New York, 1968
38. THE ALBUM SELLS ENOUGH copies to require another small printing, but the money finds its way to the men slowly, and this intensifies the strain between them. Liam and Mansour, who’ve never lost touch with Gil Rodney, invite him to their East Elmhurst show in a week’s time. He doesn’t say yes, but, for the first time, he doesn’t say no either.
They never tell Keifer that they are mentees of his father, that since they met him back in January, they’ve spent Sundays in Gil’s basement on Long Island, coughing on his imported cigars, now taking his advice on navigating their new success, with nods and cheeks full of sunflower seeds. He tells them not to take any of it seriously, tells Mansour to work on his nervousness (“That’ll take you out”) and to never, ever read reviews (“The writers aren’t even musicians”). To protect themselves from the impending roller-coaster ride of a working artist’s life with a fanatical devotion to their craft. To stop smiling so goddamn much. To get married young. To have plenty of babies. To be faithful most of the time but that it can be necessary to stray on occasion. It helps you keep the music first.
When he asks about his son and daughter-in-law, they answer with redacted, glossy stories to bring the man as close to smiling as they can. They hide their distrust of Keifer, the disputes and competing tastes that have kept each concert and rehearsal rife with tension. Rodney is generous with recommendations, referrals to good venues (half their gig roster), and his time. He is also full of anecdotes, vague and ominous warnings about the dangers of America, especially in the wake of King’s death, that go over the European men’s heads:
“Y’all be careful rollin’ together around here like a couple of happy little girls. This ain’t Paris.”
They laugh, but Rodney doesn’t, his eyes red and wet with the perpetual sadness he never speaks of.
En route to a show in Bay Ridge, Liam and Mansour tell Rodney to drop them at the corner store near his place so they can grab some cigarettes. Liam keeps prying Mansour to tell him more about Bonnie. Mansour only smiles.
The A&P’s storefront window is so completely shattered that at first glance it appears to still be in place. The woman at the counter sees Liam and Mansour gawking and ushers them in.
“Oh, man,” Liam mutters, observing the damage.
The woman gathers her sandy hair into a huge clip. With it out of her face, the men can see she is spooked.
“You know what’s funny?” she says while reaching, without looking, into the exact place where the cigarettes are propped under the glass, knowing what they’ve come in for without having to ask. “They didn’t take anything but tube socks.” She scoffs, pulls one cigarette for herself before handing them the pack. “You don’t mind, do you?” Liam shakes his head. She always does this. The woman looks at Mansour wearily as she lights it, sucks hard, then says, “Thing is, I would’ve just given them the socks.” She’s studying him, like this involves him somehow.
“I’m really sorry about this,” he offers.
She shrugs it off, but she’s studying him like she’s trying to decide if he and his people are worthy of her forgiveness.
“You guys want anything else?” she says, looking at Liam now.
“You got any jerky?”
She smiles. “You with the goddamn jerky. Sure. You?”
Mansour shakes his head, still processing the damage to the store. He looks up at the television, reporting riots in Baltimore. His eyes travel to the Frigidaire, where the rioters have damaged the cord, and the weary machine croaks, sounding like frogs in Dakar at sundown in the rainy season.
While Liam settles up, Mansour wanders out of the door and waits on the block, hands in his pockets, surveying passersby. He’d forgotten what it was like to live on this side of town. The Irish boys stare as they walk past him; most drop their eyes when he stares back in response. But some keep looking at him, and once their eyes meet, their faces open. A look that drifts from a hard leer to one of heartbreak. Like Mansour is a thief, someone who has taken too much from a place that already had far too little to give.
At the sound of Liam’s voice, Mansour turns back to the store. Liam’s face has reddened and he’s arguing with a young man standing by the counter. Mansour approaches the doorway, watching to see if it is going to get physical, if he needs to intervene. The woman has turned away so that her back is facing them. The stranger sees Mansour through the broken window and spits on the ground. He retreats to the back of the store, ending the row. Liam storms out.
“He’s seen you here a hundred times. What’s the difference tonight?” Liam says, shaking as he walks ahead of Mansour. It’s not the first time that Mansour’s presence has brought Liam trouble. He throws an arm around him.
They wait for a baseball game in the street to break so they can cross. In an accent so thick that Mansour can barely unravel it, the tallest player, a teenager with his rib cage poking through his skin and the ball in his hand, yells to Liam:
“Why do you keep bringing them to our neighborhood?”
He pretends not to hear, and they walk on.
39. MANSOUR EXPECTED to survive longer than four games in the chess tournament Bonnie’s brought him to in Washington Square Park. But distracted by what’s playing in his head from their conversation on the subway—the death of her grandmother, their shared connection to Mende—in the end, he’s bested by a kid from Yonkers who’s wearing rain boots (on a day when there’s no sign of rain) and a combat helmet. He leers at Mansour through hair that hangs down in long sandy ringlets.
“Good game,” he says, before Mansour even realizes that in just three moves, the boy has won.
Wandering, Mansour expects Bonnie to be on the grass where the other defeated have migrated to, but she’s not there. He joins a small crowd and finds that she is the attraction. Sitting on her feet, deep into a speed game. Her white-haired opponent grunts and groans, but she makes no sound, sucking on an unlit cigarette, the strength of focus showing in the tension of her mouth. Thickened and kinkier from sweat since he last saw her an hour before, her hair is pushed up high into a puff. She has a tick: each time she hits the timer, she swivels to the left, then the right, the body rock of a rapper in the zone. Mansour moves with her subconsciously. She looks up, catching him doing this dance. Sheer joy takes over her focus, making her giggle alone and loudly like a little kid, indifferent to the crowd.
They are yelling over the traffic and he’s pulling her by the hand as they hustle toward the subway station that will take him to Queens.
