Full Spectrum 3 Part 49

I glanced back at the table; the Queen of Night's consorts were tall and gaunt junkys in tight-fitting penguin suits, with expressions that spoke of heaven or the morgue, rictuses of joy. The Queen of Night caught my attention again, and would not let go. I liquesced in her gaze, her gaze, which said, come to my place, your music is lovely but it could be even better, you're better than your companions, you could be vamping, and I looked back at her, and she must have detected some resistance, because she said, yes, I have a bordello, and my bordello has many rooms... be my lover, and I'll cradle you in my beautiful b.r.e.a.s.t.s, give you money or anything else you need, and you will be worthy to sit in on the best, most secret music- And the spell was broken; boy, was the spell broken.

Dutchman walked over to the Queen of Night's table, and threw a drink at her, and said, get out of the club, get out now.

Then one of the Queen of Night's consorts said words, and Dutchman replied that they weren't the only ones in New York with some connections. No one's lips moved, but I heard the dialogue, and I'm sure anyone within ten feet could hear it. All of this happened quickly, so very quickly -the pianist and drummer had begun to really wail as Dutchman had gotten up. And the Queen of Night rose; she held no rancor, was dispa.s.sionate, as if the Dutchman had beaten her fairly in a game of croquet. But the Queen of Night had a grave dignity. Before the audience was hip to what had gone down, the Queen of Night and her consorts were departed.

After the final set, while having a final round at the bar, Dutchman turned to me: "You're moving in with me."

"What did you say?"

"Wipe the drool from your mouth, and don't get any delusions-it'll be the couch for you; it's just that I might have p.i.s.sed the Queen of Night off; it might be a good temporary measure, protection."

"Chango wasn't so protected at your place." She frowned as I recounted Raj'neej's Indian vampire lore, and his visit to the Queen of Night's. And how it tied in with my having seen the very phantom dress the Queen of Night wore, seen it, not once, but twice. And about the phantom smells.

"I think he'd be safe now." She headed for the Ladies'.

I stared at her: "What? How?"

She didn't hear. "Might be an idea: get him a sleeping bag."

Chango didn't make the Potato Head scene after that, so I had not only the couch but the whole Dutchman living room to myself.

Two weeks later, we heard from Raj'neej that Chango Chingamadre had flipped out, jumped out of the cab suddenly when they were on their way to meet Miles m.u.t.h.af.u.c.king Davis. That he'd run into the traffic screaming about secret music and been hit by a Mack truck.

Again, I smelled the phantom perfume, glimpsed the phantom skirt, heard the opening and closing door and the secret music... but only as a memory. And, after all, I was beginning to tell myself, that was just superst.i.tion and hysteria rearing their uncool heads.

And it wouldn't bring Chango Chingamadre back to us.

n.o.body could afford to do a decent burial. Besides, his old lady is in potter's field.

We Three Were Three No More.

The Dutchman moved to Sausalito, north of San Francisco. She owns three restaurants and lives on a houseboat with two Korat cats and a seismologist who's also a licensed therapist specializing in tarot therapies and future-life regressions. In her spare time, the Dutchman also supervises a rape crisis hotline.

I, M.E., I live in Los Angeles, which is kinder to my arthritis than New York. I write film scores, which is a living, a very good one. I got an Oscar nomination five years ago. I'm not holding my breath waiting for another.

If I'm North, then we do pasta. If she's South, we do sushi.

I tell her how remarkably young she looks; it's not a line. And she talks about plastic surgery, and I don't know whether I believe her, because she has the beginnings of a secretive grin on her face. But no laugh lines. And we talk. Dutchman even talks about Chango (and, at times, we take turns weeping for him), but she refuses to discuss the Queen of Night.

Once we talked about a tombstone, which we could afford to go half-sies on. It would read: "Here Bops 'Chango Chingamadre," The Monkey m.u.t.h.af.u.c.kah Of Thems As All."

There was a problem. We had never learned his real name.

I ran into Raj'neej during a Playboy Jazz Festival... and he couldn't recollect Chingamadre's name either. He did recall how Chango OD'ed at the Dutchman's. And how he found a strange lady crouched over Chango. And how when she faced him, he only saw green animal eyes. And that she'd itsplayed, walked through a wall, and he figured it was the reefer he'd just smoked.

