Geronimo Rex

1 / Blue Spades

In 1950 I’m eight years old and gravely beholding, from my vantage slot under the bleachers, the Dream of Pines Colored High School band. This group blew and marched so well they were scary.

The white band in town was nothing, compared — drab lines of orange wheeled about by the pleading of an old bald-headed pussy with ulcers who was more interested in his real estate than in his music. But the spade band was led by a fanatic man named Jones who risked everything to have the magnificent corps of student musicians he had. Jones was joked about and sworn at by educators, black and white, all over the parish.

Everyone voted on a special bond of fifteen thousand dollars to renovate the gray plank barn sitting in a basin of clay and pine stumps north of town. This was the colored high school. The bond was approved and they dumped it all on Jones, the principal, to administrate. It was well known that he was not a drunkard, lived with his wife, and was struggling to do something with the school. But the reason they voted him the money was that his school building was uglier than anybody could bear — I mean even too ugly for a casual dove-hunter to drive by and see. It looked like an old chalkboard eraser floating in a pool of beer. They awarded Jones the money at a ceremony where the white parish trustees whetted each other to death explaining what unprecedented heroes they were — most of the bond, of course, coming from white taxes.

Well yes Jones was struggling to do something for the school. He happened to be combination principal and band director of Dream of Pines Colored. His band was made up of squirrely, breathless boys and girls who wanted to avoid the physical education class. They whittled their own tonettes out of bamboo and otherwise got by on gift instruments from World War II; had lard-can lids for cymbal and a tuba full of flak holes and so on. Jones was good and sick of this. He was fed up getting the Best for Homemade ribbon at the state band contest every year, and having his band chuckled about by his colleagues, who said here comes Scream of Pines again. Here comes perennial dilapidation on the forced march again.

Jones was a marching band fool. He did take the fifteen thousand, used a thousand of it to repaint the exterior of the school building, and sunk the rest of it in new instruments and uniforms for the band. Then he drafted a hundred and twenty students into the band, which was the entire student body of Dream of Pines Colored, except for sixteen weaklings he left to the varsity football team — these boys were real mewling sluggards — because the school had to at least field a team to give the band an excuse for marching at half-time. The football team went out the fall after the bond money was awarded and got cut up in games to the tune of 70–0. But the score didn’t tell the whole story — these boys were out of breath and puking from just having run out of the locker room.

All the burly and staunch were in the band, with their new blue Napoleonic tunics and shakos, overridden with stripes and scrolled lightning filigree, and they were playing tubas, trombones, French horns, trumpets, and euphoniums, or bombing the hides of fresh, brilliant drums. And didn’t Jones and company have a band. In two months during vacation he rehearsed the hundred and twenty boys and girls. He met with them in a pine-needle clearing above the high school, right in the out of doors, and drilled them by section — now trumpets, now clarinets, now saxophones, etc. — eight hours a day, many of them standing up with their new, unfamiliar instruments, and the girls sitting on Coke cases, until the kids were ashamed to come back next day without their parts down perfect. It must’ve been like the mouth of an oven there in the clearing; the sun over Dream of Pines is so bad you begin thinking it’s an eye looking at you alone. It gums up your days; I can vouch for that. Of course it came down through the usual rank clouds from the Dream of Pines paper mills — and settled on you, dragging down to your body the wet junk of the air.

Jones told them they wouldn’t get to wear the new uniforms, wouldn’t deserve to wear them, until they came in one morning playing faultlessly. In two months, he had them all considering serious life careers in music. Jones was that good. The tone-deaf dummy on cymbals quit smoking so he could conserve his wind, and looked forward to studying at a conservatory after graduation. Three girls quit doing what they used to because of loss of energy on the clarinet. And Harley Butte, the mulatto fellow who tied up with me eventually in a sorrowful way, was fifteen then, and practiced marching and playing the French horn in the privacy of his own home. Harley told me later that the school bus which carried the band to out-of-town games and other parade events became like a church inside, that year. Jones rode in the seat near the driver; there were a hundred and twenty Negroes paralyzed against one another in the seats and aisles. And no more, the smoking; no more, the liquor out of the wallet-sized pepper bottles; no more, the wet finger with agreeing girls, or even any kissing, much — none of the universal acts of high school band trips. They knew they were too good, and had too much at stake. No one wanted to lose a dram of power on his horn. The instruments followed in a trailer truck that Jones rented right out of his own pocket money.

First time they hit the field at an early September foot-ball game, it was celestial — a blue marching orchestra dropped out of the blue stars. The spectators just couldn’t imagine this big and fine a noise. They were so good the football teams hesitated to follow them; the players trickled out late to the second half, not believing they were good enough to step on the same turf that the Dream of Pines band had stepped on. The whites living on the border of the mills heard it, and it was so spectacular to the ear, emanating from near the colored high school, they thought it must be evil. I mean this was a band that played Sousa marches and made the sky bang together. The whites in town put a spy onto them the next Friday night. He found out Jones was billing the group as “The Fifteen-Thousand-Dollar Band” over the public address microphone. This was a slight lie, one thousand of the fifteen having been spent on paint for the unsightly barn. But aside from that, Jones’s band was easily the best marching band, white or colored, in Louisiana. That’s all Harley Butte knew at the time; he didn’t have much privilege of scope to broaden his judgment at the time. He’d only been with the band to the state contest from 1947 to ’50, and he knew they beat everybody down there. Then he sat in an end zone down at Baton Rouge and saw and heard the Bossier City band, which was supposed to be the best white band in the state, and he knew Dream of Pines was better. While the fact probably was, by what I saw and heard that afternoon hiding under the bleachers at the colored football field, Dream of Pines was the best high school band in at least the world.

The way it was affecting me, I guess I was already a musician at the time and didn’t know it. This band was the best music I’d ever heard, bar none. They made you want to pick up a rifle and just get killed somewhere. What drums, and what a wide brassy volume; and the woodwinds were playing tempestuously shrill. The trombones and tubas went deeper than what before my heart ever had room for. And I just didn’t know what to think.

Then Jones, who was standing on the bleacher above me and making it creak viciously, called them to a halt with this “No, no, no” “My ass,” he said under his breath.

He’d been waving his arms and yelling at separate people in the band. Now I could detect that one or two people were out of step. They were rehearsing in uniforms on a bright day when any kind of nonconformity could be seen, like the dirt spots in the grass of the field. But when the band put their horns to their lips, I had no doubts about them, the way Jones did, jumping up and down and scolding them during the music. I understood by Jones that some poor trumpet man was going to be canned if he didn’t make his part, but I heard nothing wrong. The band to me was like a river tearing down a dam when they played, and you just don’t hang around finding out what’s imperfect when that happens.

That Jones must’ve had some ear, and some kind of wrath to overcome that music the way he did. They stopped and listened to him. He went on, cracking the bleachers over me for emphasis. This was the kind of wrath you didn’t mess with. I got the notion he’d kill me if he found me hidden down there to peek on his band in what he thought was its imperfect state; it was scary, all the way around — the great music out there, and Jones above. And of course, the waves of brown faces on the field, though I was never taught to fear Negroes generally. In those Napoleonic shakos, with their faces dead serious and hearkening to Jones, though, they were a weird forest that sent dread right down to my bones.

“Tighten it up!” Jones bellowed.

The band was so thrilling that musicos from five parishes, mainly colored band directors, met on a bluff an eighth of a mile from the football field to scrutinize Jones’s band with the intention of revamping their own band shows in the coming weekends so they wouldn’t be embarrassed off the field. Others came to prove to themselves they shouldn’t even show their bands against Jones’s, and went off the bluff to their cars planning for everybody to have the flu on a certain weekend. Jones marched his band in incredibly difficult and subtle military drills, by the way, so that horn ranks were split all over a hundred-yard field but still sounded like the best thing they ever got up in Vienna.

The wildest success of the band was in 1950, the year I watched them. They did a pre-game show that dismayed the waiting football players from Alexandria so much, that the Dream of Pines weaklings were able to rally for a safety against them and, well, lick them—2–0. It was the only win for them the decade Jones was there.

Jones made his band rehearse in uniform toward the last of the week. This is the way the uniforms went seedy in five years, and were a disappointment to Butte when he saw the band march at Eisenhower’s inauguration later, during his stay in the army.

When I saw them, the band was still regal, and Jones had just added three majorettes up front. They weren’t the chorus-girl types who did a lewd fandango to novelty numbers, either. They looked like muscular, brown eternal virgins who strutted properly in a vehement gait; they wore the Napoleonic uniform briefed up to the knees, with black boots that put you in mind of discipline. The band seemed half a mile deep and long to me. And there was this astounding rigor that the first signal from the percussion put into them; everybody snapped straight, his hat plume shuddering.

“Sloppy, sloppy,” I heard Jones mutter. I knew this man was crazy. What could he be talking about? I never saw his face, not ever.

Harley Butte was out there with them playing his French horn, I guess. It was his senior year and the third year of “The Fifteen-Thousand-Dollar Band.” Tooting his heart out somewhere in that weird island of blue, was old Harley, in the middle of a ball field just outside niggertown, where everything else was ugly as old cooked oatmeal with a few snarls of green in it — the yearling pines.

Harley was ten years older than me. He was born in 1932, the year John Philip Sousa died. This always meant a great deal to him. Sousa was his god, like World War II was mine.

2 / Green Netherlands

There are these rolling lumps of turf, with the forest looking deep and sappy, and real shade on the road and big rocks lying mossy off the roadbank, all of which at one time belonged to the Sink brothers, who were the paper mill barons of Dream of Pines. They called it Pierre Hills, and put two mansions out there on this premium property. The sign saying Pierre Hills on a turnoff from the highway would make you think it was a subdivision under development, or something like that But it isn’t There were only the two Sink mansions — which were simply big and New Orleans style in a fat way — nestling in all that luscious gloom of oaks and hickories. And none of the other hundreds of acres of Pierre Hills was for sale. Eat your heart out. The Sink boys had it for their own park, after tearing down every pine tree of beauty back in Dream of Pines for lumber and paper pulp. Dream of Pines was a smelly heap a mile east of Pierre Hills. By the time my old man moved us into our house between the Sink mansions, however, the Sink brothers and the rest of their friends managing the mills had stoked up such a glut of wood in the mill production that Pierre Hills itself breathed a slight fart of the industrialized woodlands.

So when we got into it, Pierre Hills was not the exclusive rolling green it used to be. Still, it was a great privilege for the old man to get to buy in and put a house out there. He always thought the Sinks had been kind to him. He paid so much for the land that my mother left him for a month in protest and stayed with her mother in Vicksburg, Mississippi. I mean apparently he shot about nearly everything from two good years at the mattress factory he owned. He was third richest man in town, after the Sinks. When my mother came back, he had the house he meant to build just starting. He and she fell down in the truck ruts and made love the afternoon she came back. It’s shadowed enough to do that in Pierre Hills. My mother is a fading egg-white brunette I can understand a man could miss after a month. And at heart, she’s wild for any kind of project — any kind of definitely plotted adventure. So I suppose it happened — luggage from Vicksburg being kicked everywhere. I can see the beauty. They were in between their big old shingled house in Dream of Pines and the huge country home of square gray stone we finally had in Pierre Hills. I always thought of it as the bottom half of a small English fort. My mother had a miscarriage, her last baby, when we were two months into the place. I remember everybody saying — I was six — that it was an awfully late and dangerous time to lose a baby. The Sink boys never sent condolences or anything. This came up. My aunt was sitting in the kitchen and mentioning this, while my mother was at the hospital. My old man didn’t really allow anything to be said against the Sink brothers. He always had a blind admiration for any-body holding monstrous wealth; he thought it took an unearthly talent to become rich beyond rich. He loved the city of New York because it was so incomprehensibly rich. He loved paying homage to it, and I guess that’s why we took all the New York magazines and newspapers. They filled up the house, and nobody read anything in them beyond the gaudiest headlines. I think he enjoyed paying out the ear for the land his house is on. And, by the way he acted, I got the idea we were owning this land in Pierre Hills on probation. No misbehaving or loose talk, or we were off.

The old man had a Buick. He liked to wheel it up our brick drive, which was bordered by a dense cane patch. He was one of these magazine handsomes who was turning gray in the hair at forty-five; the gray strands were flames from a hot and ancient mental life, or so he thought. His mental life was always the great fake of the household. He had three years at L.S.U., makes sixty thousand a year, has the name of a bayou poet — Ode Elann Monroe — and has read a book or two over above what he was assigned as a sophomore. So he’s a snob, and goes about faking an abundant mental life. He always had this special kind of be-wrenched and evaporated tiredness when he came home from the factory. “Show me a bed, Donna, [my mother] the old head’s been working overtime today,” he sighs — and he’s demanding Quiet Hours outside his study after supper. His study, where, if my guess is right, he sits scrutinizing his latest hangnail and writing his own name over and over in different scripts until he bores himself into a coma. About midnight, he charges out of the study, ignoring Mother and me watching the national anthem on the television, every insipid show of which (TV was brand-new to us then) he adored better than breath, but denied himself for the mental life, and he is banging into the walls of the hall making toward his bed and sleep, so frightened by the mediocrity of his own thoughts that it’s truly sad. He always thought a college man such as he was entitled to life on a higher plane, and always endured the horror of knowing that his thoughts in the study were no different than the ones he had during the day when he added a random sum on the to-the-good book. I found his name, written in different, sometimes perversely ornate, scripts on the top of variously sized and colored note pads, on the desk of his study in the mornings. Perhaps he wanted to do an essay, or a poem, or an epitaph. I don’t know what he wanted to write on the blank lines. I remember once he was intending to write a letter to the editor of a New York paper, but never finished a copy he thought presentable enough. God knows, I’m on his side in this hustle about the mental life. I’ve inherited a major bit of the farce from him, by what I can tell. And both of us jump into sleep like it was a magic absolver. Both of us, I would imagine, yearn too much for the hollows of a woman, knowing from the first touch of sex to sex, it’s all a black dream leading into sleep.

I’m second-grader Harriman Monroe. My mind is full of little else but notes on the atrocities of World War II. I saw them all in photographs in a book compiled by a national magazine. It was on some playmate’s daddy’s shelf. Then I’m eight, third grade, and have in part understood what I saw. I’m not clever enough to be horrified yet.

The Sink brothers had two peafowl that came trespassing in our cane patch alongside the driveway. It did my old man no end of good to see the birds prissing around on his land. He wanted to be such neighborly chums with the Sink brothers. North of us was Sid, and south of us, Ollie. The peafowl also had two quaint names which I refuse to re-member. The female was a whore, and the male lived on her, and was jealous as hell. They went into the deeps of the cane and loved it up, and in between time, laid an inch-high carpet of green droppings back in the romantic, cavey places, and the cock ran me out when I tried to get in there to play, not knowing all the swell places were already floored with dung. A peacock, by the way, will drill your ass if he knows the odds are anything near equal. He got me a couple of times I won’t forget.

Then one day I got in the cane when they were gone, went back to the deeps, where the Jap snipers should’ve ideally been sitting in the high crotches and just ready to be potted by my air rifle. I hit a dip and slid off into that pea-fowl dung I didn’t know was there. It was all in my hair and up the barrel of my gun, and my lever had this unmentionable stalactite of green hanging on it. I looked around and saw there wouldn’t be any decent playing in here until maybe I was twenty.

I wasn’t thinking about the birds or the cane this other day, walking out for the papers at the end of the drive, when the peacock all of a sudden beats out of the deeps and starts hammering at my thigh. I ran and finally shook him off. Now I was afraid of him, but I wasn’t about to detour around the cane walking back on account of any bird. I picked up a piece of stick I’d thrown at the mailbox a week ago, pretending the stick was a grenade and the mailbox was a German’s mouth; it was a healthy length of hickory, never a very feasible grenade. I walked back on the cane edge of the drive, and got to where the cock ambushed me coming out. The old boy was roosting about four feet off the ground this time and jumped on me at head level, making a loud racket in the cane as he launched himself. This terrified me, but I stood still and swung on the peacock with both arms. I caught him on the head, and his beak swerved like plastic. He dropped on the bricks like a club, his fantail all folded in. I toed him. He was dead, with an eye wiped away.

The old man sails into the drive in his Buick. He’s overdue home from the factory, and thinks everybody is thrilled by his making the turn so perfectly into the narrow brick drive. He rams to a halt, seeing me and the dead peacock. Up beside me faster than the shadow of a passing airplane.

“It’s not dead, is it, son?” He leans over and peers at the cock’s head. “Pray to God. He is dead. Why would you kill a lovely bird like … You know who he belongs to, don’t you?”

“He came at me. Twice.”

“This small, beautiful bird came at you. You better tell the truth, buddy. What do you think we’re going to do about this?”

“Put some lime on that sucker, he’ll melt into the ground without a stink in three-four days.” The old man’s jaw dropped.

“Who taught you about lime?”

“Aw, the Nazis used it on bodies in concentration camps.”

“Oh yeah? You’re really getting an education, aren’t you?”

“Yessir. You want me to handle it?” The old man was looking away at some hopeless horizon.

“I want what?” he said.

“You want me to handle this peacock. I’ll drag him up in that cane. You get me a little lime, and nobody’ll know nothing.” Now the old man’s roasting me with a hard look.

“You get your little ass up to the bathroom and get your pants down. I’m going to handle you.”

But he snuck and got the lime, and lied to Ollie Sink when he called a few days later wanting to know if we’d seen Bayard. By then Bayard — God help me, I did remember the sucker’s name — was a crust back in the deeps.

No more than a week later the old man and I are standing at the bay window looking out at the leaves dropping from the trees and running north over the yard in an early cool autumn wind, while the old men is trying to explain the concept of a yard chore and what it had to do with Duty. He wants me to rake the yard, he means, every Saturday for the next ten years. He says a man gets to know the earth like that, but such simple acts as touching a yard rake to a decomposing nut. Quite incidentally, too, I’d haul away uncountable yellow tons of leaves in a wheelbarrow before I even got my growth. I personally always was of the school of let them lay and rot, and just imagining all the moldering beauty underneath they must be causing; I couldn’t bear to think of moving artificial rake against them. Meanwhile, I could learn about all this unspoiled earth grit by watching our female terrier, Maggie, go wild up against our screen door when she was in heat And her suitors — bird dogs, a spaniel, a Doberman, and two beagles looking gruesomely depressed by their own desire — standing politely on the porch for two days and then, fed up, mauling each other with high croaks, were the daily theater. Finally, only the Doberman was left, and he and Maggie would stare balefully through the screen at one another. He was a grand black thing, with somebody’s chain around his throat. Nobody went out the front door while he was still there. He saved me immediate Duty on the leaves; no child could’ve been expected to go out in the front yard with him there. The old man took it hard that the Dobe was doing a mountain range of turds round the front step. What if one of the Sink boys accidentally dropped by to see how our household was progressing? Even though neither one of them ever even sent a Christmas card?

But the old man couldn’t do anything about the Doberman, either. It was the gentleness of his that my mother always bragged on him about I didn’t see this side of him, or wasn’t ready to see it, until a couple of days later, when it was too sad to miss.

Toward the last pales of Maggie’s heat spell, there was a day when the Doberman was gone from the porch, and we thought it was all over. But the morning after, there was a new suitor-dog outside. He wasn’t on the porch. He was out in the edge of the cane. He was a sick, scabby, and practically hairless combination of Spitz and setter. From way over in the cane, he watched Maggie at the screen with wheat-colored rheumy eyes. You could see he was trying to respond more than he was; he just lay there nodding and raising his ears, then falling asleep unwillingly, it seemed. There was a mule with him. The mule was emaciated and showed burned, hairless marks where an old harness had been. His nosy face looked older than stone, and he crumbled around the knee knobs with tremens. This mule stood in the shadowed bend of the cane behind the dog. Apparently the mule and dog were friends, joined up to see the last of it together. They were both clearly terminal. A big mule like he was, by the way, is a sensational sight to be-hold when you get up early and just look for the usual cane and St. Augustine grass. He seemed to be looming back and sponsoring some last romantic wish of the Spitz-setter in front. I think the dog had brought them as far as they could go.

The old man and I saw them together at the bay window. Both of us were looking for the leaves, and then, surprise!

“All right, Daddy, I’ll go be getting the lime in the garage while you get the shotgun. Better put in some double-aught shells.”

“Just hold it…”

“… put both those scarecrows out of their misery in a minute, you get a good shot to the brain on ’em. I can tell they ain’t gonna run.” I was thinking, “Big Game. See something big collapse, at last”

“You better quit running your mouth that direction, Harry. I don’t want to hear that kind of … We’re just going to leave those poor fellas alone. They look like they’re on the move.” My mother had come up, in her robe.

“That’s the strangest thing I ever saw in my life. Did you ever see a mule and a dog go along together?”

“I believe they may have hydrophobia, Donna. Now what we’re going to do is just ease out to the car, me and Harry, and see if we can’t just not disturb them driving out. And they’ll go on away. But Honey, you don’t go outside till they do.”

“You want me to call the sheriff?”

The old man faked three paragraphs of thought.

“I don’t think so. We don’t know anything for sure yet. They look like they’re on the move. Don’t they? You ever seen a mule and a dog hang around together more than …” He chuckled, and kissed her. He took me to school in the car.

The animals didn’t leave. They were still out there four days later. The old man’s sense of beauty was hurt. The mule looked like an upright hewed-out cowchip, the dog just a mangy rubble. We had a lovely yard, ordinarily. He sent me out to scare them off, but there was a massive odor coming off them when I got near; I quit waving; they’d ignored me anyway. Another day he sent me back in my room for my air rifle. He wanted me to pop them. I was groping away at the lever in an unworldly bliss and breaking out the screen door, when he called.

“Wait!” he said. “Don’t do that. No use to hurt them if they just can’t move.” The old man’s as gentle as a nerve, I find out. It got him into tight moments later. When he gave me money, and other prizes; when he raised up Harley Butte, a mulatto, to a foreman over white workers at the mattress factory. There were certain bawling natural demands he couldn’t deny. He thought Harley wanted the foreman position to a suicidal degree; he thought the mule and the dog had seen enough trouble.

“There’s an organization I’ve heard of that handles these types of animals,” he said. The dog and mule outside were getting sicker. The mule lay down. The dog attempted something drastic toward Maggie. It brought him out to the middle of the yard, and the mule wallowed loyally out in the grass too, ten feet behind him.

