In God We Trust (25 page)

All the bands, of course, are marching to their own cadence. Up ahead the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Whales shuffles on. In the cold winter of the Midwest you can hear a girdle squeak for three blocks.

We march past the assembled multitude, Duckworth never glancing to right or left, straight ahead, brow high, paper-thin black kid gloves worn on his baton hands. Up ahead the flags and banners of all kinds are fluttering in the icy-cold breeze.

The steelworkers just stand there silently, looking. From somewhere far behind a glockenspiel in the German-American Band tinkles briefly and stops, and all around the steady drumbeats roll. We were on the march.

Strung overhead from lamppost to lamppost across the main
street were strings of red and green Christmas lights. Green plastic holly wreaths with imitation red berries hung from every other lamppost.

We are now right in the middle of town. This is the big moment. It’s like Times Square in Hohman, Indiana. The crossroads. A streetcar line ran right down the middle of the main street, and I am straddling a track, trying to keep up the 180-beat-per-minute cadence; blow our own special version of “Jingle Bells” on my frozen sousaphone. Bitter frozen, sliding along the tracks with the ice packed in hard. I have lost all feeling. My ears, my nose, my horn are frozen; my hands are frozen.

We moved haltingly ahead. Slowly, slowly. We’d bump into the Italian ladies ahead, and the German plumbers behind would bump into us. Somewhere the Moose would swear, and the Eagles would yell. And then we were right at Ground Zero, the reviewing stand to our right, the assembled multitude cheering the National Champions on to further heights.

Wilbur spun and faced us with his old familiar stare, and suddenly the cold was forgotten. We were On! Two sharp rips of the whistle, a sustained, long, rising note, baton at port; two quick flips of the wrist, and our great fanfare boomed out. The parade had come alive. The Champs were on the scene. The American Legion Junior Fife and Drum Corps faded into oblivion. The Firemen’s Scottish Bagpipe Company disappeared into limbo. Wilbur Duckworth was in command.

Ray Janowski’s beat was never sharper, leading his drum section to heights that rivaled our best performances. Duckworth about-faced and went into action. His great shako reaching up like a giant shaving brush with plume into the sullen gray sky. A magnificent figure, his gold epaulets glinting as we wove at half-tempo over the hard-caked ice, little realizing we were about to participate in an historic moment that has since become part of the folksongs and fireside legends of Northern Indiana.

“The Thunderer” echoed in that narrow street like a cannon volley being fired in a cave. Blowing a sousaphone at such a
moment gives one a sense of power that is only rivaled, perhaps, by the feel of a Ferrari cockpit at Le Mans.

Spitzer, our bass drummer, six feet nine inches tall, caught fire. His sticks spinning into the air, his drum quivering, the worn gold and purple lettering on its head:

NATIONAL PRECISION MARCHING CHAMPIONS CLASS A

The crowd is subdued into a kind of tense silence. They were viewing greatness; the panoply of tradition and pomp, and they knew it. The fourteen-inch merchant mill and the cold-strip pickling department at the steel mill rarely see such glory. Children stopped crying; noses ceased to run, eyes sparkled, and blue plumes of exhaled breath hung like smoke wreaths in the air as we slammed into the coda.

Already I was beginning to wonder whether Duckworth would dare try his Capper on such a dangerously cold day as this, with those sneaky November crosswinds, and numbed fingers. His ramrod back gave no hint. One thing was sure, and everybody in the band knew it. Wilbur had never been sharper, cleaner, more dynamic.

By now he was three-quarters through his act. His figure eight and double-eagle had been spectacular. The trombones just ahead of me, usually a lethargic section, were blowing clean and hard. Wilbur’s twin batons were alive. His timing was spectacular.

We arrived at the dead center of the intersection precisely as the last note of “The Thunderer” echoed from the plate-glass windows of the big department store and died out against the gray, dirty facade of the drugstore on the opposite corner. For a moment the air rang with the kind of explosive silence that follows a train wreck, or the last note of “The Thunderer” played by a band with blood in its veins and juice in its glands. And then it began. Janowski “tic’d” his solitary beat. We marched forward almost marking time in place. The crowd sensed something was about to happen.

