Jazz Funeral

winner got to be Madonna. She had changed the words slightly:
    Let him go, let him go,
    God bless him,
    Wherever he may be.
    I may search this wide world over;
    I’ll not find a man like him.
    Then the band came in and she sang the whole song. If there was a dry eye when she was done, it would have to have been the miserable orb of a person so insensitive he might as well be dead, Melody thought. She herself was openly bawling, having given up the fight to save her makeup. She didn’t dare take off her glasses, so they were thoroughly steamed up by the time the song was over. There being no choice now, Melody removed and dried them quickly, keeping her head down. But she was sure she needn’t have bothered. All eyes were on the utterly riveting Ti-Belle, who now broke the elegiac mood with a song of her own, one of Ham’s favorites, she said, called “Afternoon Delight.”
    It was rollicking and bawdy and the folks loved it. From there on the performance soared into the stratosphere. Melody, so overcome only a few minutes before, was transported to a new level of ecstasy, a musical ecstasy, a fine, vibrating, physical pleasure that was like a drug high, only better. Or an orgasm. She hadn’t had one yet, but surely it couldn’t be better than this. She threw her hands high above her head, swung her hips, moved her feet, and boogied like she’d been born to it. And she had, she had, she was born for this—she knew, even in her trance, her zoned-out no-holds-barred ecstatic transport, that that was the title of a song she’d write soon, after she finished Ham’s song. It would be about music and what it meant to her, but not the creative process, just the physical, primitive sensation, the thing the cave people must have felt the first time one of them beat on a hollow tree and invented the drum.
    She forgot all about Ham, all about everything except the music and the sun and the luxuriant pliancy of her own little body. She was singing, dancing, screaming, hands waving in the air, in seventh heaven, when all of a sudden she felt something. Eyes. She knew what eyes felt like. She could tell when a boy was looking at her in class and when someone in the next car was staring in the window. Someone was looking at her now.
    Quickly her own eyes swept the crowd, and she saw who saw her. Someone who was moving toward her. Her nemesis. The last person she wanted to see, or expected to see. A person who shouldn’t be here if there were any logic left in the world. But there hadn’t been for four days now, and she couldn’t worry about it. She had to go.
    Bodies pressed close to her, thick as a Mardi Gras crowd, everybody boogying but staying in their own space. It worked fine so long as no one disturbed the equilibrium. Melody was messing it up bad; plowing through like some human bumper car— “‘Scuse me; sorry”—but still getting dirty looks.
    The way it worked at JazzFest, there were a couple of tents—one for gospel, one for contemporary jazz—and other than that, open-air stages, lots of them, of greater and lesser importance. The more important ones drew the bigger crowds, of course, and the crowds could expand as much as they needed. They thinned on the edges and eventually melted into the greater, strolling JazzFest crowd.
    Ti-Belle was at the Ray-Ban stage, the biggest and most important; before he died, Ham had made sure she was far the most important act on at her time. The crowd she’d drawn was enormous, probably the biggest of her life. Melody felt as if she were moving through Jell-O, in slow motion. Then she was at the end of the crowd. She started to run. And hit somebody head on, fortunately a large man, possibly a biker, someone who was only stunned, not hurt. But he was angry. She might have got away, but she heard him pointing her out to her tracker.
    Where to go? If she got into another crowd, she might be able to disappear, or she might get trapped. The tracker had binoculars; Melody had seen them, thought that was odd, and then had seen the figure start to move. She had to disappear altogether, become invisible even to the possessor of high-power magnification.
    She knew how she’d been spotted, and it had taken a clever person to do it. She had painted her hands scarlet, made her hands look like someone else’s, except for one tiny thing—her trademark cameo ring. Everyone knew about the damn ring, and yet it was such a tiny detail, who would spot it? Someone watching her