There was no SPCA around, burrow the phone book as the old man did. He would not call the sheriff, or any kind of exterminating veterinarian. Everybody knew that the Dream of Pines vet was an incompetent softy who always advised death for the least bruise on dog or cat, such a hater of animal pain he was.

I was spying in the cane one afternoon and caught him, the old man, out in the yard right by the dog; he was whispering something to the creature, and smiled. The dog lifted up, grunted pitifully, and moved a couple of feet over, then collapsed. I moved in to the old man’s thigh, not caring about any secrecy then. Where the dog had lain in the grass, hair remained, and hundreds of maggots.

The old man winced, and groaned, “Harry. This is the first time in my life I ever knew God let things like this happen.” The old man was born on a farm, but he was the spoiled child, with his mother practically holding her hands over his eyes until they moved to a thirties village called Town, Louisiana, twenty miles east of Dream of Pines. “Don’t let’s tell Mother about this now.”

He looked over at the mule.

“I guess you’re getting worked on too. Old fella.”

He scanned his yard beyond the mule, with his eyes full of tears.

“I’ve read books about it,” he said flatly. “But somebody has been keeping the real information from me. When things die, they get eaten by worms. They really do.” He milked the cleft of his chin with a hand.

He hadn’t wanted the sheriff to come over and finish the animals with a quick.32 slug. He didn’t want the sheriff’s checkerboard demarcated car in his driveway. The old man, as a snob, thought he was too well reputed for that. He knew that a number of people in Dream of Pines worshiped him as the boss of the only clean and decent factory in town, and stood in line to apply for work under him, quitting the paper mills because of toxic dirt in their skin, and the old man gave a 100 better wage per hour. Because of gentleness, modicum gentleness on his part: he thought no one should work for 850 an hour, be he a wino goof-off, even. He was not a hero of tender feelings; this gentle portion of himself mixed up his mind quite a bit, and landed him in protracted confusion, when some simple act was called for. In his study, thinking about a case like the dog and the mule in the yard, he’d get a box of matches and strike them one after another just to see them burn. Like me, he’d have to dream an answer before he knew it was right. He’d wake up and know what he ought to do, having just seen some righteous version of himself in his dream. Either that, or my mother told him in a simple sentence what she thought he ought to do, and he’d do it immediately, the old man thinking, like me, that the voice of a female was God’s direct edict. The old man and I always tended to trust every girl we ever knew, and little else but our own dreams in sleep. Eh, old man?

Mother didn’t say a word this time. The animals stayed two weeks in the yard. The old man came in to breakfast beat out and his mouth curled around a Camel. His eyes were dull and bloody. He drank coffee like there was bourbon whiskey in it. Who knows what he thought on in the office, a little acoustically insulated glass cell on the mezzanine of the factory.

Then on a Saturday night he woke me up sometime way into the sleeping hours. He wore these dull flannel pajamas with duplicated scenes of the Hawaiian islands on them. My mother was up; I heard her rustling around the old man’s study, and calling out softly to him asking where the cigarettes were. A cigarette was a rare experience with Mother, like fireworks once a year every July Fourth at the country club. I knew something extraordinary had happened. He’d dreamed something, or the old lady had risen up in the night and commanded something in short, simple English. She was babyishly nasal like Elizabeth Taylor in the shadows, and had to be listened to.

He said he wanted me to be up at six to go out in the yard with him. There was a fellow he’d phoned a while ago who owned a tractor and would be waiting to drag the animals off with a special sort of chain harness. He left me feeling drab and alarmed on the borders of sleep. I wanted to personally shoot the big mule sucker and see him cave in; and wanted to go to sleep at the same time. Mother came in and sat on the end of my bed.

“You do know why Daddy’s waited so long to kill them, don’t you, Harry?”

“No, mam.”

“He thinks he can shoot them in a kinder way than what the sheriff would.” She caressed my foot under the covers.

“A bullet to the brain is just a bullet to the brain, though, isn’t it, Mama? You can’t die quick in different ways.”

“I don’t like to hear you talk like that, Harry. Little boys aren’t supposed to be thinking about bullets to the brain.”

“But Daddy’s waited wrong this time. They ought to’ve been put out of their misery a couple weeks ago.”

“Oh, Harry. Daddy has to think it out. You don’t have to do that.” She’d smoked her annual cigarette and was looking around my room for somewhere to put the butt. I was the last child, and had a married brother and sister living out in far parts of the South. Mother always looked at me like I was not quite real, having come as late to her as I did — when she was thirty-eight — and I was an experiment, bizarre in the natural order of things. These children, children of the thirties, must have been appearing to her mind when she looked at me. I was born in 1942, and was as strange as World War II. She always treated me as if I were an interesting waif. I was at the house as an only child from the time my brother married, when I was seven.

“You know, you were a happy surprise to us. Daddy and I want you to turn out especially good,” she said. I slept on that.

The animals weren’t on the lawn as the old man and I came out at six. They’d gotten in the cane and smashed it up, wallowing. The mule was lying dead among some broken stalks. The dog lifted up his head in the foot-high pinplants on the edge of the cane. He smiled when the old man shot him with the twelve-gauge.

The man with the tractor was late. We just hung out between the cane and the porch and had ample time to study the corpses. A dead mule was such a big thing my mind couldn’t really gather it in. I had to think about him in pieces, like the dead feet, the dead eyes, the dead backbone. The wet pink scab of the dog, with the red shotgun dots on his skull.

The sun came up and we heard noises from the Sink mansions. At last, the man with the tractor came up the drive. His name was Swell Melton; he regularly was manager of the Self*Wash Laundromat in Dream of Pines, but that didn’t take all his time. All he did, as a matter of fact, was keep replacing the adhesive tape on the sign over the washers saying “Please Do Not Die In The Machines As It Colors Your Next Man’s Wash.” He was a lean, jaded fellow who got along with everybody, even the old man when he called him about the tractor at midnight. He wore the gray cotton pants and shirt which made you get the idea he was hovering about in a semiofficial position.

He didn’t hesitate a second about the dead animals. He backed up in the cane shallows, jumped off, and tied a chain around the mule’s rear feet, then strapped the dog’s corpse to the chain with a rope. Then he cranked up and towed them off. The dog hung off the load in a grotesque way as the tractor dragged him and the mule, scraping, out the drive and to the Pierre Hills road.

The old man and I were hypnotized by the sight. He held on to his shotgun by the barrel, and we both wandered out behind the tractor to the road. Ode, the old man, looked like a moronic recruit in the marines.

We were standing out in the road beholding the tractor disappear at five miles an hour as Ollie Sink crept up to our backs in his black Chrysler. He wanted by, and we were blocking his way. The old man turned around and did an inane thing: he tried to hide the gun against his side. Ollie, a big red face above white shirt collars and a black coat, glowered at the old man like, yes, he now knew how his peacock Bayard had disappeared, with this early morning gunner Monroe running around the hills. Ollie’s eyes were fixed, burning through his windshield, at the corpse-heap dragging behind the tractor ahead; then he observed the old man’s shotgun, and the old man’s guilty face, and ripped off in his car. The old man was trying to get up a neighborly sentence to shout to Ollie. But a dead mule and dog, seeming to be secretly spirited away in the early hours like this — he couldn’t say anything about the scene that Ollie was seeing.

I think he gave up trying to be a perfect neighbor to the Sink boys that morning. I don’t know what the deal was when the old man got us into Pierre Hills; what clause in the deed said if he was to buy from those land-scathing bastards, he had to like them reverently too. But he quit it that morning, and all I heard the rest of my years in the house was how depraved and ugly and destructive of the wood-land the Sink brothers were. My mother flew into them, after the old man let out the plug, beginning with how tacky their big houses were and how stupid their wives were, at the bridge dinner and other social events at the country club.

“That peacock Bayard needed killing,” said the old man, taking another cup of coffee with his Camel. “Don’t tell anybody else, Harry, but I was proud of you when you bashed him. I’m not for causing hurt to animals — you know that.” He let out a stream of smoke and closed his eyes so it made him look confident and handsome as Bogart. I could see Donna’s love for him in her eyes. After all, he was Ode Elann Monroe: slayer of the Spitz-setter. Puller of the trigger when the chips were down.

3 / Yellow Butte

Harley went in the army two years as a bandsman. He was such a success he enlisted for two more, and two more again. He was a sergeant of music when he got out. He was company director sometime during his tour of duty, maybe at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which Harley thought was way up North, until he was stationed at D.C. He marched in a group playing “Hail to the Chief’ for Eisenhower’s inauguration. Then he waited at the parade’s end and got to see his old high school band, Dream of Pines Colored. Even the people who voted the bond for Jones’s school were proud that the band had gotten this invitation from the Inaugural parade committee. The old man and others thought it was very classy for Dream of Pines to be represented by Jones’s band in D.C. Even though they hadn’t voted for Ike. Even though the one coat of paint on the main building of the high school had weathered off and the place was too ugly to forget, again, and Jones was pushing band out there so feverishly that there really wasn’t anything to the school but the band and those sixteen bad-luck sluggards on the football team. Jones didn’t make the trip to D.C. with the band. He was in jail for floating a bad check at a Shreveport store in payment for two new sousaphones he thought his band had to have to play in style for Ike’s parade. The sousaphones made it up; he didn’t. Harley Butte, waiting on the band in formal army parade uniform, was tragically disappointed not to see his old director and spirit-father Jones with the band. He knew none of the kids playing in it now.

I do believe that Butte thought Jones was a black son of Sousa. Apparently there’s no overstressing how much Jones emphasized the music of that man John Philip Sousa, composer of such monumental marches as “Stars and Stripes Forever,” “Washington Post,” and scads of others. Novelist. Jones put the two novels by Sousa in the outhut they called the library at Dream of Pines Colored. Harley read them, the only two books he ever finished in his life, not counting a few theory and composition manuals he polished off as an undergraduate at Grell A. & M. later. I always thought Harley was lying to me about Sousa having written any novels, and I had to look in the encyclopedia to find out it was true. Well, it’s weakening it to say the fire of Sousa traveled from Jones to Harley Butte. Harley knew he was Sousa’s grandson, and liked to remark incidentally in a mystic way that he was born the year Sousa died. In D.C., there must’ve been a bleak absence in his heart when he found out Jones wasn’t along with the band. He was standing there, say, by a tree on Pennsylvania Avenue waiting to link up with the father of the whole thrust of his life, Jones, and to maybe have a few words with him, casually, and explain to Jones that this pupil of his was going somewhere, from those sessions that July in the pine clearing down in Louisiana. Harley was a mite proud of his army band uniform, and of the number of horns he had mastered during his tour in the service, and of having led that company band back at Fort Sill. He was playing cornet at this time.

But Dream of Pines came by him playing a novelty number, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and there was no Jones in his simple white uniform with black shoes marching at the head rank a foot or two to the side and crying instructions, like there should have been. There was this hepcat Negro he didn’t know, some apostate sub for Jones who had taken over the band for the D.C. trip and rehearsed them in roadside parks on the way up, when the buses stopped in Tennessee and Virginia. He had tried to make them over in two days to a wailing hepcat band with tricky steps and freed rhythm. They’d all turned at Eisenhower’s stand and done a dance-bow to him, still playing, then all jumping back to the march with a sudden lope. The sub director thought the old Sousan military legend of the band ought to have something done to it. It was not eyeful enough; it needed some flashes. Their blue uniforms were getting drab and didn’t hold attention like they used to; they didn’t look like the scary celestial horde of old. But Butte disapproved of the acrobatic drum major, and of the addition of several more prissy majorettes, and of the complex mambo rebellion the drums were laying down. He thought Dream of Pines Colored looked like some group dragged out of a tonk.

It would’ve all been disaster for Butte if he hadn’t seen the movie he had the night before and still had the martial symphonia of it rushing in his head. He’d gone into a movie house on Pennsylvania and seen the premiere of Stars and Stripes Forever, the life story of John Philip Sousa, with Clifton Webb. Webb wore a German artist’s beard, and a pith helmet, and played many instruments, as Butte knew he had to, to be able to compose the works he had. Butte saw Sousa lead a band of deluxedly white-uniformed men down a street in Pennsylvania, and the movie house where he saw it was on a street named Pennsylvania, and, well, GOD, looking like Clifton Webb and Sousa together, got into his very blood all over again. Harley saw the movie just three times, being habitually a moderate man when it came to entertaining himself. Sousa was leading the band down the streets of somewhere like Haiti when Butte’s mind blanked out in pure joy.

Harley had had a bad moment as tentative director of the company band in North Carolina, and he remembered this in Washington. When he was with the band in Washington, it was indeed a disgrace for him to be merely in the ranks as only another cornetist. This novelty music had done it to him. He’d gotten busted out of his director’s position for having an uncouth band at Review Day in North Carolina. This was just after all his glory as sergeant director at Fort Sill. Butte re-enlisted because he thought he was famous as an army musician; he’d written a couple of numbers after the manner of Sousa, dedicating both marches to the old boy himself; then they shipped him to North Carolina, where he got this band that was predominantly Negro. They were all kids who hadn’t been at their instruments over a year, and they thought it was all a joke. They got out of drill because Harley told the CO the band needed rehearsal by section. Harley told the kids it wasn’t a joke. But these cats didn’t dig a Sousa march. Eight of them got together secretly in the band hall with this one cat who played on the broken-up piano that was there for no clear reason — maybe officers’ dances years ago. They did boogie-woogie on the sly. Harley walked in one day and caught them red-handed doing that. Trumpet, tuba, drums rigged into what the guilty fellow called a trap set, with pennies taped loosely to the cymbal to make it friz, and a high, yearning Negro on clarinet who just wouldn’t be denied. Harley despised boogie-woogie as frivolous, and he didn’t know what Dixieland was. That’s what the fellow on clarinet claimed to be doing, when he wasn’t playing this melancholy murk called blues. Harley told him to stop that. He feared the clarinetist was insane, and he knew the man could destroy a march, by himself; so wild a screech the man could lift in the air if he got the spirit. Harley was right. When he got the band out to play in place at Review Day, they were less than best — everybody going his own way on the tunes, and the clarinetist wailing an alien part to the trio of “Washington Post” like he was playing solo on the moon. He hit blues notes at the top range of the horn, and loud. All this, with the besodden khaki troops marching by to strict drill. The CO didn’t like that stuff either; his boys were out there in dress uniform drilling it as seriously as they could, and the moment required serious music. Harley was demoted and shipped as a cornetist to another company band at D.C.

Harley hated and feared this novelty stuff. He called it all juking and trash bop.

Then rock-and-roll broke out.

He was at Fort Shelby, Mississippi, back down South, for the last three months of his service life. Nothing had gone right for him since back at Fort Sill, except he didn’t have to go to Korea. Now it was 1956. They had him playing tuba, a concert tuba with a strap on it for marching. That big rascal was no fun to carry, either. It was scalding green summer in the southern Mississippi pines. He knew this scene. Looking at a hot pine tree long enough made him nauseated.

On the day of his twenty-fourth birthday, he was sitting on a cot in a hot barracks. His colored buddy who played euphonium in the company band switched on the radio between their cots. A certain Negro rock-and-roll screamer from Georgia named Little Richard came on howling something about somebody that saw his uncle coming and jumped back in the alley. This was followed by panther sounds.

Butte sat up, closed his eyes, and nodded incredulously.

“Don’t that make you proud now? Shhh — Sounds like somethin’ from Africa,” he said to his buddy.

Next day, playing in place with the band for the last formal military review he ever saw, the strap on his tuba broke, and he almost fainted from heat exhaustion trying to keep it on his knee. He fingered the huge valves and tried to be resonant on his instrument, as usual, while the be-sweated plungers slipped off his fingertips and crushed his knuckles springing up, and the bathtub weight of the horn dragged down his arms and cut his thighs where it rested. Harley was only a thin, middle-height mulatto. The sun worked on him, and he found himself having to stare at a stand of six-foot pines across from the parade ground.

This time it was different, looking at those pines. He didn’t get sick, but his waking sense left him. The rows of pines began moving like people, corridors of them, in step. Then they had instruments, and were a limitless horde of bandsmen in green uniforms, but made no sound. They were dreadful and glorious in silence, though there was all the pumping and stepping and setting to, and awesome flashes of brass, silver woodwind keys, and white drum hide. So then Butte thought he could hold on in this sun and not faint. What a secret, roaring sight he’d seen.

After the review was over, he found himself restored and happy. He knew what he would do when he got out. He’d go to Grell A. & M. and get a degree in music, which ought to be easy, with what he knew already. He’d hold down a job somewhere and maybe do it in odd hours, but he’d do it. Then he’d look around the states, choose the high school band he thought had the most potential, and offer to direct it. Naturally he’d get the job; wasn’t any other colored cat knew as much about march as he did. They’d love him: some big dead-serious band. He’d write a few pieces for them during concert season. He’d have them crowded around him like an orchestra on the stage of some city auditorium. He’d come down with the baton, and the breathable air in the place would just quit. The spectators would faint for a minute because the band was using all the air of the place to hit that first, oceanic note; then they’d revive, getting used to the thin oxygen of the place, and hear the band going big, high, low, but never thin, on something like “The Liberty Bell”—his band as ponderous, frightening at ebb and storm tides, as the Atlantic Ocean, which Butte had seen, once. Then talk about march season. He’d be dressed in a neat, simple tunic, and maybe be wearing a German artist’s beard, and flick his baton in the gridiron lights, and genuinely bring those mothers in green uniforms out of the surrounding pine trees, playing. It would be a surprise assault on the musical world the first fall he showed them.

So Butte went to work at my old man’s mattress factory last of the summer. Something he didn’t count on was getting married, but he did, to this moderately good-looking mulatto girl who was a native of Dream of Pines. The girl got pregnant immediately, and Butte never conceived of anything but that she’d go in the hospital at retail rate. If he’d taken her in at the charity price, he might have been able to start at Grell night school right away. As was, Butte concerned himself with saving a hundred and fifty dollars out of what the old man gave him during that period of fall semester at Grell. It wasn’t completely disheartening to him. He knew he’d start to Grell in January and make a name there. He didn’t despise the frame-making position the old man gave him at the factory. Matter of fact, he was lucky as loaded dice to get it. He could have gone to the mills.

However, one day in September Butte got low. It was after work, and he got to feeling blue about not being in Grell now when it was starting, and about being married and expectant with his wife so quick, and not having that old unboundaried feeling he had during free time in the army, and being in the rotten mill air of Dream of Pines again, living in a house on the outer edge of niggertown, where the clouds from the mills were sometimes just too heavy and juicy to float and fell on an individual homesite with an acidic fog that would peel the paint off the floor. Harley had drunk a little beer in the army. He was sure Sousa had done it at one time or another, because Harley found out he could write grand marches under the influence of a few beers. So he got home, told his wife something, and walked down the road to the bottom of a hollow where the Black Cat joint was.

He sat on a stool and treated himself to a few Regals, which were going for 200 in those days. He was the only drinker there as it turned night. By the third beer, he was really enjoying his newlywed melancholy, feeling hopeless and yet sure something would turn up.

“As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to play that moaning on the machine,” he said to the barman and owner.

“That’s Fats Domino,” said the barman.

“I said I don’t want to hear it. I’m your only customer here.”

The barman went to the juke and turned down the voice to nothing.

“Fats Domino’s from New Orleans,” the barman said.

“You mean that fucking stuff has gotten over here, too?”

“Was you in the service?” The barman chuckled, opening another Regal for Butte.

I was riding down the gravel of the Black Cat road a minute before this. I owned a black Chevy station wagon with a big console speaker for bringing in such cats as Elvis, Mickey and Sylvia, Little Richard, and Fats Domino, fixed in a pecan frame behind the second seat My radio, with this speaker, brought in these singers like they were alive and struggling in the back of the car. You could hear the grace note of one of those cat’s sighs. My wagon had 350 horsepower, moon hubcaps on the wheels, and was called a Snatch-Wagon by all the envious pubes round my high school. I guess it was sort of a sad affair, since I could drive it in, sure enough, and be the prince of the Dairy Dip for fifteen or twenty minutes, but had never touched the flesh of a girl; no girl’s backend had ever warmed the seat beside me. I listened to Elvis and Fats, and was assured by all their groaning around in unsuccessful love, that I had touched lots of girls, and had a special Love who always put me down, didn’t phone, had some guy newer and richer. I was fourteen, and this Chevy wagon was supposed to be my mother’s car, but I usurped it from her. The old man took a taxi to work and let her have the Buick. By this time, he was running scared of me. I’d broken out with a pepperish acne and lugged back and forth in the hall as if I was inventing ways to destroy myself; it was as if somebody had caught me in the hall and blasted off a shotgun loaded with BB’s at my face, two or three BB’s making it into my brain and festering there for years to make me crazy. I don’t deny I was a case in the teen years. I didn’t always know what I was up to.

I had this box of M-80 Salutes on the seat beside me. An M-80 is a brand of firecracker that explodes about like an eighth of a stick of dynamite. It’ll take the bottom out of a new zinc garbage can, and goes off under water. They’re illegal everywhere now, though you might pick up some out at a combination service station and grocery way in the sticks. Throw them anywhere, nothing defeats the use on these babies. I had a few left over from July Fourth which I’d been saving for a purpose of indefinite evil. Actually, I wanted to lodge one up the skirt of the school librarian and watch her rave off in pain and smoke. She’d called my un-satisfactory personality to attention a couple of times. Also, I had a few keen visions from television movies working on my mind: such feats as the GI lucking a grenade into the slit of a pillbox and smiling as fire was hes the Japs off the hill.

I lit an M-80 off a cigarette and tossed it down the gulley onto the porch of the Black Cat, then floored the Chevy away, showering gravel. I don’t know, the Black Cat was lit so dull and looked like such a lovely place to toss in one. It was a wooden joint which might really fall over with the blast, with great shrapnel tearing out because of the rusty tin signs around the door. I was feeling wonderful at the moment when I heard the terrific charge go off behind me. I winked to myself. “You’re supposed to be at the football game, Harriman,” I laughed out loud. It was such fun I vowed to do it again, and turned the Chevy around when I got to the highway pavement.

“That Fats Domino mess has gotten too loud again,” Harley was saying to the barman.

“Man, you got some ears I can’t eem hear it.”

Gah Dimmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! went the little item on the porch. Smoke rushed in through the screen door. The barman fell with a beer in front of the jukebox. Then they heard a car zinging away.

“I thought I uhs dead,” said the barman. “What was it?”

Butte went to the window.

