Move Under Ground | Page 9

stood as upright as a sequoia except for his sleepy,
smiling head. He licked his lips. He didn't smile because he wasn't
some sort of Satchmo gladhander. He just said "Suite," and played.
Blue and yellow fire belched from his horn. The ground shook like the
Big One had finally hit the still far-off City, and something, sweat or
blood or even gray brain started dribbling from my ears. It was
beautiful; the Negro wasn't even breathing, just blowing, just tying
notes in knots, making a tapestry of sound and burning the threads just
as quick. Blam! The head to the left of me just exploded, empty lobster
exoskeleton and black meat everywhere. The beer boiled away in my
mug and I inhaled it like dreamy opium. And the Negro blew some

more, terribly, beautifully, in time with the blood swirling in my ears.
Another patron, some dude in a dark corner, burst into flame and ran
out the door and Negro still blew. Except for the two casualties, the rest
of us were really digging the set. He let it die easy, the cornucopia of
fireworks sizzling in his horn quietly fading. Blue and yellow to subtler
reds and oranges, the key shifting, a downbeat taking over nice and
slow like summer.
Then time stopped. No beat, just a low siren whine. Even the light was
still, black and color splattered like a Pollock across the bar. But I
could move, and I stood up and saw them more clearly. A few sailors
(four, one of them without a head, his neck ended in a mass of burnt
bone and black meat), a tired older man in a nicely pressed shirt. Beetle
mandibles instead of lips stretching from their cheeks. A woman, too,
had the mandibles, hers stretched wide open, and she had tentacle
fingers wrapped three times around a tall glass. They were frozen, but a
few of the other patrons weren't. A good ol' boy poured some horrible
booze over the head of one of the sailors and set him aflame. Sort of, he
did. It was holy flame, frozen flame, like a cape of phoenix feathers
draped over a body due to the timeslip. Flame that didn't crackle or
dance, it just was, waiting for the world to start again so it could really
eat up the air. The barback pulled a shotgun from under the bar, walked
around it and put the barrel of the gun right between the
beetle-woman's pincers. And he pulled the trigger. Her head didn't
explode, it swelled, then waited. The others were dispatched too by a
few of the rougher customers--the whore with her straight razor, some
frantic queer in denim overalls with a broken chair leg digging into the
chest of another of the squares. The murder was well-practiced, like the
local ringers who manage to show up for every game of darts or
billiards in bars across the nation. They don't know much, but they
know every warp of the felt, or every wayward draft that might push a
point into a bull's eye. The folks knew what they were doing, and as the
one-note thrum of the sax started slowly turning into the wheedling
whine of a siren, I knew that this whole performance had been planned
just to draw in and eliminate a few beetlemen and squidhanded girls.
The sailor went up like a Roman candle and singed my eyebrows from
the across the room. Eyes dazzled, nose filled with beefy smoke, taste

of sour ink on the tongue, but in the ears, "Scrapple in the Apple." And
then it faded away.
I was alone in the bar, except for the besmocked girl sweeping up a
corner full of dust. Three pitchers stood upright, one rested on its side,
the handle keeping it from rolling off my little table. I was peering into
a knot in a plank of the wall. The freckle-faced girl limped over to me
finally, and even her freckles looked mean, but not as mean as her
bloody smock. The sun was up, she'd have to close for an hour or so
(heck, make it two) to hose down the floor. She thanked me for tipping
so well all night, and shooed me outside with slow hula-wave hands
and I got to the cul-du-sac just in time to see my truck, the truck I'd
stolen anyway, drive off with a heap of limbs, torsos, and leaking trash
bags in the bed. Easy come, easy go. So I went, into the morning streets
of San Santos.
Or should I say street? San Santos was like a town in an old western
film, it may as well have been all facades, and a bunch of extras just
shuffling around nonsensically in the background. Only the main