Chapter 10: Drummer Boy
Rated G
XXxx
A young man drove down the country road under the high sun in a Firebird-Orange ’69 BOSS 429 Mustang, a hand-me-down from his parents. To be honest, it wasn’t so much of a hand-me-down as it was a graduation present. It was his father’s, and he always used to dream of owning it when he was little, going into the garage to see him working on it. So, when he graduated valedictorian at Gilroy High School last year, he received it as his first car, and it would take him to college, towards his ultimate dream: a musician.
The boy was extremely gifted. He had an aptitude to pick up nearly any musical instrument you handed him and play it, gaining proficiency in a matter of hours, and he had perfect pitch; you could hum any note, and he could tell you without hesitation what it was. But, out of all the instruments he could play, he had three that were dear to his heart: his Snare Drum, Baritone, and Mellophone; four if you want to count his voice. They were his most prized possessions, and he had planned on auditioning for a Drum Corps in upcoming December.
But that was before the dimensional collision. Since then, his family and friends were gone, and he had barley any money. As a result, he traveled around the country, stopping wherever to eat, which was extremely rare, given how many humans were still left. He was often taken in by the Vivens Machina, what planes, cars, and other such machines were referred to by humans on this side of the sky, who were surprised to a) not only meet a human, but b) see a car that wasn’t living like they were, what such vehicles were on the human side of the sky. Nearly every family that he met, however, were gracious hosts extremely curious of the different musical instruments that he had with him as well as his adeptness in playing them all.
Sighing, the human rubbed his short, curly hair and adjusted his aviator sunglasses. Reaching his arm out towards the radio, he fumbled with the knob to see what stations there were.
“Country… Rock… Country… Country…” he muttered to himself, settling on the last frequency as The Allman Brothers’ “Jessica” played over the late ‘60s stereo.
It wasn’t two seconds before the boy started tapping along to the beat on his steering wheel, bobbing his head like nobody was around for miles. In fact, where was everybody?
Stopping shortly, he looked around him as he drove. He knew he was somewhere in the Midwest, obviously, judging by all the corn fields. In fact, he couldn’t see anything but cornfields, the high sun shining off the now green fields for miles. That explains the country music. And the horrible smell of some kind of fertilizer. Just then, a sign came up on the side of the road, pointing the way to some town called Propwash Junction.
“Huh. Airplane community, maybe?” he spoke to himself out loud. “Well, I guess we are going to find out.”
After a few more minutes of driving, the young human concluded that it was unmistakably an airplane colony. Between the planes flying over his head, and the airport situated on a cliff, that if viewed from the air resembled the outline of an airplane, it was pretty clear who most of the inhabitants of this little town would be. Nevertheless, he pulled up next to a building marked “Fill-‘n’-Fly,” before shutting off his car and opening the trunk to pull out a couple of things. He needed a break from the long drive.
Meanwhile, a our little group of planes and other vehicles were gathered in the grass near the river, enjoying the sunshine and whatever talk came easiest. Ripslinger, Skipper, with Sparky hunkered down beside him, and Dusty lay in the cool grass with Chug and Dottie sitting across from them. The Mustang lay, idly sucking and chewing on the end of a wheat-stalk, listening to Dusty regaling them with the tale of how he earned his championship title, even though, with the exception of Ripslinger, they were all there to witness it.
“So because I beat two rivals, and I also won the race, I got a three-point major; enough to be awarded the title of Champion,” Dusty was saying.
“Yeah, that was a pretty slick trick, Dusty,” the Corsair, Skipper remarked, “One of your finest moments.”
“Yep! It won’t be long before I’ve earned enough points to get my Grand Champion title now. I’ll bet Ripslinger could teach me all sorts of moves like that,” the smaller racer said, turning to the green and black plane, trying to get him involved in the conversation. “You know, besides just trying to kill your competition.”
“Haha…” Ripslinger, managing to ignore that last remark, maneuvered the wheat stalk in his mouth over, saying, “Not on your life, Sport.” before tapping twice on the smaller plane's nose with the end of it.
