Sleetmagazine.com

Moontrance

club

Angelique loves the rush of air conditioning, the goose pimples rising from her skin as she slips past the bouncer in forbidden short shorts. The rest of her is dressed in maroon high heels and a black taffeta shawl. Her tanned legs find the table closest to the industrial air conditioner blowing pieces of tinsel across the ceiling, almost out blowing the musicians on stage. Soon it feels as if she’s knee deep in a snowdrift and she thinks of the book she left at home on her night table. The Great Leap Forward when rich Chinese peasants were buried alive in the snow. They called it The Refrigerator. A peasant soaked in water and sent outside to freeze—A Person Wearing Glass Clothes. She is wearing glass clothes as she watches frost form on her Tom Collins glass. Outside is Houston and heat, but inside maraschino cherries chill in dishes on the bar speared by red plastic toothpicks. Tall women with long necks and haunches appear alluring and purple under black light as they nibble from platters of water crackers and oysters on half-shells. Sea mucous and sex food she hears them called. Everywhere bursts of perfume. “Hey, Skippy,” a passing face says. She is frozen like the single spotlight on the trumpeter’s face. The brilliant, hard-bop notes coming from his horn are high and cool but his face is glazed with sweat. The sounds the trumpet makes are cold white blossoms. Edging between tables she pretends she’s searching for someone, glad for the Tom Collins inside her as if she’s swallowed a hundred-candled chandelier. She likes men to look at her; she likes the feel of their eyes from a distance. A look makes the roots in her teeth quiver. The people she works with would be surprised to see her here. She teaches the retarded autistic. Everything about her work is hot: straining students’ limbs to walk when they want to roll or crawl. She envisions the dead shine far back in her pupils’ eyes, as she bumps against something, wood or flesh. Deeper in the club no fumes from the string mop, no plastic bags of soiled pampers nor boys with their terrifying erections and girls with their drool. The incense smokes crayon marks from her arms.

atrophy

Her fellow teachers know little about her not even the story of what happened to her. When she was eighteen and at a party, the boy showing off his father’s twelve-gauge accidentally shot her. She was sitting on a kitchen chair. The police told her mother later that if Angelique hadn’t been leaning forward she would have been killed right then and there. All of her life since, a gift of leaning forward. Her left arm is limp, slightly atrophied and smaller than her right, but she’s draped her shawl over it. Every night is a new night, a test to see if she passes, how many glances she can attract. You have your mind, they all said afterwards. She hated them for saying it. She wants to be body parts only. Empty-headed. Soon she is noticed like she always is in short shorts. Her legs hide her face with its scar like a meteorite shower, a 16 billion year old shooting star. In the cold dark she is hair and eyes only.

stage

She leans against the stage. The trumpet player is singing through his horn, lips to gold stem. Lush harmonic sounds, pure breath, and lungs, heart, whatever he is inside—rushing out. It’s hard to know what he looks like beyond his starched white shirt and Panama hat. He’s blowing higher, harder, improvisation then solo. Another Tom Collins appears in her hand. Floaty water, more limes slices, maraschino cherries. She drinks fast; the slush passing over her palate gives her a stabbing pain. Brain freeze. Then the music is over and the players come out to mingle with the crowd. When the trumpet player brushes by her she holds out her hand to be autographed.

bed

His kiss is much older than hers. While he studies her Angelique bites back her breath. Why doesn’t he take off his glasses? His stares are making her afraid. He tells her he is the protégé of Miles Davis, a hard blower. Who do you like? he is asking, and then rattles off names  — Joe Henderson, Horace Silver, Joe Chambers, Dexter Gordon, Slide Hampton, Rufus Reid. Angelique knows nothing. The names hurry past her like station stops on a train. She fingers the ice in the bucket. He’s not really handsome. Kinky curls, a beard shadow, a gold tooth. His head reminds her of a bulldog’s when he leans over the bedside table. He shakes brown powder from a glassine packet onto the fake wood. “Would you like some?” he asks, inserting a straw into his nose. “What is it?” He sniffs.

“Mexican heroin.”