Duckworth towered ahead of us, weaving slightly left, right,
left, right, as his twin batons, in uncanny synchronization, began to spin faster and faster.

Sound carries in cuttingly cold air, and even the Mayor up on the reviewing stand could hear the sound of those spinning chromium slivers:

zzzzzzzsssssstt zzzzssssssssssst zzzzzzzssssttt

Wilbur held it longer than any of us had ever seen him do before, stretching the dramatic tension to the breaking point and beyond. Beside me, Dunker muttered:

“What’s the hell’s he doing?”

Wilbur spun on. Janowski “tic’d” off the rhythm.

Tic tic tic tic tic …

We marched imperceptibly, like some great glacier, across the intersection. And then, like two interlocked birds of prey, Duckworth’s batons rose majestically in the hard November gloom.

Higher and higher they spun, faster than even the day that Wilbur had won the National Championship. It was unquestionably his supreme effort. He was a senior, and knew that this was his last full-scale public appearance before the hometown rabble. His last majestic Capper.

Every eye in the band staring straight ahead followed the climbing arc of those two beautiful interleaved disks as they climbed smartly higher and higher above the street. Wilbur, true to his style, stared coldly ahead, knees snapping upward like pistons. He knew his trade and was at the peak of his powers.

And then it happened. Instinctively, every member of the Bass section scrunched lower in his sousaphone at the awesome sight.

Running parallel with our path and directly above Wilbur’s shako, high over the street, hung a thin, curving copper band of wire. The streetcar high-tension line. Slightly below it and to the left was another thin wire of some nondescript origin. The two disks magically, in a single synchronous action, seemed to cut the high-tension wire in half as they rose above it, without so much as touching a single bit of copper. Then, ten
or twelve feet above the high-tension wire, they reached their apex and in a style cleaner and more spectacular than any of us ever had suspected was in Duckworth, they slowed and began their downward swoop. We watched, the crowd watched, and Wilbur marched on, eyes straight ahead. My God, what a moment!

The Mayor leaned forward slightly on the reviewing stand and even the children sensed that History was about to be made.

For a fleeting instant it appeared as though the two batons would repeat their remarkable interleaving, dodging, weaving avoidance of that lethal wire on their way down. In fact, the one on the right did. But the left baton hovered for just an instant, spinning slower and slower above the copper band, and then, with a metallic “ting,” it just ticked, barely kissed the current carrier with its chrome-silver ball. The other end fell across the other nondescript wire, gently. And for a split second nothing happened.

Janowski “tic tic tic’d” bravely on. Our cadence never varied as our feet sounded as one on that spiteful, filthy ice.

Then an eerie transparent, cerulean blue nimbus, a kind of expanding halo rippled outward from the suspended baton and from some far-off distant place, beyond the freight yards, past the Grasselli Chemical Plant, an inhuman, painful quickening shudder grew closer and closer, as though a wave were about to break over all of us.

BOOM BOOM BOOM
!

Hanging over the intersection was a gigantic, unimaginably immense Fourth of July sparkler that threw a Vesuvius, a screaming shower of flame in a giant pinwheel down to the street and into the sky, over the crowd and onto the band. The air was alive with ozone. It seemed to flash with great thunderbolts, on and on. Time stood still. It could have been ten seconds, or an eternity. It just hung up there and burned and burned, ionizing before our eyes.

Janowski “tic’d” on. A few muffled screams came from the crowd. Fuses were blowing out over the entire county, as far
away as Gary. High-tension poles were toppling somewhere miles away. Steel mills stopped; boats sank on the river. It was as though some ancient, thunderbolt-hurling God had laid one right down in the middle of Hohman on Thanksgiving Day The ground shuddered. Generators as far south as Indianapolis were screaming. Duckworth had hit the main fuse. It was the greatest Capper of all time!

