“Sonny,” I said, on impulse.
He fixed me with his liquid gaze.
“God bless,” I murmured.
“I sure as hell hope so.” And the trolley was moving with him in the open doorway, giving one last wave of his cigarette holder and an uplift of his slender chin.
“How does that song go?” he called. And the streetcar was lost in thunders. “‘Tangerine’? Johnny Mercer’s song. All the rage that year. ‘Tangerine,’” said my waiter back in another year, his face a blank on which memory wrote itself.
“That strange guy, Sonny? Had a nice sweet soprano. God, I can hear him now. And the laughter. I think that was why we all followed him. No money, no jobs, no love life. Just Saturday nights to stay busy. So he sang and laughed and we followed. Sonny and ‘Tangerine.’ ‘Tangerine’ and Sonny.”
The waiter stopped, embarrassed.
I finished my wine. “What,” I said at last, “what ever happened to Tangerine?”
The waiter shook his head but then hesitated and shut his eyes for a moment. “Hey. Hold on. Right after the war, in 1947, I bumped into one of those crazies, the old gang. He said he had heard, didn’t know for a fact, probably true, Sonny had killed himself.”
I wished my glass was full but it was empty.
“On his birthday?” I said.
“What?”
“Did he die on his thirtieth birthday?”
“How did you know that? Yeah. Shot himself.”
“Thank God it was just a gun,” I said at last.
“Beg pardon?”
“Nothing, Ramón. Nothing.”
The waiter backed off to go get my bill, then paused.
“That song he was always singing. What were the words?”
I waited to see if he might still remember. But it didn’t show in his face.
The music rose in my head. And all the old words, right on to the end.
“Don’t ask me,” I said.
The end
