The Maestro

by T. Davis Bunn

  Jake’s booming laugh brought me around. I looked over. Pipo had stopped playing and was watching me with hard, careful eyes. I turned toward him and swung into the solo, keeping more or less to the way it had been structured on the tape, but with tempo and chord changes to match the salsa.

  Pipo gave me a nod, little more than a jerk of his head, but the message was clear. He began following the beat line on the higher conga. I added runs within runs, doubling and tripling the notes, playing fast for the simple thrill of it.

  He ran off a little trill; I made my own notes fit his beat. He shouted a laugh, hit a blur on both congas. I followed with another run. Boom, boom, the two congas together, followed by a blinding flurry. I hit the next chords full on, then slid down a run as fast as I could play.

  Jake held up a clenched fist, and I followed the others down a quick run and ended. Pipo rewarded me with an enormous grin, said, “You’re okay, man!” He turned, grinning, to Jake. “I think maybe we oughtta keep this one.”

  “Long as you approve,” Jake said, looking at Amy.

  Pipo let me go with a pat on the back. “Yeah, the kid’s all right. And he’s little enough, he gives us any problems we all just sit on him.”

  “Okay.” Jake moved toward the back of the room, motioned for the others to join him. “Prayer time. Everybody over here.”

  I put down my guitar, followed the others over to the mixing board, allowed my hands to be taken by Hans on one side and Amy on the other. I raised my head, looked straight at Mario. His headphones were draped around his neck, the skin around his eyes smudged with fatigue. But his gaze held a calm joy and a strength that made a mockery of my need for barriers. I looked into the eyes of my oldest friend, really looked, and yearned for what he had found for himself.

  “Welcome to Natural Light,” Jake said. “Let’s turn it over to the Father and get to work.”

  ****

  “The band used to be just a weekend deal for everybody,” Amy explained to me as we sat in a restaurant that evening. “It started off just as a way of ministering through music, you know, a way of putting our faith to work. But it started growing faster than any of us expected.” She reached over and squeezed her husband’s massive arm. “Any of us, that is, except Daddy Jake. He never doubted it for a moment.”

  “Things are finally catchin’ fire,” Jake agreed.

  The three of us were seated in a Kneipe, a sort of neighborhood restaurant found all over Germany, located not far from Jake and Amy’s apartment. The Kneipe generally served good but simple food, and beer from one of Germany’s three hundred breweries. Because Mario’s apartment was so small, Jake and Amy had offered to let me stay with them; after practice Mario had pleaded exhaustion and left me in their care.

  “We all had our regular jobs, still do,” Amy went on. “But we’re beginning to ask if maybe we need to start looking at things differently.”

  “People gotta ask some tough questions,” Jake said. “Hans is tryin’ to finish up at seminary, Karl is a full-on social worker specializin’ in handicapped children. Sameh and Pipo are doin’ big-time studio work.”

  “You too,” Amy said quietly. “Me too, for that matter.”

  “Yeah, but it’s different for them. That’s been their life, you know? Hard for a man to give up what he thought was his life’s work. There’s a fork in the road, though, right up ahead. Gotta spend some time on their knees, I told ’em, find out which way the Lord wants them to go.”

  We had stopped by their apartment before coming to the restaurant so I could drop off my bags. It was very different from what I expected, very much in contrast to the building’s worn and dusky exterior. The living room walls were covered with framed and autographed posters from past European tours. Polished wood floors were covered with large Turkish rugs, bright swatches of color topped by brass and wood octagonal tables. Around the tables were comfortable-looking chairs with wooden arms and leather cushions. Tall brass urns adorned several corners, filled with the feathered fronds of dried plants. The dining space was separated from the living room proper by an enormous stereo flanked by bookshelves. One side was filled with large illustrated volumes. The other side, all six shelves, was jammed full of albums and CD’s.

  Jake said to me, “Those were some hot licks you played there today.”

  “I thought so too,” Amy agreed. “You really are a fine guitarist.”

  “Mario told us you’d show up ready to roll,” Jake said. “He was right. Good thing too, what with our next gig on Wednesday.”

