Songs for the Deaf, page 13
When people want to hurt each other, they throw things at each other—rocks, spears, golf balls, bullets. You take aim and then you let your rock fly, hoping your aim is exact and the rock will hit the other guy’s forehead exactly between the eyes, knocking him out, making the blood roll down into his eyes so he can’t get up and do the same to you. So the rock gets thrown and everything’s looking good. But when things are in the air they belong to the wind, and the wind doesn’t work on calculations. The wind likes to blow things around, mess things up, throw off your calculations. It sees a tree full of leaves and decides the leaves are in its way so it blows them all off the tree. Then it sees somebody’s piled up the leaves and it decides to mess up the pile. It sees a quarterback put the football up and decides to blow it over to the defensive back. The wind can stop people from hurting each other, too. The wind might see the rock heading for the guy’s forehead and decide to blow it off course. Then it just glances off the side of the guy’s head. The guy gets mad and throws a rock back at you, but that rock misses completely. Because of the wind. You end up shaking hands with the guy, and you both say, Forget it, we aren’t good enough rock throwers to make it worth our time. But really it’s the wind. It’s not that the wind is trying to teach anybody a lesson. The wind doesn’t care about that. It doesn’t care about anything. It just likes to push things around. And that’s a good thing for us. If there weren’t any wind, there’d be a lot more people hurting each other every day. There’d be nothing to throw off their calculations. Golf balls would never miss. Bullets would never miss.
These are the things I’ve learned about the wind. It changes the direction a bird flies. It changes the look of the sky by blowing the clouds around. It changes the look of the earth, too—sometimes it carries leaves off of plants, and sometimes it carries their seeds and makes them grow somewhere else.
And the wind changes people, too. It carries smells to them and makes them think about things. It talks to people that way. It reminds them that things can change, that things will always change.
That’s why I’m here, Louis.
Before I came in, I asked the doctor, Can he smell anything? He didn’t know who I was talking about at first. He’d forgotten about you. I reminded him, and I asked him again. Can he smell anything? He said he wasn’t sure. He said maybe. I said thank you.
Then I came here to tell you all this. Maybe you haven’t heard a word I’ve said. Maybe you can only hear the sound of the rain and the sound of the gun. But the doctor said maybe you can smell, and if you can smell then the wind can talk to you even if I can’t. The wind changes things. The wind can stop the rain. It can blow it away. Then people will come out of their houses again and pick up where they left off. And you can smell the people and what’s in their houses, and the trees and plants around their houses, and even the garbage they put out in front of their houses and the garbage men who come to pick it up.
I’m going to try to show you what I mean. I’m going over to the window and I’m going to open it up. I never opened it before because I didn’t think it would matter. I didn’t think it could change anything. But there are trees out there, Louis. Oak trees and pine trees. There are birds flying between the trees. Blue jays and sparrows. There are squirrels, too, and the squirrels are running in the grass. There are mushrooms in the grass. And blue and yellow wildflowers. There’s a parking lot next to the grass, and there are cars pulling in and out of the parking lot. There are people walking to and from their cars,
and those people have all sorts of smells—their skin and their clothes and their sweat and their deodorant and shampoo and everything they’ve had for breakfast and lunch today. I’m going to open the window and you’re going to smell them all. The wind is going to bring them to you. Then maybe the rain is going to stop for both of us. Then maybe things will change.
Song for the Deaf
When Tony Sutter gave his first solo performance in fourth grade music class, his chattering classmates shut up and his music teacher’s fingertips froze on the ivories. Up and down the hall of Ermine Elementary, the other teachers lost their places in mid-lesson monologues and their students quit strategizing about how to improve their positions in the lunchroom line, while outside, the playground lady, who had just put her lips to her state police enforcement whistle to break up a kickball fight, collapsed on the four-square court and died.
Only Jeremy Jones, standing on the far side of the diamond, passed over by the kickball elect for the twenty-third day in a row, witnessed the playground lady’s tragedy—the surprised look behind her granny glasses, her hands clutching her throat, her final slow-motion collapse onto the court. He darted through a tableau of slack-jawed classmates to reach her.
