Barry Hannah - Airships

And so we did. We all tuned and were burning low for the advent into Bolero , though we couldn’t believe that Quadberry was going to remain with his saxophone strapped to him and conduct us as well as play his solo. The judges, who apparently hadn’t heard about Prender’s death, walked down to their balcony desks.

One of them called out “Ready” and Quadberry’s hand was instantly up in the air, his fingers hard as if around the stem of something like a torch. This was not Prender’s way, but it had to do. We went into the number cleanly and Quadberry one-armed it in the conducting. He kept his face, this look of hostility, at the reeds and the trumpets. I was glad he did not look toward me and the percussion boys like that. But he must have known we would be constant and tasteful because I was the king there. As for the others, the soloists especially, he was scaring them into excellence. Prender had never got quite this from them. Boys became men and girls became women as Quadberry directed us through Bolero . I even became a bit better of a man myself, though Quadberry did not look my way. When he turned around toward the people in the auditorium to enter on his solo, I knew it was my baby. I and the drums were the metronome. That was no trouble. It was talent to keep the metronome ticking amidst any given chaos of sound.

But this keeps one’s mind occupied and I have no idea what Quadberry sounded like on his sax ride. All I know is that he looked grief-stricken and pale, and small. Sweat had popped out on his forehead. He bent over extremely. He was wearing the red brass-button jacket and black pants, black bow tie at the throat, just like the rest of us. In this outfit he bent over his horn almost out of sight. For a moment, before I caught the glint of his horn through the music stands, I thought he had pitched forward off the stage. He went down so far to do his deep oral thing, his conducting arm had disappeared so quickly, I didn’t know but what he was having a seizure.

When Bolero was over, the audience stood up and made meat out of their hands applauding. The judges themselves applauded. The band stood up, bawling again, for Prender and because we had done so well. The student director rushed out crying to embrace Quadberry, who eluded him with his dipping shoulders. The crowd was still clapping insanely. I wanted to see Quadberry myself. I waded through the red backs, through the bow ties, over the white bucks. Here was the first-chair clarinetist, who had done his bit like an angel; he sat close to the podium and could hear Quadberry.

“Was Quadberry good?” I asked him.

“Are you kidding? These tears in my eyes, they’re for how good he was. He was too good. I’ll never touch my clarinet again.” The clarinetist slung the pieces of his horn into their case like underwear and a toothbrush.

I found Quadberry fitting the sections of his alto in the velvet holds of his case.

“Hooray,” I said. “Hip damn hooray for you.”

Arden was smiling too, showing a lot of teeth I had never seen. His smile was sly. He knew he had pulled off a monster unlikelihood.

“Hip hip hooray for me,” he said. “Look at her. I had the bell of the horn almost smack in her face.”

There was a woman of about thirty sitting in the front row of the auditorium. She wore a sundress with a drastic cleavage up front; looked like something that hung around New Orleans and kneaded your heart to death with her feet. She was still mesmerized by Quadberry. She bore on him with a stare and there was moisture in her cleavage.

“You played well.”

“Well? Play well? Yes.”

He was trying not to look at her directly. Look at me , I beckoned to her with full face: I was the drums . She arose and left.

“I was walking downhill in a valley, is all I was doing,” said Quadberry. “Another man, a wizard, was playing my horn.” He locked his sax case. “I feel nasty for not being able to cry like the rest of them. Look at them. Look at them crying.”

True, the children of the band were still weeping, standing around the stage. Several moms and dads had come up among them, and they were misty-eyed too. The mixture of grief and superb music had been unbearable.

A girl in tears appeared next to Quadberry. She was a majorette in football season and played third-chair sax during the concert season. Not even her violent sorrow could take the beauty out of the face of this girl. I had watched her for a number of years — her alertness to her own beauty, the pride of her legs in the majorette outfit — and had taken out her younger sister, a second-rate version of her and a wayward overcompensating nymphomaniac whom several of us made a hobby out of pitying. Well, here was Lilian herself crying in Quadberry’s face. She told him that she’d run off the stage when she heard about Prender, dropped her horn and everything, and had thrown herself into a tavern across the street and drunk two beers quickly for some kind of relief. But she had come back through the front doors of the auditorium and sat down, dizzy with beer, and seen Quadberry, the miraculous way he had gone on with Bolero . And now she was eaten up by feelings of guilt, weakness, cowardice.

“We didn’t miss you,” said Quadberry.

“Please forgive me. Tell me to do something to make up for it.”

“Don’t breathe my way, then. You’ve got beer all over your breath.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Take my horn case and go out, get in my car, and wait for me. It’s the ugly Plymouth in front of the school bus.”

“I know,” she said.

Lilian Field, this lovely teary thing, with the rather pious grace of her carriage, with the voice full of imminent swoon, picked up Quadberry’s horn case and her own and walked off the stage.

I told the percussion boys to wrap up the packing. Into my suitcase I put my own gear and also managed to steal drum keys, two pairs of brushes, a twenty-inch Turkish cymbal, a Gretsch snare drum that I desired for my collection, a wood block, kettledrum mallets, a tuning harp and a score sheet of Bolero full of marginal notes I’d written down straight from the mouth of Dick Prender, thinking I might want to look at the score sheet sometime in the future when I was having a fit of nostalgia such as I am having right now as I write this. I had never done any serious stealing before, and I was stealing for my art. Prender was dead, the band had done its last thing of the year, I was a senior. Things were finished at the high school. I was just looting a sinking ship. I could hardly lift the suitcase. As I was pushing it across the stage, Quadberry was there again.

“You can ride back with me if you want to.”

“But you’ve got Lilian.”

“Please ride back with me. . us. Please.”

“Why?”

“To help me get rid of her. Her breath is full of beer. My father always had that breath. Every time he was friendly, he had that breath. And she looks a great deal like my mother.” We were interrupted by the Tupelo band director. He put his baton against Quadberry’s arm.

“You were big with Bolero , son, but that doesn’t mean you own the stage.”

Quadberry caught the end of the suitcase and helped me with it out to the steps behind the auditorium. The buses were gone. There sat his ugly ocher Plymouth; it was a failed, gay, experimental shade from the Chrysler people. Lilian was sitting in the front seat wearing her shirt and bow tie, her coat off.

“Are you going to ride back with me?” Quadberry said to me.

“I think I would spoil something. You never saw her when she was a majorette. She’s not stupid, either. She likes to show off a little, but she’s not stupid. She’s in the History Club.”