Collected Short Stories: Volume II

by Barry Rachin

  The artistically-challenged piano teacher was young, in her late thirties with three children. With her close-cropped, dirty brown hair and an overbite Muriel probably hadn't won any beauty contests since elementary school. And, even in the short time that Allen had known the woman, she had begun putting on weight. Fast forward ten years into the future, she would have added a sedentary pound or two annually until her girlish figure was little more than a fleeting memory.

  And then there was the matter of Mrs. Beagle's voice. The words came in a nasally monotone that never varied, neither in pitch nor intensity. She talked through her nose in a grating, infuriating, mind-numbing drone that made most everything she said seem utterly irrelevant. There was no variation in the cadence. She didn’t bunch her words together in a rush of exuberance when enthusing over some bit of musical minutia. Drip. Drip. Drip. Twenty-four-seven, the words meandered along like water cascading from a leaky spigot. Chinese water torture!

  Saturday afternoon, Allen played a wedding at the Foxhill Country Club. The piano player, Herb Calloway, was something of a musical celebrity having recently come off the road with the Woody Herman big band. “That lick you played on the last two measures of Misty,” Allan was addressing the piano player as they picked their way to the back of the room after finishing the first set. The bridal party and wedding guests had taken their seats as the main meal was being served. At the rear of the function hall a table had been arranged for band.

  “The polytonal run?”

  Allan laid a cloth napkin over his tuxedo pants and reached for a roll. “I was wondering if you could write it out for me.”

  A waiter approached with a bronze pitcher and began filling water glasses. Herb grinned good-naturedly. Heavyset with a mop of curly brown hair, he was far and away the most accomplished musician in the band, having recorded with a number of big name performers. “Sure, before we start the next set,” he promised. “It’s just a grouping of two-five progressions repeated in various keys." He spread a napkin across the front of his tuxedo pants. "It also works with symmetrical patterns... fourths and whole tones, pentatonics and altered diminished scales.” He took a sip of water and reached for a warm roll.

  Allan hadn’t a clue what Herb was talking about. He had heard the piano player finger a tricky run and then, on the final chord of the tune, the same series of notes oddly repeated but in a different tonal center before modulating back to the tonic F major chord.

  Herb Calloway was the complete package. He had the technical facility to pull off impossible runs and make them seen commonplace. Five minutes earlier in the context of a lush ballad, he had played a string of dissonant inversions, making the mysterious harmonies sound perfectly natural.

  Allan could cobble together a respectable solo playing off the existing chord changes, but what Herb was doing – well that was taking things to the next level. Twenty minutes later back on the band stand, the piano player ran a series of broken arpeggios and leaned over. “Here let me show you.” He fingered a block chord in his left hand and ran an inverted pentatonic scale with the right. Dropping down a half tone from G to G-flat he repeated the theme. “Do you see what I’m doing?”

  Allan was beginning to understand but only at the most basic level. “Create your own patterns.” He chose another series of melodic notes but this time dropped the chord a minor third away from the original and repeated the theme. “It works every time, because the listener's ear gets drawn away by the thematic material.” Herb kept negotiating his supple hands up and down the piano as he spoke, demonstrating the concept.

  The drummer, who was the bandleader, sat down at his traps. "The girl from Ipanema, and keep the volume down while they’re still eating.”

  The next day, Allan took his car to be inspected. On the way home, he stopped by his ex-wife’s place. “About the piano teacher…”

  “Yes,” Lois said anticipating his train of thought. “She’s quite horrid. We won’t be continuing much beyond the end of the school year.” Her response caught Allan off guard. “What with all the interruptions, Muriel never gives Ruthie a full lesson,” she continued, “and I don’t see where the girl has progressed very much in the six months she's been with Mrs. Beagle.”

  Allan was pleased that his ex-wife saw the situation for what it was. “And that mind-numbing voice!”

  “Dear god!” Lois tittered and immediately broke into a zombie-like monotone, mimicking the piano teacher.

  “We’re not being very nice are we?” Allan smirked sheepishly. The woman might have been a third-rate piano teacher with a schizoid drawl, but that didn’t make her a bad person.

  “Do you remember,” Muriel added more soberly now, “that horrid Christmas recital?”

