The Junkyard Orchestra

Part One · The Garage Next Door

The letter from the school district arrived in June, on the final afternoon of the term, folded inside every report card like an apology that nobody had particularly wanted to sign. Because of unavoidable reductions in the budget, it explained, the instrumental music program at Hollin's Ferry Middle School would be discontinued in the autumn, and every borrowed instrument was to be returned to the band room before the end of the week. Ollie Brandt read it twice on the bus. Then he unlatched the scuffed case across his knees and studied the dented trumpet nestled inside, which had been his, more or less, for three years of scales, recitals, and enthusiastic blunders. The only part of it that genuinely belonged to him was the mouthpiece, a small silver-plated cup he had purchased with birthday money in the fourth grade. He twisted it free, wrapped it in a handkerchief, and slipped it into his pocket before he surrendered the remainder of the trumpet to the secretary, who apologized as though the decision had been entirely her own.

Every year on the last Saturday of August, the town barricaded River Street, strung colored lights between the lampposts, and assembled a wooden stage beside the bandstand for the Ferry Days festival, where absolutely anyone who could play anything was permitted fifteen minutes in the afternoon. Ollie had attended since he was small, perched on the curb with a paper cone of fried dough, and for two summers he had been plotting to perform there himself with Priya, who played the clarinet, and Tomasz, who played the drums whenever anybody would tolerate it. Now the clarinet had returned to the band room too, and the drums, it emerged, had been the school's drums all along. The three of them slumped on Ollie's front steps in the sweltering heat, eating ice pops that dribbled faster than they could be eaten, and agreed, rather gloomily, that a band without instruments was mostly just a conversation. Tomasz suggested that they could simply clap. Priya pointed out that fifteen minutes of clapping was technically applause, and that applause was supposed to come afterwards.

The solution, or the beginning of one, came from the garage next door, which belonged to Mrs. Ferreira, who had been a plumber in Hollin's Ferry for forty-one years and had retired without, apparently, discarding a single thing. Through its open door Ollie could see racks of copper pipe in every imaginable length, a barrel of plastic drainpipe, coffee cans of washers, valves, and elbow joints sorted meticulously by size, and an old galvanized washtub dangling from a nail like an enormous silver hat. New instruments cost more than the three of them could earn in ten summers of mowing lawns, but pipes, Ollie reasoned, were hollow, and so were trumpets, and so, if you thought about it, were clarinets. He crossed the grass and asked her, as politely as he could manage, whether a person could conceivably build an entire band out of a garage. Mrs. Ferreira removed her reading glasses and considered him for a long and uncomfortable moment. Then she announced that a person could certainly try, provided that the person returned every wrench to the exact hook where he had found it.

She had two further conditions, which she delivered from her folding chair while the three of them stood in a row in front of her like jittery new employees on their first morning. The first was that she would do all of the cutting herself, with the pipe clamped securely in the vise on the workbench, because nobody's fingers were going to Ferry Days in a bandage. The second was a maxim from her working life, and she made each of them recite it back to her until she was satisfied: you can always take a little more off, but you can never put any back on. Then she released them among the shelves. Priya salvaged a row of glass bottles from the recycling bin, rinsed them thoroughly, and filled each one with a different amount of water, judging entirely by eye. Tomasz commandeered the plastic drainpipe, because it was the loudest thing he had dropped so far, and Ollie claimed the washtub, a broom handle with the bristles sawn off, and a generous length of sturdy nylon cord.

The washtub bass was the simplest contraption in the garage and by a considerable distance the loudest. Mrs. Ferreira turned the tub upside down, drilled a hole through the center of its bottom, and knotted the cord underneath, and Ollie lashed the other end to the top of the broom handle, which stood upright with its foot braced against the rim. When he levered the handle backward to tighten the cord and plucked it, the entire tub boomed like a door slammed in an empty cathedral. Meanwhile Tomasz had cajoled Mrs. Ferreira into cutting him eight sections of drainpipe, each one somewhat shorter than its predecessor, which he arranged side by side on a beach towel and whacked across their open ends with a rubber sandal, producing a hollow, bouncing, irresistible thwock. Then the longest pipe slid down over his head like a very small chimney, and he walked in a circle for a full minute announcing that he was a robot and that the robot could not hear anyone. For an entire week each of them practiced separately, in a different corner of the garage, completely delighted with the racket and entirely uninterested in anybody else's.

Part Two · Three Staircases

The first rehearsal took place on a Saturday morning, and it lasted for approximately nine seconds. Priya counted them in, and Tomasz began slapping his pipes, and Priya blew across the tops of her bottles, and Ollie plucked his washtub, and the sound that emerged from the garage was so dreadful that Mrs. Ferreira's tabby abandoned the windowsill and did not reappear until supper. It was not that any individual instrument was terrible. Each one, on its own, ascended and descended in a manner that sounded vaguely musical, but the three of them were climbing three entirely different staircases, and every note collided with its neighbors like shopping carts in a crowded parking lot. They attempted it a second time, more slowly and more cautiously, which only made the collisions easier to identify and considerably more mortifying. A man walking his beagle along the sidewalk paused, listened with an expression of courteous concern, and then continued walking, noticeably faster than before.

Tomasz said that perhaps junk was simply junk, and nobody contradicted him, which was considerably worse than an argument. Priya poured the water out of two of her bottles and refilled them by guesswork, and then poured it out again, and then sat on an upturned bucket with her chin propped in her hands. Ollie went home and sprawled on his bed and listened to the ceiling fan, which droned one unwavering note and seemed, just then, more musical than anything they had constructed. He brooded about the stage on River Street and the fifteen minutes slipping away, and gradually he understood that they had been tuning their instruments the way three people might set their wristwatches, each according to a different clock, so that every watch was confident and every watch disagreed. What they needed was a single clock that everybody trusted, and a reliable method for setting everything else against it. The difficulty was that he had absolutely no idea how to build either.