“A car racing off. Somebody is throwing firecrackers.”

“I tell you what…” said the barman. He walked over to the bar and lifted up a short shotgun. “That was too much firecracker.”

“What you goin’ to do?”

“See if he does it again.” Then he put the gun back.

“Come here with it. I believe he’s turned around and coming back. Give me the gun,” pleaded Butte.

“Really, man. I don’t want you to shoot nobody … be some trouble for me, now.”

Butte snatched the gun. “I don’t like anybody scaring me like that,” he said. “Look out! He’s pitchin’ one down!”

“Watch it! God d….”

Gah Dimmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

“Got damn! You come back here, man!”

Gurraw Dimmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! went the shotgun in Butte’s hands. He fired from the porch. Then he went back in.

“I didn’t kill anybody, honcho.” He smiled sickly and laid the gun on the bar. “I got a rear light and lots of the backend of a station wagon, though.”

“It was a white man, wasn’t it?” said the barman.

“It was a white child.”

“Chile?…”

“Yes sir. I do believe it was my boss’s son, little Harry.”

“You in for it, man.”

“I think I can handle it.”

Butte and the old man got along. The mulatto really had nothing against making mattress frames. Where he worked was a wide concrete shop with twenty men spread into four job groups. Harley liked to hear the music of the hammers and springs, and he liked to see the mattresses take shape through the glass where the women were working with sewing machines alongside his area. See them get stuffed and stacked up on the dock behind the tremendous doors, and the automotive lorries taking them out twelve high. Butte got along well with his innerspring squad, too. Two of them were Negro, and two white, and all they did while they framed was make jokes. It got to where the jokes went round to every man in a regular circuit, and you got booed if you came in some day without a good joke or only had a half-ass joke. Butte had plenty of stories from the army he didn’t even know he’d remembered. He and the on-and-off wino white fellow competed for laugh king. His squad knew he was clever and fast on the frames. He turned in more tickets than anybody at five o’clock, and the old man paid them by the piece after a certain number. He was always ready for overtime. He liked the way his wife treated him when he got home late and tired in the arms. She respected that he was weary, and helped herself to him in gentle ways. The old man saw how Butte was succeeding with his squad in the shop. Harley came into his office one day and told the old man he’d like to buy one of those innersprings for his own bed, and he was wondering if the price of it couldn’t just be taken out of his check this time. It seemed easier that way.

“You made a lot of money this month, didn’t you, Harley?” the old man said.

“I think I’ve got in enough for a little more than three forty this time.”

“Good for you. You look like a man who’s going somewhere, to me. Don’t think I don’t like that.”

“Mucha blige,” said Harley.

In December he asked the old man couldn’t it be arranged for him to take some college work in the afternoons over at Grell starting mid-January. It would mean he could still work till two o’clock. The old man fell into his study for about two weeks of fake mental hernia, at home, and hollered at anybody who disturbed him, thinking we were out to spoil his mental life; but sneaking in the den behind the couch and standing breathlessly still, the old man watched Jack Paar late at night. He thought, as regards the intellectual life, Paar was the last word. Then at the factory he finally called in Harley and told him that Grell arrangement would be all right. He could keep his job. The old man told Harley he wanted to see him make A’s. Winkadoo.

My old man looked something like Paar, and nourished the hell out of that fact.

Harley went to Grell. The college amounted to an exploded quad of three-story ocher buildings. The band room was in a mossy basement of one of them. He was a smash his first semester, what with all that overwhelming cognizance about instruments and Sousan music. By next fall, he took over the unofficial leadership of the thirty-piece band, the old director perfectly willing to let Butte drill and play them, and take the football trips in the yellow bus with them. At Grell, it so happened that football was inmidst of its first golden age since the school was founded. Butte took what he got.

He wore pith helmet, whistle, and sunglasses in the late afternoons. As director, he was a hard man. In a month he was marching perhaps the best twenty-piece band in the nation. And at the end of football season, there were fourteen of them left — hard-bitten Sousa-lovers every one.

Butte would take trombone, flute, trumpet, or sousa-phone along and fill in what absent parts he could, when they sat in the bleachers. Once, at a game between Grell and Alcorn A. & M., he played a trumpet with one hand, beat the bass drum with the other, and directed the group by use of an elbow.

This was one of the weekend nights when his wife, who was not a member of the Grell student body, sat with the band, one baby on an upright mobile board beside her and another one active in her womb, while she played bell lyre, and pretty decent bell lyre. Her stomach was too big for her to hold the instrument in her lap, so she perched it on a bleacher and sat sideways, tapping the tone bars, with one eye on the director, her husband. Butte would see her wrapped in her old woolen coat, a Scotch plaid scarf tied under her chin, and see his son asleep on the padded board beside her, and his wife’s eye on his conducting, and the weather was nipping cold. But the Disciples-size band would be playing, say, “Washington Post” especially well, and the air around his ears would be warm. He’d look on the wife he’d trained to bell lyre, and the kind of love that leaves no room for anything else in the soul and body would take hold of him.

It goes without saying that Butte never told the old man just how interested he was in band. Ode Elann Monroe thought Harley was grooming his life around being a foreman of the innerspring shop. You don’t tell an employer who’s giving you a raise every month that your real mental existence is somewhere else entirely. Harley did eventually make foreman, over a horde of protests — two illiterate letters from Dream of Pines racists which the old man read to us in an ironic redneck voice one morning at breakfast. And the old man felt a wee bit ill-used when Butte quit him two months after he got his Bachelor of Music degree at Grell and moved his wife and four boys over to Mississippi, where he’d happened to land on a vacant directorship of one of the biggest Negro high school bands in six states, counting Texas.

He didn’t tell me quite all of this poop about himself, either. But he told me most of it. When things got to where Harley and I could talk — behind the factory or leaning on the fence of that neat yard of his on the edge of niggertown (Harley’s yard was as neat as any yard that grew nothing but Johnson grass as I’ve seen, and he had the lattice fence, which was an absolutely revolutionary improvement out that way), or even in my own room out at Pierre Hills that he came to as a detour off mattress business with the old man — I and Harley knew that we were in for at least forty-five minutes of talk, peripherally of music and mostly about his life. Harley had a fine middle-range voice. He never emphasized any of his troubles to me, and went over the facts of his life like they were just that, facts; no whining. This man knew his dream was taking him somewhere.

But Butte always had some problem he felt required a 9:00 P.M. interview with the old man at our house. I don’t know but what he felt guilty about succeeding at the factory and with the Grell band at the same time and wanted to talk it out with the old man, though he’d kill himself before he told all about his progress out Grell way. He told that part of it to me.

4 / Ubi Sunt

The halls of my high school were wooden and olden. The maids used uncountable tins of wax and bottles of furniture oil on the halls and rooms every weekend. I enjoyed the waning smell of cleansers and polishers Monday to Friday. You could count the days by what your nose told you. By Friday, the school was filthy all over again. In sunlight, you could see a ragged trench down the middle of the wax on Thursday, but the channels underneath the lockers were always bright as newly buffed 1920 oak.

We had open lockers. Nobody stole, except now and then a sad case who’d swipe your compass for geometry and then sit right by you and use it in class — so screwed-up he didn’t think of hiding things he’d stolen. Twice a crazy boy from out in the sticks brought a loaded pistol into class, but they caught him both times. All he wanted to do was show and tell. Then they caught him exposing himself in the back row of civics class and shipped him. Then there was a scandal in the library over this bunch of greasers who were tearing the brassiere advertisements out of the magazines and taking them home. I also remember another boy who sewed a tiny square picture of a Kotex box on the front of his tee shirt. He’d walk down the hall, get in front of some lovely and popular girl coming the other way, then throw open his jacket and flex his chest, a broken grin on his face as she saw and shrieked. Then there were the football guys, half of them mill boys and rednecks, the other half boys from middle-class subdivisions stuck around town. If they were sure of the slightest secrecy in the halls, they’d cram you in a locker, or hold you by the throat and twist out your tee shirt so you were left with embarrassing female protrusions where your paps were supposed to be, or maybe they’d just come up behind you and swat the back of your head with a flat hand. All this was just pure bliss for them. It wasn’t malevolence or bullying. They did it to each other. They’d cold-cock some buddy, then wink and grin slyly, and say, “Uh oh!” like a hand had come out of the blue and done it and they didn’t have anything to do with it. One day when I was a freshman I was writing a Latin test as a big hand curled around the crook of my desk and I commenced being dragged along in my desk sideways through the aisle. I looked over and saw one of those foot-ball scoundrels pulling me beside him with one arm, his face beaming with pleasure. The teacher had gone out of the room. When he had my desk top crammed against his, he fell to cheating off my paper with an open, completely guileless face. A moment later, he shot me scooting back to my rightful row with a terrific push from his left leg. It was a beautiful feat of strength, and I don’t think his main point was to cheat. Real depravity at Dream of Pines was rare. And the principal tried to run a pretty tight ship. You could get busted for smoking a cigarette in the basement head; for profanity or insubordination; for setting fire to a waste-basket.

We were all crazy about beauty and power. Some of us fell in love with our own voices and joined the glee club or the forensic club, and some the band, some football; some went in for automobiles; some for clothes, driving to Shreveport and Dallas to buy them; some of us just lent money and looked at the beautiful girls; the guys went around adoring their own erections and body hair; the girls, their expanding breasts — everybody having at it with his aboriginal ego, for beauty and power. Even those mill boys in my home room who were in bad health and held startling contests at breaking wind while devotional was being read by a member of the Bible Club over the P.A. system — they were having at it in their way: Beauty and Power.

The room fans on second level brought in the smell of that oily peanut butter off Monday’s sandwiches, or that heated tunafish odor from salads the cafeteria maids were scooping. It was Federal Aid lunch, and cost a quarter.

We had one teacher Harvard-trained by way of postal correspondence and another who had half a master’s degree. And there were twenty others actively, passively, strangely, cryptically, feverishly incoherent, each in his special style.

I had the head football coach for biology. Here was a fellow whose ambition it was to impress us with the night-mare of a soldier burning alive in a shell-struck tank — something he’d witnessed in World War II — and also with the unknown but true prevalence of tapeworm among the kids of the South. He could make you uncomfortable with his rugged poetry on these subjects, but he seemed to have nothing else to say. It was known that he also felt deeply about masturbation, but he didn’t care to broach this in mixed classes. At three o’clock he ran off to coach the varsity in his Marine Corps shorts. He was positive the trouble with his team was either tapeworm or masturbation, and out there he made himself vocal about it, yelling out at this boy or other that he must be sleeping with his hands under the covers, or needed a physical examination. This always got a big laugh from the line coach, a flaccid baboon who taught factory arts and made a point out of being hilariously obsequious to the head coach. He wore sleeveless jerseys and had marvelously huge, sopping armpits.

My sophomore year I went out for football, but caught a cold and quit. I was just about good enough at it to make first team out at Dream of Pines Colored, which by then must’ve been featuring tuberculosis victims on its varsity. I heard their band when I was out on the field, though. They were about half a mile away and still sounded like a heavenly orchestra to my ears. It seemed silly to be out there at practice in my clouted, filthy pads when I heard them.

I was the sort that tended to bear grudges. I didn’t like anybody correcting me on anything for any reason. I was down and out. I was not proud. The old pubic pox was still scattered on my face, and yet I yearned for everything beautiful in life. I was ready to be abused and picked on. I got into a fight in the locker room at the gym over a yachtsman’s cap the old man had brought back to me as a souvenir from Miami when he went to a convention of mattress people there. And I won that fight, against a fat kid one grade under me, using depraved tactics like sitting on his chest and hitting him in the face, and using, really, everything I had in me. I admit I hit him as often as I could with the knuckle wearing the Trojan-head ring — a gift from Mother.

The spinster librarian got on me one day for not smiling in the hall. She said she knew my folks would be disappointed in the hard personality I was showing. Then I broke down — not to her, not in front of that bitch, but in my mind: Aw sweet Jesus, don’t you know when you’re as ugly as a shotgunned butt of pork, and you love everything and hate everything at the same time, when you haven’t got a face decent enough to look at the girls you want to look at, and when you haven’t got a talent to show, being neither introvert nor extrovert, because you don’t have the talent to go either way, and you start loving the rain because you might be seen with more shadow on you than usual, and hating the sun because it exposes all the corners you want to creep into, and you avoid mirrors and beautiful objects, like your old glass agate marbles, the rock garden in the country club foyer, and the color photographs in National Geographic, because you’re afraid of these beautiful things looking back and folding up into cinders from your ugly stare — don’t you know, Librarian, that you can’t go around giving everybody a smile like your ass was made of candy? Much less you, with that ecclesiastical look of sour meno-pause on your spinster face, would I smile at, Miss Dedder. You stand there telling me about my smile. And you Miss Dedder, owed some poor man your sex sometime back in the thirties, and ignored him; you might could’ve made some poor man sane with it, way back then in Louisiana, with Huey Long and his crowd rearing up, but you didn’t, did you? And you telling me about my lack of smile. You sit behind that desk six hours a day surveilling around the tables to make sure none of us write filthy slurs against the status quo in the margins of your precious books, or that the rednecks aren’t tearing the brassiere advertisements out of the magazines. I looked away from her and went my way down the hall.

In chemistry we were led by a chubby, angelic mamma who asked the class what atomic piles were. We were discussing isotopes or rather being lectured to about them by a guest from the waterways experiment station. Our teacher was embarrassed that none of us knew what atomic piles were. I finally yelled out that I guess they were the worst disease imaginable, and there was fragmentary laughter around the class. Such was my early wit.

In the same class, sitting directly behind me, was a freckled bottle blonde who would go it to the extent of a finger. I wasn’t in her clique, but I liked talking to her. She’d read the novel Peyton Place several times and told me it was the best novel, going away, for all time. She would knock her-self out in class by taking ten deep breaths and then blowing on her thumb. She actually fainted back in her seat, with a smile, for a minute or so. Her name was Winona. She spoke with some authority, implying that she knew quite a bit for her age — and I knew positively of a few colleagues who’d couped her digitally. She was always telling me what I needed. You need a beer, she’d say. I liked to be mothered that way.

At Dream of Pines High we had teachers quitting all the time for reasons of pregnancy, higher pay in the insurance field, or personal despair.

In the eleventh grade I drank my first beer, and my facial condition evaporated. I looked in the mirror and couldn’t believe what a finished piece of young manhood I was. This one old fossil teacher in history was always yelling about how time flew and how hateful it was. But I loved time, for getting me older and good-looking. I still had a few scratches around the cheekbones from the disappeared pox, but it would take a really finicky critic to say I wasn’t handsome — though maybe a little guarded and un-holy-seeming, like a sheik. I’m told I looked like an Indian long-distance runner. I was five foot ten and yearning toward six feet. My grip on the veneered scroll on the top of the stair rail felt good to me. I could bend a beer can into a crimped wad with my right hand. I still have this Asian cut of face which no one in my family can account for. The Monroes were French-Irishmen with memories of the Middle Ages, according to the lineage-tracing my old man once did with a bonus research offering from whatever encyclopedia we have in the house.

In English lit I ran into a teacher that was deep. Her eyes twinkled with arty secrets, and it didn’t hurt anything that she was lovely of face and had the figure of a schoolgirl. She read poems with a nice, calm movement of mouth. I don’t know why she was at Dream of Pines, which was known as a tough school. She was the only good teacher there. I can still feel the dull, light rhythms way in the back of my head from the poems we read in her class. We had Sir Thomas Wyatt, who composed a poem about his old girlfriends and the girl who said “Dear heart, how like you this?” as she put her arms long and small around him, and I can’t forget old cobwebby Sir Thomas and those girls stalking with naked feet in his chamber. We had “The Love-song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with timid Alfred who wouldn’t even eat a peach, but was fond of women’s forearm hair as seen by lamplight The peach and the arm hair related to each other, the teacher told us. I asked this brilliant fellow with crewcut and bifocals how that was, and he sent me an unfriendly note, not wanting to talk in class: “The peach and the arm are both fuzzy and fleshy. Don’t ask me any more questions.” I was pleased to find that out, and later I showed up that bifocals prick by handing in a poem of my own composition which the teacher raved about. She read it in class. It was about a deep-sea diver talking to the ocean and had a line

There within you, fin and sinew …

which she claimed was superb poetry by anybody’s standards. See the bifocals jackass, who made an unadulterated A in everything, fall apart at the jaw when she read out my name at the end of the poem. Of course, nobody else in the class gave a damn, and I personally was embarrassed by some of the extreme gentleness of the poem when she read it. I’d written it in a gust of all the culture 1 had in me. Our teacher had the knack of convincing you that you had to possess a museum full of culture before you deserved anything at all. You had to know all about the castles of England. You had to know about T. S. Eliot. You had to know about war-weary France.

She taught French too, and I got into it after a week in her literature class. She played the records of a French singer whose name was Edith Piaf. Her husband had brought the records back from occupied Germany. This Piaf woman sang like a petite untrained whore whose bed had been bombed out from under her; she trembled, with her voice from the bomb-metal soil to the bomb-dust sky. Oh, she could tell some stories, though I didn’t understand any of them. I remember “Non, je ne regrette rien” with those beautiful Paris r’s. I linked her exclusively with World War II. It was what the teacher said about the records coming from occupied Germany. And I could just imagine this little Piaf woman huddling down behind some statue as gunfire streaked up and down the rues and avenues. Our teacher had been to Paris and held forth on it unboundedly. The French tongue weighed heavy on my mind, and I feel it like a sinner that I never learned it very well. Even in college, I never understood but about half of Moliére. But the Piaf woman made me sentimental about war all over again. With the help of the two movies in Dream of Pines, which showed almost nothing else but war romances.

I grew sentimental about the casualties of the Korean War from Dream of Pines. I asked around about them until I must’ve been a great bore. We lost six boys from the town, as a matter of fact. The noblest casualty was the son of Ollie Sink, the mill baron. His boy was shot to death on Pork Chop Hill, but only after he’d rendered heroic duty as a corpsman. Ollie had a daughter remaining. Two colored boys from niggertown families I never knew were cut down. One of them was Harley Butte’s cousin, a boy who’d played baritone horn with Butte in Jones’s first-year band. Then one GI had returned safe from the war, but went in-sane for speed with his Mercury convertible when he got back and got killed at a driveway coming out of a joint into the highway. It was one of those crashes everybody in town claimed to have heard. Then I talked with a fellow who ran a sort of half-ass sporting goods store with his father. He was awfully bitter that nobody seemed to’ve cared about what had happened in Korea. He’d been in the conflict. He unbuttoned his shirt and showed me the worst purple stitched wounds I’ve ever seen. They looked like new wounds, in fact. The gooks had overrun a station where he was working the telephone and thrown in a grenade. He told me about the gooks throwing a woman naked down a hill and then sending down a man dressed in colonel’s uni-form to drag her half-living, screaming body up the hill by the hair, just so one GI would peep up enough that they could get a shot at him. This old boy claimed to have risen up and shot down the peasant dressed in colonel’s uniform, in spite of the threat. He claimed that the stone he was be-hind disappeared in shot from the gooks when he stood up, and that his survival was miraculous. Marveling about why he was still alive took up all his time. He held up a dusty mitt and spoke right into the pocket of it.

But in 1958 the girls in my class were hearing breathy, forlorn Elvis Presley over the big horn speakers at the parish fair. Royal American Shows furnished the main attractions there. It was October and chilly, with one rain a week. There were the animal exhibitions, the home arts tents, the rides, the concession booths, the freak shows, and two female variety acts, inside long tents with bleachers and a raised stage. One was “Rock” Brook’s show — white girls — and the other was “Harlem in Havana”—interblended girls all tending to a brown mustard color. Both of them had bands in rickety white plyboard bandstands. I attended the fair three nights in a row, and saw all the girls I knew turn away from their dates and seek as near a decorous spot as they could near the speakers carrying Elvis’s voice. Then their dates would have to sit by them and buy the cerealish hotdogs from the concessions and try to get their girlfriends to eat it while they were hearing Elvis finish his tune. I saw six or seven guys living through the agony of an Elvis song and a hotdog getting lukewarm. The girls would get into this state where their eyes wouldn’t focus and they would open their legs primly to make way for the moisture Elvis caused them. Of course I didn’t know that then. I just watched their dates gripping them and trying to resurge as lovers to them after the tune was over and they were on their way to the home arts tent.

I personally hoped that Elvis, that Hollywood redneck, would drown in his own spit. I hoped that he would knock up some nigger girl and have to marry her and that his career would crash into rust. My opinion of him had changed. I hated him for all the women he detracted from me and the rest of those pathetic amateurs taking girls over to the home arts tent. Now understand that I never had a date, not until senior year and the prpm, when you had to be a headline toad not to have a date. I never had the guts to try, before then. But I felt for the guys who were trying.

I was with another guy, walking past the false “You Must Be Eighteen” barrier to see the creamy mustard Negresses shake in their jeweled brassieres at “Harlem in Havana.” On Friday night at the dollar-fifty show this one gal came on five minutes before midnight and got down to it so you saw her totally nude and even her moss about five seconds before the strobe light went out. I couldn’t accept it; to my mind she became a life-size puppet toward the last. The guy I was with came out talking shrilly about how we’d seen a nude woman. But then the lights came on, and I saw the whole hurriedly screwed-together planks of the bleachers, the stage, and the bandstand, and I couldn’t believe I’d seen an actual nude woman in this sordid tent affair. But she’d been very pretty, with the three dark spots of nipple, nipple, and V’ed hair.

Back in the late fifties, with a couple of classmates standing the first time outside the “Harlem in Havana” tent pavilion and seeing the light-colored Negresses parade out to the outer stage to entice us inside with a few subdued but promising jerks to the band, the girls cloaked in sheeny robes and brassy wedge sandals, I first got the idea that playing hot music on a trumpet might be an exciting thing to do all one’s life. I looked away from the viciously weary faces of the girls to the bandstand balcony above them, where the “Harlem in Havana” banner draped. Up there was a Cuban-seeming fellow with a horn who wasn’t weary. He stood up playing the hell out of a trumpet. He could make that sucker scream, and the drummer was laying down something thick and Latin behind him, and the ferris-wheel lights were shooting out off the brass of his horn so it looked like and sounded like he was holding a wondrous rainbow bird with a golden throat in his hands.

There wasn’t any forgetting that.

