Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction Page 14

  Beside those complacent ranks stood Stewart Haley, Assistant Principal, and, wearing what Haley referred to privately as the uniform of a Bulgarian rear admiral, George M. Helmholtz, Director of the Band.

  Lincoln High shared the alley with bands from three other schools, and the blank walls on either side echoed harshly with the shrieks and growls of bands tuning up.

  Helmholtz was lighting pieces of punk with Haley’s lighter, blowing on them, and passing them in to every fourth man, who had a straight, cylindrical firework under his sash.

  “First will come the order ‘Prepare to light!’” said Helmholtz. “Ten seconds later, ‘Light!’ When your left foot strikes the ground, touch your punk to the end of the fuse. The rest of you, when we hit the reviewing stand, I want you to stop playing as though you’d been shot in the heart. And Leroy—”

  Helmholtz craned his neck to find Leroy. As he did so, he became aware of a rival drum major, seedy and drab by comparison with Lincoln’s peacocks, who had been listening to everything he said.

  “What can I do for you?” said Helmholtz.

  “Is this the Doormen’s Convention?” said the drum major.

  Helmholtz did not smile. “You’d do well to stay with your own organization,” he said crisply. “You’re plainly in need of practice and sprucing up, and time is short.”

  The drum major walked away, sneering, insolently spinning his baton.

  “Now, where’s Leroy got to, this time?” said Helmholtz. “He’s a disciplinary problem whenever he puts on that uniform. Anew man.”

  “You mean Blabbermouth Duggan?” said Haley. He pointed to Leroy’s broad back in the midst of another band. Leroy was talking animatedly to a fellow piccoloist, who happened to be a very pretty girl with golden curls tucked under her cap. “You mean Casanova Duggan?” said Haley.

  “Everything’s built around Leroy,” said Helmholtz. “If anything went wrong with Leroy, we’d be lucky to place second…. Leroy!”

  Leroy paid no attention.

  Leroy was too engrossed to hear Helmholtz. He was too engrossed to notice that the insolent drum major, who had lately called Helmholtz’s band a Doormen’s Convention, was now examining his broad back with profound curiosity.

  The drum major prodded one of Leroy’s shoulder pads with the rubber tip of his baton. Leroy gave no sign that he felt it. The drum major laid his hand on Leroy’s shoulder and dug his fingers several inches into it. Leroy went on talking.

  With an audience gathering, the drum major began a series of probings with his baton, starting from the outside of Leroy’s shoulder and moving in toward the middle, trying to locate the point where padding stopped and Leroy began.

  The baton at last found flesh, and Leroy turned in surprise. “What’s the idea?” he said.

  “Making sure your stuffing’s all in place, General,” said the drum major. “Spring a leak, and we’ll be up to our knees in sawdust.”

  Leroy reddened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Ask your boyfriend to take off his jacket so we can all see his rippling muscles,” the drum major said to Leroy’s new girl. He challenged Leroy, “Go on, take it off.”

  “Make me,” said Leroy.

  “All righty, all righty,” said Helmholtz, stepping between the two.

  “You think I can’t?” said the drum major.

  Leroy swallowed and thought for a long time. “I know you can’t,” he said at last.

  The drum major pushed Helmholtz aside and seized Leroy’s jacket by its shoulders. Off came the epaulets, then the citation cord, then the sash. Buttons popped off, and Leroy’s undershirt showed.

  “Now,” said the drum major, “we’ll simply undo this, and—”

  Leroy exploded. He hit the drum major’s nose, stripped off his buttons, medals, and braid, hit him in the stomach, and went over to get his baton, with the apparent intention of beating him to death with it.

  “Leroy! Stop!” cried Helmholtz in anguish. He wrenched the baton from Leroy. “Just look at you! Look at your new uniform—wrecked!” Trembling, he touched the rents, the threads of missing buttons, the misshapen padding. He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “It’s all over. We concede—Lincoln High concedes.”

  Leroy was wild-eyed, unrepentant. “I don’t care!” he yelled. “I’m glad!”

  Helmholtz called over another bandsman and gave him the keys to his car. “There’s a spare uniform in the back,” he said numbly. “Go get it for Leroy.”

