The Radio Magician and Other Stories (35 page)

Thomas put his French horn on his chair, waiting his chance to congratulate the happy couple. A trombone player stood beside him, and they smiled as they chatted. It seemed as if it had been weeks since Cowdrey could remember Thomas looking relaxed. Cowdrey thought, a good decision and a distraction in one move. He smiled too.

Elise worked her way over to him. “We’ll need a wedding march.”

“I think Mendelssohn’s is in my books. That would be traditional. Besides, it would be appropriate. He was seventeen when he wrote it.” Cowdrey reached past her to high five a couple flute players who had joined a conga line.

Elise shook her head. “That’s a myth, I think. He wrote it later. Anyway, I have something I’ve been working on. Something of my own.” Her eyes lowered.

“Why am I not surprised?”

It took the band a half hour to settle down. They cut the practice early after just two run throughs of the Beatles medley.

For the first time in two years, Cowdrey didn’t walk the halls before going to bed. We are adults here, he thought. The paradigm has shifted. He sighed as he lay down, believing when he went to sleep his dreams would be undisturbed and packed with beautifully played music, but after an hour trying to convince himself he’d changed, he rose, dressed, and walked the hall, listening at each door. Satisfied at last, he went back to his room, and his dreams played undisturbed with flawless performances.

In the morning, he found a note pushed under his door. “A wedding will not get us home. They want a perfect performance! Get us home!” Cowdrey snorted in disgust. Nobody could know what they wanted. They might not want anything. He folded the note in half and put it inside his band management book. Even the Perfectionists couldn’t bother him today, and they wouldn’t, at least until after the wedding. And who knows, he thought, sometimes the best way to a long term goal is to focus on a short term one.

Elise distributed the new march to the section leaders, who organized a music-transcribing session. For over an hour, the band met in the auditorium to make their copies. “You’d think if aliens could snatch us up to play concerts, they could at least provide a decent photocopier,” grumbled the oboist, who had several dozen bars of sixteenths and two key changes to write for herself.

A clarinet player finished, then studied the music. “This is cool. If I knew half as much as Elise does, I’d count myself a genius.”

Cowdrey waited for someone to laugh. It wasn’t the kind of comment kids made about each other. Someone else said, “Really!”

The rest continued to write. Cowdrey said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Maybe what they want is a well-played
new
piece. Soon as we finish here, break into your sections and work on this.”

For the next three days leading to the Friday concert and wedding, practice went better than Cowdrey could have imagined, and not just on the new piece either. They ascended to new heights during “March of the Irish Dragoons,” and they suddenly mastered the eighth-note quintuplets and the bi-tonal passages in “Ascensions” they’d fumbled before. Elise popped up everywhere, tweaking the music, erasing notes and rewriting passages, so every time Cowdrey rehearsed a section she had changed his pages.

On concert day, Cowdrey went to the auditorium early. He’d already realigned the chairs and moved the sections about to get the best sound balance for the new arrangements. The director’s platform could accommodate Taylor and Liz when they exchanged vows. He put his hands behind his back and circled the room. Even shoes clicking on the floor sounded beautiful in the auditorium’s acoustics. He paused at the window, which cast no reflection. Behind it, the auditorium light penetrated a couple feet into the swirling brown cloud. Cowdrey cupped his hands around his eyes and leaned against the window to peer out. At first he’d been afraid to get against the glass. What if something horrible stepped forward, resolving itself from the smoke? He couldn’t imagine an event more startling, but over the years the band had played in this room, no one had ever seen anything. Now the sinuous smoke’s motion soothed him, as if he looked into ocean waves. It was meditative.

Elise cleared her throat when she entered. She wore her marching uniform, the most formal outfit anyone in the band had. Soon, the other members filtered in, filled with anticipation, gaily bedecked in their uniforms. A grinning Taylor and bashful Liz came in last, music tucked under their arms.

As he had a thousand times before, the director brought the band to attention, hands raised, ready for the downbeat. He inhaled deeply. A good breath, he thought. Let’s all start on a good breath. Soon, they were deep into the Beatles medley. Elise had changed the music so radically the original tune vanished at times, then resurfaced later in unexpected ways. The clarinets swelled with the “Yellow Submarine” bridge as the trombones’s improvisational bars ended. Later, out of a melodious but unrecognizable tune, the xylophone led them into “Hey Jude.”

They moved through song after song. Never had the band’s sound been so tight. Every solo hit right. Even the tricky transitions flew until they reached “The King’s Feast,” the second to last piece. He wiped sweat from his forehead before leading them into the opening bars, and it wasn’t until he neared the end that he realized the French horns had played their part exactly on beat. Thomas had hit his entrance on cue. Cowdrey almost laughed in relief as he brought them to the conclusion. Thomas was safe.

