2、Chapter 129 ...
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As always was Shadow of Light, clumsy, old-fashioned tables and chairs glistened dimly; jazz blues was played in stereo.
Anton arrived there shortly after half past eight. Roger and James showed up a while later. They were seated together. Roger came with a black girl who had short hair, fit body and sweet face. It was said that he met her before he got to Detroit and they had kept in touch since then. From the way they were talking, Anton could tell that Roger had worked his relationship well just in one day after he came back. He looked around – out of his expectation, there were more people than the other day that he and Jimmy were abducted from this pub by several black men. People emerged continuously through the gate that Jimmy stepped in the other day. He then recalled the enquiry he made with Roger after that incident. They asked the old people in that day about Shaun, including the waiters, and they looked dumb and either shook their head or turned a deaf ear to the enquiry. Anton had felt the place was a bit bizarre but could have not told about what for.
Now tables in the bar could seat no more persons. Many were on their feet, and waiters were busy taking square stools out. Fortunately, Anton and his guys came earlier and got a place close to the stage. Customers of Shadow of Light were racially diverse — the white, the black, the Latin, the Italian and the Celtic. Most of them were advanced in years. Still, young figures among them could be found with a casual glance. Their clothes and hair color were distinguishing as well as way-out, and were not compatible with the strict expressions they had when they casted their sight on the stage.
‘Are there any performance today?’
Anton asked Roger’s little girl friend. Last time he came with Roger, he questioned the owner of the pub the same, and the owner replied him that there was no schedule for performance. It seemed from the continuously coming audience that the bang called Shadow of Light was to play this evening, whereas till now there was no notice of it given by post or by person in the pub at all. He wondered where the others got the information. So he asked her and wanted to make sure there was a one tonight.
‘I got the message from my uncle,’ Joyce smiled. Roger had introduced that she was a graduate student at the law school. She played violoncello in her spare time, but her favorite was jazz blues.
‘My uncle’s sixty-two years old. He can’t come out. His wife’s sick,’ Joyce felt a bit pity about them. She shook her head and continued, ‘He would’ve come otherwise. It’s been a long time since he came over and watched a performance.’
‘How’s your aunt?’ Roger cut in on her.
Joyce shook her head. She gave a gloomy smile to Roger, ‘She might never recover.’
When Anton extended his arm to reach the liqueur glass on the table, he saw Roger hold her hand under it. Anton understood what was implied in the hand contact. At the time, someone got onto the stage and tuned the instruments. The audience whistled and greeted his appearance with warm applause. Anton and the others moved their sights to the stage. The temperature in the room suddenly arose.
Outside the Shadow of Light, Rene met a woman. They stood fact to face in the lane that was lightened in fits and starts behind the pub; around them, the hurly-burly of the city seemly faded away. The lane ended with a dark street. The entrance of the latter was slightly brightened by the faint light streamed out from the pub in the corner.
‘You recognized the wrong guy.’
Rene could hear his own voice, extremely quiet. The indifference and apathy in his voice made the woman freeze upon his reply. She hesitated in a moment, and when she saw the coldness deepen in his eyes, she stood aside with a half step, embarrassed and confused. After referring to her dog behind her, twice however, she sized him again.
‘Not you?’ The woman asked.
She started to talk to Rene in frequent Portuguese. Her big black eyes flashed, mirroring her insistence.
‘You were mistaken’, Rene breathed.
The woman was stuck there.‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
At the moment, the woman’s dog barked. It jumped up and down, tightened the chain and tried to get their attention, and then made it. Unconsciously, Rene showed his emotions at the sight of it.
Suddenly, a car roared by in the street. A beam of white light was casted on the woman’s high-heels. It remained a second and then spread out and became stronger, so strong as to brighten the woman’s skirt, and then vanished in a flash. At the time, a car horn was sounded in the darkness. Rene tried to commit the moment of the woman in the brightness to his memory. He then turned and walked into the darkness.
‘Excuse me,’ the woman’s voice rose behind him.
