Time Travel Omnibus, page 606
“WILLIE’S BLUES”
Robert J. Tilley
Thursday, September 17th, 1936
Room 24, Taylor House Hotel,
Florence, South Carolina
The drive here gave me my first real chance to see rural America, 1936 style. Incredibly restful, almost too much so. I found myself dozing at the wheel a couple of times, a highly dangerous thing to do. The car has behaved itself pretty well, but I still can’t get used to actually having to steer the damn thing myself.
Florence is nothing special, what I’ve seen of it so far; could be any small town. The Freemont hall where they’re playing tonight is right down the street from here, half a block away on the other side. They’ve got posters outside, confirming the date I got from the booking agency, so at least I’ll be spared hanging around here any longer than I have to.
Not much traffic down there at the moment, certainly no band buses in sight, so it looks as though they’re still on their way from Portland.
Come on, Willie baby.
Friday, September 18th, 1936
Room 24, Taylor House Hotel,
Florence, South Carolina
It’s a little after 2:00 a.m., and I’ve just finished re-writing history.
I still can’t grasp it. I thought I was coming here to plug the gaps in our own records, but instead I’ve been finding out just what they mean at the transfer center when they talk about the past, present and future being interlinked in ways that we haven’t even begun to understand yet.
I feel drunk. I suppose the whisky has something to do with it, but it’s more emotional than alcoholic. To find out that you’re a part of something like this, a real part—
Good God. Can it really mean that without my intervention he would have spent the rest of his life skulking around in musical vacuums like Curry’s crowd? Surely it couldn’t be! A talent like that would be bound to get kicked out into the open by something. It just isn’t—
But—what else could have done it?
I must get this down in detail now, before I go to bed. I might have lost some of it by morning if I don’t. Hell, my head feels as if it’s one ambition is to float up and nestle against the ceiling. I shouldn’t think my chances of getting hold of any coffee are very bright, either. This place is like the rest of the town, lights out by one o’clock at the very latest. Better try walking around. I only hope the fellow underneath is asleep by now—and that he sleeps heavy.
First impressions. A small man who looks like an apologetic version of his photographs, playing in a pretty bad band. The acoustics were abominable, but even so it was possible to tell that the records made at the time hadn’t lied. The whole thing was a scrappy echo of what the Curry band of five or six years earlier had done so well, and the crowd knew it, too. This is only a medium-sized country town, but even a semirural bunch like that listen to the radio and know the difference. They applauded, but it was more good manners than enthusiasm.
He took no solos. All the tenor breaks were handled by Claude Perry, playing a thin pastiche of what Joe Pitman was doing with them before he went off to make it on his own. And Turnhill just sat there, blowing when the sheets told him to; a musician doing a job. I really wanted to scream. The whole thing was insane, with something uniquely unreal about it; ghosts, mimicking echoes from a glorious past, with the only real talent there confined the section work. Ludicrous. I’d been running the machine, but I didn’t waste thread when it became obvious that Turnhill wasn’t going to be given any space at all.
It finished just after twelve and I went outside with the rest of the crowd, fetched the car, and parked it across from the front of the hall. It was raining, something that I thought of at the time as a lucky break, but I see it a little differently now, of course. It was an ingredient, in exactly the same way that I was; a scheduled event that could no more have failed to happen than I could have prevented myself from being here right now, talking into this microphone.
Anyway, he came out on his own, the last one to leave. The rest of them had already beat it to different parts of town, towing local girls with them. He was wary when I hailed him and offered him a lift, but he didn’t have a topcoat and it was raining pretty steadily by then. He got in the back, gave me directions, and off we went.
To put him at his ease, I went straight into my electronics engineer/jazz buff from Baltimore routine; how I’d been passing through town when I’d seen the posters advertising Jerome Curry and his Famous Band, and decided to stay over for the night, and so on. I went on to say that I heard him once or twice with Benny Case when I’d been in Michigan a couple of years before, and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t getting any solo space with Curry.
He said his style hadn’t fitted in too well, and I didn’t find that too hard to believe. Curry had been good about it, though, he said, keeping him on the while he worked on his tone. He’d bought a new mouthpiece to help him thicken it up a little, the way they’d specified he should.
