...

 

THE PIANO PLAYER

At the Saucy Puss, one day, the piano player was tinkling the keys with a jaunty tune. The Madam smiled to see that the show was going on as planned and practiced. The showgirls kicked their legs high showing off their stockings and their bloomers, and the drunks in the audience applauded, cheered, whistled and, most importantly… ordered more and more drinks.
“Now,” the Madam said to her waiter, who was cleaning a glass while standing next to her, “watch the maestro work his magic. You can have girls but you must have a little bit of humor too.”
“Listen up y’all,” the Piano player called. The girls ran over to the side of the stage where his keyboard sat.
“What is it professor?” the girls asked.
“Why it’s a piano,” he said back, “but I need to tell you a story I heard once, maybe it was in this town, maybe it was in a town down the road.”
“And what story is that?” asked one of the girls, herhands rising to her face as she made an ‘O' shape with her open mouth. She kicked her left heel backwards as she made this pose, holding it for exaggerated effect.
“Well,” the pianist said as his fingers strode up and down the keys, “there was this woman who’d been a widow three times over, and now her fourth husband was deceased.”
“Oh no!” shouted the girls, all miming sobbing and sorrow at this newly announced death. “What did she do?”
“Well, she followed the bier into the church and sat down in her prominent place in the front row. And even though she had cried the proper amount for each of her previous husbands, this time she seemed she couldn’t calm down. She cried and cried and cried.”
In the background of the stage two of the girls twirled like ballerinas, holding a blue cloth between them. Each held up and end to her eyes so that as they merged their dance together they seemed to represent the tears of the woman in the maestro’s story. He continued:
“She cried so much everyone deemed it disruptive to the funeral. Can you imagine wailing so much at the funeral of your husband that you had to be removed from it? Well, this woman nearly was, you know? Her friends whispered in her ear, tried to console her, tried to calm her down.
“Finally one friend said to her ‘why you must have really loved this man, you’re taking his death so hard.’
“Then the widow looked at her friend. She shook her head and said ‘No, it’s not that.”
One of the showgirls shouted from the back, exaggerated cupped hands and all, “Well, then what was it? What did the woman say made her so sad?”
“Well,” the Piano player said, pausing her for a moment. He let a giant, full chord full of bass ring out through the tavern. Then he let his fingers dance over each other in an intricate pattern of melody before pausing again and answering the question.
“Well, the old woman said it weren’t so much losing the husband, that she’d done before.She said ‘I wasn’t so bad at losing a husband, I done that before, always had the next beau lined up. I used to have dates for these funerals! It’s just that I’ve grown so old I don’t yet know who my next husband will be! If I have the time and god let the creek rise.”
With that he played another jaunty melody across the keyboard, slammed the piano shut, bowed, then opened it again. He cracked his fingers, left hand and then right hand, as the working women all mimed laughing at his joke. In a moment the music began again and all the occupants of the Saucy Puss turned to their booze, their dancing, their piano playing, even their poker games.
One of the poker players, in between huge puffs on his Hull Grummond Flor de Franklin cigar, chomped at the bit end of it and said, “I wonder.”
“Shenandoah’s a better smoke,” said one of the other players.
“Not that, boy,” the first poker player said. He waved smoke away from him, sending it drifting right into the face of a passing waiter. “What I wonder is what the point of that joke was?”
“Well,” said the second poker player. He smoked a small cigarette held between his middle and index fingers. Each player smoked, letting the fire burn their inside gently, then exhaling so that the two different smoke sets danced around each other in the air as easily as the showgirls danced around each other.
“I suppose,” the second player said, “it means that women cry if geese go barefoot.”
“I suppose they do,” said the first poker player. There was a small crash. The players looked to find that the Madame, owner of the Saucy Puss stood in front of them. She had been in the midst of delivering a new round of whiskey to their table. Now the whiskey ran into the ground, spilled across the floor.
“That ain’t it,” said the Madame. “And look at how you all dropped this whiskey. You’ll have to pay for this round and the next one o’course.”
“Yes, Madame,” said the first poker player.
“I, I’m sorry,” said the second poker player, “I’ll be happy to buy… everyone… an extra round.”
The Madame motioned for the bartender to ring the service bell. The bell was old, brass, and almost a replica of the liberty bell in that it too had a large crack running down its side. The bell rang out and the place cheered for the free alcohol.
“Whiskey, top shelf,” Madam asked in a way that sounded much more like instruction than like asked.
“You only have one whiskey,” the second poker player started to say. He was raising his arms, about to get up. The first poke player grabbed the second players arms and lowered them down, motioned for him to shush, and nodded towards the Madam.
The second poke player nodded. He made his own motion for silence. He bowed, a sheepish grin across his face, in the direction of the Madam.
Then, he sighed and looked at the pile of gold, cash, and coin in front of him. He looked at his small pouch of money. He sighed again and started counting out five dollars in all the various currencies he could find.
“Good choice, sir,” said the Madam. Then she spun around and said, “The real moral here is that a good goose is like a husband— a golden one is good as they say, but they can be replaced with a new hunt!”