Cahokia jazz, p.16
Cahokia Jazz, page 16
When a takouma shopgirl of ridiculous beauty came to let him in, he reached with a sticky hand for his wallet and the Man’s card: but he underestimated the training of those who deal with the very rich. She was appalled, and she did take half a step back, but she smiled at him evenly.
‘Detective Barrow?’ she said. ‘Madame is expecting you. If you’d like to follow Angélique here, they are having drinks upstairs before the lecture.’
An equally exquisite girl, only this time taklousa, led him up two flights of stairs, he feeling with each step filthier and more out of place. At the top, an open door led into a long, bare wood-floored room where chairs were set out in rows facing a lectern, and a small crowd was milling about in conversation with wine glasses in their hands.
‘Now if you will just wait right there,’ said Angélique, in a voice in which Paris and New Orleans blended prettily, ‘I will fetch Madame.’ And she patted, not his verminous skin, but the air two inches above his hand.
But the Moon, who had been talking in a group among which Barrow recognised only the cat-eyed Mickey Casqui, had already noticed him, and came out to them, frowning. He almost didn’t know her. The hollow eyes were rimmed with kohl and now looked huge and lustrous, the skull-mask of a face had been smoothed into something slenderly perfect. The expensively minimal crop had been teased at brow and cheek into sleek tendrils that, yes, wrote lunar curves onto her skin in reverse. Her dress was plain and fabulous black. She had a necklace of rock-crystal chunks alternating with spheres of slate, and up each arm, all the way to the elbow, she was armoured in bracelets, organised ivory-jet-glass, ivory-jet-glass. White-black-clear.
‘Mr Barrow,’ she said. ‘Are you intact?’
‘Miss Hashi,’ he said. ‘More or less.’
‘I can see you’ve been having an interesting afternoon.’
‘I’m sorry about … this,’ he said, indicating his face. ‘Not really in a fit state for company.’
‘You could certainly do with a little cleaning up. Come into the atelier, there’s a first-aid box. And that shirt is done for. The shops should still be open – Angélique, just go out for me, would you, and buy a man’s shirt. What size?’
‘Eighteen collar,’ said Barrow, ‘but—’
‘This way.’
Heads turned curiously. Just inside the lecture hall, a further door opened into a workshop as practical as the showroom downstairs was not. Long benches with sewing machines, racks of fabric, dummies draped with half-finished garments. Steel industrial lights on cables that, when she flicked them on, sent down cones of unremitting brightness good for exact close-up work. A man followed them in, and stationed himself by the door: the bodyguard Barrow had seen at the house, he thought when he peered at him, only without his tommy gun.
‘Right, get rid of the shirt, and you had better just put your head under the faucet in the sink and rinse the worst off, so we can see what the damage is.’
He undid the buttons of the spoiled shirt, trying not to remember the similarity to the slicked and clagged heaviness of the fabric Fred Hopper had bled into, nor the puddle of corruption in the house by the Bridge, nor the salty red walls of the slaughterhouse, and failed at all three. Blood, blood, and more blood. The undershirt, nearly as sodden, was hard to manoeuvre over his head without touching the wound, and in the end he just pulled hard and got the friction over with in one burst of pain. On the same principle, he leaned straight into the flow of cold water and let it do its worst. Clots and rusty scales came off onto the white enamel along with the lacings of fresh scarlet, and he felt the icy tongue of the water flickering through the raw inner flesh of the gash.
He surfaced and Couma Hashi handed him a towel. She had fetched a case with a red cross on it, and put on a high-necked apron. She removed her bracelets in two orderly stacks, one for each arm.
‘Sit down on a stool, or I won’t be able to reach.’
‘You’ll mess up your outfit.’
‘No, I won’t. Sit down, Mr Barrow – there, under the light.’
He sat, with the towel, already quite bloody, wrapped around his waist. She considered him half-naked: not as if he were something she wanted to touch, but with a more distant appreciation, as if he were something delightful far off. Or perhaps it was nostalgia in her gaze, as if he were something that she had lost, and still missed sometimes.
