The old man wiped the linoleum counter top again and nodded toward the window that kept out the settling dust.  Gerald Long’s gray Ford was disappearing down the two-lane. As had become habit, I sat at the counter on the end stool, the one nearest the door.  “Tell me.  What do you think about Gerald?”  He spoke quietly without looking at me and, had I not been the only other person in the diner, I would not have known he was talking to me.  But he was—and that kind of question, I had learned after a time, had nothing at all to do with what I might think of Gerald Long.  It meant Elliott had something on his mind.
        “I don’t know, a good guy, seems like. What about him?”  I knew very little about Gerald.  Actually, that was something I could say about most people in Crosland Parish.  I knew that he owned no animals, pets or otherwise.  I knew he owned the Chevron self-serve on the other side of town.  He was a plain man of thirty or so years.  We had spoken a couple of times, but that was about all.
        
I had lived and worked among these people for almost four years by that time.  I had a clinic across the road and down a bit from the diner, and often stopped in for coffee or lunch, maybe dinner after closing up shop—sometimes just to visit.  I took care of Crosland Parish’s animals.  We were too small a town for specialties, so I handled them all: Herefords to hamsters.  I had met most everyone in town at one time or another, but I still felt like an outsider in many ways, told only what someone might think I needed to know.  I was seldom asked for an opinion when not at the clinic.  I was the only veterinarian for miles and, I often thought, if not for that, they might just have ignored me.
  
Close knit, self-sustaining, community fibers intertwined, Crosland Parish did not suffer strangers easily.  It was a farming community, and everyone either farmed or provided services to those who did: grocers, teachers, mechanics, whatever.
        They were good people all, slow and deliberate.  Very slow and very deliberate.  Perhaps people tend toward slowness and deliberateness when they mark their lives as much by the changing seasons as with hours or days.  They were mostly a sincere, down-to-earth lot, qualities that could cause others, such as me, for example, to accept what they said as true when, perhaps, a bit of skepticism might be warranted.
        Gerald Long, an uncommonly common man, was one of them.
  
Elliott drew himself a half-glass of water over a little ice and walked around the end of the counter.  He took the third stool, leaving an empty one between us.  He sat down and for several moments was silent.  Finally, he spoke, again quietly, again seemingly as much to himself as to me.  “Back a while, I guess ten years before you came, more or less, he was seventeen, eighteen maybe…his last year in high school, anyhow.  Gerald played trumpet in the school band.  Played in pretty well, most folks thought.  You couldn’t really tell about a high school band though with all the drums.  Usually ‘way to many drums playing ‘way too loud.  Sometimes they’re all you can hear, you know?”
        Not wanting to distract him, I said nothing, figuring no answer was really expected.
        The old man lowered his head to glance at me over the top of his glasses.  He did that often, even when he wasn’t wearing glasses.  “Some do for a fact,” I responded, hoping it was enough of an answer to get him on with the story, but not enough to start him off in another direction.
        “Some people thought Gerald might someday be a rich and famous musician.  They really thought he was that good.  ‘He’s the best this town’s ever seen,’ you know—things like that.  Maybe so.  Maybe he was that good.”  Elliott seemed to choose his words carefully, perhaps realizing that what he was saying was some fact and some opinion, and trying to avoid unwarranted assumptions.
        “I’m not sure exactly what was wrong with the Breland boy.  Never asked and never heard anybody say.  It was some sort of degenerative thing, and most everyone accepted that he’d probably die soon.  Bunkie…his nickname, not his real one…he was Gerald’s cousin.  Bunkie’s what everyone called him.”  He paused.  “Huh…I don’t know his real name.”  He took a sip of water and waited for the comment that did not come.  Another sidelong glance.  “It was clear that what was wrong was seriously wrong and there wasn’t any cure. Bunkie and Gerald were about the same age.  When they were little, they played together all the time.  Callie Breland and Bunkie lived in that stucco next door to the Longs.  The two boys stayed out back playing in that stand of salt cedars from daylight to dark, most days.  One thing they stopped for every afternoon though was Gerald’s hour or two of practice on the horn.”
  
