American Flamingo

Lamp Without a Shade

57 Lamp Without a Shade Lagunitas, California If you followed this beam of light down through dripping pines you’d come to an old rotting house with broken windows where a young man hears the soulful notes, like smoke in the rain, but can’t make them come out of the flute. It’s January, a rainy month along the coast range, the night the postal worker, the young man’s neighbor with seven kids, will park his car at the end of the road, run a hose from the tailpipe through the wind wing and fix it in place with a clump of rag. The young man hears the music, but it’s no use. He’s been trying for hours. If he didn’t have to play so softly he might be able to do it. If he could blow the sax, but the sax is gone, and his one good pair of shoes, his class ring, and all the books and records he kept in a peach crate beside his makeshift bed, a mattress on a door on cinder blocks. All that’s left are the clothes he’s wearing, the clothes in his pack, the jungle boots, the flute, half a pack of cigarettes, and the lamp without a shade plugged in to an orange extension cord which runs along the wet ground to the house next door, house of the kind couple and their seven kids, who agreed to this arrangement so the young man would have a place to crash, as we used to say, and a light to read by. He hears the notes, feels them move his body. He rocks, sways, taps his foot, but the flute’s metal breaks his breath. He lights a cigarette. Such a small defeat, the scale won’t balance. He breaks down the flute, cleans the three parts 58 inside and out with a small rag and a rod, lays the silver pieces in their blue velvet slots, closes the case, turns out the lamp, and feels a sudden rush of cold damp air and can’t decide if the clouds inhaled or the whole dark house just opened to receive the rain. ...