Author: Alias

The football players smashed into one another with the force of semi trucks, the sounds of their collisions drowned out by the pervasive screaming of fans.  Hal’s own throaty screech was lost in the chaos.  He wasn’t particularly loud, and his voice had gotten stuck at some point during puberty in the odd limbo between the voice of a boy and the sonorous, crisp boom of an adult male, subjecting him to frequent voice cracks.  His scream crackled now, and he could have been mistaken for fourteen or fifteen were he not a member of the marching band.

His right arm burned from the motion accompanying the excerpt from Temptation, commonly referred to as “Stands T” by the band.  Although he hardly felt it, the faint sensation was enough to distract him in the game.  He wasn’t much invested in it anyway, caring more about the stand tunes and watching halftime than anything else.

Why don’t we play a short version of W?

War Chant, the second half of the Michigan traditional duo that begins with Temptation, was just as musically robust and hype.  For the cymbals, it was a near-constant motion of pumping the arms up and down, interspersed with deep knee bends, 180-degree jumps (and one 270-degree jump), the infamous back bend, and, at the very end, a complex pattern of partner crashes that could literally kill you if you forgot to duck.  It was the perfect complement to the knee torture of Temptation, though W (or “Dubs,” as many people called it) contained knee torture, as well.

It is a universal truth that, when it comes to T + W, you can’t have one without the other…yet, in the stands, there was one without the other.  Hal had always been deeply saddened by this, as he loved both T and W, although they were grueling, especially when you were forced to do it inside the band hall with a mask on.

He always imagined a stands version of W drawing from the first part of the song, which involved a relatively complicated crash rhythm for the cymbals that alternated with eight-count drum features.  He’d never said anything about this to the band director or the drum instructor, seeing as he was a freshie reserve fresh out of a yearlong hiatus (though it might as well have been a punishment for something Hal didn’t do).

He swallowed as the play ended with the opposing team gaining three yards and prayed Stands W would become a real occurrence.

Tungsten clouds flattened as they scraped along the dome of the stadium, the residual howl of their wind battling the sonic boom of the multitude for dominance.  Within the confines of the band section, instruments bellowed and slammed into the rattled air, stunning anyone unfortunate enough not to have earplugs, and shot their notes toward the field.  Cymbals smashed a vicious beat over the intricate, layered rhythms of the drums.  Fierce, dark waves from the trombones blasted forth in ominous fronts that seized the hollow wind and regurgitated it as menacing music.

And the TV station, as per usual, completely ignored them.

Hal chopped his arm back and forth to the explosive cymbal crashes, throwing his shoulder forth and thrusting his upper body toward the football players as though they would acknowledge him.  They were too far from the band, crouched as they were at the 45 yard line, and their backs were to the north end zone where the band gathered.  Of course, the chant wasn’t directed at the Michigan football players; rather, it was meant for the opposing team, who had just fumbled the ball in the most spectacular fashion.

Hal and the other drumline reserves were not allowed to chant along with the student section for a very specific reason, but nothing prevented him from singing along in his head.  The mantra was an adrenaline rush, a ferocious vocal tacked over an exhilarating spew of domineering energy and sound.

He unleashed his fury in the form of a scream that flooded his ears but was easily trounced by the band.  Primal, feral, in perfect time, it blended with the shout of the rest of the cymbal line, his one sheer thrill forgotten in the chaos.

He wished he was able to play along with the rest of the band, but the cheer was the closest approximation he could get this season.  A freshman in the cymbal line, he’d never really stood a chance to make the performance block this year, and he had only a small chance to make it next year.  He’d practiced incessantly, but he was inexperienced and not as strong as the upperclassmen, who performed advanced visuals with seemingly little effort.

Hal loved marching band immensely, loved the cymbal section (it was objectively the best instrument), the people in it.  Loved screaming and dancing in the stands every Saturday with his band friends.  But there was a tickle in his mind, a gnawing, nagging sensation at the back of his throat, the tiny demon that numbed his arms and chipped away his resolve.

At the moment, with his arm gouging the wind and his intense glare fixated on the football players pooling around the 45 yard line, he was a machine.  A maize and blue warrior launching an offensive against the wind and against silence, smushed between two of his fellow reserves who pummeled the air with similar malevolence.  All thoughts silenced except the two-word mantra and the swell of the trombones.  Tension building, building until it climaxed in a minor duo of notes, a final crash, and then–

Uproar.