Novel

Sunday, March 6

Once, when Owen was between bands, Art Brew was out of work and Balder was at home, graduated from high school and waiting to go off to the boot camp at Parris Island to be a Marine bandsman. A trumpet player.

All three Saunders men, unemployed. At the house.

Brew drove Owen to Tallahassee, to the FSU campus, to audition for a job playing fiddle in a bluegrass band at a theme park. Dollywood?

They went by Gordon's String Music, on North Monroe, to buy a pickup for Owen's fiddle. Gordon sold Brenda her Martin shitty-top guitar for $1,000.

Owen later sold it at a bluegrass festival for $3,000. They used the money for down payment on an FHA loan for a VA repo house in Norcross, Georgia, after Brew had rebuilt his credit, after the bankruptcy, by working for several years at Suent Scientific, the fiber-optic cable manufacturer, as a senior information development specialist.

The theme park had several of every kind of band, and singing group, from bluegrass, to Dixieland, to barbershop quartet, to soft rock, to swing band music, to Broadway shows. Opryland?

The audition reminded Brew of A Chorus Line.

Please help me, Lord. I need this job.

The auditions were held in the hall over the rathskeller, a large room where Brew had been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa 25 years before.

In fact, it was Brew and Brenda's 25th wedding anniversary, and they didn't have enough money to spend a weekend at The Oaks, in Panacea.

But maybe Owen would get a job and move out again. He had been on the road since he was 16, when he went on the road with the Gillis Brothers.

Balder was surely moving out.

It would be Brew and Brenda in The Empty Nest, the trailer behind Granny Brown and Uncle Wayne in Point and Shoot. The Empty Nest was packed to the scuppers with all four of them in there.

Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Granny Brown and Uncle Wayne had taken all four of them in.

More than once. Sometimes Brew called the family Swiss Family Boomerang Family.

The room was broken up into clusters, by musical genre. Owen had a pianoist to accompany him.

You could hear snatches of music from the other groups. A veritable Tower of Babel, only tone and interval, instead of stress, pitch, and juncture.

The piano player said, "Orange Blossom Special," and kicked it off at a blistering tempo. Owen wrung--rung?--the changes on it, playing chorus after fertile chorus.

Gradually, the hall fell still.

When Owen finished, everyone applauded.

Driving home, they went the coastal route, and stopped at the Blue Parrot oyster bar, on St. George Island, to eat. The sound system was playing Jimmy Buffett's "Let's Get Drunk and Screw," with Vassar Clements on fiddle. Owen took that as a positive sign.

Owen didn't get the job.

It was just as well.

He'd have been miserable playing "Rocky Top" and "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" ("Theme From The Beverly Hillbillies") three shows a day.

Just as Brew would have been miserable teaching college. Shooting lay-ups. Doing passing drills.

When, later, a band Owen was in was nominated for a Grammy, Brew asked him what the awards ceremony was like, and he said, "A seven-hour basketball game with shitty music you don't like."

The ceremony was held in Madison Square Garden. A featured band was the Smashing Pumpkins. The Sheriff of Mayberry beat out his band, Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, in the traditional gospel category because the judges were swayed by Andy Griffith's infomercials on late-night television.

Good old television.