by Tito Perdue
“Wait a minute, you aren’t getting nervous on me again, are you?”
Lee snorted and waved it away.
“I don’t know about you, Sloan.”
“But what if we don’t win anything?”
“Well, I guess we’ll just have to go outside and dig a hole for ourseffs.”
Cheered, Lee changed positions, carrying his horn as it were a bottle of Orange Drink. The stage was further than he had expected, higher, taller, and took up a greater deal of space. The audience had turned into a plethora of little round heads with eyes and other features. The band members now seated themselves, bringing it off with considerable aplomb. He saw some of the worst boys wearing some of the most serious expressions. If he himself should do badly, or rather make no sound at all, perhaps the audience would think the silence had come from elsewhere. Putting on an annoyed expression, he placed the screwdriver beneath the chair and pretended to take out the fresh new reed he lacked and lock it into place. The concert was to endure for twenty minutes, a considerable time in some respects. He turned to Smitty, who seemed on the verge of falling off to sleep.
“What time is it?” Lee whispered.
The boy awoke, checked his watches, and then used up several moments to calculate the average time. It was his style to play much too loudly on his drums, a trait that might help to disguise Lee’s inevitable silence. It was then that Chichi dropped his mouthpiece on the floor and had to crawl for it; except for that, the hall was silent. Lee waited for the conductor to lift his arms, hold them there for a long time, and then set the music going. Lee, his cheeks bulging from the pressure, blew strenuously into his horn, actually creating a small noise somewhat like a cricket’s. He had not played twenty notes before he realized that he was going to be all right, that no one noticed, that the trumpets were carrying the burden, and what a relief it was to be among allies and friends.
They won no ribbons on that day. Lee, hopping and skipping down the sidewalk, ran to get on board the bus before anyone could preempt his position in the rear. It was well past seven o’clock at night, and the city was speckled with bright, gaudy neon lights. Suddenly Lee spun about and tried to initiate a discussion with the girl behind him, till forced to see that she hadn’t gotten on board as yet. The last he wanted was for some seventh-grader or trombone player, or something like that, to take her place.
“Well,” he said, turning toward Cecil, “I guess we didn’t win any ribbons.”
“Next year.”
Next year they would both be eighth-graders. A thousand years might go by, and they’d always be traveling to Tuscaloosa each and every year—such was Lee’s unexamined expectation at that particular time.
“Think I’ll start playing the trumpet,” he said thoughtfully, looking out into the night.
“What you need is a reed.”
The bus was mostly full by now, but still he hadn’t caught sight of the girl, not until she spoke up from the dark domain in the extreme corner where she had been abiding all the time.
“I reckon he can play a trumpet if he wants to,” she said.
He recognized the voice and, coming closer, recognized the lower left quadrant of her face that had partially emerged from the shadows. If he could just once get a clear full view of her whole person at the same time, his desire then to jump on top of her probably would be even greater than it was now. Up front, the radio was tuned to a local program of high quality where “Why Don’t You Believe Me?” was playing. Using his Will, he asked to hear it again, but was given “Wheel of Fortune” instead. Previously Preston had been sitting with Mattie Lou, and it interested Lee to see that he had changed over to Lois, where they were whispering about something or another. Their profiles, viewed against the night, were those of a gander and a goose, or like cardboard cutouts or, more accurately—they were still wearing their official hats—like a tea kettle and a coffee pot. As for the conductor, his profile was smaller than it used to be, the result of the band’s performance, as Lee believed. Suddenly the bus lurched out into the traffic and drove away.
“Hey! Where’s Clarence?” someone asked.
