The Wedding Gig Read online

  We took a twenty-minute break while the cake-cutting ceremony was going on, and Miss Gibson herself fed us in the kitchen. It was hot as blazes with the cookstove on, and none of us was too hungry. The gig had started out feeling right and now it felt wrong. I could see it on my band's faces... on Miss Gibson's, too, for that matter.

  By the time we returned to the bandstand, the drinking had begun in earnest. Tough-looking guys staggered around with silly grins on their mugs or stood in corners haggling over racing forms. Some couples wanted to Charleston, so we played "Aunt Hagar's Blues" (those goons ate it up) and "I'm Gonna Charleston Back to Charleston" and some other numbers like that. Jazz-baby stuff. The debs rocked around the floor, flashing their rolled hose and shaking their fingers beside their faces and yelling voe-doe-dee-oh-doe, a phrase that makes me feel like sicking up my supper to this very day. It was getting dark out. The screens had fallen off some of the windows and moths came in and flitted around the light fixtures in clouds. And, as the song says, the band played on. The bride and groom stood on the sidelines -- neither of them seemed interested in slipping away early -- almost completely neglected. Even Scollay seemed to have forgotten about them. He was pretty drunk.

  It was almost 8:00 when the little fellow crept in. I spotted him immediately because he was sober and he looked scared; scared as a nearsighted cat in a dog pound. He walked up to Scollay, who was talking with some floozie right by the bandstand, and tapped him on the shoulder. Scollay wheeled around, and I heard every word they said. Believe me, I wish I hadn't.

  "Who the hell are you?" Scollay asked rudely.

  "My name is Demetrius," the fellow said. "Demetrius Katzenos. I come from the Greek."

  Motion on the floor came to a dead stop. Jacket buttons were freed, and hands stole out of sight under lapels. I saw Manny looking nervous. Hell, I didn't feel so calm myself. We kept on playing though, you bet.

  "Is that right," Scollay said quietly, almost reflectively.

  The guy burst out, "I didn't want to come, Mr. Scollay! The Greek, he has my wife. He say he kill her if I doan give you his message!"

  "What message?" Scollay growled. The thunderclouds were back on his forehead.

  "He say -- " The guy paused with an agonized expression. His throat worked as if the words were physical things, caught in there and choking him. "He say to tell you your sister is one fat pig. He say... he say..." His eyes rolled wildly at Scollay's still expression. I shot a look at Maureen. She looked as if she had been slapped. "He say she got an itch. He say if a fat woman got an itch on her back, she buy a back-scratcher. He say if a woman got an itch in her parts, she buy a man."

  Maureen gave a great strangled cry and ran out, weeping. The floor shook. Rico pattered after her, his face bewildered. He was wringing his hands.

  Scollay had grown so red his cheeks were actually purple. I half-expected -- maybe more than half-expected -- his brains to just blow out his ears. I saw that same look of mad agony I had seen in the dark outside Englander's. Maybe he was just a cheap hood, but I felt sorry for him. You would have, too.

  When he spoke his voice was very quiet -- almost mild.

  "Is there more?"

  The little Greek man quailed. His voice was splintery with anguish. "Please doan kill me, Mr. Scollay! My wife -- the Greek, he got my wife! I doan want to say these thing! He got my wife, my woman -- "

  "I ain't going to hurt you," Scollay said, quieter still. "Just tell me the rest."

  "He say the whole town laughing at you."

  We had stopped playing and there was dead silence for a second. Then Scollay turned his eyes to the ceiling. Both of his hands were shaking and held out clenched in front of him. He was holding them in fists so tight that it seemed I could see his hamstrings standing out right through his shirt.

  "ALL RIGHT!" he screamed. "ALL RIGHT!"

  He broke for the door. Two of his men tried to stop him, tried to tell him it was suicide, just what the Greek wanted, but Scollay was like a crazy man. He knocked them down and rushed out into the black summer night.

  In the dead quiet that followed, all I could hear was the messenger's tortured breathing and somewhere out back, the soft sobbing of the bride.

  Just about then the young kid who had braced us when we came in uttered a curse and made for the door. He was the only one.

  Before he could even get under the big paper shamrock hung in the foyer, automobile tires screeched on the pavement and engines revved up -- a lot of engines. It sounded like Memorial Day at the Brickyard out there.

  "Oh dear-to-Jaysus!" the kid screamed from the doorway. "It's a fucking caravan! Get down, boss! Get down! Get down -- ''

  The night exploded with gunfire. It was like World War I out there for maybe a minute, maybe two. Bullets stitched across the open door of the hall, and one of the hanging light-globes overhead exploded. Outside the night was bright with Winchester fireworks. Then the cars howled away. One of the molls was brushing broken glass out of her bobbed hair.

  Now that the danger was over, the rest of the goons rushed out. The door to the kitchen banged open and Maureen ran through again. Everything she had was jiggling. Her face was more puffy than ever. Rico came in her wake like a bewildered valet. They went out the door.

  Miss Gibson appeared in the empty hall, her eyes wide and shocked. The little man who had started all the trouble with his singing telegram had powdered.

  "It was shooting," Miss Gibson murmured. "What happened?"

  "I think the Greek just cooled the paymaster," Biff said. She looked at me, bewildered, but before I could translate Billy-Boy said in his soft, polite voice: "He means that Mr. Scollay just got rubbed out, Miz Gibson."

  Miss Gibson stared at him, her eyes getting wider and wider, and then she fainted dead away. I felt a little like fainting myself.

