“I don’t know, Gillis boy. You sure got a funny look on your face.”
He remembered that, and drinking, and Vito dancing, and then Curly with the green-eyed Puerto Rican chick again, and more drinking, and the music pounding. And then he was pushing his way across the dance floor to the corner where the Quiñones crowd was standing, and he saw Cathy beside the red-haired guy, Carder, or Carlton, or whatever his name was. There was panic in her eyes. Her hand went to her throat.
“Let’s dance,” he said.
“Gillie, I’m with—”
“I said, let’s
And then he felt a sharp pain in his right arm, and the red-haired guy was in front of him, looking up in a cool way. He was smiling.
“That’s bad manners, man,” the red-haired guy said, in a way that made Gillis afraid. “I think you ought to apologize. To Cathy. And to me.”
And Gillis did what he had done so many times before; knowing what he would do, from beginning to end.
“Let’s go outside,” Gillis said. “We’ll settle this there.”
The red-haired guy was still smiling. “I don’t want a fight, pal,” he said. “I want an apology.”
And Cathy said: “Oh, Gillis, stop, don’t ruin everything.”
“Outside,” Gillis said.
The red-haired guy shrugged, turned to Cathy, and sighed: “Wait here.” Quiñones was there now, trying to calm things down. Gillis remembered that; trying to settle it. But the red-haired guy was walking out the door past the bouncer, peeling off his coat, and then Gillis was behind him, and so were Curly and Vito and Quiñones, and then he and the red-haired guy faced each other in the parking lot.
Gillis loaded up on the right hand, the right hand that had dropped so many other people in parking lots and outside bars and in school yards and on beaches. He came in a rush, and threw the right hand, and felt terrible pain in his belly, and then a swirl of chopping motions, and he looked up and saw the Paradise sign, and Curly’s astonished face. Then he was up, and then down again, his face in the gravel, something wet on his face and hands; blood. He got up one final time and hit the smaller man, but the smaller man was still smiling and then there was more pain, and a high, bright light, and broken pieces of speech, and a scream, and he was in the gravel again, and he stayed there, afraid. I can get up, he thought. But I won’t.
“Stop,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Please stop.”
And now he was in the furnished room, with the morning light as cruel as truth, thinking: Everything is different now. I dogged it, and they all know it. The little guy made me quit. I’ll never walk down the avenue the same way. I’ll never walk into the Paradise the same way or hang around the gas station the same way. Everything is different. And I hurt. I hurt.
ONE MORNING THAT SPRING, Dwight Roberts first saw the horn man. Dwight and his mother were going down the stairs of the house on Gates Avenue, he to school and she to work, and the horn man was coming up. He was a large man, with hooded eyes that made him look Asian, tan skin, a wrinkled blue suit, and dirty black-and-white shoes. He had a cheap canvas suitcase in one hand and the horn, in a scuffed black case, in the other. He was wheezing.
“’Scuse me,” he said in an exhausted voice. “Where’s 4D at?”
“Keep climbin’,” said Dwight’s mother. “It’s in the back, right over us.” She paused. “You lookin’ for Jimmy?”
“He moved,” the horn man said. “Went south.”
The man paused, as if gathering strength, and resumed the climb.
That evening they were having dinner, Dwight and his mother and his two little sisters, and first they heard the man walking, his tread heavy on their ceiling, and then the sound of water running. And then, suddenly, abruptly, they heard music. The windows were open to the warm spring air, and first there was a series of incredibly quick notes, up and down the scale, glistening, running, and then a shift into a beautiful, clear, lyrical song — a complaint, a sigh, a lament. Dwight Roberts had never heard anything like it before in his life.
“Just what I thought,” Dwight’s mother said. “A musician. Now, you stay away from him, Dwight, boy, you hear? You stay away from that horn man.”
“But why, Momma?” Dwight asked.
“Cuz he be playin’ the devil’s music.”
The horn man finished after twenty minutes, and in a while, they heard him thumping down the stairs into the night. The next day was Saturday, and in the spring morning, Dwight was reading a comic book on the stoop when a taxicab pulled up and the horn man got out. He looked up at the building and said to Dwight: “Need an elevator here. This ain’t human, man.”
And hurried up the stoop.
