Free Tiger Rag by Nicholas Christopher

neighborhood, blind drunk, and passing out in the gutter where one of the neighbors—when they still cared—picked him up. Often with his pockets turned out by his bum companions, but still clutching his cornet, even if he hadn’t played it all night
.
    Charley, you better stop before there’s just enough of you left to kill off, and nothing more.
    But he couldn’t hear her, not a word of it, even if he wanted to. He could rave and shout, but he had trouble hearing any voices except his own, and sometimes there were so many of those that it sounded like a chorus, every singer working a different key. For a while, when he was still playing, that roar was way in the back of his head, a constant, ebbing and flowing, and he was able to draw a single line of sound out of it and make it into music. But that didn’t last long
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    When everything collapsed on him, it happened so fast that for the rest of her life Alice could barely make sense of it. The previous year, Charley was still on top, raking in the big money, wearing expensive suits and alligator shoes and custom-made hats. Some days he played seven or eight engagements, from the saloons in Back-of-Town to the biggest halls in New Orleans, where people lined up to get in. For four years running, he brought her enough money so that she didn’t have to work at all, his sister Cora, too. He himself was living in a white house with yellow shutters on LaPierre Street with Nora and their daughter, Bernedine, and making his rounds, as everyone knew, of the hotels and apartments where he kept those other
women in style. He was paying rent all over town. His house was two stories high with indoor plumbing and brass fixtures and a wide widow’s walk on the roof where he could see clear to the river. He used to lounge up there with Cornish and Lewis, drinking good whiskey. Once, when Nora was out, just to see what would happen, he played his horn loud and, sure enough, people gathered, ten, twenty deep and called out to him, frightening Bernedine inside, so he never did it again. He had been spending more money in a week than Alice would see in an entire year, but then he got erratic, drinking heavily, missing gigs, disappearing for days at a time, until he was nearly broke, and Nora left him and went to live at her mother’s house with Bernedine, and Alice herself was back at Morton’s Laundry on Quillon Place, scrubbing and ironing. She would tell the story of her famous son to the other women in that steaming room, she needed to hear herself tell it, because by then he was disappearing before her eyes, and the story was all she had left, the unfinished story he would remain for the next three decades
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    Alice told them how Charley started out, learning the cornet from her onetime beau, Mr. Manuel Hall. She was still a pretty widow then, and Charley was eight years old. Her husband, Westmore, whose good looks and charm Charley inherited, had died of a heart attack two years earlier, age twenty-nine. Nearly all the men in that family died young. Not Charley, who would suffer a long living death. Manny was a cook at Nelson Quirile’s Café on Royal Street. He often had sawdust on his shoes from the kitchen. A widower himself, a big man who worked the night shift, sweating in a low-ceilinged kitchen with two coal stoves. He smelled of shrimp and shallots and the West Indian lime cologne he splashed on Sunday morning
that stayed with him till Tuesday. After she took Charley and Cora to church, and served them all lunch, ham hocks and beans with yellow rice, she and Manny would stroll along Marin Street, past the St. Jacques Shipyard, to a riverfront bar for a pitcher of beer. Then they’d go back to Manny’s house, Number 2359, five doors down from her house. Sometimes Alice felt sure Charley and Cora saw them return from the bar. But they never once came knocking at Manny’s door or questioned her when she came back home alone at dusk. Later, Charley told people that Manny