  Mrs. Beagle arranged a piano recital for all her students the second week in December. There were elementary school age children thumping out melodies with one finger. No chords – the left hand was optional as were the other four digits on the right hand! No matter that the budding child prodigies, were in kindergarten or first grade – everyone got a shot at the brass ring! One ham-fisted Hispanic girl slapped at the keys creating a Bartok-like percussive effect that might have been intriguing except for the fact that she was slaughtering a watered-down version of Claude Debussy's Claire de Lune. Still later, in the hands of a manic eight year-old, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star assumed the abstruse unpredictability of a Hindemith, twelve-tone row.

  Allan wasn’t being petty or overly harsh in his assessment of the next-generation Van Cliburns and Horrowtiz. He had attended a similar recital put on by a colleague in August. While the children played reasonably well, they too missed notes and pressed down errant keys, which was to be expected. With Mrs. Beagle's protégés the difference - and it was a profound difference - was that the students were completely clueless that anything was amiss. The flubs were not artistic errors, per se, but variations on the composer's original intent. Subject to interpretation, a bright tempo, allegro vivace marking might resemble a funeral dirge. Major chords degenerated into minor, turning the standard classical repertoire into a harmonic comedy of errors. Half the students should never have been allowed to get up on the stage; the rest ought to have been better prepared.

  As if that wasn't bad enough, the ever self-aggrandizing Mrs. Beagle charged ten bucks a head for every guest who attended the pitiful performance. Allan footed the bill for both sets of grandparents and Ruthie's god-mother so, by the end of the recital, he had a vicious headache and was out sixty dollars! Now the charade was over. No more piano lessons. Once school was finished, so was Mrs. Beagle.

  * * * * *

  In early July an unfortunate incident occurred that sent Allan spiraling into a black funk. From early summer, he planned to take Ruthie to the Haxton Field Fourth of July fireworks display, but a nasty sinus infection coupled with a muggy heat wave left him disagreeable and out of sorts. "Maybe we could stay home and rent a movie," Allan suggested.

  Ruthie's eyebrows rose halfway to the ceiling. "On the Fourth of July?" The issue was non-negotiable.

  "I don't feel so hot."

  "You can lie on the blanket and go to sleep." The girl pursed her lips. "We only get to see the fireworks once a year and, anyway, it was your idea."

  It was your idea. That was the clincher. Over a month ago, Allan asked to take his daughter. Brandenberg put on one of the best fireworks displays in all of southeastern Massachusetts. If Allan weaseled out - pulled the plug on the festivities without a bona fide excuse - being struck by a bolt of lightning, losing a limb in a freak accident, falling on the third rail at the South Boston MBTA station - his ex-wife and daughter would treat him like a mental defective.

  At seven o'clock, Allan collected the bug spray, blanket, a cooler full of soft drinks and munchies and they headed off for Haxton Field. "Do you feeling any better?"

  What type of killjoy didn't like fireworks? "Yeah, I'm okay," Allan muttered. He felt rotten but didn't want to play the spoilsport. They
were trudging up the street. The entrance to Haxton field was just beyond the senior housing complex. Allan blew his nose and a clot of greenish-yellow mucous lay streaked halfway across the handkerchief.

  A busty brunette decked out in a tank top and cut off jeans was approaching from the opposite direction. What was she… sixteen years old? Seventeen, eighteen tops? "Put your goddamn eyeballs back in your head, pervert!" the fleshy girl chided brazenly, as they passed on the narrow sidewalk. A teenage boy who was accompanying her flipped Allen the bird and stuck out his tongue. Then the twosome immediately erupted in a fit of hooting and jeering. It was all over in the blink of an eye. Allan felt a crushing despair. Mercifully, Ruthie, who in her excitement had rushed a dozen paces ahead, never witnessed her father's fall from grace.

  It wasn't just the derisive remark from a preternaturally pretty girl that sucked all the joy out of his life. Twenty years earlier when he was their age, Allan felt that same heady rush, that intoxicating exuberance of being on the threshold of some great adventure. But that was before the inguinal hernia, periodontal disease and an anxiety attack in the parking lot of Cooper's Hardware Store the day his wife had him served with divorce papers.

