David Hutto has work forthcoming in Mudfish, and his work has recently appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Defenestration, and Fjords Review, and, as well as in Crazyhorse, Fiction International, The Chamber Magazine, and other magazines. His experience as a writer includes a writers retreat in Mérida, Mexico in 2024, a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2003, two invitations as a featured poet at the Callanwolde Arts Center in Atlanta, and first-place poetry awards from state-wide contests in Alabama and Georgia.
United We Jazz
By David Hutto
Tracy gave a bright eye to the exquisite cakes in the glass case. Chocolate…red velvet…like cuisine in the daily routine of Paradise. She wanted that cake to grace her plate, and wasn’t this a birthday lunch? The angel on the other shoulder, on the other hand, was whispering you’re forty-two now, might lose a few pounds, I’m just saying. So no, she would definitely not have a huge slice of…or maybe she and Abigail could share a slice. Tracy and Abigail had come wide-eyed and wondering into this world only three days apart, close enough to beat the birthday drum together, which they had done for years and then more years still.
And there came Abigail blooming through the door, in a green blouse and wild red hair as always. “I hope you didn’t wait long.”
“Just long enough to fantasize about sex with a piece of cake.”
Abigail turned and looked at the dessert case. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
“Happy birthday,” Tracy said.
“I believe we both get one of those.” Abigail sat down. “Happy birthday yourself.”
“This makes twenty-five years we’ve been celebrating together,” Tracy said. “Since before we had that job together after high school. And yet here we are still so young and vibrant.”
“And gorgeous,” Abigail said. “Let’s don’t leave that out. Boy, that job turned out strange in some ways.”
“Oh, in some ways.”
“Which reminds me,” Abigail said.
“Reminds you?”
“A couple of weeks ago, Nellie was having swim practice, so I went to pick her up.” Nellie was Abigail’s oldest daughter, age thirteen. “I got there early, so I was sitting outside the pool area wearing headphones listening to music. I saw the swim coach come down the hall, so I took off the headphones to tell him how much Nellie loves being on the swim team. I was talking to him, and we’re yacky-yack a little bit, and while we were talking, the music on my headphones was playing, because I forgot to turn it off. Maybe I keep the volume up too loud. Frank says I do. Anyway, the coach could hear it and he says, ‘Oh, you’re listening to Joe Sample, I like him.’ So then we’re yacky-yack about how we both like jazz, and I tell him I don’t expect somebody young like him to like jazz. I mean, maybe he’s not all that young, around thirty, but he looks fifteen, you know how people start to look younger and younger like they’re all babies now. And he tells me he grew up listening to jazz CDs he inherited from his dad, because—” Abigail paused. “OK, are you ready for this? Because his dad used to manage a jazz club called The High Note.”
“Oh, shit!”
“Right! Then I connected his last name. Coach Carteret. He’s Aristide Carteret’s son.”
“My God!”
“And Coach Carteret told me he never really knew his dad because when he was a kid his dad died of a heart attack.”
* * *
Tracy tall/thin/browneyed, oh and Abigail short/thin/flamehaired, arrive at The High Note where every note is a jazz note, sometimes blue sometimes red hot sometimes orange as a desert sky, but always cool and correct. Early for work, no easy odyssey when you long to park a car in the frantic canyons of Midtown Atlanta. Ready for work, they are as well, jazzed in club uniforms—black pants long-sleeved white shirts black bow ties—first serious jobs, high school days now washed off into the sea of educational history.
“Those,” says Linda, overlord of alcohol dreams, master of the bar, “glasses need to be put away.” An older woman, the symbol of someday, Linda carries the weight of twenty-seven years, a strong likeness of an adult to Tracy and Abigail, nipping about so nimble at nineteen. Tall Tracy hangs up the glitter crystal for dream drinks, stems in air, open glass mouths yawning down toward the bar, while Abigail secretes the small serious-fist glasses down below. Those are the glasses to hurl in bellowed intoxication, but that kind of bar is down the street. This place is oh so jazz, you dig? Any crying that happens here is done on a saxophone.
The bright light of easy visibility where Tracy and Abigail clink the drinkware, that’s just for getting ready. When the time comes for customers cool as Jesus cousin to congregate, the lights go down, and a blue bulb here and a moody bulb there create that atmosphere, that jazz feel. But until then, Aristide, manager man, top dog among jazz cats, demands bright light and crazy cleanliness like he must think this place is an operating room. Nobody says no to Aristide, so they clean and then clean what’s been cleaned. If fear is respect, they respect him, if fear is admiration, he does get admired, if fear is avoidance, employees stay out of his way. “I don’t,” he says, “let anybody,” he declares, “create a problem with what’s mine.” And you know how it is, if they don’t like that, they can dislike it somewhere else. The bars where patrons bellow their intoxication are also hiring.