Dusty, a wry smirk on his face, opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again and became alert at the sound of an unfamiliar engine coming into town.
“Whoa. D'ya hear that?” he asked.
Everyone else was paying attention now.
“Sounds beefy, whoever it is,” Chug observed. “It’s nobody I recognize.”
He looked to Dottie, sitting to the left of him, who shrugged her forks.
“Me neither,” Skipper said, “How ‘bout you, Dusty?”
“I don’t know,” he answered thoughtfully, “Let’s go see!”
And before anybody could respond he was up on his landing gear, his engine fired up as he went speeding off and took flight, his companions blinking after him. In his haste and eagerness he had forgotten to contact the control tower as he approached the main runway. He would probably get reprimanded for it later, but that was the farthest thing on his mind as he soon spotted what was out of the ordinary.
The stranger was parked over by the Fill ‘n’ Fly, orange color standing out brightly. Some sort of muscle car from the looks of things. Dusty cut his engine and floated himself down the rest of the way, silently, suddenly becoming cautious. He could hear music, some kind of horn, as he approached, slinking down a bit into his landing gear, but as he got closer realized that this was no normal car, and he rose back up to his default stance in surprised curiosity.
By the time the rest of the group got there, they could see Dusty, hunkered down into his landing gear, belly almost touching the ground as he stared unblinking in a way he had when fascinated by something that he’s never seen before, mesmerized.
Sitting on the trunk of the firebird orange Mustang was a human, quite a young human, and he was playing a sort of silver horn. The stranger had at first paid no mind to Dusty when the small plane came up to him, but at the approach of a larger group of Vivens Machina, he paused in his playing, sincerely hoping that this was the welcoming committee. He lifted his shades up onto his head, revealing strange-colored eyes, they were not blue, and yet they were not green either, but the color of static water in an estuary. The two larger planes toward the back didn’t look particularly friendly, especially the green and black one. Dusty broke the tension.
“Hey!”
The male human turned toward Dusty as he took off his Aviators completely and hung them from the collar of his shirt, alert in his appraisal but holding down any expression of nervousness pretty well. This little one seemed friendly enough. Of course, “little” still being about eighteen feet long, by his judgment, but the other two made him seem very small.
“You’re really good with that horn,” the orange and white plane complemented, “What is it?”
“It’s a French Horn,” answered the stranger. “I was playing a piece out of Venus.”
“Like from The Planets?” Dusty asked.
“Yes,” the human replied softly, “How do you-”
“I did a tandem aerobatics performance at the Hill Country Hammerfest to Jupiter once.”
“Oh,” he murmured, noting that more and more he’d be noticing parallels between this world and his former world; he idly wondered if maybe there wasn’t some car version of himself or something rolling around somewhere.
He picked his horn back up and started playing the first horn set for Jupiter. Dusty laughed, getting a real kick out of this.
“Yeah, that’s the one!”
“Who are you?”
It was the green and black plane that spoke, his voice such a stark contrast to the smaller plane’s in front of him; low, smooth, and with a harder edge that jarred the human out of the relative comfort that he’d fallen into, but he kept it down as he answered.
“I’m a musician,” said the stranger, coolly, “Most people just call me Tom.”
The checker-marked P-51 seemed to relax, if even minutely, at how the boy had said “people”, as if taking it to mean that he had also referred to all of them as people as well, but kept him fixed in a scrutinizing but otherwise unreadable stare.
“Cool,” Dusty chirped, breaking up the awkwardness, “My names Dusty. Dusty-”
“Crophopper,” Tom finished. “I know who you are.”
“You do? Sorry, I wouldn’t think most humans would be familiar…”
“Well no, not really,” Tom admitted, “But I hang out with a lot of your kind from time to time when there aren’t any human settlements to lay up in.”
“Lay up in?” Dusty asked.
“I don’t really… Let’s just say I travel for a living,” clarified Tom, choosing his words carefully.
