Young Man With a Horn

by Dorothy Baker

  So they parted company with Jeff Williams, but not before he and Rick had arranged to meet at the Cotton Club the next Sunday to talk over problems connected with playing the piano.

  BOOK TWO

  1

  I COULD put it under a thick lens now, the way they show seeds in the very act and petals curling out in those educational movies. It would be a matter of the voice deepening, muscle toughening, and beard sprouting, phenomena which are of little interest in themselves, and serve only to indicate that the whistling-post of childhood has been whistled for and passed up and that the erstwhile child is now in the clear and going, single-track, full steam, to become one kind of an adult, the best kind or the worst kind or any combination in between.

  It was inevitable for Rick to become what he became. Jeff Williams taught him to play the piano; Art Hazard helped him pick out a trumpet when he got the money together, and having gone as far as that, showed him how to play it. The rest of it was a compulsion that kept him tirelessly working. To play the piano, to play the trumpet, to make music. It was with him constantly the way fads are with the rest of us. He couldn’t quit playing; it was the way you can feel about solitaire; as soon as you see it won’t come out this time you scoop up the cards, shuffle them, and start laying them out again; try it one more time, and if it doesn’t come out this time you’ll call it off and go to bed. But if you’re an old solitaire player, or a new solitaire player, you don’t go to bed. You try it again, and again, and if it comes out you wonder if maybe it would come out two times hand running, so you lay them out again just to see. And if it does it would be something of a record three times hand running, and if it doesn’t, why it seems sort of a shame to quit when you’re beat, so you keep it up until some outside influence like the telephone or simple exhaustion stops you. So with Rick. The fascination of making music was on him like a leech. He’d sit at the Cotton Club piano and practice until his fingernails ached from being sent the wrong way, and he’d play his trumpet until his lip crumpled up on him and shook miserably in the face of further discipline. But he stopped only when he had to, when it was time for him to go to Gandy’s or get something to eat.

  Or go to school. He got away with truancy for almost eight months, and just when he was beginning to feel easy in his mind about it, Lowell High School caught up with him at Gandy’s and raised an awful howl about him and Gandy both. He had stayed with his job even after he got his trumpet, because it gave him two-fifty a week and a chance to see Smoke Jordan daily without appointment. Those afternoons of pin-setting, moreover, gave his life something to turn on, a fair substitute for the routine solidity that family life usually provides. It gave him something to get away from and come back to, the tie that makes freedom valuable. The truancy fellow, I must say, gave him a tie that was a beauty from this angle. He hauled Rick into the Juvenile Court, where they made him wait around for a while to get into a receptive mental state and then put some questions to him, very brusque, enough to scare any kid of Rick’s constitution into piety for a good long time. Then they put him on probation, with twice-a-month reports to make, and gave him police escort back to school.

  And there he was with Lowell High School on him like an Oregon boot from eight-thirty until three, Monday through Friday. There were two months to go in what should have been his first year, and of course it was a mistake to make him sit there and say ‘I don’t know’ to every single question they put to him the rest of the term. Very demoralizing, very hard on the pride. But sons of the poor aren’t sent to the seashore with private tutors when they fall behind in their studies. They take their instruction when the State puts it out, and if they fail they fail. Rick Martin illustrated this point perfectly. He got to school tardy by eight months and wholly unprepared, gave out I don’t know as the answer to all questions, and beyond that was literally dumb.

  The Juvenile Court had such a hold on him that he went back to Lowell the next year too, starting from scratch as a freshman. There should have been nothing to it this time; he had an even chance with the new crop of Japanese, but it didn’t work out. He’d got his one answer so firmly in mind the year before that it seemed a waste of time to get up any new ones. He gangled at his desk thinking about music and making up long fictions in which he and Smoke and Jeff and Hazard were always turning the musical world completely upside down and smashing their way to triumph after triumph. He could make up six or seven of them in one day, each one nicely timed to last out a class period, or he could make up one whopper, divided into chapters and broadened to get him through the whole day. It was always the same story with slight variations in events. The charm of ever retelling such fiction lay in the author’s right, as author, to furnish himself, as hero, with everything he lacked in his non-fictional life. He was rich (at least you ought to see his apartment); he was brilliant (witness his profound critical judgments of music and musicians); he was well thought of by one and all but looked upon as something of a god by his constant friends and colleagues, Jordan, Williams, and Hazard (color deleted, at least not so noticeable); and finally and overwhelmingly, he was what a trumpet player!

