In the warmth I got a temper on me, in my old town much the same except they sold more whitened lawn turd and the billboards had taken over the air crying Money! It was hard to go back to my room because the woman still lived over there darker, and her hair streaked with gray, very long and neglected. The rumor was that alone, she hardly left her chair. I was not prepared to see her in the very same chair, in the exact old place, the vista through the tree obscured by the leaves of spring. I had a temper now, though, I was advanced. I could be, finally, sullen. My life’s work was ahead of me. Now was not the time for sullenness. The leaves should not have made me so angry. I was having my sullen stage inappropriate to my season. My region was covered in leaves, steaming leaves and giant insects and cats screeching as they mated, infamy proceeding regardless of the churches and their desperate parking flats swept clean to the point of cruelty. Beating back nature was the obsession of men in these suburbs, and failing that, arranging it like a combed orphan. But you could wake up here with new vines in your room like criminals.
In my absence my parents had gotten a dark orange boxer bitch. They had more affection for the animal than me, but that didn’t upset me. I wanted alone in my work whenever I found it. The dog went around the house hiding meal bones in cushions and nooks. This delighted the folks. Look at her, such a steward! Why can’t you be such a steward? This was their favorite parable from Scripture, the Good Steward. But I got home so poor I was wearing my pa’s shirts rolled up at the sleeves.
For a while I was excused as a patient in need of food and exercise. I seemed weaker than I was. I brought an old typewriter from the back porch to my room. Here I practiced letterheads for my work, toiling through several choices. A position I could hurl all my resources at, but I had none much, only fear and indignation until I settled on church trumpet. Within the day I was combing my hair differently and carried my letterheads from room to room, trailed by the orange boxer who wanted me for a friend.
My folks went all out as if this was the last gift to me and bought me a new horn. I would take myself to huge wealthy churches with their mobs of penitents. The woman, sitting in her chair, while the brown toasted loaf floated to her, out of the curtain it seemed, until I recalled the husband’s near-bald head above in it — I used this mystery in my horn and had new tones. Many horns, hundreds, were in the Scriptures, I reasoned. They would see I was necessary. I would be history walking in, an old friend.
But just now with the folks out, I went out to the tree where it was wet from rain and cut the leaves back for the notch, such a hallowed ordinary thing to be doing in these suburbs. I wore Pa’s big rubber boots. We had a long trimmer for the job and I never looked away until I exhausted my steward’s duty. But when I appeared again in my room I was naked except for the boots and the new trumpet at my belly, feeling this was how the Hebrew trumpeters of old were, they must have been. In my work. My hair was fresh from the rain and recombed in my new way. In my horn would be the beggar of New York too. And the orange dog with her belligerent adoration.
Older and darker, she was in the chair, which had been turned a little, more toward me, so that half her face might be watching me from its one eye. I in my maturity. She looked the age of a matron doing the rumba in a film I had long ago endured. They whispered she was now either a drunkard or had been lamed by a stroke. I was late, so late. So like me to turn up just in time for despair. You know the type. Several ambulances had come and gone at her place, the word was. But I begged, again the beggar, Let that which remains reveal itself, Let there be a spark of health still in her. Let my music enter her to assuage our loneliness. All she had to do was give me some sign. She had been in my dreams waking and sleeping for so long. My youth sobbed at her window. Help me, where were you? How could you live through that afternoon and have nothing more for me? You are famous in your rousing obscurity for many wretches and their duplicates in New York. For you I have borne the tale without quite having the message. Here, with my combed hair, look! I shouted through my open window. Grown, my voice no longer had that ugly wayward whine. I felt I was succeeding. This house was cast loose in this rain like a wild brick boat and I was in the wheelhouse. We were nosing into the swells. Ahoy. I with my profession. She in her enigma my woman. I was finally deep in the world, like the beggar and the others I envied.
I didn’t go on forever. I couldn’t be sure she’d ever looked even as I began playing my trumpet. In the manner of Gideon at sea, those hours until my lips went to blubber. And Jonah spat up onshore, returned in his ministry to our difficult homeland.
Although she never said so, I believe Mother had taken a job since I was in the house. Sometimes she was away weeks, so in essence the house was mine. When she returned it was in every case that she caught me in the act going about various manipulations at the window. Consider her punctuality, the unmitigated shame of this, for after all I was grown. It was as if she stayed under the house and came up only when she heard noises. I was not yet going to the churches, going about my internship there. She was promptly in the room from nowhere suddenly, myself a wincing wreck. There’s never really time to develop one’s ambitions. They just throw you out there and you grab on to something handy like an amateur, in terror. Hardly time to hide your cheap scotch and prepare a face. Pa, for instance, had chosen wrongly, rushed to life insurance when he wanted to be a cowboy, then panicked by my advent, my whirling hole of needs. Forced into his lies: I love you, love you, boy. It was grievous, but he still managed in his sentimental way to be gone huge lengths of time like a star of the rodeo. I see my pa sitting in his parked car for hours looking at true horsemen in a lot somewhere, bewitched and sad.
In my case nothing prepared me for my success. Outside my window two blue jays ebbed and flowed and made their hoarse quacks only for me, I pretended.
The first minister was no fool, he agreed immediately, and to a handsome figure that left me filthy with cash relative to the none I’d had yesterday. I played from a projection booth in the balcony through the hole where religious films were projected, big epics of the waddling masses under the Hebrew kings and their antagonists. The man believed devoutly in old Hollywood, especially Debra Paget in her golden halter. He didn’t count much on the abstract. He was thoroughly for the age of vision come again after two millennia’s trifling with print and its craven black and white. Next to the rolling wheels aloft, I blew during the films and even afterwards, antiphonal to the choir in the loft below, at last let make their own noise until everybody filed out and I was left alone with the hot machine. You could not see much from the projection slot except the minister in his pulpit to the right of the screen all thrilled and bent forward like a longbow and seized by his approving spasms. The people went out into the street, chatting gulls driven off an argosy. He succeeded in bringing in more of the young. I was partly responsible. I had the impression of motion through the universe, very happy there in my elevated box. Ahoy. I once owned a happy cat named Ralph who would rush out to meet people, calling to them. This was how I felt, like Ralph with his salutations, for the first time in my life.
Other Sundays I pressed forth, there is no rest in the professions once engaged, down to the ocean where a priest thought I was essential. I was in the ramparts instead of an organ they could not afford. It was a poor church although very pretty. A submerged cartoon in blue, white, green, and orange. Already I had broken my earlier rule to stick with the rich Christians. Maybe I was becoming a little Christian myself. It’s hard to tell. The priest felt very puny beneath all the colors and really, he was, with his grim whispers. He was trying for more balls, as he put it, in himself and service. I was instructed to play freeform at any inspired moment even while he talked or whenever I felt there was a lapse in worship. I was so good at this a very old man thought I was a violin. Then it was nice to go down wading in the sea and believe in God, to pretend I had girlfriends and deep acquaintances, like poor Pa with his cows and salty pals.