"The Horn"

Grace Willetts
Oakland, CA
USA

anjschoe@ix.netcom.com

Deep South v.1 n.3 (Spring, 1995)

There are few deaths in a town like this, and about as many births. Most of the residents of the hills have settled into a twilight stage of life. Their children are in school, or have long left home; they are long-married and far from love.

The town itself is not much more than a store, a firehouse, a smattering of churches, and two fields reserved for the dead. The Indian Path Woods mark the Northern border, two equally small towns, Parkville and Lincoln, the East and West borders, and the Singington River the Southern one.

Life by the river is different. The people move more slowly, as if to a different clock, and the houses are less sharp around the edges, as if the walls were less tightly attached than those of the sharp, crisp hill houses. The houses by the river are painted colors like pink and sulfur yellow, tropical colors that might lead one to believe that the whites and colonial blues of the hills were in another country or climate.

Lourdes and her man Orpheus rented a two-room cottage on the corner of River and Heller roads. It was pink and had small windows near the tops of the walls. If Lourdes stood on a chair, she could look out on the water, though she rarely did. She worked swing shift at the local sugar refinery, and had moved to the town because Orpheus insisted it was nice. The rent was three-ten a month, and she busted her ass because Orpheus needed the space to play his horn and feel his music. He was a horn player, and played the local clubs and even statewide, in places like Naples, Sinktown, Oldham, and Douglass. He had a chance at perfection, he said, they both thought so, and that was why she agreed to live in this godforsaken place by the river. Their friends, Prince, Laticia, Robby, Steven, and A.J. from Oldham drove to see them in the evening if Lourdes wasn't working, and the rest of the time it was just the two of them, not counting her mother who called two or three times a week now that she was pregnant again.

That she had met him at all had been nothing less than fate. When she set eyes on him, she burned for him, and the burning was such that she sometimes ceased to exist. At twenty-two, she had been divorced and tired. Her job, which she'd had for three years, consumed her time like a terrible monster, and she'd assumed she would never get serious again. Too many men repulsed her: the ones with the mustaches like her ex-husband's, the ignorant ones, the ones that drank, the ones that winked.

Orpheus was tall and slender, and the color of tobacco. He had high cheekbones, fine, thin features like those of a cat, and eyes that were wild and knowing. She had first seen him at the Juke Joint, a shopping center club in Oldham, and thought he looked crazed. It was the first time she thought of being crazed as a good thing. He had stared at her intently both during and after the set with his wild, black and white eyes. At first she turned her back to him. When she saw how the people around her applauded wildly for him, his advances seemed different; a star performer wanted her. After the show, he came up to her table and handed her a drink. Later, two or three days later, he told her, "As soon as I saw you, I knew we had unfinished business."

A month later, she replied, "I am drawn to you, I can't explain it." At first, she had resisted his kisses. Do I want him, do I? she asked herself. I won't sleep with him, she thought. I don't want to. Yet, before thirty days had passed, she felt her entire body pull toward him when he entered a room, her hands and mouth sought refuge on his flesh. She could touch him forever.

While on him, her wavy dark hair brushed against the white sheets, and her copper skin glowed against his. She fit her round ass and boobs against his angularity. How had she lived without? He bought her gold hoop earrings that thereafter hung perpetually at her ears. Special things, he called them. By this time, they stayed mostly in his small studio apartment, surrounded by trumpets and silver music stands.

"I dream about you," he said. She dreamed about him as well, willing herself to conjure up his image so that during sleep they wouldn't be separated. She dreamed vividly of long, green lawns and white buildings. She dreamed over and over that he was on a lawn and she ran out to greet him. Along the way, she began singing heartily, a song that was familiar enough in the dream, and laughed wildly as she danced in a circle. Where is he? Where is he? she asked herself. She saw him, free and in the middle of the lawn, and ran to kiss his neck. "I'm so glad to see you!" they hugged and kissed each others' necks. "Think of our new life together!" she said. A woman materialized by her side and whispered, "He still likes those Hollywood girls, you know." Lourdes laughed. "So what," she tossed off to the woman. "This is a new life, right?" She woke up laughing. She touched Orpheus' head, relieved and happy that he was still there.

Orpheus Johnson was the best horn player in the county. The more gigs he did, the better chance he had of becoming the best in the state. He stayed mostly with his hometown band, the Electrics, but played here and there with other, better-known bands like the New Town Band and Fred Waites, who had once played with Big Mama Thornton. Orpheus practiced during the day, when he was not working as a car parker. When he was not playing his instrument, he hummed new creations under his breath. He was less concerned with the size of the reputations he worked with, more with the nuances of his own performance. He believed he could be perfect. One night, he knew, his music would pour out of his horn as if it was divine.

