So Billy is cruising home at twenty miles per hour when he notices this kid on a bike behind him, matching him in speed. Billy accelerates. Naturally, the kid and the bike stay right with him, and now of course the kid can’t jump off the bike. He hardly dares to take his hands from the handlebars, but he risks it for a few seconds, trying to wave Billy to stop. Maybe Billy had drunk a few more than usual, or taken a hit on the weed, but in his rearview mirror, it appears as if the boy is taunting him. Billy hits forty miles an hour as he ramps up onto the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. He looks behind him, the kid’s still there like the Headless Horseman to Billy’s Ichabod Crane. The car’s doing sixty-five now, and Billy sees the kid has his eyes closed, face grimacing. It’s very late, there’s no other car on the bridge, so Billy tries to rid himself of this demon by performing a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. This maneuver works fine for Billy, but it catapults the kid into the air, whipping him into a pylon, probably killing him that same instant if luck was with him. The boy’s body holds almost magnetically for a moment against the pylon, then slides quickly down into the East River, which lies much too far below.

Billy could have just driven away. There were no witnesses. But he was a decent guy and understood that the kid’s family would want to know why and how their son had died, so he went and got the police.

He also got a good attorney, who was able to make the point that his client had no idea the boy’s bike was tied to the car’s bumper, that in accelerating and turning about on the bridge, Billy had only been trying to evade someone he thought was in some way “after him.”

So Billy ended up paying a speeding ticket in exchange for killing a kid. He paid in the basement of the city courthouse, and then told his family he was leaving town and would never be coming back.

That was Billy’s story.

My story I kept to myself. But I had one.

Nothing bad had ever happened to Dave Wooster, baritone sax, as far as I knew, other than him being just an average saxophonist.

But for Billy, Jerry, Frankie, and myself, our past lives were why Jack Donovan possessed arguably the best sax section in the country. The French Foreign Legion, John Hammond had named us, after the army where men went to forget. I knew that for me, forgetting was impossible. The best I could manage, for a moment or two in the course of the day, was simply not to remember.

Chapter 14

14

The Bandstand