  He got through the days so, and at three o’clock he was free to dump his books into a locker, get out of the building, and light a cigarette. He might well have been held up to Boy Scouts as an example to support the theory that cigarette smoking dulls the mind and stunts the growth, which was that day’s counterpart of today’s richly advertised notion that cigarette smoking tends to heighten the intellectual stature, steady the nerves, and work wonders for the complexion. And having lighted a cigarette, Rick would go, as fast as he could get there, to the Cotton Club, let himself in with a duplicate key he’d had made from Jeff’s, and get started on the Cotton Club baby grand.

  There, his day finally started, he worked with an intensity that you don’t find in every fifteen-year-old boy; that you don’t find, in fact, in anybody but the off-center ones, the ones who have to work whether they like it or not, and not for economic reasons either. Afternoons, vis-à-vis with the Cotton Club baby grand, he shed the husk of indifference that was the protection of Rick Martin, the ten o’clock scholar, and became excited and forceful. He had in his blood the lust to subdue, to force matter to take form. He was more interested in playing the trumpet than the piano, but he would not, for all that, stop playing the piano until he knew he had it where he wanted it. When he had it down, eating out of his hand, he could rest; until that time should come, he practiced.

  Jeff gave him pointers on Sunday afternoons. He taught him to play from sheet music, fill in the gaps with proper chord sequences, and elaborate the right hand with more or less conventional breaks—simple things, meant only to give him the feeling. The standard break was not a bad pedagogical idea; if Jeff had reasoned, he doubtless would have said that before you can invent a thing that’s really fresh you have to know what’s conventional. He didn’t reason, but he had a good set of right instincts which accomplished reason’s purpose admirably. His trump in teaching, however, was that each Sunday after he got through showing Rick what to do, he himself took over the piano and ended the lesson with a concert that sent Rick off in an ecstasy of high purpose. Sensitive students of music go one of two ways when they hear a really great performance; young violinists, specifically, come away from a Yehudi concert feeling either that they’d better take up tennis or else get more time somehow to practice. Rick was with the last class; when Jeff Williams polished off the lesson by giving him some gratuitous musicianship, Rick took it like the whip of discipline and went away champing with determination. And determination was with him no empty abstraction.

  He kept it up. He’d practice about two hours every afternoon at the Cotton Club, and then go home as fast as he could and get something to eat and put in a couple of hours on the trumpet. Then, around nine, he’d meet Smoke at Gandy’s and they’d go to hear Jeff’s band for a while, inside now, either sitting on the floor at the back of the shell or standing at the back of the ha
ll with the dancers between them and the music. He’d got so used to being with negroes that it no longer bothered him when people gave him funny looks. He’d come to take such glances for granted, as do all those who are stuck with some outward peculiarity. There it is, look at it; everybody else does. The dancers at the Cotton Club didn’t try to figure it out; for them he was one of two things, the all-white result of an unorthodox interracial union, or else a white boy of strange taste. The two possibilities flashed fast into their minds and fast out again, and they went on dancing.

  Before the year was out Smoke had a regular job playing drums for Jeff. Ward folded up with a stomachache one night, turned the drums over to Smoke, and went home. Three days later he was dead, killed by the poison of a burst appendix.

  Rick was practicing at the Cotton Club the next afternoon and Smoke banged at the back door. He said it as soon as Rick let him in: ‘Ward’s dead.’ Rick was miles away; he’d been working hard. ‘You mean Ward?’ he said when it finally clicked. The two of them stood at the door, Rick looking unintelligent as if he’d just been awakened from a deep sleep, Smoke looking sad.

