An Affinity for Blue Read online

  AN AFFINITY FOR BLUE

  An original short story by Rachel Caine

  The city smelled of music -- the hot spice of jazz, the cool river-scent of reggae, the pulsing foggy swirl of zydeco. To some people, that might have translated as spilled sour beer, mildew and the stink of a city at perpetual low tide, but not to John "Evangelist" Fredricks. As he stepped off the bus, John took in a deeply colored breath and knew, knew he’d come to the right place. It was a place where things happened. Not always good things, maybe, but that was all right, too. Music was a wild horse, and sometimes people got thrown.

  The sidewalk was old and stained, veteran of countless Mardi Gras. The party was over, the city sunk in exhaustion, but he hadn’t come for the wild times – not the way the tourists saw it. He’d come for the music.

  The baggage compartment on the bus screeked up like the wing of a dusty beetle; he ducked in and grabbed his single battered suitcase, and his horn case. The suitcase was a Salvation Army find, stained like the New Orleans sidewalks with decades of travel; the horn case was fine leather, scuff-free, maintained like the finish on an antique Rolls Royce. The horn inside, nestled in wine-red velvet, had been polished to a high gleam, and in John’s imagination it felt warm as flesh to the touch.

  "Be wantin’ a room, I ‘spect."

  He looked up, the weight of his horn case dragging on his arm like an insistent child, and saw a shadow blocking out the watery early-spring sun. Big man, twice his size, thick through the chest and arms. A face that could have been carved from granite by wind and rain, eyes the color of wet river stones. It seemed to John that the man must have been standing there, arms crossed, ever since the sidewalk had been poured.

  "What?" he asked. He’d been thinking about other things, about hopes and dreams and music. He focused on the man, who reminded him of nothing so much as a cigar store Indian made out of stone.

  "Room," the man repeated. "You want one?"

  "Is it cheap?"

  The man’s granite face split, revealing a line of white teeth like a seam of limestone. "Sure, cheap and clean. C’mon wit me."

  He started to walk away. John stayed where he was, the horn case dragging at his arm. The man looked back and came to a halt again, looking as eternal as if he’d never moved.

  "French Quarter?" John asked. The man nodded soberly.

  "Course de French Quarter. You want de music, don’ you?"

  John smiled. He was two or three shades lighter than the Granite Man, but his teeth were just as white, perfectly straight. His mother had put a lot of money into that smile, paying for a perfect armature for her trumpet-playing son. Like the instrument, it was his legacy.

  "Yes," he said. "I want the music."

  And that was that. He set out, cases in hand, following his guide down Canal Street to Bourbon. As they approached the corner, which was thick with tourists even this early in the morning, already richly veined with the whispers of music from down the street, from clubs that opened early or stayed open night and day. The street drew him the way honey draws ants, a physical hunger like a hard knot of amber in his belly, and he started to turn that way.

  A huge hand fell on his shoulder. Seen close, the skin looked rough and grainy, more like granite than ever. He looked up at his guide.

  "No," the man said. "This way."

  I want to go that way, John thought, feeling like a child denied candy. But he followed, because he wasn’t a child anymore, he was a man, trained in the craft of patience. Didn’t mean he didn’t taste that candy, though. Didn’t mean he didn’t ache for it.

  Bourbon street was kept mostly clean – he saw white-shirted, dark-skinned men on both sides of the streets, unobtrusive small men, picking up discarded bottles and cans and cigarette butts. Even so, the litter ran ahead of them; broken glass glittered like melting ice in the gutters, and even in the one look he took he saw a tall white woman in a sky-blue dress drop another cigarette to the pavement. Work that never ends, he thought. He wondered how they got through the day if they knew that.

  "Where are we going?" he asked. It occurred to him for the first time that he was a stranger, and he could die in New Orleans as easy as Galveston. One good smash from a granite fist ought to do it. He thought about getting beat to death, about somebody taking his horn and pawning it for vials of crack, and his guts knotted up again.

  "Dauphine Street," his guide said. He turned and stuck out his hand. "Sam."

  He took it, careful, and was surprised how careful Sam was, too. As if he knew he might crush poor li’l music-boy’s fingers with a twitch.

  "John," he said, and then changed it. "People call me Evangelist Fredricks."

  "Evangelist," Sam nodded. "Least they don’ call you de Baptist."

  He turned and walked on, nodding to some people, ignoring others John was already seeing would be tourists. The tourists were like ghosts, existing in some other world than Sam’s; he walked, and they moved out of the way like mist, but never looking right at him. Their eyes were always fixed somewhere else – on a brochure, on a map, on the street ahead. Two worlds, he thought. Two I know of. But there had been worlds in Galveston, too, worlds of music and money and fear. Galveston hadn’t carried melody in its bones, it was a city where the heartbeat was the steady growling pulse of traffic and the boom of ships being loaded in the harbor. Music threaded through all of the worlds of New Orleans, running like a pale whispering river through the stone and past the people. Older than the city. Older than anything.

