Nanette Hayes: Rhode Island Red Part 3

I gave him five bucks and lifted off three of the wrist bands. Stiff Indian leather embossed with an eagle's head. The same ones Siggy was wearing.

"Let me help you," Mr. Smooth Salesman offered, expertly tying the bands on my wrists and all but copping a feel as he did so.

I took an even closer look at the bracelets. No doubt about it, these were the kind that Charlie Conlin had left on my kitchen table while he showered.

"Thanks a lot," I said innocently. "Now I want something else."

He grinned and pa.s.sed his hand over the table in a gesture of magnanimousness. "Just you tell me, sistah. What else you want today?"

"I want you to tell me if you had a skinny white guy buy a lot of these lately. He would have been carrying a saxophone case most likely. Long hair. Young."

He cast a glance over at the other man and then turned his eyes back to me.

"Come on, sistah," he said derisively, "why you want a white mon when you have me?"

"You're very good," I said, and I meant it, actually. "But I've got to catch a train. Do you know the man or not?"

"Know n.o.body," the second guy spoke up then, a frost in his voice like they don't often get down Jamaica way.

"Oh really?" I said pleasantly, a little frightened but brazening it out. "Well, I think maybe you do."

"No no," cutey protested, still good natured. "We don't know your mon, sistah."

"You know what else I think?" I replied.

"What?"

"You look like a liar, mon."

He smiled wickedly. I took a ten out of my wallet and placed it on the table.

The second guy just shook his head.

"Okay, fellas," I said with a sigh, "I've got to make a quick decision here. I've got three phrases running around in my head. And I don't know which one is going to get me my answer the fastest when I start screaming. So let me try all three of them out on you. Number one: rape! Number two: vendor's license. Number three: green card."

Salesman Two started for me at that moment, but the smoothie put up a staying hand. "Mon didn't buy them," he said to me, voice suddenly affectless. "We give them to him for being lookout when we work Penn Station. He hang with old dude name of Wild Bill. They hustle, same as us. Okay, sistah?"

"Just fine," I said.

"Sorry to see you go, Sweetart."

Later that afternoon, a commuter in a tan raincoat-of all people-led me out of the wilderness. Just before he turned into Penn Station, the man called out to a musician standing nearby, "How's it going, Wild Bill?" and pressed a couple of bucks into the guy's pocket.

Wild Bill was trumpeting something that might have been pretty and autumnal if weren't for the bitter hootiness in his tone. He reminded me of a mezzo past her prime, straining hideously for the same note that had once poured out of her throat like good vodka over ice.

The man who was playing looked, in fact, more like a clowned-out decoy at the rodeo than a jazz musician.

He wasn't young. But through the zigzags of white in his hair I could plainly see the remnants of flaming Malcolm X red. Poil de carotte, as we say in French.

The map of the colored man in America was written on his face. Yes, the black past was there, but there was something else.

I approached him in the same way I'd done with all the other musicians I'd interviewed during the day-walking up close to the person, listening attentively to his number, and then, without making too big a deal of it, leaving a donation in the hat or instrument case at the feet of the player. Then I leaned in casually and asked if by any chance he knew a white guy named Sig who blew alto.

Wild Bill laid his trumpet in its case, on top of my five. He straightened his dirty scarlet tie and checked his beaten up shoes for scuffs ... and adjusted his suit jacket and pinched the pleat in one greasy trouser leg. All without making a second's worth of eye contact with me.

I was beginning to feel like a housefly.

When I repeated my question about Sig, he deigned to acknowledge me. Wild Bill looked me up and down. But there was no hint of lasciviousness in his glance.

"I was wondering if you've seen Sig lately," I said politely.

"Yeah, I saw him ... Have you seen a beautician lately?"

Aha. So that was what I'd glimpsed in his face: he was mean.

When he was through cackling, he turned his head slightly, coughed and lit a cigarette.

I let him have that one. He knew Sig. I couldn't afford to unsheathe my rapier wit just now. Instead, I pressed on in the same pleasant tone. "When was it that you saw him, Wild Bill?"

"Two, three days," he offered. Like we were friends now.

"Wow," I said. "I've got a gig for him but I can't find him anywhere. Friend of mine wants him to play at his wedding. Any idea where his lady is ... uh ... whatshername?"

"Inge."

"Right, Inge. Know where she is? I could just give the message to her."

"'Message' is just about right, baby. You look like the mailman in those threads."

Okay, that made two. I've never been a baseball fan, but everybody knows, three strikes and you're dead.

Still, I remained calm and good humored. And in a few minutes-thank the baby Jesus-Wild Bill grew tired of me. And just told me straight out, in plain English, no more zaps, that I would find Siggy's girlfriend near the school on Twenty-sixth and Seventh.

The "school" was the Fashion Inst.i.tute of Technology.

The street was popping with activity: traffic bombing then crawling down Seventh Avenue, students resplendent in their downtown anti-fashion chic, luncheonette busboys in dirty ap.r.o.ns, wealthy ladies hailing cabs to all manner of late afternoon a.s.signations in Soho. And then there was Inge.