  The Lincoln High School Ten Square Band swung smartly along the street, moving toward the bright banners of the reviewing stand. George M. Helmholtz smiled as he marched along the curb beside it. Inside he was ill, angry, and full of dread. With one cruel stroke, Fate had transformed his plan for winning the trophy into the most preposterous anticlimax in band history.

  He couldn’t bear to look at the young man on whom he had staked everything. He could imagine Leroy with appalling clarity, slouching along, slovenly, lost in a misfit uniform, a jumble of neuroses and costly fabrics. Leroy was to play alone when the band passed in review. Leroy, Helmholtz reflected, would be incapable even of recalling his own name at that point.

  Ahead was the first of a series of chalk marks Helmholtz had made on the curb earlier in the day, carefully measured distances from the reviewing stand.

  Helmholtz blew his whistle as he passed the mark, and the band struck up “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” full-blooded, throbbing, thrilling. It raised the crowd on its toes and put roses in its cheeks. The judges leaned out of the reviewing stand in happy anticipation of the coming splendor.

  Helmholtz passed another mark. “Prepare to light!” he shouted. And a moment later, “Light!”

  Helmholtz smiled glassily. In five seconds the band would be before the reviewing stand, the music would stop, the fireworks would send American flags into the sky. And then, playing alone, Leroy would tootle pathetically, ridiculously, if he played at all.

  The music stopped. Fireworks banged, and up went the parachutes. The Lincoln High School Ten Square Band passed in review, lines straight, plumes high, brass flashing.

  Helmholtz almost cried as American flags hung in air from parachutes. Among them, like a cloudburst of diamonds, was the Sousa piccolo masterpiece. Leroy! Leroy!

  The bands were massed before the reviewing stand. George M. Helmholtz stood at parade rest before his band, between the great banner bearing the Lincoln High Black Panther on a scarlet field and Old Glory.

  When he was called forward to receive the trophy, the bandmaster crossed the broad square to the accompaniment of a snare drum and a piccolo. As he returned with thirty pounds of bronze and walnut, the band played “Lincoln’s Foes Shall Wail Tonight,” words and music by George M. Helmholtz.

  When the parade was dismissed, Assistant Principal Haley hurried from the crowd to shake Helmholtz’s hand.

  “Shake Leroy’s hand,” said Helmholtz. “He’s the hero.” He looked around for Leroy, beaming, and saw the boy was with the pretty blond piccolo player again, more animated than ever. She was responding warmly.

  “She doesn’t seem to miss the shoulders, does she?” said Helmholtz.

  “That’s because he doesn’t miss them anymore,” said Haley. “He’s a man now, bell-shaped or not.”

  “He certainly gave his all for Lincoln High,” said Helmholtz. “I admire school spirit in a boy.”

  Haley laughed. “That wasn’t school spirit—that was the love song of a full-bodied American male. Don’t you know anything about love?”

  Helmholtz thought about love as he walked back to his car alone, his arms aching with the weight of the great trophy. If love was blinding, obsessing, demanding, beyond reason, and all the other wild things people said it was, then he had never known it, Helmholtz told himself. He sighed, and supposed he was missing something, not knowing romance.

  When he got to his car, he found that the left front tire was flat. He remembered t
hat he had no spare. But he felt nothing more than mild inconvenience. He boarded a streetcar, sat down with the trophy on his lap, and smiled. He was hearing music again.

  Bagombo

  Snuff Box

  This place is new, isn’t it?” said Eddie Laird. He was sitting in a bar in the heart of the city. He was the only customer, and he was talking to the bartender.

  “I don’t remember this place,” he said, “and I used to know every bar in town.”

  Laird was a big man, thirty-three, with a pleasantly impudent moon face. He was dressed in a blue flannel suit that was plainly a very recent purchase. He watched his image in the bar mirror as he talked. Now and then, one of his hands would stray from the glass to stroke a soft lapel.

  “Not so new,” said the bartender, a sleepy, fat man in his fifties. “When was the last time you were in town?”

  “The war,” Laird said.

  “Which war was that?”

