J R

— That one’s my type, the saxophonist confided over Bast’s shoulder as he sat to the piano. — Maybe you can… but he was cut off as Bast came down with an E-flat chord that sent the boy scaling the peak of the stacked chairs and the Rhinemaidens wriggling and howling by turns below, arching limbs and brazening impertinent bodies in what quite rightly they believed to be lewd invitation, whispering, perspiring, cowering to the blast of the Call to the Colors obliterating a brief saxophone chorus of Buffalo Gals while, in sinister pianissimo, making good use of his unimpaired hand, Bast echoed the Ring motif oblivious, staring, up into the stage illumination on the dwarf’s uncostumed threadbare scaffolded above the caterwauling, and he pounded an open way for his desperate crew through the rhythms of the Nibelungs, hand drawn up in twinges each time a finger struck among those sharp cadences teeming with injury.

— Look! Who’s that up in the back there, came in a stage whisper.

— The lights, I can’t see nothing…

— It’s that fruit Leroy.

— He’s too little, it’s that Glancy.

— Running…

Faster, Bast played now as though hurrying to catch a train, straining toward the crescendo of its arrival till this, with pain that streaked to his elbow sharp as the chord he struck, was all he heard, and the cry of the dwarf was lost, — Hark floods! Love I renounce forever!… lost, if it was ever made at all, the figure running down the aisle reaching the piano as it crashed with the Rhinegold motif that brought the pile of chairs cascading to the stage and scattered the Rhinemaidens in disheveled pursuit of the dwarf, who seemed indeed to know his part, and had got off with the Rhinegold.

— I told you…! shouted Wotan bursting out into the sun, bearing down on the only figure in sight who watched this extravagant onslaught without alarm; but all they wrested from her was the change purse, its nickeled clasp worn down to brass from being closed, and opened, and closed, opened now and on dead leaves at that, flung back to the ground indistinguishable from the leaves they trampled, drawing up in garish clumps of recrimination.

— Where’d he go? that lousy little…

— Look!

— Look out!

Gravel sprayed them from the drive.

— In the car, that’s Mister Bast. They’re chasing him in the car.

— Whose? Driving…

— Glancy. That big lardass Glancy…

— It wasn’t either that’s deSyph, that old junk heap that’s deSyph’s… and they drifted off to tell, over groundswells of lawn heaving with the slow rise, and fall, of light broken by the gentle sway of trees on winds bearing news, from higher up, of a used car sale blown down on retching waves of the tune Clementine to the wailing counterpoint of the saws in Burgoyne Street, where the used car plunged among the dangling limbs.

— The lesson’s all set up, the visuals everything right from the teacher’s guide… and the brief prospect of a straightaway freed his hand from the wheel to turn on the radio. — The script that’s her script and that book, that’s to pretend like you’re reading it it’s a prop…

— But this money, the boy who ran off with that paper bag we were using it in the Rhinegold rehears…

— You don’t need it no, for the Mozart that Rhinegold bag it would throw off everything the testing, the whole…

— It’s not that it’s the money, it’s the money…

Steel teeth overhead shredded a descending bloat of Clementine as the radio warmed to Dark Eyes, and the driver shifted in a seated schottische overshooting a turn to the right. — My wife will help you out don’t worry, she’s waiting for us I already called her and I told you about the singalong, don’t forget the singa…

— But then maybe your wife could…

— Help out yes she has a resource program on right after, she’s in the arts too maybe you know her? B’hai, folk song, preColumbian sculpture… he cut short with a grimace that might have been merely the effort of swerving to a halt at the door where he promptly resumed the catalog in introducing — my wife Ann Mister Bast, she had the Senior Citizens’ class in clay sculpture too, the ones with arthritis here, wait! don’t forget the script… before leaving Bast in a spray of gravel, where Mrs diCephalis took his hand and kept it.