look ill, Young.
—Oh, I’m just high.
—High?
—I smoked a little pot, took some uppers.
—You’ve got drugs on you?
—Oh yes.
—Can I see them?
—Sure. Take a helping if you like.
Clutching his papers, the lawyer for the defence heard out Ryan’s story and asked,
—When did you first become aware that the defendant was under the influence of something like narcotics?
—I had suspicioned it when he first came into the company.
—What made you suspect?
—Well, his colour, sir, and the fact that his eyes seemed bloodshot and he didn’t react to training as he should.
Pres drifted off again. He thought of yellow light pouring into a field, blood poppies nodding in a breeze.
Next thing he knew he was in the witness box himself, standing there in his shit-coloured uniform, clutching a dark Bible in his hand.
—How old are you, Young?
—I am thirty-five, sir.
His voice floated across the courtroom like a child’s yacht on a blue lake.
—You are a musician by profession?
—Yes, sir.
—Had you played in a band or orchestra in California?
—Count Basie. I played with him for ten years.
To their surprise all members of the court were mesmerized by the voice, eager to hear his story.
—Had you been taking narcotics for some time?
—For ten years. This is my eleventh.
—Why did you start taking them?
—Well, sir, playing in the band we would play a lot of one-nighters. I would stay up and play another dance and leave and that is the only way I could keep up.
—Did any other musicians take them?
—Yes, all that I knew . . .
Taking the stand to give evidence – it was like taking the stand to play a solo. Call and response. He could tell he had the attention of this small, sparsely populated court – a real crowd of stiffs but they were hanging on his every word. Just like a solo, you had to tell a story, sing them a song they wanted to hear. Everyone in the court was looking at him. The harder they concentrated on what he was saying, the slower and more quietly he spoke, leaving words hanging, pausing in mid-sentence, the singsong of his voice charming them, holding them. Their attention suddenly seemed so familiar he expected to hear the clunk of glasses, the scrunch of ice scooped from a bucket, the swirl of smoke and talk . . .
The army lawyer was asking him now if they knew about his drug addiction when he went before the board.
—Well, I’m pretty sure they did, sir, because before I went to join the army I had to take a spinal and I didn’t want to take it. When I went down I was very high and they put me in jail and I was so high they took the whiskey away from me and put me in a padded cell, and they searched my clothes while I was in the cell.
The pauses between phrases, the connections not quite there, the voice always just behind the sense of what he was saying. Pain and sweet bewilderment in every word. No matter what he said, just the sound, the way the words shaped themselves around each other, made each member of the court feel as though he were being spoken to privately.
—When you say you were pretty high, what do you mean by that? Do you mean the whiskey?
—The whiskey and the marijuana and the barbiturates, yes, sir.
—When you refer to being high, could you explain that?
—Well, that’s the only way I know to explain myself.
—When you are not high, does it affect you physically?
—Oh yes, sir. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t care to blow my horn and I don’t care to be around anybody . . .
—It affects you badly?
—Just nervous.
His voice like a breeze looking for the wind.
Seduced by the voice and then hating themselves for succumbing to it, they sentenced him to a year in the stockade at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Worse than the army even. When you were in the army being free meant getting out of the army; here freedom meant being back in the army. Concrete floor, iron door, metal bunk beds suspended from the wall by thick chains. Even the blankets – coarse, gray – felt like they had been woven from iron filings swept off the floor of the stockade workshop. Everything about the place seemed designed to remind you of how easy it would be to dash your brains out. The human skull felt delicate as tissue in comparison.
Slamming doors, clanging voices. The only way he could stop himself from screaming was to cry and to stop himself from crying he had to scream. Everything you did made things worse. He couldn’t bear it, he couldn’t bear it – but there was nothing to do but bear it. He couldn’t bear it – but even saying that was a way of bearing it. He became quieter, looked no one in the eyes, tried to find places to hide but there was nowhere, so he took to trying to stay inside of himself, eyes peeping out of his face like an old man’s face through the gap between curtains.
At night he lay on his bunk and looked at the fragment of night sky that angled through the tiny prison window. He heard the guy in the next bunk turn toward him, his face flaring yellow in the light of a match.
—Young? . . . Young?
—Yeah . . .
—You looking at them stars?
—Yeah.
—They ain’t there.
He said nothing.
—You hear what I’m saying? They ain’t there.
He reached across for the proffered cigarette, pulled deeply on it.
—They’re all dead. Takes so long for the light to get from there to here by the time it does they’re finished. Burnt out. You’re looking at somethin that ain’t there, Lester. The ones that are there, you can’t see ’em yet.
He blew smoke toward the window. The dead stars hazed for a second and then brightened again.
He stacked records on the turntable and walked to the window, watching the low moon slip behind an abandoned building. The interior walls had been knocked down and within a few minutes he could see the moon clear through the broken windows at the front of the building. It was framed so perfectly