  The threshold of a great adventure ... What adventure? Had anything even vaguely resembling a great adventure ever materialized. The girl with the beguiling breasts would go from the Fourth of July fireworks to even more dazzling pyrotechnics. She was a comet streaking through the heavens, more glorious than all the bottle rockets, cherry bombs, sparklers, spinners and jumbo jumping jacks. Like a territorial animal peeing on a bush, she drizzled her insouciant scent everywhere. But Allan, the crusty old geezer with post nasal drip had absolutely no right lusting after the glorious creature. He deserved what he got. Yes, he truly deserved public humiliation.

  * * * * *

  Thirty years earlier in nineteen fifty-four, the nation was buzzing with the first nuclear powered submarine. The Kellogg's Cereal Company came out with a miniature facsimile that ran on baking powder. Allan was eight years old. He hand delivered a cereal box top and twenty-five cents in an envelope to the post office. Exactly two weeks later the plastic toy arrived in the mail.

  His best friend, Morris, was visiting that day. They locked themselves in the bathroom with the metallic gray submarine, the printed directions and a box of Clabber Girl baking powder. Allan filled the raised compartment on the submarine deck with the white powder, inserted the lid and placed it in the sink. The four and a half-inch toy sunk to the bottom coming to rest on the scaly enamel. Then, miraculously as the baking powder reacted with the water, carbon dioxide was produced forcing some of the water out and causing the device to drift back to the surface.

  Fizz! Fizz! Fizz! In much the same way that a real submarine rose to the surface by purging its ballast tanks, the toy delivered the goods. What did Allan or Morris know about buoyancy, density, or the production of C02 when sodium bicarbonate mixed with acidic cream of tartar? The toy burped, gurgled and bubble. Over and over again, it rose up and settled back down until the baking powder was exhausted. Then the third graders spooned another heap of mix into the top and did it again. An hour and a half later, only when the box of Clabber Girl baking powder was completely empty, did the bathroom door swing open. Allan's mother wasn’t going shopping until Thursday. For the next few days it was agreed that Allen would bring his toy sub over to Morris' house and they could continue the great fun until that caché of white gold was gone.

  Apparently the clever gadget was still popular even today. A slew of baking powder submarines, deep sea divers, frogmen and sea creatures could still be ordered from a toy manufacturer in Sherman Oaks, California. The cost was negligible. He located the supplier over the internet. Thirty-eight year old Allan Swanson gawked at the offerings for a full five minutes before shutting down the computer. Nostalgia was one thing, but, short of a psychotic break, people couldn't travel back in time. A sink full of baking soda submarines couldn't dull the melancholy or fill the void. He shouldn't have gawked at the obscenely pretty girl. He should have made better choices with his stultified life.

  * * * * *

  The Tuesday before Labor Day, Allan stopped by to collect his daughter. "I could never picture them as a married couple, and yet they’re so blissfully happy together." Muriel tossed the comment out, a total non-sequitur. When she realized that Allan had no idea what she was alluding to, she added, "The Beagles."

  "No, they seem like an odd match," Allan added with a self-conscious chuckle. "But then, it's not like I'm the leading authority on marital bliss."

  "Speaking of romance, how are you doing these days?" Muriel cocked her head to one side and poked her tongue in the side of her mouth causing the cheek to bulge.

  "Okay."

  "Seeing anyone?"

  Allan flinched. Muriel meant no harm. His former spouse was neither vindictive nor intentionally malicious; it wasn't in her genetic makeup. And she seemed genuinely happy, fulfilled in the new marriage. "Nobody special."

  Allan was still ruminating on the mismatched Beagles. The husband, Bruce, was a strikingly handsome outdoorsy type with Robert Redford good looks. One week when he brought Ruthie to her piano lesson, Allan ran into him loading up the Jeep Grand Cherokee with camping equipment and fishing gear. "Going white water rafting in Vermont," the man explained.

  'What about the little woman?"

  Mr. Beagle cracked a conspiratorial grin. "No women allowed, little or full-size, on this trip." He crammed a pair of waterproofed hiking boots to the left of a propane stove. "We're just a bunch of working stiffs traipsing off to commune with Mother Nature."

  His easy-going, if slightly chauvinistic, charm was infectious. Allan certainly couldn't picture the joyless, pokerfaced Muriel Beagle slogging through the underbrush, fighting off mosquitoes as big as raisins and poison ivy for the privilege of sitting on an inflatable raft as it catapulted through roiling water, dodging jagged rocks.