‘Hmm,’ she said, and sorting through the case picked out gauze, swabs, cotton balls, iodine, a little kidney-shaped dish. She washed her hands thoroughly. She poured iodine into the dish. Then she used her left hand – long fingers spread as if spanning a melon – to hold his head still, and with the other dipped a swab in iodine.
‘This will hurt,’ she said. ‘But then, in my opinion, almost everything real does.’
She started to clean out the wound, making neat, sure, completely unflinching strokes to paint the iodine deep into the slash: and it did, indeed, hurt, both from the chemical burn of the antiseptic and the mere touch on the skinned meat of his forehead. His eyes ran. The intent face of Couma Hashi wavered and blurred.
‘That’s a very gloomy philosophy,’ he said, for something to say.
‘True, though, don’t you find? Love hurts. Loss hurts. Failure hurts. Success hurts. Responsibility hurts.’
‘… Music doesn’t hurt.’
‘Doesn’t it? When you take it seriously?’
Barrow thought about it. Effort, yes; heartbreak, sometimes; frustration, often; the dive back to the ground again, inevitably, after any spell in which you managed to fly. And the woe the blues was made on. But then that was changed by being uttered.
‘No. Not always.’
‘Mm? Lucky man. Now – I’m afraid you’re going to need stitches in this. The cut goes right through your eyebrow and it’s pulling apart.’
‘I better go, then.’
‘Maybe not, Mr Barrow. Look around. This is a couture house. Sewing is something we specialise in. I could do it for you right now, if you would trust me. Of course, it will—’
‘—hurt. Yes. All right, then.’
She nodded, and went to fetch a length of black silk thread and a fine needle. The bodyguard struck her a match to sterilise it. He was looking at Barrow with an expression that he couldn’t read. Through the wall came the continuing hubbub of the party. A little pyramid of used swabs and cotton balls stood in the dish, yellow and red. She came back. Her hands swam towards him with the bright sharp spark of the needle glinting in them.
‘Don’t look at my hands,’ she said. ‘Look at my face. Or better yet close your eyes.’
‘I’d rather look at your face.’
‘Would you.’ She threaded the needle. Her eyes were huge, and intent. He had still not seen her smile. She put her left hand back on his head to brace it, fingers still a cool arch, but with a different grip to press the sides of the split flesh together.
‘Tell me a story,’ he said.
‘What story?’ she asked, unsurprised.
‘The story of Thrown-Away Boy?’
‘Very well. Listen to this, then, Joe Barrow. Once, in the very-long-ago, not long after the world was made …’ And she drove the point of the needle deep into good tissue to the side of the gash, pushed it through the raw pulp where the knife had gone in, and into the flesh on the other side, tender as an oyster, and pulled the thread after it, cutting and dragging, as huge-seeming as a hawser in a trench.
All the way through the story that followed, Barrow felt himself to be in two places. One was the indoor place of bright light and fine, fine pains, where his skin was being drawn together like especially soft and tearable leather; and the other, which was not an escape from it, and even seemed to borrow the inescapable piercing of being sewn, was some outdoor space, some mist-shrouded riverbank very-long-ago.
Once, not long after the world was made, the hunter Kanati lived with his wife Selu on Looking-Glass Mountain. She gave birth to a baby boy, and they named him Lodge Boy, because they always took great care of him, and watched over him as he played near the cabin. The afterbirth, they threw away into the river, as was traditional. But as Lodge Boy grew older, his parents sometimes thought they heard two voices when he was playing on the riverbank. And spying through the leaves, Kanati saw another child beside Lodge Boy, bright-eyed and dirty, wearing clothes made of feathers. ‘Who is that, that you play with?’ Kanati and Selu asked Lodge Boy when they were eating that night. ‘He says he is my older brother,’ Lodge Boy replied, ‘but you threw him away into the river.’ So Kanati laid a trap the next day and jumped out and seized the strange child. He was hard to hold, for he had magical powers, and could turn himself into many things, but Kanati gripped him tight, and in the end took him home to the cabin to raise as their own. They called him Thrown-Away Boy, and in every adventure that Lodge and Thrown-Away had together, it was always Thrown-Away who encouraged his brother into mischief and disobedience. ‘You must not enter this cave,’ said Kanati, ‘for it is there that I keep all the animals.’ ‘Father says, we must go into the cave at once, and let all the animals out,’ Thrown-Away told Lodge. And they did, and that is why, from that day to this, animals are hard to catch, and human beings must work hard all day to have something to put in the pot.
