Woodwinds

The band room at the Junior High School in Shell Lake, Wisconsin is emptying out. My name is Gordie, I play the clarinet. Theres an assembly for all the parents next Friday. They made it a half-day and everything. Playing the clarinet is stupid. For one thing, I cant even really play. Not the way somebody can play the guitar and write a song and play it for everybody. I just look at the dots on the paper and try to guess what notes they are and nobody can really hear me anyway. Thank God. Also, its not like I picked to play the clarinet. It's a girl's instrument and I've never heard of anybody choosing to play this dumb thing unless of course they were a girl.

Lessons are in a dark little room. Mr. Walden always gives some kind of oppressive lecture on practicing more. It just happens, over and over. I wish he'd just realize that it isn't going to happen. You just squirm around in your seat, scrambling for notes on this stupid, stupid instrument. It's a half hour of torture. Some times he'll extend it to almost forty-five minutes trying to get some passage right. I'm always kind of afraid he's going to do something. He never has. But I'm kind of expecting it. I bet he molests his kids. I bet theyre as stupid as he is.

Tall, rolling hills separate our home from town. You can smell cow pies and sandy roads for miles. Moms a nurse at the Hospital in town, she teaches Sunday School for third graders and every day when we come we have to write a report about something out of the encyclopedia after we finish our homework, even in the summer. We have a cabin in the woods outside Spooner. Dad works for a laboratory out near there. He once had a patent for building a new kind of detonator. It blows up bombs I guess.

A boy walks through a wooded area playing a clarinet.

Have you ever seen a ghost? I had a cousin that died out here a long time ago. He fell off a dirt bike. Nobody knew why. Somebody said something scared him really bad. After his funeral all my aunts and uncles and everyone was in our cabin talking about what had happened. My uncle was saying something about how fast he was going in his truck and that the speedometer only went to 85. My cousin said we were going much faster. Then he was gone. Everyone saw him say it, but nobody said anything. Everybody just went along like nothing happened.

Sometimes there's a girl in the woods. She doesnt say much. We play together sometimes. She can appear anywhere. She says she knows my father. I didnt bother to ask him. Adults dont like talking about ghosts and their mostly liars anyway.

A boy arrives on the edge of the woods near a cleared prairie. A tank unit rolls off in the distance toward what looks like a very large and somewhat incomplete satellite dish.