Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll, King Oliver and Bunk Johnson floating from the record player in the background. And the conferences and breakfast feasts returned, with Booker and his siblings, Carole, Donovan, Ellie, Favor and Goodman, all trying to think up interesting answers to the routine questions. In time the whole family perked up like
Sesame Street
puppets, hoping that cheer, if worked at hard enough, could sugar the living and quiet the dead. Booker thoughttheir joking strained and their made-up problems both misguided and insulting. During the funeral and for a few days after, a visiting relative, an aunt they called Queen, was the exception to what Booker thought was mindless rote. She had a last name that no one remembered since she was rumored to have had many husbands—one a Mexican, then two white men, four black men, one Asian, but in a sequence no one recalled. Heavy-set with fire-red hair, she surprised the grieving family by traveling all the way from California to attend Adam’s funeral. She alone sensed her nephew’s anger-mixed sorrow and pulled him aside.
“Don’t let him go,” she said. “Not until he’s ready. Meantime, hang on to him tooth and claw. Adam will let you know when it’s time.”
She comforted him, strengthened him and validated the unfairness of the censure he was feeling from his family.
Wary of another crisis that might eliminate the soul-stretching music his father played, which Booker counted on to oil and straighten his tangled feelings, he asked his father if he could take trumpet lessons. Sure, said Mr. Starbern, provided his son earned half the teacher’s fee. Booker nagged his neighbors for chores and earned enough to skip the Saturday conferences for trumpet lessons that dampened his budding intolerance for his siblings. How could they pretend it was over? How could they forget and just go on? Who and where was the murderer?
His trumpet teacher, already slightly drunk early in the morning, was nevertheless an excellent musician and an even better instructor.
“You got the lungs, the fingers, now you need the lip. When you get all three together you can forget about them and let the music out.”
Which, with persistence, he did.
Six years later when Booker was fourteen and a faintly accomplished trumpet player, the nicest man in the world was caught, tried and convicted of SSS, the sexually stimulated slaughter of six boys, each of whose names, including Adam’s, was tattooed across the shoulders of the nicest man in the world. Boise. Lenny. Adam. Matthew. Kevin. Roland. Clearly an equal-opportunity killer, his victims seemed to be representative of the
We Are the World
video. The tattoo artist said he thought they were the names of his client’s children, not those of other people.
The nicest man in the world was an easygoing, retired auto mechanic who solicited home repairs. He was especially helpful with old refrigerators—the Philcos and GE’s built in the fifties to last, and ancient gas stoves and furnaces. “Dirt,” he used to say. “Most machinery died because it was never cleaned.” Everyone who had hired him recalled that advice. Another feature some remembered was his smile, how welcoming, attractive, even. Otherwise he was fastidious, capable and, well, nice. The single other thing people remembered most about him was that he always traveledwith a cute little dog in his van, a terrier he called “Boy.” The police withheld what details they could but the families of the murdered boys could not be stopped or silenced. Nightmares about what might have been done to their children did not outweigh the facts. Six years of grief and unanswered questions coalesced around their recollections of time spent in the morgue, heaving, weeping, stone-faced or on their backs in helpless faints.
There was not much left of Adam when he was found, but the details of the more recent abductions were Gothic. Apparently the children were kept bound while molested,
Sesame Street
puppets, hoping that cheer, if worked at hard enough, could sugar the living and quiet the dead. Booker thoughttheir joking strained and their made-up problems both misguided and insulting. During the funeral and for a few days after, a visiting relative, an aunt they called Queen, was the exception to what Booker thought was mindless rote. She had a last name that no one remembered since she was rumored to have had many husbands—one a Mexican, then two white men, four black men, one Asian, but in a sequence no one recalled. Heavy-set with fire-red hair, she surprised the grieving family by traveling all the way from California to attend Adam’s funeral. She alone sensed her nephew’s anger-mixed sorrow and pulled him aside.
“Don’t let him go,” she said. “Not until he’s ready. Meantime, hang on to him tooth and claw. Adam will let you know when it’s time.”
She comforted him, strengthened him and validated the unfairness of the censure he was feeling from his family.
Wary of another crisis that might eliminate the soul-stretching music his father played, which Booker counted on to oil and straighten his tangled feelings, he asked his father if he could take trumpet lessons. Sure, said Mr. Starbern, provided his son earned half the teacher’s fee. Booker nagged his neighbors for chores and earned enough to skip the Saturday conferences for trumpet lessons that dampened his budding intolerance for his siblings. How could they pretend it was over? How could they forget and just go on? Who and where was the murderer?
His trumpet teacher, already slightly drunk early in the morning, was nevertheless an excellent musician and an even better instructor.
“You got the lungs, the fingers, now you need the lip. When you get all three together you can forget about them and let the music out.”
Which, with persistence, he did.
Six years later when Booker was fourteen and a faintly accomplished trumpet player, the nicest man in the world was caught, tried and convicted of SSS, the sexually stimulated slaughter of six boys, each of whose names, including Adam’s, was tattooed across the shoulders of the nicest man in the world. Boise. Lenny. Adam. Matthew. Kevin. Roland. Clearly an equal-opportunity killer, his victims seemed to be representative of the
We Are the World
video. The tattoo artist said he thought they were the names of his client’s children, not those of other people.
The nicest man in the world was an easygoing, retired auto mechanic who solicited home repairs. He was especially helpful with old refrigerators—the Philcos and GE’s built in the fifties to last, and ancient gas stoves and furnaces. “Dirt,” he used to say. “Most machinery died because it was never cleaned.” Everyone who had hired him recalled that advice. Another feature some remembered was his smile, how welcoming, attractive, even. Otherwise he was fastidious, capable and, well, nice. The single other thing people remembered most about him was that he always traveledwith a cute little dog in his van, a terrier he called “Boy.” The police withheld what details they could but the families of the murdered boys could not be stopped or silenced. Nightmares about what might have been done to their children did not outweigh the facts. Six years of grief and unanswered questions coalesced around their recollections of time spent in the morgue, heaving, weeping, stone-faced or on their backs in helpless faints.
There was not much left of Adam when he was found, but the details of the more recent abductions were Gothic. Apparently the children were kept bound while molested,
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