Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans by Rosalyn Story Page A

clean, and marked by a sartorial elegance he associated with success. Tassled loafers handcrafted in Italy. Hand tailored shirts from London, and gig suits designed by Hugo Boss. His people marketed him a “young lion of jazz”—accessible, with a nouveau-bop edge that straddled a graceful line between the mercurial tastes of the young and the older jazz purists. He made more money than he had time to spend, and women clung to him like lint to coarse black wool. Once he became well known in top music circles—when the word went out that another new hotshot was up from New Orleans—he was the curiosity everyone wanted to hear.
    His life was exactly the way he wanted it to be—every day, another dream.
    Until the accident.
    He stood up from the bench. He could have sworn he heard a sound—like a ship’s foghorn—coming from the river. But maybe not, maybe it was just in his head. Whatever, the music of the sound—a low, husky B-flat—was enough to make him unpack his horn.
    The metal mouthpiece was a cold shock to his lips, as always when he hadn’t played for a while. The valves were stiff; he drummed his fingers, miming a quick scale. His lips and fingertips had grown tender and uncallused since the surgery. He started blowing a flood of hot air through the horn.
    A small sharp burn swelled in his jaw, then went away. He touched his hand to the spot and held it there. He waited, then tried again.
    A scale stumbled out—his tone cracking horribly, notes splitting like dry wood. But in a moment, through a dull film of pain, clean notes streamed into the thick night air.
    The doctor said the soreness would go away and the nerve endings would take a while to heal. Didn’t make sense to press his luck. But after a minute, he put the horn back up to his lips and played again.
    The moon, arced higher now, its silver reflection casting longer tendrils of light on the surface of the river, bathed everything in deep purple and strands of muted light. A tune surfaced from somewhere beneath his jumble of thoughts, low and lazy like a whisper of sea-fog, a blues drenched in flood water and rising like mist from a childhood summer night. He felt lightheaded. He was a little kid again, playing street tag, double-dog-dare, stickball. And like most of the kids he knew, he felt safe, like nothing bad would ever happen in his life.
    No thoughts of his city sinking in on itself, or simply washing away.
    Standing by the river in the dark, he realized he’d thought little about the city itself, about what all this meant. This was his home, the place where he’d been born and grew up, where his roots stretched so deep into the sandy soil that their beginnings seemed to have no end. Now, it was unfit for human life. He closed his eyes and his tears burned and in the shadow of the song a rhythm section grooved in the breezeless night—wire brushes soup-stirring watercolor patches of blue—while the sodden soil of home grew soft beneath his feet.
    Tomorrow he would go to Silver Creek to find his father and bring him…home, whatever that meant now. If he was there.
    If he was there.
    As he lifted the horn high and played out over the big, silent river, he wondered if anybody out there in the endless dark was listening, if maybe he could play so loud that Simon, wherever he was, could hear him. From nowhere, the legendary musician Buddy Bolden sprang to mind, the golden brass god blowing the city’s first song, a sound so big it soared across time to split the air where he stood now.
    When he was small and his friends’ fathers spooked them with stories of ghosts and dragons, Simon had made up tales to get Julian to practice. He told stories about the mythic cornet player who blew way back when the city was young, when jazz crawled up from cradle-high to paddle upriver to the world. He was a genius, the best anybody ever heard. A horn player who blew so loud that clouds trembled and birds’ wings stuttered in flight. Handsome,