Blues Next Door

Model A wore gold in his ear, in his teeth, around his cigarette holder; and on the black rhino horn of a finger was his Creole ring. Asked why he chose an English girl 32 years younger than he, Model A once replied, " 'Cause in old age I would prefer to smell perfume than liniment." As for Sandra, her temper did not provide her reasons; she married him. When Georgina was born, like perfect honey but slightly paralyzed, it simply made the two of them hold hands more.

Sandra liked to be able to say, "He's part Cherokee as well, actually." Further than that, no one dared inquire: Her hand, sudden-white on his, locked out all other difference. But she had been known to admit, "Well, at first the language was, you know, a bit much. Because when all them blues musicians get together, it's nothing but mother this and mother that."

People always called her sarcastic. Indeed, the more timid of her relatives could picture Sandra only in retort--hair back-combed from a somewhat angelic forehead, eyes drawn together, mouth puckered to a tart little trumpet. She had been married once before, at 17, and had proved her independence by inattentiveness. Her first husband had been reduced to silence while Sandra painted her nails and hummed a tune.

"Tell us about New Orleans, Model."

"I told you already a hundred times," he teased, " 'bout New Or-leens."

"Tell us some more, go on."

So he told her about the street gangs in Indian feathers, the bonfires at early morning, the barrel house where he learned to play, how he came to be called Model A for running faster than the police cars. She could sit for hours listening to all that. But he had his moods as well. Anything might set him off, Sandra noticed; the most ordinary sound of home, like a clack of the wooden dog gate or Georgina's footsteps pummeling across the room above. His mustache would go lumpy, as if he had a mouthful of boiled sweets; Sandra was even a little frightened of the cuts that appeared in his face.

"Forget about all that," she said. "Come on, duck."

"I cain't forget 'bout it. All my life from six years old, all I ever wanted," he mumbled, "to work and save enough money and git enough ammunition and catch them Kluxers in a meetin' and spray 'em and let 'em spray me. Long as I could lie down in the field with a few of 'em, I'd be happy."

She tried to be patient, but she could hardly picture Model A smaller than he now was, let alone picture him watching his father and mother burn. How could it still haunt him, on a council estate? And Georgina was climbing on his knees to reach for the boxing gloves that hung on the wall from another part of his past. "She wants to play the piano like Dadda, don't you? Oh, go on, Model, show her."

"All o' that was buildin' up in me ever' day from six years old. Them Kluxers burn the church, too. Jesus, he came from the Arabs' country, he wasn't no white man.

"Christmas, nobody give you nothin'. I used to go to a show on Christmas. Sit up in that show till ever'thing finish. Christmas for me jus' like any other of the days...."

"Get on!" Sandra chided. She'd heard this one so many times.

"I mean it. Jus' like any other of the days."

"Oooh!" she exclaimed. "You lousy cow! You know you enjoy shopping for Georgy at Christmas as much as I do. Every year it's the rotten same. 'Oh, we're not going to spend so much this year' and we always finish up spending forty pound."

They lived on his savings. Though the house was small for four--Sandra's dad lived there as well--Model A had bought it from the council. That and his van, lettered Model A Statesborough, Blues Singer of New Orleans, gave them a prestige on the estate because the van was brand-new. They lived surrounded by all that was commonplace to Sandra--bits of dropped food, the spires of nail-varnish bottles, Georgina's socks drying like tiddlers on the cage of the gas fire. Model A liked system, however, and finally he prevailed with it. On the kitchen wall, an envelope hung below the notice All the Paying-Off Books is here. He never kept her short. Money had no part of her present exasperation.

The north of England's deepest dislike is for any kind of waste. Sandra's uncertainty as to the precise commodity being wasted made it all the more tantalizing to her: the entreaties by succeeding posts that Model A should go back to playing. The BBC in Leeds even sent telegrams--a telegram meant real urgency--but he would just say, "No, I ain't gonna hire myself to nobody no more."

"Then," Sandra would yell, "you're barmy, aren't you?"

And there were the people who turned up on the doorstep to see him, looking as if they'd walked across the world, which in some cases they had. Sandra would haul them inside quickly before the neighbors saw.

For them, however peculiar they were, Model A always gave in and played the old piano upstairs wedged against the bars of Georgina's cot. They sat in a row on the cot with their mouths open, like baby birds. Since they always looked half-starved, he'd cook a meal for them, too; he was a good cook. Eating ham hocks, string beans and rice and staring at a view across the recreation ground to the power station, their faces changed, as Sandra put it, "from dreamy to plain daft."

