In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [77]
“The Thunderer” echoed in that narrow street like a cannon volley being fired in a cave. Blowing a sousaphone at such a moment gives one a sense of power that is only rivaled, perhaps, by the feel of a Ferrari cockpit at Le Mans.
Spitzer, our bass drummer, six feet nine inches tall, caught fire. His sticks spinning into the air, his drum quivering, the worn gold and purple lettering on its head:
NATIONAL PRECISION MARCHING CHAMPIONS CLASS A
The crowd is subdued into a kind of tense silence. They were viewing greatness; the panoply of tradition and pomp, and they knew it. The fourteen-inch merchant mill and the cold-strip pickling department at the steel mill rarely see such glory. Children stopped crying; noses ceased to run, eyes sparkled, and blue plumes of exhaled breath hung like smoke wreaths in the air as we slammed into the coda.
Already I was beginning to wonder whether Duckworth would dare try his Capper on such a dangerously cold day as this, with those sneaky November crosswinds, and numbed fingers. His ramrod back gave no hint. One thing was sure, and everybody in the band knew it. Wilbur had never been sharper, cleaner, more dynamic.
By now he was three-quarters through his act. His figure eight and double-eagle had been spectacular. The trombones just ahead of me, usually a lethargic section, were blowing clean and hard. Wilbur’s twin batons were alive. His timing was spectacular.
We arrived at the dead center of the intersection precisely as the last note of “The Thunderer” echoed from the plate-glass windows of the big department store and died out against the gray, dirty facade of the drugstore on the opposite corner. For a moment the air rang with the kind of explosive silence that follows a train wreck, or the last note of “The Thunderer” played by a band with blood in its veins and juice in its glands. And then it began. Janowski “tic’d” his solitary beat. We marched forward almost marking time in place. The crowd sensed something was about to happen.
Duckworth towered ahead of us, weaving slightly left, right, left, right, as his twin batons, in uncanny synchronization, began to spin faster and faster.
Sound carries in cuttingly cold air, and even the Mayor up on the reviewing stand could hear the sound of those spinning chromium slivers:
zzzzzzzsssssstt zzzzssssssssssst zzzzzzzssssttt
Wilbur held it longer than any of us had ever seen him do before, stretching the dramatic tension to the breaking point and beyond. Beside me, Dunker muttered:
“What’s the hell’s he doing?”
Wilbur spun on. Janowski “tic’d” off the rhythm.
Tic tic tic tic tic …
We marched imperceptibly, like some great glacier, across the intersection. And then, like two interlocked birds of prey, Duckworth’s batons rose majestically in the hard November gloom.
Higher and higher they spun, faster than even the day that Wilbur had won the National Championship. It was unquestionably his supreme effort. He was a senior, and knew that this was his last full-scale public appearance before the hometown rabble. His last majestic Capper.
Every eye in the band staring straight ahead followed the climbing arc of those two beautiful interleaved disks as they climbed smartly higher and higher above the street. Wilbur, true to his style, stared coldly ahead, knees snapping upward like pistons. He knew his trade and was at the peak of his powers.
And then it happened. Instinctively, every member of the Bass section scrunched lower in his sousaphone at the awesome sight.
Running parallel with our path and directly above Wilbur’s shako, high over the street, hung a thin, curving copper band of wire. The streetcar high-tension line. Slightly below it and to the left was another thin wire of some nondescript origin. The two disks magically, in a single synchronous action, seemed to cut the high-tension wire in half as