The right to sing the blues

XVIII

Nudger returned to his hotel room after leaving Fat Jack's, where he sat on the edge of the bed, stared at the telephone, and listened to the resonant thrumming of elevator cables in an adjacent shaft. It was a hollow, forlorn sound, an echo of isolation. Distant train whistles had nothing on elevator cables when it came to loneliness.

He knew why he wanted to call Claudia. He missed her suddenly, achingly, and he realized that he hadn't been away from her for any appreciable length of time or distance since they'd met. But that wasn't the real reason he needed to talk with her.

He looked at his watch. Almost four o'clock. She might not be home from the school by now; calling her would be a gamble. She had a tangle of traffic to fight on Highway 40 in her long drive in from the county.

He decided not to wait, and pulled the phone over to his lap to punch out the switchboard number for direct long distance.

On the second ring, Claudia answered her phone.

"Is something wrong?" she asked, when she realized it was Nudger.

"There's always something wrong," he said. "That's what keeps me working at least sporadically."

She caught something in his voice, paused. "How come you called?" Wily woman.

"I love you. I miss you. I wanted to hear your voice and for you to hear mine."

"It's just like you to get homesick, Nudger, but not at all like you to admit it." The phone line sizzled and crackled in Nudger's ear. He waited. "Are you becoming involved with Ineida Studd?"

"That's Ineida Mann and you know it. And no, I'm not getting involved with her in the way you suggest." Nudger was surprised by her intuition; she was on target but off the mark. "Ineida is a tragic, naive child poised on the edge of the abyss; not my idea of a sex object."

"I'm sure your interest in her is strictly fatherly."

"Grandfatherly," Nudger said.

"Last time we talked you described it as avuncular."

"So I did."

He could hear Claudia breathing into the phone. Claudia and phones; he had met her over the phone, fallen in love with her via electronic impulse. "I trust you, Nudger." She didn't tell him that lightly, he knew.

Nudger thought it best not to say anything. He heard a hollow, rolling sound on the line. It took him a few seconds to identify it as thunder.

"It's going to storm in St. Louis," Claudia said. "It'll cool things off. Is it hot there?"

"Hot as the music; not a hint of relief. This is an unreal place, as exotic as Zanzibar. It's so swampy here they inter their dead aboveground. The cemeteries look like miniature cities without windows or traffic."

"They buried your friend Billy Weep today. I saw it on the television news in the school lounge when I was at lunch. Benjamin Harrison Jefferson."

"What?"

"That was Billy Weep's real name. Didn't you know that?"

"No. He told me it was something else, a long time ago."

"They showed part of the service on the news. A man named Rush read a eulogy. And somebody played a blues number on the saxophone. It was sadder than a funeral march."

"He wasn't laid out at the funeral parlor for very long," Nudger said.

"I don't think he was laid out at all. He died indigent. The musicians' union paid for his burial."

"Was there anything else on the news about him? Such as who might have killed him?"

"No."

Nudger wasn't surprised. The living weren't particularly interested anymore in Billy Weep, probably hadn't been since he'd stopped making music that saddened them but reminded them they were alive. Nudger stared out the window at the soft, slanted early evening light. Painters and photographers lived for this time of day; it was too bad the world really wasn't the way it appeared in such a light.

"Billy Weep's death is connected with what's going on in New Orleans, isn't it?" Claudia said.

"I think so."

"Are you… being careful?"

"More than is necessary." He knew that she understood his caution was for both of them. She held her silence. Their wordless mutual understanding was more of a declaration of love than if either of them had professed love. Their relationship had evolved into this while neither of them was watching. That was the trap people fell into.

"Are you in any kind of imminent danger, Nudger?"

"Sure I am. And I'm scared. But that's the way of my half-assed occupation."

"You're always honest, anyway."

The dark worm of conscience writhed in Nudger.

"We're running up your phone bill," Claudia said. "Are you on an expense account?"

"I'm told that I am, but what I'm told and reality in this city seldom seem to match. It's been that way since I've been down here. Maybe it's something in the grits."

"The rain's started here now; it's blowing in and getting the floor wet. I'd better go close the window."

"Are you trying to get rid of me?"

"I'm trying not to need you so much. You and the mop."

"I might call you again tomorrow around this time," Nudger told her.

"Or you might not. Either way, I'll be here."

Nudger hung up the phone, replaced it on the night- stand, and sat gazing at it. There was something undeniably maudlin in such interdependence, he thought. He had never felt that way even in the early days of his marriage with Eileen. But then he had divorced Eileen.

His digestive tract let it be known that he'd thought about Eileen. She and it had never gotten along well. Their relationship had been conducive to ulcers, not Eileen's.

If he was going to mull over women who disturbed, he might as well check on the latest addition. He picked up the receiver again and punched out the number for the desk.

"Are there any messages for Nudger, Room three-oh- four?" he asked.

The desk clerk mumbled in a way that suggested that there were never any messages for anyone, but said that he would check. The phone downstairs clattered as he set it down.

Nudger waited.

"Yes, sir," a somewhat surprised voice said after a few minutes. "A phone message marked three o'clock. From a Miss Marilyn Eeker."

Nudger gripped the receiver tighter and pressed it hard to his ear. "Well, what does it say?"

"It says she's sorry she missed you again and will call or come by whenever she can."

Nudger relaxed his grip on the receiver. He wished now he hadn't called the desk. He was right where he'd been before the call, only more puzzled and anxious.

"Anything else, sir?" There was alertness and respect in the clerk's voice now. A guest who got messages at the Majestueux commanded that.

"No. And thanks." Nudger hung up, and unglued his fingers the rest of the way from the phone.

He chewed a couple of antacid tablets and lay on his back on the bed, one hand toying with the phone cord and the other absently massaging his uneasy stomach, and thought about it raining in St. Louis. At least it had waited until after the funeral.

Jesus, he thought, Benjamin Harrison Jefferson.