilled. No one, they've told him, every uses it so why fill it? He climbs the fence, unstacks one of the plastic chairs and sets it near the edge of the deep end. Slumping into it, he stretches his legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankles.
Maybe it's not the burial pit or the dozen or more bodies that must have been buried there, long ago, paid the proper respects and now brushed and posed and photographed like prized dogs for a judging or a Miss America in all her bathing-suit empty-smile glory.
Maybe it's not any of that. Maybe it's the silence, even the trucks along Route 20 stopping in for the night, the birds nestled in, the crickets and locusts and train whistles done until dawn. Maybe it's the silence, the sound without the horn, without the soul of the man who sings to the town his joy and fear and sadness. Just the silence.