  “Which war?” Laird repeated. “I guess you have to ask people that nowadays, when they talk about war. The second one—the Second World War. I was stationed out at Cunningham Field. Used to come to town every weekend I could.”

  A sweet sadness welled up in him as he remembered his reflection in other bar mirrors in other days, remembered the reflected flash of captain’s bars and silver wings.

  “This place was built in ‘forty-six, and been renovated twice since then,” the bartender said.

  “Built—and renovated twice,” Laird said wonderingly. “Things wear out pretty fast these days, don’t they? Can you still get a plank steak at Charley’s Steak House for two dollars?”

  “Burned down,” the bartender said. “There’s a J. C. Penney there now.”

  “So what’s the big Air Force hangout these days?” Laird said.

  “Isn’t one,” the bartender said. “They closed down Cunningham Field.”

  Laird picked up his drink, and walked over to the window to watch the people go by. “I halfway expected the women here to be wearing short skirts still,” he said. “Where are all the pretty pink knees?” He rattled his fingernails against the window. A woman glanced at him and hurried on.

  “I’ve got a wife out there somewhere,” Laird said. “What do you suppose has happened to her in eleven years?”

  “A wife?”

  “An ex-wife. One of those war things. I was twenty-two, and she was eighteen. Lasted six months.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Wrong?” Laird said. “I just didn’t want to be owned, that’s all. I wanted to be able to stick my toothbrush in my hip pocket and take off whenever I felt like it. And she didn’t go for that. So …” He grinned. “Adiós. No tears, no hard feelings.”

  He walked over to the jukebox. “What’s the most frantically popular song of the minute?”

  “Try number seventeen,” the bartender said. “I guess I could stand it one more time.”

  Laird played number seventeen, a loud, tearful ballad of lost love. He listened intently. And at the end, he stamped his foot and winked, just as he had done years before.

  “One more drink,” Laird said, “and then, by heaven, I’m going to call up my ex-wife.” He appealed to the bartender. “That’s all right, isn’t it? Can’t I call her up if I want to?” He laughed. “‘Dear Emily Post: I have a slight problem in etiquette. I haven’t seen or exchanged a word with my ex-wife for eleven years. Now I find myself in the same city with her—’”

  “How do you know she’s still around?” the bartender said.

  “I called up an old buddy when I blew in this morning. He said she’s all set—got just what she wants: a wage slave of a husband, a vine-covered cottage with expansion attic, two kids, and a quarter of an acre of lawn as green as Arlington National Cemetery.”

  Laird strode to the telephone. For the fourth time that day, he looked up his ex-wife’s number, under the name of her second husband, and held a dime an inch above the slot. This time, he let the coin fall. “Here goes nothing,” Laird said. He dialed.

  A woman answered. In the background, a child shrieked and a radio blabbed.

  “Amy?” Laird said.

  “Yes?” She was out of breath.

  A silly grin spread over Laird’s face. “Hey—guess what? This is Eddie Laird.”

  “Who?”

  “Eddie Laird—Eddie!”

  “Wait a minute, would you, please?” Amy said. “The baby is making such a terrible racket, and the radio’s on, and I’ve got brownies in the oven, just ready to come out. I can’t hear a thing. Would you hold on?”

  “Sure.”

  “Now then,” she said, winded, “who did you say this was?”

  “Eddie Laird.”

  She gasped. “Really?”

  “Really,” Laird said merrily. “I just blew in from Ceylon, by way of Baghdad, Rome, and New York.”

  “Good heavens,” said Amy. “What a shock. I didn’t even know if you were alive or dead.”

  Laird laughed. “They can’t kill me, and by heaven, they’ve sure tried.”

  “What have you been up to?”

  “Ohhhhh—a little bit of everything. I just quit a job flying for a pearling outfit in Ceylon. I’m starting a company of my own, prospecting for uranium up around the Klondike region. Before the Ceylon deal, I was hunting diamonds in the Amazon rain forest, and before that, flying for a sheik in Iraq.”

  “Like something out of The Arabian Nights,” said Amy. “My head just swims.”

  “Well, don’t get any glamorous illusions,” Laird said. “Most of it was hard, dirty, dangerous work.” He sighed. “And how are you, Amy?”