But what nettled her most of all was the man who claimed to have every record Model A had ever made, over 200 of them. They were the huge old breakable kind, like those Sandra threw out when Elvis Presley was popular, and no one but the collector himself was allowed to touch them. She'd asked how much they were worth and he'd replied, £80 or £90 each.

Her campaign was renewed that night.

"No, I ain't gonna hire myself no more," Model A said.

"Oooh!" She could shake him. He was little enough.

"It's not of interes' to nobody," he said.

"They're all begging for you, you great lump!" Model A showed the gold in his teeth.

"'They,' " he repeated, "who 'they'? Huh? 'They' jus' the jivers and cheaters. All 'they' want to do is jive you after they use you. 'They' 'llowed Blind Lemon Jefferson to die at the streetcar stop."

"Now, don't start mithering on about Blind Lemon Jefferson again."

"He lie next to Classie in a unmarked grave. You know who done put him in there? 'They.' "

"This is different," she urged. "It's England."

Then he said something that really made her wild. "Aah, you white folks is all the same--"

"You'll pay for it, you know that, don't you?" Sandra shouted after him as he went up the staircase, which was lined with pictures of him at the microphone on tropic nights before she was born.

She turned to Mrs. Trolley, their neighbor, who by infallible radar for violence or celebration had just then appeared in a turban at the side door.

"He'll pay for it, he will," Sandra told her. "He always does when he's sorry. I got a new pair shoes out of him last time."

• • •

They'd both had stomach upsets the day Big Sister Oak came. Model A's cure for anything, taught to him by the Italian orphanage in New Orleans 50 years ago, was a hot potion of rum and garden mint. Sandra had spent an unhappy morning on the couch, with little grimaces and curses, trying to bring it up again as wind. Dad was there, too, watching the Persian lessons on television.

Model A started to mend Sandra's electric hair rollers. He was, in every way, clever round the house; he always did the ironing and fed Georgina on Sandra's two mornings at work. Only in ordinary things like this did Sandra feel the twitch of something uncommon in her life. She felt it when he looked over the day's runners at York, his cigarette holder in his mouth, or when he took his shirt off to wash and she saw the glisten of prize-fighting scars.

As with all houses in those parts, their side door stayed open to admit (continued on page 232)Blues Next Door(continued from page 148) neighbors, neighbors' children, the large-tailed dogs peculiar to small dwellings. But as a rule, any visitor was signaled by Mrs. Trolley--"Radio Ambury," Model A called her, because their houses were in Ambury Park Estate. Sandra's eyes were closed momentarily with a spasm and at first she didn't realize that someone had come in. She merely thought the sun had clouded over.

Rex the Alsatian jumped from under the table. Model A looked up from the point of his screwdriver. Normally, reading glasses gave his face an old man's scowl. Sandra now saw it change--as it sometimes did when he sang a rude song for Georgina in the bath--to a boyish look.

"Hey--"

Rex alerted his ears but decided not to bark.

"Hey, there's a dog outside! Go see the dog!" The newcomer turned around.

"Oh, hel-lo, Big Sister Oak. Come in, my duck," Model A said.

Big Sister Oak chuckled at Rex, who had cowered back under the table. "Hey, that guy don' know he's a dog. Go on, brother, go see the dog outside."

She doffed her army tunic and changed from men's work shoes to flat-heeled slippers. Above her flowered pinafore's incalculable mass, a tiny face glowed like a cooking plum.

"I'm sweatin' already," said Big Sister Oak. " 'Scuse me, gen'lemen."

• • •

"One egg or two, Big Sister Oak?"

"Model A," she replied jovially, " 'splain to this young bitch I got to have six eggs fo' breakfast."

Georgina knelt on the little stool and watched. The Cherokee ancestors had given her such graceful bones that there seemed no more to her disability than a pretty obliqueness.

She never left Big Sister Oak all that day--riding on the hip covered by the mountain of pinafore, climbing the broad elastic leg to tumble flop. They walked together over the recreation ground, the honey child and the monument in carpet slippers. Sandra looked out the window. They were still in the sand pit.

Later she asked Big Sister Oak, "Is Shut Eye down in London with you?"

"No, he ain't. You know, Model A--las' thing, they done stole Shut Eye's gitar."

