That summer, that blasted-hot 1995 Chicago summer, I had no job, nothing to do but sit in a hot-box apartment, drink beer, and listen to the radio.
The whole city was trapped, like an ant in amber. The heat infiltrated every crevice and corner. Tar-roof radiation held me by the throat and not even the lakefront offered a whiff of cool.
Then, from somewhere, nowhere, every where, bouncing down the hall and up the alley, saxophone music streamed through my apartment, formless jazz recitals in a blue note. After some investigation, pacing the hallway pretending to look for something, I found the music coming from a neighbor down the hall. I envisioned a fantasy naked woman, lonely, rehearsing for a gig at the Green Mill or some South-Side jazz shack.
I lit cigarettes and listened, grooving from riff to riff, rubbing sweated beer cans on my arms and head. The impotent fan stirred smoke with smog, swirling ashes around the windowsill.
"He's been off crack for about six months," the saxophonist's beautiful wife said when we rode the elevator together. Her boy stared at me from knee-height, open brown eyes probing my pale skin.
"He plays saxophone too, don’t you?" the beauty said, her long eyelashes reaching down to her son. The boy eyed his mother silently, then pressed his head into her thigh, bashful, giggling. "His daddy found him a baby sax and they play at Wrigley Field sometimes."
A few days later, the saxophonist showed me a folded newspaper clipping pulled from the horn's case. He and the boy had been photographed in a duet on Michigan Avenue, busking for tourist quarters. They were displayed in full color, on page 1A. He smelled like soap but the heat had already broke sweat on his brow.
We all made it through that summer, most of us. A few died, but that's another story. I somehow managed to find a job.
The following February, the saxophonist decided to smoke crack again, or that's what my neighbor said. He went into a cracked-out rage and busted all the windows in his apartment, spreading hot terror on the coldest night of the winter; the snow twisted, whorls of white danced around the building. I never again heard his sax, nor saw his beautiful wife, her high cheekbones, her graceful neck.
I hope the boy still plays the saxophone, remembers jamming with his father, delighting the crowds in a time when the Windy City stood still.
Hobie Anthony lives in Portland, OR where he writes and watches for rain. A MFA student in Queens University's low-res program, his work can be found online at Wigleaf, Dogzplot, Gloom Cupboard, and Apparatus Magazine. He will soon be found in the print pages of Four Branches, The Los Angeles Review, and the flash anthology, Dogs: Wet and Dry.
Permanently archived: http://girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/prose/48-non-fic/140-ha-022010
Short link: http://frsh.in/6z
