Stephanie Burgis - Magical Books for Ages Ten to Fifteen

When my maternal grandfather died, a few years ago, one of the ways I coped with grief was to write a story. It's a fantasy, like all my stories, and it's completely fictional - but I wrote it in memory of him and the strong bond he had with all his brothers, the first generation of their family to grow up in Youngstown, Ohio instead of in Croatia. Over the years, they found lots of different ways to make a living together, from forming a family band to owning a Burger King to running a nightclub (and playing the music for it themselves). They were a team in every possible way.

The story was originally published in Shimmer magazine back in 2009, but now I'd like to post it here, to share it with you guys for free. (ETA: It will also be republished in the anthology Bewere the Night, edited by Ekaterina Sedia.)

As I wrote the story, I listened to scratchy old recordings of my grandfather and his brothers playing 1940s jazz. "Blue Joe" was written in memory of Emil Bauman, Sr., and I'm posting it now in memory of him and also all of my Croatian-American great-uncles: Rudy, Joe, and Carl Bauman. I love and miss them all.

You can read the story behind the cut...

Blue Joe
By Stephanie Burgis

Josef Anton Miklovic, Blue Joe, was twenty-one years old and playing the sax in a nightclub in Youngstown, Ohio, when he met his father for the first time.

Joe was on stage with his family band: Karl on keyboard, hunched and intense; Niko on drums, grinning his lopsided, dreamer's grin; and Ivan, as smooth and polished as a Croatian Clark Gable, playing his shining trumpet like a peal up to heaven.

Smoke swirled across the tables, obscuring the waitresses in their Betty Boop outfits and the customers in their sharp suits, with dyed blondes on their arms. Ivan had hooked up with the son of a local mob boss to pull this job, and the rest of the brothers knew how lucky they were to get it. Ivan had big plans, and Joe was happy to go along with them.

Joe soared into his lead break, and at the end of it, as he emerged sweating and victorious, he met the fierce gaze of a hawk-nosed man at the back of the room, through all the smoke and the darkness. Time froze around them, and the music stopped.

"You don't look much like your mother," the man said as he crossed the room. He wore a long black coat from a different era, and it flapped around him like the wings of a crow.

Joe squinted through the smoke, watching the man sidestep frozen Betty Boops and customers' arms flung out in mid-gesture. Joe's brothers were as still as statues on the stage around him, and he thought he probably ought to be scared.

"Everyone always said I took after her," he said mildly.

"All they meant was, you don’t look like that lump she married." The man reached the stage and jumped up onto it as easily as if it were only an inch high, instead of four feet from the ground. "You take after me."

Joe looked the man up and down and knew it to be true. They shared the same crazy golden eyes, the same jet-black hair, though Joe's was slicked back into fashionable lines, and the same great, hooked nose, about which Joe's brothers had always teased him.

He turned to look at his brothers now, and the man before him shook his head.

"No. They're not mine. Your mother and I had parted ways by then. But I told her I'd come for you to raise you right, when I was ready."

"And you waited till now?" Joe laughed, despite the shock. "You left it a bit late, don't you think?"

"It took time to make my way over. Do you remember the journey you took?"

Joe shook his head. "I was only a baby when we came over to the States."

"Well, I took a longer route. It's harder to leave the old country, for some."

Some. Joe didn't know exactly what the  man meant, but he didn't care to ask, not with the rest of the nightclub frozen around them like stills in a newsreel. Whatever power this man had, it was obviously more than the local mob, and that was enough to scare anyone with sense.

"I'm here now," the man said, "and it's more than time. Your mother hid you too well." He fixed Joe in his hawk-like gaze. "Time to go."

"Hey, I'm not going anywhere." Joe stepped backward, crashing into Karl's keyboard. "I've got family."

"I'm your family."

"Uh-uh." Joe drew strength from his brothers' presence around him, even though they couldn't move. "I'm in a band. We're going places together. Might even break into Hollywood, if we're lucky."

His father snorted. "You're as stupid as your stepfather, if you really think that."

"I'm with my brothers," Joe said. "We're a team." He squared his jaw. "We can have a beer sometime and talk, if you like. But it's too late for you to act like a real father now."

"You'll change your mind," his father said. Anger flared deep and raw in his gaze. "I promise you. You'll change your mind."

Black, choking smoke erupted around him, making Joe tear up. He bent over, coughing...

And the music started up around him again, as if it had never stopped.

A black feather lay on the stage next to Joe's polished shoes.

Three days later, his draft papers arrived in the mail. Six days later, Joe shipped out to training camp, carrying his saxophone by his side but leaving his brothers behind.