"They stole his gitar!"

"Sho' nuff. While he's sleepin' on the subway train."

"Hell."

"He's funny, he is," Sandra said fondly. "Just goes off for forty winks when he feels like it."

"When he wake up--my! The subway train in the yard and the gitar gone!" Big Sister Oak's eyes widened at Georgina. "But Shut Eye still leanin' on it!"

"Oooh, Big Sister Oak, you ought to have seen the pair of them when Shut Eye came up here. He gave Georgina twenty dollars when he went. No, it was forty, wasn't it, Model? Forty dollars he gave her."

"You never drank no liquor, did you?" Big Sister Oak inquired.

Model A innocently shook his head. On the sofa next to her, he sat up all straight and dimpled with his little boy's face. Big Sister Oak belonged to the second generation of blues singers, who could think of him only as a little waif from the Italian orphanage and who disapproved of his drinking spirits. The last time Sandra had seen her, in Copenhagen just before Model A stopped playing Continental clubs, Big Sister Oak had sternly refused to let him drink a glass of gin.

Later that same evening, a rash Dane had hit her with a chair. She'd been unmoved. She then had thrown the Dane through a closed set of folding doors.

"But I was plenty gone that night on Long Life beer," Model A said mischievously. Dad's ears went back like a gun dog's at the word beer.

"Oooh, he's not kidding at all. Him and Shut Eye was paralytic-drunk together that night--lousy cow!"

"I enjoy a drink," Dad remarked.

Sandra narrowed her eyes at Model A.

"Don't you sit there pulling that innocent face. Oooh--he comes upstairs and I'm chasing him all round the room, trying to rotten-well undress him and all the time he's on the move. He wouldn't stop still. Shall I tell you what happened then?"

"Yeah, hit it, Little Momma," Big Sister Oak said genially.

"Well, here's me wakin' up at five o'clock in the morning and he's hanging on to me--weren't you?--yelling, 'Don't let him get me, don't let him get me!' Know what it was? He'd been reading the book Dracula and thought Dracula was after him."

In the afternoon, she took Big Sister Oak into town to try to find her a dress at Pack's. No dress would fit, of course, nor any confederacy of dresses; but behind the full laundry bags of her breasts there beat a schoolgirl's heart. She loved to bring her dainty flat nose all the way down to smell different perfumes dabbed on the forearm of a salesgirl whose face remained immobile as a trapped hare's.

"What's the name o' that one, honey?"

"Rose of Autumn," the girl managed to say.

"Back home, we had a rose," Big Sister Oak remarked. "Reckon why it smelt so good was we pee on it ever' day."

Several times, she intimated that she wanted Model A to join her blues show in London. "I got to get me a good blues man--I don' want no chile." But he turned it aside or said no one was interested in him.

"Nobody interested?" Big Sister Oak asked.

Sandra burst out, "And how many rotten telegrams have you had from the BBC, eh, you great lump?"

"That mean, nobody interested in T-Bone," Big Sister Oak said, "or Muddy Waters or The Spoon--"

"Chap down in London spends a fortune ringing up saying, 'When's he going to appear, when's he going to appear?' " Sandra said.

"Nobody interested?" Big Sister Oak repeated incredulously. "You know, one time he playin' in a joint with bad cats there. While he playin', a guy gits five slugs in the kisser from a forty-five--ring, ring, rap against the bar rail."

"Oh, leave him," Sandra said in exasperation. "He's got it into his thick head people are going to try and cheat him."

"Five shots," Big Sister Oak said. "The shooter runs out, the po-lice runs in. 'Hey, who was that shooter? What was that shooter like?' All the people in the bar say, 'Hell, he was just a man. Had a gun; he was just a killer; c'mon, Model A, and play. Whup that piano, Mr. Piano-Whupper!' "

Later, when Big Sister Oak's minicab came, the sun was ripe on the pavement. Outside stood Mrs. Trolley, her friend Mrs. Tattman and Mrs. Tattman's daughter-in-law's baby, Tania. Across the road, all down the hill, people suddenly found it imperative to open their front-bedroom windows.

Georgina brought flowers from the garden for the departure: buttercups, pansies and Michaelmas daisies, their stems all hot with the clutch of love. Big Sister Oak lowered the dress circle of her chin; Georgina reflected buttercups in it. Then, in front of all the neighbors, she lifted Georgina and the buttercups and kissed her in every place where she was not quite perfect.