Lee could see where at least three people were smoking cigarettes, even if he could not readily name them in the dark. He heard a noise that sounded like a girl slapping someone’s face. Worst of all was the driver, thoroughly drunk by now. He teetered from side to side. Outside, a tall man standing in the intersection tried briefly but unavailingly to force open one of the windows on that side. But they were too fast for him. They had come into an area of highly granulated neon, a fluid substance that ran into the alleys and was reflected in pools of ink. Even now some of the Tuscaloosians were still at work, still laboring in the upper stories of office buildings. He saw a worried-looking man hunched over a desk, and then a woman in an apron using a broom. This was the adult world, a form of life in which a ride by twilight aboard a bus was no doubt a routine matter. Saw a coed pacing homeward hurriedly—(where is she now?)—with two books cradled in her arms. And a policeman wearing sunglasses in the pitch-black night. He shivered, Lee, saying, “Good Lord, I’ve still got another sixty or seventy years for things like this!”
His arrogance increased. He was sitting on the next-to-last seat of a Ford-built bus somewhere in Alabama in late October of that year. He had needed eleven years to arrive at this point, and things could get only better as time went on. He turned to look at Gwen, who smiled right back, giving him the sort of maternal glance he loved to see in ninth-grade women. Cecil himself was half asleep, but ready at all times to come awake in case of emergency. And the next he knew, they had broken out of the city and into the ambient countryside.
The bus was so fast, so strongly put together, so pressurized and waterproof that he began to imagine they were on board a submarine gliding at high speed above the ocean floor. Strange creatures, squids and octopuses, pressed at the windows and tried to look inside. He saw a ruined fortress and broken tower, as at first he had let himself believe, and then the yellow Moon itself, a frail structure crumbling into dust. Telephone poles came running and jumping past, and then a few scuttled farms that had settled to the bottom of the sea. Later on, laughing back upon it, he would remember it as only the third “pre-experience” (pre-aesthetic experience) to have been vouchsafed him.
Up front, the beautiful “Tennessee Waltz” had played twice in succession, followed then by “Ebb Tide,” “Harbor Lights,” and “Red Sails in the Sunset.” It made Lee bitter, knowing in advance that this journey must someday end. There were twenty souls on board that bus, each with a profile unique to him or her alone. They rode then though a small town in which everyone either had gone to sleep or else was sitting in darkness on their porches. Just then, a raccoon or opossum stepped out into the road and fired back at them with amber rays extruding from its eyes. The woods were dark and deep and full of beings enduring lives of constant insecurity. That was when Cecil bent forward and whispered in his ear, “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You need to calm down some.”
“I will,” he said.
He didn’t. There was a ninth-grader sitting not more than twenty-seven inches behind him, a pretty one lucubrating in the shadows. He let a few seconds go by and then turned and, sheltering his eyes, began scanning for her in the dark.
“I’m here,” she said.
“I guess we didn’t win any ribbons.”
She laughed.
“The driver’s drunk. That’s why we’re going so fast.”
“I like it that way.”
“Me, too.”
They grinned evilly at one another. He could see her right eye, or part of it anyway, and the gleaming bill of her military hat. The next minutes went past slowly, both of them still looking at one another. Gwen had fallen asleep on Cecil’s shoulder, allowing him to guard over her while he was smoking. There was yet another person of some sort on the back bench whom Lee hadn’t seen before. He caught a glimpse, Lee, of a minor mete
orite falling to earth slightly north of Vance. He was also aware that the ninth-grade girl had moved somewhat closer to him, so much so in fact that their two heads were but about ten inches apart.
“I saw a falling star,” he said.
“Oh, you did not.”
“I’m not saying it was a real big one.”
“Oh! You’d say anything, wouldn’t you?”
He admitted that he would. Just now they were about nine inches apart. Meantime Cecil had turned his attention to them and was watching closely.
“She wants you to kiss her, Slade,” said Cecil, using his new favorite name for the boy who did his homework.
Lee waved it away. They were not that close, not yet.
“It’s up to him,” the girl said.
Lee trembled. They were seven inches apart, possibly less, and he could clearly make out her lips, indisputably those of a girl. They were just simply different from each other, boys and girls, and meantime she was a person in her own right with inclinations of her own. He now recognized that fourth person, a former friend of his.