By now the second baton had descended. Without so much as an upward glance, Duckworth caught it neatly and spun on. The drum section picked up the cadence and we marched smartly through the intersection, leaving behind a scene that forms the core of several epic poems relating the incident.

Duckworth immediately signaled for “El Capitan,” and as we attacked the intro the crowd burst into a great fantastic roar of applause and surging emotion. The aroma of burnt rubber, scorched copper, ionized chrome, and frozen ozone trailed us up the street. Santa Claus, in a window, sat mouth agape. Grumpy’s hammer was held stiffly at half-mast. The Christmas trees had flickered out, and
MERRY XMAS
neon signs were dark.

We knew that the baton that had gone up in smoke had been one of Wilbur’s awards—his Presentation set of matched wands, won at the State Championships. The other, the survivor, he held lightly in his gloved right hand, his arm shooting high over his head and down diagonally across his body, up and down, up and down. He spun as we finished “El Capitan.” Three quick blasts, the signal for “Under the Double Eagle.” His eyes as steely as ever; his jaw grim and square.

From all sides we could hear the sound of sirens approaching the scene we were leaving behind us. “Under the Double Eagle” with its massive crescendos, its unmatched sousaphone obbligato. As we played this great classic and Duckworth led us on into the gloom, every sousaphone player, every baritone man, the trombones, the clarinets, the piccolos and flutes, the snare drummers and Janowski, all of us thought one thing:

“Did he plan it!?”

You never can tell about Drum Majors. This was not the sort of mistake Wilbur Duckworth would make. Had he calculated
this? Practiced, worked for this moment for four long years? Was this gigantic Capper, this unparalleled Capper his final statement to Hohman, Indiana, and the steel mills, the refineries, and the Sheet & Tube Works, those gray oyster eyes, and the Croatian Ladies’ Aid Society?

Up ahead Duckworth’s arched back, as taut as spring steel, said nothing. His shako reached for the sky, his great plume waved on. He blew a long, single, hanging blast, holding his remaining baton at a high oblique angle over his head. Two short blasts followed, and he smartly commanded a Column Right. The drums thundered as we moved into a side street and headed back toward school. The parade was over. The wind was rising and it seemed to be getting colder. A touch of snow was in the air. Christmas was on its way.

XXV
I RELATE THE STRANGE TALE OF THE HUMAN HYPODERMIC NEEDLE

The retired trombonist stood behind the bar with his shoulders thrown back, an old familiar light blazing in his eyes. He wore the look of a man on the mark; tensed, waiting for the sharp downbeat, lips slightly pursed for the opening blast of “Under the Double Eagle.” Gradually he relaxed, as we returned to the warm, moist, sudsy atmosphere of the friendly corner tavern.

“You know, Ralph, I don’t tell many people this, but once in a while I go down in the basement when nobody’s home, and I play my trombone. The lip is still there.”

He drummed his fingers in a rhythmic, quick cadence tempo on the polished mahogany to the pattern of our well-remembered and much envied, by the other bands, of course, March Cadence. It is not generally known outside of the marching band world that each band has great pride in its distinct March Cadence drum pattern. It can be identified by this sound just as surely as a set of fingerprints gives away an axe murderer.

“Well, Flick, there are times when I can feel an old, dull itch in my left shoulder. Especially when I’m watching football games on TV, and they come on with the half-time shows.”

“Ah, they got all them girls with them cowboy hats. You don’t see many good
marching
bands. Just a lot of bazooms, doing the Frug.”

“Times change, Flick.” Again the beer was sparking deep philosophical concepts. Flick continued, with a touch of bitterness in his voice:

“Fer Chrissake, there’s nothing funnier than a short, fat girl clarinet player wearing a band suit, trying to do a double-time quick countermarch.”

“It’s Showbiz, Flick. That’s what it is.” We were getting a bit maudlin.