5 / Horning In — A

Tonnie Ray was passionately busy all her days at Dream of Pines High. In junior high she was one of those neutral-looking skinnies very much concerned with the concept personality, because she didn’t think she had any, and she was right. So she got together with small groups of like spirits and went around telling, keeping, and betraying in-credibly inconsequential secrets, and that was about it, for Tonnie Ray Reese. She changed skirts every day, and was generally clean, and could be counted on to be scandalized by a shady joke or bad word. When “John was home” the first time, that is, when she had her first menstrual period, she missed a day of school. A girl actually asked about her when she came back. So she missed school every first day of her period for a while. She liked to create that mystery, and liked to reply in coy ways to anybody that asked about her absence — like she would say “I was with John,” which was sort of romantic too. She and her group were the giggling poultry of the recess yard, huddling here and there with their little egg-secrets. But in high school she was very busy; she had gotten desperate. The only boy who’d ever asked her out was an absolute grub. Tonnie Ray wanted to get into a good crowd so badly; she wanted in with the popular crowd. And now she’d quit her old crowd and was really of no crowd. All she thought of was emulating the popular set and it kept her busy and extremely nervous. She would sit by the popular cuties in the cafeteria and listen to all the recent anecdotes on parties and dates, and then laugh along knowledgeably at them. There were several girls like Tonnie Ray at Dream of Pines. They were all equally frantic. Frantic to please, if you were the right person. We called them roaches, mainly, I guess, because they were as addled as maimed insects, and sucked up to such social crumbs as were offered.

I and the couple of guys I ran with paid a bitter kind of attention to Tonnie Ray and her type. We’d watch her collar some cheerleader, or class officer, or football player and start chattering away with them, making out to have crucial deals going with the honchos of the school. The guys and I winked at each other as her nervous voice rose in cries when she spotted somebody important in the hall. I don’t know why Tonnie Ray and all the roaches rubbed us so raw. But we despised them from a special place of hatred in our hearts. We hated them so much that we’d skip lunch and loiter out in the hall in hopes of seeing one of them in the act.

“Look at Tonnie Ray leach up to that cheerleader babe,” I said to a guy.

“I know. Wouldn’t you love to put a shotgun down her throat and let it off coupla times?”

“It wouldn’t be enough.”

I confess that the guys and I, who weren’t really hoodlums at all, talked theoretically on and off of assassinating Tonnie Ray. We had a prolonged deliberation over this idea throughout the rest of high school, but never could imagine anything quite excruciating enough for her. And we beheld with agony the fact that Tonnie Ray was making friends, she was getting in with the popular set; she became stylish and finally, to our horror, was one of the “Personalities of the Week” in the student newspaper.

“I say once a roach, always a roach,” one guy said.

“Damn right.” We were a bereaved consensus of three.

“Wouldn’t you like to pick up a pair of ice tongs and just …”

“Not good enough.”

We had the mill girls at Dream of Pines, too. These were the daughters of anybody who held a position below master foreman at one of the paper mills. Some of these gals were twenty-one and had given birth. These girls didn’t roach or advertise themselves. They even seemed to resent being spoken to by students above their class. Of course you noticed them right off; their clothes were not terribly sharp and they tended to be a bit bruised around the legs. They swarmed in at lunch from another building where vocational arts were taught. They’d look at you straightforwardly with either lust or disdain, and you could pick up on un-known swear words by just hanging back in a locker and listening to them crowd into the cafeteria line. We liked them. We looked studiously at their bosoms and hips and had nothing to say when they disappeared.

I fell hard for one of them, under the influence of a dream I had of her. In the dream she was completely charming, said nothing, and was lusciously red-haired, and just before I awoke, she coyly threw her wrap aside and was milk naked. It was one of those dreams that mesmerizes your waking life. I waited in torture to see her again. When she came in with them, I tried to get her attention but couldn’t. Her name was Ann. She had fine orangish hair and passable skin. Her hair was actually her best feature, but she peroxided her bangs so her hair went into toasted yellow around her face. Ann never wore a dress to school — always pants, with a raincoat like dirty beach sand thrown over her and a tee shirt underneath. The raincoat had a habit of draping on one nipple to one side and exposing the other slightly, the way it dropped. Ann dear, with that unamused face of an operatic slut, gave the impression that she wouldn’t have cared if she had a burning sparkler on both nipples.

I already knew she worked at the old man’s mattress factory in the afternoons. Her father worked there too, in another shop. He was a legendary wino who’d probably vomited or slept on every square foot of the pavement in Dream of Pines at one time or another. But he could cure himself for periods reaching to a year. Her mother was some species of obese dwarf who wore a swath of garbage for a dress and black high-top tennis shoes. I’d seen the mother before on the porch of a two-room plank house hard by the biggest Sink mill. Ann’s old man used to work at the mill until he lucked into a place with the mattress factory. The mother waited for them sitting on the porch and just being a slum unto herself. God knows what she fixed them to eat. I often thought about that. I could see Ann, who by the family standard was Helen of Troy, being slowly destroyed by some monotonous supper of grease and cornmeal wads.

Three days a week she skipped lunch because, I guess, she didn’t want to pay the quarter. She’d sit in the Film Room, right outside the cafeteria, and wait for her friends. While as for me, I always had a bunch of dollar bills in my wallet. She needed me; I knew she did. In my dream she’d been so happy to please, and the body which she had let me see I loved and pitied too for its helplessness. My feeling for her threw me. It got me in soft places I didn’t know I had. I was a fool over some rare idea like taking her out to my house and giving her a shower and letting her sit on the edge of my bed in a towel and holding her face in my hands.

There was a story about Ann. Back in the tenth grade she was rumored to have given birth to a dead child. She was known to be a follower of the Dream of Pines basket-ball team, and some boy on the varsity was supposed to be the father. I saw her on the front row at the gym several times, sitting in her raincoat, alone, smiling out at the court as if enchanted by the game in a calm way. She didn’t clap, or cheer, and was otherwise placid — not strictly a fan — except for the fixed smile. I used to think she was an idiot or a gypsy. She looked a little like the woman on a package of Muriel cigars. She smoked in the gym while she sat there, This was not allowed; there were signs up all over the place, and I saw her get called down for it several times. She never hid her cigarettes and in a minute she’d have another one going strong and have to be spoken to again by somebody officious like the scorekeeper, who was also a Baptist preacher. Well, about the third time he walked over to her, I thought she was just clearly insane. But she finally quit smoking when he told her she’d have to leave the gym if she didn’t. And she remained transfixed to the game with the smile getting dimmer and dimmer as the game neared a close. Nowadays she never smiled, that I knew of. She ran with a crowd of girls that looked like hicks, lady wrestlers and carnival women. I wondered if it was true about her baby. Maybe having it had hurt her, and maybe she was pregnant again, and maybe eating made her sick. No wonder she looked right through me when I said hello and called her name in the hall.

Dear Ann you need me, need me, I beckoned to her mentally. My good looks, my sympathy, my $800 checking account. What do I care if you’re in trouble again? You haven’t ever met anybody like me before. I don’t run. I know what life’s about. I believe in my dream about you. I’ll watch you give birth, even in Mexico if that’s what it takes. I know life, honey. The ins and outs: no sweat. I’ll watch the baby come out, dearest, and kiss your lips when it’s over. I know it’ll hurt and you’ve been hurt so much al-ready. And about other matters that might come up: I won’t expect marital privileges with you. I mean not until a whole lot of soft talking between you and me. I imagined us together in a modest cottage overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Malibu, California, by this time. I would be a fisherman and bring back natural things to eat from the hills. National Geographic illuminations of blue, green, and wheaten shades, with rocks, surf, and coves as private as the planet Mars, took over my head and carried me sleepily down all the roads of color-photograph geography. I did feel sleepy throughout all this thinking about Ann and me. I’m the sort of fellow, anyway, who isn’t inclined to ever bring himself fully awake. I have a tremendous respect for people who do meet life with eyes wide-awake — like Ann, for example — but I’ve always been a coward that way; I think that if I ever did wake up completely, life would be too harsh and would lead me to suicide. Whereas, at the borders of sleep, I’ve usually adored life and could take down every breakfast bowl of thorns that came along.

Where my passionately imaginative kindness for Ann came from must have been the dream. I’d never been this way before. I wasn’t ordinarily even courteous to folks I didn’t know. For two weeks I was miserable over her. Aw, that she ignored me, that she maybe wasn’t even conscious enough of me to be doing even that. I tried hard to dream about her again and get her to give me some message in the dream, but I couldn’t. The memory of her in the dream was waning, and I got in a desperate funk. I made a fool out of myself when she came by one day. I started singing a song, “I’ve got the money, honey, if you’ve got the time,” loud, putting myself directly in front of her face and doing a little hazardous bop stop. Ann looked at me worriedly, she did notice me, and then drew in her lip while glancing around it her crowd and deciding it was only her I was trying to entertain. Oh yeah, it was embarrassing as hell for me to have to do this. I was probably red in the face and silly as a sheik in drag, but I thought music might get her. She looked back at me once as she went on to the cafeteria. I was sure I had something moving now.

But no. I decided she was extremely shy. I couldn’t wait any longer, though. Next day I found her sitting in the Film Room by herself. I stepped up to the wall and printed out a note, went in and put it on the desk she was sitting on, then fled. The note read: “I dreamed about you and I like you very much. If you’re in trouble I want to help out Do you know, want to know what I dreamed about you (us)? Even though you might of thought it was stupid of me singing in the hall yesterday I meant it, I Have The Money Honey as in the song I was singing. I know I don’t have a very good voice. You know who my father is don’t you. I have $1000 in my bank account. Please call me at 212–5037 at Pierre Hills soon. You know that song ‘You Send Me’? I listen to it on the radio and think, You Send Me. Cares, Harry Monroe.”

She never called. I went out to the mattress factory in the afternoons and watched her from my old man’s glass office. It wrecked him with curiosity that I came down and watched the work. Ann worked behind a sewing machine in the shop just below us. She knew I was watching her. Then one day I noticed with a shock that she was violating the smoking ordinance. A great careless cloud boiled out of her mouth and floated up in the rafters. The old man chose this moment to rise out of his chair behind the desk and walk over to the shop window beside me, meaning, I think, to put his arm around my shoulder in a father-chum gesture. I knew he’d see Ann smoking. I could think of nothing very smart to distract him, but moved wildly, looking for some trick. There were several piles of job tickets on a table near me, and so I just dashed my hand through them and knocked them all over the floor. Sure enough, the old man stopped. He bent down and picked up a couple of handfuls, then rose up and stared at me.

“It was an accident. Let me help you,” I said.

“I worked on those tickets all morning,” the old man spoke, very dry. “It looked like you just … knocked them, son.”

“Something nervous happened to me.”

“That was crazy.” His face meant something deeper than this. I felt sorry for him; he started hopping from ticket to ticket on the floor.

“Let me help.”

“You can’t help. You go on home and … get well, boy. Sometimes you scare us. You know that? Donna says you close up your room in the afternoons and lie on the bed listening to the phonograph in the dark. What does that mean?”

The only answer to that was I liked to do it. Hell — kick a guy because he favors salt in his beer, peanuts in his soft drink, dark with his music: he happens to be a guy who likes to grip the sheets and close his eyes until greenish movies featuring him as the hero appear, changing scenes and milieux with the changing climes of music — Harry happy, Harry sad, Harry bitter or melancholic, Harry truculent, but always Harry marvelous, Harry celebrated by the high-class babes of Paris, Berlin, London, Rome, New York, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and of such shady places as Vicksburg, Natchez, Biloxi, Mobile, Savannah, and Charleston, twentieth-century holdouts of the romantic Southland, where it would be all magnolias, swamps and bayous, Spanish moss, cigarillos, piers, catfish, subtly brewed Bourbon drinks, and extravagantly well-dressed, complex, historic vagina, for Harry suave. Caving in a pier by his sheer presence. And lately, dreams of Malibu, California, in the simple cottage with Ann. Kick in a fellow’s head for wanting the dark, and the evocative phonograph. Very well.

I suffered in behalf of Ann and in behalf of, really, my-self, the way I happened to be. I had enough pride to be proud of it, though. Times were when I felt like God’s special friend, I was suffering so much. Like the Jews. We were reading about the unspeakable persecution of the Jews under Hitler in history about that time. Of course I had dug into all that lore years ago. The old teacher was married to a Jewish woman from Chicago. He held forth on the sins against the Jews as if he suffered a chronic nightmare one week a year about it. The atrocity photographs he showed were the only attraction of the year’s history class. He’d bring them out of an old cardboard folder and just sigh pitifully as he passed around the pictures. Guys would take his class for reason of the photographs alone. The pictures they were really awesome and sordid, showing open mouths and exposed pubes. The year I was under the old boy, a girl in my class threw up, and the principal came in the next day to say he couldn’t show those pictures around any more. So right in front of us the old boy got his folder together, put on his overcoat, caught up his briefcase, and quit the school, giving us some kind of hopeless salute. So what? everybody says. The only thing he was good at was telling about the Jews and about how time flies — tempus fugit, and all that, with a few other Latin phrases that seemed to grip him personally but never affected any of us. The principal read to us out of the textbook the rest of the year. And let me take this opportunity to say that this man, the principal, had an acute breath problem; air like from a cavern full of dead men came out of his mouth, and I caught it all, being on the front row, attempting as a sort of last ditch effort to create a scholarly air around myself by sitting there. I was doing so mediocrely at Dreams of Pines, and my parents wanted me to get in such a mighty college. They had the money. They wanted me at Harvard, or Princeton, or better yet, Columbia, in New York City. As I said, my old man was partial to New York because it had all that unimaginable money.

Another time I came to the factory to see Ann. I had managed to force myself into another dream about her. This time she was a kind of puppet that said, “I love you. I need you. I love you. I need you.” She’d taken off her clothes again and revealed a painted-doll type of nudity, showing two red dots and a black V that seemed varnished and inaccessible. The old man happened to be out of the office. I waved at her vigorously at the office window. She was talking to a stumpy fellow in gray coveralls and smoking a cigarette. When the fellow saw me, he hiked off instantly to another shop. Ann kept her eyes on me. Then she lifted up her hand and gave me the finger. I couldn’t believe it But the familiarity of the old signal somehow gave me some hope.

I followed her home. She was in some smoky car of the women’s car pool and I was in the black station wagon of old. They let her out at her slum-pocket and she walked rapidly over her lawn toward the house. I say lawn, but what it was was a soil flat that looked beaten out by a goon whose duty it was to let no sprig grow. I drove up with her and began calling her name. She seemed to be ignoring me and was almost running into her house, thinking to be rid of me in there. What a dump to run to for safety. I saw her doing this, and I could not believe the story about her having a baby. This was a furiously shy girl I was dealing with.

I lay down on the car horn. I had quite a horn. It was loud, and by some accident at General Motors, played a whole harmonic chord, like C against E and G. It sounded like a band tuning up. It pierced, was rather regal, and could not be ignored except by the deaf. All right. Ann gave up and walked back to my car and got in, leaving her door open. She was the first girl I’d had in the car.

“Ann. Why aren’t I good enough for you?” I said right off. I knew good and well that wasn’t the issue. All the signs were that I was too good for her and was bending down to her heroically.

“You do talk, don’t you?” I asked her further.

“I know a guy that would kill both of us if he knew we were together,” she said. God, she’d spoken to me. She looked beautiful in the sunset at five-thirty — thatwas when I was talking to her. Her raincoat came apart.

“You don’t wear a brassiere, do you, Ann?”

“Don’t you talk like that.” Her voice was steady. It had a low harsh music in it. That pleased me.

“I’m sorry, Ann.”

“Don’t write me notes. Don’t follow me around. You’re not big enough or old enough. You wouldn’t want me if you knew you might get killed for wanting me.”

“I heard you had a baby. Did you?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“You did, didn’t you? I don’t care. I had a dream about us. You liked me and took off your clothes…” I stuttered this out.

“Oh yeah?” she took it up. “What’d you do in this dream?”

“I just stared. Looked at you.”

“You see. You’re not ready to do anything yet, you see.” She looked away from me toward the sunset, and then all around at the scraggly pines growing outside her lawn; she seemed to be inspecting the whole globe. It was just a minute before night, and very red in the sky. “You know I’m the best piece of ass at Dream of Pines that has ever been, don’t you, Harry?”

“No, mam,” I got out. No, I didn’t know she was anything as deluxe as that. Ann laughed.

“They say I am. I am the girl whose butt don’t often hit the mattress, they say. Some guy was looking in a window and observed that when I didn’t know it.”

While she was saying that she was taking me all in, probably for the first time. I was exhausted by all I’d found out about her. I’d always thought of her as my private discovery.

“You come back around when you grow up some,” Ann said. “I haven’t got anything against you.” She got out of the car.

“What do you think of Malibu, California? I’ve got love for you. I’ve got money!” I yelled when she seemed to be leaving the car. She came back and put her red-haired head in the window.

“Don’t think I ain’t dreamed of all that money with you … Harry … Everybody knows love is the loveliest word there is, also. Don’t throw it around like you do.”

She went in. By God, I wanted her more than ever. She had a little intelligence, which surprised the daylights out of me. You bet I’d wait around and grow until I was man enough for her. I’d grow hair all over. I’d seen what a woman she was when I talked to her. All set Ann and I would wait on each other. An enormously profitable way to spend your spare time, waiting, growing, for Ann.

Two weeks later I drove the car up in the garage and there was the old man. It was twilight. He was sitting on the hood of his Buick. I knew by his weak smile that he was after me.

“That’s the way to park that old caroobie,” he yelled. I knew something was on his mind, like a ton of bricks. The old man gets friendlier than a faggot Japanese when he approaches me on bad trouble. He wants to establish that all is normal except one tiny thing, and that thing is the business at hand.

“Guess what Mr. Mick told me the other day?” he says. No relation to anything. I am alarmed. Mr. Mick is Ann’s wino father. Her name is Ann Mick.

“He said the reason he gave up wine the last time was that the air from the paper mills in Dream of Pines was so bad it cut into his wine and ruined it the minute he pulled the cap off. It was like mixing wine with raccoon dung, he said.” Big laughing in the garage. I’m struggling toward the house but the old man has got a great humorous cuff on me.

“It’s a shame about Mr. Mick,” I say. Let me go, old man.

“His daughter goes to your high school,” says my father. His voice has the crisp delight of profundity in it. What am I supposed to do? Deny that she attends the school? “She works for me on the sewing machines. She’s the worst worker I have. She smokes in the shop. Somebody told me she does something worse than that with somebody else back of the stacks at coffee break. I’m thinking of letting her go.”

“You know I have a crush on her,” I admit.

“I’ll say a crush. With dreams abut her, and singing songs to her.” He lifted out of his vest pocket the very note I gave her in the Film Room. It was the blue-lined note-book paper with ripped ringer holes, and then it was very crumpled and folded and almost yellow. “You don’t want me to read it, do you?”

I snatched it out of the old man’s fingers.

“You put our phone number in there,” he mused.

“Did Ann give this to you?” I asked.

“No. It’s been through several people before it got to me. You’ll be happy to know that. First, she gave it to her father, and he thought it was such a precious joke that he handed it over to Harley Butte, his foreman. Then Harley kept it a week, thinking about it, and finally decided I ought to see it He gave it to me. He said he thought I wouldn’t think it was very funny, and he was right. I don’t think this note’s very funny. With all the fine girls you could be interested in…”

He had me down. He began accusing me of trying to embarrass him. He said he didn’t need that, and that my mother Donna, who was a very fine lady, didn’t need that He said it was a slander to her name that Ann Mick was the first girl I chose to show any interest in, because (he whispered) Ann Mick was a little “harlot” that everybody knew about. He finally got so upset, saying we wouldn’t mention any of this to Mother, and that this matter was “Closed. Closed, you hear?” I couldn’t understand him. I’d agreed to everything he said long ago, out of sheer fright and humiliation. But he was forcing himself into a nervous panic, still holding onto my arm, and looking out into the dark back yard as if there was some specter there which yet threatened his life and family. I do believe he was holding to me protectively and not just to keep me from running in the house. I’d seen the old man nervous and full of clamor before, but never like this.

The old man was a converted Presbyterian and was occasionally flooded by the idea of being morally circumspect He’d quit smoking and use up a bottle of Listerine in one week trying to expunge every hint of the weed within and without his body. He’d begin drinking worlds of milk and throw out the one bottle of sherry in the house, which he and my mother touched only about twice a year anyway. He’d walk to work and back, a distance over all of five miles, with his hair combed neat and slick and a modest pin-on bow tie at his throat — other days he despised bow ties as menial-looking — and he would have some book in his hands: a dictionary, or a book of poems by a Presbyterian missionary to China, what did it matter. He never cracked it, but made sure to have his name signed gloriously on the flyleaf, and all he wanted out of it was the sober sanction that a piece of literature in the hands gives one. He’d get home drunk on sunshine, goodness, and his own sweat. He would be concerned about his family name, which meant that he was concerned about me. He called me into the kitchen, where he’d have two glasses waiting. There he began, “Well. Tell me what you’ve been doing,” and engaged me in a sort of contest at milk-drinking while we waited for the answers to come out. It all ended with our drinking so much milk we were ready to puke; the old man churning himself into a dull butter of meditation about my life. Not one understandable sentence having passed between us.

So I thought after I left him in the garage that he was only being a Presbyterian again, with all this business about the family name and so on, but that was not it. Or that was only partly it. I think I saw into this matter later.

I went to his office again one afternoon to look at Ann. He did not see me come in. The old man was sitting on a stool near the shop window and peering down at someone very concentratedly. I walked over — I suppose quietly — and looked past his shoulder. There was Ann bent down at her machine. I know he wasn’t looking at the middle-aged women around her.

“You didn’t fire her, did you?”

He jerked around coming out of a very soulful smile. Then he seemed to become concerned over what he was doing. He squirmed around right-face on the stool. He bit his lips, closed his eyes, and failed once at crossing his arms.

“Who?” he said weakly.

Oh, Daddy, oh, Ode Elann Dupont. You’ve been in love with her too, haven’t you? Or at least you like to look at her very much, don’t you? I do not think I was wrong about it. The fishiest grin I’ve ever seen popped out on his mouth. I looked past his shoulder down to Ann on the floor, and seeing her, blooming heavily forward, unbrassiered, under her tee shirt as I’d never seen her before, her legs crossed, her hairstrands falling over into her eyes like wispy copper as she bent to the machine doing her little bit, I knew she was too much woman for me, for one thing, and for another, no man could look on her without becoming a slobbering kind of rutting boar; she did not enchant you: she put you in heat. You thought of a pig-run alley full of hoofmarks running between you and her — lots of hoofmarks, dried deep in the clay — for after all, she was known to have mated with others. She was at the edge of a water hole, bending down for a drink with her feminine parts up in the air. I thought of the old man looking at her.

