When Bowman Garris drifted into the piano lounge on a foggy Tuesday night, a few hours before closing, you might fancy that a shimmering trail of musical notes drifted in behind him. Certainly Garris himself fancied it. With a saunter refined by long practice, he made for the bar and exchanged folding money for a scotch and soda. His scotch was high-end. He was establishing credibility. The thing was accomplished without meeting the bartender’s eyes. Garris didn’t have an eye to spare; he was looking for the piano player. Looking to size him up.
He found him in the corner farthest from the door, opposite the window. The pink and blue of the neon 88 LOUNGE sign outside diffused in the fog, making cool-toned shadows on the tiled floor. The piano man looked like a ghost in the dim light, thin and threadbare in a dinner jacket of dubious provenance, with a doleful face and colorless hair. He was young. Garris made him at twenty-five, tops. The piano itself was a baby grand, done up in some light color rather than the usual black lacquer, and the kid hunched close over it like he was performing heart surgery. His lips were moving, but if he was singing, Garris could not make it out. He played so quietly that Garris had to step away from the bar for a moment to even identify the tune. Ellington. Very tastily played, too, but soft-pedaled to a murmur.
Garris lifted his drink to hide a smile. The scotch glowed in his empty belly. He had not eaten since leaving St. Louis, and he was hungry, but there was work to do before he could eat.
The kid finished up “Just Squeeze Me” with a run like a slow fade on a jukebox record. The applause was no louder than the riffling of a magazine, though the room was halfway full. Couples and small parties were scattered among the tables, with a couple of pert waitresses keeping them in cocktails and wine; hardly a one of them was even looking at the sad-faced kid at the baby grand. Garris could scarce believe his luck.
The kid launched into “When I Fall in Love,” slow and easy, so delicate that the notes vanished in the clinking of ice in a dozen glasses. Garris finished his drink, ordered another. He finally glanced at the bartender—a sharp-faced old hawk with the eyes of a hunter and an apron the color of dishwater. “What time’s your piano man get his break?”
“You mean Dexter?” The bartender set down a glass, then looked at the clock as if he suspected it had been skimming from the till. “After this number, I imagine,” he said. “But he don’t take requests, as a rule.”
“I don’t intend to ask,” said Garris, and turned his attention back to the baby grand.
The kid lacked confidence, Garris thought. Cutting him would be easy. Soon he would have money in his pocket and a bed for the night—with a pretty waitress to share it, like as not—and a gig for the next night. He would retrieve his suitcase from the bus station locker in the morning and settle in, and stay ’til it was time to go.
Bo Garris had only two natural-born talents. He had an unerring instinct for leaving a party at just the right moment, and he could play the piano as if he’d invented it. He didn’t think of himself as a musician, not really. He was, in his own mind, a gunslinger, a cage fighter. He blew from town to town with the wind—compact and sharp in a succession of dark suits, with a worn handsome face, hands elegant and groomed and surprisingly big for a man of his size—and when he got somewhere, he stowed his case and went looking for the piano bar. From there, it never took much to hustle up a cutting session, and those only ended one way.
He looked around the lounge again. Looked at it as if he owned it. Once he’d run this Dexter off, he would work the 88 Lounge for drinks and tips, as he had worked so many other rooms, for as long as things stayed friendly. That might be a few days, usually a few weeks; his record was six months. Then he’d leave before things turned sour. And if it turned bad, he could always start over. He kept a stake tucked into his hatband—enough cash for a bus ticket and a scotch and soda. He hadn’t had to touch his stake in six and a half years. Not since Reno.
He didn’t like to think of Reno. His knee still ached when the weather turned damp.
Dexter was easing into the final choruses of the Van Heusen. Garris picked up his drink and made his way to the back corner, weaving through, taking in the customers—their expensive cocktails, their quality shoes. And Dexter, wan at his bleach-blonde piano, practically unnoticed. Well, thought Garris, they’d soon notice him.
The instrument was a true baby grand, scarcely five feet long, not one of the parlor grands you usually found in a joint like this. Up close, Garris could see it was clad in maple, the natural wood grain rubbed shiny with beeswax. It was a striking effect; the piano looked freshly made, somehow almost unfinished, like a loaf of bread that had come out of the oven early. Bar pianos took a lot of abuse generally, but the thing was pristine—no discolored rings of careless glasses, no cigarette burns, no scuffs where hasty ladies had bumped it with their bags in their eagerness to pass the player a request or a phone number. Not yet, anyway, Garris thought wryly.
Dexter himself was slumped on his bench, running his fingers over the gleaming keys like he was stroking a cat. Damned if they didn’t look like real ivory. Garris wondered if that were even possible. Maybe they’d been taken from an old instrument and repurposed into this new baby grand—for Garris couldn’t shake the thought that it was recently made—but they had the unworn luster of new ivory, without the yellowing of the vintage stuff. Some sort of bone, anyway. He’d ask later.
