The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown (free ebook reader TXT) 📕

I hurried home and packed. I was both glad and sorry that Mom and Gardie were out. I left a note for them.

Uncle Am was already at the corner when I got there. He had his suitcase and a trombone case, a new one.

He chuckled when he saw how I looked at it. He said, “A going-away present, kid. With a carney, you can learn to play it. With a carney, the more noise you make, the better. And some day you’ll play yourself out of the carney. Harry James’ first job was with a circus band.”

He wouldn’t let me open the case there. We got our streetcar and rode away out. Then we walked to a freight yard and cut across tracks.

He said, “We’re bums now, kid. Ever eat a mulligan? We’ll make one tomorrow. Tomorrow night we’ll be with the carney.”

A train was making up. We found an empty boxcar and got in. It was dusk now, and dim inside the car, but I opened the trombone case.

I let out a low whistle and something seemed to come up in my throat and stick there. I knew what had happened to just about all of Uncle Am’s two hundred dollars.

It was a professional trombone, about the best one you can get. It was gold-plated and burnished so bright you could have used it for a mirror, and it was a feather-weight model. It was the kind of a tram that Teagarden or Dorsey would use.

It was out of this world.

I took it out of the case reverently and put it together. The feel and balance of it were wonderful.

From the trombone playing I’d done in the Gary school, I still remembered the positions for the C-scale. One-seven-four-three—

I put it to my lips and blew till I found the first note. It was fuzzy and sloppy, but that was me, not the trombone. Carefully I worked my way up the scale.

The engine highballed and the jerks of the couplings came along the train toward us and past us, like a series of firecrackers in a bunch. The car started moving slowly. I felt my way back down the scale again, getting more confident with each note. It wasn’t going to take me long to be playing it.

Then somebody yelled “Hey!” and I looked and saw my serenade had brought us trouble. A brakeman was trotting alongside the car. He yelled, “Get the hell outa there,” and put his hands on the floor of the car to vault inside.

My uncle said, “Give me the horn, kid,” and took it out of my hands. He went near the door and put the horn to his lips and blew a godawful Bronx cheer of a note—a down-sliding, horrible-sounding note—as he pushed the slide out toward the brakie’s face.

The brakie cussed and let go. He ran alongside a few more steps and then the train was going too fast and he lost ground and dropped behind us.

My uncle handed me back the trombone. We were both laughing.

I managed to stop, and I put the mouthpiece to my lips again. I blew and I got a clear note—a clear, beautiful-as-hell, ringing, resonant tone that was just dumb luck for me to have hit without years of practice.

And then the tone split and it was worse than the horribly bad note Uncle Am had just played for the brakeman.

Uncle Am started laughing, and I tried to blow again but I couldn’t because I was laughing too.

For a minute or so we got to laughing at each other, and got worse, and couldn’t stop. That’s the way the rattler took us out of Chicago, both of us laughing like a couple of idiots.