#

Joe was on patrol in Germany the next time he saw his father. It was the middle of the night and he was alone on his shift when a great black wolf slunk out of the shadows and shifted into the shape of a man in a long black coat.

"Evening, Joe," his father said.

"Evening," Joe said, keeping his voice even. He kept walking as his father fell into step beside him. "Pleased with yourself?" he asked.

"Not really. It meant another long trip, and I don't care for travel."

"Maybe you should have thought of that before you got me drafted."

"You had to learn a lesson."

"If you mean you've got a nasty temper, I've learned that for sure."

"No," Joe's father said. He stopped walking and stared Joe in the eye as he intoned the words with a street preacher's intensity. "In the end, you're alone. You're always alone."

"Not tonight," Joe said. "Unfortunately."

He started walking again, leaving his father behind.

"You don't know what you're giving up," his father called after him. "I can take you away from all this, boy."

"Too late," Joe called back, without turning around.

His brothers had marched down together to the recruiting office the day Joe's draft papers had come through. That was his family, all over. Sure, Ivan had had big plans, but when it came down to it, they were a team.

They couldn't argue the Army into putting them all in the same unit, but they made a bargain. All of them had joined the army bands, and they saw it as good practice. As soon as the war ended, they'd be back on the road to Hollywood.

When Joe came back on his next rotation to the spot where he'd left his father behind, all he saw was a tuft of long black fur. He shook his head and let it lie forgotten on the ground.

#

Joe didn't see his father for the next three years, and he didn't miss the old man, either. He marched through days and nights of war, playing his sax for the unit, until the endless German rain rusted his beautiful instrument beyond repair. He played a shoddy borrowed replacement, provided by the army, to cheer the troops as they marched into towns filled with thousands of corpses lying piled on the ground, the aftermath of successful air raids. By nighttime, the corpses had been cleared from the streets with grim efficiency, but their faces filled Joe's dreams, to a soundtrack of the jazzy two-steps he played in the army band.

The day the keys of his second saxophone rusted over for good, Joe thought he'd tasted true despair. But he was wrong. That came later, when he got the telegrams.

Karl, who played keyboard with the intensity of a man possessed by angels, who'd dreamed nothing but music notes since he was a four-year-old kid, had had his left hand shot off in an accident in the Pacific. Looked like he wouldn't be playing in any band, in Hollywood or anywhere else.

And Ivan, slick, movie star-handsome Ivan with his great big dreams for the family, was dead, killed by a German sniper as he'd marched with his band.

If Joe's father had appeared to him then, Joe might well have killed him.

But his father didn't come.

Joe played a third saxophone, so harsh and squeaky it would have pained him to hear himself play if he'd ever bothered to listen. He was with the army unit that liberated two concentration camps, and the horrors sank deep into his skin and stayed there, like the hollow-eyed stares of the survivors.

The night his unit found out that the war was over, Joe saw his father for the third time.

There was a party in the camp, everyone celebrating with hectic gaiety. Booze flowed hard and fast, as if it could wash away the memories. Joe left after the first round of toasts.

He sat alone in the darkness, smoking one of the free cigars that had been passed around the party. A small black cat crept through the shadows to sit next to him. Joe eyed it warily and didn't reach out a hand to pet it. A moment later, he knew he'd been right, as the cat shifted into his father's shape.

"Well, Joe," his father said.

"Well," Joe said.

It was hard to tell for sure in the dark, but he thought his father looked older and more haggard since the last time they'd met. The black coat billowed out over a skinnier frame, though the golden eyes were just as fierce in the hollow face.

A year ago, Joe would have killed the man on first sight. Now he just kept on smoking, too numb to move or say any more. Faint light and the sound of voices filtered out from the mess hall nearby.

"My condolences," Joe's father said.

Joe stopped smoking and looked up sharply. He couldn't read an expression on his father's shadowed face.

"They wouldn't have been here if it weren't for you," he said.

"Who?" his father said.

They blinked at each other in mutual surprise. Then his father said,

"I was talking about your mother. She passed away two nights ago, in her sleep. I thought that you should know."

Joe took a deep breath. Then he kneaded his fingers over his forehead, closing his eyes against the lance of pain.

He wasn't completely numb yet, after all.

"She was a good woman," his father said, tentatively. "She did her best for you. By her standards."

Joe nodded. He couldn't speak.

"I was thinking," his father said. "I could take you back to see her, if you want."

Joe looked up. "You could do that?"

"I could," his father said. "She would have liked it."

"Did you—?"