  They stood silent a while, and then Rick’s face lost the fuzzy look he got when music was on him, and he came reasonably back into the world.

  ‘Gee!’ he said, shoving his hands deep into his pockets and wagging his head back and forth like big business, ‘That’s going to make it bad. Who’ll Jeff get for the traps?’ Then the two-plus-two logic added itself up and Rick turned a bright face up to Smoke as if he’d come independently on something very good. ‘You,’ he said. ‘Gee!’

  Smoke confirmed the discovery and looked sadder than ever. ‘Jeff asked me this morning. Poor guy. Here I been playing his drums two nights and wishing he’d stay sick a little while longer, in a way, or take a good rest for a while, and then he just hauled off last night and died.’

  Smoke was maybe going to cry; he kept moving the back of his hand back and forth across his forehead and showed his dusty pink palm. ‘Jeff and Davis and I were talking to his old lady this morning,’ he said. ‘She said he came home that first night he got sick, and after he went to bed he started hollering around and she didn’t go in to see him because she thought he was just tight or something, but after while he sounded like he was crying, so she went in and he was rolling around on the floor. She said she thought first maybe he had religion, but then she figured it must be something he ate, so she left and went up to the corner to phone for a doctor, but she didn’t know how to work the nickel phone and lost her nickel and started walking. She found a cop finally clear down on Alameda and he phoned for the ambulance, but old George was pretty bad off when they got to him. They had to take him to the county hospital almost to Pasadena, she said, and write up a lot of papers and the next morning they operated on him, but it didn’t do him no good anyhow. His appendix bust was what happened.’

  Rick turned away to avoid the sight of the pink palm moving so constantly back and forth above Smoke’s wide eyes. He walked back to the shell where Ward’s drums were, saying, ‘Sure too bad.’ Then he looked back at Smoke and said, ‘When you going to start?’

  Smoke, following slowly, said: ‘You wouldn’t figure a guy all of us knew would haul off and die that way. Everybody knew him. Gives you a kind of a funny feeling for a guy that’s always been around like that to die.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Rick said, and let it go at that, eyeing the drums.

  Smoke, bent on philosophy, discussed death in its narrow aspect and in the large. The large he dealt with very soundly; death comes, he said, to all of us, to the powerful and to the powerless. Take for instance the richest man in the world, he’s got to take it on the same basis as a mill hand. It comes one way or it comes another. What’s the difference, maybe, how you die? Or when? In a hundred years who knows whether you got blasted coming out of a trench with an idea of killing some Germans for your country, or whether you sat it out in an electric chair for knifing somebody you really wanted to knife?

  ‘They know all right if you’re the Unknown Soldier,’ Rick said, in defense of an honorable death.

  Such incontrovertible tribute to honor broke Smoke’s train of thought. He turned back fast to the case in point, to death in the narrow aspect. Here was George Ward dead, and for no reason. Twenty-one years old was all he was. If he could die like that so could anybody, Nathan could, Bud could, you could. A thing like that can make you distrustful, suspicious of the ones you’ve got the very most faith in. Gives you a morbid feeling about every living thing.

  ‘Old Ward,’ he said.

  ‘When you going to start?’ Rick said. He didn’t have anything to say about death; the only thing he ever had anything to say about was music. From his own point of view as a pianist and trumpet player he could tell you whether a piece was hard or easy; in a larger sense, as critic, he could say right off whether a thing was good or bad. His instinctive taste was infallible within the bounds of his chosen field. Outside of that he was deaf, dumb, blind, even slightly halt and more or less lame. What was death to him; what was plane geometry; what was Spanish Conversation and Composition? He looked steadily, with appraising eye, at the late George Ward’s drums.

  ‘I guess I start regular tonight,’ Smoke said. ‘I been playing for him three nights, counting part of the night he got sick, and he only died this morning at four o’clock. I don’t feel so good about it either. Playing a dead man’s drums; I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know how to play a drum, like I never saw one of the things until right now. I could tell Jeff to get Mort Fricke. He’d do it.’

