Jazz Heaven
The nightmare always started with the exact same shade of bruised, unapologetic purple.
In the dream, the sky wasn’t just dark; it was hemorrhaging. A siren, shrill and jagged as a rusty razor, sliced through the humid air of a nameless, crumbling ghetto. I was running, my boots slapping against slick cobblestones, lungs burning with the metallic tang of ozone and old, fermented regrets.
“Why run?” I asked myself, even as my legs pumped like the pistons of a 19th-century Mississippi River steamship churning through the muddy waters of my own subconscious. “Where’s the finish line in a world that’s folding in on itself like a cheap accordion?”
The buildings were screaming. Flames licked out of smashed windows—angry, orange tongues tasting the soot-heavy night. I skidded to a halt, my chest heaving like a bellows, and there he was: an old man in a raincoat that had seen better decades, leaning casually against a crumbling brick wall. He was sipping whiskey with the nonchalance of a man watching a lazy sunset rather than the fiery apocalypse.
He looked at me, his eyes two burning coals that seemed to read the ledger of my sins. He held out the bottle. “Thirsty, kid? The abyss is a long drop. Might as well go down hydrated.”
I reached for the bottle, and the ground gave way—
I bolted upright, gasping for air, tangled in sweat-dampened sheets. The siren was still there, but it was fading, a distant mechanical howl mourning the streets of urban America. As the silence rushed back in, it was immediately filled by something vastly superior. From the corner of the bedroom, the cool, liquid gold of a jazz trumpet began to flow from the record player.
It was Miles. It was always Miles when the soul needed stitches.
I let my head fall back against the pillow, the panic subsiding as the heavy, sweet scent of jasmine and warm skin filled my nostrils. I wasn’t falling into an abyss. I was in a creaky, beautiful old house in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and there was a heavy, intoxicating weight draped across my chest.
“Morning, hero,” a voice purred, thick with sleep and mischief.
I looked down. Maggie was peering up at me through a tangled shock of fire-red hair, her deep, terrifyingly beautiful ocean-blue eyes sparkling in the dim morning light. She had a tiny, perfect mole just above her lip, and right now, that lip was curled into a wicked smile.
“You were kicking like a mule again, John,” she murmured, tracing a lazy circle on my bare stomach with one fingernail. “Dreaming of the end of the world, or just regretting moving in with a girl who steals all the blankets?”
“I don’t need blankets when I’m sleeping next to a space heater,” I said, my voice thick with sleep. “And for the record, it was the apocalypse. But waking up to you makes the end of the world seem entirely manageable.”
Maggie let out a low, musical giggle, shifting her weight so she was straddling my hips. The sheets fell away, and for a moment, the world outside the bedroom simply ceased to exist. “You’re a silver-tongued devil, John Hindle,” she whispered, leaning down so her lips were a breath away from mine. “But I know the real you. Beneath all that brooding poetry, you’re just a soft touch who picks up stray girls off the side of the highway.”
I grinned, brushing a stray lock of red hair behind her ear. “Hey now. You weren’t just any stray. You were a very loud, very angry stray kicking a suitcase on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.”
“Rural Louisiana is a nightmare in high heels, I’ll have you know,” she shot back, her eyes dancing. “My ex-boyfriend—may he rot in a swamp—kicking me out of the house was the best thing that ever happened to me. But standing out there with the mosquitoes treating me like a buffet? Not my finest hour.”
“You looked like a feral cat ready to claw the eyes out of the next passing motorist,” I teased. “When I pulled the Chevy over, I wasn’t sure if I was offering a ride or volunteering as a human sacrifice.”
“Oh, please,” Maggie scoffed, leaning her weight against my chest. “You took one look at these legs and decided playing Sir Galahad was worth the risk. And look where it got you. Living in sin in my fabulous French Quarter house, sleeping until noon, and putting up with my insatiable demands.”
“It’s a tough gig, but I’m a dedicated man,” I laughed, finally capturing her lips for a slow, deep kiss.
We had been living together for a month now. From the moment she threw her battered suitcase into the backseat of my car on that desolate stretch of highway, the gravity between us had been undeniable. We were two atoms that had collided and decided to fuse, taking up residence in the rambling, bohemian sanctuary of her family’s old house in the Quarter.
“As much as I’d love to stay here and be corrupted by you all morning,” I said, gently easing her off me and swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, “I’ve got to go see a man about a job. My funds are looking a little tragic, and a man can’t live on jazz and your good graces forever.”
