Crickets, Part 2
Part 2 of 4
This is chapter two of an ongoing serial. If you’re looking for chapter one, click here.
Crickets
by J. Kyle Turner
Second Movement
“You don’t mind playing a duet, do you?”
“Actually, Ms. Landy, I feel like I have a lot riding on this, and I’m sure Emily is great and everything, but I’d rather just sink or swim on my own merits and not worry about bombing a really important audition by playing with someone I’ve never met, you know?”
Is what I should have said.
But if I’ve learned anything from three years in Ms. Landy’s orchestra class, it’s that fifty percent of your grade boils down to “plays well with others,” and you could probably round that to ninety percent for the section leaders. This conversation alone probably counts as much as the actual performance.
So I cave.
“Sure, that sounds fun. I’ll talk to her about it this week.”
That second part also ends up being a lie, but there isn’t much I can do about it. Emily heads straight for the door after class and turns the corner before I can catch up with her, which is probably for the best because I’m still too rattled to not say anything stupid. We don’t have any other classes together, and I don’t see her at the bus stop, so Monday passes without a word between us.
I spend the whole night thinking over what I’m going to say and show up to school the next day in a better mood, but Emily isn’t in class and I don’t know anybody who has her number. I consider switching to a different song, but that would only give me two and a half days to find new sheet music and an isolated track to practice with. I could probably learn a new piece in that amount of time if I didn’t think about anything else, but I’m good at the Prokofiev sonata. Even Fours thinks so.
More importantly, I can imagine the look on Ms. Landy’s face when I tell her that the new girl is on her own. I don’t like the thought of all that disappointment landing on me.
Wednesday comes and goes with no sign of Emily, so that’s another day wasted. It’s a lucky thing I don’t work on Wednesday nights, because if I had to unwrap any pallets I’d probably lose my thumb to a box cutter and end the night with Hector driving me to the hospital. Instead, I pick up a box of microwave burritos on the way home and don’t do anything but eat or play violin until eleven thirty.
I play the isolated track at half speed, double speed, everything in between. I start at random timestamps until I’m confident that I can pick up the tune within two beats of any measure. I practice until I start hearing it without anything playing, like my brain can’t imagine a silent moment without that music in it.
On Thursday, I show up to school with a plan.
By now I know how things are going to go. I know I won’t see Emily until the audition on Friday, so I don’t even waste time looking for her. After school lets out, I get off at the wrong bus stop so I can hit the grocery store on the way home.
I have a hundred bucks in cash from my last paycheck, and I fill the shopping cart with as much cheap food as I can find: canned tuna, peanut butter, instant oatmeal, trail mix, fruit cups, cereal. The register flashes $99.73 at me, and I drop the change into a little plastic donation jar and push the cart out through the automatic doors.
This would be easier if I had a car, but since I don’t, I have to push the shopping cart for almost two miles on the sidewalk before I get back to our trailer. I stash the shopping cart behind a tree just past the fence, then run in to drop off my backpack and fill a water bottle before heading back out.
The path to Fours’ camp is clear enough to walk, but the cart rattles so hard that I think it’s going to come apart in my hands. Eventually I give up and just carry the cart for the last hundred yards. It’s almost sunset by the time I see Fours’ truck. My arms hurt, I’m covered in sweat, my water bottle is already empty, and I realize way too late that I forgot to bring any food for myself.
“You planning a siege or something?” Fours asks when he sees the shopping cart. He’s grinning ear to ear, in case I have any doubts about how ridiculous I look.
“It’s for you,” I manage. “I have an audition tomorrow, and I need to be ready for it.”
The grin disappears. “You’re asking me to break the rules.”
“Yes,” I say without hesitating.
“It’ll cost you.”
I look down at the heap of food in the shopping cart. I don’t have any cash on me. I didn’t expect to need any. Fours has only ever asked for food.
“How much?”
Fours shakes his head. “Can’t tell you that,” he says, as serious as I’ve ever seen him. “Part of breaking the rules is you’re not allowed to know how much it costs.”
“That’s fine with me,” I say, and I mean every word.
Then Fours does something I haven’t seen him do since the first night I heard him playing in the woods three years ago. He hops off the tailgate and walks around to the passenger side cab to open the door. The door creaks like it’s being torn off but stays attached to the skeleton of rust holding the truck together. Fours digs around the floorboard for a minute, then walks back to the tailgate with a violin case in his left hand.
“Okay, kid. What are we playing?”
***
Emily shows up to class on Friday, of course. At this point I don’t even know if she knows we’re playing together, so I walk straight over to her before the bell rings to introduce myself and figure out what we’re doing.
“I’m Jake,” I say.
“Emily,” says Emily. She doesn’t have her nose stud in today, no jewelry of any kind except for a silver ring on her right index finger. She’s wearing a black dress with a gray, long-sleeved shirt underneath it, like she’s the sad friend on a kids show or something.
“I guess we picked the same song, so Ms. Landy wants us to audition together.”
“Oh,” she says. “I guess that’s fine.”
“Is it? Glad you fucking think so, because I’ve been killing myself to make sure that I can nail this. But hey, no stress, right? No need to practice or anything. Not when you can show up on the last day and let someone carry you through the audition.”
Is what I manage not to say.
