Читать книгу Indentations and Other Stories - Joe Schall - Страница 9

Bub Lilly was certain of four things when he was twelve: he had acute asthma, he hovered between eighty-two and eighty-five pounds, he did not want to play the trumpet ever again, and he longed to own a Zebra finch and name it Goldy and let it fly free in his bedroom. Like cleats on a slow, spongy, indoor track, these certainties flopped around the perimeter of Bub’s head, setting pace and direction for his life.

He spoke to his dad about it.

“Pop,” he said, practicing the speech alone in his room. “I remember when I was eleven and you said a man should speak up when he’s troubled or he would get crushed like a melon in his head for keeping it all inside or else it would all explode and that’s what I’m doing and I’m telling you I will never never never ever play the trumpet again, and you will sell it for me and buy me a finch named Goldy and then we’ll both be happy and men.”

“Why would you name a finch Goldy?” his father would have said.

So Bub sat on his bed, his skinny butt crinkling the stiff green bedspread, and continued to heave with asthma, unsure about what to say to his father.

He sucked on his inhaler and decided not to tell him that he would never play the trumpet again yet.

Instead, the next day after band practice, Bub pretended that he threw his trumpet into the pond on the way home from school. Actually, he left it by the door in the band director’s office—where the words “Mr. Gregory Bailey, Director,” blared through the etched glass even at night when the school was quiet. Bub walked calmly to the edge of Garret’s Pond, plucked the gleaming instrument from the plush mauve lining of his mind, thonked the mouthpiece into place, and sent the entire beast flickering and whooping through the sky with a sound like a mourning dove’s retreat up, up, and out into the middle of the pond, where it hovered mystically on the water for a moment, then slurped down all at once, leaving behind only a black mysterious bubbling that made Bub grin knowingly.

While Bub stood looking at the pond, Mr. Bailey called Bub’s mom and told her that her son was holding back the band.

“I’m afraid your son is holding back the band,” he said. “And he left his trumpet in my office after practice.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Mrs. Lilly said.

Mrs. Lilly yelled up the steps to her husband and told him that Mr. Bailey said Bub was holding back the band.

“I’ll talk to him,” Mr. Lilly said.

They all talked during dinner.

“More squash?” his mother offered, oozing it onto Bub’s plate.

“Thanks,” Bub said, “are there any more almonds?”

“Your father finished them all,” she said, winking at her husband, signalling him to begin the conversation about Bub’s holding back the band.

“I dropped my trumpet on the way home,” Bub announced, suddenly sitting up straighter in his chair.

“When?” Mrs. Lilly said.

“After band practice. In Garret’s Pond,” Bub said.

“In Garret’s Pond,” Mr. Lilly repeated.

“In the pond,” Bub said. “Definitely.”

Mr. Lilly pensively crunched the fried almonds in his mouth.

“The case too?” Mrs. Lilly said, trying to hide a smile.

“No, not the case,” Bub said, thinking fast. “Just the trumpet. And the mouthpiece. I left the case at school. In Mr. Bailey’s office.”

“Bub,” his dad said, “Mr. Bailey says you’re holding back the band—”

“Why did you leave the case at school?” Mrs. Lilly said.

“I forgot it,” Bub said, looking down at his pasta. The white crescents were cold now and pocked with red pepper slices which Bub picked out and stuck in his pocket when his mom wasn’t looking.

“I wanted to play it on the way home, so I forgot the case,” Bub said, twiddling his fork nervously.

“Why are you holding back the band?” Mr. Lilly said.

“I don’t know,” Bub said, confused. “I don’t know what it means. I wanted to play the trumpet on the way home, so I forgot the case, and I slipped and dropped it in Garret’s Pond, and by now it’s all rusted up I guess, and that’s it.”

Mr. Lilly noisily exhaled, sputtering his lips.

“Do you like being in the band, Bub?” his mother said.

“It’s nice,” Bub said, avoiding his father’s eyes, “but the best part is the spit thing. I like to pull on the little plug and watch the spit run out. The more I play it the more spit there is. Sometimes I spit into the mouthpiece, hard on purpose, just so I can open it up and let the spit come out, but it doesn’t work. I think the spit gets clogged up inside and comes out later when you don’t expect it at all. It gets stuck in the coils or something.”

“But do you like it?” his mother said.

