The Blind Pig by Jon A. Jackson

group.”
    “Brandywine? Never heard of him.”
    Benny was shocked. “You don't know Brandywine?That's odd. He's a native. He was here when the Indians came.”
    “That long, eh?”
    “Well, he's part Indian,” Benny said. “His great-great-I-don't-know-how-many-greats-grandfather came here with the French explorers. That's right! There was some brothers with the French, you didn't know that?”
    Mulheisen mused on this while they drove toward down-town in Benny's Cadillac. He had a vision of a giant cargo canoe hurtling through the rapids of the St. Lawrence, portaging onto the Ottawa, then into Lake Nipissing, onto the French River, thence onto Lake Huron. From Lake Huron the canoe would enter the St. Clair River and drift steadily past the site where Mulheisen's home would be built one day. Then it would ride out onto the smooth bosom of Lake St. Clair and float gently down into the Detroit River —d'Etroit, the throat itself—pass by Belle Isle and draw up on the shore where Cobo Hall now stood and the Detroit Pistons played basketball. In this imagined canoe was a tall, strong black man from Senegal now named Maurice Brandaouin after his master. Maurice would find love and comfort among the Chippewa in a heavily forested plain by the side of the river, in a country provisionally named New France.
    Mulheisen and Benny pulled up in front of a duplex on Riopelle Street. Riopelle would be named for another French settler, of course—laid out along the ribbonlike edge of his farms as they ran back a mile or more from the river.
    There was a fat black man at the door of the duplex. He grunted suspiciously at Mulheisen, but at Benny's gesture, he let the two in. There were thirty or forty people inside, in a somewhat dingier and smokier atmosphere than Benny's. This was more like a house party. People stood and talked with whiskey glasses in hand and passed around joints of marijuana. Mulheisen recognized a young vice-squad detective sitting on a sofa talking to two white girls who wereevidently not prostitutes but just a couple of Wayne State University coeds out for a little fun.
    Mulheisen and Benny stood at the flimsy dime-store bar and drank bottled beer. A pretty black woman in a blond wig came up to Mulheisen and rested her hand on the nape of his neck. It felt cool and dry. The hand slipped downward toward his hip, where the .38 nestled in its hip grip holster. Mulheisen stopped her hand with his right elbow and gently shoved her away. She drifted off.
    About three o'clock, four black men entered the barroom, carrying musical-instrument cases. In one corner there was a low platform made out of plywood and covered with green carpet. A basic drum set was draped with a sheet. One of the men whisked off the sheet and settled behind the snare drum. He set about adjusting the cymbals. Another man took a tenor saxophone out of its case and installed a new reed he'd been soaking in his mouth. The third man blew short, breathy notes from the cornet. He was the oldest, a balding forty-five, and he wore dark glasses in the dimly lit room.
    The youngest man switched on an amplifier/speaker behind the chair on which he sat. He held a flat electric guitar on his lap and fiddled patiently with the knobs of the amplifier.
    “Who are these guys?” Mulheisen asked Benny.
    “I don't know their names,” Benny said. “I believe I've seen that guitar player before.”
    The tenor man turned toward the drummer now and began to blow long looping phrases that caught the drummer's cadence on every fourth bar. He had a large, breathy tone and Mulheisen smiled involuntarily, remembering Lester Young.
    The cornet man shook his horn to get rid of some moisture. He came along with the other two then, making precise little stabs in tempo.
    Finally, the guitar chimed in and they all jammed along in G for a few bars. Then the guitar pointedly set out a brief chord progression and the two horns segued smoothly into“Last Year's Love.”