“That explains why you weren’t all that surprised to see us then,” Skipper concluded.
“I see…” said Dusty, “Well, you could say that about me and Ripslinger too,” he gestured toward the larger, checker-marked plane. “Between the two of us, we’ve been just about everywhere almost.”
“Speaking of which, I haven’t really seen much of you on the tube lately, Ripslinger,” Tom observed, “So what are you doing out here?”
“I’m on vacation,” the P-51 replied flatly.
“Huh. Funny, I didn’t really think you two were friends.”
“We aren’t.”
Dusty suddenly looked uncomfortable, and Tom wasn't quite sure of how to react to that one, and so stifled down a snort instead.
“Hey, what’re these other things?”
Tom turned to see Dusty now peering into the open windows of the car at the other instruments that he had with him in the back seat. He scratched his head at how fast the little plane was already beaming with vibrancy and curiosity again. The way his focus could fly from one thing to another was enough to make one’s head spin, almost reminiscent of a dog that’s spotted a squirrel.
“Oh, those are my other instruments.”
“You can play all these?” Dusty said, impressed. “Take them out, I want a better look.”
“'Kay…”
And so Tom did, sliding off the trunk of the BOSS 429 and opening the back seat, taking out various kinds of horns and drums, laying them all one by one down onto the grass. At this point the whole group came forward, marveling at how similar they were to instruments in their own world.
“So, here we have what I like to call the “Drum Corps Brass” set: Contrabass Bugle, Baritone, Mellophone, and Trumpet; notice how they are all silver. These instruments are used for Drum and Bugle Corps… or were, I should say,” Tom said, threatening to break up ever so slightly at his crushed hopes and dreams, but he sucked it up and continued. “Same over here, this is the ‘Drumline’ set: Marching Snare and Marching Quads, which are clearly for more rhythmic aspects. And then,” Tom smiled, “one of my favorites of the periodic table of percussion is a Guiro de puertorriqueño.” Tom stopped for a second before rotating on his feet. “Ustedes pueden hablar español, ¿verdad?” He said, before getting some very blank looks, although Ripslinger seemed a little less clueless than the rest. “Never mind then,” he said, and continued nonchalantly.
As they all nosed around and handled the different instruments, Tom noticed that Ripslinger was no longer among the group. He looked around, and found him standing in front of his car, a detached, bored look of appraisal etched into his features and he stared down at it. Now that he was away from the others, Tom could see that he wasn’t exactly what he was expecting of a plane of his kind of celebrity. He looked… thin, and just generally unhealthy, and he had a certain melancholy about him that was perplexing. Then the large green and black plane leaned down, sticking his nose under the front bumper of the car and Tom stiffened in alarm.
“Hey!” he exclaimed, and then his chest seized with horror as the P-51 lifted the front of his car nearly two feet off the ground, letting it drop back down, bouncing into its suspension. “Hey, hey, hey, hey, HEY!”
Ripslinger backed away, but kept his nose pointing down at the human intently as he ran in font of him and between the car, seemingly forgetting the considerable difference in size and strength.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”
“What’s your problem?” Ripslinger seemed to sneer, his eyes narrowed, “It’s not like this thing is alive.”
“I don’t care! It damn may as well be alive! I…” Tom paused, everyone was frozen; nobody made a sound as plane and human stared each other down, “It’s all I’ve got left of my old life, okay?”
Ripslinger’s nose tipped up slightly as he backed up another inch or two, and where his eyes, Tom observed, seemed rather dull, something flickered in their continence. Not enough for the human to be able to place what emotion it was, but enough for him to notice. The checker-marked racer, reversed further before slewing his body away and moving back toward the rest of the group, who were slowly going back to their examinations. What was up with this guy? Tom thought. Why’s he so robotic?
