Young Man With a Horn (14 page)

Rick couldn’t say a thing. Jack came up through the passageway with Phelps and the rest of them, and when he came to Rick he came to an imponderable and had the sense not to ponder. ‘Do that again sometime,’ was all he said. And then Rick threw down his cigarette and walked back to the stand with him. He didn’t try any explaining; he allowed himself his basic assumption—that it’s unrewarding to play waltzes on the piano if you really know how to play a good trumpet—and he said: ‘It would have sounded better if there’d been a piano in it. Guitar’s hardly strong enough for a place this size, no matter how loud it’s played.’

Jack nodded his head. He was doing some reconsidering. ‘I’ll play with you next time,’ he said. ‘You and me and guitar and drums, don’t you think?’ That, apparently, for Barbara; and that, too, for Mary-Lou. Man’s work to be done. ‘That would make it just about right,’ Rick said.

Done. Every fourth dance, or just about every fourth dance, turned out to be a trumpet solo by Rick Martin, flanked by some rhythm. Jack may have brought himself to believe that every fourth dance was a piano solo by Jack Stuart, assisted by trumpet and guitar, but it wasn’t. The precedent was established, nevertheless, no matter who thought what, and once a good precedent like this one really takes root it can thrive and flourish like this one. The dancers came to expect to hear Rick’s trumpet in the small combination, and when the season was no more than a month out, the boys and their girls threw their tickets into the box when Rick’s turn came, and pushed each other around trying to get up close to the stand to hear him play.

It’s a strange thing. It might never have happened, and it might have been just as well if it never had happened to happen, but there it was; Rick Martin, the summer he was twenty, had already clicked.

Jack Stuart knew that he was blessed above the run of band leaders. It isn’t given to all organizers to have a stand-out in their organizations. It’s what makes the money roll in. Jack saw it sharply enough on the night of the token, and when Rick’s success held up for another two weeks his course was clear. He had a picture of himself and Tracy and Tommy and Rick put up along with the other pictures at the entrance, under the caption: Featuring Jack Stuart’s Oregon Four. He couldn’t quite bring himself to give Rick a by-line, but he did give him a chance to play.

They were big days. Rick was on the way and he knew it, but not in definite terms. All he knew was that he was good and that he wanted to be better. The honest truth was that he wanted to be the best. Martin Maximus. At night after the hall had closed, he did whatever anybody invited him to do. He sat in back rooms and talked and drank with Tommy Long and Phelps and anybody else, or he drove to Wilmington or San Pedro with or for women. But when he woke up at the house, the first thing he knew was who he was and what he did for a living. It was in the daytime that he didn’t do what anybody invited him to do. He consciously, and with stealth, tried to get away in the daytime. There was one, and only one, simple way to do this thing, and that was to get up early, to get up and leave the house between ten and ten-thirty in the morning, when no one else would think of such a thing. He liked everybody and everybody liked him, but all the same he had to get away, he needed some time to get his thinking done.

Outside, unshaven and unfed, he walked the longest way around to a fish and chips place on the bay, drank two cups of coffee and part of a third, and ate something easy. Then he got a shave the next block up and he was free for the day or as much of it as he wanted. He usually walked, then, all the way to the end of the peninsula and out to the end of the jetty. He didn’t walk fast, he just kept going until he got to the end of the jetty, and then he sat down and looked at the water and watched far out for ships. Whenever he saw one his heart quickened, and that’s about all the thinking he did. He just needed to have things quiet for a while and know who he was and what he was going to do about it, and he could get a better sense of it while he was looking at something good and big, like the Pacific Ocean. He built up a taste for the Pacific Ocean that nothing but the Pacific Ocean could satisfy. He got to it every day before noon, and sat clandestinely beside it for a long enough time to do him some good before he went back to Balboa.

It was probably the same thing that makes some people take naps in the afternoon or setting-up exercises in the morning or patent medicine—a double sense that one must neutralize past indulgence and prepare oneself for future ordeal. Parents foster it in children: drink your milk so your legs will be long, and if your legs get long enough goodness knows what you won’t be able to do—ride a bicycle, climb trees, anything at all; but first drink your milk. In order to deal properly with the world the weak need something outside themselves to build up their nerve. The Pacific Ocean did it for a while for Rick. He sat beside it and took it easy.