She was seated on an old camp stool, her appreciative little audience forming a semicircle about her. There was her hat. There was her sax. There were her dead blue eyes and her dirty blond hair. There was her big rust colored seeing eye dog ... Lord have mercy she was blind.

She was playing September Song. She was awful. But a white man was crying anyway. I waited out her set, trying to decide what to say to her. She treated us to a touchingly incompetent Lost in the Stars. Then she tackled Speak Low. And finished up, after that mini Kurt Weill festival, with a few pitiful riffs of Cherokee. d.a.m.n, thought I, life is strange.

The people dispersed and she began to feel her way through the take in her hat. In a minute she stopped, c.o.c.king her head in my direction. But she remained silent, the smallest little smile on her lips.

Finally I spoke up. "Inge?"

"Yes?"

Asked and answered. Now what was I going to say? I wasn't ready.

"You're Siggy's friend, aren't you?" I improvised.

At the mention of his name her hand went up to the top b.u.t.ton of her denim jacket. "Yes. Who's there?"

I was trying to pull some kind of semi-coherent lie together, but my mind wasn't turning over fast enough.

"Who's there?" she asked again. "Who is it?"

"My name is Ann. I-I'm a friend of Sig's."

"Where is he? Where's he been?"

There were freckles across the bridge of her nose. She became prettier the longer you looked at her. In fact she looked a little like Sig.

"Listen, Inge, I need to talk to you."

The dog at her feet seemed to look up expectantly at me. He was ma.s.sive and sad-looking, and when he got to his feet it was as if they hurt him.

"I need to talk to you alone. Can we go someplace private?" I asked.

She snorted, as if I'd said something funny. Maybe the whole world is private if you're blind.

"I live close," she said. Inge packed up quickly and then leaned down to give a gentle tug on the dog's kerchief. "Let's go home, Bruno. Good boy."

With every step, Bruno threatened to get himself tangled up in her legs-almost tripping her-but she walked on nimbly.

I followed her wordlessly through the streets, too embarra.s.sed to offer my arm at the crosswalk. The sax was plainly not this girl's calling. I wondered if she could sing, wondered if she had some kind of crazed Ray Charles fantasy working-hey, I'm soulful, I'm hip, I'm blind. Or maybe it was Sig who had that particular fantasy. Perhaps that had been part of his attraction to her. I flashed pruriently on the two of them making love, her willowy body moving under him, breath clogging, eyes staring at nothing. Well, maybe not at nothing; how did I know what she saw?

She lived in a brownstone between Sixth and Broadway. On the ground floor was a wholesale florist. We walked up a flight and then straight back to a plain, big, square of a room at the end of a hallway. Little furniture except a bed and chair and a plush little mattress for Bruno.

Inge kicked out of her high boots and lit a Newport 100.

"You're going to tell me bad news," she announced. "You're here to tell me something has happened to Sig."

The dog watched me carefully, seeming to wait for my reply before he settled his weight down onto the floorboards.

I gave up on the elaborate story I'd been working on. And merely said, "He's dead, Inge."

She moaned once and then fell silent. She smoked furiously for a minute.

"I knew it," she said by and by. "I knew it. The minute I heard your voice on the street. What happened?"

"He was murdered. It was-I mean, it looks as if it was a robbery gone wrong."

I waited for her tears-or something. But no-she went on puffing, biting into her bottom lip every now and then.

In a minute, she held the pack out to me. I took one gratefully, continuing to watch her face.

"What will you do?" I said after a few minutes.

"Nothing. I don't know. I didn't know him that long."

"Did you love him?"

She laughed abruptly. Then I saw the tears in the corners of her eyes.

"Inge, I feel terrible about what happened. Sig was in my ... neighborhood when it happened. I just know he'd want me to come and tell you about it. And to help-help you out in any way I could."

She sat down then. "What did you say your name was?" she said wearily. "Angela?"

"Ann."

"Um. So Sig told you about me?"

"That's right. The last time we met, he did."

"I don't remember Sig talking about you. You a musician too?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"I blow tenor. Not too good, though. Sig was helping me."

"Can I make you a cup of coffee?"

"Why don't you just rest. I'll get it," I said. "Just tell me where things are."

"Ann?"

"What?"

"You have a good voice."

"Thank you."

"You know what?" she said, sounding like a six year old.

"What?"

"I'm sleepy now."

Inge slept for a half hour or so. Bruno kept an eye on me as I drank my coffee and toured the poor room.

I didn't know much about blindness or blind people. I thought they all read best sellers in Braille. So I was surprised to find, in the rickety, badly painted little bookcase near the bathroom, a few paperbacks, a couple of public library books and several other texts and magazines-even a couple of flesh rags-all in normal print. I also spotted a couple of well worn steno pads with mindless doodles penciled on the front covers.

I picked up one of the library books. Days of Luxe: Luxury Liners on the Hudson Piers read the cover. The Irish of h.e.l.l's Kitchen, 19091969 read another.

I looked at a couple of the other t.i.tles: Life and Death on the New York Docks and A Complete History of the Stevedores Union.