  “We’ve got a gig in five days?” It was the first I had heard of it.

  “Didn’t want to say anything about it unless we were sure you’d be with us,” Jake said. “We got one more practice on Tuesday, but you and me, we’ll be pushin’ it hard between now and then.”

  When our meal arrived Amy thanked the waiter in flawless German. I asked her where she had learned to speak like that.

  “Here,” she replied in English. “Where else?”

  “You’ve lived in Dusseldorf for a long time?”

  She shook her head. “Darmstadt. South of Frankfurt. It’s where we’re playing next week, as a matter of fact. Do you know it?”

  “I know where it is, I’ve never been there. The only place I’ve really been in Germany is Dusseldorf.” I turned away from that topic by asking Jake, “Do you speak German too?”

  “Never could get my mouth to fit around those sounds,” he replied. “I speak enough to find my way around, but any real conversation is taken care of by the lady here.”

  “What languages do you speak, Gianni?” Amy asked.

  “Italian, English and German.”

  “Mario told us you’re American, is that right?”

  I nodded, said, “I haven’t lived there since I was five.”

  “Yes, Mario told us. Maybe that’s why you have such an incredible accent. It doesn’t sound really Italian, though. Kind of a mish-mash. Almost British sometimes.”

  “They teach British English in the German schools,” I explained.

  “That’s right, they do,” Amy said. “I forgot. It never affected me like that, since we were always around my father and all his American buddies.”

  “You studied in Germany?”

  “Gymnasium for six years,” she replied. “Then I decided to go full time with my music.”

  “I thought you were American.”

  “I am. Or half, anyway. But the only real time I’ve ever spent in the States were summers with my grandmama in St. Louis. It was always hot and muggy and it rained a lot, I remember that much. My daddy was a full-time army man. When his last tour of duty ended, he got us a house near the Darmstadt base and went to work as a civilian in the PX.”

  Amy’s dark hair was cut long and full, cascading around an oval face with strong features and full lips. High cheekbones framed black shining eyes. Her skin was flawless, a beautiful canvas for the emotions that shone from her as she spoke. Beside Jake she looked petite. When she looked up to his face, she talked in a low husky burr that sent shivers up my spine.

  They had their own way of talking, those two. It made me feel very alone to watch the way they moved in such fluid tandem. Amy dominated the conversation, but only because Jake held her aloft. She was the dark beauty that the world gaped at, he the unyielding pedestal that raised her up.

  Jake was content to let Amy speak for them both, adding a few deep-spoken words from time to time more in emphasis than in any need to be noticed. She spoke with a performer’s desire to be the center of attention, casting her words out with heart-snaring honesty.

  I asked her where she had developed such an amazing stage presence. Not to mention such a beautiful voice. I had seldom seen the two qualities so well matched in a performer, and never in one who did not need an entourage on hand to help carry their ego. Amy glanced at Jake before answering, a question in her eyes. Jake looked down at her for a long moment, and the granite facade of his face yielded to rev
eal a deeper, different man. He nodded to her, a simple motion that for some reason brought a look of pure love to her eyes.

  She turned back to me and began, “I’ve been singing in nightclubs and hotel bars since I was seventeen years old. Had a backup on keyboards who programed our drum machine. You make good money touring the big hotels in Europe, but it’s a nowhere kind of job. I started drinking more than was good for me, didn’t find anything wrong with a little toot now and then. Got to be on friendly terms with some of the big spenders, and when some halfway decent old boy put the moves on me, I’d think, why not? Only I was smart enough not to do it for free.”

  “Smart,” Jake rumbled, nodding his head slowly. “Real smart.”

  She took a tiny sip from her drink, set it down, said, “I’d just gotten back from a long weekend with some guy at an exclusive resort. Only thing I can remember about him is he drove one of those fancy Italian cars. Isn’t that something? Spend three days with a man and I can’t remember his name, his face, nothing at all except he drove too fast. Gave me a sapphire bracelet with rocks the size of peanuts. I think I lost it, I don’t remember. Money didn’t have any more meaning for me than life.”