Lourdes wanted to move on with him. She was tired of staying with her mother, who had taken her in again after the divorce, tired of seeing Orpheus in a place that was not hers as well. She knew that he had stayed there with other women. She knew that if she opened certain drawers or books their property would be there, their barrettes, their addresses on scraps of paper, their underpants mixed in with his. Her husband had come home with strange perfume on his clothes, and screamed at her if she questioned him too closely. She never asked Orpheus about them, but every time she found evidence of these invaders, she felt both sickened and superior, sickened because of their mere existence, which sometimes seemed to extinguish hers, and superior because, in a sense, she had won, she was with Orpheus now, she was his love of loves. She asked him to move to a clean place, where they could begin a new life, and after a month or two, he said, "Shoot, come on. Let's go."

He found them the tiny house by the river. "Look, babe," he said. "We'll be out on our own, out here by the water. We'll be doing our own thing here. What do you say?"

She shrugged. They could barely see the house next to them, which loomed over them on the top of a hill, and she never saw anyone walking around the town. The idea made her nervous. What if something happens? she wondered. Who will hear me scream? On the other hand, Orpheus could practice all day and no one could complain.

She agreed to take the house. She agreed also to support him with her union wages; why should he waste his time parking cars when his playing was beginning to take off? Now was when he needed to practice and become better. Orpheus kissed Lourdes hard on the mouth and did a wild, gyrating dance on the kitchen floor with his horn, blowing out occasional exclamations that sounded like, "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" His quick, dark movements were like those of a panther getting ready to mate.

"You're a crazy man," she said. Hot and a little jealous of the horn that was dancing with him, Lourdes laughed and rushed at him until they both fell down on a kitchen chair.

When she moved out, her father, who drove trucks across and around the country, barely commented. Her mother, a tiny woman with salt-and-pepper hair and worried brown eyes, asked her, "Are you sure? Are you sure? Remember the last one."

Lourdes had laughed and told her, "Mama, I never met a real man before I met him. It's right." She ran her fingers along the gold hoops in her ears.

They lived in the little town, and made dinner and margaritas for their friends, usually musicians Orpheus had played with and their girlfriends. The men played their instruments or made Orpheus play his horn. Those not playing would clap their hands or stand up with raised arms, cigarettes burning in their hands, clapping in time. "All right!" they'd cry together. "Let's go!" Sometimes the bass player, a small man named Tommy, would stomp or pull his girlfriend to him in a staggering, dancing embrace. Sometimes it seemed as if the room itself was dancing. Lourdes was always surprised that the little house could contain all of that carrying on.

Many of the girlfriends wore heavy eyeshadow and curled their hair tightly, it seemed to Lourdes. It must take hours to look that way. She barely had time to change out of the white pants and shirt that were her work uniform. She maybe wore lipstick. Orpheus always said that she was a natural beauty, more beautiful with a smile than with makeup. These girls, the girlfriends, looked Orpheus over and studied him a little too long under their heavy, blackened eyelids.

One in particular, Fran, sat in the kitchen and smoked cigarettes until the ashtray overflowed with butts tipped with the blood-red of her lipstick. She never spoke to anyone, just stared and tried to sit next to Orpheus when she could, a negative, smoking presence like a dark cloud that had found its way into a crop of white ones. Usually Lourdes laughed and had another beer when this happened, because she knew it was out of the question. Orpheus was hers.

When the sax player, Stephen, or the bass player, Milt, asked her, with an undertone, "What about you? How are you doing?" she shook out her hair and jubilantly said, "Fine. I am just fine, thank you."

Soon, not everything was as it was. She began to feel irritated. Waking up at five was irritating, as was having to work until midnight or two. The long hours, once unbearable because they kept her from Orpheus, became full, usually with the mistakes of other crew members for which she was blamed, or the amount of work to be done, or the attitudes of her loud, heh-heh-heh-ing coworkers. She was the only female on the loading dock, and they made sure she knew it. She had survived a childhood of people making fun of her name (Lourdes the Tortoise), her family (Was it true that they slept six in a bed and didn't have running water?), and nationality (Did she speak English?), and she wasn't about to let five seedy, running-to-fat men get the best of her. Could he believe that they stared at her boobs like that? she asked Orpheus. Could he believe they had talked to her that way?

"No, babe," he always answered. "They're just assholes. Don't let them get the best of you." Then he would go back to blowing his horn. She sometimes wanted to take the horn and throw it as hard as she could to the ground and scream, "Listen to me!" She didn't, of course. She was just being silly.

The guy who had played with Big Mama Thornton asked him back more and more, and talked about taking him to Douglass with him in three weeks. Orpheus would have to stay away from home for a few nights, and the thought filled Lourdes with dread. Would she have to sleep alone? The little pink house would be too quiet without him in it. She didn't like to think what might come in off of the river. She would try to get on the night shift then, or stay with her mother. In the end Orpheus didn't get the gig, and Lourdes privately worried about where his career was going.