She ran to him fast. Her heels hit the ground and made a fit of clatters which echoed in the lane. Upon her voice and the sound, Rene stopped and turned back. He looked a bit surprised.
‘These are two albums of mine,’ she caught up with Rene and stuffed him a square paper box.
‘You saw the nightclub over there?’’ She pointed to the neo behind her and said in haste, ‘I own it. I’ll give two trial performances there in two days.’
Then she took Rene’s hand quickly and wrote down her address on the cover of the box breathlessly, ‘My address. I moved to US this year and settled there since then.’
Rene held the box. He seemed to be surprised by her moves. He shook his head again and tried to give them back to her.
‘If I was wrong, my dog must’ve not’, the woman insisted and said in a whisper to Rene, ‘keep it, please.’
She was on the verge of tears. She turned and ran towards the entrance of the street before she finished the sentence, leaving Rene alone in the lane.
Rene watched her leave until he lost sight of her around the corner in the light. He then looked at the paper box. When another car drove past, he saw the address on the cover of the box and that made him surprised again. The street mentioned in the address abutted the breach to which the villa of DSD was adjacent on the other side. Rene recalled the night he and Anton were on the beach embellished with white shells twinkling in the moon light. He remembered the half heart drawn by him on the beach and the singing faintly audible.
Rene gazed at the box in his hand. Finally, he raised his head and shot a glance around. A breezing of autumn wind swept the empty street. Suddenly the lane got darker. Rene was beaten by a feeling of nervous from the bottom of his heart. He was unable to tell what this could mean and what would happen to him tonight or in the future.
Inside the pub, Anton glanced at the door again. Jimmy hadn’t come yet. ‘Is old Jim coming?’ Not far from besides him, two old men whispered to each other and kept their sight of the stage.
‘He passed on last year,’ the elder of them said.
‘Oh, I forgot it,’ the other murmured.
‘Horne senior passed away the year before last year,’ his companion seemed to murmur to himself, ‘Justin was also gone in that year …’
At the moment, a burst of warm whistle roared from the audience. Several old musicians got onto the stage. The last of them who shambled slightly when walked was a tall, old white man that both his hair and beard had turned white.
‘Fein’, somebody off the stage called him, ‘You are still able to hold the guitar, aren’t you?’
The old man nodded his head, ‘Aha, Old Cooper!’
He smiled friendly and continued, ‘I accidentally caught a cold but am fine now.’
Somebody put a chair on the stage for him and hand him a guitar which seemed to have been well maintained.
There were two white men and four black men of octogenarian age on the stage. The ensemble consists of two guitarists, one bassist, one keyboardist and one saxophonist. The band members greeted to each other with a few words. Soon they struck up a short, lively and lilting tune. The resounding tune lasted only one and a half minutes, and ended with a loud sound of cymbal against the resonant sax solo. The musicians laughed. They just said hello to each other again with music. The audience cheered for their reunion.
This was the first time of Anton to watch the performance of the band Shadow of Light, and was it not because of Roger he would have been like the majority of the city not knowing about the band at all. Their tune gave an intriguing impression to Anton. He looked at those old musicians through the darkness surrounding the orange light. Their delightful tune could not prevent him from feeling sad. He remembered that he had seen the old pictures stuck up on the wall. Only three of the musicians on the stage were in those pictures, and as the rest of the band was not, there might be original members of it that had passed away.
The music rose again. The white bassist gave a deep walking-bass intro. Then the drum joined, which sounded like a firm old friend who cared about his friends and was always there for them. The sax followed the drum, which gave out an undulating and plaintive melody, and then followed them the sprightly sound of guitar in which there was a touch of granularity. Anton was struck a chord in his heart by the guitar’ passing notes that sounded familiar to him, and then he recognized that it was the tune of jazz blues that had just been played in stereo of the pub. However it sounded more random and tasteful in live performance. A several continuous tactful chords fired the audience. Some of them whistled and the pub simmered again.
Upon the tune done comes completely silence on the stage, which was then broken by the sound of tuning the strings by the black guitarist. Following the sound was a string of undulating blue notes. The black guitarist then stopped and looked at the mouth of the stage.