The following morning he lugged the washtub back to the garage by himself and asked Mrs. Ferreira whether he could borrow her tape measure for an experiment. He measured the cord from the knot on the tub to the top of the broom handle, calculated the exact midpoint, and marked it with a strip of red electrical tape. Then he plucked the open string, listened intently, pinched the cord firmly against the handle at the red tape, and plucked it again. The note leapt upward, but it was unmistakably the same note, only higher and brighter, the way a small child can sing the very same melody as a grown man. He tried it three times to be certain, and it happened three times. Mrs. Ferreira, who was sorting brass washers at the bench, remarked without looking up that musicians called that an octave. Ollie scribbled in his notebook that half the length produced the octave, underlined it twice, and then, after some deliberation, a third time.

A pipe, Mrs. Ferreira explained, operated according to the same principle, except that the thing vibrating inside it was not a string but a column of air, and the length of that column determined the note. A shorter column produced a higher pitch, and a pipe exactly half as long as another, provided they were the same width, sounded roughly an octave above it. That was precisely why Tomasz's eight haphazard pipes had produced eight haphazard notes. So Ollie made a decision, and it was the thing he would be proudest of afterwards, although it did not feel like anything remarkable at the time. Instead of everybody tuning separately, they would choose one note, build one instrument that always played it, and measure everything else against that single dependable sound. When he explained the plan to the others that afternoon, Priya asked where they would find a note that never wavered. Ollie said he had been carrying it around since June, and reached into his pocket.

Mrs. Ferreira unearthed nine feet of soft copper tubing, the variety she had once used for water lines, and coiled it carefully around a paint can so that it kept its shape. Ollie fitted the trumpet mouthpiece into one end with a snug wrap of tape, and she soldered a dented kitchen funnel onto the other end to serve as a bell, wearing heavy gloves and safety goggles while the children watched from behind the workbench. When he blew into it for the first time, nothing happened except an extremely rude noise, which Tomasz described as educational. On the fourth attempt, with his lips buzzing exactly the way his band teacher had taught him, the coil produced a low, mellow, slightly wobbly note that made all three of them laugh out loud with relief. It was not beautiful, exactly, but it was steady, and it was identical every single time, which was precisely what a clock needed to be.

Part Three · River Street

With the horn as their clock, the remainder of August became arithmetic. Ollie tightened the washtub until its open string matched the horn, and then marked the broom handle with tape at a half, at two thirds, and at three quarters of the length, so that he could locate the other notes without guessing. Tomasz calculated the pipe lengths on the back of a cereal box and asked Mrs. Ferreira to cut each one a finger's width too long, because you could always take a little more off. Then the two of them trimmed and tested, trimmed and tested, filing every rim smooth, until every pipe agreed with the horn. Priya tuned her bottles against the pipes, adding water a teaspoon at a time, since a fuller bottle left a shorter column of air above the water and therefore sang a higher note. By the third week they could play four complete songs, and the tabby had returned to the windowsill, which everybody agreed was the most encouraging review they had received.

On the last Saturday of August, River Street smelled of fried dough and freshly mown grass, and the Junkyard Orchestra, which was the name Mrs. Ferreira had stenciled in meticulous capitals on the side of the washtub, clambered onto the wooden stage at a quarter past three. Ollie's hands were trembling so violently that he nearly dropped the horn into the audience. Priya counted them in, and Tomasz slapped the first pipe, and the notes aligned themselves one after another, like passengers stepping politely onto a bus. Nothing collided. Then, halfway through the second song, there was a pop, a crackle, and a long electrical sigh, and every loudspeaker on the stage went completely dead. The crowd murmured in sympathy. A man at the sound table frantically jabbed at switches, Priya stared at the others in horror, and Tomasz mouthed a word that Mrs. Ferreira would certainly not have approved of. Ollie did the only sensible thing available to him, which was to lift the copper horn and keep on playing.

Without the amplification, the instruments proved to be entirely sufficient. The washtub boomed like a door slammed in an empty cathedral, Tomasz's rubber sandal thwocked out its hollow, bouncing rhythm, and the bottles rang across the silent street, each note landing exactly where it belonged, because every one of them had been measured against the same dependable horn. People stopped eating and edged toward the stage in a curious, hypnotized crowd. At the front a toddler began to dance with tremendous solemnity in a manner that had nothing whatsoever to do with the rhythm. When the loudspeakers finally revived themselves for the last chorus, nobody even noticed. Afterwards a gentleman from the town council shook their hands, a woman inquired whether they offered lessons, and Tomasz's little sister announced to everybody within earshot that she required a washtub for her birthday, and possibly a pony, and possibly a lifetime supply of fried dough.

Mrs. Ferreira had observed the entire performance from a folding chair at the side of the stage, with her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead, and she remarked only that the pipes had been cut properly, which from her was an extravagant compliment. Ollie removed the mouthpiece from the horn on the walk home and turned it over and over in his fingers. Back in June it had felt like the last surviving fragment of something that was finished, a small silver reminder of everything the district had taken away from him that spring. Now it felt like the first piece of something else, something with copper in it, and the coiled horn, hanging on its own nail in the garage beside the washtub, would be waiting for him in the morning, along with Mrs. Ferreira, the tabby, and a fresh length of drainpipe, which Tomasz was already wearing on his head.