Free Bagombo Snuff Box by Kurt Vonnegut Page B

arm around Maude, who was staring through the
picture window at the grill. He squeezed her gently. “I said it’s quite a
story, isn’t it, Mama?”
    “We really did ask him to stay,” she said.
    “That’s not like us, Maude, or if it is, I don’t want it to
be anymore. Come on, hon, let’s face it.”
    “Call him up at the hotel!” said Maude. “That’s what we’ll
do. We’ll tell him it was all a mistake about my sister, that—” The impossibility
of any sort of recovery made her voice break. “Oh, Earl, honey, why’d he have
to pick today? All our life we worked for today, and then he had to come and
spoil it.”
    “He couldn’t have tried any harder not to,” Earl sighed. “But
the odds were too stiff.”
    Converse looked at them with incomprehension and sympathy. “Well,
heck, if he had errands he had errands,” he said. “That’s no reflection on your
hospitality. Good gosh, there isn’t another host in the country who’s got a
better setup for entertaining than you two. All you have to do is flick a
switch or push a button for anything a person could want.”
    Earl walked across the thick carpet to a cluster of buttons
by the bookshelves. Listlessly, he pressed one, and floodlights concealed in
shrubberv all around the house went on. “That isn’t it.” He pressed another,
and a garage door rumbled shut. “Nope.” He pressed another, and the maid appeared
in the doorway.
    “You ring, Mr. Fenton?”
    “Sorry, a mistake,” said Earl. “That wasn’t the one I
wanted.” Converse frowned. “What is it you’re looking for, Earl?”
    “Maude and I’d like to start today all over again,” said
Earl. “Show us which button to push, Lou.”
     

The No-Talent Kid
    It was autumn, and the leaves outside Lincoln High School
were turning the same rusty color as the bare brick walls in the band rehearsal
room. George M. Helmholtz, head of the music department and director of the
band, was ringed by folding chairs and instrument cases, and on each chair sat
a very young man, nervously prepared to blow through something or, in the case
of the percussion section, to hit something, the instant Mr. Helmholtz lowered
his white baton.
    Mr. Helmholtz, a man of forty, who believed that his great
belly was a sign of health, strength, and dignity, smiled angelically, as
though he were about to release the most exquisite sounds ever heard by human
beings. Down came his baton.
    Blooooomp! went the big sousaphones.
    Blat! Blat! echoed the French horns, and the plodding, shrieking,
querulous waltz was begun.
    Mr. Helmholtz’s expression did not change as the brasses
lost their places, as the woodwinds’ nerve failed and they became inaudible
rather than have their mistakes heard, while the percussion section sounded
like the Battle of Gettysburg.
    “A-a-a-a-ta-ta, a-a-a-a-a-a, ta-ta-ta-ta!” In a loud tenor,
Mr. Helmholtz sang the first-cornet part when the first cornetist, florid and
perspiring, gave up and slouched in his chair, his instrument in his lap.
    “Saxophones, let me hear you,” called Mr. Helmholtz. “Good!”
    This was the C Band, and for the C Band, the performance was
good. It couldn’t have been more polished for the fifth session of the school
year. Most of the youngsters were just starting out as bandsmen, and in the
years ahead of them they would acquire artistry enough to move into the B Band,
which met the next hour. And finally the best of them would gain positions in
the pride of the city, the Lincoln High School Ten Square Band.
    The football team lost half its games and the basketball
team lost two-thirds of theirs, but the band, in the ten years Mr. Helmholtz
had been running it, had been second to none until the past June. It had been
the first in the state to use flag twirlers, the first to use choral as well as
instru—A mental numbers, the first to use triple-tonguing extensively, the
first to march in breathtaking double time, the first to put a light in its
bass