Just before she left, Big Sister Oak said, "Model A, I been keepin' it from you--" But what it was, Sandra couldn't hear, because Georgina had burst into tears. Only when they were back in the house--how dull it seemed and how spacious--did he tell her:

"Shut Eye dead."

"He's what?"

He'd died of pneumonia. That, to Sandra, was the curious part; she always imagined it boiling hot in America. And he'd been sweet, too, bringing home half the butcher shop for them every day, giving Georgina $40, going happily to sleep on the rug.

Model A said nothing more. He put his spectacles on; the cheeky look vanished. He finished mending her hair rollers, then he went upstairs. In Georgina's room, the piano started chopping.

Dad, meanwhile, had risen from a program concerning potter's wheels and was pulling on his cardigan. All day, to the overflowing dusk of Big Sister Oak, he had awarded no more attention than to anyone who dropped in--immovably, he'd sat by the television, peering at it as if viewing for a moment under sufferance. At nightfall, however, he conducted one of the authentically beautiful relationships a man can have with the highlights in a glass of bitter.

Sandra was brisk. She got Mrs. Trolley to come in and sit with Georgina; she made Model A agree to go out with Dad for a drink and take her a'ong as well. She did her best to be cheerful, but he looked really old this evening; his eyes were speckled like birds' eggs with pink; his voice was almost too thick for even her to understand. What he ordered, after they had arrived at the pub, was a bad sign, too--beer and white wine together, like the stevedores in New Orleans.

"Real character, isn't she, though?" Sandra said, recalling Big Sister Oak. "Remember when she threw that Danish chap through the folding doors?"

"He lucky she never slit his gizzard."

Then Model A lapsed into what he had been mumbling earlier. "Through hell for me, that cat went. Through hell."

"Who did, love? Shut Eye?"

"He coulda' cried himself, what the Kluxers done."

"Well, come on, then," she said with energy. "Talk about it. Trouble shared is troubled halved. Tell Dad about when you were on the boxcars."

"And Otis Spann, he came over, went back and died. Sonny Boy Williamson came over, went back and died. Bukka White--"

"Oh, Model, don't be morbid, love."

"I mean it," he said. "Scare me to death, these cats, with all o' their dyin'."

Dad winked at the healing golds in his glass.

"Y' only die once," he remarked.

They were at a new pub called The Crazy Horse--a smoky lake of beer with tables like damp, red lily pads, where the local yobs leaned with an assumed air of expectancy. Full-thundery in the chip sound of bottles, it was still no place for trouble. Wrestlers were employed as waiters, clearing pint glasses that appeared like rings on their fingers; and the police had proved that, only seconds after an alarm, they could effect a grand, trampling entrance with dogs.

Trouble in bars was of the distant past, anyway, for Sandra: four years ago, when she met Model A. He had mellowed since, thanks to home and little Georgina and the local ale, and he'd put his knife away in a pocket of his best suit. It was Sandra who dealt with any bother when they were out. Should a philosopher accuse Model A of coming and taking white people's jobs, she, with mouth-fatiguing scorn, always replied, "Yes, and he's stole one of your women, too, and what you going to do about it?"

Sandra caught the laugh--a scrap of beery filth from that clout of men round a pillar--but not the remark that had provoked it. She never did discover what accidental hooks caught and bore it over the ale smoke to Model A, right into the part of his brain where savage moments waited, despite four years of taking the dog out.

The first clue she got was the sound of his chair falling.

Through the tables and legs and rallied glasses, a broad aisle had opened to the side of the room. At the altar of it, the yobs stood back impressed at one of their number suddenly crucified a short way up the pillar by Model A's knee. All their eyes pooled in fear at the blade of Model A's knife, for he happened to be wearing his best suit tonight.

"Breathe loud," he said, "and I'll pull y' dam head off."

• • •

So had she won. Model A, after that night, decided that he had to play once more, in case he were to die unexpectedly. He kept to this theme with big eyes, despite Sandra's hilarity.

But she was the one to be tense on the night of his appearance. Before they left the house, she seemed to detect the smell of nerves in the pear drops of her nail polish. Georgina was grizzly and Mrs. Trolley took a misguidedly humorous viewpoint and kept getting in the way on the stairs and curtsying. Round the van outside, a small crowd waited.

"Model! Where'd you get that shirt from?" Sandra asked.