  Just then, from outside, came the most anguished scream I have ever heard, then or since. That unholy caterwauling just went on and on. You didn't have to peek out the door to know who was tearing her heart out in the street, keening over her dead brother even while the cops and newshawks were on their way.

  "Let's blow," I muttered. "Quick."

  We had it packed in before five minutes had passed. Some of the goons came back inside, but they were too drunk and too scared to notice the likes of us.

  We went out the back, each of us carrying part of Biffs drum-kit. Quite a parade we must have made, walking up the street, for anyone who saw us. I led the way with my horn case tucked under my arm and a cymbal in each hand. The boys stood on the corner at the end of the block while I went back for the truck. The cops hadn't shown yet. The big girl was still crouched over the body of her brother in the middle of the street, wailing like a banshee while her tiny groom ran around her like a moon orbiting a big planet.

  I drove down to the corner and the boys threw everything in the back, willy-nilly. Then we hauled ass out of there. We averaged forty-five miles an hour all the way back to Morgan, back roads or not, and either Scollay's goons must never have bothered to tip the cops to us, or else the cops didn't care, because we never heard from them.

  We never got the two hundred bucks, either.

  She came into Tommy Englander's about ten days later, a fat Irish girl in a black mourning dress. The black didn't look any better than the white satin.

  Englander must have known who she was (her picture had been in the Chicago papers, next to Scollay's) because he showed her to a table himself and shushed a couple of drunks at the bar who had been snickering at her.

  I felt badly for her, like I feel for Billy-Boy sometimes. It's tough to be on the outside. You don't have to be out there to know, although I'd have to agree that you can't know just what it's like. And she had been very sweet, the little I had talked to her.

  When the break came, I went over to her table.

  "I'm sorry about your brother," I said awkwardly. "I know he really cared for you, and -- "

  "I might as well have fired those guns
myself," she said. She was looking down at her hands, and now that I noticed them I saw that they were really her best feature, small and comely. "Everything that little man said was true."

  "Oh, say now," I replied -- a non sequitur if ever there was one, but what else was there to say? I was sorry I'd come over, she talked so strangely. As if she was all alone, and crazy.

  "I'm not going to divorce him, though," she went on. "I'd kill myself first, and damn my soul to hell."

  "Don't talk that way," I said.

  "Haven't you ever wanted to kill yourself?" she asked, looking at me passionately. "Doesn't it make you feel like that when people use 'you badly and then laugh at you? Or did no one ever do it to you? You may say so, but you'll pardon me if I don't believe it. Do you know what it feels like to eat and eat and hate yourself for it and then eat more? Do you know what it feels like to kill your own brother because you are fat?''

  People were turning to look, and the drunks were sniggering again.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered.

  I wanted to tell her I was sorry, too. I wanted to tell her... oh, anything at all, I reckon, that would make her feel better. Holler down to where she was, inside all that flab. But I couldn't think of a single thing.

  So I just said, "I have to go. We have to play another set."

  "Of course," she said softly. "Of course you must... or they'll start to laugh at you. But why I came was -- will you play 'Roses of Picardy'? I thought you played it very nicely at the reception. Will you do that?"

  "Sure," I said. "Be glad to."

  And we did. But she left halfway through the number, and since it was sort of schmaltzy for a place like Englander's, we dropped it and swung into a ragtime version of "The Varsity Drag." That one always tore them up. I drank too much the rest of the evening and by closing I had forgotten all about her. Well, almost.

  Leaving for the night, it came to me. What I should have told her. Life goes on -- that's what I should have said. That's what you say to people when a loved one dies. But, thinking it over, I was glad I didn't. Because maybe that was what she was afraid of.

  * * * * *

  Of course now everyone knows about Maureen Romano and her husband Rico, who survives her as the taxpayers' guest in the Illinois State Penitentiary. How she took over Scollay's two-bit organization and turned it into a Prohibition empire that rivaled Capone's. How she wiped out two other North Side gang leaders and swallowed their operations. How she had the Greek brought before her and supposedly killed him by sticking a piece of piano wire through his left eye and into his brain as he knelt in front of her, blubbering and pleading for his life. Rico, the bewildered valet, became her first lieutenant, and was responsible for a dozen gangland hits himself.

  I followed Maureen's exploits from the West Coast, where we were making some pretty successful records. Without Billy-Boy, though. He formed a band of his own not long after we left Englander's, an all-black combination that played Dixieland and ragtime. They did real well down south, and 1 was glad for them. It was just as well. Lots of places wouldn't even audition us with a Negro in the group.

  But I was telling you about Maureen. She made great news copy, and not just because she was a kind of Ma Barker with brains, although that was part of it. She was awful big and she was awful bad, and Americans from coast to coast felt a strange sort of affection for her. When she died of a heart attack in 1933, some of the papers said she weighed five hundred pounds. 1 doubt it, though. No one gets that big, do they?

  Anyway, her funeral made the front pages. It was more than you could say for her brother, who never got past page four in his whole miserable career. It took ten pallbearers to carry her coffin. There was a picture of them toting it in one of the tabloids. It was a horrible picture to look at. Her coffin was the size of a meat locker -- which, in a way, I suppose it was.

  Rico wasn't bright enough to hold things together by himself, and he fell for assault with intent to kill the very next year.

  I've never been able to get her out of my mind, or the agonized, hangdog way Scollay had looked that first night when he talked about her. But I cannot feel too sorry for her, looking back. Fat people can always stop eating. Guys like Billy-Boy Williams can only stop breathing. I still don't see any way I could have helped either of them, but I do feel sort of bad every now and then. Probably just because I've gotten a lot older and don't sleep as well as I did when I was a kid. That's all it is, isn't it? Isn't it?