He stopped talking and picked up the lemon-shaped bottle of juice and let a couple of drops fall into his glass.  He started to get up, then instead of going back around the counter to get a spoon, picked up the glass and gently sloshed it around.  I waited.  He would say more when he felt like it.
        He set his drink on the counter, lifted the glasses off his nose, and began wiping the lenses with his counter rag.  The glasses had been clean before he started wiping them, but now his hands were occupied.
        “As the kids got older, I guess they had to grow apart somewhat.  The time came, not too long before Bunkie died, that he and Gerald might go for as long as a week or more and not see each other, even though they lived right next door.  Gerald was in school and Bunkie, well, his body grew older but his mind just seemed to start slipping backward.  Gerald still practiced every evening, and when the sounds of the trumpet came through the windows of the stucco, Bunkie would tug on Callie’s skirt and say, ‘Gerald-on-the-horn.’
        “Sometimes things can stick in the minds of people like that, I guess. And so, for the last few years of Bunkie’s life, his cousin was Gerald-on-the-Horn.  Sometimes they would meet on the sidewalk downtown, or in church or wherever.  Gerald would hug him and Bunkie would say something like, ‘I love you, Gerald-on-the-horn.’
        “Callie had a small phonograph.  As Bunkie’s health failed to the point where he could barely get around, he used to sit for hours in the living room and play one particular song over and over.  It was an old album, and had some scratches where Bunkie had moved the needle over to replay his favorite piece.  ‘Wonderland by Night’ it was.  I’m not sure if it was Bert Kaemfert or Ray Anthony, or just who played it.  Maybe Bacharac.  No matter.  He’d listen to it and as soon as it finished, he would move the needle and start again.  Are you hungry?
  
I was sitting on a stool in a diner.   Still, the unexpected question caught me by surprise.  I told him I was “good”—didn’t need anything to eat, and no more coffee.  He stood up then and I watched him disappear into the kitchen.  Years earlier, when I had moved to Crosland Parish, I had asked about renting the vacant stucco while I finished converting my place to an office/residence.  It would have been perfect.  I needed a few months to finish the clinic and, from what I’d heard, I may have been the only renter to come to town in ages.
        “It’s not for rent, at least not yet. Sorry,” Gerald’s father told me.  Head down, he was speaking to my feet and offered no further explanation.  I had managed without it, and the stucco stands empty even now.
  
“I turned off the grill,” Elliott said.  “Ought to turn off the lights too, I guess.  I’m probably done for the day.”  But he sat back down on the

 stool.  “Every now and then, Gerald would take his horn next door and play for Bunkie.  That really fixed him up. The kid seemed to worship Gerald and when he played the horn just for Bunkie…well, you know how people like that—retarded folks—you know how they are.  In the whole world, nothing could make Bunkie happier than to have Gerald-on-the-horn play just for him.”
        The old man’s pauses were getting longer.
        I said something like, “Yes, I know,” although I had no clue really.  I stood up and stretched, checked my watch, then sat down on the stool next to him so I might hear more clearly the voice that was getting softer with each sentence.
        “Bunkie got worse.  He was going downhill, faster each day, with no way to slow down, much less stop.  After a while, his life narrowed itself to two things that could bring any pleasure or comfort to the boy.  One was having company come over.  Anybody who stopped in to see him really made his day—the more, the better.  The other was that song, ‘Wonderland by Night,” on the record player, or better, if Gerald played it for him on the horn.
        “By the time Bunkie’s birthday rolled around that year, his eighteenth I think, he was in pretty bad shape.  It seemed as if his systems were shutting down, one by one.  He had stuff in his lungs and throat and had these coughing spells that got more frequent as time went on.  Very little he could eat, or at least eat and keep it down.  He didn’t go anywhere except to bed, to the bathroom, and his place in front of the phonograph.  It was only a matter of time.
        “I guess we all knew it.  Bunkie, too.  His birthday was coming up soon, but the party wasn’t going to be any big deal. Birthdays are minor stuff to most folks, but to someone whose life is otherwise empty, I guess it means…I don’t know.  Maybe it is important, if that’s all there is. Anyway, to Bunkie, it was Christmas, New Years, and Fourth of July, all in one—a bunch of people coming to visit him, and Gerald-on-the-horn, too.
        “Gerald was graduating from high school that spring.  In a town this size, everybody knows about the get-togethers, parties and such that come up at the end of a school year.  It was the senior trip, I recall.  In a family as close as theirs, everybody knows when birthdays are coming up too. The trip and Bunkie’s party were on the same night.  It was a matter of logistics, or miscommunication, or something, because everybody knew about everything, but nobody put the two together.  And by the time they did, it was too late to change either one.  Gerald wasn’t coming to Bunkie’s party.  Oh, he apologized and said he’d come over the next day and play for him. Bunkie cried a little, but he was long past understanding the complexity of what had happened.
  
