SCHOOL WAS LETTING OUT, but it wasn’t letting me out. We reached the end of the corridor where Frank and Mike were to head straight out into the sunny afternoon, and I was turning right down the dark hallway of band practice.
“I wonder what he wants?” I said, and everybody knew who I was talking about because I kept talking about him.
“He just wants to see you,” Mike said.
“He saw me already. There’s nothing more to see.”
“That’s not true,” Frank said. “The hair keeps changing. Every day it’s taller and wider, and another new color. And by new color I don’t mean it’s changed from what it was. I mean a new color as in a color that never existed anywhere before.”
“Don’t you have someplace to go?” I said.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I’m meeting those two girls from the bowling alley. You want to... oh, that’s right, you have band. Guess I’ll take Mikie. Mike, you up for it?”
Frank wasn’t looking for an answer. He was already headed for the door. Mike, smiling, turned to me and shrugged his answer. Not that it mattered.
“Not that it matters,” Frank said, holding the door. “They’re both mine.”
They were gone, and I was heading down the hallway, enjoying the small bit of peace between the squonk of classtime and the squonk of band.
Spleep-spleep. My phone. In the near-empty cavernous hallway of the school, the sound was like some evil Hitchcock bird coming to get me.
“Hi, Ma,” I said.
“Hi, Elvin, how are you? You sound very echoey. It seems like every time I talk to you on the phone, there’s feedback or echo or zoo noises or something. Do you need a new phone so we can have better conversations?”
“Ma, I have to say, the fact that you call me up to talk about my phone, that’s the kind of thing that affects the quality of our conversations.”
“Anyway, I can’t stay on long because my boss thinks I’m on the phone to you too much as it is. She says she doesn’t believe this is a fourteen-year-old I’m talking to all the time. Says it’s got to be either a boyfriend or a six-year-old. I told her you’re a little of both.”
“Ma!” I said, my mortified voice bouncing around the walls and coming back to mock me two and three times. I looked around and found no one to be embarrassed in front of. I was deeply embarrassed just the same, my cheeks like toasted marshmallows.
“Oh, don’t be so stiff, Elvin. Here, why I called. It just occurred to me, why did I see Grog inside your tuba this morning? Don’t you have band?”
My tuba.
I took my phone and did what I do when my phone makes me mad. I rubbed it back and forth over my forehead, then my temples, the way truly hypertense people do with the heels of their hands.
The tiny voice came from the side of my head, “I’m guessing from the grinding sound that you did have band today.”
“Yes,” I said flatly, the phone now in traditional phone position.
“What are you going to do?”
“I have to go. I just have to sit there and read the music and go oom-pah with my mouth at my parts. The band teacher says it’s to help me keep progressing with the rest of the band when I forget my instrument. I say it’s to make me look like a turd when I forget my instrument.”
“You won’t look like a turd. You’ll be cute. Right, I have to go. Don’t forget you have Alex coming this afternoon. So get right home after band.”
Thursday used to be one of my top four or five days of the whole week.
It wasn’t full band practice anyway, which was a break. It was brass ensemble. The county held a music festival every year with competitions and prizes in every conceivable category of classical caterwauling, and for weeks we were broken up into our specialties to practice.
So today I was in the basement, in Practice Room C, with my brass ensemble—Neil Patterson on flugelhorn, Callum George on trombone, Tobias Kolb on tenor horn... and Elvin Bishop on deep, foolish noises.
“Again, Elvin?” Callum sighed when I walked in sans tuba.
“Hey, lighten up, will you. I have a lot of stress.”
“God,” Callum said, “not the hair again. You’re not going to blame your hair for this, are you?”
“No, I’m not going to blame—”
“Then it’s his mother,” Tobias said. “I bet he’s going to blame his mother.”
In between wisecracks the ensemble punched the air with blurps and honks from their respective brass weapons, so the atmosphere was quite festive.
“You can’t blame your mother for everything, Elvin,” said Neil. Bwooorp. “It’s just not cool.”
This wasn’t the X-Men, it was the brass ensemble here, ranking on me and instructing me on what’s cool. If my reputation had reached this woeful state, I had to consider the possibility that I was partly to blame.
“I don’t really blame and complain like that, do I, guys?”
They decided to answer through the medium of song.
Bweeerp. Bloop. Fweee-fwee-fwee. Gaarrruup.
“Well then,” I said.
“On the bright side,” Tobias said, “you are getting pretty good at the tubeless tuba.”
“Thanks.”
