Thunder and Roses

by Theodore Sturgeon

  He didn’t know which of them moved, but suddenly their lips were together, just barely touching. She closed her eyes, and her hair was softly around his face. She turned her head slightly, stroking his lips with hers, a kitten-paw touch and a high little sound spelled with m’s escaped her. His shoulders and arms were rock-hard. His eyes closed too, and then she twisted away from him and to her feet, laughing. She stood before the mirror, rapidly twisting her hair up in two great swept-back wings. She was on tiptoe as she worked, stretching tautly, and he knew he would never forget her as long as he lived.

  Later, he was in his room alone, wondering why he had given the taxi-driver her address first, wondering why he had refused the nightcap she offered, and knowing that it was because ultimately he would tell his wife about it, and that would be good as long as it was not unbeautiful in the telling.

  There was a blue envelope on the floor under the maildrop. He picked it up, smiled at his wife’s rounded handwriting, opened it and stood there until he had read it all. It was a very short letter, completely screened of any emotion whatsoever, and it said “I want a divorce.” It went on about not wanting any money from him, and that she was genuinely sorry, but he certainly realized that the separation consisted of more than eight months and two thousand miles. It said that they both had known for a long time that he would go farther and faster alone, and it thanked him for those good years. It was utterly sincere and irrevocable, or she wouldn’t have written it.

  He laid the letter carefully on the table and removed his overcoat and hung it up. Then he went to the telephone and dialed.

  “Yes?”

  “I hope I didn’t wake you. I just got a letter from my wife. Listen.” He read it to her. There was such a long silence that he thought she had hung up. “Hello?”

  Surprisingly, she said, “I can’t see your face. I have my eyes closed tight and I am listening to your voice, but I’ve never seen your face like that.” She stopped, and he could hear her breathing. She said, “Are you glad?’

  “Well, of course.”

  “I’m coming over.”

  “But you c—”

  “Shush,” she said, and hung up.

  He cradled the telephone, picked up the letter and read it again. At last he smiled.

  It was all right. It was all perfectly all right. Obviously a change-partners deal was indicated. Nobody need be hurt. A pity, possibly—funny little words he and his wife had made up together, little tricks they used to play on each other, a way they had of saying good night. Pawing the air and gnashings of the teeth could be left to the uncivilized. He’d be all right. Nice of her to make the break so quick and clean. Change partners. All right; make it a double ceremony. The whole thing was beautifully timed.

  He was suddenly conscious of perfume, for a little clung to his cheek. He thought carefully of his wife, and then of the girl, and the comparison pleased him. He moved about, emptying an ashtray, straightening the cover of the studio couch, learning as he moved how to turn his head to catch the elusive fragrance of the perfume. He was still smiling when the padded knock sounded.

  “Come in.”

  She was inside the room immediately, and the door was closed, with her hands behind her on the knob. “You poor darling,” she said softly, and came toward him.

  Puzzlement swirled in him. Sorry. She was sorry for him, as if something bad had happened.

  She looked up into his face, and put her hands on his chest.

  She said, “Didn’t you know?”

  “Not consciously. Not until tonight.” He waved at the letter. “But it’s all right. It’s all perfectly all right.”

  “And she just let you have it … Just like that. What a rotten, bitchy thing to do!”

  He watched her face, full of pity and passion, and he saw it go questioning. Slowly, fear crept into her eyes. She backed away from him. She opened her mouth but he said “Get out.” “Get out,” he said again, and began to move. She turned and ran, and when the door closed, he sighed. He was all twisted inside the way her face was twisted.

  He slumped to the couch. He sat that way all night without moving.

  Wham Bop!

  IT’S THE KIND of thing you wonder about, so I went and asked him at the end of the number.

  “How do you get to whip the skins in the big time?” he repeated, and grinned at his sweating combo. He racked his sticks. “Take ten,” he called to the boys, and then turned back to me. “Lead me to a cola with the emphasis on ice, and I’ll tell you.”