He seemed depraved and perverse, this old boy who should’ve been out of the running years ago. I didn’t like him. I suspected him of really having tried something with Ann, of maybe keeping her in some kind of wagebondage lust. I thought of the old boy naked, using her like a trampoline. I’m sure he never did anything but look, like me, but uncertainty in me has always bred a phantasmagoric imagination.

Well, to the credit of his honesty, the old man instantly gave up the sham and said, “She’s quite a slut, isn’t she?”

We broke out laughing when he said that. The old man and I are both amused by the concept of a whore. The idea of women being gored for lucre by some poor man has al-ways been a joke to bring down the house between us. We heard it called the oldest profession, and then thought of a cavewoman doing it for a glowing coal, a piece of fire from his cracking wealthy bonfire; an Egyptian woman doing it for a leek; a Hebrew woman doing it for water; a Roman woman doing it for an acre of German tundra; a World War II woman doing it for a radio. The only contact the old man and I had for years was whispering whore jokes to each other. We started giggling when the word whore was first mentioned. The worst of them all was told by me during a terrible period of my college life. It was about a seventy-year-old whore thrusting a bag into a dark closet where her lover was hidden; he thought they were potato chips, but they were actually the scabs off her own body. The old man closed his eyes and edged away after I told that one, not knowing his own flesh and blood son all over again. I really hadn’t wanted to tell it, but it had gone around for bowelish laughs among the terribly unhappy crowd I ran with at college. My resources were low; in my crowd, whatever gagged a maggot passed for humor. After I’d told the old man that joke, the whore jokes between us stopped completely, and there was, as a matter of fact, no further communication between us. I did us in as father and son when I told that last rotten one.

However, now we laughed together. I forgot all the vile imaginings about the old man. I forgot everything and laughed with him till I cried. I do believe it was all because of the pleasure of finally forgetting Ann. He’d called her a slut, and I at last believed him. She was a comic whore. I told her goodbye. You’ll be waiting a long time for me to grow up enough for you, Ann, I thought. The old man and I got out our handkerchiefs and wiped the tears off our cheeks. He reached over and held my shoulder. Too bad for you, Ann, I thought, looking at her still, past him. She looked up and saw us in the office and her mouth fell open with some surprise. That’s the most I ever evoked from her. Too bad you don’t get to go to that cottage in Malibu with me, Ann. What kind of gimp did you think I was? You whore. How dare you?

What a farce! I had come to the office with my suitcase packed and in the bed of my station wagon. I was intending to draw out the $800 in my account that afternoon. I had come to the factory for no other reason than picking up Ann, persuading her, and driving straight to Malibu with her. I thought I’d drop in and see her through the glass window again, and see the old man too, for sentimental rea-sons. I was laughing over the ruins of my first dream. The facts were of course that Ann was not strictly a whore. She never took money, that I had heard of. She did it with mature athletes because she liked it. I knew that. But it was somehow less humbling to the old ego to think of her as a whore than as a woman of pleasure. There were too many muscles involved in that.

And sometimes things are so monstrous you can’t do any-thing else but laugh. The old man liked to have her around him; he liked to look at her and think of her putting out; he liked to think of that tee shirt rolled up to her chin and of that red hair writhing and of her yellow teeth biting her underlip and of her shut eyes and smile when she was getting her paroxysms. Great God, he was the same as me, and that was what was monstrous. He could not bear to be picturing the same woman that his son was. He thought it was depraved. All that he knew of Presbyterian decorum was brought into question. That’s why he got so upwrought at me in the garage.

There was a light rap on the office door, and then the door opened and in stepped that devil Harley Butte. Don’t think I hadn’t been thinking of this man for a couple of weeks. I’d never heard of such an officious nigger. I just couldn’t figure him, the man who handed my note to Ann to my old man. Mainly what I couldn’t figure was what the old man had said about Harley thinking for a week before he decided to hand the note over. I didn’t know anything about a thinking nigger at the time. I knew of wild niggers, romantic niggers, lazy niggers, comic niggers, fishing niggers, foxy niggers, even rich niggers, but I knew nothing about yellow thinking niggers.

Harley was colored more toward white than I’d imagined him. He was my size and handsome, with points of brown at the brows and eyes, and stiff hair; he had an orange pretty face. His eyes closed every other breath he drew. He was a baby bursting forth with dark points of maturity and had on his face a sort of amazement that all this growth had come to him so suddenly. He looked toward me, immediately shut his eyes, and talked only to the old man.

“I’m afraid they’ve scheduled another game on Friday afternoon. I’ll have to have Friday off again, Mr. Monroe. I can’t help it I’m the director of the band, and there isn’t any way I can get out of it”

The old man looked to me.

“Have you met Mister Butte, Harry?” The Mister threw me. Especially as used toward a man whose parents you wondered about first thing when you saw him. Yellow man. I made a point out of despising him as a mixed breed. I be-came an authority and a prophet about his certain doom. I gave him no more chances than the chances a child begat of human sperm and sheep egg had. I knew there were special laws against doing it with sheep, because something would produce — something unspeakable. I thought, Butte, you’ll probably die at thirty at the latest, of simple natural causes. Go ahead and be a foreman for the old man, be the band director out at Grell, hand in notes I wrote, kick around a few more years, then you’ll be gone, buddy. You look too strange to make it, my friend. It satisfied me to think such thoughts.

“I don’t think you’re going to get much out of him. Your boy doesn’t like me,” said Harley. He and the old man laughed.

“But now, Harry and I know each other from way back. I and he were introduced one evening he was throwing fire-crackers. He was having lots of fun.”

The old man bent his brows impishly. I couldn’t tell whether he knew what Butte was talking about. It’s among the old man’s habits of snobbery to make out like nothing is unknown to him. I began feeling watched, or worse, spied upon, and went home.

Butte is a spy in the old man’s hire, I thought. I was out-raged. What else has the yellow son of a bitch seen? How long has he been watching? Then I imagined that unlikely scene with the old man and Ann again, such things as his saying, “Come here, my pet, and sit on my lap,” with him sitting in nothing but an underwear shirt, and Harley Butte smiling cynically at the window, every now and then lifting up binoculars to spy out for me. It all a depraved inside joke on me.

Put some shotgun holes in that yellow son of a bitch, then he can sigh and play his intestines like a flute, I thought. Then I regretted dismally that the old man had been able to make me give up Ann so easily. Something filthy had been going on against me.

I went to bed and lay there. I had the phonograph way up loud on an old record of marimba music. Looble Loo Loo Loooble Boooble Looooo Loo Pi Pi Looble! “Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket …!” was the tune. Ordinarily I detested this record, but now it evoked bereft, dispossessed emotions in me. I imagined that it was the musical version of the cliffs and seascape of Malibu, California, where I had wanted to take Ann. I saw the National Geographic picture flood out of its frame in thick gorgeous colors of blue, wheat, and green, and I saw the cottage sag into rivulets of white. It was dripping away, all gone: Loo Looble! And I was left floating on this bed somewhere between Dream of Pines and Malibu, alone, Harry tragic. The suitcase was still in the car, the silver ballpoint which would have signed for the release of my money was in my hands.

Ann, I whispered. Ann, Ann, Ann. You were going to be so sweet at Malibu. You were going to have a clean white tee shirt and be always just coming out of the bath. You and I were going to wait until your red bangs grew out and there wasn’t any more of that yellow peroxide in your hair. We would have gone swimming and one day I would give you a mild kiss on the foot and love would grow gradually from there. Maybe one day you would come in with your tee shirt rolled up coy so I could see your navel. Another day I might come in mistakenly and see your bare breasts. I know they look like crushed ice with rubies on top. Another day I would accidentally get in the shower when you were already in there and you would say, “Oh, you silly thing,” and then we would have love, with you moaning against the shower wall and water droplets on our faces. We could not help it, all the forces said “Love.” But you had been my legal wife for all this time and I had held back like a shy hero. Ann. I loved you.

But I did not love her any more. She was a whore in the comic strips. She probably took money from beasts who smelled of the locker room and the paper mills.

Thank the old man for reminding me of that I hated him. I saw him in his undershirt having his way. Vomit fumes came up in my throat. And I thought I could taste in my mouth the body of a yellow nigger; he was standing, pressing spread-eagled against my esophagus walls; his eye-balls boiled out a rancid muck which dripped down to my lungs. He had the rubbery smile of a minstrel entertainer from the old days.

I didn’t know I was taking the flu that night. At around five in the morning, one eye seeped out a tear, and then the other began raining down my cheek. I thought it must be sadness over Ann, so I just let go and let the disease of my world have me.

6 / Horning In — B

It turned out that at the last football game of the season I was too dejected to be held back any longer. I was sitting high up in the bleachers beside the band with the same bud-dies, and we were making up original profanity about how bad the band was while we took the Coke cups into our jackets and sneaked a dip of Dom Pedro muscatel into them when the other team made a touchdown and every-body stood up to despair over it. I don’t know of another evening when defeat was so totally evident in the air. You could smell it. The rain was coming down in a frigid mist, our team was being swept away by an old rival team from Alexandria that seemed to achieve some advantage of grip on the mud, the drums of the band sounded like clubs against sodden paper, and Dom Pedro with Coke made the worst toddy perhaps in the history of alcoholic mixtures. The other two guys had hung beneath the bleachers to throw up once already, but I was more stubborn. I had my eye on a small trumpet-player in the band and kept down all the booze in me I could to prepare for what I was going to do at half-time.

The band went out dutifully at the half and fell apart in some unrecognizable formations and music as the home crowd drizzled out of the bleachers to leave for their homes and fires, until only about twenty folks were left. The band came back, the members wiped off their horns and put them in their cases; the old bald-headed man who led them told them he wanted them back in ten minutes. They swarmed off toward the masonite blockhouse where the concessions and restrooms were. I noted with pleasure that the boy I was watching took his horn with him. I dropped below the bleachers and followed his legs through the tiers to the blockhouse.

He only wanted to pee, and there was a tremendous line outside the restroom door. He waited a minute, then swerved off, looking all around him, and walked up the clay bank behind toward the woods on the edge of the stadium. He got in the shadows of the pine scrubs and then darted into them resolutely. I followed him. Ten feet into the woods, he had his striped uniform pants down and was making water. In one hand was his golden trumpet, with its march music stuck on a little wire clamp protruding from it.

“What you think you doing, boy?” I sounded like a deputy sheriff. “Just hold it right there, band boy.”

The little man — he must’ve been twelve or a small thirteen — jumped when he heard me and went into a spasm trying to hustle his pants up. I knew his name; it was Lloyd Reese, Tonnie Ray’s little brother. He was the brother of a roach. I didn’t think he knew me, though.

“Harry. I thought it was somebody … You’re Harry Monroe, aren’t you?” Lloyd said when he finally buttoned up and turned to see me.

“Give me the horn, you little fart” I grabbed the trumpet but Lloyd held on, unexpectedly, with his skinny crab-like hands. I hit him in the mouth. His march music flew everywhere and he crumpled back ino a huge weedplant. Lloyd howled like a wounded cat. I grew panicky thinking he might be heard down in the stadium and charged into the weedplant thinking to calm him down with a few blows. I hit at his face a couple of times, and sure enough, he got quiet. But he began whimpering and I felt pretty sorry about that. His tiny pointed kneecaps showed under his pants; his uniform was covered with wet grass crud.

“Now look, Lloyd. All I wanted you to do was give me a lesson on this old horn. I’m interested in playing it. Lloyd? You hear?”

“You hurt my embouchure,” Lloyd whimpered, putting his hand to his lips. I didn’t know what embouchure was, but guessed of course that it was a diseased condition of Lloyd’s and got very afraid of him dying on me.

“You’re all right, Lloyd,” I pleaded. “Give us a tune, buddy.” I gave him back the horn and Lloyd played an airy little version of “Lady of Spain” with no hesitation, sitting down, rather pitiful in his rumpled orange uniform and with his brown hair jagged on his forehead.

“That’s fine, Lloyd. You really get in there with it, buddy.” Actually it had been rotten playing, but I appreciated the fact he thought I would kill him if he didn’t play something.

“My embouchure is ruined,” said Lloyd.

“Nawww! Now look. I want you to teach me the keys. I’ll blow on it and you make the notes for me.” I eased the horn out of his hands.

“That’s silly,” little Lloyd said.

I looked down at him from my height and he didn’t think it was silly any more. I sat by him and pursed my lips on the mouthpiece as I’d seen him do. I blew and a rugged whiff came out. He reached over and began fingering the scale for me. I was surprised to see there were only three valves. I’d always thought there were more — I mean, for all the different sounds.

“No valves down for C,” Lloyd said. “First and third down for D. First and second down for E; only first down for F.” I felt the tones go up in a grand ascension. “Don’t blow so loud!” said Lloyd.

In ten minutes I could play a few bars of “The Marines’ Hymn.” I played it over a couple of times and then began to give it a little finesse and surge, delaying the notes jazz-style and bellowing on the tones when I finally hit them. Wild Jesus! I knew I had been made for this horn, or that it had been made for me — whichever! Look how I was coming along in ten minutes.

“Say, Lloyd. Aren’t I doing pretty good?” I said. I really enjoyed the taste of metal on my lips.

“My band has started to play. I’m supposed to be with them, you know.”

So they were. It must’ve been the fourth quarter by then. The frosty rain was drilling down on Lloyd and me up here in the weeds. A giant oak stood right behind us. Its big leaves were clattering under the rain; it might have been sleet. The band, however, was cutting right through it with a brassy grunt.

“Look, Lloyd. Wouldn’t you agree that I was exceptional as a beginner?”

“I’m going to be in big trouble now,” Lloyd said. He had a spindly crooked nose that seemed to seek a less trouble-some life.

I gave him back the horn and he collected his wet sheets of music in the weeds and left for the stadium. I yelled to him when he went down the hill that I thanked him very much. Then I drove home, ignoring my buddies, and got in the bed. I needed no phonograph music. The sound of myself on trumpet was good enough. I loved that trumpet. I wanted one of my own.

As my luck would have it, that little Lloyd Reese turned out to be a genius. He is studying anthropology at Cam-bridge in England as of this date; this will be his second Ph.D. and I think the small fart even has two or three books out by now. How could I know who I was messing with?

He got back to the bleachers in an unbelievably disheveled state and with no horn. He had tears running down his cheeks and there was something pronouncedly wrong about the way his fly was buttoned. The little snake stood in front of the band and declaimed about how I had beaten him, stolen his horn, and further, how I had threatened him until he had to agree that I could molest him. He shouted this out so a few townsmen nearby and some of the sub football team could hear him. Then he fainted, and there was a big scene where his sister Tonnie Ray ran out of the stands and supported him in her arms. What a hell of an actor Lloyd was. He knew what crowd to speak to. The townspeople who remained in the rain were the violently loyal to Dream of Pines; the football subs would kill out of pure mean frustration.

Things were not rosy for me in Dreams of Pines for a few months. Half of the high school thought I was a violent homosexual and the other half didn’t know for sure. I was the first even suspected case at Dream of Pines. There was suspicion at home the Saturday morning after I’d first played the trumpet. I remember the phone ringing early in the morning, but I didn’t know what was happening when the old man replied into it with sleepy surprise. To the lasting credit of the Reese family, it was not Mr. Reese calling the old man at this hour. The Reeses probably knew what a smart fraud Lloyd was and had found out the truth some time during the night. But they were, on the other hand, a gutless family for never denying Lloyd’s accusations against me. They were a family in one of the subdivisions and I have no doubt they were trying to be as quiet as possible about Lloyd, who was not yet so known for his aberrant lying as he was later.

It was broadcast throughout Dream of Pines that I was a desperate queer.

The old man woke me up at eleven with a sad look on his face. I’ve never seen him so miserable. My mother was standing at my door, already preparing to intercede on any brute thing her husband might say to me.

“I am always here to give you anything,” the old man announced. “I always have been.” He was crazy with nervous confusion. I didn’t know what this was all about, but he approached me at a time when I was voraciously greedy.

“I want a trumpet,” I began. His eyes widened. I know now that, according to what he knew by the phone call, all the evidence as to my being homosexual was in.

“Don’t you already have a trumpet in this room?” he asked.

“No. Are you nuts? I found out just last night that I wanted a trumpet.” The old man blushed. I swear it.

“I want a trumpet I want the title papers for the Chevy wagon. I want a hundred dollars. I want a private tutor to teach me trumpet. And I want… a pistol.” I threw that in because it was the only thing I could think of on the moment that was shiny and expensive.

“You can have all that,” my mother said. My father looked back at her mournfully.

To this day, the old man doesn’t know but that the sordid story about me he heard over the telephone is partially true. Who could have, would have, called him? I keep asking myself. I think it was Ollie Sink or his wife. They were there during the rain at the game, and lately they had be-come members of the Baptist church, in a deep vengeful sort of way. Ollie had mailed some tracts about the end of the world to the old man. Without postage, that is. I saw Ollie putting the envelope into our mailbox while I was reminiscing around the cane one afternoon.

I got the pistol first. I’m sure the old man thought it was the most manly thing to give me. It was a miniature snub Italian-made automatic; it was heavy, a.22, and was a smooth brute that shot with a loud sound. Next he told me informally that the Chevy was mine for keeps. Next he told me I had another hundred dollars in my savings account. This was toward college, he made me under-stand. Next he gave me a piece of property in southeastern Texas that I have not to this day seen. He assured me it was a nice wooded bluff from ten acres he had bought and would make a splendid site for a house in the event I got a wife in the next ten years. How he did emphasize my getting a wife. Last came the trumpet, which not he but my mother brought into my room one evening. It was a brass and silver plated beauty lying in an alligator case of blue velvet fur. Mother had picked it up on a secret trip to a music store in Shreveport The horn was a Reynolds Contempora model exquisite by even professional standards. I didn’t know that and only said, “Thank you very much,” to my mother. Bless her heart, she had gotten me on purpose the finest horn in Louisiana.

It was well known in Dream of Pines how miraculous Harry Monroe became, in such short time, on trumpet I had a private tutor all right, but that doesn’t explain it. My mother got me a weird old fellow who had played for years in a Shriner’s band. He was retired from the automobile trade and never went anywhere without a can of beer, but I don’t want to take anything away from him; he played trumpet terribly well for a guy his age. He’d had lots of practice playing fast circus music, and he could still cut away with a solo of high-ranged brassy spunk. His name was Ralph Medford; I think he had been in the First World War; he called the trumpet the long horn, as opposed to the shorter cornet And as a teacher, after he got through wandering around and admiring the pieces in our house, he was competent: stiff on my learning the scales, stiff on my never playing over phrases and tunes I had already mastered; when I learned something, I got no praise — Mr. Medford just lost interest in the exercise altogether, and gave me to know I ought to do the same. He had eyes that reminded me of broken grapes and a handsome tanned scalp where he’d grown bald. His car was one of those old Hudsons that looked like a zeppelin somehow incapacitated and made to creep along the earth; it made a sucking sound coming in the driveway and going out it, to wherever he lived in Dream of Pines.

But — not to stampede away the idea of grand old Mr. Medford — I was amazingly talented on this horn, and was past any help he could give me in about six months. I played the Arban book all the way through and then won the state solo contest down at Shreveport, or thought I had. I learned later that several trumpeters won first-place ribbons in that contest and none of us was necessarily the best It was not a contest to establish the state’s best trumpeter, Mr. Medford thought I had won best-in-the-state too; he drove me down there and played the piano for the little virtuoso piece by Raphael Mendez that I did, and maybe was in love with his own piano-playing, which was, by the way, rotten. The judges were from schools in New York and Chicago. There was also a judge from Eastman Conservatory who looked at me peculiarly — had his tongue out through a horseshoe beard. I went free-lance, attached to no high school, and that was a rarity.

Medford went into my old man’s study very honorably one day and told him that he had taught me everything he could and that I was better than he was now and he thought he ought to step out. He said also that he suspected there was some practical joke being played on him, because I had learned trumpet just too rapidly really for him to believe that I had been only a beginner. The old man probably looked at him in some flat way and wrote him out his check. I never knew how proud the old man was of me. I don’t know but what he was embarrassed by my musical progress. In one way, of course, every good thing I did in music proved me a little more of a pervert — if you accepted Lloyd Reese’s story about how I had molested him and stolen his trumpet.

Once I heard the rumor about myself in full from one of my buddies who’d stayed for the game and witnessed all of Lloyd’s testimony. My buddy knew it was false, and he and I went out in the bushes on that hill of the stadium and kicked around trying to find Lloyd’s horn. I don’t know what the little snake did with it; as I’ve said, he was a genius. After the night I was alleged to have molested him, he quit band and went secretly into his great discipline of anthropology, a course that wasn’t even offered at Dream of Pines.

I put the Italian pistol under the seat of my car and drove around pretending I was going to nail Lloyd. I discovered how much I detested this place, with its rancid paper mill air and its rumor-hungry dead Baptist subdivisions. I couldn’t drink coffee any more because the taste reminded me of the atmosphere. I saw those rain-gray stacks of pulpwood down by the tracks again, and right above them, a steely little airplane creeping across the hot tops of the pines and my stomach wanted to throw up everything in it. I’d seen Dream of Pines too much. I drove by Ann’s house with only a gassy, diarrhetic feeling in me. And then I sat in my car in the garage for two hours one night thinking about Dream of Pines until I decided I wanted to see everything in it burn — the subdivisions, and Pierre Hills, and especially those houses on the track like Ann’s house, and Ann tangled up with her current lover in the back seat of a car parked in her front yard, Ann on fire like a building, with her ribs broiling in an X-ray view, and the guy she was with screeching as his crotch turned to embers and flames took his head. And you bet I wanted Harley Butte’s house on fire: Harley lying in bed with his musical instruments having been made into molten brass by the fire before he wakes up, and then he wakes up to be scorched to death, howling, by the molten pool. I also wondered what my old man would do if he woke up with walls of fire in all corners of his room. I had a box of wooden matches with me and struck them one by one in the car, studying each one from the initial ragged burst of yellow to the cool blue wavering blade at the last I wanted Dream of Pines High School to burn too; to turn into the coal skeleton like the matches did.

