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Dance Dance Dance
Courtesy Jeff Prior
Dolphin Dance
The dolphins frolicked just south of the end of the pier, leaping in playful arcs that took them completely out of the water. They bumped fins and swooped in and out of the pod. A select few angled their slick bodies into vertical positions, coming half out of the water to eyeball, up on the pier, the delighted casual strollers and the jaded fishermen behind the wooden railing above them. Children laughed; the dolphins smiled. A bright sun glittered off the facets of the blue wind-blown wavelets, and a guy with a fishing pole pulled a mackerel out of a red bucket and threw it over the rail. Down below, a large male bumped a smaller pod-mate aside and ate the fish in one bite, as Larry Lenihan—soprano saxophone in hand, always searching for a song in his seaside strolls—put the horn to his mouth and blew the melody of
Herbie Hancock
pianob.1940
The sun, settling toward its late afternoon dip in the ocean, reflected a starburst of light on the horn's bright metal. A toothless old fisherwoman dropped a line into the water, and a half dozen dolphins went into vertical postures, their heads rising from the surface to listen to the song, as a cool, dry Santa Ana wind blew in from the east.
Goodbye
Hobgood Rivard got his walking papers as Larry played his song to the cetaceans. He had worked as a cash-under-the-table grill cook at the Loma Alta Cafe, on Highway 101 three miles south of the Loma Alta Pier for seven years. The cafe's owner, Joanie Corona, had paid Hobgood well, for a guy cooking eggs and hamburgers. Still, with the yearly pay raises, he had become too expensive as the little cafe began to fail under the competitive duress of the trendy new restaurants cropping up in the city's newly gentrified downtown east of the pier. Joanie found a fresh-out-of-the-Navy cook who would work for half of Larry's hourly wage. She put him in part-time at first, on Hobgood's days off. When Navy Man got his sea legs on the running of the kitchen, Joanie—on the day of the dolphins' dance—gave Hobgood the bad news and a tearful hug and two crisp one hundred dollar bills in severance pay at the end of his final shift. He walked away, a portly fifty-seven-year-old man with a missing front tooth, high blood pressure and out-of-control cholesterol, a flirtation with alcoholism, no prospects for a new job and an eviction from his rented trailer hanging over his head. He crossed the parking lot to his car with Gordon Jenkins' "Goodbye"—the saddest song in the world—playing inside his skull.I've Got Rhythm
The dolphins departed, and Larry, horn in hand, turned and walked shoreward, the wind in his face. He nodded to Charlie, a splenetic-looking old pelican who had found a perch near the bait shop halfway between the shore and the pier's end. Walking on, he came across a spindly nut-brown little man in a straw hat working furiously on his reel, his fishing pole bent into a curve, its tip pointing toward the water."What do ya think ya got there, buddy," Larry asked, as a wriggling silver fish broke the water's surface to begin its slow ascent to the top of the pier.
"Halibut!" the little man cried. "Good eatin.'" The man's gold-capped eye tooth, sharp like a shark's, glinted in the sun.
Larry leaned on the damp rail ten feet from the quivering fishing pole, his horn pointed at the doomed halibut, and he blew into "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," the melody stuck in his memory banks from repeated spins of an
Ella Fitzgerald
vocals1917 - 1996
"Ah hah!" the man cried, plopping the flopping fish on a damp and frayed towel. He then hit him hard on the head with the handle of his knife. This killed the fish, the animal that would become his dinner. The fisherman then folded the terry cloth towel over the shimmering body, as Larry finished the chorus and went on his way, spotting fifty yards closer to shore, the figure of a small shapely, pretty-as-a-picture woman coming his way, accompanied by a man with a camera emblazoned with the logo of the local television news station strapped over his shoulder. This news team was going for a puff piece, searching for Charlie, the pelican, who was rumored to take handouts of fish scraps and fishheads from the fishermen just west of the bait shop.
Larry watched the woman walk, the fluid undulations of her Betty Boop figure, the bounce of her hair that was as black and shiny as obsidian, the sway of her hips. As she came closer, he recognized her. She joined him for coffee every morning in the Whispering Palms Trailer Court, Larry with his steaming mug in a tattered chair, Angelina Diaz—that was her name, he recalled—on the small screen of his T.V., smiling brightly, gesturing provocatively at the weather map, reminding him not to forget his kids in his car because it would be a hot day in due to the Santa Ana wind.
"My youngest is forty-two, little angel. I don't think I have to worry about that," Larry would say aloud, though he knew she couldn't hear him.
As Angelina—with her red sweater and bright red lipstick and dazzling white smile, her skin the color of milk chocolate—approached with her camera guy and a spring in her step, Larry broke into Gershwin's "I've Got Rhythm," in an up-tempo way, much like the version on drummer
Paul Motian
drums1931 - 2011
Joe Lovano
drumsb.1952
Larry watched her go. So did everyone else.
Dancing In The Dusk
Ten minutes after Hobgood Rivard arrived home from his last day at the Loma Alta Cafe, the landlady came over and told him it was time for him to hit the road, that trailer 47 in the Whispering Palms Trailer Court was no longer his home. He hadn't paid the rent. Today was the day. This, Hobgood thought—ten minutes after he received this information, as he loaded two cardboard boxes containing all his worldly possessions into the trunk of his dusty old Toyota—is a big-time bummer."Sorry it's come to this, Hobsie," Barb said. She stood by the mailbox at the end of the trailer's driveway, a stout, jowly, late-middle-aged woman with a bob cut, big boobs, big arms and a sleeveless blouse.
Hobgood closed the trunk and said, "Me too, Barb."