  He was a big fellow, red-headed, with wide shoulders and a good grin. We got off the stand and around to the tables. He buried his mouth amongst the ice cubes for a long moment and came up out of it with a sigh. It was hot that night.

  “Saw you stompin’,” he said. “You’re a cat.”

  “You and your drums got me to jumping,” I smiled back.

  “Thanks,” he said, and I could see he meant it. “Now I’ll tell you how a guy can beat his way to the top.” He leaned back and, as he spoke, looked at something over my head and quite a while ago.

  “The very first combo I had,” he said, “was a five-man group—clarinet, alto, trumpet, guitar, and me. No piano—we were strictly portable. We were all in school and playing this river resort, partly for peanuts, mostly for kicks. After the first couple of weeks, we began to drag a pretty faithful public. Word got around the way it does, and pretty soon the lot began to fill up with out-of-town license plates. I can’t say that any one of us was really terrific. Thing was, we meshed. When we rode it, we rode it together. It was fine.

  “Things went on that way for a while, and we were in pretty solid. There was no talk of bringing in any pro outfit, anyhow.… Oh, I might as well come out with it. This river place I’m talking about, it was my uncle’s. See what I mean? But don’t get me wrong. We delivered. At first, anyhow.

  “Maybe I got a little cocky, after a while. I began to circulate among the customers a little. Nothing wrong with that. Joey Harris was on guitar. Very solid. That was rhythm enough for some numbers, and the cats liked the drums all the better after I’d given ’em a miss for a while. Anyhow, I planned to go places in the music business, and I figured one good way to do it was to play the customers person-to-person as well as from the stand. Dig me?

  “Well, you can go too far with that kind of horseplay. It had to rain sometime, and when it did, and we drew a small crowd, I couldn’t see the sense in knocking myself out. You might remember that—too much glad-handing is slow poison.

  “One night it was like that—ten or a dozen couples and the band with or without me was strictly so-what. I was down in the far corner telling somebody about myself when I heard the drums.

  “It was a kid called Manuel. Black-haired sleepy-looking guy, sort of round-shouldered and slow. He was crouching in my saddle up there over the suitcases, running over the trap with the brushes. Nothing loud, you know. Easy. Easy like breathing. I just relaxed. I knew the kid. His old man had a motor-launch downstream on charter. They fished some. Manuel used to hang around a lot, watching me on the drums. He knew what he’d get if he tore a head on me. He was careful. And besides, there was nothing going on.

  “He got his foot on the bass pedal and filled out his beat some. Before I knew it the cats were out on the floor, letting the chairs get cold for the first time that evening. Well, that was all right with me too. I like to see people enjoying themselves. All hands were cutting it, and my trumpet man, Stompy Pearle, was sitting up straight for the first time that night.

  “There was a change in the tone of the drums, but not the beat. Manuel had dropped the brushes and grabbed the sticks. And without seeming to make a move, he brought a lick out of those drums that was like a bucket of gas on a coal fire. It brought me right up on my feet, and Brot Hoffman—well, you could see him shiver from the far end of the floor. He pointed his clarinet at the roof and blew out a climbing riff that’d make your hair curl. It got Stompy too; he stood up on his chair
and caught the riff at the very top and brought it back down again with the trumpet. Joey began stroking all the upbeats—something he only did when he was really sent. Every gate in the place said ‘Ah-h-h’ at the same time and stopped dancing.

  “They stopped dancing! What was going on on the stand was just frantic, but nobody moved. They just stood there and soaked it in, with their mouths and nostrils open. Something went pop! inside my head. I was wild. I’d had ’em driving before, but I’d never seen the lid blow off like that.

  “I went up to the stand and back to the drums. I nudged Manuel. He was adrift. I nudged him again. He looked up, still working, waking slowly. I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ He slid out, and I slid in. I got the sticks from him without missing a beat.”

  Red brought his gaze down to me and shook his head slowly. “You’re a cat. You know. You’re playing along, all of a sudden something happens, the whole place is twenty-two thousand feet altitude—and all of a sudden you’re back to earth. You don’t know when or why it starts or stops, but there it is.” He shrugged. “That’s what happened when I took over.” He turned a thumb down. “Like that. The boys fumbled it for a measure and then slipped into our usual arrangement of ‘Whispering.’ But it was all gone. I wanted to take them out one by one and husk them. I didn’t like it a bit. I was mad clear through.