  Allan spent a good fifteen minutes talking with the piano teacher's husband while Ruthie finished up her lesson, and the boisterous man never came up for air. As Bruce Beagle explained it, he and a group of buddies from the heating and refrigeration firm that he owned were heading north to tackle class III and IV rapids on the West River. Driving in separate cars, they would rendezvous at the base camp in Stratton Mountain. They had opted out of the full package, which featured an Alpine village with full amenities in favor of tents and sleeping bags. "I prefer going whole hog with the back-to-nature shtick," Bruce noted.

  Allan was delighted - flattered even - at the way Bruce took him into his confidence. He could almost picture himself shooting the rapids, camped out later that evening on the banks of a placid lake buried in the New England wilderness, throwing back long neck beers and bullshitting with the guys.

  "We put in at Ball Mountain Dam, but the first big water doesn't come until we hit Landslide Rapids."

  "How long a stretch?"

  "About two miles of continuous churning white water." Bruce unscrewed a water-tight aluminum canister stacked with sulfur-tipped wooden matches. Lips moving silently, he counted the slender sticks before securing the lid back in place. "There're a couple of pretty tricky S-turns that push your paddling skills to the limit, but it's really tons of fun."

  Her piano lesson over, Ruthie emerged from the side door. Mrs. Beagle cracked a toothy smile and waved sharply before disappearing back into the music studio. "Seems like you got the best of both worlds," Allan noted, watching his daughter near the porch, playing with a calico kitten. The Beagles had several dogs, three canaries, a painted turtle and indeterminate number of cats.

  "How's that?"

  "Along with a beautiful family, you still get the privilege to come and go as you please." No sooner had he spoken, Allan wished the words back. It sounded peevish - as though he might envy the handsome man's inordinate capacity for pleasure and personal fulfillment.

  Bruce simply smiled and jutted his chin out with a
mischievous smirk. Raising his hands, palms splayed to the bright sky, he whispered, "Guilty as charged." Then the robust man winked, a conspiratorial gesture, and turned his attention back to the packing.

  * * * * *

  Allan took Ruthie to see Toy Story II over the weekend. Afterwards, they went to Ryan's Diner for supper where she ordered a hot dog with curly fries from the children's menu. Allan settled on the brisket. "That Mr. Beagle seems like a swell guy."

  "He cracks tons of jokes," Ruthie waved a French fry in the air, "and he's always smooching and hugging his wife." She dabbed the fry in a puddle of ketchup and deposited it in her mouth.

  "Mrs. Beagle … you're piano teacher? He's always kissing her?"

  "Who else?" Ruthie looked at him queerly. "He can't hardly keep his hands off the woman. It's a bit embarrassing but sort of cute." The waitress returned with a pile of napkins which she centered on the table. "Were you and Mom lovey-dovey like that?"

  Allan speared a slice of brisket and jabbed it in the brown gravy. "Yeah, sort of."

  "Well, were you or weren't you?"

  "At the beginning… for the first few years." He cleared his throat. "I don't think, maybe with the exception of the Beagles, too many people stay that way much beyond the honeymoon."

  "Well they ought to."

  Allan shook his head up and down just a bit too vigorously. It suddenly occurred to him that, somewhere up in the pristine wilderness of Vermont, Bruce Beagle was probably hunched over a campfire with his buddies sipping black coffee. The good-natured man, who brazenly pawed his wife in front of the piano students, would curl up in a sleeping bag and be lulled to sleep by a symphony of frogs, crickets, owls and assorted night creatures. "You know what I liked best about the movie," he blurted, deflecting the conversation elsewhere.

  Allan needed a new life - a hobby, an ardent passion, a raison d’être. He definitely needed a break from the tedium, something a tad more adventuresome than honking on a saxophone at weddings and bar mitzvahs. White water rafting was out of the question. First of all, he had no intention of becoming a Bruce Beagle clone, replicating the man's back-to-nature lifestyle and habits. Secondly, as a swimmer, he hadn’t progressed much beyond the dogpaddle. At one point earlier in the week when they were commiserating, Bruce Beagle wandered into the garage to retrieve an item. "That's one hell of a weapon." Allan gestured at a crossbow hanging from a rack on the far wall.