  He almost bumped into Sam when he came to a stop. There were tourists here, too, but on the other side of the street, crowded around a bar whose sign John couldn’t see. Piano music floated out, something in a ragtime rhythm with a dark blue edge of Cajun accordion.

  "Up dere," Sam said. He pointed at a window on the second floor, blind as something born in a cave. "Go in dis door, up de stairs, tell Vivyan Sam send you."

  He stood there, waiting, for long enough that John got the message. He dug in his pocket for money, hesitated, handed Sam a twenty dollar bill. Sam smiled.

  "You got dat to spare?"

  "Not really."

  "Where you from, son?"

  "Galveston, Sam. In Texas."

  "Shit, we know ‘bout Galveston. Seaports know each other. You know how to take care ‘round a seaport?"

  "Got a pretty good idea."

  Sam’s smack on his shoulder almost toppled him, and it worked up his neck in an ache he knew would be a bruise later. A love tap from Sam.

  "Where you playin’, Evangelist?"

  "Thought I’d just go around and sit in until somebody liked me," he said. "That’s the way we do it in Galveston."

  "Way we do it here, too. But you take care," Sam said. "Get yourself a charm. Somethin’ powerful."

  John smiled and went in the door Sam had pointed to. It was a narrow little hallway, not much wider than his shoulders, the sides rubbed dark with the passage of time and bodies. The ceiling was lower than he was used to, and the one flickering fixture a converted gaslight with an ancient fly-specked bulb. The stairs smelled of incense and mold. He lifted his cases up and climbed, pausing at the landing to look up the second flight. It ended in a dark mouth that could be another hallway. Halfway up he saw a glow of light, and as he got to the top he saw it was a time-dusted blue window far down the hall, the iron lace of a fire escape misty beyond it.

  A door was open next to that window. He walked to it, listening to a deep silence; the carpet was old but still lush, and the blue-streaked light gave him a feeling of being underwater. He paused at the open doorway and looked in.

  There was a young woman sitting in a rocking chair. She looked up at him and smiled, and he thought, Oh. It’s her. He felt he�
��d always known her, which was crazy, he’d never set eyes on her before in his life. In the next second that feeling passed, and he didn’t know her at all, and he felt awkward and stupid and young.

  She was wearing a flowing African-print dress, and her hair was in small elegant braids weighted with blue beads, and she was holding a baby. A small, wrapped baby who was asleep in her arms. She kept smiling as she looked at John, then lifted a hand and put one long finger to her lips. Shhhhhhh.

  "I came for a room," he said as quietly as he could. "Sam sent me."

  Her smile deepened, and he felt it wash through him like the pull of a tide. The room smelled of lavender and milk. She stood and walked the sleeping baby to a crib in the corner, put him down and covered him carefully with a blanket. She crossed to where John stood and offered her hand. Bracelets jangled.

  "Vivyan," she said. Her fingers felt cool and strong. Her skin was the delicate color of milked coffee, her eyes a rich brown like the leaves at the bottom of an autumn pool. She wore gold necklaces, five or six of them, decorated with crosses and stars and moons and things he didn’t even recognize. "I have one room next door. Clean and simple, the bath’s down the hall. No cooking in the room."

  "Yes ma’am."

  "What’s your name?"

  It made him suddenly aware that they were alone in the blue-tinted shadows, the baby asleep across the room, and she didn’t know who he was. There was such a thing as being too trusting. Any sensible Galveston woman would have met a potential boarder with a smile and a loaded .357, behind her back. "John," he said. "John Fredricks."

  "They call you John?"

  "Mostly," he said. He looked down at the horn case. "Sometimes they call me the Evangelist."

  "John the Evangelist." Dimples formed around a suppressed smile. "Bet you preach up a storm with that trumpet. No practicing in here, though. You want to play, you got to go out."

  "Sure. How much?"

  A glimmer like starlight passed through her eyes, and he realized too late how that might sound to a pretty woman like her.

  "Seventy-five a week," she said. "First week in advance. You come to play, John?"

  "Yes ma’am," he said. "I come to play."

  She took one of her necklaces off, a crescent moon pendent with a white crystal hanging like a star next to it and a small, perfect model of a boat. She reached up, and he realized she wanted him to bow his head.

  He hesitated. Saw dimples again, saw starlight in her eyes.

  "You afraid?" she whispered. "Nothing here but the good symbol of Erzulie. Protection. You want to play here, you need somebody looking after you, John the Evangelist. Take it."

  He dipped his head, felt the kiss of gold on his neck. The pendent was surprisingly light, the chain warm from her skin. He closed his hand around the moon, the star, the boat, and looked her in the eye.

  "Seventy-five a week," she said. "For the room."

  He reached in his pocket and took out the cash. He counted it out into her hand and watched her put it in her own pocket. She turned away and walked, hips swaying, to the small neat kitchen in the corner, with a half-sized stove and small refrigerator, the dishes neatly stacked on shelves above the sink. She took down two glasses and filled them with water. Water? he thought. He’d thought something else, something more … New Orleans. It seemed like a city where babies as young as the one in the crib were raised on smooth hot whiskey.

