Evan Hunter: Sons

So Dawn Patrol it had been, and Dawn Patrol it still was, though many of the other groups changed their names constantly, like The Four Dukes, affectionately known far and wide as The Four Ducks. They once used to be called The Four Barons, nobly elevating themselves only after they’d been around for three months, and putting a sign up on their very next job, the sign reading THE FOUR DUKES, FORMALLY THE FOUR BARONS, which gave everybody but the illiterate Ducks a great big laugh.

Yancy was nodding and offering profuse thanks to everyone for the dubious honor of having placed third with his inept group. Mr. Coopersmith shook his hand with genuine enthusiasm, as though congratulating John Lennon, and Yancy finally sidled off the stage, all grins and embarrassment. Mr. Coopersmith gripped the mike again, leaned into it, and said, “In second place, winning a prize of fifty dollars...” He hesitated here, and I held my breath, figuring if we didn’t take second, we were sure to take first, and Mr. Coopersmith said, “In second place... Phase Nine!”

Nelson gave a short nod as the crowd burst into applause, confirming my surmise: we were sure to take first now. Only Rog looked his usual sallow gloomy self, chewing on his fingernails as Peter Drew come up to the stage to accept the fifty-dollar check for Phase Nine. There was more applause, and a few catcalls (“You got robbed, Pete!”) and Mr. Coopersmith clutched Drew’s hand in both his own meaty hands and grinned approval from that great big world of radio broadcasting, and then Drew looked at the check, and nodded, and folded it. and put it into his wallet, and walked off the stage to where Donna Fields was waiting for him. She gave him a big hug, and I automatically glanced out over the gym floor to see how Cass was doing with Dundee’s arms still around her, and Mr. Coopersmith held up one of his hands for silence again, and then said, “Now... before I announce the winner of the first prize. I’d like to tell you that the winning band’ll be playing for an additional half-hour, and I hope you’ll all stay around to listen and dance. So... in first place... for a prize of one hundred dollars...”

Again, Mr. Coopersmith paused. He grinned out at the audience. I glanced at Rog, who was busily chewing his fingernails.

“In first place,” Mr. Coopersmith said, “Sound, Incorporated!”

“Sound, In—” Nelson started, and then turned to me with an enraged look on his face, gripping my arm fiercely just below the elbow, and then turning to gape at Mr. Coopersmith, as though certain he had made some terrible mistake. Rog, expecting disaster all along, merely nodded his head knowingly. Connie sat abruptly in one of the folding chairs and slapped his hand to his forehead. The response from the teen-age audience was mixed, some of them cheering and applauding, some of them booing and shouting at the stage. Mr. Coopersmith, unperturbed in his broadcasting tower, waited blandly for Gerry Haig to come up onto the stage for Sound, Incorporated, and collect the group’s ill-gotten hundred bucks.

“That’s the last time,” I said. “I swear to God, that’s the last time we play a battle!”

“Sound, In corp orated!” Nelson exploded. “They’re the worst group here!”

“It figures,” Rog said gloomily.

“Let’s pack up,” Connie said.

“You want to congratulate the winners?”

“The winners suck,” Nelson said.

Angrily, convinced that there was no justice in the world, we began unplugging our leads, winding them up, covering the amps, taking our mike stands apart, unscrewing the organ legs, packing the guitars and drums. Danny Boll, who had been one of the judges, and who prior to this January had been the rhythm guitarist of the best group in the area, The Butterfly Push, most of whom were now away at college or in the Army, came up onto the stage while we were still packing. “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “I voted for you guys.”

“Thanks, Danny,” I said.

“You guys are really coming along fine,” Boll said. “I can remember when you first started, and there’s been a tremendous development.”

“Thanks,” Nelson said. “Thanks, Danny.”

“I mean it.”

“Thanks,” I said.

But we were still angry and bitter, especially me, because I had a few other choice items bugging me besides. My father, for example, had refused me permission to drive the station wagon that night, his point being that there’d be a lot of heavy equipment in it, and it was dangerous to be lugging two tons of amplifiers and instruments on a Friday night, when half the population of Connecticut would be drunk and zigzagging all over the roads. I personally could not see the difference between driving heavy equipment around during the day or driving it around at night, and I’d informed my father that I’d shuttled the loaded car all the way to Stamford just last weekend, with six kids packed into the damn thing besides, and I was a very careful driver, and what dire thing did my father expect to happen, would he mind telling me? (This isn’t a locker room, my father had said, watch your language.) I’d lost the battle with my father, and I’d lost the band battle, and now it looked as if I were losing the battle of Cass Hagstrom as well, to no less a hood than Scott Dundee, who ran around with a bunch of boozers, the dumbest asses in the school. How could you expect to ask- a girl if you could take her home when you knew your father would be waiting in the parking lot? What was the sense of taking Driver s Ed a whole damn six months, what was the sense of having night lights if your father never let you drive the damn car at night?

As I carried Nelson’s snare drum out to the loading ramp near the school commons, I heard Cass telling Dundee that she would just love to see Dr. Strangelove, she had heard it was a perfectly marvelous film, but she knew that Love with the Proper Stranger was playing in Westport, and Steve McQueen was her absolute favorite, so couldn’t they go there tomorrow night instead? “Hello, Cass,” I said as I went by, and she said, “Oh, hello, Wat, you were terrific.” and I said, “Yeah,” and walked off. Nelson was waiting outside on the ramp, the big bass drum in his hands.

“Where’s your father?” he asked.

“I don’t know, don’t you see him?”

“No.”

“Well, let’s get the rest of the junk,” I said. “He’ll be here.”

Cass was heading for the phone booth when I went inside again, undoubtedly to give her mother a ring, tell her she might be delayed as she had run into one of the school’s intellectuals and they wished to discuss the satirical content of Dr. Strangelove.

“Hey,” I said.

“Oh, hi,” she said, “did I tell you you were terrific?”

“Yeah, you told me,” I said. “What’s with Dundee?”

Cass shrugged. She was a slender, diminutive girl with straight blond hair falling to her shoulders, dark brown eyes, a frightened smile that tentatively budded on her mouth even when she was deliriously happy, as she seemed to be now. “He’s very nice,” she said, and I immediately said, “He’s a hood.”

“Well, I have to make a phone call,” Cass said. She was wearing a gray flannel jumper over a white turtleneck sweater, and she tossed her long blond hair now, and smoothed her skirt, and went clicking oft down the corridor to the phone booth while I glared at her with something less than masked hostility. Nelson helped me lift the organ, and we carried it together out to the ramp. The Ford station wagon was waiting at the curb, but my father was not behind the wheel. Instead, my mother was sitting there, staring straight ahead through the windshield.