Bub was quiet. He switched from his fork to his butterknife, feeling its weight in his hand. He felt suddenly bold, and wondered if it was a good time to mention the Zebra finch named Goldy.

“Playing the trumpet is good for your asthma,” Mr. Lilly said flatly.

It was the old argument. Bub had a million retorts planned. It makes my head soft. It hurts my heart. It gives me diarrhea. Bullshit. Mr. Bailey is a queer. It’s a waste of good brass. I feel more like a flute, Pop.

Bub gripped the butterknife tighter, blade-down, and looked over at his father’s curved back. He could see the bulge of the spine through the crisp blue shirt. It would be so easy, he thought, to just go on over and poke him in the back with this knife and leave it sticking there while he falls flat on his face there in the plate. Then Bub imagined he would pick up the scattered almonds one at a time and stand there holding them happily between his teeth while his mother looked on, puzzled, asking him if he liked being in the band or not.

“I quit the band,” he said, standing up.

“What? No,” Mr. Lilly said.

“Tomorrow,” Bub said.

“You’re not,” his father said.

“I’m quitting the band tomorrow and selling my trumpet for money,” Bub said.

“Sit down, Bubba. You left the trumpet in Mr. Bailey’s office. He called your mother after school.”

“Tell him I quit,” Bub said.

“No.”

Bub shoved his chair behind him with the backs of his knees and walked away as slowly as he could stand it, waiting for the smack of his father’s hand across the back of his neck. He climbed the stairs heavily, dragging one arm along the thick oak railing, his chest tightening with the first of the night’s wheezes. Below him he could hear his mother, noisily clattering silverware as she cleared the table.

In his room the asthma hit harder. The wheezes came and went quickly now, getting ready to slow down and firmly settle like an engine in Bub’s chest, chugging a steady, patterned lullaby that had periodically kept him awake at night since he was five. The lullaby was most pleasant when the engine ran slowly, so Bub relaxed his chest by turning out the light and standing a few inches from the wall, leaning his forehead against the poster his father had hung to inspire him when he was in the fourth grade. It was a reproduction of an aerial photograph of the 1980 Hilton Junior High School Marching Band, taken directly overhead from a helicopter which had been flown in special. Bub’s father, a math teacher at Hilton Junior High, had helped Mr. Bailey design the formation. In the picture, Mr. Bailey sat comfortable and cross-legged in the exact center of the football field, flanked by tight, expanding circles of the ninety-seven band members sitting on the grass with elbows locked. They were all decked out in their new orange and mint green uniforms. For the coup de grace—as Mr. Bailey told the photographer—the band members were surrounded by widening circles of supine musical instruments, organized by order of appearance in the Hilton alma mater, with the brass and woodwind bells all turned counterclockwise, and the bass drum at 12:00. The band members sat either back-to-back or foot-to-foot, all the smiles tilted up at the camera, the high fuzzy white hats forming jagged circles of their own, which layered down smaller and smaller to finally embrace Mr. Bailey’s upturned face in expanding folds of cottony white love.

Bub didn’t know that his father had helped to design the poster, but he still sensed that it had some odd historical power over him. When he slept, a car’s headlights occasionally arced along his bedroom wall and the fuzzy white hats gave him two long secret winks.

In his room, Bub rocked familiarly from side-to-side on his forehead against the poster, faintly aware of some memory of dinner stuck in his throat, catching fragments of the conversation downstairs between wheezes.

His own mind. Lips. A little nervous. Practice, practice. Asthma too. Walks around puckering. The paper route. Quit the band. Acting up. His own head. I know.

They were talking about him, Bub knew. He could tell that he and his mother had won by the lowering volume of his father’s voice. Soon all he heard was the slowing pull and release of the asthma engine in his chest. He reached a comfortable rhythm, getting to where he pretended there were tiny bunches of bubbles packed into the pasta crescents lying somewhere beneath his lungs. With each exhale he managed to release a few bubbles at a time, which rose up to scrape and tickle his throat, then escaped out onto the bed, where they popped and left small damp circles. Now he would be able to fall asleep if he propped himself up on an extra pillow. Now he could pull down the poster and lean his forehead against the blank, cream wall.

Tomorrow, he decided firmly, he would quit the band, take the trumpet to the pet store, leave it by the birdcages, and carry Goldy home in a tiny, fold-out, colored box.