What else was there to say? They'd cut his hours at the Loma Alta Cafe two months earlier, bringing in a new kid fresh out of the Navy to work the grill for four bucks less an hour than Hobgood made after seven years of slaving in the place. That left him with Mondays and Tuesdays to work—the Navy guy's days off. He earned then just enough to buy food and gas, but not enough to pay the rent. Then Joanie had canned him. He expected this, writing on the wall and all, and he'd looked for another job, but nothing came up. A fat, balding, fifty-seven-year grill cook was a hard sell in this town. They wanted young dudes with little fairy buns on the backs of their heads and tattoos on their necks. Or young women with big forearms, buzz cuts, facial piercings and tattoos on their forearms. The city of Loma Alta had gone trendy, and Hobgood didn't fit in.
"Got any idea of where you're gonna stay?" Barb asked, crossing her arms crossed over her heavy breasts.
"My brother's place," Hobgood lied. "He'll put me up for a while."
"That's good, Hobs," Barb said, looking like she didn't believe him. She uncrossed her arms, slipped a thumb and forefinger into the conjoining of visible cleavage in the middle of her button-down blouse and pulled out what proved to be a hundred-dollar bill.
"Let me give you something to tide you over for a bit," she said.
The wind gusted. The bill fluttered in front of her, and Hobgood wondered if he should have taken this busty, big-around-the-middle Barb up on her offer to let him move in with her when she gave him the eviction notice last month. He turned and lifted a box of his shirts and underwear and socks and put them in the back seat of his car. When he faced her again, Barb narrowed her eyes and gave him a wry smile and said, "My offer still stands, if you're interested, Hobsie," a second before she moved in for a hug, his second of the day.
Oh fuck me, Hobsie thought. He had made the mistake of bedding her two weeks earlier when he was drunk and about as lonely as a man can be—a move he regretted.
He saw the bill go by his ear just before Barb wrapped her big bare arms around his neck. She held him tight for a few seconds, treating him to the chemical aroma of a day's worth of her heavy vodka drinking and of the thirty cigarettes she'd already sucked in since sunrise. When they broke she stuffed the hundred dollar bill in his shirt pocket and leaned in to kiss him on the lips. A reflex made him jerk back. She pursued, coming at him with a determined smile, stepping on one of the big beach cobbles that Hobgood had put in as a border for the flower bed he'd never planted. The rock rolled, and so did Barb's balance. She shot her arms out and flailed to stay on her feet. She grabbed Hobgood's shirt, tearing his pocket and setting the hundred dollar bill free. The wind blowing in out of the desert caught it as the landlady hit with a seismic thump on the gravel path on her butt.
"You motherfucker," she hissed at him.
He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, stepped around the fallen Barb, and pursued what he thought was a twenty-dollar bill. It had gotten hung up in a monstrous aloe plant in front of his old drinking buddy Larry Lenihan's place. Hobgood plucked it up, took a good look at the numbers and decided against his initial plan of going on principal and giving it back to Barb. He would keep it. He would need it.
He stuffed it into his front pants pocket as he strode back to his car. Barb was up and on him before he could get halfway there. The pair wrestled for possession of the money in the middle of Lupine Lane, the path that winds through the Whispering Palms. Barb grabbed his neck and tried to choke him out. Hobgood, a man who had never struck a woman before in his life, cuffed her good and hard on the side of the head. She returned the favor, then tried to knee him in the groin. He turned his body and took the knee on his thigh as he worked his forearms up inside of hers and broke her hold on his neck. She hissed like a cat and threw a short right cross that would have dropped him if it had landed flush instead of glancing off his cheek. He grabbed two fistfuls of her blouse and hung on. She pushed him away and swung a roundhouse left. He ducked under it and moved in on her, jamming his forearm into her neck, just under her jaw. She hit him in the liver then wrapped him into a headlock and wrestled him to the ground, where they rolled and tumbled and cursed and bit, with Barb using her superior weight to her advantage, mounting him and pinning him to the ground, then rifling his pockets for her money. When she had it, she rose slowly on her swollen arthritic knees, gasping. Hobgood lay on his back on the lane, panting like a tired old dog, and Barb slipped the hundred dollar bill back between her boobs, into her bra that had been exposed in the tussle. Hobgood struggled up on one knee, his front pockets turned inside out, and Barb stepped back away from him, growling, "Now get your fat ass outa here, Rivard, and don't show your ugly face in my Whispering Palms again, Got it?"
Hobgood fingered a couple of pieces of gravel out of the skin on his cheek, took a deep breath of the dry breeze and said, "Got it, Barb."
Again, "Goodbye" played in his head, seeping through the convolutions of his cortex, and Barb stalked back to her trailer, poured herself a stiff drink, lit another cigarette, sat down in her chair and suffered the bursting in her brain of an aneurysm the size of a tangerine that killed her.
The Last Dance
Larry parked his car on the curbless street outside the Whispering Palms. He climbed out from behind the wheel with his saxophone, slammed the door and ambled toward his trailer with visions of dancing Angelina playing on a continuous loop in his mind.Arriving at the park's entrance, the movie of news lady's dance playing in his head got eclipsed by the sight of Hobgood Rivard engaged in what looked like mortal combat with the park's manager, Barb. Considering the fighters' portly frames and their lack of athletic grace, he thought they looked like a pair of trained bears that had shifted from dancing to trying to kill each other. With Hobgood's recent drunken coupling with Barb in mind (there was no end to the razzing he had taken from Larry and the other guys in the park for that), Larry put his saxophone to his mouth and began to blow "What Is This Thing Called Love?" copying as closely as he could the
Sonny Rollins
saxophoneb.1930
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