‘There,’ said the Moon. ‘Done.’ She repainted the stitching with a last lick of iodine, and he could feel from the rub of swab on thread that there was now a tight little row of stitches binding his eyebrow. ‘Shall I tape on some bandage? It would be for other people’s benefit, really.’
‘How rough do I look?’
‘A little villainous, but only to an interesting degree. Fit for company, if that’s what you’re asking. No bandage? Up you get, then. Here comes the shirt.’
Barrow stood up but his head swam and he had to drop back down again on the stool abruptly.
‘Oh,’ said Couma. ‘Head between your knees.’
He obeyed, and he felt her cool hand on the back of his neck keeping him in place. A blur in his vision like an electric soup of jigsaw pieces gradually receded.
‘Come to think of it, I kinda haven’t got around to eating anything today,’ he said to the floor.
‘That would do it. And you’ve bled quite a lot. We’ll have to fill you up with steak later. Better now?’
‘Yeah.’ The hand, disappointingly, went away. ‘So,’ he said, ‘Thrown-Away Boy is the bad guy, right? The bad one of the twosome.’
‘Uh-uh. Bad versus good is for takata stories, not ours. They aren’t Cain and Abel. Thrown-Away is more like … wild to Lodge Boy’s tame, and both of those qualities usually turn out to be useful in the stories about them.’
‘There’s more?’
‘Heavens, yes. Avenging their mother when a kolowa eats her; stealing the lightning eggs; fighting the Giants; travelling west to the land of the dead – on and on.’
She turned away and washed her hands again, and armoured up her arms again in clinking bracelets, while he dressed in the new shirt Angélique had been out to buy. It was soft and grey and, he suspected, more expensive than anything else he had ever worn. There was a new necktie to go with it, soft and purple. He felt a little as if he were being dressed up like a doll but the tough guy in the workroom mirror with the iodine-yellow stitched brow and the incipient black eye undeniably looked good.
‘Ready?’ said the Moon, looking at him approvingly. ‘You know,’ she added, ‘if my uncle compared you to Thrown-Away Boy, he was teasing but he wasn’t insulting you. Thrown-Away is a hero, Detective.’
The bodyguard’s expression was perfectly intelligible to Barrow, now. It was naked envy.
*
It had grown dark outside; the tall windows in the lecture hall were no longer showing violet sky but plain reflecting black. The circle of people in which the Moon had been chatting re-opened to admit them both, and Barrow found himself holding a canapé in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other, poured from a plain bottle marked FOR SACRAMENTAL USE ONLY. Mickey Casqui saw him looking at it and said, ‘I assume you’re off duty, Detective?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Barrow.
‘It probably comes from the cathedral’s stock,’ Casqui said. ‘One of the little work-arounds available in a Catholic city. No-one checks exactly how much the churches order in to use at Mass, so whole box-cars of the stuff come clinking eastward to us.’
‘Ah, it is Californian,’ said a takata in his forties, grey tweed-dressed and bearded. ‘I thought it had a familiar taste.’
‘This is Professor Kroeber of Berkeley, who’s lecturing tonight,’ said Couma. ‘And this, Professor, is Detective Barrow of the Cahokia Police Department, whom I’ve invited along because the case he’s working on involves the nature of the city, even if he hasn’t necessarily discovered that yet.’
‘Intriguing!’ said the professor politely, taking in Barrow’s battered-and-repaired state, but apparently with simple interest rather than judgement or repulsion. ‘Ayokpachi, Detective. Would you prefer English or Anopa?’
‘Definitely English, sir.’
‘And I see you’ve met Michael,’ the Moon continued.