They made love less, Lourdes lost count of how often. Her drive to be near him was partly replaced by anxious thoughts about work. Some of the men knew her ex-husband and kept referring to how she was a lousy lay, a frigid bitch. Sometimes all she could do was crawl onto his lap. Help me. They keep touching my ass and I can't make them stop. They run away before I can see who it is. The pressure of paying for them both was mounting as well. The electric bill was huge, and he had to ask her for money. He began to just take it out of her purse. They had two hundred dollars in the bank, and two cars. Help me, Orpheus, I feel so bad, she'd say. He always laid his hand on her forehead and answered, "It's okay babe, it's okay."

When they had lived together for six months, and spring arrived, they began taking walks along River Road, hand-in-hand. The leaves were just starting to emerge from the tips of the trees and the ground took on that growing smell. The water rushed by, on to more exciting places. Its busy sound replaced their talk, and Lourdes leaned against him. She felt as if she were slower than before, that she needed less from life, but she was content. They maintained their silence all the way back to the house. If Orpheus had a gig, he kissed her and left.

The night it happened, Lourdes had been working until two every night for four days, and was used to the pattern. She assumed that, as was usually the case, she would finish out the week that way, but she forgot that, after having worked one double shift the week before, she actually had the day off. Thus she dressed in her uniform, hugged him, and went off to work as usual at six. "Don't worry about me, babe, I've got a gig with the Electrics tonight," he said as she left.

Once at work, she was told of the mix-up and to go home. In the car, she felt elated. What would she do with this extra time? Maybe Orpheus would stay home with her. Maybe they would have dinner, or go to a movie. She pulled up to the front of the house with her head full of plans.

She entered the house, which was dark except for the kitchenette light, and put her purse down on the floor by the front door. Without thinking, she went into the bedroom, prepared to call out Orpheus' name. She stopped in the bedroom doorway. Orpheus lay on the bed, on top of a young, white body. She froze for a minute, waiting for what she saw to make sense. The girl's leg moved, and so did his bare, brown ass. Lourdes backed out of the room, and ran in again with a frying pan, which she started swinging at his head. "You bastard!" she screamed over and over again.

The girl was Fran, the silent, smoking bitch. She somehow escaped without Lourdes noticing. Lourdes chased Orpheus around the room, until he regained his senses and began pulling the frying pan out of her hand. All at once she became afraid that he might hit her back, and ran into the bathroom.

Orpheus remained silent outside the door. Lourdes tried to comprehend the new information: he has slept with another girl. He has fooled around on me. I will never let him touch me again. Too much had happened at once. She stared at the locked door, and momentarily forgot why she shouldn't go out into the living room as usual. Then, the image of the white girl squirming under Orpheus filled her head. The legs had been skinny as a child's. Lourdes opened the dusty medicine cabinet and touched each bottle of pills shakily. I shouldn't, she thought. It's going too far. As she thought this, she opened up a safety razor with a pair of scissors and ripped the flesh on her arms to ribbons.

"It was a crazy thing," Orpheus told the men at the hospital. He carried on as if he was telling a joke to a guy in his band, shaking his head dramatically and fixing the men with his wild-looking eyes. "The guy wanted her wallet, and when she said no, he held her down and cut her up. We'll go to the police later."

The men couldn't have believed him, but they sewed up Lourdes and didn't stick her in the nut house. Orpheus drove her home in her blue Pinto, one hand on her knee. She couldn't talk. The blood she had let had only partly appeased her anger. Half of her wanted to ease into his warm body, the other half wanted to leap from the car. "I'll take good care of you," he said. "We're gonna be fine." His slender features were lit up by the yellow streetlights. The luminous whites of his eyes turned toward her anxiously.

The air around their house was still and thick with the smell and sound of the river. She stayed home from work the next day, and the day after that. Orpheus fed her soup and made her lunch while she stayed in bed and remained completely silent. She didn't know where to begin with him. When she fell asleep, he went outside and practiced his horn behind the house. The sound of it was lonely, as if he was asking himself what he should do. When she woke to hear him playing out into the green of the late summer like that, Lourdes cried silently in response. I don't know, I don't know.

They never spoke of the matter again. It didn't come up. They lived as usual, with her going to work, having musicians over for drinks and food some evenings, walking by the water. Lourdes spoke to her mother, who was busy with the new baby, less frequently, and Lourdes became afraid that she might ask too closely about Lourdes' own life.