We had normally twenty minutes to sharpen up before Mrs. Llewellyn came to start the hard-core drilling, and we had to make use of that time. She did not tolerate dull or slack playing, and if we weren’t already good when she got there she made us play “Mandy” over and over until we broke. So we saddled up our instruments—I saddled up me—and tore right into “The Foggy, Foggy Dew.”
Tobias was right. I was getting pretty good at this. I sounded better without my tuba than I did with it, and while this had the potential to become a problem down the line—say when I needed to play the actual tuba in front of actual people—right now it was kind of rocking.
“Oom,” I called out. “Pah,” I answered. “Oom-oom,” I said, and “Pah-ahh-ahh.”
I was jamming. The other guys were pretty good too.
“You gotta be kidding,” came the loud, brittle call from the doorway. It was Alex. He was standing there with a baffled expression on his face and my tuba around his little hips.
Beepety-beepety. My phone.
“Hi, Ma, how are you?”
She spoke in a rush-hush. “I think Alex is coming there.”
“I think you might be right.”
“Is he there now?”
“Well, my tuba just came in with something trapped in its coil. I’d better go before it constricts.”
“Have fun.”
“Do I ever have anything else?”
“Elvin,” Alex said, “that was the silliest thing I ever saw, and I have seen some silliness in my time.”
I walked over to him and gently removed the tuba.
“If you followed me around more, you’d see plenty of silliness to beat that.”
“Sounds like an invitation. I accept.”
How do I do it?
I tried the here’s-your-hat approach. “Well, thanks for bringing this, Alex....”
“Don’t mention it. Your house is far too easy to break into, by the way. I have to speak to your mother.”
“You broke into the house?”
“Well, that tuba was hardly going to get itself down here. When I talked to your mother and she told me....”
I knew this had to be traceable to—
God, I do blame my mother for everything.
“Are you going to introduce me to your band?”
“His band?” Callum George spluttered.
Cripes. “Callum, Neil, Tobias, this is my uncle Alex.”
“Hi, guys,” Alex said with real enthusiasm. He then went around and shook hands with each of them. “I was in a band myself when I was younger. Called the Hairy-Handed Gents. You probably didn’t hear of us....”
I wished he hadn’t left that dangling in the air like that, like somebody was required to respond. I was aware here of one of those special moments I had missed out on with not having a dad: the scorching embarrassment they could produce.
“I think maybe I did,” said Tobias Kolb graciously.
“Ya, maybe,” said Neil. “It sounds familiar.”
I liked my band.
Alex was beaming, even if he couldn’t possibly be believing it. “I played with this guy’s dad. We were hot. I played bass, so you see we got a musical legacy here to live up to.”
“Maybe legacy is a little too—”
“Hey,” he said, happily interrupting me, “we had a motto in the Hairy-Handed Gents: Shut up and wail.”
“Cool,” Tobias said. “Can we use that?”
“You can if you shut up and wail,” he said.
One of the good things about brass is, if you want to wail, you have to shut up. And so we did both, for my uncle.
We played our “Foggy, Foggy Dew,” this time with me on actual brass. It was nice. Better than nice. We blended better than usual, all of us hitting our marks just right, all of us peeking at Alex over our music stands as he gently but clearly did the job of conductor/timekeeper with his bony hands swirling the air between us. A beautiful small, contented smile clung to his face as he concentrated on the notes, and floated on them.
I was all over the place. Not musically, as my oooms and pahs were impeccable, but in my head, and in my heart. Alex was embarrassing. He was weird, and he was still scary. He was death on legs, even more so now than he had been a couple days earlier. But at the same time, in this time, in this place, when I could see him on a whole different plate, there was a different something else about him.
He got lost in what we were doing here, and in getting himself lost he gained something else, something nice, and innocent. Which I don’t think is any small trick for a veteran of federal incarceration. And he looked like a kid, too. An ancient kid.
I had to admit I was worried just how badly the guys were going to take this. I feared they were going to see Alex as a total freak, as a joke, and if I saw them passing around those unmistakable looks... I’d have been mortified, and I would have clocked every one with my tuba. One of the few great things about tuba, it being the best weapon in the orchestra.
But it wasn’t necessary. They didn’t exchange the looks. They were too preoccupied watching Alex. They were liking it, liking him, liking all this. I guess I had forgotten we were the brass ensemble here. We suffered geeks gladly, and appreciated any appreciation.
And appreciation it was. Alex directed the music, hummed the music, bobbed his head and squinted his eyes like he was drifting off somewhere better than the dull, damp cell we were squonking in. Then he did one better.
“Can I have a go?” he said before he had even stopped his maniac clapping at the conclusion of “The Foggy, Foggy Dew.”
“What?” I asked. “A go at what? The tuba?”