If Dexter noted Garris eye-humping his piano, he gave no sign. He seemed completely relaxed, even unaware of his surroundings. Expressionless. He played like a meditation. His fingers were long and white and nimble. Powerful hands, Garris could tell, but they seemed to hardly touch the keys. His tone was exquisite. An instrument so small could sound harsh and metallic, but Dexter’s baby grand was round and mellow in the bass, clear and sweet in the highs even with the lid down. He spun the chorus around for another pass with a series of ascending block chords, so smooth and lightly touched that of all those listening, only Garris—standing maybe five feet away—could appreciate the complexity of the passage. Indeed, Garris may have been the only one listening.
The last chorus dissipated like vapor, but for a long moment Dexter’s hands worked up and down the keyboard, forming shapes of chords but not depressing the keys. His eyes were closed; his lips worked soundlessly. For the first time, Garris wondered if the kid might be touched in the head; some kind of savant, maybe. It had been a long time since Garris’s conscience had been subjected to any kind of meaningful exercise, but he was not sure how he might feel to be cutting on a dummy.
But at last the kid raised his head and caught the bartender’s eye. “Colonel,” he called in a gray little voice, lifting two fingers pallidly ceilingward. “Make it a double.” The old hawk behind the bar started doing things with bourbon. Garris was relieved. If the kid drank like a man, then there was no sin in rolling him like one.
Then Dexter turned on him, so fast and smooth that Garris realized the kid must have been aware of him all along. “Sorry, mister,” he said, gently lowering the cover over the keys. “But I never did learn ‘Happy Birthday,’ and let’s be honest—whoever she is, she’s never going to marry you if you propose in a joint like this.”
Garris showed teeth. “What I’m asking for isn’t in your fakebook, cousin,” he said. “I’d like to buy you that drink. Should I hum a few bars, or do you know that one?”
Dexter gave a ghostly smile and waved him towards the bar. Garris introduced himself on the way. Dexter’s handshake was strong, but curiously gentle.
“She’s in fine voice tonight, Dex,” said the Colonel. “How’re you holding up?”
“Keeping it together,” Dexter said. “Keeping things mild and mellow.” He downed his drink in three swallows, then banged down his glass and held up two fingers for more.
The Colonel looked at him cockeyed, but poured out the bourbon. “Looks like you mean to get a bit mellow yourself, tonight.”
“Why not?” smiled Dexter. “It’s not often I get to drink on someone else’s dime.”
“Who’s this, then? You got a secret admirer?”
Dexter waved a hand at Garris. The hand was not steady. “Doesn’t matter to me, so long as he’s buying.”
“I was admiring your instrument,” said Garris.
“Heard that one before,” said the Colonel with a smirk.
“The baby grand,” Garris continued.
“Ohhh,” he drawled in mock surprise. Then, to Dexter: “How’s the mood tonight?”
Dexter sipped his second drink. “No worries. Smooth and easy.”
“A little too smooth, maybe,” interjected Garris. “Doesn’t this crowd seem a little… sleepy to you?”
Dexter stared at his drink. “It’s a Tuesday night, if you hadn’t noticed. And it’s getting late.”
“Not that late,” said Garris. “I could wake them up for you.”
Dexter turned to face him. Garris could see his eyes were rimmed in red, like he’d been sleepless, or crying. Or both. “You some hotshot piano player, are you?”
“Hot enough, maybe.” Garris smiled. “Maybe I could show you a few things.”
The Colonel laid a hand on the bar between them. “That’s not how we do things around here,” he began, but Dexter waved him off.
“Did you come here to cut heads, Mr. Garris? Is that your game? Are you some big coffin hunter, looking to nail something to your wall?”
The Colonel gave a sniff of laughter at that, for no reason Garris could fathom. “Me? No, no,” said Garris. “I was thinking more along the lines of a friendly competition.”
Dexter’s drink hand was trembling. “You and I are not friends.”
“You so sure?” said Garris. “Seems to me you could use all the friends you can get. You’re looking a little peaky, amigo.”
Dexter winced; rubbed a knuckle in his eye. Young, but such a wreck. Like a college kid in the middle of some never-ending finals week.
“Come on,” said Garris. “Give yourself a break. I’m new in town, looking to make a name, and frankly you look like hell. Why don’t you lay out, let me play this last set? You look like you could use a break.”
Dexter pressed his lips tight. “I’m afraid not.”
“What’s wrong, cousin? Worried that I’m gunning for your job?”
Dexter smiled. There was no amusement in it. “You couldn’t do my job,” he said. “You haven’t got the temperament.” He stood up. “I’m off to shake the dew off the daisy. And you”—he stabbed a finger at Garris—“have got the tab to pay.”