I felt an uncomfortable prickling around the scalp at that point, the first hint that things weren’t as I’d expected them to be. The statement itself was bad enough, of course, but what really worried me was the offhand way that it was delivered. Here was the man who was going to have more influence on the distilling of the music than anybody else in its entire history, placidly telling me that he was in the process of mutilating the most sublime instrumental tone I ever heard, and talking about it in the same way that he might have discussed wearing a different kind of hat.
The conversation died completely for maybe half a minute while I digested this, or tried to, and then I asked him what his plans were, whether he intended sticking with Curry or perhaps trying his luck in surroundings that might offer him a little more scope.
I’d expected at least a glimmer of discontent in his answer, some small hint of restiveness, but again, nothing, and this time my hair really rose. He made some vague remark about New York, a new co-operative band, but it was obviously a straight lie, prompted by what was left of his vanity. He didn’t really want to try his luck in New York, or anywhere else. It was impossible to imagine a more ludicrous candidate for revolution, but there he was; a man who honestly seemed to think that he’d found his slot and was staying in it as long as he could, thickening up his tone the way they’d told him to and glad of the chance to commit such a crime.
We reached where he was staying, and I stopped the car, wondering what the hell was going on. Although I still had no inkling that I was in any way essential to the pattern of events, I did have the feeling at that point that to let him go without trying to work on him in some way, soften him up a little, would be a mistake. So, on the spur of the moment, as he was getting out of the car, I asked him if he’d like to come on over here for a drink.
He didn’t dither too much this time. I’d more or less established my credentials by then, and the place he was booked into was a drab, unwelcoming hole. He said thanks, sat down again, and we headed back into town.
His relief at my invitation had been pretty obvious, and I began to get a bit more of the picture. He was twenty-six years old, a professional musician for ten of these, but despite that he was still a small-town boy from Oklahoma, still painfully shy, and the fact that his head had gradually filled with ideas and sounds like nobody else’s had proved to be no asset in his present employment. It must have been an almost traumatic experience in some ways, after painfully building himself a minor reputation in territory bands; the chance of playing with a name band on the skids when Curry found himself stuck for a tenor in midtour, the reactions of the older, relatively established musicians, gradually corroding what little confidence he’d ever had, until finally this; a small, confused, tired man, gratefully snapping up the stale crumbs that they threw his way.
It was murder, pure and simple. But somewhere along the way I knew that he was going to hear the Sam Lacey band, and that was to be the turning point. I sweated with relief when I remembered that, knowing it for a solid fact that had been entered in the history books a long, long time before I was even born, something that, no matter what was said and done prior to the event, had actually happened.
Feeling better, I asked him if he’d heard the Lacey band, and he said he hadn’t. He’d met Lacey, though, had gigged with him a few times around Scranton, but he didn’t know anything about him getting his own group together.
It was right then when it hit me, and I still don’t really know why. It was as though I’d turned a page in an until then comprehensible story and suddenly found myself looking at the key to the whole thing, the piece of the puzzle around which everything else fitted and without which none of what was happening right then would have made any sense at all; my actual trip back to this time, the two days in Kansas City, when I’d visited the Blackjack Club, our meeting that evening, my choice of “profession”; all of them slipping smoothly into place and making beautiful sense, without a seam showing anywhere.
What had happened up until then had shaken me, but this was something else again. It frightened me then and it frightens me now, because it’s confirmed a suspicion that I’ve had all my life and which I’ve deliberately avoided thinking about too much, for the simple reason that I didn’t want to run the risk of convincing myself that it really was so. But it’s happened, and there’s no going back. In short, what it means is that free will is just an expression, a myth founded on vanity and wishful thinking; that every single mote in the universe is committed to exist in time and space only according to the specification.
The interaction of time that they talked about at the transfer center is even more of an involved fact than they perhaps dream, and my mind is still blundering along after the concept, unable to get more than an occasional and all too brief grip on it. Dear Jesus—every step that I take around this room, every movement that I’ve ever made, every syllable that I’m saying right now; all of it indelibly printed on the circuit’, each inflection a response that it’s impossible to break or even bend, just a little.
Where did I get to? Fetched him back here, right. I sat him down and poured drinks and gradually got him to open up about himself, prompting him every time he started to slow down and crawl back into his shell. It’s on thread, and it’ll make an interesting exercise in sifting fact from fiction when I get around to working on it. He was a pretty pathetic character in a lot of ways at that point, but I can’t honestly say that I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for him. After all, how do you feel pity for a god that you know is standing on the threshold of his kingdom? If he’d been given the choice, I don’t think he would have hesitated for a minute in choosing the way that he was destined to go, and I doubt that there are many people who would really want to trade long-lived anonymity for that kind of glory, however brief.