The words seem no more dangerous than this Holiday Inn room with its bed and brown comforter pulled back to reveal white sheets. The words are as innocent as the picture on the wall of a wooded New England hillside in autumn, a bleed of yellow and red leaves. “Just a taste,” she says. He cakes the tip of his finger in the brown dust and rubs in on her gums. The sconce light of cast brass and amber winks as she licks what remains on his finger. He sniffs from the pile again then studies her. The thick lenses enlarge his eyes until there is no escape. What does he see? Her arm? His eyes are intense as if iron is being smelted inside them. Is that why he’s stopped kissing her? The exchange of tongues is nothing compared to this looking. When he gets out of bed and puts back on his boxer shorts, she notices his long lovely thighs. His knees are ashy like he has knelt in a newspaper fire. The brown powder is upsetting her stomach. Nausea spreads through her like the all-day simmer of meat gravy. “Why do you take heroin?” she asks lazily, feeling weak as the limb of a salt cedar. A crease forms above his nose. “It helps me come down after I play.”

jew

He reaches to the plate of black grapes under the bedside lamp, feeds her a grape, then to another plate, picking up some sweetness that is fried, a hot muskiness that could be plantain or spring lamb. “You get so much adrenalin on stage.” He eats a grape. His eyebrows rise over the frames of his horn rims. “Are you a Jew?” He likes Jewish women because they’re intelligent; they understand his music, why he’s not going to go electric or jazz-fusion, why he’s going to stay with bebop, with harmonic. Has she heard any of his recorded music? His compositions? Live at Monterey? Live at Playboy Jazz Festival? She lifts the sheet and wipes the drops of sweat that linger on his shoulders. He must have seen her deformity. That’s why he’s showing this interest in her mind. He must be too polite to ask her to leave or else he is kind.

meteorites

They talk about falling stars, about the meteorite showers predicted in the Houston Chronicle. The girl knows by far the largest number of meteorites is Chondfrite. Similar in composition to the mantle of Earth. A ton of meteorites enter the atmosphere every day. Probably the fire shower will have formed billions of years, then a billion year journey through space. It is the eternal and infinite. Bits of falling solar systems. “Meteorites are the one material evidence of the universe beyond,” she says. “Are you Russian?” he asks. “You seem mystical.” Then he mentions the sect of the Skoptzy. Has she heard of it? She nods. The trumpet player loves Russian history and the girl has studied flagellants, cults of pain. The girl tells him of “the little mark,” made by red-hot irons. She describes for him the “great purification” involving amputation with a pruning knife and a bone from a bull.

phone

“I find exploring alternate cosmologies fascinating. You have a mind,” the trumpet player says almost smiling. The phone rings. He reaches for the phone, then puts a finger to his lips. “Ssssh.” After saying hello he holds the telephone receiver against his chest. “Maybe you should go. It’s my manager. New York calling.” She hears the whirr of an ice machine, the thump of a soda can hitting bottom. Somewhere stars are burning toward Earth. Six years later she sees his obituary in People. “One of the truly great trumpet players dead.” “Huge Loss to Jazz World.” She begins to tremble when she reads that he tumbled down a stairway at Dekalb Avenue subway station in Brooklyn and a train struck him, severing his left arm. She reads on, “He suffered from failing eyesight all his life.”

street

The darkness is thinning and the workday is about to begin. When it arrives it will pull her inside it. She fears the swampish heat. The magnolias know first the creeping light and close their petals before the brush fire of the sun. She lights a cigarette, inhales, filling herself. The dawn doesn’t want to be walked in. The overheated magnolias have taken back their sugar. Already mosquitoes and black flies hover like tea lights, dropping stings like bits of cigarette ash. She passes azaleas and flowering pear, milkweed twisting in backyards. The mockingbirds sound like traffic luring her down a street that smells of corn tortillas. She thinks of the trumpet player getting off the bed and putting on his boxer shorts. How did he find her out? Did she relax? On her shawl the trumpeter has pinned a publicity button showing his laminated face. His eyes are closed as he blows. He can’t see the horror in them.