Buck ended it in the middle of a phrase, with a shocking, brutal blatt that tore everybody’s nerves. It jolted my fingers right off the keys. Lew’s hands froze on the bass. We turned and stared at Buck and then looked where he was looking.
I saw the man at the bar. I hadn’t seen him come in. He was looking at Buck and Buck was staring back at him. It was hard to recognize him, but I finally did. Jack Bryce, wearing rumpled khaki pants. Life had broken his face and his eyes and his heart. Four years had added 15.
They stared at each other. It was late and everybody sensed the tension. It was so quiet I could hear the trucks droning down the trail.
A drunk said angrily, “Whassa matter witha music?”
“Shut up!” somebody else muttered at him.
Jack Bryce pushed himself away from the bar, turned with a little difficulty and came directly toward the stand. I heard his blue canvas shoes slapping on the worn floor. He walked directly toward Buck. He grunted as he stepped up onto the stand. I didn’t know what was going to happen and yet I couldn’t break out of the freeze.
Jack stopped in front of Buck and held his hand out. “Let me play one, Buck?” he said hoarsely.
Buck stared at him as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. Then, slowly, he gave him the horn. Jack turned around, fingering the valves. He turned toward me. “ ‘Tea for Two,’ Harry,” he said in a low husky voice.
I gave him an eight-bar intro, and he didn’t come in, so I gave him eight more bars. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that he had the horn to his lips.
Maybe I’ve been to too many movies. Maybe those Hollywood types have set me up too often for the warm glow. You know what I mean. Ruined musician comes into Hungarian restaurant, borrows gypsy violin, plays his new concerto for violin that has him back at the top before you can say Darryl Zanuck.
He took it after the second intro. Ever live across a street from a kid who has just taken up the horn? Torture, man. The kid has no lip. And Jack’s lip was gone. A dissonant and hideous squawking. But the kid bores through to the very end. Jack could hear himself. He quit after five notes. He just opened his hand and let the horn fall and bounce. He went off the stand. He nearly fell, but caught himself and got to the door and went out.
Vicky got to the horn and picked it up. She handed it to Buck. He worked the valves. He looked at a new dent in the bell. He wiped off the mouthpiece. If there was any expression on his face at all, it was a faintly puzzled look. If Iron-Pan Hogan should ever completely whiff a tee shot, he might wear that same look.
Buck played a fast test scale. Vicky stood near him, looking down into his face. For the first time Buck had a chance to really look down those cellar stairs and see that bright hot light that shone there for him. That night, life had handed him his revenge without him raising a finger, so he didn’t have the other thing on his mind any more. Now he could look at Vicky.
The cash trade was beginning to mumble. I started with two handfuls of nothing, and Lew picked up the beat, and I faked and then pulled it into an intro to that old Goodman theme, “Good-by.”
Buck put the horn on it. I took a glance. Vicky stood with her hand on his shoulder. He looked up at her as he played. He was playing “Good-by” and his eyes were saying hello.
It was good horn. It was good, competent, unmagical horn.
Lew and I talked about it this morning over four a.m. coffee. I mean I talked and he grunted in the right places. We agreed that maybe Buck will never play as much horn as he did those nights when he was summoning the ghost of Jack Bryce in out of the Florida night. So in that sense something is lost.
But it is still a fine fat horn, a very good horn, and something else has indeed been gained. They don’t pop up with a Vicky every day. And you can’t go out and find one. You just have to be lucky enough to have one come along.
And you see, I’d never let her see even one small glimmer of the torch I’d been carrying that year.