"Just under th' other shirts," he said calmly.

"It's a mask of rotten wrinkles!"

"Well, what kinda' place is this we goin'?"

"How should I know?" she blazed.

"You wanted it."

"I wanted it. I like that! Who thinks he's going to drop down dead on the door mat?"

"How much they fixin' to pay us?"

"Twelve pound," she said, "and a percentage of the takings over and above so much, I made sure of that with the feller, he sounded ever so nice, so don't you start wittering about 'They're trying to cheat me.' All right, my lad?"

Then her father came downstairs. He was wearing his best sports jacket and a shirt of repulsive orange.

"Just the job to knock around in," he remarked with satisfaction.

"But you're not going to knock around--oh, Dad, honestly!" Like most women of 30, Sandra was deeply formal in her habits.

Growing calmer, she said to Model A, "Come on, then, let's put your earring in."

But it kept falling out. His lobe had slackened in the years since it was pierced. When he was a boy, the practice had still survived from the tabulation of cotton slaves.

"Keep it in your pocketbook till I begin playin'," he said.

Outside the club, his name appeared, incorrectly spelled, between those of two Yorkshire rock groups of no consequence.

It was as dark as a cinema inside. All that showed was the white figure of a disc jockey who danced, seemingly, above their heads while an earthquake acclaimed him--whistles, cries that he should never ever stop. He, for his part, embraced the blackness that adored him. He stretched, he writhed, he ground his tightened buttocks one upon the other.

When Sandra's eyes had at last absorbed the walls of night, she saw that, in fact, nobody in the club was applauding. The customers stood with arms dismally folded, since it was impossible to dance and applaud at the same time. The ovation was played on a gramophone record. The triumph of fame in which the disc jockey whirled had no source but his own opinion.

They were taken to a banquette beside a harsh break in the darkness lettered service door. A moment later, a man whom Sandra assumed to be the owner of the club passed them. He wore a business suit and stiff collar upon which the bluey bar twilight played luminously. He did not acknowledge their presence.

She put her irritation aside, however, in sizing up the complete strangers who had surrounded them and had begun to talk to Model A. Two boys, dressed in what looked to her like school paint rags, sat on either side of him, tossing their heads, staring at his mouth when he spoke. Since Dad had assumed the attitude of reclining Nero on the promontory of the banquette, one fellow had to kneel down--a bodiless face, since he wore all black. He was, it seemed, the London photographer who had been ringing them up for months.

"All right, I don't mind having a half," Dad said graciously.

"I didn't get you," Model A said brusquely to the stranger.

"Socks taught you the blues, isn't that right?"

"Are those cowboy boots you are wearing?" Sandra asked.

"But what was he like? Socks?"

"Alcoholic," said Model A.

"I tell you," Model A said to her--and the rest of them strained forward to hear, "I ain't so appointed of Georgina stoppin' the whole night with Radio Ambury."

"All right, then--clever! How do we get out for the evening, if Mrs. Trolley doesn't look after her?"

"I jus' don't want for her to get too enthused so she forgets where her real home is."

"Model A," pleaded the face.

"Yeah," he said ironically.

"Your grandfather did play on the riverboats with King Oliver, didn't he?"

The disc jockey had stopped his dance now, temporarily sated with adoration. Across the dance floor, he appeared to be playing at shops behind an area of glass. A confused announcement began. Model A stood up. There were people on their knees all around him.

"My earring!" he exclaimed.

"All right, hold still, I ain't got rubber arms."

Sandra kept their places. She'd been listening to him play for years--that chopping sound up in Georgina's room. She ate a basket of chips, which were not at all bad, despite the eccentricities of the place. She looked at the time, tested a loose rosette on her shoe and, beside her, Dad reclined motionless and ale-pink, beatific as a moored balloon.

"How'd it go, duck?" she said after Model A had finished playing and had returned.

"All right," he said.

The club was different. Before, the darkness had been intensified by emptiness and apathy. Now that it was packed to the archways, all the lights glimmered half on and somehow awash like an aftermath of tears or, Sandra thought, a pub at chucking-out time.

There was great clapping and this time the disc jockey couldn't turn its volume low. The disc jockey's voice, indeed, was drowned somewhere behind the scenes.

"Will you all carry on dancing now, please!"

Model A sat down again. Every crease in his shirt had vanished. The crowd near them had become as dense as one around a street accident.