The stage at one end is why people come to The High Note, in addition to alcohol and showing off their own exceptionally cool existence. That stage of worn wooden floor, of blood-red curtains in back, of the perfect spotlight when paying attention is needed, that’s where the sax will cry, the piano will talk philosophy, and the singer will lament, “I only exist for you!” The red curtains have bled across the room, so chair fabric is red, other decorations are red, and sometimes the faces of patrons grow red as well. Walls are tan, trimmings dark black, on every menu in ebony and gold, an attitude that’s been bankrolled, the club logo: United We Jazz. You better damn well know it.
While Tracy and Abigail make glasses move, Aristide comes forth, from the office with green lamps where fate decides each day, Aristide comes forth himself, blue-suited this day, gray the previous day, pin-striped some other day. The caesar of the club approaches the bar, stopping with a dangerous frown to adjust the angle of napkins on the tables. If fear is avoidance, the employees stay out of his way, and do they therefore look for livelihoods where the sparks of harshness are scattered with less abandon? They do not. Aristide pays his people well, both musicians and employees. When the money is good, we make our mental adjustments, even if the soul suffers. This is our world.
“Where,” Aristide says to Tracy and Abigail, “is Linda?”
“She told us,” Abigail says, “to put these away. She’s in the back.”
The laser of Aristide’s eyes scans his quick calibration. “Space them,” he says, “better,” and he points to the rack above the bar. He moves, he stops, his fist rises to touch himself on the chest.
“You OK?” Tracy asks.
“Fine,” he growls with irritation. “Probably gas from eating lunch.” Again his fist touches his chest.
Watching him turn, observing him walk, seeing the door close behind him, cautious Tracy waits a minute longer, then says, “Who would want to fuck him?” Abigail is laughing. People who are completely insane do not work at The High Note, and only a completely insane person would tell Aristide everything they know. Each of them, from most to least aware, knows about his affair with Linda, knows also that this imperious patriarch is married with a male child and a female child. Aristide knows they know. Caring what they think is well below his interest. That same evening, in the moody blue atmosphere, the piano moaning philosophically, the patrons like glad mammals seeking oblivion, Tracy is at the bar picking up a drink. Aristide approaches Linda and says, “Tomorrow at 3:00.”
So it goes, life, that is, abounding with all its gratuitous complexity. Tracy tall/thin/browneyed and Abigail short/thin/flamehaired come to work at The High Note, asking the happy drinkers what they’ll drink and then drink after that. “We,” they say to friends, “love our jobs” and this is mostly true. A year will go by for everyone eventually. For a person seventy years old, the year passes like a flash of lightning in a thunderstorm, while the twenty-year-old is still seeing sunny days and is that a cloud on the horizon? Every night at The High Note, jazz notes woke and pleaded and spoke, oh baby please come back, you know how much I love you, and damn you twice if you don’t.
Olivia is the new waitress, earning good jazz money while drifting through the bookish anxiety of grad school. One night Olivia stands with a tray in her hands, eyes bright from the light of piano. “I love,” she says to Abigail, “a great piano player. Maybe I should flirt with him.”
“Just,” Abigail replies, “don’t say I told you to.”
Life is so rich and full of opportunities for bad decisions, eventually there is one for every person. Olivia lets the piano player go. He is, after all, a musician, itinerant, passing through, probably unemployeed soon. She decides—oh, Olivia, how did someone like her get into graduate school?—to flirt with Aristide instead. Men who believe the sun comes up just to shine on their heads think they are all Big Daddy. When Aristide decides that his glorious penis, like a luxury yacht, can move from one port to another, he chooses the island of Olivia, where the sun shines a little bit brighter. Linda is now free, under the bylaws of being with Aristide, to “go find a boyfriend”. Slow to express her gratitude, she sullenly slogs on as bar boss, still presiding over bottles of forgetfulness, to the wonderment of the young ones, such as Tracy and Abigail.
“How,” asks James, a waiter, contemplating Aristide, “does he do that?” The boy looks perplexed. “That,” he says contemplatively, “shit would give me a heart attack.”
And when it happens, James’s pale brown eyes are wide in witness. James, on a day in spring when trees near his cheap apartment are full of pink flowers, stands at the bar folding napkins. Linda with eyes full of darkness stands watching as Aristide, cold, precise, walks up calmly, saying, “Where is Olivia?”
“Balls,” James relates later, “he’s got as big as grapefruit. Can you,” he asks Tracy and Abigail, “believe what he said?” Maybe young James exaggerates his own surprise, inspired by fondness for the citrus metaphor. They all know Aristide. True surprise springs like a toad of malevalent magic from the mouth of Linda.