I then told Raj'neej what I'd seen that night, and the next.

"Maybe." Raj'neej folded his hands. "Maybe Chango's dead old lady came for him, maybe she needed him more than we did. Or the Vetala claimed him. Or maybe we had what the French call a group delusion." Raj'neej unfolded his hands, reached for his wine gla.s.s. "But maybe not." He downed the Chablis in one gulp. "Have I ever told you about the '63 Newport Jazz Festival?"

"No, but we haven't seen each other since '62."

"Has it been that long... ? Well, I was producing a live alb.u.m; we were recording everyone. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Mingus, Ella, Max Roach, Carmen McRae. And this act shows up-I'd forgotten who sponsored them-called the New Queen of Night, and these guys were dead ringers for the house band at the old Queen of Night's...only, if they were the same cats, they had not aged a day. When they played, it was like the Re-Birth of the Cool, they had the audience and all of us backstage eating out of their hands... nothing 'secret' about that music-I tried to catch them after the set, I had an A & R gig for Blue Note, too. So I ran out to the back parking lot to offer them a record contract, and they were tearing out of there in a black hea.r.s.e. Then later the recording engineer played the tape back, and all we heard was a faint sound, like the secret music c.r.a.p Chango raved about, like what I heard at the Queen of Night's. Only there was some percussion, not quite so faint, a clave beat. It was Chango. But no matter how that engineer twiddled those pan pots, the notes stayed faint, became a secret music again. It all made me think of old Bela Lugosi's Dracula and how he never cast a reflection in a mirror."

I slouched, felt drained by all the emotions Raj'neej had summoned. But I wanted to hear that music, hear Chango. "You still have the master?"

Raj'neej shook his head. "My engineer, he'd been a junky, but cleaned himself up, like you. He fell apart. Police found him OD'ed in Central Park, they found him by following the trail of master tape he left. I had another copy, but I erased it. Then threw the blank tape away."

Raj'neej recounted every ghost story he'd ever heard, in India and, later, in Wales. On through the night, and into the cold eye of noon.

But he could not remember Chango's real name.

So Chango it was, and Chango it shall be. But what about his grave, what about a proper marker?

Well, to h.e.l.l with the Queen of Night, when Gabriel plays his secret music on his horn I'll have it put on my tombstone: Here Bop We Three: Chango Chingamadre, Dutchman, & M.E.

Apartheid, Superstrings, and Mordecai Thubana.

MICHAEL BISHOP.

THE TRANSVAAL, 1988.

A.

N ELEPHANT blossomed in his headlamps. At two-thirty in the morning, on the highveld between Pretoria and the northeastern Transvaal, a doddering bull elephant-which had not been there-suddenly was there; and Gerrit Myburgh, a thirty-eight-year-old banker, knew that his imported cranberry Cadillac was going to hit it.

As hard as he could, Myburgh began braking.

The Cadillac, hydroplaning on his astonishment, slid into the elephant. Its rusks flashed like scimitars. Gla.s.s shattered. A bewildered, trumpeting bleat echoed over the landscape, and so much plastic, chrome, and steel crumpled around Myburgh that he knew the world had ended.

Well, fine. He was already in his coffin, the flashiest coffin a success-driven Afrikaner could ever want.

Eventually, Myburgh untangled himself, crawled through a broken window, and got to his feet on the debris-strewn asphalt.

It was July, the torso of winter, as clammy-cold as it ever got in this part of the highveld, and his tailored suit was a drafty ruin. His forehead was bleeding, there were bruises on his upper thighs, his left shoe had disappeared. Traffic on this stretch of roadway was seldom heavy, and at this hour his hopes for a quick rescue were laughable.

Myburgh turned about, searching for the elephant. "I hope you're happy!" he shouted in Afrikaans, his words muting themselves in the drizzle. "You've turned my car into a pile of G.o.dd.a.m.ned slag!" Even worse, he realized, his insurance a.s.sessor would never believe that he had hit... an elephant.

What the h.e.l.l was happening? There weren't any elephants in this part of South Africa. You had to go to a national park to see them. Out here, where a few bittereinder Boers resisted both state and corporate attempts to buy their land (the government to feed it into black "closer settlements," industry to turn it into another hideous factory site), wildlife consisted of stray chickens, stray dogs, stray cattle.