  The waiter came over to clear our plates. Amy sat in silence, her eyes fixed on the table by her hands. I did not know what to do, what to say, how to react. Her openness overwhelmed me.

  Jake leaned across the table, said to me, “The lady’s just plantin’ seeds, Gianni. God willin’, you’ll understand that in time.”

  When the waiter departed she went on. “My father met Jake at a jazz joint and dragged him home. It was one of those rare occasions when I was on speaking terms with my family. I was the youngest daughter, the best looking, and the most trouble. My father met my mother while he was stationed in Japan after World War Two. My mother was trying to support half a dozen relatives by dancing in a GI bar. When she started seeing my father, things got a lot easier for her family. Suddenly there was meat on the table every night, cigarettes, and other goods they could trade.

  “Her family was smart enough not to ask where the stuff was coming from, and she was smart enough to keep quiet about having fallen for a foreigner, and a black American to boot. Mama finally told her father the day they were married, which was the day before the army shipped my father off to Germany. Mama sent her family a check for fifty dollars a month every month for the next ten years. That’s not an easy thing to do when you’re trying to raise a family of four girls on an NCO’s pay. The checks were always cashed, too. Every single one. But you know what? My mama never heard from her family again. Not a peep.”

  “Every place on earth’s got its share of people determined to live without love and forgiveness,” Jake said. “They say there ain’t no need for the Lord in their lives, then turn around and just keep on showin’ how bitter is the harvest for a man walkin’ on his own.”

  Amy looked up at him, asked quietly, “Am I doing this right?”

  “I hear a fine-lookin’ woman talkin’ from the Spirit,” Jake said. “Tellin’ her version of the most beautiful story on earth. She don’t need to ask me if it’s right. Go ahead, sister. The man’s waitin’.”

  She turned back to me. “Pop is a very serious, straight-laced type, but plays a pretty mean blues piano. The night he brought Jake home, I sat downstairs and listened to them jam. Jake was strumming along on this guitar my sister had tried to learn on years before, doing all these fancy moves and running all over that music.”

  “Just playin’ a little twelve-bar blues, is all,” Jake said.

  “Those two played and talked until dawn. Every time the music stopped, Jake would start in about the salvation of Jesus Christ. He never looked my way, not one time. But I felt all the words were meant for me. I could tell my father didn’t like what Jake had to say, but he was liking the music too much to quit. That was the first night I could ever remember sitting with Pop for more than fifteen minutes without us fighting.”

  “The Holy Spirit was talkin’ to two hungry souls,” Jake said. “Didn’t neither one of them have time for anger.”

  “Jake just sat there, quoting Scriptures and making all the sense in the world. I felt as if somebody had tied me to the chair; I didn’t have any strength to move. Then all of a sudden I was crying, sobbing so hard I couldn’t breathe. It felt as if something inside of me was breaking up and washing away, like I was dying.

  “It was what Jake had been waiting for. He came over to me and asked my father if he could take me into the kitchen. Pop was so shocked, I could barely see him through my tears but I still remember his expression. Here was the tough little girl that nothing could touch, not anger or slaps or the meanest words he could find, crying so hard she couldn’t stand up straight. Jake took me back into the kitchen, sat me down, took my hands, and asked me if I’d like to pray with him.”

  Jake touched her hand gently. “The waiter’s standin’ over there givin’ us the eye, must be a dozen people at the door waitin’ for tables. Time to pay up and get out, we can carry this story home with us.”

  “I sure will,” Amy said, sliding from the booth. “This is one story that’s inscribed on my heart for the rest of my life.”

  That night, as I lay in my bed and listened to the dull whispers and vague sounds of a home I did not know in a city where I did not belong, I could not leave the story of Amy’s coming to faith behind. I painted the darkness above my head with the visions that her words brought forth, and I felt such a bonding with her sorrow that I ached for her and for myself at the same time.