It’s hard to tell whether my trumpet-playing profited by all this fire I was dreaming up. I did stay at the old trumpet every afternoon after school. I would play long after my lips had given out, even after they would begin tasting bloody, to prove something or other. The bruises on my lips finally calcified until they were tough enough to play high and low for long periods without giving out. I went around with a strange, purple mouth.

I was directly accosted as regards the Lloyd rumor only once. In May, I was at a spaghetti supper sponsored by the Lions Club. I went alone, because I liked spaghetti, or the brand of it mixed up for the Lions Club by the only Italian lady in town. “Music’s golden tongue,” she said as I went by with my tray. I did not expect the smile of genuine approval I saw on her face. It was pure sunshine from Naples. God be kind to her. I ate my spaghetti, roll and salad, and thought of Italy, the beauty of it and its immense distance from Dream of Pines.

I went out by the storeroom door and down the greasy steps to the parking lot. This group standing by a Ford noticed me, and a fellow on the second-string football team, a small halfback type, started yelling to me that I was a queer, a queer, a queer. He wouldn’t quit. I sized him up, and noticed that Tonnie Ray Reese was leaning beside him, maybe as the date who had put him up to it. And I’m sure the guy had been drinking. I ran over to him, grabbed him by the shirt, and hit him in the face. The poor bastard didn’t know anything to do but try to body-block me; he destroyed himself missing me over and over and crashing on the blacktop. Then I dragged him up against the car window and hit him around the mouth, using the Trojan ring with a raised knuckle again. He commenced sobbing and finally fell down cold-cocked. I myself had the sick heaves. I felt all that Lions Club Italian sauce climbing up in me. My fists hung down throbbing and there were tears in my eyes. I don’t think I was meant to be a fighter.

“Prick,” Tonnie Ray Reese whispered to me. “Bully.” Tonnie Ray had beer or wine on her breath.

I didn’t have strength enough left to contradict her. I only looked at her face and saw the glum mouth and the lusterless wax-paper sort of skin and a broken curl of hair at the eyebrow. We used to think of killing you, I thought. I used to think of ironing you to death, Tonnie Ray. The Roach. Made it this far, that you go out with a halfback and get socked away on two beers, have you? Were intending a little scrimmage with him later, were you? Were going to show him a whole view of one of your crabshell knee-caps, were you, or even shuck off the sneakers from your claws during a moment of gay abandon? To be written up about slyly in “Who and Who” of the school newspaper: “Cute Tonnie is not ignoring a certain suave tailback. In fact, as W&W has it …” meaning they are mutually masturbating each other to death. I was getting back my wind. I introduced myself to her in as literate a fashion as I was able, sweeping my hand out a little.

“Prick. Bully. But not a queer. Your little brother lied about me.”

From then on to the end of high school, Tonnie Ray had a crush on me. And, by way of her tremendous mouth, my reputation around Dream of Pines improved.

7 / Horning In — C

In June I left for New York.

The old man finally took me seriously as a musician when I got a letter from Dr. Perrino inviting me to take part in what he called a “brass clinic” at N.Y.U. Perrino was the man with the horseshoe beard from Eastman who’d heard me down at Shreveport. I told the old man I wanted to go.

“I wanted you to go. But I want you to promise me one thing. That you’ll go over to Columbia University and talk to the dean.”

“What about?”

“About you going to Columbia.”

“Listen,” I said. This was hard to put. “I don’t think I want to beg any-body to let me into his college. Don’t ask me to do that.”

“Not beg. Tell about yourself. Tell about your music,” says the old man. “Use your style. You have a style. You’re my son, aren’t you?” He grins, and blushes.

I suppose he meant I would woo that dean at Columbia as if I were Jack Paar of New York and the dean were a horny old maid. I didn’t have that kind of confidence. It surprised me that the old man had this much trust in any “style” I had. I’d never heard anything about this. Could the old man be thinking of me as a seventeen-year-old version of himself, making a smash in New York on his first visit? Yes.

What a shame it was he never got closer than a Gray Line tour to the city. He saw it, all right, a couple of years back, gorged his eyes on the skyline — all those frightening gray clusters of turrets, banked against one another like fingernails growing from the hands of corpses — and on the harbor, and on the brick caverns everywhere. It hurt him in his soul to be seeing the city only as a tourist, though; he felt awfully left out and inadequate and went into a six-month gloom back in Dream of Pines. When I was in college, my mother sent me letters about her trying to coax him out of it. He would have loved to be invited to New York, like me. I’m sure he thought New York was calling me to its marble palaces of Art. I lied and told him I’d drop by on the dean of Columbia.

New York. Perrino taught us trumpet men in a basement room overlooking Washington Square. There was a huge green lawn out back with a wide brick walkway running down it. There were adult people walking by barefooted out there, and lots of beards and pipes, books, but most memorable, queer lovely girls with heavy eye make-up, jeans and tee shirts, and pagan-seeming sandals. No fool could deny New York its women. I’m the type that can pick out obscure graces in a crippled hag, but I know the kind of beauty that burns your eyes, too. First night I was in New York, I bought myself some tennis shoes and wore them without socks, like I’d seem some of the milder beatniks do, and walked around the fountain at Washington Square thinking to pick up some romance. And I did.

This group of four girls came up to the edge of the fountain where I was sitting all tired out with trying to attract a lover, which is hard to do when you’re too shy to make the first move. I merely said hello, and they got very friendly. They wanted to know where I was.from. Eventually they invited me over to their place for a Wine Party. They giggled and implied that this was an event that was going to tear the rafters out of the house.

“Sounds good. Am I going to have a girlfriend?” I said.

“Oh. We’re all engaged to be married,” says the brunette.

But the red-haired girl in the back that I hadn’t noticed much came up and slipped her arm in mine coyly.

“I’ll be your girlfriend tonight,” she lisped in a voice of antic falsity, playing that game of pretend-lover that certain kinds of girls like to play with unthreatening men. I didn’t much like this, but I was taking anything New York would give me, and so we paraded over to their place. She put her pale hand in mine.

On the walk we ran into a crowd having a hassle with a big cop. The trouble was he was running two colored musician beggars off the square and the crowd didn’t like it. But someone in one of the brownstone houses had complained of the noise. I looked over at the musicians, expecting to see a trombone or something like that around somewhere, but what I saw was an utterly destroyed little man who seemed made out of brown wires slumping beside the cop with a scratched bass ukulele in his hand; the ukulele had the back completely out of it; he had his hand full of small change. His partner was on the other side of the cop, looking sullen and paying no mind to any of us. He held a comb covered with wet tissue paper. On his head was a sea cap of dirty white with crossed captain’s anchors insignia above the bill.

“Officer, who are they hurting? We had to get up close to even hear them!” pleaded an older bohemian sort of woman who had a pigtail plait which whipped back and forth. Everybody in the crowd looked anguished. “They were lifting the spirits of this fucking slumpy swamp!” cried a bald-headed fellow in an army jacket. I looked around at the terrain of the square, which was very green and solid. I really expected the cop to come out with his billy club soon, with the crowd pressing in and shrieking at him. There must’ve been a dozen of them. He was huge and thick, in his double-breasted blue, and he bit his lip reflectively as if deciding who to bash first. “Don’t be a tool!” somebody yelled. “Why don’t you arrest the goddam square that complained?!” “I’m not arresting anybody,” the cop says finally. “You go around telling people to get off of free turf, though, man.” “… by what philosophy was these two a crime?” moaned this one guy shaking his head and spreading his hands; I think this was the first real Brooklyn voice I ever heard.

The cop answered him, “This is your philosophy: you want New York to turn into a town wit’ streets full of beggars, like D.C.? You want to get hustled for a quarter every time you put your foot in the street? We’re cleaning up the beggars.”

“What you mean is you’re sending these men back to Harlem. I’ll bet you’ll give a free ride back, courtesy of the Police Department, huh?”

“Everybody shut their goddam mouth!” said the man in the army jacket. “Let these men do their number and you see if they’re not earning their money. O.K.? All right, everybody step back and let’s hear them.” The cop frowned but dropped back a couple of feet from the musicians. The crowd eased back too, falling in like a jury gallery around the girls and me. The bald-headed fellow stayed in front and got up on his toes with raised hands like a conductor. He thrashed downward. “Hit it, cats, like never before!” The Negroes didn’t stir immediately. But they did play, with the little morose man stomping on the ground and strumming and fingering the bass uke for all he was worth, while the taller fellow in the sea cap waved back and forth with the comb and tissue paper. I couldn’t hear a damned thing. I attempted to get in closer, stretching the arm of the redhead, who didn’t want to move but held my hand. I heard some low thrumming, a foot hitting the ground, and an occasional buzz off the comb. No song, exactly, got through to where I was, only a scratching beat and a low hum. It was like hearing rock-and-roll from somewhere far, far away. Even so, I got caught up in it, danced around a little, and attempted to draw up the redhead in an embrace. My mind lifted and I became rather careless hearing this scratchy music coming off the pavement. The girl didn’t find it agreeable. “Stop it, stop it,” she whispered. “There isn’t anything to dance to.” “I’ll kiss you. I’ll try to do other things. Right now we’ve got to dance!” I found myself saying. God, I felt torn-away and reckless off this scratchy music. I never even looked to see how she was taking it. My feet and hips went out every way. The musicians quit.

“Well, I believe that settles it,” says the cop. “Nobody’d call that music.”

“I’d call it music, you deaf shit!” yells the man in the army jacket, who was still dancing solitary. “These men earn their way. I think that settles it!” cries the Brooklynite, who had been bumping and snapping fingers while they played. “Let’s pay these men for the entertainment.” He thrusts down in the pocket of his big gray pants, and every-body in the crowd is opening purses and going down in pants for change. The cop steps between the musicians again to prohibit talk any further. His hands are up. But behind him the subtle darkie on uke has his backless instrument turned over, and wiggles it, inviting donations. Silver flies past the cop and strikes the wood, sometimes getting and sometimes glancing off into the grass or on the pavement. A hinging music of falling coins sets up around the musicians and the cop. The cop holds up the billy club at last, and this grim stick is standing on his hand about nine feet in the air. I myself have a handful of quarters, dimes, and nickels ready to loft over him to the musicians and am just waiting for a decent chance. I see the man who played the comb sprawling on the pavement behind the cop; his sea cap is off, he is grabbing everywhere for coins. Somebody’s legs spread and I get a view of this, and also the gun and bullet belt of the cop moving toward us more. “Come on, honey!” says the redhead. She pulls on me and tells me there’s going to be some trouble if we don’t get away. I see her light face is drawn thin in terror, and her mouth is all pretty and wet. I get an instant lust pang; her face is parallel to the ground while she tugs at me; the other girls are retreating, and I notice an incidental panty under a flaring dress. But I raise my fist filled with coins.

The cop has come up three feet from the crowd and is grabbing hands of people who are still trying to get coins to the musicians. Fellows around me start throwing the coins hard; the crowd starts stoning the cop with quarters and nickels. People keep back the dimes because they don’t carry well. The cop begins to get stung; some of these low-bred bastards around me are throwing at his face, and pink slices appear on his cheeks as he tries to hold down the hands. A huge fifty-cent piece sails against his brow and blood falls down through his lashes almost instantaneously. The action pauses. Then everybody falls back a little and starts throwing even harder. The coins sail in coveys toward the cop. I suddenly realize that the idea is to throw your coins through the cop to reach the musicians. But what a cop! I think. He’s still standing with outspread arms, club in one hand, blood streaming off his forehead into his eye, and a look of placid boredom on his wide face, while the coins pelt him. I got the feeling he considered all this child’s play, with him as the resigned papa. Behind him the Negro man is spread-eagled on the sidewalk with hands teaching and heels scraping, trying to drag in the falling money. The knees show through the holes in his trousers. The poor bastard was trying to make a net out of himself. This does it; I throw my coins softly toward the walk, but a couple of them drop on the cop’s knee. Mine was the last bunch. Everybody else had run out of coins. The cop sees me and comes alive. “Oh. A smart-ass, huh?” He wades into the crowd and they split, turning back their faces toward me. I’m too shocked to move, and feel the girl’s hand rip out of mine. Without hesitation, as I turn away from him, he whales me across the back with the billy. My body leaves the ground and I come down crumbled in pain and running amuck, shouting “God damn!” The cop’s shoes thunder behind me. “All right, Mister Filth-mouth! Go talk that one over!” he roars. Then he crunches me a farewell one across the back of my thigh with that piece of lumber again. It was a nasty, scalding hurt, but I stayed on my feet out of sheer panic and found myself running low on the sidewalk, legs and shoes flying by my face. I stopped by the fountain and looked back. Why? Why? I’m wondering. Why did he hit me? What’s wrong with this place? I felt spooky all of a sudden in this city. Those concrete rungs around the square pool seemed unnaturally gray and morbid to me. The brownstone apartments were stuck together with the spit of old, crazy men. The ache of my backbone and thigh taught me there was no happiness in this place.

The bald-headed man in the army jacket is holding the sleeve of the cop’s uniform and berating the cop with obscenities. The cop is shaking his head. The beggars are slinking off, sea cap and neck of ukulele high. The Brooklynite is facing my way giving a shrug I can make out from fifty yards. “Who …?!” I can’t help hollering out at all of them. “Who am I to get done like that? … What kind of country do you think this is? … This place has got some goddamn rules, hasn’t it?”

“No sir. You poor bayah-bee,” comes this voice from be-side me.

I haven’t been deserted by my girls. They are all four standing beside me, the redhead foremost; I notice that each girl is wearing differently colored pastel tennis shoes of the same type — there’s blue, orange, yellow, and violet. The redhead reminds me of everything Ann Mick could have been if she’d taken care of herself. Her name is Sylvia; her mouth is constantly red and wet, and she’s used some chalk over her eyes to make the upper half of her face glow dull green and sultry. The others are not beauties, but they all have a little style. I mean they poise around on their calves giving the impression they have the universe by the tail, being engaged to be married and having run through all the preliminaries of romance. I can pass them by without any grief, but as for the redhead who’s offered to play at love tonight with me — even the hint of red in a woman’s hair makes me gimp around like a pogo stick; puts me up in the air like a pole-vaulter hung up over the bar and dreaming about his shocking soft fall into the sawdust.

“He hit you, didn’t he?” remarks the brunette.

“Poor bayah-bee! I was trying to tell you about this crazy place and get you away from that policeman,” says the red-haired girl. She put her arm around me so far her fingers met my navel. “Now you’re hurt. Listen: we were in Central Park one afternoon and this Negro man jumped out of the bushes and started hitting this woman and she just laughed. Laifed”

“Oh, Sylvie. It was apparent that they knew each other very well,” says another girl, whose face was like that of a cat without any hair.

“It was a white lady,” Sylvia explained.

“Oh, Sylvia,” the others sighed, exasperated.

“You sound like you’re from the South,” I said.

It turned out they all were from the South. They were coeds from the University of North Carolina doing a summer session at N.Y.U., principally for the reason of living in New York for eight weeks. Their stay was drawing to a close. They had had to study to make their grades, and nothing of particular excitement had happened to them, until me. They thought my getting beat up by the cop was exquisite. “I’ll bet that hurt,” says the humid-eye girl with a blotched yellow face. I never could figure out whether it was a peeling suntan or a disease. “You were really uncontrollable dancing and throwing those coins at the cop. You were really an item. How old are you?” I lied. I told them I was from Tulane up here in New York to learn jazz and told them other false halves of stories proving that New Or-leans, my birthplace and ancient lover, was holding its breath waiting for my return to one of the premium night clubs on Bourbon Street. I had a lot of Italian and French names at my disposal, and managed to lapse imperceptibly into a Cajun dialect that had them all groping to understand me. I recited straight through a brief history of the Acadians (I did learn something in Louisiana history!), which really put them on the marvel. Except for Sylvia, the girls were tepid academic sorts. I caught on that they resented Sylvia’s betraying they were all from the South. And as for their speech, I couldn’t understand much, with them trying so hard to lose their accents and bend their mouths around some weary idea of New Yorker dialect. A lot of sputtering and pronouncing of Ayie for I. The thicker they came on with the New York, the thicker I came on with the Cajun.

We walked past places like the Gaslight Cafe and several clothing and music shops on MacDougal Street and went off into an alley where the door of their apartment was. Sylvia kept her arm around me and mentioned the fact that I must be still hurting and made other soft, nurselike sounds in my ear that the others couldn’t hear. She was truly one of the sweet girls of the South. She never used bad language, a cigarette was a tremendous experience to her, she was extravagantly interested in me, she had popping, lashy gray eyes, and the innocence of a World War One bandage-mistress. She kept her skirt over her knees and sat sideways.

The Wine Party amounted to one bottle of champagne in the house and me as the only visitor from the other sex. The furniture was benches, scattered cushions, and books with notebook paper leaking out. The girls drank half a glass of champagne and started complaining immediately of being sleepy and drunk. That left me half of the magnum to myself, and I was feeling no pain by the second glass. One of them got up and played a Maynard Ferguson record on a dinky portable phonograph, for my benefit, I guess. Ferg depressed me, as usual, sailing about three registers above his band where there weren’t even any notes, as far as I knew. I told them — sour grapes — that Ferg was quite all right as a “novelty” trumpet man. It got them excited that I was able to cut a pure genius like Maynard. “Technically, he’s competent,” I threw in, implying there was something lacking about him that certainly no one in this room except me could possibly understand. Then I became the intellectual idol of the crowd.

“I never thought about it, but there is something wrong … something is missing … something bothers me about modern jazz,” said the owner of the phonograph, the brunette, and I did not hasten to point out that Beethoven would sound like a tin dish thrown down the alley on that music box of hers.

“Anyway, let’s dance!” I said, getting up. Ferg and crowd were into a hard bop number now, and I couldn’t keep still. Apparently these gals weren’t used to dancing and thought it was a bit gauche and goofy to do, but I had them all up imitating me in a little number called the beau-bitch back home, which requires a lot of shrugging in time with hands on the ribs. All five of us were out on the floor, kicking paper around and jarring the phonograph. Ten minutes of this, and we’d passed high tide in the party.

“My God, what a night!” the girl with the dehaired cat’s face sighed. She and the other two thought they’d turn in. God knows what passed for fun among this crowd — probably a flat tire on the bus back to North Carolina. I noticed the apartment was strange in that each girl went to a separate sleeping room, tiny rooms; each room had a thin ply-wood door, and the girls closed each one resolutely.

Then I heard breathing in back of the doors, and a bump of wood somewhere.

“You know what those girls are doing, don’t you? “whispered Sylvia. We were sitting on the longest wooden bench. I didn’t know what she was talking about. “They’re all listening to us. They’re leaning against the doors holding their breath.”

“Why?”

“They know I’m engaged. They want to hear what you and I are going to do. They know I like you.”

“Really? Thank you. I like you, Sylvia. What can they hear?”

“Almost everything. They can hear in here just about what we can hear in there.” I listened and did in fact hear one girl who seemed to have her lungs pressed against the door. “Let’s just talk a while. We can turn up the record player.”

She talked a long while, beginning on an excursus about her roommates and ending with her boyfriend. It seems all four of the girls had gotten so scared of New York by their second week that they had each written letters to the boys back home saying Yes, darling, she would marry him. Sealed With A Kiss. Dumped into the envelope almost an ounce of an intriguing perfume she had bought in a weird shop in Greenwich Village. Caused the faithful weather cocks to spin around deliriously on the roof down at Charlotte, or Ashville, Winston-Salem, or Rayford, once the boy received the letter.

As for Sylvia Wyche, the girl from Durham, N. C., she was affianced to a sad cat who couldn’t even make his C’s at Chapel Hill. He was from Rayford and drove fast cars which his old man, an old bard as concerns gasburning engines, rigged up for him. Sylvia said this boy was good-looking and she had never figured out any way of forgetting him. She said this boy, in his one semester at Chapel Hill, was the best-dressed boy on campus. He wore seven different suits, rotating them every week, and her heart went out to him and his family because she knew his folks couldn’t afford to dress him like that and he wasn’t even comfortable in those Ivy League suits, but wanted to make himself proud so badly as a college man. He attended all his classes and received D’s and F’s. Sylvia liked him also because he knew when to call it quits. “Here, I’m going to make a B at N.Y.U. in History of American Indians, but I’m still just so unhappy,” she sighed. But her lover-boy went back to Ray-ford and getting speeding tickets and having his driver’s license suspended and working at the fiberg lass plant.

She almost never stopped talking about him, and sung out his name, Charles! Chbrles! so it went echoing in agony down the hall of doors.

“Are you really everything you say you are, Harriman? Are you really a trumpet player from Tulane that plays on Bourbon Street in the night clubs? Are you as sweet as you seem, even so, when you know that you really ought to be swell-headed and have nothing to do with a nothing like me?” Sylvia had finished a second glass of champagne and was flinging around doing her limbs everywhere. I swore to her that I had always tried to be sweet when I saw some-body like her, who deserved it. She put her hand on the neck of this striped shirt I was wearing and dragged it down so it peeled off my shoulders.

I had been shyly cupping her breast in my hand since we’d slid off the bench and eased to the floor (hard as a bone, ugly tiles of brown), but I was so high from champagne it was like my hand was working separate from me. I didn’t expect that Sylvia would be this serious so soon, and my body was still lax, my head still thinking about poor Charles in the fiberglass plant down at Reyford.

“Let’s get these out of the way,” Sylvia said. She reached up in her skirt and dragged out her panties, which were yellow. She got them over her blue tennis shoes with a little effort and kept them clutched in her hand. I had my arms under hers and was not daring to look. The phono-graph was going high. Sylvia stared at me for several moments, giving me her face. She was tense and desperate, and the long hairs along her forehead were lying stiff in an upside-down crown of red, and I could see tears of sweat bursting out of her pores; her eyes were green and watery.

“Please don’t think this is stupid, but — Do you know what a girl’s hymen is? That’s what makes a girl a virgin. I don’t want you to go through that. That’s for Charles. I know I have some space before you get to that, and I want … Please, now.”

I was kneeling between her legs studying the white, unfreckled thighs, the. shocking red hair with roots of brown. She was lifting the purple wound below it so very high. Her tennis shoes came back to rest under her thighs. What a sight! There are some I’ve talked to who have no trouble comprehending the beauty and slavish, passive cunt of a woman, with its thorny, rather prohibitive hair. But me! I’m so sensitive toward these way-out foreign shores, it’s like I’m a blubbering near-corpse washed up in Rangoon harbor, with crabs ganged around me and pinching me out of the water, and I stand on the beach seeing a temple of jewels in a flying architecture. So I go in.