“On a date,” she says of Olivia. “She went to Sassafrass.”
Aristide is only human, not a volcano. How, then, is he able to explode in ash and fire, obliterating villages and setting forests aflame? The door to the back room slams, the door to the building slams. Given this clattering pattern, probably his car door slammed as well. News reporters adore these incidents, because people who listen to news adore these incidents even more. Did something ugly happen? Oh yes, please, tell us all about it! Don’t spare a single detail, we’ll sit right here and listen.
The pleasure of such a story brings palpitations of excitement, conveys the thump of a racing pulse, practically delivers a heart attack of happy expectation. The version of this story with the brightest colors is recounted by Olivia, she of graduate school studying hospitality. At the club later, when it is all over, Olivia, darling star of the dark macabre tale, tells them how she sat in Sassafras with her date, a man unsuspecting how exciting life is going to be very, very soon. Olivia is sipping a glass of wine, and looking across the room, she sees that villages have been obliterated and forests are aflame. The wave of lava rolls toward her table, toward the man unsuspecting. Approaching their table, Aristide says to Olivia, “What the fuck are you doing?” The man unsuspecting looks up, surprised.
Olivia explains (oh, Olivia) that she is not scheduled to be at work.
Another forest bursts into high red flames. “When,” Aristide says, “you’re with me, you don’t fucking go on a date with another guy.”
The man unsuspecting has suddenly been enlightened. He stands and pokes Aristide in the chest. “And who are you?” the man asks, perhaps believing that with labels things become more clear.
“If,” Aristide says, “you’re man enough, I’ll be in the parking lot.”
Oh, yes, the man who is now enlightened is man enough. Indeed. When a bull comes charging another bull, they both put their head down in the majestic grandeur of combat for the ladies. Snorting and pawing the ground, but…barely out the door, with no time to paw the ground, Aristide’s fist is in the other man’s face, in the face, in the face, in the face, in the face, in the face. The man is down, yet Aristide persists in punches, lingers for one last kick, then stops and stands with glorious breath over the immobile intruder.
We might expect a moment of quiet respect for this triumphant moment, but there is none. Instead, there is Olivia, with shrieks, Olivia, with screams, Olivia, with cries of horror. Aristide turns to the female he has won through ritual combat, perhaps to display his horns gleaming in the sunlight, to spread his broad fan of colorful tail feathers, to roar to the skies that he is still king. He roars, however, at Olivia, at her disloyalty, at her gall in—
“Hey!” a voice shouts, a little gutteral, maybe, a bit hoarse, possibly. “Piece of shit!” The man who is now enlightened—so much more enlightened than before—has somehow managed to rise and reach his car. How can a person even walk after that kind of beating? He is not walking well, but he does hold a pistol in his hand. And no more words are needed. We are here for you, Aristide, the bullets sing, we have risen from dumb motionless inertia, have burst out into the light of day, to hurry across this small space singing your name, to sing you into Eternity.
Olivia, dark star of the macabre tale, tells them everything at the club later, extolling her own tragedy, tells them how Aristide looked into her eyes before he died.
* * *
“Your coach said a heart attack?” Tracy said. “He doesn’t know how his father died?”
“I guess he was so young they told him it was a heart attack.”
Tracy shook her head as her mind filled with perplexity. “I never really understood it. I mean, why did Linda tell him where Olivia was? Why would she do that?”
“Oh.” Abigail paused. “She did that because of me.”
“What? What do you mean because of you?”
Abigail leaned forward. “You remember Olivia telling us about that guy asking her out?”
“Yeah.”
“That day Aristide died, I was in the break room with Linda, and she was looking at the schedule. She said, ‘So Olivia’s off today’ and I wasn’t thinking anything about it. I just said, ‘Oh, yeah, some guy’s taking her to Sassafras tonight.’ That’s how she knew.”
“I knew about that,” Tracy said. “Except Linda didn’t believe you.”
Abigail looked puzzled. “What? But she told him.”
Tracy shook her head. “When I was picking up a bar order later, Linda said, ‘Abigail gave me some shit about Olivia being on a date’. I said no, it’s true, I was there when Olivia said it.”
“Oh, so…”
“So we both told Linda. But I still can’t understand why she told Aristide.”
“Because the world is full of weird madness.” Abigail waved her hands in front of her, to brush away the clouds of existential stupidity. “I don’t know either.” She paused. “Do you think I should tell Coach Carteret what really happened?”
Tracy stared at her. “Did you just this moment go insane? Hell no.”
The Galway Review 