Maggie pouted, wrapping the sheet around her like a Roman toga. “You’re no fun. But fine. Go see my father. He’s been threatening to put you to work anyway.”
I splashed tepid water over my face at the sink, looking at the weary eyes of a man who’d seen a lot of miles but finally found a place to park. “Your old man terrifies me, Mags. He looks like he was carved out of driftwood by an angry god.”
“Daddy’s just a big, loud teddy bear,” she said, stepping into a pair of floral panties with a casual grace that made my head spin all over again. “Just don’t mention the fact that we’re completely naked under this roof every night. He’s a strict Catholic, you know. He thinks we’re living in squalor and sin.”
“Oh, I’m well aware,” I muttered, grabbing my jacket. “I’ll be on my best behavior.”
I stepped out into the New Orleans humidity. The houses leaned toward each other like gossiping old crones, the wrought-iron balconies dripping with ferns and secrets. I caught a ride with a guy in a beat-up pickup who smelled like cigars and engine grease, and before the clock struck two, I was standing on Bourbon Street.
It was a beautiful, neon-lit catastrophe. A junkie’s paradise, sure, but for a traveler whose map had been rained on one too many times, it was the Promised Land. I stopped in front of a jagged neon sign that buzzed like a hornet: JAZZ HEAVEN.
“This’ll do,” I said to the sidewalk.
Inside, the air was a thick soup of Turkish tobacco and cheap gin. On a tiny stage, a saxophonist in a silver-sequined suit was playing notes so blue they felt like physical bruises. Every time he moved, he sparkled like a spilled glass of Moët.
I hit the bar. “Tequila,” I told the bartender. “The kind that makes you forget your middle name.”
I had the drink in my hand when a heavy shadow fell over me. It was Alistaire. Haggard, grizzled, and chewing on an unlit cigar like it had personally insulted him.
“John,” he growled, his voice a gravelly rumble that could shake the foundation of a church. “You look like you’ve got a back strong enough to carry a heavy secret. Or at least a drunk tourist. Drinks on the house. Let’s talk about your future.”
I leaned back, swirling my tequila. “My future usually involves Maggie keeping me on my toes, but for a free drink, I’m an optimist. Talk away, Alistaire.”
“I need a bouncer,” he said, leaning over the mahogany bar. “This is my joint. You look like you can handle yourself without breaking too much of the furniture. And Lord knows you need the cash if you’re going to keep shacking up with my daughter in that house of hers.”
“I’ve got a policy against breaking things I don’t own,” I said smoothly. “And Maggie and I are doing just fine.”
He narrowed his eyes, pointing a thick, calloused finger at my chest. “Son, I don’t take kindly to my daughter living in sin. It ain’t right. It ain’t Christian. She’s been through the ringer with that last fool who kicked her out. If I find out you’re just using her for a free bed and a good time…”
“I love her, Alistaire,” I said firmly, and to my own surprise, the words rang with absolute truth.
He grunted, showing a gold tooth. “Good. Then make an honest woman out of her before the good Lord strikes you both with lightning. Until then, you start sweeping the floors and tossing out the drunks at eight o’clock.”
The rest of the week blurred into a sepia-toned montage of sweeping floors, hauling kegs, and spending my afternoons with Maggie. We’d escape to a hidden courtyard off Royal Street, a place with a crumbling stone fountain, a dancing banana plant, and enough daiquiris to sink a battleship.
“You know,” Maggie said one afternoon, dangling her bare feet in the cool fountain water, her dress hiked up to her thighs. “I don’t believe in commitment. It’s against human nature. We’re all just atoms bumping into each other in the void.”
“Is that so?” I asked, leaning back against the sun-warmed stone, admiring the curve of her neck. “Because your dad seems to think we’re atoms that are going straight to hell if we don’t get matching gold rings.”
She gave me a wide, mischievous grin. “Daddy’s old school. But we make our own rules, John. When the music stops being fun, we change the record. Right now, though?” She splashed a handful of water onto my chest. “The music is playing just fine.”
I pulled her into my lap, the cold water soaking through my shirt. “You are a menace, Maggie.”
“And you love it,” she purred, biting my earlobe. “Now take me home and prove it.”
It was the perfect arrangement, right up until the night the “goblins” showed up at Jazz Heaven.