  “We finished it somehow. On the last beat I threw my sticks on the floor and beckoned to Manuel. When you want to tear into somebody, call them over. Don’t go to them. I waited until he was standing by me. He looked very worried and anxious. I guess he could see I was mad. Joey Harris put down his guitar and came over too. I said to Manuel, ‘Who told you to horn in?’

  “Manuel just stood there licking his lips. Joey spoke up. ‘I told him to sit in, Red,’ he said. ‘Somebody around here’s got to play drums once in a while.’

  “I told him I’d talk to him later. I said to Manuel, ‘Look, bud, you know you’re a little out of your element around here.’ He just looked at me, sort of squinching up his face. He knew what I meant. Joey and Brot and Stompy and Fred—that was the guy playing alto—and me, we were all from the resort. There were no tracks around there, but this Manuel, he was from the wrong side of them. Dig me? I said, ‘Maybe you ought to go graze in your own pasture.’ ”

  Red went back to his cola. I watched him. I didn’t quite know what to think. I said, “I thought you were going to tell me how a drummer gets into the real big time.”

  He flashed that grin at me. “Stick around. I’ll get to it. What it amounts to, a guy’s got to be good. Then, he’s got to be smart. He’s got to be smarter than anyone who tries to crowd into his spot. Well …

  “Joey and Brot were still hanging around. They watched Manuel climb off the stand and amble across the floor and out. Then they looked back at me. They just stood there. Nobody said anything. Well, I guess they didn’t like it. But a guy’s got to look out for himself. Those skins were important to me, see?

  “Those guys surprised me after that. They sort of ganged up on me. No kidding! Can you tie it? Wasn’t much they could do. There was nowhere else to play around there, and they knew that a word from me would bring another outfit into the resort. I had ’em, but all the same they laid down some law. I was supposed to keep hands off Manuel. I was even supposed to let him sit in sometimes.

  “I okayed that. Yeah. It wasn’t backing down. It was just being smart. I told them that I had nothing against the kid, and he could sit in any time things were slow, like tonight. But not when we had a mob. That was all right with them. They wanted Manuel’s kind of drums for themselves, not for the customers. We dropped it there. After that we played a lot of music, and if I didn’t get much company from them, I got along all right without it. One of them—I don’t know who—went down to see Manuel the next day and explained things to him. He showed up every once in a while after that, when he wasn’t working the launch with his father. Sat in a few times, too. But never unless I told him he could, and that was only often enough to keep the boys happy. He was good. I had to admit that. Had the easiest attack I’ve ever seen. Strictly relaxed. A simple, shuffling stroke that left you cold—you thought—until you felt the goose-pimples.

  “Couple weeks after that there was a picnic and dance down at the Island. It was two miles downstream and out toward the middle of the river. A nice place. Pavilion, tables—you know. Most of the customers would go down in their boats. The resort hired the old launch to take care of the overflow.

  “I remember it struck me as peculiar that Fred came to me before rehearsal one afternoon and mentioned Manuel. Wanted to know if the kid could sit in at the picnic. I said sure. Why not? We wouldn’t be drawing anything much but local people. He seemed happier about it than he let on. I forgot about it.

  “It was Joey that gave me the first idea that there would be anything special about that picnic. As I said, Joey played very solid guitar. He could read, but mostly he ran his progressions by the seat of his pants. He broke into the middle of ‘One O’clock Jump’ and wanted to know about that modulation in the bridge section, and should he go through an augmented fifth instead of right from his tonal seventh to the dominant. Stop popping your eyes! Guitar players all talk like that. I said, ‘Let’s hear it.’ He ran it off both ways: the new way was strictly from Roxy. I told him yes, if he liked it that way. I trusted him. Next thing I know Fred is up, blushing like he used to do. His mouth was almost useless to him without a saxophone in it, he was so shy. Seems he’d worked out some counterpoint with Stompy and Brot. Could they run it off? Well, I didn’t know they’d been rehearsing among themselves, but why should I kick? I put out an ear and they tore off into this thing.