As he knelt beside her, her crow’s feet unfurled and her thin lips bloomed to a youthful fullness, and he saw her as if for the first time.
Jeremy Jones had never caused her grief—never cursed or fought or pulled a girl’s hair at recess—but neither had he paid her any attention before this. And now it was too late. He was no better than the others.
A shimmer of reflected light drew his eyes to the whistle resting on her chest. She must have bought ever bigger and louder whistles over the years, believing each time the new one would make a difference. He couldn’t recall the sound of a single one.
A shiver passed through him. He swallowed once and curled his trembling fingers under the playground lady’s head, slid the whistle’s cord past her crinkly gray hair. He jumped to his feet and ran.
Only later, as he buffed the whistle’s stainless steel skin with the front of his blousy t-shirt, did he discover the metal pea inside was missing. Had the playground lady sucked down the pea when she’d heard Tony Sutter’s golden voice? Had she choked to death on it? Or had she stood there blowing and blowing a defective silent whistle until her heart and lungs seized from the effort?
He preferred to think she’d died trying.
Jeremy kept the whistle in his pocket every day throughout elementary school, and when he had no pockets—when his ex-hippie single mother dressed him up in sissified pocketless shorts and then, in junior high, when he had to face the pubescent horror of showering in front of his classmates—he gripped the relic tightly in his fist. Sometimes at night, he took it out of his pajama pocket and put it to his lips, knowing the unjust fate of the only other person to do so. He blew. But without the pea, the noise was breathy and weak. If only it had worked for the playground lady, he thought, the pure, authoritative sound of it would have distracted the kids and teachers from Tony Sutter’s magnificent voice. Then Tony Sutter might have lived the rest of his life as the stuck-up loser he really was.
Instead, after his glorious day of school-wide acclaim, Tony Sutter began to hold himself in the highest esteem, and for some terrible reason nearly everyone else went along. He changed his name to Antonio—just Antonio—a name he decided fit better with his angelic singing voice. Even his parents had trouble with it at first. They’d been calling him Tony for nine years, so if they slipped up they were to be forgiven—by God, maybe, but not by Antonio, who’d already perfected his tantrum-throwing by studying the backstage antics of moody opera singers in Opera Talk! magazine. He stamped his tiny feet and snapped his LPs over his knee until his parents apologized and promised to pronounce “Antonio“ with the correct Italian inflection three times over.
“Say it! Say it! Say it!” he yelled, driving his little fist into his soft palm, and they complied as well as they could but never well enough. They were the fifth generation owners of a small ranch, and they’d never met a full-blooded Italian. They’d only heard the accent once years ago, when they’d seen an Italian maitre d’ in a movie smack his rounded lips to snap the waiters to attention. But he may have been French, they weren’t sure.
“Ain-toh-nee-yo,” they said, but stopped short of popping their oh-ed lips.
It was okay by them that their son would never take the reins of the family ranch. In fact, everything Antonio did or didn’t do was delightful to his devoted parents; he was their golden-haired, angel-voiced baby boy, pure of heart even if his voice killed a hundred playground ladies.
By age eleven, Antonio had let his golden hair grow out. By thirteen, he’d dyed it black. He was old enough then to be regarded as a town misfit, and he wore the mantle proudly— along with the black cape he’d mail-ordered from the opera surplus store. When he walked into town from his family’s ranch, his black hair and cape raking behind him like an airy, dual-action farm implement, the other ranchers stopped their work and stared. Antonio’s chin was too high, his posture unspeakably perfect. The ranchers leaned over the fence, put a boot up on the lower rail. They nudged each other and laughed.
And the shopkeepers in town didn’t like him lingering in their stores. Come back for Halloween, they said. We’ll have candy for you then.
In school, the kids used him as a litmus test for witches: touch his hair, and if the dye came off in your hand you were cursed. Bullies yanked at his cape, shouted obscenities in his ear, and tried to kink his perfect posture with well-placed shoves to the spine.