The human followed suit, watching with interest as Dusty nosed at the contrabass bugle, sort of rolling it over the ground and feeling it. He winced as Dusty then started mouthing it a little, eventually moving to pick it up but shortly laid it back down when he realized that it was much heavier than it looked. Great. Airplane slobber on his instruments. He hoped it wasn’t corrosive or something weird like that; how was he to know? At least he was being gentle. He could just see the sharper, pointed teeth toward the back of his jaw as he had gripped the contra in his mouth, some of which were nearly three inches long and over an inch thick at the base.
“Hey, Rip!” the former crop-duster called out, “Come over here and pick this thing up.”
“Busy.”
Tom looked over to see Ripslinger examining his marching snare with Sparky. He leaned down, turning his body slightly to the side and running one of his propeller blades across the top of it and then tapped on it twice. Tom watched with a curious attentiveness as he then brought two of them down onto it, one right behind the other, sounding almost like what he recognized as a flam only a bit slower.
“You like drums, Rip?” Sparky asked.
“Yeah,” he answered somewhat absent-mindedly.
“Here, I got an idea. I’ll be right back.”
The little gray forklift scooted off, and when he came back he had his bracers for drumming in his tines.
“What are those for?” Ripslinger inquired.
“I use these when I do gigs and stuff.” said Sparky as he began clipping them on to the green and black plane’s prop blades. “These are meant for forklifts, but seeing as how you have two propellers that can be moved independently I think these should work out well enough. Hey, Tom, where’re your sticks?”
Tom eagerly grabbed two of his drum sticks from out of the glove compartment and went to go fit them into the bracers, interested to see where this was going to go. As he approached him from his left side, he was suddenly interrupted.
“Ooh, uh, Tom!”
Tom stopped abruptly and slowly turned around a bit at the sudden urgency in Dusty’s voice. He hadn’t quite cottoned-on yet to the way Ripslinger tensed and lowered into his landing gear as he was walking up to him, his flaps beginning to extend down.
“I think, uh, it might be better if you approached him from the front, ‘kay?” Dusty covered, smiling a bit sheepishly.
“Uh, okay…”
Tom adjusted his course, more apprehensive than he was before at the thought of just walking up to the business-end of an airplane, especially at how sharp these particular propeller blades looked. He stopped just in front of him, the plane’s manner and the enigmatic stare that he’d fixed the human with telling Tom nothing.
“Alright,” Tom began tentatively, “I’m gonna put these on now.”
Dusty watched with reserved interest as Ripslinger actually stayed still for Tom as he attached the drum sticks and tightened them into the bracers. He pulled and tugged on them a bit to see that they would stay put, and once satisfied, stepped back.
“Okay, now try them.”
After a moment’s hesitation with everyone watching him he began just tapping here and there, alternating between a proper flam and seemingly random taps, but then he suddenly started into a continuous flam-tap, increasing in speed until the cadence hit that of the chugging of a locomotive. After holding that tempo for a few seconds he changed his technique and intensity, speeding up even further into a buzzing drum roll before slowing back down into the flam-tap from before, but then gradually coming to a stop once he’d noticed all the looks of wide-eyed astonishment directed at him.
“What?” he said nonchalantly as he looked around at everyone.
Tom sat there, pensive as he looked at Ripslinger. Without another thought, he went and grabbed another set of snare sticks, taped orange and green all the way down.
“Here Rip, try this. Right, left, right, right, left, right, left, left,” he said, slowly hitting the paradiddle as he said it before Ripslinger joined in.
They worked their way up the tempo before the sticks were a blur of motion, the sound perfectly spaced apart. Ripslinger then evolved his patterns into some paradiddle-diddles, and some quintuplets with flams thrown in the mix. He continued to get more complex, even throwing in a book report before Ripslinger and Tom worked their way back down the tempo.
“Hmm. Have you ever played the snare before?”
“Yes.”
The answer was short, and Tom was able to tell the subtle hints of “but let’s not go into that right now.” in the large plane’s tone. He respectfully moved on.
“How extraordinary…” Skipper murmured thoughtfully.
