A worried look came onto Tony’s face — the look that always arrived whenever he had a decision to make. “I thought we’d try some of the simpler stuff first,” he said.
“Hell, this is simple enough,” Frank answered. “Vic can play it. You heard him say so, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but...”
“Then why not? Come on, let’s try it.”
“I’m game,” Vic said, perhaps a little too loudly. He was sitting alongside Frank, with the three saxes in front of him and with Bud on his left, facing the piano.
“There,” Frank said. “Harry James is game. Let’s try it.”
“Well, all right,” Tony said reluctantly. “I want to number the sheets first, though.” He said this apologetically, keenly aware of his puppet status, knowing he’d been chosen for leadership simply because of his name. Oddly enough — oddly because Tony was Italian — his real name was Tony Banner. Reen had often voiced the opinion that the immigration authorities on Ellis Island had undoubtedly wrangled with a great-grandfather’s Bannalinza or Bannicossoni before resignedly recording it as Banner, but Tony remained noncommittal on the possibility. He made no attempt to reconcile the Anglo-Saxon handle with the obvious Italianness of his features. For even though he had blond hair, the blond was a muddied color which combined with his deep brown eyes and his swarthy complexion to cancel itself out in an over-all impression of darkness. His brows, as if in perpetual disagreement with the accidental light coloring of his hair, were jet black — a combination any young lady in the United States would have envied deeply. There was nothing unmasculine about Tony Banner, though. He was five feet ten inches tall, and he was solidly packed with bulging muscles, of which he was uncommonly proud.
“What’s the number?” Bud asked.
“Twenty-seven,” Tony answered.
“I can remember when we had only three,” Mike said, proudly awed.
“Well, we’ve got twenty-seven now,” Frank informed him. “Come on, let’s number the damn thing and play it.”
Tony passed a pencil stub around and they all scribbled a “27” on the fronts of their sheets. Bud propped his on the rack, spreading it out, testing a few chords with his fingers, but not striking them. Vic was staring at his sheet solemnly, his eyes squinted as if he were reading a Hebrew newspaper.
“We’ll take it slow,” Tony said, “very slow. Ah-one, ah-two, ah-three, ah-four, like that. One, two, three, four. You got that, Frank?”
“I got it,” Frank said.
“And don’t speed it up. This is the first time we’re playing it. We don’t have to sound like stars.”
“The trumpet is the star of this one,” Frank said, deriving a perverse pleasure from giving Vic the needle. Vic looked at him briefly and then turned back to his music.
“Okay,” Tony said, “let’s take it.” He arranged his own sheet on the stand, adjusted the strap around his neck, and then called, “Ah-one, ah-two, a h-three, ah-four; one, two, three four...”
Frank and Bud started with the rhythm, a four-bar introduction with a boogie beat. Vic missed the pickup at the end of the fourth measure, and Tony called a stop and said, “Okay, let’s try it again. Watch that pickup, Vic.”
Vic nodded, ignoring Frank’s grin of superiority, and then Tony counted off again. Bud and Frank took the intro once more, and this time Vic caught his pickup and went sailing into the fifth bar with it. He wasn’t Harry James, and no member of the band doubted that fact. He had a thin, feeble tone, and he gave the trumpet part all the power of a ruptured flea. On the sustained notes his tone cracked and wobbled, and when the business began to get a little tricky, he went completely berserk, playing in a little vacuum all by himself, not listening to the rhythm and not paying any attention at all to the background the saxes were giving him.
“Okay,” Tony yelled, “hold it, hold it.”
They all stopped, and Vic came to a reluctant, preoccupied halt about four beats after the rest of the band. Frank sat at his drums with a big smile on his face.
“Uh, I think we ought to try that again,” Tony said diplomatically. “From [A] this time. You all got that?”
The boys nodded, and Tony said, “Set the beat, Frank. You know what it is.”
Frank gave the boys four beats on the bass drum, using the foot pedal, and then he gave them another four, and they all came in from [A]. If anything, it was worse this time. They started out together, but Vic got lost somewhere in the shuffle, and pretty soon he was back in his little vacuum again, playing for his own private audience, forgetting all about the band, studying his sheet with those solemn eyes of his, blowing his feeble music from the side of his mouth. Bud looked at Frank, and Frank looked back at him, and they kept the rhythm going, both wondering just where Vic was on the sheet. Bud read ahead a little, but he still couldn’t find just where Vic was, and he didn’t know where the saxes were any more, either. Tony and Mike, on first and third altos, were blowing together, but Ox was somewhere up on a cloud, blowing his own carefree way, and Vic had already left the land of the living and was running completely amok.
Bud lost his own place then, what with trying to read ahead and all, and the resultant cacophony was really a marvel to hear. Everyone kept pounding away or blasting away, apparently blaming the guy sitting next to him for playing either ahead or behind. Tony was so absorbed in following his own sheet that he didn’t hear a sound around him. He was probably the best sight-reader in the group, and when he sight-read, he threw all of his muscular five feet ten into it. He finally was blasted out of his unconsciousness, and he stood up suddenly, as if he’d been goosed, and shouted, “All right, all right, hold it!”
If the band hadn’t been playing exactly together, they certainly stopped together. One minute there was this godawful sound that pounded at the walls, and the next there was complete silence. And then, through the silence, even before their ears had grown accustomed to the welcome peace, the voice from the door said, “Buddy?”
Bud swung around on the piano bench, and every pair of eyes in the band swung toward the door at the same time.
A kid with a trumpet case was standing there. He wore a boxlike raincoat and a battered rain hat, and his green trousers were rolled up over his ankles, showing orange-and-black striped socks. His shoes were caked with snow, and he stood there with the trumpet case in one hand and a man’s black umbrella in the other. He searched the faces of the seated musicians, apparently wondering which one of them was Bud’s. He rubbed one finger across the bridge of his nose, cleared his throat, and repeated, “Buddy?”
“I’m Bud,” Bud said, puzzled.
The kid did not move from the door. He seemed afraid to enter, as if he’d stumbled into the Ladies’ Room by error.
“I’m Andy Silvera,” he said.
“Who?” Bud asked.
The kid gulped down something in his throat, grunted after it was gone, and then repeated, “Andy Silvera.”
Bud couldn’t think of anyone he knew by the name of Andy Silvera. He kept staring at the kid and waiting for him to say something else, but Andy Silvera had apparently said all he was going to say. He stood by the door silently, the snow melting under his shoes and spreading in a small blackish puddle. Tony looked at Bud wonderingly, and Bud shrugged slightly and turned back to the kid.