Jazz Funeral

fascinated. “Are we going there?”
    “Hell, no. I can’t take that scene.”
    “Just for a while,” said Randy.
    So they went.
    The bar, which opened out to the street, was essentially a three-sided room. The furnishings were basic, if you were being kind, and Chris was right—no one there was over thirty, probably not over twenty-five. This early, it was pretty sparsely populated, which Chris said was good, he hated it when it was crowded. Randy and Chris played the video games across from the bar while Melody and Sue Ann got acquainted. Mostly, Melody asked questions and looked around. Some punk rockers were starting to arrive, pretty tough-looking customers, and she bet there’d be more as the night wore on. She wondered how she’d look all punked-out.
    Chris came back, Randy tagging behind. “I can’t take this scene.” He gestured with his head. The place was starting to hop. A lot of people looked pretty unsteady already. They got a six-pack and some go-cups and went out to the Moonwalk, all four of them. Melody wasn’t too happy about it, but didn’t feel she had a choice, since she was depending on them for shelter. She had a pretty good idea about what was going to happen—Randy was going to make a play for her while Chris looked on in that amused way he had.
    Sure enough, the fat one fell into step beside her, sat down next to her when they reached the Moonwalk. That part was right. But Chris wasn’t paying even the slightest attention. He was talking to Sue Ann, not intimately, just joking around, but Melody might as well not have existed.
    Randy was going on and on about something that had happened to him in high school, something to do with football, punctuating his story by touching her leg, her arm, anything he could get away with. She wanted to tell him to stop, but then he’d sulk, and she didn’t want to piss him off right at the outset. And she was still trying to avoid contributing to Chris’s amusement-at-her-expense. Randy had sucked down his first beer on the short walk and was now into his second. He smelled beery and sweaty; revolting. He had his hand on her shoulder now, leaning close, not merely touching, but really latched on, like a barnacle or something. The hand was dirty. There were black lines under each fingernail, on the knuckles. She was going to have to say something or throw up. Involuntarily, though, she looked around at Chris, wanting his help but not daring to admit it to herself. She caught his eye and saw his expression change from bland to alert. Not amused.
    He said, “Hey, Janis, want to go down to the river?”
    She said, “Sure,” swiveling slowly, as if she’d expected it, known it was due. Later, she realized she must have looked utterly desperate.
    There were benches like bleachers, which you could climb down and sit on, dabble your feet in the Mississippi itself. “Come on,” said Chris, and clambered ahead of her. At the bottom they stood clutching their beers, peering into the stillness of the water. “Pretty, isn’t it?” he said.
    But it was more than pretty. It was vast and calming, soothing in an unexpected way that was new to her. “It’s like … a mom,” she blurted, and thought what a dork she sounded, what a baby.
    But Chris nodded. “Yes. It’s like being rocked. Just listening to it, just being this close. It’s an entity. It feels like a thing with a personality.”
    She stared at him. She didn’t know who he was, where he came from, but she hadn’t expected this. She had thought he was handsome, talented, transient, and no one she could take seriously—in other words, someone perfectly suited to be her first fuck, to be used and discarded. She wanted it that way because it wouldn’t get messy. Now she thought she could fall in love with him.
    “I grew up near the ocean. In South Carolina, where it’s like velvet. People who come there, Yankees, hate to go in—they say it’s like being in a dirty bathtub. Because it’s so warm.”
    “And what’s it like, really?”
    “Like heaven.” He smiled at her, a shy smile, she realized, and she liked that. “Just like heaven.”
    She smiled back, but didn’t know what to say, just held his gaze. He didn’t speak either, and she felt uncomfortable. She slid her eyes back toward the river, took another sip of beer. She twisted her ring the way she did when she was nervous, the cameo ring that Nonna, her father’s mother, had given her. It had been Nonna’s,