His tone was still rather cryptic as to what exactly about what they were looking at was extraordinary, but Dusty knew well enough himself as he smiled knowingly up at his mentor before turning his eyes back onto the spectacle of a human being and an thirty-three foot long airplane wailing on the drums together, not one movement, not one drum beat out of place. Tom started getting fancy with some stick flips and hi-moms before he hit a shot on Drum 1, and then both the drum head and the stick snapped. As Tom yelped in pain, the others went rushing over to his side; even Ripslinger seemed concerned.
“Oh my god, are you okay?” Dusty said, his voice laced with worry.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Tom assured them as he shook out his hand. “Hurt like hell though. I’m going to need to get a new drum head,” he said, before another thought crossed him. “I’m also going to need a place to stay for a while, if you guys don’t mind.”
The group, having already gotten rather attached to this young man that had so suddenly dropped into their lives, chorused in a plethora of “Oh no's” and “Sure's” before Dottie offered up.
“I’ve got room, and I’ll bet Sparky will be able to help you with that drum head.”
“Yeah you’ll just have to put up with her fumbling with that old baby grand of hers every morning,” Sparky jested.
“You shut up! Just because I can’t play anything fast…”
“No, that actually sounds pretty good.”
“Well, come with me then,” she said, turning “Let’s get you set up.”
XXxx
The sun was nearly set, keeping the cliffs of Propwash Junction’s airport brightly lit while the land below was already shrouded in darkness. Ripslinger sat in his usual spot near the edge of one of the cliffs, nose pointed into the sun as he stared off into the distance, still wearing the bracers on his prop blades. Where Dusty really enjoyed the sunsets a place like this could offer, Ripslinger preferred to stay out after it went down for the real show to start. He could never see the stars back home in Los Angeles. He remained motionless even after he became aware that he had company. Tom had come to stand beside him, and the two sat in silence for a while before the human spoke.
“You know, I gotta admit, I never thought I’d find myself playing a duet with an airplane, but that was pretty fun earlier.”
“Yeah…” Ripslinger spoke, the barest traces of a smile making itself seen.
And it did not go unnoticed by Tom, but he wasn’t going to push the issue. The sun was nearly set, darkness starting to prevail on the cliffs now. There was another companionable silence between human and plane. Tom looked back up to the P-51, noticing the bracers.
“Here, let me take those off.”
Ripslinger turned and leaned down to Tom’s level, wincing a bit as he un-clipped the bracers and took them off. As the human took off the last one, he reached up, his hand nearly brushing the plane’s nose cone, and Ripslinger jerked up and away. He quickly pulled his hand back, startled at how fast something that size could move. He was constantly getting thrown off like that, the Vivens Machina just didn’t move the way a human would think they should, given what they were. Such vehicles making such fast, and rather fluid movements just didn’t process right in a human’s brain.
And yet Ripslinger, after some hesitation, seemed to be drawing inexplicably nearer to him. He once again reached out his hand, the two both moving toward each other. He flinched slightly, when the green and black Mustang lifted his nose a bit, his mouth opening just enough to see the rear teeth, where from this close up Tom could see exactly how big and how sharp they were. But he pushed forward, his hand eventually coming to rest on the side of Ripslinger’s nose cone. He just let it rest there for a moment before slowly, gently sliding his hand about halfway around it’s circumference, marveling at how warm it was contrary to how he thought it would feel.
Olive stared into deep teal, and Tom could have sworn he saw that same something from before flash through the checker-marked plane’s eyes again, feeling a prickle as his hair raised as to what that was. Dusty had been watching from a distance, a huge, hopeful smile on his face as he saw the human and plane withdraw from each other, and Tom walk away back toward town. Ripslinger stared after him, an odd sort of confused yet wistful look about his features.
“Don’t worry,” Dusty said, making his presence known as he approached, “he’ll still be here when you wake up in the morning.”
“Who’ll still be here?” Ripslinger asked, suddenly becoming haughtily aloof as he moved to go back into town himself to the hangar.
Dusty sighed, a flutter blowing from his engine as he shook his front and smiled, following Ripslinger back.