“Not too far!” she begs of me. My first woman is telling me that. “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t. Please, please, please. No, No, No!” These are the words I got from Sylvia, who labors with brown shirt and pearl buttons and pale blue skirt lying around her stomach. Her tennis shoes flap on the floor, Sylvia looks down astonished. She looks up at me, with some kind of cautious love on her face.

“I love you,” she huffs. “Again! I don’t care.”

I got out of there. The phonograph had stopped some-time about three-quarters way through our act. I could hear the silence and all our sighing. The hall doors were bowing in, cracking at the joints of the plywood; the girls had listened to enough and were lying on their doors to hear more. Sylvia had been loud. “A-a-a-a-a-a-ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhwrrrrrr!” she’d yelled and had kept it up almost all the way.

One thing about New York: you really can tell some-body goodbye. You aren’t going to see them again. Not in the bus station, not in the train station, not at the airport, and even if you do see one another (like I saw Sylvia at the airport with her friends, running back and forth along the seats, so nervous about her life that she couldn’t stand to take anything as slow as a bus back to North Carolina, and her friends were raising their eyes and seeing her off), even if you do see one another, this is Idlewild Airport, and there are ten people between you and whoever you don’t want to see.

I left the apartment with Sylvia hanging on my jaws thrusting her tongue back in my throat with French kissing. Pop! I’m free. Out in the alley walking toward MacDougal Street, breathing the warm midnight of the hottest June New York has had in a while — says the radio back at the hotel. I mount the stairs of my hotel and lie down to sleep on a bed between a trumpet-player from Oklahoma and another one from Oregon, high school prodigies like me. I think our hotel had a name like The Bibi. Anyway, it was in walking distance of N.Y.U.

Perrino, still sporting his horseshoe beard and instructing trumpets, was odd. Eastman had given him license. He came to us wailing; he had his hands over his head, and you could see written back in his eyes that he had obtained some ruinous Ph.D. from somewhere. His tie knot waggled down on his open collar, and his clothes were like bandages coming apart over a horrid wound to his chest and soul. He wore sandals over black socks, which seemed to represent the same anguish at his feet. He was slightly chubby, with bags under his eyes like rotting bananas, and behaved as if he were the last gasp of Italianism in America. We rehearsed a Shostakovich brass chorale under him. He was never satisfied. He shrieked and kicked over the stand, bellowing that we were all out of tune.

Toward the last of the clinic session he caught several of us watching the girls through the window of the basement while we were playing. He charged over and raked down the Venetian blinds.

“You watch me” he screamed. “What you think I’m doing with this stick — picking my nose with it?” He ran the baton in and out of his fist and closed his eyes, then opened them hugely. Then he grew cold and bit both his lips. “I hear all these original styles going round this room. All you little green-asses want to have some style, don’t you? You want to be big jazz men. Huh?” He collapsed, hands to knees.

“What?!!” Nobody had said anything. “Listen here, shit-ties, don’t try to distinguish yourself with an original tone when you’re just beginners. You play all the notes set in front of you for a while, and you’ll develop some style out of that. Music. You have to know enough of it. Music will teach you your tone and your style. Trust it. Do the notes,” he pleaded. He ran toward the back of our ensemble. “Don’t look, but I’m getting out my thing and laying it on the shoulder of one of you boys. Nobody knows whose shoulder I’ve got my thing on.” We heard a sound like a belt buckle hitting the floor. Nobody looked back. “You must play this chorale as a team, nobody having any style, or I’ll come around and lay it on your shoulder. The man who has the most individual style has a thing laying on his shoulder!” He counted us to start, and we played the chorale in a perfect, soft harmony, nobody wanting to stand out.

“That’s more like what Shostakovich wanted!” Perrino exclaimed. He jumped up and down to the front of the ensemble. “Only it was too timid. What’s the matter? Is any-body afraid of getting an old thing in his mouth? Do you take me for a fairy?” He started limp-wristing and lisping around in a great imitation of the Prince of Queers. “You silly gooses!” he hissed to us.

Oh, Perrino was odd. But his lesson stuck. Forever after that I hesitated to play with any volume or any particular style for fear some dago wild man would be sneaking up behind me to lay his prod on my shoulder. Perrino had a great bit to do with destroying me as a jazz man. Our last night we did a free brass concert on the mall in Central Park. The public loved us, and Perrino wore a sharp blue suit and intimated over the microphone that he had taken us bunch of yokels and whipped us into style in about two nights. Perrino was a monstrous bastard from the word go.

My last night in New York, I went out by myself again and sat on the Washington Square fountain. Everybody was having a good time. The pool was thick with people sloshing about. It turned dusk. I saw the bald-headed fellow in the army jacket again. He was having a water fight with the side of the pool. Then a big Negro waded up to me. It was about dusk then. “Y’know, man. I know I lead an essentially nonexistent existence,” he says. He brought up his hands, and they dripped water all over my pants. Then he lay down in the pool and seemed worlds away from me. I couldn’t answer him; I didn’t know what he meant. But I liked his calling me man. I did like that. Everybody at home was so fond of calling me son and Harry, in condescending tones of voice. “Y’know, man …” echoed through me. It was as if he’d known I’d had my first woman. “Y’know, man … Y’know, man.” New York and Washington Square weren’t so bad. All those adult types out in the pool having such a good time. And at least one man who took me seriously. Two men! I thought. That cop wouldn’t have come after any juvenile like he came after me. This was a week after the cop incident, and I was all ready to settle down and see what became of me in New York. Then the airplane took me out, with this boy staring down at the lights and not holding back a tear when it came.

“You saw the dean at Columbia.”

“Yes, yes, yes. Nothing doing. Columbia is all filled up already with its quota for five years.”

“He liked you, didn’t he?”

“He said he wanted me to go there. If there was any way …”

This Was the old man and me. Something had happened to me. I had seen a little of the world and was able to lie freely. I have no idea what Columbia University looks like to this day. I saw nothing but Coney Island and Greenwich Village. I gave the old man a phony description of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, which he fed on. The Museum of Modern Art for my mother. “It’s just too much to fathom, Mother.” Mother wanted to know about New York generally. “The city didn’t do much for me. It’s just concrete blocks with people trying to live under them and between them.” My mother was delighted. She knew there wasn’t any place more imposing then Memphis. She copied what I said down in this diary that she kept about once every five years; she kept notes on important events of her lifetime in that book.

8 / Where’s Your Daddy?

I always wanted to ask Harley Butte, “Where is your daddy?” “Who is he?” “What does he think of you?” His mother was black. She lived in town, not too far from Harley’s own house, up a hill full of dandelions and wild clover, in a house with a huge rectangular porch in front; the house had a sunken first story or basement, and the porch was on the second level and had steep wooden steps running up to it. These steps had no rails; they were about a yard wide — just a slight improvement over a ladder. The porch itsdf was a sloping platform on which four decrepit rocking chairs sat; there was a banister running across it, but only about a third of the original support sticks were left. Some of the other sticks were lying on the ground under the porch. This house was a ruined summer home that some white family had lived in seventy-five years ago. A forest of tremendous oaks and beeches used to stand here; Spanish moss and shade hung around it. Just below it was a lake wider than a mile. Now, the bed of that lake held all of niggertown. Driving across the tracks at the mill, you really decline into niggertown. Once I heard about this lake that used to be there, I thought of being underwater when I passed Ann Mick’s house and went on down into the spade community. I’d see colored people down in these brown hills and think about them as fish, dark fish breathing some-thing different from what I did, some thick gas in brown water with the gases of the paper mills boiling on the top of it. Harley’s mother’s house was without paint, and the timbers stood forth in a dark, grainy brown like a limb you’d pull out of an ancient lake. She was the only one there. Harley himself lived in a neat cottage with a white fence on a rise on the other side of niggertown. His mother called herself Mrs. Butte, and must’ve been about sixty-five.

Butte was her only son. He was cream-colored. Yellow. Almost orange. Who was his father, and where was he? That’s about the only thing I never asked Harley.

He started coming to the house at night in June. He was worried and upset. “Where’s yoah daddy?” he’d ask.

My old man had treated him very square, and Harley was concerned Ode Elann might think he had been stringing him along these years making him think he was interested in staying on at the mattress factory all his life. He liked his job as foreman, and it was a very responsible job, and maybe he had given the impression that he had sworn his life to the Monroe Mattress Factory. He’d gotten excited about his job at odd times.

But he was in the process of finishing his degree at Grell A. & M. and already had the offer to direct the Gladiator Band at that high school in Mississippi. One hundred and forty Negro musicians were waiting on him in south Mississippi. They were hidden in the pine trees holding their breaths until he got there, gave the signal, and they would prance out gloriously in their green uniforms. Harley checked on this. The band where he was going wore green uniforms, with white filigree and legstripes. His head was turning around on its stem in anticipation.

He told me this, but I know he never got it across fully to the old man until the very last time he came to our house, in August.

First time he appeared, it was nine at night and the old man wasn’t in the house yet. He was still at Kiwanis meeting. Harley drove in the garage in his new Plymouth and I let him in the door. We had nothing to say to each other. Harley wore a light suit of tan, a blue shirt with a zag-striped tie and Marine shoes battered to gray with scuffs. It was what the scholar-studs down at Tulane were wearing. Harley had taken to wearing black horn rims, too, and had the beginning of that little scruffy musician’s beard the old man groaned about all summer. Butte was putting up some brave vibrations, all right.

I told him he could wait in the den. I told him cautiously that he looked very … jazzy tonight. He pulled out a pipe and said something I didn’t catch.

“Huh?”

“I said jazz doesn’t have anything to do’th the way I’m dressed. Jazz is going to hell in a boat made out of a Negro’s asshole.”

I know my face hung out and I was even slightly embarrassed. Then Butte laughed. His voice was always hoarse from yelling at the student musicians out at Grell. His eyes boiled mirthfully over the match he put to the pipe. Butte was still rather pretty, in his yellow way, even at thirty. And always shocking, like a baby jerked up abruptly to adult size.

“You like classical music, then. You’re a musician, aren’t you?”

It turned out he liked the march from Lohengrin, the march from Aida, the marches of Purcell, assorted British and French marches, most recent march music in general, but above all that, John Philip Sousa. Oh, there had been times when he’d felt low and sorry and didn’t think he liked Sousa any more, for months. Then he would climb up out of his gloom, he would wade out of that prune-syrup swamp of misery; something would lift him up, like hearing a march over his car radio when they were giving college football scores, or just waking up one morning feeling good and reasonable for a change. And he would rediscover Sousa. Sousa would have changed a little. Sousa would be a little wilder, Sousa would be more playful with the horns, Sousa would be less cautious, Sousa would be tending a little more toward chaos, toying with the very structure, the magnificently ritualized harmonic of the March form itself. Harley saw as he picked up a score-sheet of some well-known Sousa march and went down the parts with his finger, saw for the first time, the titanic laughter of the giant musician. Like in the Finale of “Stars and Stripes Forever” where the silly piccolo whistles out an obligate over the melody and the whole band. Sounds like a god striding the earth, tongue in cheek, whistling a mischievous tune to himself. It would be Sousa again. Sousa bolder, Sousa better, Sousa even more uncanny. He read all the old scores again and heard all the new voices in the formulas of his wizard John Philip. And then he and John Philip were ready to sail together again.

“Since I was fifteen I spent most of my time liking Sousa,” Butte chuckled. Butte was the proudest slave I ever laid eyes on. He became a scholarly lunatic, an absolute pedant, when he talked about Sousa. It was hard to shut him off. My mother called him from the kitchen. She was putting back the globe on the ceiling light after changing the light bulbs and asked him to help her. It didn’t bother him, apparently, that he had been in the house less than thirty minutes and was already the houseboy at beck and call. He put his pipe in the ashtray, took off his coat, and backed toward the kitchen still jabbering away at me. I’d just asked him if march music was the only kind of music he liked; didn’t he get bored with it after a while?

“I’ve asked myself that … am I a one-way fool? No, I’ve heard every kind of music and liked bits and pieces of some. But I got a reason and an answer I’ll tell you …”

“Harley, I’m holding this thing upl …” my mother called again.

“Yes mam … Wait a minute, man, I’ll tell you.”

He rushed into the kitchen apologizing and I sat there on the couch having forgot for a moment how queer Harley was because again somebody — another colored fellow — had drawn me into his confidence by calling me “man.” Maybe only in casual lingo, but “man” again. Back to Washington Square in New York and the fellow at the fountain disclosing to me, “You know, man …” and God knows what followed about the secret of his person — a little experience has told me he was most certainly high on some drug and was being the tourist’s quintessential beatnik but I don’t care. “Man” was an agreeable way to start a conversation. You flatter the other guy by acknowledging that he’s made a few scenes too. It’s nigger jazz talk, I guess, and I’ve believed it for many a year now.

But you know Harley wouldn’t have cared for this sort of talk. To him, hearing the blues was like having some smegma-covered old uncle wrap around you and slobber in your ear.

There was a terrible bump and crash on the kitchen floor. My mother squealed. I ran in and saw Harley getting up out of a mass of glass fragments. The stool was lying over in the corner. Harley had come down with the light globe in his hands after the stool skidded out from under him.

Dark blood was streaming in a web over one of his hands. He put his arm in the sink and turned on the water. Mother saw him gripping his wrist and said she’d get some bandages. Butte grunted and I heard a piece of glass plink in the sink.

“How is it?” I asked him.

“Well, it’s almost like cutting yourself.” He stared at the wound and sneered slightly. He noticed me looking at the blood and lowered his arm out of sight in the sink.

The healthy maroon blood flowing out of Butte’s cut got to me. I felt tremendously sorry for him. He stood there bleeding like any normal person, accepting it, not too surprised that there really was blood in his body, holding the wound out of simple duty to himself, and trying not to make much mess. And hiding his wound, a bit hangdog and ashamed, trying to get it out of my sight. It’s how we all act when we get hurt, but at that moment the whole thing struck me as unbearably pathetic — the glass all over the floor, the knocked-over stool, Butte’s utter helplessness when he fell. In the next room a minute ago Butte was a clown. Now he was a full-blooded man, and it was almost more than I could take. When I meet a man head-on as a man and not as an item, I always have to double back. My first impulse is to become chaotically polite; a hospitable ninny. I reached down to get my shirt tails out and rip my shirt off to make a bandage for him, when the old man comes in the door and meets my mother with her arms full of bath rags and white gauze.

Tonight the old man has digressed wildly from his normal dressing habits. Perhaps he has seen Jack Paar with something similar on, or maybe he is trying to prove that age is only making him more of a sport. He wears a blazer of light blue, that is, the blazer is draped over his shoulders and the arms are dangling while his real arms are pressed against his stomach; his shirt is open at the throat and there a kerchief, an Ascot of navy and red splotches, hangs around his neck. On his feet are glistening brown RAF boots. A new cigarette, most likely lit right outside the door, burns neglected in one hand, fine celebrity style. He’s coming on stronger than I ever dared to, and he’s around fifty. There’s my daddy, Butte. I loved the old man at that instant. What guts it took to wear that outfit to Kiwanis meeing. To be president of Kiwanis that year, and show up in his Jack Paar gear; wrap the gavel, standing up with the movie-tone Ascot bursting out of his shirt. They would say he was absurd; the men with the clip-on black ties, they would think he was being struck by an indecent youth-panic in his mellowing years; he would be embarrassing them, those of them that were sure by now if they were sure of anything that ninety per cent of the good life lay in taking age mildly. Or maybe not. Maybe they patted him on the back for his courage and were good envious joes. God knows the crowd my old man ran with at Kiwanis. I never did. But anyway, how many hours had Ode Elann spent in his study worrying about wearing the duds he bought? Un-countable. To him, it must’ve been like coming out in leotards and cape with golden signet letter of his initial on his chest. (I heard later from my mother that this particular night at Kiwanis it was the old man’s duty to introduce and make social with a female journalist speaking to the Kiwanians as guest lecturer. He doted on the photograph she’d sent from her office in Chicago, because she looked hard, passionate, and beautiful. But that picture had been taken in the 1940’s and by the time she got to the Dream of Pines Kiwanis Club, she was a rueful gray hag who quoted the prose of John Dos Passos and did nothing else but drink an amazing amount of coffee and say “Pardon?” to anything anybody asked her. Terrible disappointment for the old man, in his Ascot, and I pity and love him even more for dressing to please that tough big-city gal in the 1940’s photograph.

So the old man has entreed into the kitchen and is hunting for that assurance from Mother and me that his clothes are all right, anyway, and dashing; that we will take him back into the house even as the crazy Riviera cosmopolitan free-liver that he sometimes is. And he sees my mother with an armload of bandages that could just as well be for the personal wounds he has suffered showing up in this outfit for that Chicago journalist woman who so badly failed her photograph.

Then he sees Harley at the sink and notices all the glass mess in the kitchen. Harley is wearing his striped tie and blue shirt, and for a moment there is a question of who is more the wardrobe stud between them. The old man advances his RAF boots a little, and they seem to win hands-down over Harley’s scuffed Marine shoes. Perhaps the old man has never seen Harley in even this much a real suit before, and what a bracing striped necktie Butte is wearing. The old man recedes a little. The edge of his effect has been taken off somewhat by Harley. Resentment and concern cross his face. But what is this? The high-yellow man has his arms in the sink. Harley turns around fully toward the old man, and my father winces at the sight of Butte’s young beard. He doesn’t like it. It doesn’t quite do for a foreman at the mattress factory. It looks like, or makes you think of, some kind of bull nigger who would stick a knife into you for nothing or possess a woman and then break her spine to let her know he was through with her.

Either that, or a completely harmless and ascetic musician, and the old man doesn’t know anything about that. The old man didn’t know that there is no such thing as a physically violent musician; I mean a musician really convinced of his own music.

“What’s going on?” he cries at last, like somebody was setting fire to his house.

“I wasn’t watching what I was doing and got myself cut,” says Harley. I feel that Harley knows his presence, and mainly his beard, is not wanted around here and he is trying to leave the house, in a business-like way as possible. Whatever he wants to tell the old man has been spoiled.

My mother wants Harley to get to the doctor and I offer to drive him. She has wrapped his left arm in a huge, beehive-like glob of gauze and no blood is showing. Harley tells me to drive his car. The new electro-rubber smell is still in it. We whip out.

“Not to the doctor. I ran cold water on it and it’s closed up. I ain’t bleeding any more,” said Harley.

I told him I was worried about infection and he told me not to worry about that; he knew our house and everything in it was clean. He said he knew Betty Perry, our colored maid, who cleaned our house. She was an ex-nurse from a hospital in Dallas; that I didn’t know. Betty had never said anything about being a nurse.

“Same old story,” chuckled Harley. “She fell in love and followed a man to this town. Turn on the radio. I want to get back to what we were talking about.”

I did, and we got some patter from a Shreveport disk jockey; he was raving about the sound about to come up. It happened to be Mose Allison, a white fellow from Tippo, Mississippi, who sings more like a Negro than any non-Negro on the planet: “Gonna find me some kinna worldly companion, eben if she dum, deafm, cripple, and blind!” Mose ended it. I thought Mose was extremely fine. I wanted to be Mose, as a matter of fact.

“Cut it off,” Harley ordered. “You see, here’s some nigguh that just wants and wants, and yearns. He thinks it’s something special to sit on his butt and just yearn after things. Okay, give him … give him … (this was a mild crisis for him, since for all he knew I was still a firecracker-throwing thug) give him Marelynn Monroe and, he’s still gonna find time to plug in his electrocuting guitar and make up gripings about how it’s not so fortunate as he thought—yearning again.”

“But that’s the nature of the blues, Harley. Anyway, that song we heard was sung by a white man making out to be colored. His name is Mose Allison.”

Butte couldn’t get over this. Some white man making out to be colored. Some man granted the same racial strain and cultural heritage as John Philip Sousa, and then … Butte sighed and told me he thought that made it twice as dismal. I had heard of the supposed snobbery of this high-yellow brand of fellow toward the regular blacks. I couldn’t tell if this snobbery worked in Butte or that he’d come by this love of Sousa independent and honest.

“A good march doesn’t leave you yearning like that. Say Sousa. He starts out at some place and takes you to another place and sets you down. You ain’t yearning after anything when a Sousa march is over. You’re there and you’re happy to be there. Then the punch-note on the climax — sometimes, not all the time — like ‘Amen!’, like putting a roof over the place you’re at.”

I heard a band hitting the punch-note and understood what Harley meant. There was great safety in the end of a march, I remembered.

“Do you think about this sort of stuff when you’re at the mattress factory?” I wanted to know. Harley turned toward me and I could feel him staring as I drove. We were barreling down one of those avenues with silvery streetlight arms and twelve-foot pines in the front yards. Everyone had his yard trimmed beyond reproach — green carpets, shaggy needles, the lukewarm wind flying by. I had no idea where we were heading.

“You mean do I think about my music when I’m working? Do you have to ask that? I’m a musician, aren’t I? You bet I do, every minute of the day,” Butte said. I turned and saw him looking at me like I was crazy. “You’re a musician, ain’t ya? You play the trumpet. Don’t you think about your music all the time?”

I certainly didn’t, and suddenly, in Harley’s presence, I felt very lazy and feckless. No, I didn’t think about my music very constantly. There were even times when I’d walk in my room, see my horn on the bed, and be surprised that it was there, that it was mine, and that I was supposed to be able to play it.

“But I guess you’re thinking about girls now, aren’t you?” Harley answered for me. He hissed and seemed rather disappointed in me.

“Look. I feel sorta like a fool driving us around in your car. Where are we going?”

“I thought we would talk. I have to tell you something that I want to tell your daddy but can’t make myself do it. I don’t want you to tell him either.”

“Well hell, what is it?”

“I’m quitting him in August. I’m getting through with school and I have another job I have signed papers for.”

“Why can’t you tell the old man that?”

“He’s giving me a lot of money nowdays for being a foreman. He’s paid me for hours I wasn’t there and was out at Grell taking classes. And … and I don’t think he knows I was studying to be a band director. He’ll be mad and hell think I’m outa my mind to do it. I’m taking a big cutback in salary to take up this band. He’ll ask me about the money I’m making.”

“Where are you going?”

“Mississippi.”