  “Me?” said Amy. “How is any housewife? Harassed.”

  The child began to cry again.

  “Amy,” said Laird huskily, “is everything all right—between us?”

  Her voice was very small. “Time heals all wounds,” she said. “It hurt at first, Eddie—it hurt very much. But I’ve come to understand it was all for the best. You can’t help being restless. You were born that way. You were like a caged eagle, mooning, molting.”

  “And you, Amy, are you happy?”

  “Very,” said Amy, with all her heart. “It’s wild and it’s messy with the children. But when I get a chance to catch my breath, I can see it’s sweet and good. It’s what I always wanted. So in the end, we both got our way, didn’t we? The eagle and the homing pigeon.”

  “Amy,” Laird said, “could I come out to see you?”

  “Oh, Eddie, the house is a horror and I’m a witch. I couldn’t stand to have you see me like this—after you’ve come from Ceylon by way of Baghdad, Rome, and New York. What a hideous letdown for someone like you. Stevie had the measles last week, and the baby has had Harry and me up three times a night, and—”

  “Now, now,” Laird said, “I’ll see the real you shining through it all. I’ll come out at five, and say hello, and leave again right away. Please?”

  On the cab ride out to Amy’s home, Laird encouraged himself to feel sentimental about the coming reunion. He tried to daydream about the best of his days with her, but got only fantasies of movie starlet-like nymphs dancing about him with red lips and vacant eyes. This shortcoming of his imagination, like everything else about the day, was a throwback to his salad days in the Air Force. All pretty women had seemed to come from the same mold.

  Laird told the cab to wait for him. “This will be short and sweet,” he said.

  As he walked up to Amy’s small, ordinary house, he managed a smile of sad maturity, the smile of a man who has hurt and been hurt, who has seen everything, who has learned a great deal from it all, and who, incidentally, has made a lot of money along the way.

  He knocked and, while he waited, picked at the flaking paint on the door frame.

  Harry, Amy’s husband, a blocky man with a kind face, invited Larry in.

  “I’m changing the baby,” Amy called from inside. “Be there in two shakes.”

  Harry was clearly startled b
y Laird’s size and splendor, and Laird looked down on him and clapped his arm in comradely fashion.

  “I guess a lot of people would say this is pretty irregular,” Laird said. “But what happened between Amy and me was a long time ago. We were just a couple of crazy kids, and we’re all older and wiser now. I hope we can all be friends.”

  Harry nodded. “Why, yes, of course. Why not?” he said. “Would you like something to drink? I’m afraid I don’t have much of a selection. Rye or beer?”

  “Anything at all, Harry,” Laird said. “I’ve had kava with the Maoris, scotch with the British, champagne with the French, and cacao with the Tupi. I’ll have a rye or a beer with you. When in Rome …” He dipped into his pocket and brought out a snuff box encrusted with semiprecious gems. “Say, I brought you and Amy a little something.” He pressed the box into Harry’s hand. “I picked it up for a song in Bagombo.”

  “Bagombo?” said Harry, dazzled.

  “Ceylon,” Laird said easily. “Flew for a pearling outfit out there. Pay was fantastic, the mean temperature was seventy-three, but I didn’t like the monsoons. Couldn’t stand being bottled up in the same rooms for weeks at a time, waiting for the rain to quit. A man’s got to get out, or he just goes to pot—gets flabby and womanly.”

  “Um,” said Harry.

  Already the small house and the smells of cooking and the clutter of family life were crowding in on Laird, making him want to be off and away. “Nice place you have here,” he said.

  “It’s a little small,” Harry said. “But—”

  “Cozy,” said Laird. “Too much room can drive you nuts. I know. Back in Bagombo, I had twenty-six rooms, and twelve servants to look after them, but they didn’t make me happy. They mocked me, actually. But the place rented for seven dollars a month, and I couldn’t pass it up, could I?”

  Harry started to leave for the kitchen, but stopped in the doorway, thunderstruck. “Seven dollars a month for twenty-six rooms?” he said.

  “Turned out I was being taken. The tenant before me got it for three.”