  Rick got a gleam in his eye. First time he’d ever seen anything wrong with Smoke.

  ‘My gosh!’ he said with a flash of real anger. ‘You mean you might not take the job when Jeff asked you and everything? My gosh, you big horse’s tail, something must be wrong with your brains.’

  The way he said them they were harsh words. Smoke looked up, shocked; he couldn’t believe he’d heard it right. He sank slowly to the piano bench, laid his head on the black and white keys, and began to cry; no noise, but he was crying all right. Rick looked at the ceiling, then at the floor, and finally at Smoke. His tension broke at the sight of the black head bowed in grief for a dead friend and in pain from the words of a live one. He dropped to the bench beside Smoke, threw an arm around his neck, and with his face on the keys close beside Smoke’s he made a decent confession:

  ‘I didn’t mean to call you a horse’s tail, Dan. All I meant was you’re a good man on drums and now Jeff needs one, and you’re really good. Why I said it is I like you better than anybody. Damn it, honey, don’t cry any more or I’ll have to too. I’m sorry I said it, and I didn’t mean it. Honest to Christ, I didn’t mean it.’

  He did the best he could, considering that this was the first time he’d ever handled any tenderness directly. His knowledge of the jargon was limited to the lyrics of popular songs. He made it work, though, well enough to make Smoke stop crying. Both of them rose from the piano bench recovered, the one reassured and the other exculpated and neither one embarrassed, though the one had certainly wept like a nervous woman and the other had fallen into the wrong terminology.

  Here, Rick said, let’s smoke a cigarette. And they did. And after a moment Rick laid his cigarette in a groove above the keyboard where another cigarette had been laid sometime, sat down again, and said, ‘What do you think of this?’ And he played through the fast part of a piece called ‘Dog on the Piano,’ a tone poem of a sort, sequel to another one called ‘Kitten on the Keys’ which was very popular with that day’s virtuosi. Rick hit right into it and when he’d finished it Smoke said, ‘If I couldn’t see it was you I’d know it was Jeff.’ The extreme compliment. ‘How long you been practicing up on that?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, about a week,’ Rick said. A lie, a clear-cut lie. He’d spent two hours a day on it for a good three weeks.

  ‘Play that part again,’ Smoke said. His eyes had lost their beagle look. The whites were on
ce more white. Rick played again, and halfway through Smoke sat down at Ward’s drums, and then it was just a question of time. He and Rick played until the cook was busy in the kitchen and the hall was almost dark. They left together.

  ‘George’s mother’s getting him up a funeral for tomorrow afternoon,’ Smoke said outside. ‘You could come if you wanted to; it’s just for friends. She asked Jeff to play, and old Jeff don’t know what to do. He can’t think what to play, because it’s got to be—oh, you know how it’d have to be, and he says the piano at the church has got at least six or eight keys on it that won’t do nothing but click, and he’s scared it won’t sound so good. He’s going to see if Art will play “The Holy City” and let him just play the piano part soft, if it’s all right with Mrs. Ward. It’s a pretty good tune. It goes “Jerusalem, Jerusalem.” Sounds good on a trumpet.’

  Smoke sang ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem’ all the way down the block, making his voice ring out clear like a military horn. At the corner where the ways parted he stopped singing and said, ‘You coming to the funeral or not?’

  Rick couldn’t say. It was another one of those questions which, faced one way, require careful consideration, and faced the other way, require equally careful consideration. ‘What do you say?’ he said.

  Smoke took it slowly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s for his friends, and you’re one of his friends; but it will be mostly people you don’t know.’

  There it was, faced this way and faced that way. ‘Oh, I’ll think it over,’ Rick said with the air of one who doesn’t want to do any more facing. Then, shifting his ground, he gave out a question to Smoke: ‘You going to play tonight?’

  ‘I guess it’s about all I can do,’ Smoke answered, and like a good poem, the words meant more than they said.

  ‘I guess I won’t come down tonight,’ Rick yelled from a half-block away. ‘I got some work to do.’