“Yes, you would. They’re all cute as the devil.” She picked up a lantern that had dropped from its nail and hung it back. “When Paul suggested that I take over a section, at first I really wondered. I’m not a social crusader. But you wouldn’t believe how good these kids are. And quiet? With a bunch of seven, eight, and nine year olds, it’s a little unnerving just how quiet they can be. They do practically anything I say.”
“They’re all probably scared to death.”
Lanya made a face. “I’m afraid, really, that’s what it is.”
“Of you?” Denny’s great light bobbed.
“No.” Lanya frowned. “Just scared. It was my idea to try actually teaching something…just to pass the time. It works out a lot better than letting them run loose—mainly because they don’t run.” She blinked. “They just sat around and fidgeted and looked unhappy.” She turned to the table. “Well, anyway, here—”
The aluminum face of a four-spool tape recorder, interrupted with a quorum of dials, twin rows of knobs, tabs, and multiple ranks of jack-sockets, gleamed above coiled wire, on which lay three stand-mikes and several earphones.
“…since you’re here—” Lanya sat one rod-mike upright—“you might as well help. I was going to try something out that I’ve been working on—Denny, if you’re going to keep that thing on, please be still! It’s distracting!”
“Okay.” A chair rasped back. Denny’s light, quivering, lowered about it; and consumed it. “Okay. What do we do?”
“You can start off by keeping quiet.” She pressed a switch; two spools spun. “Then it gets more complicated. This is a great machine. It’s two free and reversible four-track recorders on one chassis, with built in cell-sink.” She pressed another tab; the spools slowed. She blew a run on the harmonica toward the mike, pressed the off button. Another finger went down on a black tab. The spools halted, reversed; another finger went down.
The spools slowed, stopped.
Another finger.
They reversed.
From under the table—Kid’s eyes jerked down to the metallic-shot speaker cloth—the harmonica, twice as loud and with echo, rang like a mellophone.
Lanya turned a knob. “Level’s a little high. But that’s the effect I want for the third track.”
The tape ran back (more tabs: chud-chuk), reversed. Lanya blew another run, and replayed it.
“Gee,” Denny said. “On the tape, it sounds just like you playing.”
No, Kid thought. It sounds entirely different. He said: “It sounds pretty good.” But different.
Lanya said: “It’s about okay.” She turned one knob a lot, and another only a little. “That should do it.” She pressed another tab. “Here goes nothing. Be quiet now. I’m recording.”
Denny’s chair leg squeaked on the floor.
Lanya scowled back over her shoulder and positioned herself at the mike. Without lifting her sneaker heel, she began swinging her knee to keep time. Her shoulders rounded from the armholes of Denny’s vest. She blew a long, bending note. And another. A third seemed to slide from between them, bent back, hung in the half-dark room—light glowed in three of the dials; red hairlines shook—and turned over, became another note, did something to Kid’s eyebrows so they wrinkled. And Denny had turned off his shield.
She played.
Kid listened, and remembered crouching in dim leaves, leaves tickling his jaw, while she walked beyond him, making bright music. Then something in the playing brought him to the here and now of the room, the plastic reels winding, the tension-arm bouncing inside its tape loop, the needles swinging, three (of the four) signal lights glowing like cigarettes. The music was more intense than memory; emotional fragments, without referent scenes, resolved through the brittle, slow notes. She moved her mouth and her forehead; her two forefingers rose vertical over the silver (her nails were slightly dirty; the music was wholly beautiful), then clamped. Silver slid between her lips. She played, played more, played some phrase she’d played before, then turned the tune to its final cadences, taking it to some unexpected key, and held and harped on the resolving chord sequence; a little trill of notes kept falling into it, every two beats; and falling; and falling.
She dropped the harp, clutching it in both hands, against her bare breasts, and grinned.
After maybe ten seconds, Denny applauded. He stuck out his legs from the chair, bounced his heels, and laughed. “That’s pretty good! Wow! That’s pretty nice!”
Kid smiled, pulled his bare toes back on top of his boot, pushed his shoulders forward; in his lap his hands knotted. “Yeah…”
Lanya grinned at them both, stopped the tapes. “I’m not finished yet. You guys have to help on the next part.” She plugged in one earphone set, tossed it to Denny: “Don’t drop—”
He almost did.
She started to toss another set to Kid; but he got up and took it. Tangled cords swung to the floor. “I’m going to lay in another track on top of it. Remember that little part just before the end? Well, this time you have to clap there, five times, each time a little louder. And sort of shout or hoot or something on the last clap.” She played the section over.
Denny started to beat his hands together.
“Just five times,” she said. “Then shout. I’ll bring you in. Let’s try it.” They did. Denny hooted like a choo-choo train, which broke Kid up laughing.
“Come on,” Lanya said. “You guys don’t have to overdo it!”
They tried again.
“That’s it. Put your earphones on, and we’ll lay it in.”
The rubber rims clasped Kid’s ears and damped the room’s silence down a level.
“I’m going to be playing something entirely different.” Lanya’s voice was crisp and distant through the phones. “But I’ll signal you two in with my elbows.” She flapped one at them and put on her own phones. The vest swung from her sides. “There we—” she turned on the tape. Momentarily the silence in Kid’s phones crackled—“go.”
Kid heard Denny’s chair leg squeak; but it was on the tape.
Then, a long note bent.
Over it, Lanya began, as the beat cleared, to rattle out, like insects, high triplets, first here, then up half a step, then down a whole one. Her mouth jerked across the organ and she dragged a growl up from the windy lower holes. Then jerk: bright triplets rattled. The old melody wound, beneath them and decorated by them: each time the third batch arrived, they thrust it into a new harmony, and toward Kid’s and Denny’s cadenced entrance:
Denny leaned forward, eyes wide, hands out and up, cradling an invisible globe. Kid’s fingertips tickled his palm…His head was down, to feel the rhythm; his eyes were wedged at the top of his sockets, to watch her.
Lanya swung her whole body back and brought both elbows in to her sides.
Denny’s globe collapsed.
Kid’s palm stung. And stung again. And again. And again—the sound, and his head, rose—and again: his face burst with noise and sudden joy.
Through the phones, from under his own cry, the rough fabric of the ending, with the little trill falling into it again and again, secured in its foreign key, brought all to its proper close.
Denny, still seated, looked about to explode. And, after five seconds shouted: “Whoop-eee!” and bounced in his chair.
“You like that, huh?” Lanya grinned over her shoulder, ran the tape back. “I want to lay in one more track. You guys have to do the same thing again.” To Denny’s frown, she explained: “Because I want it to sound like a whole room full of people clapping, not just you two. See if you can shout on a different note. I mean, if you hooted high before, hoot low. And vice versa.”
“Sure,” Denny said. “Where’d you learn to do this?”
“Shhh,” Lanya said. “Let’s just do it. I don’t have too much to play on the harmonica this track. But don’t let what I do throw you off.”
Kid nodded, pulled apart the phones at his ears—two rings of perspiration cooled—then let them clamp back.
“Here we go.” She glanced back. “Ready?”
The crackle…
The chair squeak…
Then the long note, bending…
Lanya reinforced the first phrase with middle notes, dropped the harp from her mouth, took a step back, and whistled a phrase over the quiet beginning. One of the harmonicas, already recorded, took it up. Kid suddenly understood the movement between soft and loud built into the two tracks already down; Lanya whistled again. Again the harmonicas carried the whistling into their organ-like development. She put the harp to her mouth, gave some bass strength to another section, waited, glanced at Kid, at Denny. Another thirty seconds of music gathered itself together: suddenly she whistled shrilly, and her elbows came down.