He nodded wildly and came at me.
I extricated myself from the tuba with some difficulty, and some trepidation. There was still some essence of Grog wafting up every time you pressed a valve, so I had some hope he wouldn’t have the stomach for this.
When was I going to remember, Alex had the stomach for everything. He’d already experienced everything.
He slipped into the tuba, smiling broadly, looking it all over like he was test-driving a new car, fingering valves, tapping the mouthpiece.
“See,” he said to his attentive audience, “since I was a bass player, this contraption is not entirely foreign to me. I know how to lay down the bottom to the music.”
He blew into it a few random times, producing some muddy notes. His sound was not entirely amateur, practically as full as mine when I blew, though not quite as nice as when I played the invisible tuba.
“There were four guys in my band too,” he said wistfully, seeming to disappear a little into the instrument. He looked like he might have been looking at his reflection in the center coil where the Grog oils would have made the shine brilliant. “So we have that in common as well. And one of them looked just like this”—he pointed to me—“so this is all practically a big fat flashback for me. Though to be truthful, Hairy-Handed Gents–related flashbacks are not unknown.”
He looked up from the tuba, out of his reflection, out of himself, into me.
It kind of hurt. It was kind of great, the way he was looking at me, and it kind of hurt. Looked like he felt the exact same.
“Now, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to play you my signature tune. Actually, it’s every bass player’s signature tune, ‘Smoke on the Water,’ by Deep Purple.”
All the other musicians in the room looked blankly at one another. The bass man blew.
Blum blum BLUM
Blum blum BLUM-BLUM
Blum blum blum
BLUM-blum.
And that was it. Whatever it was. Alex lowered the horn from his lips—or rather, lowered himself from the horn in a kind of serpentine withdrawal that left him crumpled on a stool and wheezing like a train. I ran to him just as the tuba was pulling him to the floor.
“You okay?” I said, pulling it off him.
“Great,” he huffed, “great. Did you hear that? I still got it after all this... time.”
“Ya,” I said, and I meant it. He had it, all right. It wasn’t music, but it he had in abundance.
The other guys were clapping politely and thanking Alex just as Mrs. Llewellyn marched in. “What is this?” she demanded, meaning my uncle.
Alex was wheezing harder, looking more pale and skeletal, looking and sounding distinctly like something the cats dragged in off the street.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said. “Nobody is supposed to be here. How did you get in?”
He just glared at her. His face turned instantly hard, much more unsettling than his physical condition would indicate. He gave me a chill, and I remembered the hard stuff about him that was so easy for me to forget.
“It’s okay, Mrs. Llewellyn,” Callum George said.
“He’s my uncle,” I said.
“Well...” She was noticeably shifting away from him now. “He’s still not to be in here. He has to go right now.”
He got right to his feet, did a small half wobble, then went rigid so not to let her see. Then, silently, he walked toward the other guys. He reached into his pocket, pulled out some bills.
He shook Callum’s hand, thanked him, then gave him ten dollars.
“Whoa, Mr. Bishop, I can’t take this from you.”
“Yes, you can,” Alex said sternly, warmly. “You played music for the public, me, and you should be paid for it. Now you have had your first paying gig and it’s only up from here. Maybe a little sideways, too, but then up. How does it feel?”
Callum stared at the bill, then at Alex. “It feels very good, actually.”
Alex laughed quick and hard. Made himself cough. “I was a busker myself for years. Made pennies playing in the streets, but the pennies added up. And I was getting paid to play music, which was beautiful. But you earn it. Even went to the Busking World Championships in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and did pretty well, too. Time of my life.”
He moved on to Neil, repeated the gesture, repeated the phrase, “Time of my life.” He went on to Tobias Kolb, who made a tentative move to hand the money back.
Alex pointed at him. “It’s true money can’t buy you happiness. But it can rent it for a good while. So go on.”
Tobias grinned shyly and took it.
“Same goes for love,” Alex added, “in case you were wondering.”
Then he was on to me, passing Llewellyn on the way and looking at her in an I-dare-you kind of way.
He paid me the going rate. I knew better than to resist. And anyway he looked so happy. So beat and happy.
I never much minded before, not having the dad.
I minded now.
This, I think, was what I was afraid of.
“Are we doing something later?” I said.
“Afraid I’m too wrecked now,” he said through a whistly sigh.
“Me too, actually,” I said. “Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow absolutely,” he said, and kissed me on the cheek.
I was stunned. I was okay.
“Right,” Mrs. Llewellyn shouted as soon as he was gone, “I want to hear ‘Mandy,’ and it better be good.”
We gave her “Mandy.” And it was better than good.