It was late, the air thick with sweat and brassy music. Two guys, built like brick outhouses and covered in tattoos of bleeding hearts and barbed wire, burst through the double doors. They didn’t want jazz; they wanted trouble. They swaggered up to the bar, and when Maggie came out from the back room carrying a tray of glasses, they honed in on her like wolves.
One of them reached out, pawing at her dress, his greasy hand wrapping around her wrist. Maggie let out a sharp cry, the glasses shattering on the floor.
Alistaire was in the back. I didn’t think; I just grabbed a wooden pool stick from the rack and stepped between them, the adrenaline spiking my blood with ice.
“Gentlemen,” I said, trying to sound more confident than a man holding a stick against two mountains of muscle had any right to be. “The lady isn’t on the menu. Let her go, and walk out the door.”
One of the thugs looked at me, let out a booming laugh, and snatched the pool stick right out of my hands. He snapped it over his knee like a dry twig. Then he grabbed me by the throat, his grip like an iron vise, and slammed me against the exposed brick wall. My vision went white at the edges.
“You were saying, hero?” he sneered, his breath reeking of stale beer and chewing tobacco.
Maggie didn’t hesitate. She jumped on his back, scratching and biting like a wildcat, her red hair flying. But the other thug just stepped up and tossed her aside like a rag doll. She hit a heavy oak table with a sickening thud.
The red haze of fury blinded me, but before I could throw a punch, a thunderclap echoed through the room, deafening and absolute.
Silence slammed down on the bar.
Alistaire was standing at the edge of the stage, his eyes blazing with righteous, Old Testament fury. In his hand was a snub-nosed .38 revolver, a thin wisp of smoke curling gracefully from a fresh hole in the ceiling.
“Next one goes in your kneecap,” he growled, the safety clicking loudly in the quiet room. “And the one after that goes somewhere you’ll miss a whole lot more.”
The thugs didn’t wait for a second invitation. They dropped me, stumbled over each other, and scrambled out into the sticky New Orleans night, the doors swinging wildly behind them.
I coughed, rubbing my bruised throat, and rushed over to Maggie. She was shaken, trembling slightly, but otherwise unhurt. Alistaire lowered the gun, his chest heaving. He looked at me, then at his daughter.
“Take her home, John,” he said quietly, the anger draining out of him, leaving only a weary old man. “Just get her out of here and lock the doors.”
I walked her back through the foggy, twisting alleys of the Quarter. The adrenaline was slowly leaving my system, replaced by a deep, aching exhaustion and the throbbing in my neck. When we finally reached her bedroom, she collapsed onto the bed, her eyes wide and wet, staring at the ceiling.
I went to the kitchen, found a bottle of cheap, biting whiskey we kept under the sink, and took a long, burning pull straight from the neck. It tasted like fire and bad decisions, but it dulled the ache in my throat. I walked back into the bedroom, the bottle dangling loosely in my hand.
“You okay, Mags?” I asked, sitting heavily on the edge of the mattress.
She stretched out like a sleek cat, her form beautifully outlined through the slightly torn fabric of her dress. Her eyes found mine, the fear already replaced by something darker, hotter. “I’m better now,” she whispered. “You were a real hero tonight, John. Even if you did get your stick broken in half.”
“I got my ass handed to me,” I corrected, taking another pull of the whiskey. “Your dad was the hero.”
She sat up, sliding closer to me, her body radiating heat. “You stepped in front of a giant for me. That counts.” She winked, a flash of the old, mischievous Maggie returning in full force. “You deserve a reward for chivalry.”
She reached out, her fingers deftly undoing the top button of my shirt, her touch electric against my skin.
“Mags,” I sighed, gently catching her wrist. “I’m beat. My neck feels like it was put in a trash compactor, and this whiskey has my blood running like thick molasses. I don’t think I’m up to the task tonight. Give me a rain check?”
She pouted, her lower lip pushing out in a way that was entirely unfair. “A rain check? John, look at me.”
I looked. It was impossible not to. She was kneeling on the bed now, reaching around to unzip her dress, letting it fall away to pool around her waist. She was bathed in the warm, sepia glow of the bedside lamp, looking like a painting that belonged in a museum of beautiful, dangerous things.
“The day we met,” Maggie said softly, her voice dropping an octave, rich and velvety. “I was standing on the side of that highway, feeling like the whole world had chewed me up and spit me out into the dirt. And then you pulled over. You didn’t know me. You just saw someone who needed saving. You were my hero that day, John.”
