“Sentimental, that’s the kind of man Mr. John was. And I’m very emotional, Frank. That’s why I’m so upset about Mr. John.” Louie waited for a reply, but I couldn’t think of anything emotional, so I kept quiet. “I’m glad we had this little talk,” he said. He maneuvered his big body out of the booth and went upstairs. Russell fussed around for a while. “Gotta close, pal. See you real soon!” I left.
Down below, the city sparkled and hummed like a giant beehive. I walked home. My apartment building is the oldest wooden structure on Bunker Hill. Each floor has a covered porch across the front, and the rooms open out onto it. At night, you can see the lights of the city stretching away to the east. The river, the train tracks, the gasworks, Lincoln Heights, El Sereno, and beyond. I like living there, even though the showers are downstairs. When I got back I checked the directory to make sure the money was all there. I listened to some opera records and looked at the poetry books. I hadn’t been doing so well with my lessons. I knew some of the words but I didn’t understand the poems. “Try harder,” Cousin Lizzie kept saying.
Next morning I went out to buy a paper from Lou Lubin, the gray-haired newsboy who hangs out by the Angel’s Flight platform. “ ’Lo, Lou.” I said. I always use that line with him. “What’s this I hear about war?”
“Where you been, in the jug?” He’s short, and he cocks his head to the side, looking up.
“I’m a working man, Lou, I don’t have time to know all these things. Fill me in.”
“Hitler and Mussolini got it all sewn up tight. I haven’t heard from the family in two years, don’t know where they’re at. It’s all sewn up tighter’n Aunt Fannie’s girdle.” Lou used to be a nightclub dancer and an extra in the movies.
“Sorry to hear it, Lou. I hope they’re okay.”
“Thanks.”
“You know anything about Mr. John?”
Lou turned so that his back was to the street. “Some guys were talking to him. Very tough guys in a Cadillac. A Cadillac sticks out.”
“What’d they want?”
“I’m just the newsy on the street here. Gotta keep the nose clean. You were a friend of his. It was something they thought he had. Something small, something he had hidden in his place. They didn’t find it, and they went away. Then they came back.”
“The police said it was suicide.”
“The Catholics would be out of business.”
“Where would a man go for clarinet lessons?”
“Look it up.”
Lou was getting nervous, he wanted me to leave. I looked up “Music Teachers.” It was mostly women teaching in the home. Mostly piano and violin. I came across The Saxophone Shop, Leo Schenck, 319 Spring St. R1121. I called the number from a pay phone. He sounded like an older man.
“This is Leo.”
“Do you teach clarinet?”
“Age?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Too old.”
“I’d like to try.”
“Why?”
“I was given a clarinet.”
“Bring it in.” Leo sounded tired, and it was only eleven in the morning. I walked there. It was Saturday and the downtown streets were crowded with shoppers. Every restaurant had a line of people waiting to eat, but I had a salami sandwich in my pocket. The shop on Spring Street was tiny and dark, with saxophones hanging up and saxophone parts lying all around. Leo was a skinny bald man with horn-rim glasses and a green visor like pawnbrokers wear. He opened the clarinet case and stood there looking at it. Inside the case, the clarinet was broken down into four sections. You could see it was old, but it had been well cared for. Leo looked at me through his thick glasses.
“I don’t want to know how you got this,” he said. “I don’t want to know about you or who sent you.” He closed the lid and snapped the latches. “I got a sawed-off. I made it myself. You try anything, I’m taking you with me.”
“I represent the City Directory. No other medium can —”
“I got double-ought buck here. They’ll just turn the hose on you and wash you into the street.” He brought it up from under the counter and showed it to me, the meanest looking little thing I ever saw. I took the case and left. I started walking fast down Spring Street. I walked right through every red light and didn’t stop until I got to my bench in Pershing Square.
I tried to calm down. People were coming and going all around me: kids, old folks, men and women, laughing and talking, friends meeting and calling out to each other. I was too scared to move. After a while, I opened up the case and looked at the four sections of the clarinet as Leo had done. I took the pieces out and turned them around in my hands, but it meant nothing. It was just one more thing I didn’t understand.
“You don’t look like a reed man,” said a voice next me. I jumped, but it was only Finchley, the retired hobo. He took the case and began assembling the pieces like he knew all about it. “Le Blanc, very nice. Something’s stuck in here.” He fingered around inside one of the sections and brought out a rolled-up piece of paper. “There’s your problem,” he said, handing it to me. There was a little box in the case and thin pieces of wood inside the box. He took one out and moistened it with his tongue; then he fitted the wood into the end of the clarinet and put the end in his mouth and began to play a little tune. I recognized it. “Over the Waves,” which everyone has heard at some point. The woman in black appeared. She came out from behind a palm tree holding her arms straight out to the side and twirling around with the music. She had her Bible in one hand, but she seemed to have forgotten about it. People passing by stopped to watch her. She was a sight, with her torn black dress and her matted hair and those fingernails! After a while, Finchley stopped playing and tipped his hat. “Thank you, friends and neighbors, you’re very kind, I’m sure.” He passed it around. Some people put money in the hat, others walked off. The woman sat down on her bench across the path and seemed to go right to sleep. “We did good business,” Finchley said. “Let us repair to a nice, cool bar. Should we ask your friend?” I shook my head. “She’ll be fine,” I said “I need a drink bad.”
The nice, cool bar turned out to be the Tokyo Big Shot.
“Finchley!” said the Japanese bartender. His gold teeth lit up.
“And the shecker,” said the snaggletooth woman at the end of the bar.
“My friend is in a quandary, at a crossroads, and we have come here today to find resolution. For this purpose, we require your back table and a bottle of your cheapest whiskey, tout suite,” Finchley said. The woman grabbed her glass and made a beeline for the curtain behind the bar, but Finchley said, “You’d best remain on watch, my dear. Be on the lookout for a midget carrying an umbrella.”
Behind the curtain was a tiny room with a round table and four chairs. There was nothing else in the room except a telephone and a Mexican pinup calendar from 1936. A lightbulb hung from a nail in the ceiling. The bartender brought a bottle and two glasses. “That will be