"All right, Dad?" He gave a sudden, huge smile; then he laughed: "He only come for de beer."

"My God!" stammered a voice. "I never heard anything remotely like it!"

"Did you see the way he handled that trio?"

"Lovely pecking--light--not a note too many. Oh, beautiful!"

"I know what long hair's for; I've suddenly realized. It's to shake and shake across your face when you hear something like that."

"He played the guitar as well."

The guitarist was among the kneeling. He held up the red electric biscuit as if disbelieving what sounds had lately been coaxed from it.

One of the boys in paint rags, the leader of the local trio who had accompanied Model A, entreated, "Were we really all right, do you think?"

"Now I know how you tell great music--"

"How about that Wine Wine Wine?"

"I liked The Sheik of Araby."

"It's when the audience sings along in tune!"

"Model!" Sandra exclaimed. "You showed me up!"

The Sheik of Araby was the rude song he sometimes sang to Georgina in her bath.

Model A leaned forward as Sandra wiped his forehead, which shone like the wooden knob of a bedpost. She could tell he was in a lovely mood: When all the lines in his face, under the gray peak of curls, looked so kind, he became both the father she needed and her husband in one.

"Look." he said, "you got a i-dea. I gotta say this for the ben'fit of the local musicians that was with me there. Long as you have an i-dea, ain't no-body play any better 'n you all."

"I say, do you really mean it?"

The sigh the paint rag heaved was broader than his body.

It was the disc jockey who came across to speak to them about payment, the £12 and the percentage. Sandra knew that there must be a percentage: The club was crushed full. Nobody moved, nobody danced to the faint strivings of tin that came through the loud-speakers, but somewhere voices were still singing The Sheik of Araby with Model A's descant:

"At night when you're asleepwith no pants on

Into your tent I'll creepwith no pants on."

The gorgeous emissary was shorter than he seemed when viewed from below his pedestal, and his romper suit of white was not absolutely spotless.

With a radiant smile, he said, "Can you just come back into the, er, office, Model A, my love?"

"I told you," Sandra said, "I'm dealing with that part of it, all right?"

"Model A, how many versions of Frankie and Johnny are there?"

"I been told ten thousand."

"I don't mind a half," Dad said.

"Well, sure, my love, but ... you know ..." the disc jockey said.

"I'm not your love, either," Sandra said.

When she came back from the office, she had to fight to get through the crowd to Model A.

"It really stood in a graveyard!"

Around him, the faces rocked in an ecstasy of New Orleans and the agonies of kneeling.

"Sho's hell, in a graveyard. Back o' Chantilly, we knowed it as."

"Oh, how fantastic!"

"Ever' day, we see 'em tippin' the dead people into the--"

"Right, that's the finish. Excuse me, please. Come on, Dad, we're going now.

"You know how much they reckon they took at the door?" She stormed. "Eighty-one pound! We get a percentage after a hundred; he's charging fifty pence each to get in and the place is rotten-well packed. I'm going to see his book.

"Do you know what I said to him? I said, 'You're the lowest of the low, and you know what that is, don't you? It's the snake that crawls in the grass.' "

"I don' want it," Model A said. "None of it."

"Doesn't matter what you rotten-well want, I'm going to see his book. Eighty-one pound I don't think!"

"Drop this now, Sandy, you hear?"

He called her that only in dead earnest.

"Talk about low, tightfisted, mean, grasping--"

"Honey," he said, "that's the jive."

He took his cigarette holder up to his mouth with the gold ring gleaming on his finger. Suddenly, she thought: It's beneath him.

"Here--no diff'ent," Model A said. "Same jive. You freezin' like Blind Lemon Jefferson at the streetcar stop and they--they sorry--they only took eighty-one pound. We don't got to play for 'em."

In the heart of the young crowd, he shrugged.

"Only thing is, we got to."

Once outside in the cold air, Dad yawned so vastly, Sandra had to warn him that the wind might change. He altered to musical yawns and ascending and descending scales. The trio of paint rags who had accompanied Model A were loading their equipment into an old ambulance. He walked over and pulled a door open and grinned at them. They grinned back at him and it was safe and secret between them, the cleverness implied in an old ambulance. Sometimes, she thought, she'd never understand him.

Halfway home, Model A said, "Nex' time I play that club, I gonna' go there without my wife."

Sandra replied, "What they want there, my lad, is a young cock, not an old rooster"; but under boats of city light, they touched hands a moment.