And Antonio didn’t care, a maddening fact that made Jeremy Jones squeeze his fist so tight the playground lady’s whistle imprinted itself on his palm. Tony had his voice, and everyone, even the bullies, stood in awe of that. The voice turned them so cowed and reverent that when the bullies threw a punch, they threw it considerately, so as not to hit him in the voice box. They blackened his eyes and bent him double with blows to the gut, but to Antonio the black eyes were just a little stage make-up, and a blow to the gut gave him the opportunity to practice his deep bow. The one bully who grazed his throat with a punch, just barely and of course accidentally, bore the wrath of the entire school and got his face scrubbed with a gravy-soaked slab of Salisbury steak.
So when the time came for Antonio’s final junior-high recital, the bullies attended, just like nearly everyone else in Ermine, including the ranchers who laughed at his freakish looks, the shopkeepers who hurried him out of their stores, and Jeremy Jones, whose mother had a compulsive appreciation for the arts and insisted he go.
When Antonio took the stage that night for the finale, all motion stopped, and the entire school auditorium held its breath. He didn’t disappoint. His oversized, somewhat rubbery mouth fired piercing volleys of bel canto ballistics, and each grateful casualty clutched his heart as if it were Antonio’s only target. The Erminers’ eyes fell shut and they forgot themselves and their cows and goats and pigs and new boots. They stopped creaking in their fold-down aluminum chairs. They stopped plinking tobacco juice into rusty Del Monte cans. And the incidental noises that usually ran through their heads on a continuous loop—the voices of conscience and desire, the radio weather forecaster’s droning report, the lowing and bleats of their animals, the theme songs of their TV shows, the rattles of their aging and overworked machinery, the complaints of their spouses and children—all suddenly shut themselves off, and then they imagined themselves riding through the valley and up into the mountains on Antonio’s voice, flying weightless and in love and as pure of heart as the Dead.
Jeremy sat in the back with his arms crossed and a John Deere cap pulled down over his watery eyes, trying not to enjoy himself. But when he looked at the others he saw a glimmer of what he felt in himself, and that scared him. He remembered the playground lady, how she’d choked on that voice and died.
Why couldn’t this Tony Sutter just look in the mirror and see himself for the loser he was? His blond eyebrows and jetblack hair made his face look ghoulish. And even the long hair couldn’t hide his droopy earlobes. He had a weak chin, a girlish neck, and a thin body with long arms and loppy clown feet. He wasn’t tall enough to be charmingly gawky, not small enough to be cute. By all rights, Tony Sutter should have been the bottom-feeder in the social aquarium, the one who slurps the filth off the stem of the plastic plant and the deep sea diver’s shoes. But there was that voice, and the voice had saved him. It had lifted him up just enough to leave Jeremy Jones alone at the bottom, forever pressing that useless pea-less whistle to his straining lips.
While Jeremy wasn’t as ugly as Tony Sutter, he had an almost unspeakable plainness to him. He was beneath detection even by the bullies, who prided themselves at outing even the subtlest losers and freaks. The most interesting thing about Jeremy was his mother, the town’s only remaining ex-hippie, who scraped by selling organic fruit and vegetables at prices just low enough to make her feel she was doing a little good in the world but also suffering for all the good she’d intended to do and hadn’t. Unfortunately for Jeremy, the low prices at her fruit and vegetable stand had earned her the town’s grudging respect—and that made her less interesting. And she didn’t dress or act like a hippie anymore, so she wasn’t a source of gossip.
As the junior high recital neared its close, the now Magnificent Antonio reaching new heights with each song, Jeremy raised the bill of his cap, desperate for some sign that Tony Sutter’s spell could be broken. There were all the bovine faces, eyes closed, eyebrows arched, some of their heads trembling just slightly on their necks like sprung jacks-in-the-box in a breeze, their hands on their knees, or else folded over their chests as though holding their spirits to their bodies, barely. All of them disciples of Tony Sutter.
Except one. Across the aisle, in the back row like Jeremy, she sat between her parents, straight blond hair dangling over the aluminum seat-back, hands in her lap, polite and attentive, but hardly bewitched. In fact, she was struggling against boredom. He could see it in her eyes. He remembered, then: She was deaf.