The audience shushed.
Upon the fall of the blue notes, the white old man with white hair and beard seated at the edge of the mouth of the stage bowed his head, and weighed the guitar in his hand a bit by holding its neck, and after a good while, he clicked the scale.
Anton felt that a corner in the depth of his sole was toughed upon by the tactful and wild notes. He turned his eyes to the old man and followed his movement closely. ‘Hah hah …’ the old man laughed by himself. And immediately there was an outbreak of a warm applause around. Anton knew that the band had warmed up and now it was their show time that he and the others in the pub had waited for tonight.
The band played hot on the stage. It seemed like the instruments were conversing, some of them were telling their own stories while others were complementing.
Anton could not help but followed the melody sad or joyful. One of its sections full of pathos reminded him the deadly sadness that he had ever had, but when he tried to find the matching details in his memory, the tune had already turned delightful, which made him think of the indistinct happy time he had had and then he smiled. He had not heard as good jazz blues as this for quite a long time.
Looking around, Anton saw some audience of advanced age were moved to tears, and some of them were sobbing while smiling, and even the young audience were addicted to their performance, and then he caught a glimpse of the gate randomly and this time saw Rene sitting at the table close to it.
Rene worn a pair of glasses, slightly colored, which was just like a pair for the nearsighted, and on his head was a beret that covered his hair and forehead, which made him completely different from what usually he looked. Again, Anton couldn’t even recognize him. His grey parka made him attracting no attention among the people.
Now Rene was listening to the melody peacefully through room not very much left by the people in front of him. He didn’t look at the stage but fixed his eyes on the glass in his hand.
Anton was surprised. He had casted his eyes to the gate many times, yet he did not know when Rene emerged. Instinctively, he believed that Rene had caught sight of everything that had happened around from the very beginning.
Again, Anton sensed that Rene was acute to sights casted on him, now Rene looked up at him and smiled a silent smile and waved him his stay where he was.
Anton then turned back. Attracted by the tune, he looked at the stage again through the small spaces potted around the arms of the crowded people. The white man at the mouth of the stage was strumming his guitar and stepping with the rhythm attentively. Unconsciously, Anton began to ask himself why Rene appeared dressed like that tonight.
The melody reached the climax and people in the pub came to full excitement. While Anton turned back upon the simmer, he saw Rene was no longer on the seat. He then looked at the gate and just caught the sight of Rene’s back. He parted the crowd and walked into the darkness outside of pub, alone.
In the pub, lantern dazzling, wine mellow and pleasure still.
The performance of Shadow of Light was more passionate and impressing than that Anton had heard before.
‘Anton! Anton —’ Roger tried to make Anton to talk with him again.
Roger talked and drank a lot tonight. He kept asking about the newsy affairs of his old friends but did not say much about his life in Detroit.
An hour later, Anton and Roger and others with them went out during the time the band took a break.
They parted and said goodbye to each other in the lane behind the pub.
‘Anton! Joyce and I perhaps will marry soon!’ All of sudden Roger shouted and came back and grabbed Anton’s arm, and then put his hand on Anton’s shoulder and inclined to him, and he whispered in Anton’s ear, ‘We will marry soon!’
Anton took a look at Roger’s car parked across, in which Joyce was smiling at them.
‘So soon,’ Anton was taken aback and he looked at the person facing him stunningly, ‘you are not kidding, are you?’
‘Absolutely not,’ Roger said seriously. He gave an across glare at Anton. His eyes were sparkling with eager anticipation in the darkness, ‘I’ve discussed with Joyce. We will do it quickly and marry before I went back to Detroit!’’
Roger patted on Anton’s shoulder and walked to his car in a hurry. He took several steps with big strides and then turned his head and winked at him. Joyce laughed and waited him till he got into the car and then they hugged each other passionately.
In the weekends, Anton and Rene made to arrive at Yonkers and met with the ex-adminstrator of the orphanage who had taken care of Neo there.
作者有话说
第2章 Chapter 129