Cowdrey put the baton on the podium and nodded to Elise who had already stored her flute on the stand next to her chair. She came forward solemnly, climbed the platform, then picked up the baton. Shuffling their papers, the band switched to her wedding march music. The baton’s tip pointed up. She took her own deep breath. The march began, a lingering intro that sounded nothing like a march or wedding music, but soon the drums rose from behind—Cowdrey hadn’t realized they were playing at all. He’d been paying attention to the odd harmonics in the flute and clarinet section—but there the drums were, dancing rhythms that made him shift his look to them. Then the brass opened, and the tune bounced from side to side, all in a few bars, all too quick before fading for the ceremony. Cowdrey closed his eyes. “What was that?” he thought. He almost asked her to play it again.

He stood to the side on the floor a foot below the director’s platform, Taylor and Liz’s wedding vows ready to read. On cue, the two held hands and came forward. Music swelled around them as they made their way toward the front. The musicians played with part attention on Elise and part on the young couple.

Cowdrey read a preamble, his heart in his throat, Elise’s wedding march still in his ears. Taylor and Liz exchanged vows. They kissed. As they exited, arms around each other, two drummers threw confetti, and the band played the wedding march’s coda, seeming to pick up without losing a beat. Nothing Cowdrey had ever heard sounded like this. Clarity of notes. Surprising shifts in scale. A moment where a single cornet carried the music before the band swallowed it whole, repeating the notes but changing them round so what was bright became dark, and the dark exploded like fireworks. The music filled Cowdrey’s chest, pressed cold compresses of notes to his fevered head, made him sway in fear that it would end or the band would break, but they didn’t. The music ascended and swooped and pressed outward and in. At the end, the sound flooded the room, as if to push the windows open to free the band from captivity and give them the grassy pastures Elise talked about so often, rushing toward the triumphant climax they’d been practicing for the last three days. Cowdrey heard wind caressing the tips of uncut grass. He smelled the meadow awash with summer heat. The music painted Earth and home so fully he nearly wept from it, but then it ended. Elise held them on the last note, her face lit with concentration and triumph. Her fist closed, cutting the band off, leaving the memory of her composition lingering in the air. Cowdrey could still hear it, ringing. The lights began to flicker. They loved it, he thought. He turned to salute Elise, the ringing emanating from the middle of his head.

Then, he recognized the sound in the strobe-effect lighting. It built until he thought it would burst him open, and he fell.

A short soft shock of waking.

His cheek rested against cool metal. A weight pressed against his other side. Groggily, Cowdrey sat up. He was in a bus parked in the dark. The student leaning against him groaned, rubbed her eyes, then sat up too. Other bodies stirred in front and behind them. Outside the window, a streetlight showed a long chain link fence and a sign, POLICE EVIDENCE YARD.

“My god,” said someone in a voice filled with disbelief. “We’re home.”

Someone started crying. Their voices mixed. Some whooped and yelled. Some laughed, all at once, voices and sounds mixing.

They poured from the bus into the parking lot, still in uniform, holding on to each other. A boy rattled the gate locked by a large chain and a hefty padlock. A head poked up in the lit window of the building beyond. A few seconds later two policeman carrying flashlights ran out the back door. Cowdrey started counting heads, but someone noticed before he did.

“Where’s Elise?”

For a second, the happy noise continued.

“Where’s Elise?”

Cowdrey stood on the step into the bus, looking over the crowd. One by one, they stopped talking. They didn’t appear so old now, the streetlight casting dark shadows on their faces. He stepped down, walked through them, checking each expression. No crooked glasses. No clipboard tucked under the arm.

Cowdrey pictured her alone in the empty auditorium. Were the lights still flickering? She, the one who wanted to go home the most, stood now, among the silent folding chairs, staring back at the swirling smoke behind windows. What had they wanted from us? What had they wanted?

The band looked at each other, then down at their feet, unable to meet each others’ gaze. They looked down, and Cowdrey couldn’t breathe.

He moved through the darkness surrounding the band, turning the ones toward him who faced away, searching their faces, but he already had accepted it. He’d lost her. Elise was gone.

As the cops unlocked the gates, shouting their questions, Cowdrey could see the days coming: the interviews, the articles in magazines, the disbelief, the changes in his life. One day, though, after the story had passed, he’d stand in front of another junior high band. He’d raise arms high before the first note, encouraging the players to take that first good breath, but Cowdrey could already feel in his chest the tightness, the constriction, and he knew he’d never be able to make the music good again.

He wouldn’t be able to breathe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Van Pelt teaches high school and college English in western Colorado. He has been publishing fiction since 1990, with numerous appearances in most of the major science fiction and fantasy magazines, including
Talebones, Realms of Fantasy, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Analog, Asimov’s, Weird Tales, SCIFI.COM
, and many anthologies, including several “year’s best” collections. His first collection of stories,
Strangers and Beggars
, was released in 2002, and was recognized as a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. His second collection,
The Last of the O-Forms and Other Stories
, which includes the Nebula finalist title story, was released in August 2005 and was a finalist for the Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award. His novel
Summer of the Apocalypse
was released November, 2006. His third collection,
The Radio Magician and Other Stories
, was released in 2009. James blogs at http://jimvanpelt.livejournal.com