That summer, too, he found a solace that held good for him all the rest of his life. It came about by pure chance. One of his Mondays off he went up to Long Beach on the Pacific Electric to look around in music stores and see what Hermie Klein’s orchestra sounded like, and in the afternoon while he was walking around killing time, he got on a roller coaster for no reason that he knew—he’d never been on one before and he’d never wanted to. He knew it was all wrong the minute the thing started, but he was in it and his choice of alternatives was restricted; there was nothing to do but sit there and take it. He went crazy on the first dip, it hit him so hard he couldn’t stand it and he was in something like a swoon until the thing stopped. He got off and held himself together for a block or two, but he was really shot and looking around for a straw to clutch at. What he saw was a sign for a Turkish bath and he thought maybe he could lie down in one, so he turned off the street and went down the stairs. He abandoned himself to rubbing and steaming; he got his nerve back and along with it a deep faith in Turkish baths. He never lost it. What men find in the church, in a mother, in all the offices of consolation and protection, Rick took out in Turkish baths.

With the summer solstice Balboa gathered its full force and Stuart’s Collegians knew they were in the right place. The small combination in particular had Fortune smiling all over it. Rick got Phelps worked into it to give him something solid to play against, and then he was set. He was set in a mold then, as far as the rest of his life went.

It wasn’t until about the eighth week that the slick fellow in the white linen suit came to talk business with Rick by way of Jack. He came up to the stand between numbers at about a quarter of one on a Saturday night and told Jack who he was. He was Lee Valentine, and he’d just finished two weeks of three-a-day at Grauman’s Million-Dollar Theater. He’d been making stands at moving-picture houses all over the country for three months and he’d be going back to New York, thank God, in a week or two now. At the moment he was taking a rest and getting a chance to go around and hear how some of the other bands were doing. ‘Nice band you’ve got,’ he said.

Jack was the happiest of band leaders. Lee Valentine was a force among musicians. ‘Thanks,’ Jack said. ‘I’m glad you like it.’

‘I was wondering,’ Valentine said, ‘if you’d be interested in getting together after you’re through; I thought we could have a drink or two some place and talk things over for a while.’

‘I’ll tell you,’ Jack said. ‘I have a kind of a date, but I think I could get out of it without much trouble. I’ll sure try.’

‘Oh, if you’ve got a date, why of course,’ Mr. Valentine began; but Jack cut it off right there, and let it be known that he’d like much better to spend the evening with a fellow band leader, and of all fellow band leaders this very fellow band leader. ‘Come back here in fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘We quit at one; wait for me until I get it fixed.’

The man in the white suit walked off the floor, and Jack leaned over and said to Tommy Long, ‘That guy was Lee Valentine,’ and Tommy got it to Phelps, and Phelps to Jones, and Jones to Rick, and it went from him to the reed section and back by way of the drums. Jack called one, six, and ten for the last group instead of four, eight, and six as planned. Might as well play the best they had; put your most pleasing foot forward. The thought never came that they’d ever been listened to before right now, that it didn’t make much difference which foot.

They played. Jack watched the floor like a hawk, but Valentine apparently wasn’t dancing. When the last number was over, Rick and Jones went into their fanfare and the saxophones gave the answer: That’s all; a high note and a low note. Jack left immediately to break his date. The rest of them pushed chairs around and removed mouthpieces and snapped cases and talked about what to do now. You could do one of two things, or both. Or if neither one had any appeal, you could go home and get some sleep because the next day would be Sunday, and on Sunday it was a question of playing straight through from two in the afternoon until one at night. Sunday was the real day. ‘Let’s go around to Aleck’s and have a nightcap and go home, huh?’ Tommy said to Rick. ‘Sure,’ Rick said. He always did what somebody else thought up. And at that moment there was that man again, the one in the white linen suit. He’d come to the stand by way of the back door and he was standing by Rick and saying: ‘Are you Rick Martin? I know a fellow that knows you.’

‘That right?’ Rick said. ‘Who?’

‘Jeff Williams,’ Valentine said. ‘He told me you were out here some place in a band, only he told me a place in Ocean Park.’

‘Sure, I know Jeff Williams,’ Rick said. ‘I used to know him pretty well. He lived right near me.’

