Page 11 of Shadow Ticket
…even
in Chicago,
Any town but this one,
Couldn’t we be kids again,
With our hearts in Par-ee?
So long to Mil-wau-
-kee…Lonely
night-times, adieu…hmmm
Quite a dream, yes, you’d say,
Enchantée, bonne soirée…oh get away
from me, you—
ol’ mid-
-night…in Milwaukee…
“Back when I didn’t know any better, laying on the tremolo, thought it would get me noticed, what it did was drive ’em screaming from the room, till one day over the radio along comes Annette Hanshaw, and some curtain in my mind just suddenly goes up…
“Not another of these white thrushes who thinks she can sing—Annette thinks shecan’tsing, may not really know how she affects people. Made me rethink my whole approach. Got to see the insincerity in it. Anytime you think you hear the least little vibrato from me—”
“I should kick you,” Hicks helpfully.
“Thanks, maybe lift an eyebrow anyway, that’d help.”
Even visitors in from Illinois grasp right away how much respect April rates around Arleen’s, enough to go easy with the yakking and tabletop sound effects and sometimes even look like they’re listening. The band personnel changes night to night, refugees from rooftop and upper-story ballroom floors in the area, pit bands from vaudeville houses halfway throughconversion to talkie palaces, sidemen from territory bands, rotating between here and Chicago, depending on the whims of bill collectors, ex- and current wives.
If you stay late enough, everybody shows up here. Musicians out on the variety circuits drop around after their paying gigs to sit in with the regulars. Bennie Moten personnel in matching three-piece suits and two-tone Oxfords, including the new piano player “Count” Basie, from whom you’re apt to hear “Rumba Negro” more than once before dawn comes filtering up over the Lake. Jabbo Smith and Zilner Randolph going after high F’s and G’s not without some jugular risk, while in the back at any moment might be standing in wait some hopeful kid, his own instrument bouncing back highlights, his face still in shadows he’s never felt at home in, as if, when the spot finds him at last, as he steps into the full light, he’ll turn out to be somebody we already think we know…
“Bel lavoro, that load you threw us in the Lake.” As out of a cloud of La Corona smoke now appears Lino “the Dump Truck” Trapanese, in a pearl-gray suit and custom homburg in pale maroon, beaming at Hicks like it’s been years. Weekends Lino is most likely to be found up here in Bronzeville, putting up with remarks like “Took you for more of a ‘Come Back to Sorrento’ type of fella.”
Hicks, long flagged among the police at all levels as Uncooperative, has enjoyed some attention from the other side of the law, tough parties like Lino here bending an eye kindly on Hicks’s work life, maybe not down at it like the angels but at least sideways from time to time.
“Don’t know if you can use this,” Lino now behind the hand without the cigar and into Hicks’s ear only, “even if you can’t, it ain’t me you heard it from—”
“D and D, Lino, that’s me.”
“Um piccolo consiglio.Yer Uncle Lefty? Funny stuff goin on,” gazing intently, as if trying to send thought patterns through empty space.
After a while, “Bene?” inquires Hicks.
“Not for me to say.”
“Thanks, Lino.”
Since the early bad old days of street war, hand bombs and tommy-g fire syncopating the dark hours, Hicks has learned to look at these hot tips as letters of intent from Beyond, hasty, most often in rough draft, a sort of bargain-counter faith, which working ops down at his own level have been given in place of prayers unanswered. He decides to pay a family visit.
4
Next evening, halfway up the porch steps, here comes Uncle Lefty, fixing his nephew with a bright and wary look, as if beaming a professional high sign between criminals.