Jeremy didn’t know her name, only that she was never seen far from her parents, the new owners of the Hats and Boots Mart. They schooled her at home, in the apartment above their store downtown. He’d seen her sweeping the store’s entry on his way to school sometimes, but this was the first time he’d gotten a good look at her face—small nose and tall forehead, little bulb of a chin, high cheekbones. From a certain angle under these lights, she was as laser-cut as a model, but when she turned her head slightly, the other half of her face folded up the promise of her perfect profile and her looks were plain, underachieving, maybe just underformed.
Jeremy had never gone to church because his mother was agnostic by default, but something about the cathedral ceiling, the enraptured crowd, and—he couldn’t deny it—Tony Sutter’s angelic voice made him feel a rare sense of mystery, and so he thanked God for making the deaf girl deaf.
As the Magnificent Antonio hit his final notes, each more beautiful than the last, Jeremy thought he heard a new edge in the voice, a fierceness that cut through all that dreamy sweetness. Tony Sutter’s face showed increasing annoyance. Not his mouth, which held shape to buff each note that left his golden diaphragm. But his eyes and his furrowed brow. He was staring now at the shopkeeper’s daughter and singing only for her, struggling to bring her into his fold. He didn’t know she couldn’t hear.
Meanwhile, the deaf girl was composed, polite, and totally unaffected. That had to sting Tony Sutter more than any bully’s punch.
Jeremy bent over and put his hand to his mouth. As laughter filled his cheeks and sawed out his nose, he missed Antonio’s stunning climax.
Later that night, in the dark of his room, Jeremy got down on his knees and rested his forearms on his bedspread. He unclasped his palms and brought the empty whistle to his trembling lips. He sighed into it, the weak rush like a breathy prayer to the God of the Unnoticed.
And so it went, the next night and the next. While Antonio rode the magic carpet of his wondrous voice, Jeremy Jones clung to its fringe with a card up his sleeve and only the faintest hope of ever playing it.
In high school, Jeremy slid like a frozen fish off the stainless steel prep counter of teen society. Party invitations floated over his head and behind his back and sometimes, it seemed, right through him. Girls brushed past him in the hall and never broke the flow of their conversations, never even lowered their voices.
Then, when Jeremy was sixteen, his mother founded a local chapter of the Arts Appreciation League and made it her first order of business to take up a collection to send Antonio to a prestigious music school in New York.
The townspeople were eager to give by this time, not so much as art patrons but as people who wanted some peace and quiet. Antonio’s endless singing carried throughout the valley and rebounded off the surrounding mountains—causing avalanches, some said. People heard him on their ranches, in their shops and restaurants, even in their showers—the one place where they’d once thought it safe to hum a few bars themselves. They had business to attend to, lives to lead; they couldn’t just close their eyes and drift off into the clouds all day. Also, Antonio had grown stranger in his ways. He wore the same old tuxedo every day. The too-wide jacket shifted back and forth like a bell as he walked. His short-legged, wide-waisted pants snapped like flags in a stiff wind. At any moment he might drop to one knee and burst into song, gesturing melodramatically with his small but expressive hands. When he returned to his feet with his trousers drooped low in back, he’d hike them up and hold them with one hand, still gesturing with the other. He’d begun to wear dark make-up around his eyes, and people called him The Singing Dracula.
When the scholarship check was presented to him, the league’s co-vice-president patted him on the back. “I just know we’ll all be tuning in to PBS real soon to see you whoop the pants off them three tenors.”
Antonio accepted the check and the challenge in the name of all artists everywhere, most specifically himself. He bowed deeply, his black hair flopping over his head and sweeping the wood floor of the library meeting room.
The four other people in the room applauded: all three members of the Arts Appreciation League and Jeremy, whose mother had laid her usual guilt trip on him until he agreed to come. He’d had to suffer through dozens of Tony Sutter recitals, Tony Sutter school assemblies, Tony Sutter special achievement awards broadcast over the school intercom. At least this would be the last.