“You want him out?” said the Colonel.
Dexter, already walking away, did not look over his shoulder. “Oh, he can listen all he wants. He just better not touch, is all.”
And with that Dexter waltzed off to the head, leaving Garris to settle up. The Colonel eyed his cash like it was dogshit, but said not another word and soon returned to slicing limes. In a cold flush of annoyance, Garris sidled up to the piano again. He ran a surreptitious hand over the baby grand’s flat top and found it curiously warm. The grain was vivid and distinct to the eye, but the wood was as smooth under his palm as the untroubled cheek of a child. The raw golden color made him think of a beetle, fresh out of its chrysalis, before its shell hardens. He half-imagined it would darken to lacquered black with age, like a Polaroid picture developing.
He came around to the bench, thinking he might play a few chords and runs before Dexter’s return, to pique his interest. Drinks and insinuations didn’t always hustle up a session on their own, but he’d never known a piano man who could refuse a challenge once they’d heard the other fellow play. Then he saw that the lid over the keyboard had been fitted with a latch, and Dexter had slipped a padlock through.
That tore it. Dexter wasn’t on the spectrum, thought Garris—he was cracked. He’d seen it before. Something about the keyboard, its linear nature paradoxically coupled with its infinite, relentless variations, fostered mental illness as surely as did mathematics or tournament chess. The kid had gone paranoid, and had taken it into his sick little head to deny Garris what was his. He could’ve jacked the latch easy enough—it wouldn’t be the first lock Garris had picked—but with that hawkeyed bastard behind the bar, he’d probably be buying himself a night in jail. All his hungers and thirsts curdled into fury. He swallowed it down and squared his shoulders. He wasn’t about to let himself be run off by some screw-loose punk.
And so Bowman Garris—who knew in his bones when and how to leave the party—let his anger grind down his common sense, and formulated a most inelegant plan. Discreet exits be damned; he determined that he would simply hide until closing time and emerge triumphantly to whip this Dexter’s ass.
The place filled up during the final set. The late movie let out, and people moved in and through, in couples and knots, so many coming and going that there was no way the old man could be counting heads. Dexter, never acknowledging the ebb and flow of bodies through the club, played through it all. Up and down Tin Pan Alley he went, playing the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart. He played “Autumn Leaves” and “La Vie en Rose” and “Willow, Weep for Me,” played Carmichael and Kern and Loesser and fragments of Weill, played Stephen Foster parlor ballads and Jobim sambas, played it all exquisitely, impeccably, and with a dynamic range spanning from a whisper to a sigh.
Garris for his part simply faded away. He disappeared in the crowd, dissolved into shadows, and in the end resorted to concealing himself in the crapper ’til last call. He perched up on the tank with his feet on the seat when the barback came in. He was momentarily afraid he’d be spotted, but the kid never raised his head from his phone, eyes lowered to its glow as he squoze out a perfunctory piss before beating feet to bed the piece he was sexting at that very moment. Garris perched quietly, scarcely breathing, and when the barback split and flipped out the lights, he perched in the dark, listening to the comings and goings of the waitresses in the ladies’ room next door. He let himself breathe, then. Some places mop out the restrooms after closing; some mop them out before opening. Any barback who worked in a mop-after-closing joint would have left the lights on. And still he waited. Clicking of heels, gruff goodbyes from the Colonel, closing doors; the waitresses gone. The low droning hum of a vacuum cleaner.
And then Dexter’s ghostly voice through the wall. “Colonel. I’m going out for a smoke.”
“Take your time, son. Nearly home and safe for another day.”
“Not near enough.” Footsteps. A soft curse. “Hey, Colonel? I left my keys in my jacket—leave the back door open for me, wouldja?”
“You got it.”
Then doors; the click and whir of the cash register; the drawer banging open. And more softly, and from further away, an adding machine.
Bo Garris showed teeth to the darkness, slipped his feet soundlessly to the tiles, and crept through the bathroom door. The piano lounge was empty. No one at the bar, no one at all in the club. Just Garris and the baby grand, and the once-white dinner jacket draped across the bench.
The baby grand was locked down. Garris rifled the jacket’s pockets, found the keys, palmed them, so they came without a telltale jingle. House keys, car keys, keys for the various doors in the club—and a little skeletal silver number just the right size for the padlock. Garris slipped it in, sprang the lock, raised the lid, all silently, silently. He scarcely dared to breathe. The baby grand grinned up at him its dazzling ossuary grin. The keys were bone, all right, sure as eggs is eggs, but whiter even than virgin ivory. White as snow, shining pearly as new-cut milk teeth.
Garris hovered his hands above the keyboard. He didn’t dare to plink or noodle, not tonight. The only way to get Dexter’s attention would be to go full oratory with no throat-clearing. He pondered a moment what to play, and then it struck him: Ellington. He’d show that fading specter how the Duke was done.
