Crickets
Part 1 of 4
Author’s Note: Throughout this story, I mention several pieces of music the reader may not be familiar with. Where appropriate, I’ll add links to a performance. These aren’t necessary to understand the story, but I’ve included them for readers who want to listen to what the characters are playing.
Crickets
by J. Kyle Turner
First Movement
Fours is sitting where he always is, legs swinging from the tailgate of his pickup truck, which—to my knowledge—has never vacated its perch overlooking the northbound lane of County Road 34. At this point, you’d need a crane to move it. The tires are a study in dry rot. The axle would split in two if you tied a string to it.
The truck’s owner doesn’t look much better. Old and thin, Fours is more rangy than muscular, with too-long arms and a paunch that untucks the hem of his shirt every time he reaches for something. You couldn’t tailor a suit to fit him, and I doubt anyone’s ever tried.
“Evening,” he says as I walk up, which is true. It’s the first Thursday night of summer break. Three months until the start of senior year, which feels more and more like a deadline, like time is slowing down and speeding up all at once.
“Evening,” I say, hopping onto the tailgate and nestling the violin case between us. Atop this meager table, I lay out an offering of cold sandwiches and a Ziploc bag with three chocolate chip cookies. He eyes it all, greedy, then nods and reaches for a sandwich. One of Fours’ many unwritten rules is that he doesn’t talk while he eats, so I sit quietly until he brushes the crumbs off his jeans.
“What are we working on tonight?” he asks.
“Rieding,” I say. “The B minor concerto, first movement.”
“Kid stuff,” he says. “You should play Bach.”
“I’m not good enough for Bach,” I say, but he shrugs this off.
“No one’s good enough for Bach,” he says. “But okay. Show me where you’re at.”
I pull out my violin and cradle it between my chin and collarbone. The harsh light of Fours’ camp lantern blares against the varnish, so I turn half an inch and stare off into the woods at an audience hiding somewhere in the trees.
I play atrociously, like I always do, like I’ve never played the violin before. Part of the trouble is that I can only play fast or slow but can never manage both in the same song. Either I dance over the eighth notes and rush the legatos, or I get a perfect tone from the long pulls and trip over the accents. Worst of all, I get nervous at the thought of my own imaginary audience. I rush through the end of the piece and end up limping over the finish line, grateful to be done.
“Not bad,” he says. “Hand her over.”
I pass Fours the violin, and you can almost see the trees lean in to listen. The bugs stop chirping. The underbrush falls quiet. Birds leave their nests and gather on branches at the edge of Fours’ campsite.
He plays, and it’s like rain falling on dry earth. Every note lands exactly where it’s supposed to, resolute and inevitable, but with a few pauses here and there to leave you twisting with the music. The first movement ends and he continues on to the second and third. Halfway through I notice him humming his own counter melody, adding the piano parts back in so that the violin has something to lean against. I don’t even think he knows he’s doing it.
The piece ends, and the night rushes to fill the silence with a breeze that ripples through the trees like scattered applause. Fours hands me the violin.
“You’re up.”
That’s the thing about Fours. He doesn’t actually teach you anything. He doesn’t correct your posture or your hand position, doesn’t show you the proper way to hold a bow. He just makes you believe in magic and then asks you to prove it.
I do better on the second attempt, which isn’t always true in orchestra. I usually choke up in front of other people, repeating all the mistakes I made on the first try and adding in a few new ones for good measure, getting worse and worse the longer I play. Out here in the woods, I can relax a little. I can coast in the wake of someone else’s talent without comparing it to my own.
“Better,” Fours says when I finish. It’s a threadbare compliment, but I beam anyway.
“I’m also working on a few other things,” I say, trying to twist the rules a little. “We could play Bach, if you want. Anything.”
But Fours is already shaking his head. “One meal, one song,” he says, like it’s something older than the written word, like he’s explaining how the sun comes up.
Disappointed, I pack up my violin and wish Fours a pleasant evening. I trudge home through the woods, shedding little motes of magic and starlight onto the path until the world reasserts itself, heavy and obtrusive. Brambles snag against my jeans. The violin case thunks into my knees as I walk. Dirt gets into my shoes. The moon is too dull to be useful to anybody.
The house is dark when I get home because it’s my job to turn on the front porch light and I always forget. I jump in through my bedroom window and walk to the front door to flick on the light. Then I make myself dinner, followed by half an hour of violin practice.
Sometime around midnight, I hear my mom’s car crunch into the driveway and idle for a few minutes while she finishes a cigarette. In the morning, I’ll hear another story about how I should never ride on a motorcycle, how the guy came into the ER with a pound of gravel in his kneecaps, how his wife just kept crying and crying when she saw him, and I’ll cram spoonfuls of cereal into my mouth and chew until I can’t hear her talk.