“Where were you anyway?” I ask instead. Neutral. Polite. Merely curious.
“Mental day.”
“Three of them?”
“You have a problem?” She sounds pissed now, which is honestly a relief. I’m at that point where I want to be angry, and it’s hard to stay mad at a plank of wood.
Unfortunately, Ms. Landy walks in just as I think of something vicious to say, so I miss my chance to make things worse. I get up to move, but someone else has taken my usual seat and is still talking to her friend when class starts, so I sit back down. I can feel Emily’s frustration wavering in the air between us, and I hope she can feel mine.
“Right,” Ms. Landy says from behind the podium. “Auditions today. Who wants to go first?”
Emily’s hand shoots up before I can react, because of course it does.
“Wonderful,” Ms. Landy says. “Jake, Emily, whenever you’re ready.”
“Thanks for the heads up,” I whisper as we’re walking up to the front of the class.
“Whatever,” she whispers back. “Let’s just get this over with.”
We take our places, and Emily plays a long note on the A string so I can tune. I match it, so she moves on to the others, but we must have been close already because the whole process only takes a few seconds. She nods once to Ms. Landy, who beams at both of us like a proud parent. Then she turns to look at me. I signal that I’m ready to start, so she lifts her bow and starts to play.
People who don’t play an instrument have a hard time judging talent. They can judge whether or not they like a song, but beyond that they can’t really appreciate anything other than speed. If you’ve spent time on both sides of the strings, it’s much easier to tell how good someone is. They stumble over a difficult technique that you’ve mastered, and right away you know that you’re better than them. Or they breeze past something that you haven’t tackled yet, and you immediately appreciate how much time and effort they’ve put in.
Two measures in, and I can already tell that Emily is better than me. Her posture, her timing, the confidence in her tone, the microscopic shifts in the way she tilts her bow. I’m so caught off guard by it that I almost forget to come in on the fifth measure, but my hands remember the song better than I do and they don’t fail me here.
That fifth measure is the trickiest part of the song because the second violin—mine—comes in at an off tempo, like it’s warming up at a different cadence before it fully joins the first violin. But we play our parts perfectly, dancing around each other like we’ve been playing together for years.
It’s a good thing my hands remember the song so well, because I can’t stop staring at Emily as she plays. Part of it is needing to read her body language, to guess whether or not she’s going to speed up or slow down so that I know to match her.
But she’s also just good. She plays almost as well as Fours, and Fours could kill an angel if he wanted to.
We suddenly run out of music, and I realize that the first movement is over. Technically, this is all we need for the audition, but now that I’m past it, I want more. I want to prove how good I am, and I want to see how good she is.
As the class starts in with half-hearted applause, she looks at me, bow hovering an inch from the violin’s neck. There’s just a hint of a question there, and we both know that the answer is yes.
I nod, and we immediately launch into the second movement, which starts with four blaring eighth notes designed to snap necks. The class stops applauding. They don’t really have any other choice. I carry the momentum with three quick repeated phrases before handing the melody back to her, which she picks up perfectly before repeating my part and leading us back into another whipsaw of eighth notes.
Nobody moves to stop us. Nobody could even if they wanted to.
The second movement ends as quickly as the first, and we both sense that finishing the song would wear out our welcome, so we stand up and take our bows. The applause is thunderous this time. I can’t tell whether Ms. Landy is laughing or crying or both.
And why shouldn’t she be emotional? It’s only the first audition, and she’s already found her two section leaders.
***
I stay up late to catch my mom when she gets home because I want to share the good news. It isn’t official until Ms. Landy posts the results on Monday, but no one else sounded half as good as we did, and volunteering to play a duet had to count for something.
Mom pulls into the driveway just before midnight and finishes two cigarettes before she trudges up the wooden steps and fumbles with the lock. She’s surprised to see me, even though I usually wait up on Friday nights.
“Hey, Jakey,” she says as she sets her keys and wallet on the side table.
“Hey, Mom. Rough day?”
She nods vaguely and sinks into the plastic chair on her side of the table. She pulls out a third cigarette, which is unprecedented, especially since there’s no smoking whatsoever in the house. I should see this as a bad sign, but I’m still brimming with good news and can’t wait any longer.
“I had my audition today. It went really well. I think I might get section leader this year.”
“Oh, sweetie. That’s wonderful. This is the song you’ve been practicing?”
“Yeah, the Prokofiev sonata.”
“Good. I’m proud of you.” She smiles, but I can tell that it doesn’t put a dent in the bad mood she walked in with. And there’s still that third cigarette.
“What’s up, Mom?”
She drops the half-finished cigarette into an old cup of water and sits up a little straighter. “Got some bad news for you, Jakey.”
“Okay?”
“We had an older gentleman come into the ER today. Hemorrhagic stroke. We got him onto the table right away, but he was alone when it happened, and it was a while before anyone called the paramedics. I don’t know how close you were, but you’ve mentioned his name a couple times, so I thought I should let you know.”
My first thought is Fours, but I’ve never mentioned him to Mom, and there’s no way anyone would find him in time to call an ambulance. If Fours died, I’d probably be the one to find him at his campsite, already cold.
“Who?”
“Hector Rosales,” she says. “I think he owned the hardware store.”