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had not seen many white men having fun or even smiling in Caw, a town thickly grim even by Texas depression standards. Most were Christian, but their music was dirges and they would rather nod than talk. Once musicians came to town in a dusty Airstream trailer towed by a Mercury. They did not mean to stop here, but they had no money for gas to move on westward, perhaps to Auburn, where one of them had an aunt of substance. They set up in the street and began to play.

    One of them was a Negro who played trombone, a man of some girth like the present John Roman. He was not young but still had the face of a boy in his jowls. He wore spectacles. Nobody had seen anything like this. The man was from Galveston, dark as French coffee. Four men gathered around the front of the band, peering directly at the chubby Negro. Melanie was uncertain whether they intended to harm the dark man or were mesmerized by him. They were unschooled in an audience’s relationship to a band, these weathered white men in gabardine pants or overalls and each with a felt George Raft hat the color of lead with sunspots and sweat lines on the crown. They stood right in the faces of the reed players on their folding chairs, planted almost in the band itself.
    The sun made perfect high noon. This was no time to hear jazz, this Tuesday. Nor was any a good day in this part of Texas, she supposed, staring at John Roman asleep on his lard bucket.
    The Negro trombonist might have been playing for his life. He set his horn and face, that face of a happy boy in rims of flesh, and never closed his eyes, as she saw other horn men do in later days. She knew one of the white men was a Baptist preacher who’d once ordered an unrepentant man’s death as he sat drunk and cursing in bedroom slippers with his sex loose under a vomitous white shirt. One of the assassins his brother.
    In the street before the one-room school, students of all heights stood at the window for a sight of the band. The bandsmen were unaware of interrupting school, and Melanie did not know whether the white men cared. The band kept playing, an open suitcase on the ground before them where folks might toss coins, but three tunes and none had dropped a penny. Urchins stood behind the legs of themen. The black man began getting happier and happier in the face around the big mouthpiece. He was the soloist often, with only bass fiddle and drums and tinkling piano nursing the silences.
    Grown children now stood behind the others, and a little Chinese-Cajun man in a straw hat with an ethereal crown carried a bucket of water to the survivors of the music. A carpenter began nailing and sawing on planks across saw-horses at the hardware door four buildings northward. The hammer popped squarely like shots. The carpenter was good, off in his own dream. Then the Negro began to shuffle and dance during the trumpet solo. The dust rose around his polished brogans, his brown ankles went pigeon-toed and duck-footed, without hosiery.
    The bell of the trombone seemed to Melanie like a cave for an elf city. The man worked the plunger with violence and trembling. He danced and danced and then played with the rest toward the end and they desisted.
    The carpenter was walking rapidly to the band, urging himself through the crowd. He held a hinged-lid trunk clean-squared, nail heads sunk smoothly, an artifact of instant cabinetry. He knelt to remove the open suitcase and lock it. Then he put the trunk in its place, drawing the lid back. “So as not to get your luggage dirty,” he said to the bandleader, whose hands had left his accordion as if to prevent blows on his person.
    Then the rain of coins into the box began. The weathered men backed away. The spectacled boy in the face of the fat black man had never stopped smiling. Melanie dropped in her dime. She understood the man had saved his own life and her eyes grew wet in love for him. His music, the boy in the man’s face, his peril.

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