***
I get my usual summer job at the hardware store. I don’t even fill out an application this year, I just walk in on the first Saturday in June and punch my time card, and Hector nods at me as I clip on my nametag and start stocking shelves. Hector is fifty or sixty years old, quiet and imperturbable. I feel a burst of pride whenever we communicate like this, without speaking.
I start my work week on Friday morning and usually manage a few hours of overtime by Tuesday afternoon. The work is both easy and satisfying, which worries me because some of the other guys here are forty years old and working the same job as me for an extra two bucks an hour, and I keep thinking how easy it would be to accidentally spend your entire life unpacking little boxes of screws.
There are only about six hundred paychecks between being seventeen and being forty, which used to sound like a lot.
My mom works the evening shift at the hospital from Tuesday to Friday, so we barely cross paths during the week. Mostly, this means I can play without bothering anybody as long as I keep the windows closed, which I do anyway because June is murder in Ohio. The heat sinks into you here, dulls your sense of time. I find that I can only count the hours after they’ve passed.
By the time Thursday evening rolls around, I feel human enough to play music again, so I walk past the chain link fence at the edge of the woods and follow the trail to Fours’ campsite. When I get sick of Rieding, we move on to Küchler and Seitz. Aside from being the best violin player I’ve ever heard, Fours’ knowledge of concerto music is comprehensive. Even when I bring sheet music, he plays without so much as glancing at it.
“How did you learn all this stuff?” I ask.
The question isn’t off-limits, but it’s close. Fours doesn’t like to talk about the past, but if you’re fine with a vague answer, you can pick up hints every now and then.
“The trick is to pick a worthy obsession,” he says. “Humans are addicts by nature. Just look at all the great composers. Vivaldi didn’t write five hundred concertos because he liked music.”
I chew on this for a minute. “So you’re addicted to the violin?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Aren’t you?”
Toward the end of July, Fours convinces me to try Bach’s Partita no. 2, and he sweetens the deal by counting Chinese leftovers as two separate meals. He plays along with his own joke by unwrapping a fortune cookie after the lo mein but before digging into the pork fried rice. He reads the fortunes out loud and directs me through the tempo changes in the first movement by waving his fork.
When I finish, he wipes the grease onto his jeans and plays all five movements–all the way to the Chaconne–without missing a note. Then he hands the violin back to me and nods patiently while I butcher the first two minutes of the Allemande again.
“How long did it take you to get so good?” I ask, deflated.
“Years and years,” he answers, which could mean anywhere from four years to four hundred.
“Will I ever be that good?”
He shrugs. “Up to you. But I wouldn’t rule it out.”
Meanwhile, summer flows along.
***
Orchestra tryouts happen on the first three Fridays in September, which is better because you don’t have to risk everything on a single performance. Our teacher, Ms. Landy, is a reformed perfectionist. There’s a picture on her desk from when she was a soloist in the Columbus Symphony, but she drops hints about it being a dark time in her life, and she runs a “stress free” classroom like she’s an alcoholic knocking drinks out of her own hand.
Underclassmen get rotated between sections depending on the piece, but seniors typically stick with their section for an entire semester. First violins handle the higher melodies, and if the piece needs a soloist, Ms. Landy pulls from that group first. Second violins play harmonies in the lower ranges and usually have more of a supporting role, but she tries to pick pieces that challenge both sections, and good violinists need to understand both sides of the music anyway.
Given my nerves, I don’t trust myself not to choke during a solo, but I’ve also had three years to figure out my strengths. What I want–what I need, if I’m going to have any chance at a scholarship–is section leader for second violins. Section leaders work directly with the conductor to figure out what’s needed from their section, and you need a pretty good ear to manage it.
The first two auditions are group performances, but since Ms. Landy picks two of our big pieces from last year, I do well enough. For the final audition, I choose the second violin part from the first movement of Profokiev’s Sonata for Two Violins.
“Oh, good,” Ms. Landy says when I hand her the sheet music. “Emily found a partner.”
I reach for a face but come up empty. The name doesn’t mean anything to me.
“Who?”
“Your new classmate. She picked the same piece, but she wanted the first violin, and now you want the second.”
She nods to a girl sitting off in the corner. Short, with dark hair and one of those nose studs that look cute until you think about cleaning them. She’s reading a book, but the fingers of her left hand are covering the title, and she looks up at me just as I realize I’m staring.
I turn back to Ms. Landy. “I haven’t met her. She picked the same piece? Kind of a weird choice,” I say, and I’m not just making excuses. Profokiev’s sonata is kind of unique in that the second violin part is much more interesting than the first. It’s almost written to let the second player show off.
“Must be fate,” Ms. Landy says with a smile. “You don’t mind playing a duet, do you?”