John D. MacDonald

Enough to Cure the Blues

The way we got booked into Sarasota, you could laugh about it or cry. The outfit is called Three Beats and a Belle, a name I think we could do without. But Cuddis, who books us, likes it extremely, mostly because he made it up. I’m Harry, on piano. There’s Lew on bass, a nervous, dark, wispy little guy. And there’s Buck on the horn, very fine horn indeed. He’s a big type who looks Princeton, about the fifth reunion bracket, but isn’t. We’re the Three Beats. The Belle is Vicky, 5-foot-5, hair like black ink, dimensions like those you read about after they’ve elected a Miss Potato Crop, or a Miss Extruded Plastic.

What Vicky does, she sings in a raspy little voice which I find pleasing because it’s a true voice, and the timing is there. Too many times I hear big rich voices with as many flats as old trolley wheels, and about as much timing as a cracked distributor.

About this Sarasota thing, we’d been booked in Miami, at the Carralonne on the Beach until February last, and then it was roar across state in the wagon to hit the opening of a new club on Lido Key called — honestly — The Inside Track.

We got across to Sarasota on schedule and found the men in black rubber raincoats still wetting down the ashes of The Inside Track. I’m good old Harry, house mother. I drive the wagon. I deal with management. I deal with Cuddis. I spread salve on all bruised personalities. Also I get the horse share of work on account of in many places they want piano alone for the cocktail kick, and the whole group at night.

We moved into the motel the owners of The Inside Track had lined up. Vicki, of course, gets her own room. I bunk in with Buck. Lew sleeps alone because, though a very small guy, he has a snore like bowling with square balls.

Cuddis, highly distressed, said on the phone he would check around and call back. It took him a whole day to get us lined up in a Tamiami Trail trap called The Flying Gull, on a one-week-at-a-time contract for half the money. He said it was purely a stop-gap.

Somebody had shot that gull in mid-air. It was the sort of place which, even though it hasn’t got one, you always remember as having had a dirt floor. A little stand with tired crepe paper and weary tinsel. A beer-nursing clientele. Brass-throated waitresses and half a ball bat behind the bar. Also, I might add, the piano wasn’t exactly the kind Liberace lights candles on.

I looked it over alone and went back, slightly on the moody side, to report to the others. It was like stepping into the past. Like three years ago in Chicago, we worked that class of joint. Not Vicky, just Buck, Lew and me. Vicky is within the last year.

I painted it black, and that night we opened. Vicky looked around at the place as though she was holding it out at arm’s length, by one corner. I knew I would have no trouble with Lew. Away from his bass he is a pretty bleached-out personality. Three words in a row is a long chatter. Give him gin, board, room and Molly — which is what he calls the blond bass fiddle — and nothing can roil him.

With Vicky, I didn’t expect much trouble. She’s a very nice girl. (There are many very nice girls in the business; it’s only the clowns who give the canary trade a bad name.) Vicky’s nice in the morning-glass-of-milk, money-home-to-Mother meaning of the word. I picked her up after she won a TV deal, and by then we had it made, so this earthy-type bistro was a serious shock to her.

But she’s a workman. In our production numbers, like the ersatz Spanish deals, she wags around clacking sticks and shaking gourds among other things. Even with the wolf yelps and leers, I did not anticipate trouble with her. And I was right, because even if she was working at the bottom of a tar pit and it was working near Buck, it would not be too sticky for her — on account of the torch.

It’s not a torch she carries where you can see her wave it around. It’s a torch she keeps in her cellar. And not a feeble light, either. It’s maybe 10 thousand candle power. Once in a while she leaves the cellar door ajar and then, for a fraction of a second, like when she looks at Buck and he’s not looking, it could blind you. As is most always the case, Buck wouldn’t see it if she flung it in his face.

I knew I’d have trouble with Buck. The surroundings would make old memories sharper.

It was like this. There was a girl. Also a canary but this one was not as nice, and her name was Reena, and she and Buck had an understanding. There was another horn, and his name was Jack Bryce. On old disks you can still hear him. Gaudy, rough, mellow — a horn that makes the backs of your hands prickle, and shoots golden bullets through your head. A better horn than Buck’s. Not much, but enough.

It happened four years ago. Jack and Reena took off together. They had to take off, because if they’d tried to stay, Buck would have killed him. He had a bad case of Reena. Jack fell off the edge of the world. Buck couldn’t trace him. Buck played drunk horn for a year. And despite rumors to the contrary, drunk horn is bad horn mostly.

I formed the trio, then, three years back. Buck never failed to ask any musician about Jack Bryce, and Reena. But as I said, they had fallen off some place. Buck was cured of the bottle, and he was cured of his yen for Reena, but not of his one-track determination to find them and bust Jack’s head in.

Buck began to play more horn than ever before. He had chances to leave the group. But most of them would have meant a steady stand. And with us he could keep roaming. He had the idea that some place, sometime, he would run into the pair of them.

I expected trouble from Buck and I was right. But, believe me, it was the right kind of trouble. This is the only way I can explain it. Take a joint like The Flying Gull, outside Sarasota. Fill it with a great big group of amateur and professional girl-watchers. Then put our Vicky, who is without flaw, in something as well-fitting as a coat of varnish. And then have Buck come up with so much horn that they’d rather hear him than watch her. It’s the truth.