“You going to kiss her? Or not?”
“Haven’t decided.”
“You better. You don’t get a chance like this every day, for Pete’s sakes!”
It was true that she seemed to be waiting. He could see no actual harm in coming as close to her as she already had come to him, a gambit that put them about three inches apart. No other falling stars were to be seen at this particular time.
“Do it!”
Lee came nearer, giving her the concentrated attention that women, according to his sources, actually crave. By this time, their lips were actually touching, and he was able to testify to the pressure that hers applied to his. Six seconds went by in this condition while the half-dozen persons who had gathered about cheered him on. She did not move away, neither did she retreat in any direction, the most brazen behavior he had seen since being assaulted by that high school girl in the Canteen. Having now finished with one kiss, he came back for more.
“Alright!” Cecil said. “Don’t stop now.”
“I won’t.”
He was beginning to understand the attraction of it. It was not the very first time for him, and yet he was far from being bored. By now the girl had actually placed one of her hands on the back of his head and was using it egregiously to increase the pressure. And just how many other things had she not already done in her fourteen years? Loins benumbed, he grew dizzy with excitement.
“Keep it up, Sloan. She likes it.”
“Me, too.”
Laughter from several places. Suddenly the girl drew back to take a breath, wasted time as it seemed to him. Reaching out, he was able to take her by the neck and bring her back.
“Look at Lee!”
“Yeah. He’s one of us now.”
Again the girl drew back. Lee could feel his gorge rising.
“Hey!”
“No, you’ve had enough.”
“I have not!”
Laughter.
“Wait till next year. When you’re older.”
Next year? He wanted to cry. Also it seemed to him that some of the others were beginning to lose interest in what he was doing, a tendency he had noticed before in people.
“Okay, one more, okay?” he said loudly, trying to bring them back.
The girl laughed, came forward, and gave him a brief one that endured for hardly more than a second or two. Next thing he knew, she had drawn back into her shadows, where he was never to see her again.
The evening now came on in full force, bringing with it clouds darker than the night. Darker still were Alabama’s two varieties of bats, great ones and small, searching desperately across the sky. Itself, the Moon had separated into three unequal pieces, where they appeared on the brink of going out entirely. Turned he then toward the north-northeast, where he caught tonight’s first view of the gleaming lava streams running down old Epsilon, largest of the volcanoes that lay over against Jacksonville. At the same time, he half-hoped to see the stars form themselves into the likenesses of historic faces, Confederate generals and people like that. And yet his aesthetic development was not quite as advanced as that, not at that particular time, at any rate. Next, he turned to speak to Cecil, but then decided not to say anything when he recognized that the boy and girl had lapsed off to sleep in one another’s arms.
It might be that everyone was asleep, everyone but him. Nor did he expect to sleep, not after today, and not for a long, long time to come. Accordingly, he came out of his berth and went forward, checking each and every face one by one insofar as the Moon allowed it.
Seven
Retiring early (and rising early, too), he got through the next four and a half weeks without further slippage. His stamp collection, built on borrowed money, was also thriving, especially in the Sino-Japanese region. (Later on, looking back upon it, he was to remember his surprise when he found that these were two distinct societies, each with a writing system of its own. [Earlier still he had thought the Sun and Moon were one and the same disc, albeit in two modalities. {And dogs and cats the male and female of a single species.}])
He needed three days to organize the above-referenced stamps and then one day more to leave school early on a dental excuse, and hurry off downtown to see The Adventures of Robin Hood for the third time. He admitted it, that he had perhaps allowed himself to become overly focused on this historical personage who had so amazingly and with such attention to detail prefigured his own personality and career. Both these people had been destined for heroism, even if perforce Lee would have to carry out his part without benefit of background music. And then, too, the weather was getting chill, and he had to hurry home from the theater, arriving sixteen minutes too late for Sky King.