‘That’s what he said,’ Valentine said. ‘I found the place in Ocean Park, all right, but you’d left it. Jeff told me to look you up if I got a chance.’

Jeff Williams, it was easy to see, was in the eyes of Lee Valentine a musician, not a negro. Valentine could be free of the fraternity boy standards of Jack Stuart. Jack Stuart himself might be free of them by the time he’d been around as much as Lee Valentine.

‘Do you know Jordan, plays drums for Jeff?’ Rick said.

‘Smoke?’ Valentine said. ‘Sure I know him.’

‘How is he?’ Rick said.

‘He’s all right,’ Valentine said. ‘Fact is, he’s the best drummer in the country.’

‘I mean how’s he getting along?’

Lee Valentine didn’t make much of this either. ‘They’re all getting along all right,’ he said. ‘They’re packing them in at the Old South, and have been all winter.’

‘Well,’ Rick said, and gave it up. He could write to Smoke if he wanted to know how he was.

‘How many bands have you played in?’ Valentine asked.

‘Me?’ Rick said. ‘Oh, I’ve played jobs about twenty places. I’ve only worked steady at the Hawaiian Gardens and here with Stuart.’

‘How in the world did you ever get mixed up with that Hawaiian Gardens outfit?’ Valentine wanted to know. ‘That’s the saddest bunch I ever heard. The night I was down there the trombone was out in his chair; every once in a while he’d try to play for a minute or two, but he didn’t have an idea where he was.’

‘Gus,’ Rick said. ‘I know it. Nice guy, too, when you know him. He used to play with Tod Newsome when he was younger; they grew up together in the same town and stayed together for years, but I guess Gus got to be such a souse even Newsome had to kick him out. He’s had a kind of a funny life.’

Jack Stuart came up behind them and said to Valentine, ‘Let’s go; I got it fixed.’

‘Come on with us,’ Valentine said to Rick; ‘have a drink.’ But Rick said he was going with Tommy and get home early on account of tomorrow being Sunday, thanks just the same.

Next morning Rick was up and fed and out on the jetty by ten o’clock. He watched the regatta—seven star-boats with immaculate white sails against a turquoise sea, and fourteen sportsmen taking chances on their only lives to find out which of them could get to Catalina first. He watched them until he couldn’t extend his sight any further, and then he spent a lot of time thinking that it would be nice to have a telescope, one that he could let out until he got a squint at the place where those parallel lines meet when they’re drawn out forever, ad infinitum, world without end. His eyes burned, feeling what that would look like; and then he had in its place a more real sense of time and space, the showman’s instinct for the passing of time and precise estimate of how long it takes to get to looking like something in order to appear on time before the public eye. He stood up, tightened his belt, brushed off the seat of his pants, and started back to town.

When he went into the house, Jack Stuart, bleary in a white terry robe, came from his bedroom into the living-room and collapsed on the closest chair.

Rick was cheery and clear-eyed. ‘How are you, kid?’ he had the poor judgment to say to Jack.

‘I’ll say,’ said Jack. And then he said what he remembered from the night before: ‘Lee Valentine wants to take you over, if you want to go.’

‘Over where?’

‘He wants to hire you, put you to work in his band.’

‘Who said?’

‘He said.’ Jack held his head in his hands.

‘No fooling?’ Rick said.

‘Yes,’ Jack said systematically. ‘No fooling. His first trumpet ran out on him a week ago, got married to somebody in the movies, nobody I ever heard tell of. He tried out three trumpets last week and he didn’t want any of them, but he thinks you’d be all right. He was at the hall all evening last night listening to us play.’

‘He was?’ Rick said. ‘For God’s sake.’

‘So we talked it over last night, and I told him as far as I was concerned I wouldn’t stand in your way if you wanted to go with him when he goes back to New York. He’s in a bad way with no trumpet.’

‘What about our band here, though?’ Rick said. ‘We’ve got four more weeks; I can’t quit.’

‘Oh, I’ll get along,’ Jack said. ‘I don’t want to hold you up.’

‘Well,’ Rick said, ‘I like it here. We’ve got the quartet all fixed up. We’re doing fine. I couldn’t quit now, but thanks for telling me.’

Jack had a very bad headache and he wasn’t in any condition to go on being politic much longer.