But he had run into it, an elephant. Surely, it had suffered as much damage as-if not more than-the Eldorado. He had heard it bellow its agony. Still, it had managed to totter away from the accident scene. Even when he made a painful circuit of his Caddy, stooping to search for blood or other spoor, nothing on the paving or in the nearby bush rea.s.sured him that what he knew had happened had actually happened.

At least it wasn't pink, Myburgh thought. At least the d.a.m.ned thing wasn't flying, like Dumbo.

The elephant may have been a phantom, but the gash on his head was real. So were his battered thighs, his lacerated jacket, his blood-smeared trousers. He stood like a scarecrow in the center of the road, guarding the wrecked vehicle and peering about for some sign of a farmhouse, a police van, or a besotted Ndebele tramp who could be bribed to help him.

He took a monogrammed handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and touched his brow. This simple act made him flinch, but he held the handkerchief to the wound, determined both to halt the bleeding and to restore some clarity to his thoughts.

Should he walk back toward his brother's farm or on toward the Pretoria suburb in which he had a condominium flat? Onward, of course. Nothing but wintry veld lay behind him, whereas a hike southwestward would carry him into populated areas, white or black, where he could buy or beg a.s.sistance.

G.o.d help me, Myburgh thought, calculating-for a quick glance at the mileage counter on the Eldorado's caved-in dashboard told him that Pretoria was still eighty miles away. It would take him days to walk home. He felt too weak to start hiking.

Holding his handkerchief to his temple, Gerrit Myburgh began to cry. He sat down on the wet pavement and hugged himself as if he were his own lost child.

He heard it before he saw it, a raw chugging from the alley of Boer farmland dividing the eastern boundary of KwaNdebele from the western boundary of Bophuthatswana.

It was coming down the road toward him, a blunt-grilled Putco "commuter" bus, one of the armada of state-subsidized motorized argosies that hauled residents of the homelands to and from work in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Witbank, and Middleburg. They ran morning and evening, Myburgh knew, but he was surprised to hear one coming so early. It wasn't yet three o'clock, and surely no one would be riding at this G.o.dforsaken hour. Myburgh himself usually arose at seven-thirty, took a leisurely Continental breakfast, and got to the bank by nine. It was an accident that he was still up tonight, the result of his journey to see Kiewit and of his mulish brother's mulish disdain for reason. Otherwise, he'd be safe in his bed in Pretoria.

Myburgh got up off the road, spread his arms, and began waving his clotted handkerchief. Then, seeing that the bus would have to stop or slow down for the wreck of his Caddy, he realized that maybe he didn't want to be rescued-not by a bus full of kaffirs on their way to grinding dead-end jobs paying them just enough to get potted in a shebeen and to listen in ale-beclouded sullenness to rabble-rousing ANC shortwave broadcasts from Lusaka, Zambia. No, he didn't want that at all.

But just as it had been too late to brake for the elephant, it was too late to sidestep the bus. Its wan headlamps picked him out of the darkness, and it squealed to an eardrum-puncturing halt a few meters away, then rocked back and forth on its shocks like a melancholy elephant. Its driver remained invisible, hidden by the tocking blade of a lone windshield wiper and the fuzzy glare of the headlamps.

All right, then. He'd a.s.sert himself. He'd force the pathetic kaffirs to help him.

Myburgh limped over to the bus's door. The bus itself, he saw, was painted a chalky blue. A legend in English on its dented flank read grim boy's toe. That, Myburgh supposed, was its name-the way wealthy tyc.o.o.ns named their yachts. Whether Grim Boy's Toe carried a full allotment of pa.s.sengers, he couldn't tell, for the bus's windows were smeared with dried mud and its rear third tailed off into mist and darkness.

The hinged pa.s.senger door creaked open. Myburgh peered up and in. He saw-in the wash of a single bulb in a crimson globe-that the bus's driver was a heavyset African with a face etched of ruby shadows. The driver gazed impudently out, as if Myburgh meant less to him than a crippled plowhorse.

Myburgh began to regret not jumping into the roadside donga and cowering there until the bus had chugged on by. Its pa.s.sengers, he suddenly understood, could kill him with impunity, bludgeoning him to a ruddy paste and sticking his body under the collapsed steering column as if he'd died in the accident.

