The Snare

15. OPEN DOOR

15. OPEN DOOR Bunny Terrence's band was booked at Dixieland Hall for one week only. But following the one-night engagement at Preservation, there was a write-up in the Picayune and a longer one followed the same afternoon in the small weekly paper the French Quarter published, not only for tourists but for the whole city. The second night the hall was packed, and the next and the next. They were turning them away at the door. Julia noticed how the decor of New Orleans persisted through these evenings, allowing the players to be quiet and faithful only to the music they played, to pack up instruments and pay no more attention to the audience than if they had been part of some great ritual, like priest and acolyte, to give out the air of its making no difference whether the church was packed or empty save for two or three souls. She overheard scraps of talk: "Can't tell me that boy ever killed anybody." "Just a killer for music." "'Killer' Springland, huh? Let's name him." It was one of the hall managers talking this way. He had caught the dark upward cat slant of her glance, overhearing him, and grinned at her. "Okay by you?" She smiled back. So they would try to make that stick. Somebody had done the same, she guessed, with Jelly Roll Morton and Pee Wee Russell and Satchmo, though here he was mainly known as Pops. The story would fill in around Jake too, she guessed. Tried for murder but they couldn't find the corpse . . . either that or the corpse got up and left for California. Other lore would pile up as it did in the 3*3 314 T H E S N A R E casual wash of life there, barnacles sticking to the new surface, once it got firmly fixed in that dirty sea. Could he rise to the high level that demands a nickname? He would have said he didn't know, added that he didn't care, not any longer. She didn't know either and saw that she too had to say she didn't care, had to learn to master it, mean it, no faking, not ever. After a break, they were filing in again, picking up music sheets, tightening strings, getting settled, while the audience shifted, settling too. There it went again—slow and easy for a starter. . . . "I like you baby but I don't like your low-down ways. . . ." Then picking up through Tiger Street Rag and Lazy River. Music hammered around her ears. She could mark the point of improvisation beginning, of flinging the theme back and forth, then of breaking through entirely, as they now had the luck to do. She knew the moment too when for the players in the whirl and spin of sound the audience itself had dropped away and there was nothing for them but the take-off from the improvisation, the off-spun statement, far from the original beat itself abandoned for flight after flight, the return to question and answer, to repeat and wondering and hesitation, until renewed inspiration sprang from a single player who was hailed and joined by one and all, so that all went traveling down the road together into gladness pure and simple, and discovered flight and soared to rapture until now, altogether . . . Halt! There was the wild applause that came at them, waking them out of their trance. Julia knew they were cutting a disk that night, for the second time. Whether the players knew, had thought of it, she didn't know. She edged toward the door with the crowd, leaving. Hearing "Where's that mulatto girl?" "You mean that girl he ? Part French, I thought." "There she is, here every night." So she knew she was in the legend too, getting to be, because the press had praised him by name, both for banjo and straight jazz guitar, a difficult feat, Elizabeth Spencer 315 and now the jazz buffs had come crawling out to approve or not. But what it mainly was, she thought, was glory. He hardly mentioned it; which was how she knew best that he felt it because like the name of a beloved he didn't want to say it. Getting up, shaving, not talking about it even when he said good-night to the other five, standing...