13 November 2007

Chapter 4: It's too late to cry

I can sense Red looming uncertainly over his corpse. It's giving me the creeps. I don't think he quite realizes yet that he's dead. I can see (you have no idea the things dogs can see) that something in him is trying to tell him, trying to help him let go. It's a memory. Involuntarily it's misted up into his consciousness; he has no idea why. It's of a concert he attended as a boy when his parents took him to England. Red's father Jim made his living as a honky-tonk piano player. For the most part Jim had pissed away his gift of music, but he never lost his exquisite taste in it. Jim could not believe their great good fortune when he heard the incomparable Lonnie Johnson had come to play. And Lonnie played, no longer with the fretboard pyrotechnics of his youth, but with a voice that had mellowed into a sweet greatness, "soulful to the bone," that had nothing to prove and nothing to justify.
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