He loved to run past the Christmas decorations, the ornamented trees, the strings of lights, and at least two places showing cardboard Santas disappearing into chimneys with bags of gifts. This was not the largest of Alabama’s cities, and yet the spirit here was superior even to Tuscaloosa. Halfway home, he stopped to gaze upon a tree that had been painted white and adorned with blue lights only, the loneliest, remotest, and most dignified of all the things he saw that night.
It pleased him to run into his own home (warm, stocked with food, dog), and then to assimilate the last minutes of his favorite radio program before Gabriel Heatter came on. Hunched in front of an instrument as big almost as a refrigerator, he loved to dial across the miles, sometimes happening upon Philadelphia or New York, where people spoke the way they did. His father meantime, mostly asleep by now, sat shriveled up in the corner of his chair, his cigarette ash ready to topple off onto the floor. The man had been laboring all day, but could look forward to a few hours of rest before having to arise and go off and toil away another day. It was the common fate.
Lee next turned his attention to his younger brother, a short personality with a large head and pale face who stood some ten feet away, watching everything. Finally, their mother, who took up the second-best chair—she was knitting or darning (he didn’t know the difference) while wearing the little smile so characteristic of her when the family was together, warm, fed, and safe. As to the world outside with its cars and criminals, the noise of other people’s radios and footsteps passing by—they knew nothing about the family and its private dealings. Which is to say until about nine when, suddenly, Steven burst through the front door and, after giving his regards to Leland’s parents, asked to borrow a no. 2 lead pencil. That door was never locked, a Southern tradition that his father was unwilling to ignore. Besides, he had a .32 caliber revolver in his top drawer, where Lee was wont to take it out from time to time and show it to other boys.
He retired soon after, abandoning the radio to his parents. He had hoped to go to sleep instantaneously; instead he had to fight for it. He dreamt at first that he was walking across an open field, and when that threatened to bore him back to wakefulness, imagined himself aboard a submarine with a small crew o
f the people who were dearest to him. Ten minutes went by, the boat continually diving until it reached the very lowest level of the sea. Here, in utter silence, rocked gently by the currents, a person could sleep.
He woke with the day, got into his clothes, and then hurriedly undressed again when he saw that he had been mistaken about the actual time. He judged it at somewhere between midnight and dawn, the best of hours, when the malfeasance of the world was at its lowest ebb. His brother had also climbed into bed at some point during the foregoing evening, and when Lee propped himself on his elbow and inspected him more closely, he verified that the boy’s eyelids had become translucent, an amazing development that allowed him to maintain vigil even at this hour. It chagrined Lee even more that a late-season moth had found a way into the room and was beating on the ceiling with two pairs of tattered wings. Outside a car drove past, casting contorted shadows that leapt from wall to wall. Sleep? In a world of stamps, heroes, girls, radio programs? He laughed out loud at the thought of it.
He waited until it really was day and then again transferred over into his clothes. A great shame, that people had bodies. Nor could he add up the time he had spent washing and brushing and the rest of all that. His brother had gone. Came then to him the scent of bacon, along with the somewhat more modulated smell of toast and eggs. His father had not had the rest he needed, and the woman remained silent as she hovered over the table in her robe. Unwilling to ask for any more money than he had already spent on stamps, Lee mentioned something about the need to replace his no. 2 lead pencil, a ploy that brought five cents.
He squandered several minutes waiting for Cherise to come along, and when she wouldn’t do so, proceeded on to school in a darkening mood. The day was cold, by his standards, and overcast, the sort of weather that up north would have been considered very good. No single persimmon still hewed to the topmost branches of Mrs. Jenson’s tree; her Christmas decorations were superb, however. He then passed in front of a house that hadn’t bothered even to set up a wreath on the door, nor tree in the parlor, nor anything. Gorge rising, he tried to understand the sort of people who declined to enter into the season. Because they wished to distance themselves from their neighbors? Or had given up on life entirely? Even his own father, as tired as he might be, had set up a high-quality tree.