  She handed the glass to him. "You like to drink, John the Evangelist?"

  "Sometimes," he said. What he meant was, yes. It had got him in a whole mess of trouble, trouble with women, trouble with friends, trouble with bosses. He liked the melted-caramel sting of fine scotch, the cheap cold burn of tequila. He liked wine, too. Fine dark wines like rubies. As he thought of them he could taste them melting on his tongue, and for a second he smelled the city again, old in booze, old in music. The two were mixed, in his mind.

  As if she knew that, Vivyan said, "The old ways say drink is a doorway. Sometimes you don’t want to open that door. They don’t call it spirits for nothing."

  He took his first sip of New Orleans water, and it was like no taste he’d ever known before, brassy and sweetly cold. He hadn’t realized he was thirsty until then, and he tipped the glass, drank until it was empty. She watched him drain it before she sipped her own, then took his glass and hers and put them back in the sink.

  "Key’s in the door," she said without looking up. She ran a splash of water into the sink, and the patter of drops on porcelain sounded like a deliberate, complex Zydeco rhythm. "Make yourself to home, John the Evangelist."

  He slept, dreaming of dark and wine and the brassy taste of music in his mouth, and when he woke up night’s face was pressed to the window, and he could hear the echo of jazz in the streets.

  Home.

  He took his horn case and went out to play.

  Bourbon Street had turned into a neon wilderness full of strangers, but that didn’t matter, what mattered was the sweet wine-rich flow of music. Like the voice of God, it was everywhere, shouting down drunken conversations, music huge enough to swallow the noise of the world. A tangle of riffs and phrases washed over him, sticky and warm. He slowed to listen, closed his eyes and turned his face toward it like a flower to sun. He stopped in the doorway of a bar and picked out the instruments – alto sax, upright bass, electric guitar, trumpet – already a trumpet in the mix. He savored the vibe for a couple of minutes, then continued down the street. Strangers bumped and slid past him, a faceless stream of people caught in the music’s wake, being pulled helplessly along like fish on a string.

  He kept walking until the music told him to stop.

  The bar had a name, but he didn’t see it; it was just another neon blare in the dark, quickly gone when he stepped inside. What was inside wasn’t air, it was a thick sweet smoky fog that rolled over him, whispered over his skin, settled hot in his lungs.

  Oh, and the music. The music.

  There were three men on the stage, two of them old, one young: sax, piano, accordion. When John blinked his eyes he saw them as smears of color, something stronger than this world, something vital. The sense came over him that Music – Music with a capital "m" -- was here, right here, running like water through this room, pouring right out of the men on stage. He was only tasting a trickle, but it made

  him desperate with thirst.

  He had been standing there for a while, gaping, when a girl tapped him on the shoulder and waited for his order.

  What had Vivyan said? Spirits are a doorway. He’d always thought they were like keys, keys to open those doors that normal, sane folks kept closed. You had to be crazy or divine to live with those doors wide open. But behind one of those doors, one of those dark closed doors, lay Music, the way it was being played up on that stage.

  "Rum," he said. The waitress nodded and went away. He turned his attention back to the stage, because the music was running wild, swirling like white water, drowning the unwary in a flood of blue notes and chords hard as jutting boulders. People were dancing, some just drunks moving to the music, some dancing that True Dance, the one that meant they’d given themselves up. More True Dancing than drunks, here. A lot more. The room was filled with worship, with bodies caught and turning in the savage, caressing flood of sound.

  All musicians live the music in different ways. The piano player, he lived it in a churchlike exaltation, his eyes rolled up to heaven, his body moving in slain-in-the-spirit jerks and tics. His fingers blurred, moved so fast they didn’t really seem a part of him. There was a deep rapture in his eyes.

  The sax player – young, hardly old enough to be buying a drink in the bar, but plenty old enough to play in one, at least in New Orleans – grooved and moved with it, sending out joy with every move. But it was the accordion player John found he had to watch. That one was young, too, his skin a glossy blue-black, his body toned and fit. He had eerie eyes, bright, shocking blue in that dark face. And the pupils – it was hard to tell, th
rough the smoke, through the silver fog of music, but John thought the man’s pupils looked narrow, slitted instead of rounded. Intense eyes, amoral, full of power. Full of –

  "Rum," said a voice at his elbow. He looked around to see the waitress standing there, holding out his glass. "Four fifty."

  He dug for a five and dropped it on her tray. The rum caught the show lights, broke them into rainbows, smeared colors like fresh paint.

  It felt like a ritual, putting that cold glass to his lips.

  Fire tore down his tongue, down his throat, hit his empty stomach and kindled. He coughed and downed the rest of it, thinking of doorways and keys and music, and Vivyan’s autumn-brown eyes.

  In his memory, her eyes changed colors, to a blue hotter than a summer sky, and the pupils narrowed into a cat’s knowing shape, and when he imagined her smile her teeth were needle-sharp and the color of polished opal.