James Van Pelt - The Radio Magician and Other Stories

That week was his toughest trial. Fright. Fighting. Despair. To end it, he took the only step he knew: he called for a practice, and they became a band again.

Cowdrey trod softly from door to door, pausing, listening, and moving on.

He stopped for an extra long time outside Taylor Beau’s room. Was Liz Waters in there with him? Were they in Liz’s room? Cowdrey rested his hand on the doorknob. No way they could be serious about a marriage. They were children, junior high students, not adults; under astonishing circumstances, to be sure, but band standards and school regulations glued them together. For all his years as director, Cowdrey lived by one rule: would he be comfortable with the band’s activities if parents or school board members watched? This marriage talk did not fit.

No sound beyond the closed door. His hand tightened on the knob; he didn’t turn it. Did he want to know?

Next he paused outside Elise’s door. She wouldn’t be asleep. She’d be looking over the day’s notes, rewriting. Cowdrey shivered thinking about her brilliance. What must it have been like for Mozart’s father when a three-year-old Amadeus picked out thirds and sixths on the harpsichord, when the father realized the son had surpassed him and would continue to grow beyond his comprehension and hope? But did Mozart eat and breathe music like Elise? Did he ever believe that music would take him home? Cowdrey didn’t think so. Maybe at the end of Mozart’s life, when the brain fevers wracked him, and he could feel death’s hand on his neck. Maybe then he wrote with equal intensity.

Not many teachers ever had the chance to work with an Elise. If they did, they prayed they wouldn’t ruin her vision, that they wouldn’t poison her ear.

When he reached the hall’s end, he turned and repeated the process back to his door. At first, he and Ms. Rhodes had done the room check together, then stood guard in the hall until the children quieted. After a few weeks, they had traded nights. Now, he patrolled alone. Perhaps Elise was right. Maybe it was too much for him to handle.

He sighed. The silent hall stretched before him. He felt his pulse in his arm where he leaned against the wall. Soon, his chin headed for his chest. Cowdrey jerked himself awake, walked the hallway’s length two more times before admitting he had to go to bed. In wakefulness’ last few seconds, head resting on the pillow, he imagined he heard doors opening, the stealthy pad of bare feet, and the hush of doors gently closing on clandestine liaisons. Could Taylor and Liz be a single case, or had he lost control? A tear crept down his cheek as consciousness flitted away.

In the morning, Elise met him in the hallway. “Here are the variations I told you about for the Beatles medley. Mostly I need the saxophones’ sheets, but I also syncopated the drums for ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ and reworked the trombone bridge into ‘Yellow Submarine,’ so I’ll need their music too.”

Cowdrey nodded as he took the scores. “Did you sleep?”

Elise made a checkmark on her clipboard. She moved to her next item. “I thought if we told the sections to treat their breathing exercises this morning like they were all preparing for a solo, we might get better sound from them. Remember, you told us once we should breathe from the diaphragm, and if we missed it, to miss big. I think about that a lot.” She smiled, made another check, then frowned. “Also, you need to drop in on Thomas. I heard a rumor.” Her pencil scratched paper firmly. “Look, Mr. Cowdrey, the band is on edge. All they think about is music and getting out. To some, Thomas is a handicap. They need something else. A distraction.” She made another check on her list, then, without waiting for an answer, snapped the clipboard under her arm, before striding toward the practice rooms, a girl on a mission.

“Good morning to you, too, Elise.”

Soon the hallway filled with sleepy kids. Cowdrey greeted them each in turn as they passed. Most smiled. He glanced at their eyes. The red-rimmed ones would be a worry, but they had been fewer and fewer as the weeks since their arrival turned into months. At first there had been nightmares, a reliving of the night they’d been taken. He’d had a few himself: the bus’s wheels humming through the night, Junior High Band Management open on his lap, and then the growing brightness out the bus windows, the high screech that seemed to emanate in the middle of his head before the short soft shock of waking on the fishbowl auditorium’s floor with their equipment and everything else from the bus scattered about. (No bus driver, though!) Those dreams had tapered off through the months. He thought, kids are resilient. If they have a structure, that is.

Thomas came by last. A short boy who played in the band because his parents told him it would look good on a college application, he’d never been an inspired musician, but he was competent enough. Thomas kept his head down as he passed. “Good morning,” he mumbled.

“Can I speak to you a moment?” Cowdrey moved away from the wall to block his path.

“Sir.” The boy didn’t meet Cowdrey’s gaze, but even his head held low couldn’t hide the bruise that glowered on his cheek.

“How’d that happen?”

Thomas glanced up, frightened for an instant, then his expression went bland and unassuming. “I fell in the shower. Slipped.”

The instruments tuning up in the practice rooms filled the silence between them.

Finally, Thomas said, “Look, I want to get away from here as much as the next person. If playing on pitch, on tune and to the beat is what it’s going to take, then I’ll do that.”

Cowdrey heard the Perfectionists echo in Thomas’s speech. “There is no such thing as a perfect performance, Thomas.” He thought about Elise’s perfect pebble. Perfect because there were no pebbles here, nor weeds or malls or bicycles. No families. Nothing but each other and that day’s playing.

Thomas shrugged. “Yeah, well maybe not, but I can be better. I don’t want it to be my fault the lights don’t flicker.”

“We don’t even know what that means, son. Flickering lights may not be their applause.”

The boy’s eyes revealed nothing, and for a moment he didn’t appear seventeen at all. He looked adult and tired and cursed with a terrible burden.

“Thomas, if someone is threatening you or hurting you, I need to know about it. That’s my job. You don’t have to play solo.”

Thomas studied the hallway beyond Cowdrey’s shoulder. A few steps past them, the hallway branched to the auditorium with its enigmatic windows. “My mom told me once that the world is a big place, and I could become anything I wanted to, but it’s not. It’s no bigger than the people you know and the places you go. It’s a small world here, Mr. Cowdrey, and I don’t have any place to hide in it, so I’m going to go the practice room to see if I can’t get my act together a little better.” He pushed past the director.

The director threw himself into the morning’s work. Teaching is time management, he thought, and staying on task. He moved from student to student, checking intonation and technique. “It’s not all about the notes,” he said to a clarinet player. “Once you know the music, it’s about feeling the sound from your own instrument and your section. The song becomes more about heart than head.” The player nodded and replayed the piece.

For a time, mid-morning, Cowdrey sat in the practice room with the brass section. The leaders paced the group through their pieces, focusing on problems from yesterday’s session. Each had Elise Morgan’s suggestions to consult. Cowdrey watched Taylor Beau and Liz Waters, the numbers three and four chairs among the cornets. The couple wore matching silver crosses on chains around their necks. He wondered if they had given them to each other. Liz kept her red hair in a pony tail, and when she finished a long run of notes, her skin flushed, chasing her freckles to the surface. Taylor often played with his eyes closed, the music consigned to memory well before the other players. Although he wasn’t first chair, the section elected him for solos frequently, which he played with lighthearted enthusiasm. The director thought about Elise’s question on the marriage, and he remembered the duet Taylor and Liz worked up for the state competition. They played “Ode to Joy,” and when they finished, they hugged. Now that he thought about it, he should have seen the budding relationship in the hug. You can’t rehearse so often with the same person that you don’t start having feelings about how they play. The breathing. The fingerings. The careful attention to each other’s rhythm and tone. Harmonizing. Cowdrey shivered, thinking about music’s sensuous nature.