She crawled closer, her bare skin practically glowing in the dim light, and pressed her chest against mine.
She took the whiskey bottle from my hand and set it on the nightstand.
“Don’t let a little amber liquid and a bruised ego come between us tonight,” she whispered, her hands tracing the muscles of my chest, her breath hot against my neck. “I need you. I’ve got a craving, John, and you’re the only one who can satisfy it. Be a man. Be my hero again.”
I looked into those terrifyingly beautiful ocean-blue eyes. The whiskey in my veins was no match for the intoxicating pull of her gravity. Resistance wasn’t just futile; it was a ridiculous concept entirely.
“A craving, huh?” I murmured, a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth despite the ache in my throat.
“A wicked one,” she confirmed, pulling my face down to hers.
I happily, willingly, and completely succumbed to her womanly wiles. The rest of the night was a blurred, passionate frenzy of tangled limbs, whispered promises, and the desperate, beautiful collision of two atoms that had found exactly where they belonged.
We slept heavily, exhausted and entwined, completely oblivious to the world.
Which is why we didn’t hear the front door open the next morning.
The first rays of the sun were just beginning to crawl across the wooden floorboards when the bedroom door flew open with the force of a hurricane.
Alistaire stood framed in the doorway, a key dangling from his thick fingers, his eyes wide behind his glasses. He took in the scene: the clothes strewn across the floor, the empty whiskey bottle, and the two of us, completely, undeniably in the nude, tangled up in the sheets.
Maggie shrieked, pulling the blanket up to her chin. I bolted upright, scrambling for a pillow, a pair of pants, anything.
“Lord Almighty!” Alistaire roared, his face turning a shade of purple that matched my nightmares. “Mother Mary and Joseph!”
“Daddy! Get out!” Maggie yelled, her face flushed red.
“I will not get out of my own family’s house!” he bellowed, throwing his hands up to the heavens. “I knew it! I knew it in my bones! Living in sin under this roof! Defiling the sanctity of a Christian home!”
“Alistaire—listen to me for a second!” I shouted, desperately wrestling my legs into a discarded pair of denim trousers while hopping on one foot.
“Listen to what? The sounds of eternal damnation?” Alistaire thundered, pointing a trembling, meaty finger at my chest. “I ought to fetch the shotgun from my truck!”
“Alistaire, I swear to you,” I said, finally planting both feet on the floor and holding my hands up in surrender. I looked at the furious old bar owner, then down at Maggie, who was clutching the tangled sheets like a lifeline. Suddenly, the whiskey-soaked panic vanished, replaced by a crystalline, undeniable clarity. I stood up straight. “I promise you, Alistaire, I’m going to marry her. We are going to stop living in sin. I’m making an honest woman out of her.”
Before Alistaire could even process the weight of the words, Maggie dropped the sheet just enough to free her arms, her face lighting up like a Roman candle in the dim room.
“John, are you proposing to me, John?” she gasped, a genuine, blinding smile breaking across her face. She didn’t even wait for me to nod. “Oh, John, marry me! I accept. We’ll say ‘I do’ and do it right, darling.”
The righteous, Old Testament fury drained out of Alistaire so fast he actually swayed on his feet. The apocalyptic purple faded from his weathered cheeks, slowly replaced by a stunned, and then profoundly satisfied, grin. He adjusted his thick glasses, looking between the two of us.
He let out a heavy sigh that sounded like a tractor engine powering down. “It is about time,” he grumbled, the harsh edge completely gone from his gravelly voice. He pointed toward the door. “Now put on some clothes. And John, you do my daughter right now. Don’t you dare get cold feet.”
With a final, stern nod that felt more like a blessing than a threat, Alistaire turned on his heel and pulled the heavy wooden door shut behind him, leaving us in the sudden, echoing quiet of the sunlit room.
I looked down at Maggie. She let the sheet fall away completely, her terrifyingly beautiful ocean-blue eyes sparkling with the kind of brilliant mischief that could start a war or build a dynasty. The nightmare of the burning city and the screaming sirens felt like it belonged to another lifetime entirely. Here, in the golden, humid light of the French Quarter, my wandering was over. My future was sealed, and looking at the fiery redhead pulling me back down into the bed, I knew I wouldn’t have traded it for all the jazz in New Orleans.
