Powers, Richard - Orfeo

Criminetly. What’s wrong with the chords they got?

Nothing at all, if those three make you happy. But what’s happiness, compared to an earful of forever?

It’s not about the chords, Paul spits.

It doesn’t go anywhere, Pauly. It just sits there, circling the drain.

Circling. .? Are you bat-shit deaf? His brother gets that faraway look: the sledge, the sex, the drill of infant rock. You can’t hear that? Freedom, you dried-up little turd!

Peter hears only harmonic jail.

The tribunal puts on “Blue Suede Shoes.” Peter shrugs: Why not? Peppy dimestore fun. His refusal to swoon maddens his older brother. Paul cocks back his arm to brain the punk with a Magic 8-Ball. But an ecstasy of backbeat sweeps him up, and he calls out, Listen to that. Jeez! Does music get any better?

He flicks the cannon shot across the drum-flooded basement. Peter catches it, bows his head, and reads the plastic fortune-teller’s reply:

CONCENTRATE AND ASK AGAIN .

All my life I thought I knew what music was. But I was like a kid who confuses his grandfather with God.

A boy treads in the shallows of a summer lake. Sky and pine in all directions, the buzz of noisy relatives. The air has the heft of vacation, with Peter back in the early rehearsals for his life.

Call it late afternoon, but hours before dark. This far north, near the solstice, the sun hangs for days near its zenith before dropping into dusk. The lake fills with swimming children: an Elsfest — that annual jag that his errant family branch rarely dares attend. Elses from across the States lay claim to the southern shore of this northern water. Thirty yards out, kids swarm a plywood float lashed to empty oil drums, like ants massing a melting sugar cube. Shore-hugging uncles fish beer bottles from an ice-filled zinc trough and open them on the trough’s handle. Aunts and worse stretch out on beach blankets in a suntan assembly line. Elses in all directions. Not even Peter’s father can identify the whole bevy of relatives. One tiny Russian device — even a conventional one — would finish off the family name.

Midsummer comes with a crystalline theme that Peter has been practicing to death for days. He woke this daybreak and woodshedded for hours, up in his hillside hideout, on the Evette & Schaeffer clarinet his father found for him at an estate sale. By the time he joined the others down at the lake, summer’s theme was burned deep into his brain.

His clarinet is the one thing Peter would take with him to the moon or a desert island or prison. His fingers come home to the keys; he practices even here, under the waves of this summer lake. He can swell, launch leaps, race up and down the tube in runs that feel invincible. Playing is like solving a perfect proof — QED.

The tune under his fingers this summer is the new national anthem of his desire. He’ll perform it next month in his downtown debut, with twelve older players. The piece is everywhere, in the bobbing water, in the raft-swarming chatter. He loves that dance suite like he loves his mother, who lies up on the shore of this upstate lake in her gappy one-piece suit with the little skirt that makes her look like a Ponchielli hippo ballerina. He knows the music better than he knows his father, there on his lifeguard rotation, Lucky Strike in one hand and Carling Black Label in the other, conducting the Els uncles in a verbal brawl.

Peter can’t name the secret of the suite’s power. But somehow its first few notes, like the rays of sunrise over eastern mountains, lay down a foundation for all the developments to come. They return at the end, layered against an old Shaker hymn tune, to make a sound bigger than any country. He can’t say how that simple return produces a release so spacious and shattering. He knows only that the piece predicts even this blazing afternoon, these bracing lake breezes. Peter has tried to imitate them, jotting down his own chords on systems of clean staff paper — a boy’s pencil sketch of the stupor that dizzies his head each time he hears this piece’s openness.

He will love this music to death. In a few more years, he’ll snort at its sentiment and mock its stirring progressions. Once you’ve loved like that, the only safe haven is resentment. Peter won’t realize until too late that all he ever wanted was to move a listener the way these variations moved him.

But the throats of his dozens of younger cousins scream another soundtrack altogether. One by one they scramble up on the raft, swivel their broomstick hips, shout, I’m all shook up! and jackknife into the water. The older kids take up a game called smear the queer, dunking whoever dares hold an orange beach ball. Bodies plunge. Yelps spatter the air. Peter clings to the float’s algae-coated ladder, keeping his fingers safely underwater. Horseflies as big as hummingbirds nip at his nape.

He watches Minnesota cousin Kate carve her manic path through the swarm. Who knew that such surprise could move about on two bare legs? Peter has scribbled her name with ballpoint deep down in the soles of his All Stars, where no one but he will ever know the word is hidden. He has dreamed of her haunches and the backs of her knees. Now she’s everywhere at once in this water war, colluding, colliding, cannonballing through the air, crawling back onto the float and hitching up a slipped strap as if her apricot tit didn’t just go sunning. Her Mayday cries quicken Peter’s flesh, and the kick of her scissoring legs matches that ballet suite running through his brain. Her smile plots the next escapade even before her last one is finished.

Up on shore, around the hissing grill pits, the Els patriarchs wage a war of their own. Their words reach Peter above the shrieks of the raft battle. The women, from their sun chaises and mah-jongg tables, shout at their spouses to give it a rest. Can it. Or better: bottle. Hey Mabel — Black Label! Peter’s three favorite aunts — two real ones and one aunt’s companion, a trio who sing each night around the campfire, reliving the glory years of their Andrews Sisters knockoff act, when their shiny-tight added sixth chords once backed for Sinatra himself — start belting out “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive.” Half the Els Tabernacle Choir joins in on, “Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.”

But Mister In-Between is everywhere, messing with them. The men wade into current events. They determine what went wrong in Korea. Peter’s father — self-made insurance sales force manager with a captured Nazi flag hanging in his subterranean rec room — declares that America should have bombed its way up both banks of the Yalu until the Chinese saw reason. Elses of all stripes parry him with snub beer-bottle lances. Get a load of this guy! He’s off his nut!

A squeal from lissom Kate dispels all politics. She launches off the raft, arcing into the air with a C# of delight, a missile aimed to land with deadly precision inside a ring of Pittsburgh male cousins.

When Peter turns his ears back shoreward, the adults have crossed the bloodstained map to Hungary. Uncles decree that going up against the Russians for nothing would have been suicide. For nothing? Peter’s father shouts. We egged those people on; we then left them for dead . But he’s outgunned, scoffed at even by the chorus line of sunbathing aunts.

The uncles jump from Hungary back home, drawn along by the family need to fight. They squabble over the buses down South, the black and white chess game for the nation’s soul. Karl Els pokes a bottle in his brother Hank’s chest and says that blacks have more right to North America than whites. Uncles swat the air, dismissing him and his whole blighted branch. Aw, go raise your rabble in the Congo .