Lourdes and Orpheus discussed getting married, if only for a tax and insurance break. "We'll do it sometime," Orpheus said. "Sure," Lourdes replied. They spent much of their time together turned away from one another, one involved with the radio, the other with sheet music, one involved in the kitchen, the other lying in the bedroom lazily playing scales. They expected each other. How and where their magical pull had gone was a mystery to Lourdes, and one she didn't ponder too deeply. She didn't think about life without him. It was out of the question. She went to as many of his gigs as she could, but they were now ordinary to her, noisy, and the thrill of seeing her man on stage was all but gone. She knew what his playing sounded like. She looked at her watch and hoped they could go home and go to sleep.

"Love you, honey," he told her.

She always nodded in response and blew him a kiss from her pinky. She never dared to ask him, "Are you playing by the rules now?" He seemed to promise that he was.

One night, two years and a bit after they first met, Orpheus had a gig with the Electrics at the Juke Joint. Lourdes sat at a table with their friends Laticia and A.J., drinking gin and tonics. They were talking about how Orpheus might make a demo tape to send out to record companies, and how his best bet might be to stick with the Mama Thornton guy, who really liked his work. Lourdes sighed and threw back her shoulders. She was wearing a red sweater dress and high heels; she now made it a point to enhance her appearance with makeup and show-off clothes. She had stopped asking herself long ago if they knew what had happened. It didn't matter. "I hope something happens for him," she said. "This county is pretty small, you know? Fame only travels so far." Laticia and A.J. stared at her and said nothing. Laticia ran her long fingernails through her stiff brown hair, and A. J. played with his diamond pinkie ring and looked toward the stage where Orpheus and the band reappeared.

She was supposed to work swing shift the next week. After her stitches, the men at work had backed off. Either they figured I was crazy, or that I've got a crazy man at home who'd rip the shit out of them, thought Lourdes. She became angry when she thought of all the time she had wasted thinking about them. Assholes. She ordered another drink, and looked at her watch. It was eleven.

After the band was through for the night, Orpheus came over to their table and grasped her hand but didn't really look at her. "I'll be right out," he said. "Let me get my things together, and help out back stage. I'll be out in a few minutes." He turned and grasped A.J.'s hand and nodded at Laticia.

The three waited, and smoked cigarettes. Lourdes liked to smoke once in a while, mostly when she drank. They talked about A.J.'s new girlfriend, who was a legal secretary. "I bet she doesn't know she hooked such a ladykiller," said Laticia.

"She didn't hook me, baby, I hooked her," joked A.J. His ring winked in the light from the overhead lamp.

Lourdes rose and wobbled to the bathroom. Her legs were asleep, and her feet hurt. She had worked a full day, and wanted nothing more than to go to bed with Orpheus. How long was he going to take? Her body felt heavy with alcohol.

Once out of the bathroom, she decided to go backstage and see how close Orpheus was to ready. She pushed her way past an old velvet curtain, to the few feet of the stage that were covered by it. Where's Orpheus? she thought, scanning the dark heads of the shadowed that were clustered in front of her picking up equipment and putting instruments into cases. His horn lay in its blue velvet case on the floor in front of her. A man in the corner was kissing a woman, a long kiss bright with passion. Their heads turned slightly. She saw it was Orpheus. As if he sensed her presence, he pulled his lips from the dark woman's. She was skinny. She heard the smack of the damp, parting flesh. He turned and looked at her flatly, as if he really didn't know what he had just done.

Lourdes turned and fled back to the table, where she told her friends in an even tone of voice, "I'm going. See you later." She slung her leather coat around her shoulders and jogged out to the car. She looked behind her to see if Orpheus was in sight, but that he was not. She backed into another car, and sped away into the night as if she had no say as to where she was going.

Three adolescent town boys who lived up the hill on Lamplighter Street were frog hunting on a path on the other side of the Singington River the night of the accident. They had a fire going, and had brought a few sandwiches and beer to keep them amused that Saturday evening. There was even talk about spending the night in their sleeping bags by the water. They pulled on flannel shirts and baseball jackets as the night grew colder. They smoked cigarettes and threw the butts in the water. They talked about the virtues of the Chevy Nova, and the best high one of them had ever had, from Thai stick at a party the week before. Headlights tore past them, accompanied by the sound of a speeding car. "Who the hell was that?" one asked. The others shrugged. "Dunno," one answered. They looked after it, and followed the angry glow of the tail lights with their eyes. Where the lights should have curved, they continued on a straight path. A breaking sound, what they later realized was the guard rail, was followed by a large splash. The lights fell downward and disappeared. The three witnesses looked at the spot where the car had been, and bowed their heads to the water as if praying.

In a town like this there are few deaths and few births. The streets are oddly quiet during the day, as if living noises are held back in reverence. There was a time when the pink house on the corner of Heller and River Road used to give off the sound of someone playing trumpet in the early afternoon and evening, a sound that was rich and drowsy and glorious as if it were God's own creation. It thundered up and down the countryside, across the water, into the trees and parched hillsides like a white horse. The music hasn't been heard for many years now, and the house is like any other.