Accordion Crimes Read Online Free PDF Page B

lolling drunk,practiced his first American sentence on a one-eyed dog scavenging for orts.
    “Get outta, I killa you.”
    The accordion maker disliked the music that the black men played, confused music, the melody, if there was one, deliberately hidden in braided skeins of rhythm. He was contemptuous of their instruments—a horn, a broken piano, a fiddle, the wiry curls of its strings twisting out of the neck like morning glory vines, the banjo. He recognized one of the players from the docks, as black as a horse’s hoof, a man with an eye patch and a latticework of scars from the corner of his eye to his jaw that made his face rigid and expressionless on one side. They called him Pollo—what, “Chicken”? thought the accordion maker, but it seemed the creature’s name was Apollo, someone’s sardonic joke—flailing at a—what was it?—a corrugated surface, somehow familiar, set in a gaudily painted wooden frame, a thing that made a raspy, scratching sound like a treeful of cicadas, and singing “ shootin don’t make it, no, no, no. ” It was a quarter of an hour before he recognized the object—a washboard, a thing women used to rub the dirt from wet clothes—and saw the metal thimbles on the man’s fingers. Pollo put away the rub-board and pulled a pair of spoons from his back pocket, making a clatter like heavy castanets. And the other one, Fish Man, scraping a knife over his guitar strings to make a wobbling shrill. What wandering imprecision! What kitchen music! And the words, the accordion maker could not catch one, but understood the singer’s salacious tone and low, hot laugh. Fish Man twirled his old guitar with a scarred back, sang:
    On my table there a blood dish,
    Dish with drop a blood,
    Somebody butcher my old cow,
    Tell me it really good,
    It really good—
    I don’t have to milk her no more.
    Soon enough the accordion maker was distracted when Cannamele, cock-a-hoop, shoved a black woman against him, a dirty puzzle with running eyes, put his wet mouth to the accordion maker’s ear and said she would change his luck.
    “The man who holds back risks tuberculosis and worse. The bodily system weakens. Go ahead, mine some coal.” (Although the accordion maker contracted syphilis from these adventures, he never knew it.)
    In a Sicilian village, the right eye of a woman no longer paralyzed itched with great ferocity.
A strange instrument
    In the weeks that followed, the accordion maker recognized many dockworkers among the musicians of the barrelhouses. There were no accordions to be heard until a band of gypsies camped outside the city on a bit of high ground with their tinkers’ tools, horses and fortunes; two of the men played accordions. They stayed a week, another week, a month, mending pots and pans. Sometimes at night passersby heard their private music, a slow, sad wailing, saw the shimmer of sequined bodies dancing. He went to their camp one evening with Cannamele to hear what was to be heard. The music was boisterous and wailing at the same time and five or six men danced a fight with sticks. He was interested in their accordions but could not make the men understand that he wished to examine one. Their language was incomprehensibleand they turned away as soon as money changed hands. True outsiders, he thought, people without even a home, lost in the wild world. One day they were gone, leaving trampled earth.
    “Moon men,” said Cannamele, winking his bad eye.
    At first the accordion maker was afraid to bring his instrument into the sweating, dangerous dives where men fought and bled and overturned the tables. He played it only in the room he shared with Silvano and Nove, forty years old and half deaf, who came in many nights streaming blood from knife fights, would wake from midsleep and shout hoarsely, “Listen! Somebody knocking!” But the knocking was in his head and in a few minutes he would lie down and sleep again in his rumpled, stained clothes.
    The accordion maker found