"Go find me help," he said in English, expanding his chest even as he took a half step back. (Afrikaans, his own tongue, wouldn't do-he didn't trust it here.) The insolent driver merely stared at him.

"Get me help!" Myburgh shouted. "Understand?"

At this, the driver's eyes widened-in astonishment, it seemed, to Myburgh. He leaned toward the door, as if to make sure that his eyes weren't playing tricks.

"Didn't you hear me?" Myburgh said. "Find me help."

"No can do, nkosi."

"Of course you can. Can't you see I've had an accident? Can't you see" -blotting his forehead-"I've been hurt?"

"Nkosi, number 496 has run late three times this week. I can't afford to run late again. There are men in Tweefontein E and other closer settlements who'd kill for my job."

"Why do you run late? Are you a bad driver?"

The driver glanced at Myburgh's wrecked Caddy. "I do as well as many," he said. His expression grew conspiratorily earnest. "A blowout one night, sir. Two nights later, a dope-fiend trucker ran me off the road. And last night-with all the unexpected rain, you see-well, we got stuck."

"Look," Myburgh said, feeling both exposed and ridiculous, "I'm in trouble."

"Yes, and I will help you. But not by going off my route. No, sir. You must climb aboard and ride into Belle Ombre station with the rest of my pa.s.sengers."

"How long will that take?" Belle Ombre was in the Marabastad neighborhood of Pretoria, once an Indian enclave.

"Three hours. No. Two hours, forty-five minutes."

"That's absurd. You ought to be able to make it in an hour and a half. Two at the most."

The driver laughed, shrugging his bearish shoulders and holding out his hands to indicate the ramshackle condition of number 496. "Not possible, my baas. We have more pickups and a Putco checkoff still to do. Really."

"Don't you have a two-way?"

"No, nkosi. And no landing gear, either."

Myburgh heard laughter-not obnoxious or general laughter, but the weary guffaws of a few riders near enough to overhear.

"Take me to the Putco checkoff." He gritted his teeth against their amus.e.m.e.nt. "Somebody there will help me."

"Maybe. Not to get your car towed, though. You should go all the way into Pretoria with us."

Myburgh considered. "Very well-let me on." He climbed aboard and turned to limp down the aisle.

The driver put out a hand. "My name is Ernest Kabini, nkosi. Sorry to say so, but you must pay."

"Pay?" Should he also introduce himself, as Kabini had just done? d.a.m.ned if he'd do it.

"Your fare. Everyone must pay, you know. Sixty cents to town, sixty cents back."

"Sixty cents?"

Kabini hesitated. "Half a rand, okay? Ten cents off. Putco doesn't want to screw a fellow down on his luck."

Myburgh dug into his pocket and handed over the fare-the full fare. He was a paying pa.s.senger on number 496. He turned again to face the kaffirs with whom he was going to be riding for the next three hours and found himself staring as into an immense shotgun bore that seemed to extend all the way to the Transvaal's border with Zimbabwe. The faces peering back were devoid of distinctiveness or personality-like a grainy group photograph of skin-headed National Defense Force recruits. A bulb in a green globe threw sickly khaki shadows over the bodies slumped in the bus's middle rows, while, at the back, a bulb in a yellow globe jaundiced the half-dozen riders napping beneath its pale sheen.

If h.e.l.l had bus service, Myburgh told himself, this is what the inside of one of its buses would look like. He grabbed a seat back for support and silently cursed the inconsiderate elephant that had brought him here.

At this point on its route, Myburgh could have chosen any of a number of seats behind Kabini, but, more angry than grateful, he limped down the center aisle.

His wet sock slapped the metal floor. The twelve to fifteen riders inhabiting the bus seemed to shift from one seat to another without getting up and physically moving.

Meanwhile, Grim Boy's Toe leapt into gear and growled around the abstract sculpture of his Eldorado. Myburgh stumbled, caught himself, shakily tottered on.

You've had a blow to the head, he reminded himself. It's not so unusual that you should be seeing things.

But it was troubling. Why wouldn't these seat-hopping kaffirs settle down? No, that was wrong. Why wouldn't his dizziness go away so that he could see things as they really were?

He stopped again. The black faces watching him were no longer popping up in different seats with the same annoying frequency. Maybe he was beginning to get a grip on himself. Maybe the world-or this incapsulated portion of it-was finally beginning to come into focus.