His right hand came down like a mouse prancing over the keys, sounding the opening trills of “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Then the left, in a strolling barrelhouse boogie from deep in the guts of the gutbucket, fingers splayed so wide in the rolling octaves that his pinkies looked dislocated. Clustered jabs in the right like trumpet blasts. Melody in crushed block chords, jarring discords taking the harmonies to places Strayhorn never imagined. Rumbling less like a subway car than like a freight train, five miles long, tanker cars full of rocket fuel. It was physically explosive. Garris had never played so well, never touched an instrument that so perfectly translated the music in his head into vibrations in the air. He was invincible. In that moment, Garris could have taken them all. He could have beaten Willie the Lion. He could have beaten Earl Hines. He could have cut Art Tatum, and not broken a sweat doing it.
Then there was a very loud click behind his ear, and it all fell away.
“Stop, God damn it.”
Garris turned his head. Dexter had taken a large black automatic pistol from the holster that had been covered by his dinner jacket, and was pointing it between Garris’s shoulder blades. This was unexpected. Dexter motioned for Garris to stand. He put up his hands and slowly rose from the bench; his mouth refused to work. Dexter waved the gun again, and Garris shuffled backward.
“You have no idea what you’ve done,” hissed Dexter. “No idea what she could do to us.”
The piano was between the two of them now. Garris glanced behind him to see if the exit was clear. But the Colonel had produced from somewhere beneath the bar a heavy hunting rifle, big in the bore and almost comically long. He was not aiming the rifle at Garris, but was instead covering the door. The rifle was enormous; a gun for shooting elephants. Ivory comes from elephants, Garris thought, and the voice inside his head had an unfamiliar, panicky sound.
“You just had to hear that baby grand in full cry, didn’t you?” said Dexter, behind him. Garris turned. Dexter was pulling a double-barreled shotgun from inside the piano bench.
“Put down the guns, man,” said Garris. “Let’s talk about this.”
Dexter scoffed. “You think this firepower’s for you? Mister, we’ve got bigger problems. Here.” He flipped the pistol end-over-end through the air to Garris, who caught it by the barrel. “Give you a fighting chance, anyway. Not that it will do any good.”
“She’s coming,” said the Colonel, still staring at the locked door. “She’s got our scent.”
Dexter pushed past Garris and trained his shotgun, too, in the direction of the entrance. “You’re sure of it?”
The Colonel nodded. “She’ll have heard that. It’s only a question of when, now.”
“Hey!” Garris pointed the pistol at Dexter, fumbling with the safety. “How about somebody tell me what the hell is going on?”
“If we could have kept him quiet another few months,” said Dexter, still watching the door, as if he had not heard Garris at all. “A year, tops. Let him mature.”
“What? Let who?” said Garris. “What kind of crazy—”
“Listen,” said the Colonel. “There.”
And from far away outside Garris heard it. A grinding, splintering, crunching sound, like hardwood timber falling in a hurricane. Rhythmic, like steps. If a tree could walk, he thought, this is what it would sound like. No: not a tree. Something with legs like trees, three of them, and the thrumming, the thrumming—
“What is that?” said Garris. He could hardly hear himself.
“You’ve only ever played factory pianos, haven’t you?” snorted the Colonel. “You don’t know nothing. Birthed in captivity. All the savagery bred out of them.”
“Once they reach six foot, six and a half, see, they’re functionally mature,” said Dexter dreamily. “The lacquer comes in, and they’re independent. You can even release them into the wild. But a baby grand…”
The blood was roaring in Garris’s ears, and under it all a subsonic bass rumble that turned his bowels to water, like sledgehammers, like piledrivers, pounding on taut wound cables thick as high-tension lines, and the heavy lumbering tread of lumber, of black-clad maple legs drawing ever closer.
“Soon now,” said the Colonel, and as he spoke, a sonic boom in a key ten octaves below low C shattered all the windows at once. Garris threw up his hands. The Colonel turned his head for a moment, just ’til the glass stopped flying, then leveled his ludicrous elephant gun once more. Behind Garris, the baby grand was humming, its every wire singing with sympathetic vibration.
“You shouldn’t have woken the baby,” Dexter said sadly. “Do you have any idea what she’s going to do to us?”
The club lights sputtered out for a moment, and Garris gave a little scream. Plaster was flaking off the walls; a panel of drywall crumbled, and he could see the studs and rebar naked within. He could hear the individual beats now in the deepest bass, sine waves snapping like slow whipcracks up and down strings as thick as battleship chains. And now he could see it, glimpses through the fog and debris, its glossy black shell like that of a monstrous insect, its dozens upon dozens of dreadful rattling teeth.
“You might not want to stand there,” Garris heard Dexter say just before the walls came down. “The most dangerous place in the world is between a mother and her baby.”