‘In fact, no,’ said Casqui. ‘He’s met Mickey the newshound, not Michael the poet. I’m off duty too, Detective. I won’t ask you about the case if you don’t ask me about the press coverage. I’m here as the editor of Apisa. – A magazine,’ he explained, when Barrow looked baffled, ‘which this generous lady supports through the Foundation.’
‘Michael is the father of modern verse in Anopa,’ said Couma.
‘Shouldn’t that be uncle?’ said Kroeber, which Barrow suspected was a scholarly joke, judging by the polite smiles.
‘No, no,’ said Casqui cheerfully. ‘I’m not responsible enough to be an uncle. The most I can do is to impregnate the language and run away.’
Laughter, less polite.
‘I’m sure the language wasn’t looking for anything more than a good time from you, anyway,’ said a short woman in her thirties, wearing a button that said HANDS OFF THE NST. ‘She’s talking you over with her sisters now, comparing you to other poets she’s known. Probably to your disadvantage.’
‘Ouch!’ cried Casqui, clutching himself comically. ‘I suppose you think she prefers your Sapphic embraces?’
‘Infinitely,’ said the woman, grinning.
‘It’s conversations like this,’ said the professor, stuffing his pipe with tobacco, ‘that make me wonder whether the classification of Cahokia as patriarchal, or at least at the patriarchal end of the spectrum of societies, actually means anything at all? I mean, even given the inappropriateness of the term, for a culture of uncle/nephew inheritance in the male line.’
Kroeber, Barrow saw, was not quite off duty; or perhaps was just too curious, perhaps about everything, to pass up the chance of asking questions in a room full of Anopa intellectuals. For that, looking around, was what this was: Northside takouma doctors and lawyers and teachers, as well as the poets, plus a sprinkling of priests and nuns from the university. Probably the first violin from the Cahokia Symphony was somewhere in the crowd too, and the actors from the National Theatre.
‘I think,’ said Couma Hashi, and everyone in the circle turned slightly towards her, ‘that it makes sense to see us as a culture which has elements of both patriarchy and matriarchy together. The holy fathers gave us a push towards the relations between the sexes they were used to from Spain, but it didn’t entirely take.’
‘That’s what Morgan said,’ nodded the professor.
‘Morgan?’ said Barrow. If the Moon had brought him here for a free tutorial, he might as well understand it.
‘Uncle of American anthropology,’ said Kroeber, twinkling amid a cloud of smoke. ‘Came here in 1859 when the railroad opened. Wrote the first monograph.’
‘Popular with Marx and Engels,’ put in Mickey – no, Michael – Casqui. ‘Said we were all communists.’
‘We are!’ said the short woman. ‘The question is only whether our collective embodiment should continue to take the form of a solar monarchy.’
‘Please!’ said Couma. ‘A solar and lunar monarchy.’
Again, they all laughed, but Barrow noticed that though they were willing to mock each other, there was a limit to how far they would go with the Moon. The conversation wandered on towards a takata fellow from the city called Tom whom the Foundation was helping out while he wrote something earth-shaking and worked in a bank in London. Casqui had had a letter from him, asking advice about some Anopa phrases he wanted to put in his great work. But soon Couma tapped her glass with a spoon for silence, and led Kroeber to the lectern while everyone took their seats.
‘Ayokpachi, takouma, takoumaya,’ she said, and there was a murmur in return. ‘Although our guest this evening is one of the few white men to speak truly fluent Anopa, we will proceed in English in his honour. Professor Alfred Kroeber is an anthropologist at the University of California, the curator of the ethnological collections in the museum there, and the author of The Handbook of the Indians of California, which we hope the Smithsonian will eventually get around to publishing. – Professor, if they don’t, the Foundation will be glad to take it on. But most of you are probably aware of him as the expert witness who tipped the balance in Yurok v. State of California. He is a constant friend to the native civilisations of this continent – and he has always described them like that: as civilisations. Truly, we may call him tak’ nakni okla, a man of the people.’
There must have been a particular compliment buried in that last part, because Kroeber grimaced amid the applause, as you do when you have been unexpectedly moved in public and do not wish to show it. He fiddled with his pipe to calm himself and shuffled his papers.