We drank and talked for about half an hour, and then I went over to my suitcase and fooled around, making it look as though I had the recorder in there instead of my jacket pocket. I dug out the thread with the Lacey band on it, changed it with the one I’d been using during the evening, and then showed it to him. I told him it was something I’d been working on for a while, an experimental model, but I hadn’t been able to iron out a few bugs just yet so that it would be marketable. I stuck it between us on the carpet, switched on, and then sat back, confidently waiting for the big awakening.
It didn’t take long for it to dawn on me that his reactions were hardly those of a man who was at long last seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I hadn’t expected him to leap to his feet shouting “Eureka!” anything like that, but all I was getting was guarded approval, completely. in character with what had gone before. He drank and tapped his foot, and every so often he would smile a little and say that this or that was OK. He did criticize the tenor player—he said he thought he was a little busy for that kind of outfit—but even this came out as a kind of apology, as though he thought I might bounce back at him for_having the nerve to put down somebody that I personally might think was pretty good.
Again, I couldn’t believe it. I sat there, staring at him, my piece of history shriveling like a deceptively bulging paper bag that had been holding nothing but air after all. The situation had degenerated into pure nightmare this time. There might have been the faintest shadow of wistfulness somewhere in his eyes, but it didn’t disturb the other things that I saw there. He was still small, still frightened; too smart to take any real notice of siren songs like the one he was hearing then, too battered by experience to consider venturing from his small corner to add his own voice to it.
After a while, there was a knock on the door. It was the manager, asking me to cut the noise down in response to a complaint from the room underneath. I apologized, and when he’d gone I switched off the machine and sat down again, feeling like the biggest damn fool in all creation.
It seemed to be a total impasse. I thought that I’d stumbled across the real facts as opposed to the inevitable distortions of historic records, but now it looked as though I’d simply jumped to the wrong conclusions, probably steered there by some childishly vain part of my subconscious. But the records had been wrong, anyway. He’d heard Lacey now, and if he was all fired up to race off to Kansas City, he certainly had me fooled. It’s always been common belief, supposedly backed by his own testimony, that he’d heard the band on the radio and straightaway wired them, offering Lacey his services. But the moment of encounter had come and gone, and he was still the same vaguely shifty nonentity that he’d been before; liking what he’d heard, that had been obvious enough, but showing not the slightest sign that he’d been stirred sufficiently to even consider leaving Curry of his own volition.
He hadn’t been fired, that was pretty certain. There’s an interview that Curry gave to Downbeat magazine in the nineteen-forties, where he confirmed that Turnhill had walked out on the band during a tour, this tour. So something had yanked him up out of his rut and set him running, but whatever it was it wasn’t Lacey’s music. There was another ingredient that hadn’t shown itself yet, lurking somewhere just along the way; something so potent that it had reached right down through the fear and shattered confidence and ignited what was buried somewhere there underneath it all. And then I got it, my second and conclusive flash of realization, and my immediate reaction was “My God, I can’t possibly do it.”
The reason for this was simple enough. I’ve broken a cardinal rule laid down by the transfer people, and at that moment the fear of possible resulting restrictions being placed on the rest of my program if it was found out was all that concerned me. But gradually I began to get it in proportion, because it was obvious that this was going to be the only possible way to stir him from the awful apathy that was pinning him down. And again, I saw that this was further evidence that the transfer people still don’t really appreciate what they’re tampering with. The rule itself is clear and on the face of it perfectly reasonable and logical, but only because the workings of time still aren’t understood and probably never will be completely. When they say that apart from essential equipment absolutely nothing originating further along the time-line must be taken back, their reasoning is just plain wrong. The rule is pointless, because any such action and its results have already happened. The pattern is set, and if some lunatic, in a misguided attempt to benefit humanity long before it’s due, is going to bring back the formula for curing cancer a hundred years before it’s found, then it’s simply not going to work. It couldn’t. Something would be bound to stop it, even if the ingredients for periducium were available now, which I guess they are; lab equipment that hasn’t been invented yet, or maybe something even more obvious. But whatever it was, the line would break down somehow, because everything has its place in the sequence, and there it stays.
