Ghostlands

TWENTY-FIVE

The girl was asleep in the bed that looked like her bed, in the apartment that was like her apartment. For one night, no dreams visited her, and it was as close to heaven as life, waking or sleeping, could ever be now.

The old man stood over her, watching her with blind eyes, his face gentled, the dark lines etched like furrows in old bark, there in the darkness.

“Thought I might find you here,” the voice behind him said in a whisper.

Papa Sky turned. He had heard the boy coming, of course, padding into the room on light, quick feet; nothing ever surprised Papa, nothing in the world of sighted men, that was.

Now, in the realm of their minds, that was a different story….

He led the boy out into the hall, softly closed the bedroom door. “Glad to see you back in one piece,” he said, without the slightest hint of irony.

“Where’s-?” Inigo didn’t have to finish the sentence; they both knew who he meant.

“I don’t rightly know. He’s a wild one, my wandering boy.”

“They’ll be coming soon, I think,” the boy said, and there was excitement under his words, and fear.

“That’s good, real good. You hungry? Carnegie Deli might still be open.” Neither of them added, If it’s there at all; rather the copy of it, replicated, abducted from memory, and not gone back to mist and yearning…

They exited out onto the street, which tonight at least retained its solidity, the paving stones arrayed in orderly fashion, the walls standing upright. The air was warm with a mild breeze, perfect for a late-autumn night, with none of the humidity that so often cursed the city nor the frosty promise of coming snow. This was an idealized New York, not a real one, after all-a fact that was further confirmed as Papa Sky caught the lovely roller-coaster trill of the opening strains of Pops’s magnificent “Potatohead Blues” playing out of some phonograph from a distant window a street or two north. He knew this had been lifted out of his mind, it had to be; Papa Sky had actually played with Louis Armstrong once, along with Kid Orry and some of the other great old cats, fifty years back, on a paddlewheel steamboat, at Disneyland, of all places. Life was full of things so odd you had to laugh not to cry, it always had been.

Papa Sky knew where all those cats were now, under the sod, where by all rights he should be. He wondered what became of that paddlewheeler and the rest of that place.

Well, maybe I’ll just go there, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, if I ask the Powers That Be real nice, pretty please with sugar on top….

Nah, don’t even go there, Old Man, not even for funnin’. You play with fire, you get burned, even if you’re eighty-three years old and blind as a stone.

“He was like her, like Christina,” the boy beside him spoke up without prompting, bringing Papa’s thoughts back to the street here and now, where he was tapping out an easy rhythm with his cane as he turned from Eighty-first onto Columbus and headed south (all this being an unspoken agreement, you understand, to assign the familiar names and directions to these passing mirages, these phantasms).

“That so,” Papa Sky answered.

“Quiet, and strong,” Inigo said. “And patient, too.”

“Fine, that’s fine.” Papa thought back on when he’d first met Mr. Cal Griffin and his entourage, in Chicago, in Legends, when he’d been a traveling man, even at his age, a man on a mission. “He still with that Russian doctor, and that girl with the spiky hair?”

“How you know her hair’s spiky?”

“Just sounded like it would be, is all.”

“Yeah, he’s still with them.”

“And how about that other cat, the twitchy one? Mr. Magic?”

“Goldie, yeah. He’s there, too.” Papa caught the tightness in the boy’s voice, sensed something hurtful there, but he didn’t delve further. You respect people’s pain, and give it room.

“And what about Enid…Enid Blindman?” Papa Sky ventured, and it was his turn to feel a spear of pain in his chest, like a warm blade slipped between his ribs into the soft place beneath.

“Nah, I didn’t see him.” Inigo replied offhandedly. And why not? He’d never met the young bluesman, who could work his voice and four-reed chromatic harmonica and guitar of finest maple into a sweet honey sound, into miracles like angel wings.

Just like Papa Sky could blow his horn on the soft autumn nights and warm summer days, and during wintertime and springtime, too. It was a gift, one both of them had long before any Storm blasted through this old world.

It had been hard, bonechill hard, for Papa Sky to meet up with Enid in Buddy Guy’s club there on the South Side, along with Griffin and the Russian and the rest, and pretend he didn’t know him, act like he was just another stranger, blown in from off the street like a discarded playbill.

But then, Papa Sky supposed he really didn’t know him, not this grown man, three decades down in his life.

No longer a baby, no, whose only music was the soft cooing he made as he lay rocked in loving arms.

The boy walking next to him stopped abruptly. “Why are you crying?” he asked in stunned amazement.

Papa Sky wiped fiercely at the wetness running down the furrows that were like old bark in maple wood. “Just something an old man does,” he said. “Don’t mean nothin’.”

They continued on, the tapping of the cane their sole music now.

All the others were dead now. Pops and Kid Orry and Bix Beiderbecke, Wingy Manone, too. All of them, all but him. But Papa Sky knew there was a reason he was still aboveground. He had something to do.

And before it was done, he would see Enid Blindman again.