"I was with her at the end," his father said. "She'd forgiven me, by then."

Joe tasted a story he'd never know, and let it go. "Fine," he said to his father. "Take me."

That was the night Joe found out what it meant to be his father's son.

They flew some way as crows at the beginning of the journey, but crows weren't fast or strong enough for an ocean crossing. They turned into smoke for part of that, then caught a lift on the wings of a military airplane.

Flying in the cold, thin altitudes, half disintegrated into smoke, Joe felt the wind blow through the pain. Pure, freezing numbness overcame him, and finally, he thought he understood what his father always felt.

Freedom. He could have flown forever, and never had to touch his pain or memories again.

At the end, well past midnight on a dark, cold Ohio night, they shifted back into human shape to jimmy open the window of the funeral home and crawl inside to the room where Joe's mother was laid out for viewing.

Joe touched her cold fingers and tried not to cry in front of his father.

"She was the prettiest girl in Kravarsko," his father said. "She wasn't afraid of anything or anyone. Not even me."

"She turned us into a team," Joe said. He looked down into his mother's face, calm beneath the layers of paint, and for the first time in over a year, he felt a clear point of resolution form underneath the brittle shell of numbness and the swirling, scattered layers of pain that had been hidden underneath. "She's the reason we all take care of each other."

"Well. That." His father cleared his throat. "I heard about your brothers and what happened. So. I guess there isn't going to be a band, after all. No more plans of Hollywood."

"Hollywood?" Joe almost laughed as he looked up from his mother to his father's fierce golden eyes. "You still don't get it, do you?"

"I didn't cause your brother's death," Joe's father said. "But it's been some time since then. I thought you might be ready to move on." He took a breath. "I thought you might be ready to come with me, now. Now that you know what it's like."

At that moment, Joe glimpsed something he'd never expected to see on his father's face. It was fear, pure and simple...and there was something else mixed in.

Loneliness.

Flying high above the ground, you could always feel free. Now that Joe had tasted that freedom, he felt the difference himself, standing thick and heavy on the ground, weighted down by human concerns, all the cares and sorrows that his father would never know.

But that wasn't enough.

"I'm sorry," Joe said, speaking to his father gently for the first time since they'd met. "It's too late for me now. It's not your fault. But I need to get back to my unit. I've got responsibilities."

"But—"

"There might not be a band," Joe said. "But my brothers and I are still a team." He hesitated and drew a breath, releasing the anger he'd carried with him for so long. "You could come and stay with us sometime. Anytime, really. I—"

Before he'd even stopped speaking, his father shook his head. The golden gaze shuttered, but not before Joe glimpsed the raw pain hidden behind the fierceness.

"Too late," his father said, and it sounded like the harsh cawing of a bird that knows it's lost all hope. "Too late."

#

Three of them came back from the war: Joe, without a saxophone, Karl, without a hand, and Niko, whose goofy lopsided grin had turned into a mask of sorrow. They gathered in their mother's house and huddled together, waiting for inspiration.

Ivan had always been the one with the big ideas. Ivan was gone. But the brothers were still a team.

Joe was cleaning out the attic one hot and dusty afternoon when he found his father's final message to him. Buried underneath the rubble of twenty years, he glimpsed the corner of a shining black leather case.

At first, he didn't know what it was. Then he lifted away the piles of old clothing that had covered it and saw its sleek rectangular lines, and his breath caught in his throat.

He undid the clasps and swung the case open.

A perfect, golden saxophone lay inside, gleaming and new.

Joe stared at it a long moment, caught between sharp, prickling emotions.

Finally, he reached out and picked up the saxophone. It fit perfectly into his hands.

As he lifted it out of the case, a black feather slipped out of the bell of the instrument and fluttered onto Joe's knee.

Joe let out a huff of breath that could have been either a laugh or a sob. A box of fresh reeds sat tucked in the case. He took one out and moistened it, even as tears blurred his vision. He fitted the mouthpiece onto the body of the sax and closed his eyes as he lifted it to his lips. He could already hear the wailing tune that wanted to be born.

Within a year, that tune would make his name in the nightclubs of Youngstown and Cleveland.

Five years from then, every jazz fan in the country would know the names of Blue Joe and his backup band—Niko on drums, grinning the loopy, lopsided, visionary grin of a man who's touched despair and been reborn into hope; and Karl, playing the keyboard like a demon with only one hand, worshipped by jazz fans everywhere for the uniqueness of his vision.

But at that moment, as Joe accepted his father's gift, he only knew one thing:

Maybe it wasn't too late after all.

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