The old man looked away—lost in thought, I guess.  I wished he would get on with it.  I could do nothing but wait, so that’s what I did.
        “Alan,” he said after a few moments, “there’s no way anyone was at fault for what happened.  Personally, I think Bunkie was tired.  Maybe angry, maybe disappointed.  Mostly, I think, tired.  Of everything.  I think his body decided to quit. Anyway, that afternoon, the coughing spells came on again, one after another.  Callie cancelled the party, of course, and Bunkie died before morning.  It hurt most all of us, but Gerald took it especially hard.  Maybe he thought he might have made Bunkie’s last day better had he been with him that night.” 
        He rubbed an imaginary spot on the counter.  “The church was full that afternoon at the funeral.  Not too many of us, though, went to the cemetery afterwards, a couple dozen, more or less.  They put his casket over the grave and the pastor said a few more words about Bunkie and how he was better off now.  The usual stuff.  When the preacher was finishing up, Gerald left the group under the awning and went to his Daddy’s station wagon.  He reached into the back and got out his horn.  Those of us watching him didn’t think an awful lot about it.  He was probably going to play something Bunkie liked.  It was a fitting thing to do.  No big deal.”
  
I watched Elliott as he sat beside me, his hands now resting on the counter. Before him were a water glass, reading glasses and a counter rag.  Finally, instead of picking anything up, he laced his fingers together and said, “Can I get you some water, Alan, a Coke maybe?”
        “No thanks.  I’m good.”
        “If you’ve ever heard that particular recording of ‘Wonderland by Night,’ you know that the first note or bar, or whatever, is really, and I mean really loud.  And high pitched, almost like a scream. And that’s how Gerald played it.  Maybe it got the crickets’ and locusts’ and bullfrogs’ attention too, because all of a sudden, it was very quiet.  Not a sound anywhere except for that horn.  ‘Course the cemetery’s not even a half  mile from town, but still, that’s pretty far off to hear a trumpet playing.  Several people in town did, though.  Even Courtney over at the welding shop heard it.  I tell you, every note was exact—perfect, I guess.  Anyway, it was beautiful.  It was Bunkie’s.  It was unique.
        “There were tears in Gerald’s eyes and on his cheeks while he played.  I guess that was likely true of the rest of us, too.  When he took the horn from his lips and the last note faded away, the silence was the most absolute I’ve ever known.  There was nothing.  Not a heartbeat, not the sound of my breathing, or of anybody standing with me.  We all noticed it.
        “Now it only lasted maybe a second.  Sort of a punctuation for what we’d heard. Then everything was back to normal, crickets and bullfrogs and all.  As we walked to our cards, I heard Gerald tell his mother, ‘I’ll have to get a new horn, Mama. There’s no music left in this one…maybe not in me either.’  That’s what he said.  But he never did get another horn and, as far as I know, he hasn’t played since.”
   
The old man fell silent. The tale was told. After a few moments, he stood and walked to the end of the counter.  “Are you sure you’re not hungry?  I could fix you a sandwich.”
        The story was probably true, or close to it.  Maybe Courtney at the welding shop or those other folks in town didn’t hear the music as clearly as they claimed, and Elliott and the others at the cemetery may have exaggerated a bit about the silence of the frogs, but none of that mattered.  I now understood Gerald’s long years of reticence.  I understood his father’s hesitancy in renting out that stucco, and why that perfectly fine house stood vacant still.
  
Elliott would not have shared the story with an outsider.  As of that evening, I was a citizen of Crosland Parish, one of them, a member of whatever we were.  “No Elliott.  No thanks.  I’m not hungry.”  I rested my hand on his shoulder and kept it there momentarily as I passed behind him and headed for the door.  “See you tomorrow… Sleep good.” 
 
 
                         About The Author
  
                Buddy McDougald is a high school math, English, and social studies teacher in Wichita Falls, Texas.  He lives on a small acreage outside of town where pecan and peach trees vie for space with a target range and a dirt track for the grandchildren to race 4-wheelers.  He enjoys flying, shooting, and trying to work crossword puzzles.
        He says of the writing life: “I came to writing late in life and find it to be perhaps the most satisfying thing ever.  I can only imagine what it must feel like to be really good at it.”
        An earlier piece in Calliope (Issue #121), “Pomp & Piety…,” earned Honorable Mention #3 in the 2008 fiction contest.
    
    
                             Copyright © Buddy McDougald