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.”
“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
