White Butterfly by Walter Mosley

Coltrane, Monk, Holiday, and all the rest, drinking shot for shot with their men.
    It was a bold and flashy time. But by that evening all the shine had rubbed off to expose the base metal below. The sidewalks were broken, sporting hardy weeds in their cracks. Some clubs were still there but they were quieter now. The jazzmen had found new arenas. Many had gone to Paris and New York. The blues was still with us. The blues would always be with us. The blues will always be with us.
    Sonny Terry, Brownie McGee, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Soupspoon Wise, and a hundred others passed through the hotels and back-street dives that still cluttered Bone. In the old days the jazzmen came in fancy cars like Cadillacs. The bluesmen came by Greyhound, sometimes by thumb.
    The women were still there. But their clothes didn’t fit right anymore. Their eyes were more hungry than wild. All the promise after the war had drained away and a new generation was asking, “Where’s ours?”
    Rock and roll waged a war over the radio and in the large dance clubs. Bone Street was forgotten except by those lost souls who wanted a taste of the glitter of their day.
    Aretha’s was in an alley halfway down the 1600 block of Bone. It had other names over the years, and different addresses too. It was a legal bar, more or less. But the waitresses were all scantily clad girls and the police found it proper to shut Charlene Mars down every once in a while. Charlene ran Aretha’s, or whatever it was called at the time. Over the years it had been named the Del-Mar, the Nines, Swing, and Juanita’s. The name and the address changed but it was always the same club. The girls had different names too and even different faces, but they did the same work.
    That year they wore a very short black skirt over a one-piece brown bathing suit and black fishnet stockings. The room was long and narrow with a very high ceiling and a stage at the far end. Down the left side of the room ran an oak bar tended by Westley.
    Westley and Charlene had started as lovers. She was skinny and he wore fine clothes. They both loved jazz and, along with John from Targets, had the best hornmen and vocalists in the country. But a lot of whiskey and fine men, and fine women, moved through their lives. Charlene bought a small house in Compton, where she took care of her retarded brother. Westley, a tall large-handed man, took to sleeping in the bar.
    The whites of his eyes were yellow and he stooped over. His arms were as strong as iron cables.
    He looked at me and nodded at an empty table, but I walked up to the bar.
    “Hey, West.”
    “Easy.”
    “Johnnie Walker,” I said.
    He turned away to grant my request.
    The room was dark. The phonograph played a light and lively version of “Lady Blue.” With no introduction a buxom woman, well into her fifties, jiggled out onstage. She wasn’t wearing much and all of that was a shiny banana yellow against high-brown skin. She carried a long yellow plume, which she waved along with her breasts and thighs.
    There were eight small tables opposite the bar and a cluster of them before the stage. Black men and women sat here and there. Fragile ribbons of smoke rose from gaudy aluminum ashtrays. A waitress moved petulantly from table to table. “You want sumpin’ else t’drink?” was the question I heard her ask most often. The answer was almost always “No.”
    This was the early crowd, not huge tippers. They were kind of a warm-up act for the customers, mostly men, who came later.
    Charlene sat right up next to the stage, sipping at a lime-colored drink. She had always claimed that the girls never did anything that they didn’t want to do, but I’d known women who’d been fired from there because a customer had complained that they were “unfriendly.”
    I took the whiskey and moved toward the stage. Closer up you could see the makeup that the banana dancer wore. Her face looked like a carved wooden mask.
    “Easy Rawlins!” Charlene