Jazz Funeral

you heard us singin’ last night.”
    “How was I going to miss it?”
    “Wasn’t bad, was it?”
    Proctor raised an eyebrow, forebore to answer.
    “Well, it wasn’t now, was it?”
    “How was it going to be bad? You’re good, she’s good—and you’ve got chemistry. Of course it wasn’t bad.”
    “Know what? I kind of like the idea.”
    “You what?”
    “I mean it. I do.”
    “Is this Nick Anglime speaking? The same Nick Anglime who swore five years ago he’d never work again even if ordered to at gunpoint? Remember what you said? ‘They can kill me, I don’t care. I’m not doin’ it one more time.’”
    “I was tired at the time.”
    “Man, you are somethin’.”
    “Well, that little gal’s somethin’. I want her and I’m gon’ do whatever it takes.”
    “What about your spiritual life? How’re you’re going to spend the rest of your life meditating and studying?”
    “Well, I am. I’ll just do it between gigs and makin’ love to my wife. You don’t get this, do you, buddy?”
    “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
    “The spiritual stuff is about being afraid I’ll live my whole life and miss out on what’s really important. Do you get that much?”
    “Most people would kill for your life, but so far as a normal human being can get it, I get it.”
    “Ti-Belle’s what’s important. It’s that simple.” He looked straight ahead, certainly not at his friend to say what he had to say, and spread his arms. “Love, baby. Love’s it. The whole ball of wax.”
    “Nick, you’ve been in love before.”
    Nick had used Proctor to think the situation through, and he didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking. Proctor’s voice was starting to take on a carping note.
    “Lighten up, would you? Let’s go find some young ladies to dance with.”
    They’d arrived at the fais do-do stage, where two ancient black men who looked and sounded as if they came from a bayou where English wasn’t spoken played the harmonica and the washboard. Their voices were fine and sweet, and they were as good as seventy-five percent of the artists at the festival. Nick figured they probably had a combined income of $15,000 a year, and wondered how he could help them. For now, he just wanted to enjoy their music.
    All around the stage couples twirled gracefully to the charming old tunes. Cajun dancing had become popular, but you had to go out in public to learn it. It had never occurred to Nick to do that.
    He realized now that he could have hired a dance instructor to come to his house—hell, maybe he could have gotten Ti-Belle to teach him, she was a Cajun, wasn’t she? But then where could you go dancing if you were Nick Anglime? You couldn’t just hop over to the Maple Leaf like you lived in the neighborhood. This was the first time he’d been to a public place where it was happening. It was a deliciously anachronistic sight—everyone, men and women alike, in shorts and baseball caps, Reeboks on their feet, going through a set of motions from another era, a softer, sweeter time when “fais do-do” was more than a quaint old phrase. It was from “faire dormir,” Ti-Belle had told him—you brought the babies to the party and let them sleep while you danced.
    He wanted to do it—and Nick Anglime was a person who got what he wanted. There was a girl on the sidelines in black shorts and a black T-shirt, with tiny, multicolored musical instruments on it. She was a little fat, too much makeup, hair a little too high and sprayed too stiff—the kind of girl Uptown New Orleanians called a “charmer” (pronounced “chawama” in imitation of the blue-collar whites they called yats). But she was tapping her foot and looking like she was just dying to dance. She was way too young to know who he was.
    He tapped her on the shoulder. “Do you know how to do this?”
    She turned to look at him, eyes bland and a little blissed out—he loved the way women here were relaxed, didn’t get bent out of shape when a stranger approached. Suddenly she gasped, and he half expected her eyes to roll back in her head; but she turned red instead of white and yelled, “Christie! Omigod! Christie!”
    A dancing yat couple, the woman in white shorts and dainty white sandals, the man, spare tire barely covered and then only sometimes by a T-shirt that kept riding up, stared at her, startled. The woman yelled, “Audrey! What is it?” Then saw Nick. Her jaw dropped.
    The sight of a dropping