  The scenes that danced before my eyes were from the life that had been my own. I ached for the little Mario who swooped from his parents’ store armed with gifts for his newest friend, for the feel of my grandfather’s beard, for the love of my stern and giving grandmother, for the mother who was no more than a shadow-encrusted memory. I recalled these scenes as Amy had, telling them to my own mind and heart, fashioning them into a story to be told to the stranger I had become.

  Yet there was a difference between Amy’s story and the one I told myself. Amy’s story had an ending, while mine seemed to go nowhere at all. I lay sleepless in the dark of that unsettling night and wondered what gave them the strength to believe so strongly in something unseen.

  ****

  Early Wednesday afternoon we set off for Darmstadt. Jake and Amy led the way in the tightly packed van. I rode in the second car with Mario and another full load of equipment. Somewhere between Mainz and Frankfurt I fell asleep. A couple of hours later Mario shook me awake in time to see us pull into Darmstadt. New buildings beside ancient structures told of wartime destruction, giving the town a confused look—half modern and faceless, half old and gracious. Every few moments a low-flying jet sliced the air above our heads and screamed away.

  We followed the signs to the American military base and joined the line of cars inching toward the main gates. The sun was beginning to peek through the clouds, splashing brightly on wet streets. Just before the gates, Jake pulled the van over to one side and stopped. A man who looked vaguely familiar walked over; not until Mario had hopped from the car and embraced him did I recognize Danilo, Mario’s older brother. I had not seen him since my fourteenth birthday.

  Jake climbed from the van, accepted Danilo’s embrace with stone-faced ease. Amy bounced down and smothered him. I looked across the street, saw soldiers eyeing us strangely and talking among themselves. Jake waited for a break in the line of cars, walked over, accepted an uncertain salute with a solemn nod.

  “Anybody that big, they gotta either shoot or salute,” Danilo said to me, and stuck out his hand. “How you been, Maestro?”

  “Not bad. Good to see you again, Danilo.”

  “How long has it been? Seven, eight years?”

  “More like eleven.”

  “Yeah? Who’d ever have thought that night that we’d be getting together now to spread the Word?” Danilo reached out, snagged his brother’s neck with one elbow. “Or that my baby
brother’d have come to see the light?”

  Beyond us lines of two-story apartment buildings stood like sentries behind a tall wire mesh fence. The street before the gatehouse was lined with small grocery trucks, their backs and sides opened to reveal fruits and vegetables and meats and canned goods. Many of the men and women who stood chatting and shopping were dressed in camouflage uniforms.

  Danilo led Mario and me across the street and up to the gatehouse. The broad entrance gate was marked by a flagpole, several large signs, barriers, and a dozen armed men. Six wore mottled green; the others had dark blue uniforms, polished black boots laced with white strings, and berets cocked jauntily down on one side. One of them came over, gave Danilo a mock salute.

  “How’s it goin’, Dago?”

  “Not bad, not bad,” Danilo replied. “You remember my brother, Mario.”

  The man grinned, offered his hand. “Sure, the Dago Junior. Still making ’em roar, kid?”

  “Every chance I get,” Mario replied.

  The man jerked a thumb toward the gatehouse, where Jake seemed barely contained by the cramped quarters. “Those guys sure take their time with your buddy. Guess they think he’d be better off in a cage.”

  “He’s probably talking Bible and handing out tracts,” Danilo replied. “This is Gianni, the guy I told you about. Gianni, this is Al Williams, a brother in the Lord.”

  Al offered his hand. “You really a genius like he says?”

  “You gotta hear him play,” Danilo said proudly.

  “Maybe later. I got duty for another four hours. Steve told me to call so he could come down and walk you past the duty officer. That is, unless your buddy decides to eat the lieutenant. How much does that guy weigh, any idea?”

  “Jake?” Danilo shrugged. “Fill a seven-foot sack with concrete and weigh it. That should give you an idea.”

  “Park around back and wait for Steve to come down. No terrorists in your van, right?”

  “Not today.”

  “Be sure to come back out through this gate, okay?” The soldier waved at us. “Nice to meet you guys.”