  “It was a sort of fugue. It was like braiding three colors of rope together, so that you get one strand but you can follow each color of each rope all through it. I’d never heard anything like it before. Not from a jive combo, anyhow. It killed me.

  “When they were finished, nobody said much. Joey was sitting back with his eyes rolled up, making little noises with his tongue.

  “ ‘Fred.’ I said when I got my breath back, ‘you’ve been sneaking into dark corners, that’s what you’ve been doing, and you’ve been listening to Bach. You’re a Persian, Fred, a long-haired cat. It’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous. I’ll buy it.’

  “We ran it off again while I worked the drums in. At first I accented it hard, but the three of them looked as if I was cussing in Sunday school, and Joey held his hands up in front of his face. I got the idea and dropped off to an easy brush, just a low-down walkaway behind all that precision stuff. It was fine. And I still didn’t get the idea. Why should they take all that trouble for a picnic date?

  “I got the idea the day before the picnic, though, but good—and I went up in a mushroom-shaped cloud. My uncle got hold of me and told me to play some really good music at the Island. I said we always played good music. He took out his toothpick and told me no, this was important, or it could be. Seems that one of the out-of-town guests was Phil Drago. The Marshalls were bringing him.

  “Phil Drago! Can you imagine how I felt?” asked Red.

  “No,” I said. “Who is he?”

  “One of the big wheels in the music business. The public knows all the name bands, but the real cats know who plays what instruments how well. Guys like Drago, though, they never get a spotlight. They’re the arrangers and orchestra managers. They do the styling, making one orchestra sound different from another. And mostly, what they say goes. Drago, he was with the King of Swing himself that year.”

  It began to dawn on me. “And that was the year that the King’s drummer got into that—”

  He nodded. “That was the year the King was looking for a new drummer. And you know how he used to pick up players from the bush. Man, this was it!

  “Well,” he went on, “first of all, I wanted to tear into that gang of mine and rip ’em apart piece by each. That bunch of so-and-so’s had probably known about this for days. Hence
all that frantic arranging. Hence something else—I’d been caught unawares and made a promise to let Manuel sit in. I saw the whole pitch. If I laid down the law, they’d give me the big Or Else. They knew the spot I was on. If I was going to play the kind of drums Phil Drago would notice, I’d need a group to back me up, and if I didn’t let Manuel get in a couple of licks, I wouldn’t have a group.

  “Now, you were asking me how a guy gets to the top in this business. Remember what I said? You’ve got to be good in your work. And you’ve got to be smarter than anybody who has his eye on what you want.”

  “I’m making a list,” I said. “What’s the next item?”

  “The next item,” said Red, and made the grin again, “is to be quite sure of what it is you want, and then to use any material at hand to get it. And I mean any.”

  “How low can you get?” I muttered. I was embarrassed when I realized he’d heard me. He just laughed.

  “How ambitious can you get?” he said, and went on with his story.

  “As I told you, this Manuel character helped his father with a launch. It was a busted-up old scow, long ago retired from harbor service, where it used to carry sailors out to ships at anchor and stuff like that. Maybe you won’t blame me too much for what I did. Manuel was a darn good mechanic and knew his boats. I really believed that he’d be happier sticking with it. He might get a disappointment with the drum deal, but he’d get over it. As for me, I felt that the drums were my high talent. I could justify what I did—to myself, anyway. And it was easy to do. You see, Manuel and his father were the only ones in miles who held inland waterway licenses. The launch had to run that night. It was chartered by the resort, and they needed the dough. If Manuel’s father couldn’t run it, Manuel would have to. You don’t take chances with the Steamboat Commission.” He shrugged. “Manuel’s father wasn’t there to run the launch that night. He was out of town. He got a telegram from his sister. She was awful sick. Or at least that’s what it said in the telegram—that I sent.” He smiled.