“You distracted me. You cost me that game!” she says.
“Maybe he’s just a better player than you,” he teases.
“Why are we running?”
“My gig’s in forty minutes!” he says.
“What?” she yells over a bus.
“Forty minutes!”
He begins his pre-show ritual on the sunny street. A perfect mimic, he’s making the sound of a siren. He imitates the purr of the pigeons. It is New York City, so no one pays him any mind. He vocalizes loudly, going high—something close to a screech—and winces at his own sound. “Annnd … We won’t be goin’ up there tonight, kids,” he says, as Johnny Carson. By the time they arrive at the station, she is in tears from laughter, holding her stomach, and clasping his arm to stay standing.
“I gotta get away from you,” she says, and he’s grinning at her giggles. Losing track of the time again, he slips an arm around her waist, pulling her in.
“You’re late,” she says, but she keeps her eyes on him, a smile with closed lips and a cautious glare. He slides one of his bracelets onto her wrist. She steps back, brushing hands with him as she slips out of his grasp and jogs across the street for a train home to Brooklyn.
Halfway home on the R train, Bonnie is still thinking of, still feeling, his hands. Rough hands. Hands that remind her of that feely map in her homeroom class back at Mulberry High on which the blue tributaries of the Mississippi river raised up off the wood. This is where we ran, Bonnie had thought once as she felt the river, wondering how many with her blood drowned on their journeys out of hell and how many survived. She imagines where Mansour’s hands might take her.
40. ON HIS WAY to their show in East Elmhurst, Liam crosses the street with his bass strapped across his body. It fits tighter than usual. He’s starting to feel the weight he’s gained since landing a steady girlfriend of his own: an Italian American carpenter’s apprentice who lives on the first floor of his building. At the gate of the train, he feels a warm breath on the back of his neck, the sharp prick of a knife at his side. He stiffens.
“The watch,” a vaguely familiar voice says. Liam fumbles for his wrist, suddenly dumb with fear. He yanks the watch off, feels a clammy hand gather it from his palm. He doesn’t dare turn around.
“Where’s your nigger?” the voice hisses, and then it disappears.
When he can move again, Liam bolts back up the subway-station steps. Still trembling, he goes into the nearest hardware store and buys the first handgun the old man pulls from the display case. When Liam tells the salesman that he’s never used a gun before, the man shoots out the naked light bulb to warn Liam about its power.
Over the course of their set, the audience dwindles to a third of its original size. Keifer’s insistence on a jazz treatment is beginning to cost them in the folk venues Liam and Mansour had done well in as a duo. As they bow to disparate applause, Liam tries to hide his trembling. His teeth slam uncontrollably. He hasn’t stopped shaking since the moment the knife was in his side.
Mansour storms off the stage before the applause ends. Keifer follows him onto the street, also angry and shouting, furious at Mansour’s betrayal—as the crowd parted, he’d seen his father. Their voices, loud and insistent, carry as Liam and the other musicians follow the men outside.
“What part of ‘don’t bring him around’ don’t you understand?!”
“I didn’t bring him here! He came on his own!”
“Yeah! For you! Congratulations.”
By the time Liam reaches them, the trumpeter is pulling Keifer off Mansour. Davis stands to the side, unusually silent, his back at the brick wall. Mansour charges at Keifer again, but the trumpeter blocks him. Mansour throws him out of the way, gripping the pianist once more. They are equal in power, taking it in turns, throwing each other to the ground.
“Carl Rodney! Get off that boy!” Keifer releases Mansour at the sound of his father’s voice. His fiery eyes turn on Gil.
“What are you doin’ here?” he asks, almost desperate.
“I came to see you,” Gil says, and he takes a cautious step or two forward.
“You mean you came to see him.” Keifer turns back to Mansour, who’s now off the ground, gaining his bearings. “I told you to stay away from my family,” Keifer says.
Keifer is shaking his head, speaking to Mansour again, but now like a brother who’s betrayed him. “I told you, man, I can’t be around Gil, man. I told you everything. I told you things I never told my wife … I told you what he did.”
“Talk to me,” Gil cuts in, louder. “I’m right here, son. Talk to me.”
“And say what?!” Keifer screams at Gil. He walks toward the club, but stops, facing Gil again. And when he does, he’s finally calm.
“You throwin’ him gigs. You comin’ out here in your big car to hear him sing. I’ve been playin’ in this city for ten years. You ain’t never come anywhere to see me!”
Gil is silent, and Keifer finally turns away, heading back into the club. The band follows him. The steel back door shuts.
Mansour and Liam accept a ride from Gil back to Liam’s place in Bay Ridge.
“He told me to stay out his way,” Gil says to himself and shakes his head, watching the road as he drives. “There’s no pleasing him. No pleasing him. He was always that way.”
Mansour lies awake on the dusty couch at Liam’s. He’s shaking his head, Keifer’s voice still ringing in his ears. Liam had suggested that he come by in the morning once everyone had cooled down, but Keifer insisted. He wants his money tonight.
The buzzer goes off, and Liam grabs his jacket, stuffing the cash in his pocket.
“Stay here,” Liam instructs Mansour wearily. “We don’t need any more trouble tonight.”
He goes to meet Keifer downstairs.
The front door whines loudly when it shuts. In the silence of the sweltering apartment, Mansour can feel that it is over. Not only the band, which is mostly made up of Keifer’s friends, but, more significantly, his sonhood with Gil Rodney and his (turbulent) brotherhood with Keifer. Keifer had set his three rules—and meant them.
Mansour tries to ignore it, but the loss cuts deep. It has triggered a memory of the first time a father was lost. And now some hibernating terror in him is suddenly alive again, pumping an old wound with fresh blood.