He rode it way out there into the lost places of the human heart. All the bittersweet and the sadness. He leaned on the old ones: “Body and Soul.” “Penthouse Serenade.” “Talk of the Town.” “Sophisticated Lady.”

Listen, sometimes those notes would come out like those little balls of mercury you held in your hand the time you were sick and the thermometer broke and your mother let you have the escaped silver in a dish.

Sometimes the notes were brass claws, closing on your heart. Sometimes the sound came with banners waving, proudly, but a parade that walked the edge of nightmare.

We let him have his head. That first night and the next and the next. The place was packed. Buck began to pull in the good trade. A lot of it. You might think that I might think that he was wasting all that horn on that place, at those prices. But with musicians it doesn’t work like that. It comes to you and you have to give it out. No matter where. Even a sodden hotel room with a towel stuffed in the bell of the horn and no fee at all. Music for free. Buck was singing about how the good times had gone. Vicky stood to the side, with a breathless look about her, and she watched him with all her heart and all her longing in her eyes. That cellar door was wide open, but Buck’s eyes were shut. The only breaks Lew and I took were to give Buck a chance to breathe and brace before hitting it again.

Once in a great while you get it like that. I can remember only three times in my life. A weekend in St. Louis. Four nights in New York on the old 52nd Street, before the street was turned into a dirty post card. And Buck in The Flying Gull. Each time it was horn. Funny why that should be. Maybe a horn plays closer to the raw notes of the human heart in both ecstasy and agony.

It happened on the fourth night at The Flying Gull. I was chording a background for him, anticipating the key changes. Lew was right with it. I could faintly hear Vicky humming a dusky counterpoint to the fine horn. It was quarter of two in the morning. The piece was old: “One Hour Tonight.” And Buck was putting things in it that had never been there before. The crowd had slimmed out. The ones that were left listened, looking into their drinks, thinking of old times and old faces.

Buck ended it in the middle of a phrase, with a shocking, brutal blatt that tore everybody’s nerves. It jolted my fingers right off the keys. Lew’s hands froze on the bass. We turned and stared at Buck and then looked where he was looking.

I saw the man at the bar. I hadn’t seen him come in. He was looking at Buck and Buck was staring back at him. It was hard to recognize him, but I finally did. Jack Bryce, wearing rumpled khaki pants. Life had broken his face and his eyes and his heart. Four years had added 15.

They stared at each other. It was late and everybody sensed the tension. It was so quiet I could hear the trucks droning down the trail.

A drunk said angrily, “Whassa matter witha music?”

“Shut up!” somebody else muttered at him.

Jack Bryce pushed himself away from the bar, turned with a little difficulty and came directly toward the stand. I heard his blue canvas shoes slapping on the worn floor. He walked directly toward Buck. He grunted as he stepped up onto the stand. I didn’t know what was going to happen and yet I couldn’t break out of the freeze.

Jack stopped in front of Buck and held his hand out. “Let me play one, Buck?” he said hoarsely.

Buck stared at him as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. Then, slowly, he gave him the horn. Jack turned around, fingering the valves. He turned toward me. “ ‘Tea for Two,’ Harry,” he said in a low husky voice.

I gave him an eight-bar intro, and he didn’t come in, so I gave him eight more bars. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that he had the horn to his lips.

Maybe I’ve been to too many movies. Maybe those Hollywood types have set me up too often for the warm glow. You know what I mean. Ruined musician comes into Hungarian restaurant, borrows gypsy violin, plays his new concerto for violin that has him back at the top before you can say Darryl Zanuck.

He took it after the second intro. Ever live across a street from a kid who has just taken up the horn? Torture, man. The kid has no lip. And Jack’s lip was gone. A dissonant and hideous squawking. But the kid bores through to the very end. Jack could hear himself. He quit after five notes. He just opened his hand and let the horn fall and bounce. He went off the stand. He nearly fell, but caught himself and got to the door and went out.

Vicky got to the horn and picked it up. She handed it to Buck. He worked the valves. He looked at a new dent in the bell. He wiped off the mouthpiece. If there was any expression on his face at all, it was a faintly puzzled look. If Iron-Pan Hogan should ever completely whiff a tee shot, he might wear that same look.

Buck played a fast test scale. Vicky stood near him, looking down into his face. For the first time Buck had a chance to really look down those cellar stairs and see that bright hot light that shone there for him. That night, life had handed him his revenge without him raising a finger, so he didn’t have the other thing on his mind any more. Now he could look at Vicky.

The cash trade was beginning to mumble. I started with two handfuls of nothing, and Lew picked up the beat, and I faked and then pulled it into an intro to that old Goodman theme, “Good-by.”

Buck put the horn on it. I took a glance. Vicky stood with her hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her as he played. He was playing “Good-by” and his eyes were saying hello.

It was good horn. It was good, competent, unmagical horn.

Lew and I talked about it this morning over four a.m. coffee. I mean I talked and he grunted in the right places. We agreed that maybe Buck will never play as much horn as he did those nights when he was summoning the ghost of Jack Bryce in out of the Florida night. So in that sense something is lost.

But it is still a fine fat horn, a very good horn, and something else has indeed been gained. They don’t pop up with a Vicky every day. And you can’t go out and find one. You just have to be lucky enough to have one come along.

And you see, I’d never let her see even one small glimmer of the torch I’d been carrying that year.

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John D. MacDonald
Enough to Cure the Blues