“I’d think,” I began, sniffing the air now that we were right up next to the mills and going over the tracks and down to niggertown, and becoming awfully wise off that old smell, “you can’t get out of Dream of Pines without being cleaner than when you were in it.”

We drove aimlessly around the gravel and the pavement for a while and then I took myself home. Harley vented himself freely. He wanted to tell me what brought him to the mattress factory and how lucky he had been to land into it just after he’d gotten married. He’d had a busy four years, from the factory to Grell A. & M. to home, and wake up again. But at least, he said, it hadn’t ever really been hard knocks. He mentioned the fact that he had quite a bit of cash in his pocket at this very moment. He may have been the biggest mark in Dream of Pines at this moment, in fact. Harley considers it a miracle. He pats the dash and confides, “I don’t owe as much on this car as you’d expect, either.” I begin driving the car rather daintily. His face is crossed by the angelhair glow of some street-light, and brush shadows from a pine tree make their way across it. He is the color of the inside of a carrot. His head is high and alert, and his mouth seems to give him pleasure, moving, telling, laying it all out. He tells me about the army. He is going to make it back to that place of honor when he was briefly director of the company band at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. There aren’t going to be any woodpeckers who want to play jazz standing in his way. He would know how to handle that situation if it rose again. He knew so many more horns now; he could compose and arrange an original march given two free nights.

“I’ve been over a lot of people now. Not only at Grell in the band but at the factory too. I have been given charge. In three days, no, in one day, I can tell you the people who come to do business and the ones who come in for a escape from somewhere else.”

Harley was inclined to grow sort of tipsy off something he’d just said, if he thought it was particularly wise or correct or charming, and burst out with something else to go himself one better. This was what kept him talking constantly, open-endedly, once he got your ear. Not to say he was never wise or all the rest. But like then, he followed up on the idea of what a personality judge he was, and remarked, “If I meet a new married couple, at the end of five minutes I can tell you if they’re gointa stick with each other or not. I can tell you in one minute whether a certain person is instructable or not.”

“Oh yeah? I guess that makes life fairly easy for you, doesn’t it.”

“Look here, Harry. I’ve put in my hours. I have done my homework in this university of life. I have did my time in Ups and Downs College.”

Was it some scene I had seen in the movies, or was it something I had read? The man carrying a wad of money on him, new car, being very expert and gabby, while just around the corner … I didn’t want to think of that with Harley here. I liked him, and it was terribly pleasant to be sitting here in his car on our driveway and listening to Harley on Harley, even though he made me ashamed. I think now it was the bastard’s function to make me ashamed: I had had it so lazy and soft and didn’t even care much for what I had, while all the time Butte was attacking away under the name of some idea or other. Only it was this bad idea that was coming into the car with my not wanting it, resenting it when it came, but trapped by it. I looked at Harley’s confident face — the thickish lips opening and shutting like small weiners making coos — and I thought of bad luck and broken dreams. His queer ocher skin, was it, or was it the bandage on his wrist, his Tulane sports outfit, and all of it, the fat wallet, the new car, the drunk hope in his voice. My brother in the insurance field once told me that his company avoided selling life insurance to Negroes. The percentages for the company just didn’t pay off. Of all things, I thought about that fact just then. His company was an astute and studious firm that did huge volume all over the States. I thought of that. Either the Negroes did not pay the premiums or they died too soon, and maybe too often by violent accidents, which meant double indemnity. The facts rolled chock, chock in my head. What a nasty, morbid way to think; nothing had ever come to me like this before.

Then this horrible, filthy scheme of romance came into my mind. I began noticing Harley’s skull, seeing it as an item, a tender ball, a noun, to lay a tire-tool against, to whap. His skull invited me, me, to knock him out. And it wanted this bad luck, begged for it. And the wallet, and the new Plymouth. Take them. Easy business. Fly. Out of Dream of Pines, toward Malibu or green, rocky Canada. Hell, the insurance companies knew what Butte’s chances were anyway. Course of nigger Nature. Then get that one moment of fame you always wanted to come by casually some day. Be seen in the great spotlight of the cops, be fired upon, but yet escape, and have maybe fifteen minutes of local TV devoted to you. “… described as brooding but mild by his shocked father. Was a promising musician. But was at times rowdy, says his admitted girlfriend Miss Tonnie Ray Reese. She was ‘not wholeheartedly surprised,’ said Miss Reese.” Wouldn’t I stop thinking on this scheme? Finally, it was shut out for me by the flat thought that I was too much of a bore to even borrow his car without permission. And only then did I return to the only fact there should have been: I was too humane to hurt Butte; I cared for him; I’d protect him from as much as an insult.

What this runaway thought-scheme had to do with Harley or me, I had no idea. Bad, bad news had appeared in the car with us; I had an itchy, criminal feeling.

He thought I was observing him because of being avid to hear more of his life story. He speaks as he unwraps the gauze on his arm to discover just what his cut is like. I become overly polite again, wanting to make up for the horrors that were in my mind, wanting to ease him, aid him. He is going on about my old man again, raising Ode Elann into some unknown idol that he’s ashamed to cross or show the triflingest intimation of ingratitude toward. So I jump in to help him out.

“Now come on, Harley. He’s only human, and most of the time he’s downright silly…. Did you notice what the old man was wearing tonight?” I giggled familiarly; I thought it would change Butte’s point of view. “When the time comes, why don’t you just tell him to go to hell, and leave?! You don’t owe him your future.”

Harley lit into me, I mean a full-blown scold. He wasn’t even very courteous about it, and I began to feel the grill, and squirm. Did I know how many people looked up to my daddy, did I? he wished to know. Did I know whose beautiful house I was living in? Did I know what man in Dream of Pines paid above the Minimum Wage years before he had to pay it by law? Did I know who air-conditioned first, who stayed out of the workers’ way and off their backs and didn’t hang up a lot of Don’t Do This signs around the factory? Who paid for more than one wino to dry out at the parish hospital? Who was phoned and stood in more times than once as collateral promisee for even a relative of a worker trying to be admitted to the medical clinic?

“You better think about putting your daddy down, boy. Wouldn’t this Dream of Pines mess be some hell without him.”

I’ve said it. The bastard’s function was to shame me. Brood on the thankless jackassism of my life for short periods. I’d never known quite all these tales about the old man. Or more: how they apparently seemed to Harley. I got out of the car wrung every which way.

The old man was by himself in the den watching the last bit of the Paar show. Still wearing his playboy cosmopolite rags and boots, worshiping Paar. I did love him all over again, but I can’t say loving him then made my life any surer, or even better. I was still sitting on the dry rim of a cornucopia, my back to this feeling of huge, socked-in, un-liberated plenitude. Along my back charges of danger and joy ran worrisomely.

9 / Bully and Prince

Who’s to say exactly what I was senior year at Dream of Pines? I continued practicing the trumpet, but the introverted privacy of the musician bored me, and I stepped out to do things like act the second lead in the senior play. I did a solo in auditorium assembly one day, playing variations off “Down by the Riverside” with good old Mr. Medford chording me — the last thing he did before he died — delightedly on the piano. Mr. Medford discovered how much fun jazz was, and then he died the next week. I attended his funeral, and was seen by the class president, whose uncle Medford was, and my stature as a loyal fellow was increased around the high school. God forbid, but I profited by the death of this honorable old trumpeter from the Shriners’ band.

Tonnie Ray Reese went after me the whole length of the year. I walked down the hall and she was in front of me, winking with both eyes. She was still plain as a stick, but she’d had something marvelous done to her hair. It was all over her ears in upshot curls, and she had been down to Shreveport for some advice on cosmetizing her face, and came back with two bubbling coals for eyes and a wide pink swipe for her mouth. Also, her breasts got somehow hoisted to where she was making the impression of coffee cups under her sweater. Her legs could not be cured: they were poor as warped rice. She also had some odd heaviness around the stomach and hips. Tonnie Ray was not exactly a flower, but her hair and face were making toward it. I still hung with the group that ridiculed her above all others. She tried too hard. She was a roach dipped in paint, trying to make it as a famous class chum. But to her credit, she was so much in love with me that she was never mentioned once that year in the school newspaper. Bob and Earl teased me about her, and I felt compelled to suggest one halfhearted way of doing away with her.

“Set her still, ram a hook in her gums, and take off with a Corvette that’s got a line running from its bumper to the hook. Make sure it’s a gravel road.”

“Yank her brains out the top of her head,” continued Earl, dully.

But what did senior year come down to? It came down to senior prom, when you had to be a total failure not to have a date, and the only girl I knew that was even likely was Tonnie Ray Reese. The roach. The spittoon made out of the shell of a creepy insect. I phoned her three days before the weekend. Her brother Lloyd answered.

“Is Tonnie Ray there?”

“She’s here. She’s sitting on the commode, crying,” said Lloyd. A shriek came out of the back of the house. I heard it making toward the phone in frantic blurbs.

“This is Harriman Monroe,” I stated, for politeness.

Lloyd dropped the phone immediately. Then I heard a whining rancor on the other end. This was Tonnie Ray. She said “I don’t know” about five times, and finally gasped, “Yes, Harry. I can get away from this other boy who asked me two weeks ago, I think.”

Earl and Bob had some really grotesque dates from an unknown junior high school two parishes away, and were in no position to ridicule me at the dance. It was held in the top loft of Dream of Pines’ only hotel. Earl and Bob both got there drunk, and thought I was lining up Tonnie Ray in order to kill her. I met them in the men’s room.

“You gon drive your car off a cliff and jump out it the last moment, innuh?” Earl asked me. He was near ready to pass out. His date was fourteen and all broken out with specks of acne.

Give Tonnie Ray the honor that she showed up in a manageable gown. It was white, with my corsage pinned on her side under her breasts. She could move in it to the beat of the band (five Negroes with expensive electric amplifiers who weren’t anything special, combined with a tenor singer who was good, especially on the blues and Memphis-sounding stuff) without causing any strangeness, like the other girls in their evening gown wads, crinoline petticoats; they were all like iron-lung victims trying to kick around. But not my girl. She got hot and sweaty, and before long wanted to kiss when we hit the floor for slow dances. Tonnie Ray’s gown was all silk and hung straight, like pants made into a gown. I’m telling you, putting my face back to the base of her neck and smelling her hair, odorized by a spray of peppery violets, I could almost forget she was a roach. My hand came off her waist full of sweat; I noticed the silk around her waist was wet.

“Let’s kick away,” I whispered. “We’ll drive in a roundabout way to the house party.”

There was a house party we were invited to, in a house built over a big lake, a modern house of open-face brick and cedar rafters owned by the father of one of the class-mates. The mother was an alcoholic, and it was rather sad, when we got there, to see her coddling the school drunk beside the fireplace and sympathizing with how sick he felt, while she reached for her own bottomless glass on the hearth and stroked the young drunk’s head in her lap. I looked away before things got too intimate and they began throwing up on each other.

Some college bucks were in the house, two old grads from Dream of Pines and a couple of others from L.S.U. and Tulane, all of them sold on themselves, looking at the ceiling or the baseboards and wearing those little titty-pins with chains on their sweaters as fraternity men are wont to do. Their penny loafers and their cultivated slouches; hair raked aside violently into a part; little fingers curled around the little fingers of their girls, college men enjoying their own smirks of careless possession. Their dates were girls who had not gone unnoticed by me during the last few years. They were girls who had been pretty so long they looked tired of it. Ah, the perfect medium-sized bosoms, the thin necks, the burning hair (they were wearing it short, then), the graceful legs, which demanded your hands around them and the long caress, from knee to ankle, like milking a cow. They weren’t for this boy — not yet. Rock-and-roll was pounding out of a speaker by the hearth — Ray Charles on “What’d I Say” and “Sticks and Stones”—a speaker as big as a giant Negro’s mouth. Couples slogged on the rug, with arms going up in the dim hearthlight. Over to the right, in a lighted dining room, the drabs and roaches were sitting in foursomes at tables playing bridge; this was the gang not too much on looks but high on spark, talent, or personality. This house party wasn’t for every senior at Dream of Pines. I understood it was for people who had become conspicuous in any conceivable way: homecoming queen to second-place winner in the state hundred-yard dash. I suppose there were forty of us there. Earl and Bob, my buddies, didn’t make it. Tonnie Ray Reese, of course, did. She looked around bug-eyed at all the celebrities under this single roof.

We’d just driven over thirty miles on gravel roads and had knocked off a pint of vodka with Seven-Up and smoked as many cigarettes as we could get in our mouths. (I myself was carrying three different brands in my coat at the time.) Also, we’d gone to work against each other’s mouths for about an hour, and I had a rosy-tasting tobacco and alcohol spit rolling around in my throat. Tonnie Ray went off to change into suitable party wear. I made my way casually toward the head, and passed Ollie Sink’s niece in the hall. She noticed me, stopped, and gave me a smile of withering sweetness. This girl, whose nickname was Lala, had tiny bones and a sort of emaciated prettiness that grabbed you only if you thought on it a while. The big brown eyes were there, all right, along with the small lips, which always seemed to have a glint of juice on them. She stepped like a baby stork, and wore girlish-ritzy clothes. Her family was rich, and yet she was shy and always seemed to be apologizing to you with those big eyes. I imagined that her hard little brassiere was stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. She was dressed in a pants and sweater outfit of creamy pink. I was high enough at the moment to think I loved her and had always loved her, only her. But I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I just ran back and blocked her and looked at her sincerely.

“Oh, Harriman,” she said timidly, looking down with closed eyes. “Tonnie Ray looks so nice tonight!”

Those days I was wearing an affected serious-musician’s hairdo, with long lanks and a part almost in the middle. I thought this would really sink Lala, and was slaughtered by what she said. Yeah, Tonnie Ray. Lala passed by and didn’t feel my hand as I reached to her back in agony and swept my fingers down the soft fuzz of her sweater. I thought of Tonnie Ray and went to take a leak.

I was thinking wistfully of Lala Sink and having that minor orgasm of urination, when I felt somebody’s breath on my bare backside.

I turned and saw one of the college honchos standing behind me. He held a blown-out match in one hand and was sucking a cigarette.

“Hey! Watch where your breath goes,” I complained.

“Sorry, buddy. This is a crowded head.”

I recognized him as the Tulane romeo I’d seen playing little fingers with this magnificent natural-blond gal from Dream of Pines. They were standing against the sliding glass door, on which the hearth fire and mantle were reflecting, and they did indeed look like an ideal couple in a ski-lodge plate from National Geographic. He had a dark, slightly skeptical handsome face and the girl was like pale butter molded lovely, and the way she was lounging toward him, his slouching power in his fern-green windbreaker, the chain of his fraternity pin lobbing back and forth brilliantly, you imagined he was the one who had molded her. I hated him with a hate that came deep, out of my dreams. And I had been drinking, of course. But I pulled it off rather well, I think.

“You’re a lucky dog, brother.”

“Why … what … wh …?” he wanted to know.

“Come on. You know what I mean. Your girlfriend. Blond. Personality. She’s simply tremendous. You couldn’t do any better if you tried.”

“Thanks. Thank you very much.”

“Listen. I know. And Earl and Bob. We’ve all gotten it from Sherry, and I mean, she can put it to you. She can really throw the junk at you. Man! She’ll grind you out of the backseat of a car. (I whistled and wagged my head dazedly.) Uuuummph!”

He collapsed as much as a man can and still stand up. His face broke and fell into a saggy frown, as he watched me zip up — an action I made a lot of to-do about, realizing that it gave a sort of authenticity to everything I’d told him. At this point I was a dramatic genius, having acted in the senior play, etc. I left the head; the Tulane romeo was by the commode shredding like a cigar butt you might see in a toilet.

Tonnie Ray was in one of the bedrooms chattering away with another roach. She was still in her evening gown. The fact was that she was prettier in that gown than she’d ever been before, and maybe knew she’d never be that pretty again and was hesitant to get out of it. I called to her and said let’s go out to the pool. She said wait a minute, and I said come on, now. Tee hee, I was such a brute, she giggled to the other roach, also still vainly wearing her evening gown. This other girl had on one of those huge, stiff bell-like contraptions and looked like a pumpkin seed stuck up in a bowl of sugar. I made off with the intention of deserting Tonnie Ray and her sickening friend. Tonnie Ray swept out in the hall, however, and clamped on my arm with her swimming suit in hand. She managed to do a lot of winks and poses to the society we passed in the kitchen. The old man parent of the house was trying, with the help of two boys in dinner jackets, to cram a horrid, bloody pig corpse into the rotisserie of his electric range. Everybody had to eat a slab burned to char outside and completely raw inside that morning at the house party breakfast.

The pool was in the back yard. It was late May and still cool, but there were a few body-conscious football players thrashing in the water yelling for their dates to jump in. I dragged Tonnie Ray into the bathhouse, a building made of two separated rooms with V-shape roofs and curtains inside hanging from a rod which went across the middle of the V. The view from inside gave you a triangle of glass above curtains at two ends, three tables in a concrete room like a teepee, and a brownish single light bulb hanging on a frayed old-timey wire of pleated yellow and black. We were alone.

“This is the girl’s room, stupid!” Tonnie Ray laughed. Her voice was as thin as an ill-poached egg thrown against the treble strings of a harp, like I did once. Besides that, it had a little wavering crackle in it Tonnie Ray was slightly drunk.

I was very sad that night, especially after seeing Lala Sink and wishing for her. Almost sorrowfully, I was re-signed to getting from Tonnie Ray whatever I could get Oh, I thought of taking Tonnie Ray out to the pool and drowning her in her evening gown. I felt some betrayal to Earl and Bob for not killing her in an inventive way. But I went on. Said what I had to say.

“I know where we are. Let’s change together.” My curiosity mounted, with a little conscious effort from me.

“Ohhhhh. Naughty!” she rebuked me coyly. But she sat up on one of the tables and started working her panties down. Her evening gown fell back to her knees, and her feet became coiled in a mess of garters, stockings, and shoes. When I saw her open her knees a little to make room for everything, I leaned over, grasped down her thigh, and put my middle finger up to her prize, felt her slippery flaccid sex, and plunged in. My finger was attacked by salty, numbing chemicals. It seemed to float. Solid to muscle to jelly to gas. I was trying very clinically to understand it She reared up her face. It looked like an old servant in a horror movie, only … there was a wide swipe of red smile on it. Her feet turned together in her white high heels. She was uniquely unalluring. Then her head went down and she started working, seriously. I saw a woman, how a woman does, in the act, without her man. This was a sight. I looked on like a doctor.

“Harry, Harry!” she began spewing. “You are a serious musician, and I am your date to the senior party, and oooooh! … Oh, Dream of Pines High! What fun it’s been … oh, I was such a … success! Yes. Success, success, success, sue, sue, success! The parties — I had dates, real dates. I didn’t miss a thing!”

Her dress thrashed and scrunched around her hips, wide white silk sliding everywhere. Felt to me as if I had my arm down in a bin of popcorn. Tonnie Ray had her moment She froze, lifted up, and moaned like an emergency stroke victim. Then a big expulsion of shark’s breath blew out of the lifted dress. It was hard to forgive her that. I was really outraged. I pinched her with my thumb on top.

“Wow! Golleeeeee! Yes! Do it again! Oh, you have been to New York to study music …”

What do you mean “Yes?” I thought. Oh, ugly, ugly, nauseous ugly … When would you ever stop? You’re a roach. You have been some serious roach … have been away to some foul garbage lair in the basement of the filthiest most monstrous city dump in the country to study being a serious roach. Her feet turned together in the wad of stockings and panties. Ugh. The crabshells of her knees rattled together.

“… and now it’s all over, Harry. Can you believe it? Our best days are over?” God save me, then. “The parties and the friends and the good times,” she went on, still lying flat. I leaned over to check out her face. All the beauty parlor glow had sweated off of it, and the original pasty shell with nose-holes expanding showed, the chin clopping away. “Oh, Harry! I think I’m sick. I’m going to …”

“No, Tonnie Ray, don’t, please. Sit up. We were going to change together, remember?” I helped her up.

Then I saw a pair of girl’s horn-rimmed glasses lying by a bundle of clothes on a table. I grabbed them and wore them; they were extremely thick. I saw a haze of brown and gray, and Tonnie Ray hovering four feet off the ground in it.

“Oh, Harry, silly … Uuuuuuuuurrrrrppp!” Curdled Seven-Up broke out of her. A speck hit my spectacles. I jumped in the air and my pants knees got really washed.

“Aaaah!” I screamed in horror. “Stop!” But she wouldn’t. The sheeny mound of white fell off the bench. Then it moved off low. This was Tonnie Ray, saying, “I feel better.”

I commenced ripping off my clothes. It was unbearable that I had Tonnie Ray’s muck on me. But it was so beautiful not to be seeing Tonnie Ray clearly. And the world of these thick glasses was rather delightful. Everything waved by me. I didn’t really know where I was. The vodka was working on me too. I got down to my shorts and tee shirt.

“Yoo hoo! I am naked!” sang Tonnie Ray’s voice off to a corner, near the board shield of the girls’ bathroom. I made out the exit door through the edge of the spectacles and rushed that way with hands out, fearing slightly that I would bang a shin on something metal, but keeping on. I felt on a table some girl’s slip and grabbed it.

I dipped down with it to swab off the vomit that had globbed onto me through my pants. Successful at that, I brought the slip up to get the speck off my left spectacle, which was glowing yellow and carrying a small but rancid stench — right from Tonnie Ray’s abdomen — over the rim and into my eye, which was watering. I also had my other hand out still trying to get to the door. I made it, opened it, and a refrigerator-size bright light from the walkway with the boys’ door on the other side burst on me.

But there were persons on the walkway. There were human voices, almost in my face. I never dared to take off the spectacles to see who it was, but there were boys and girls.

“He’s in his underwear in the girls’ dressing room.”

“He is wearing girl’s glasses! He is slobbering on a … girl’s slip. Sssst. He is slobbering on a girl’s slip!”

“A-ummmm!” clucked a girl’s voice.

“It’s Monroe.”

“He was with Tonnie Ray Reese,” called an athlete’s voice. “Check her out! He had done something to her!”

Some bodies knocked me out of the way and coursed past into the dressing room. Immediately they came out, bumping me violently into the walkway. My borrowed spectacles fell off and shattered on the concrete. I was looking at Lala Sink, standing there in her pink pants outfit and holding her neat swimming bundle at her stomach. One boy held my arm from behind.

“Tonnie Ray is sick. She looks … wounded … in some way. She is lying on the floor … (he gulped and whispered) … without no clothes on.”

“You girls go on in there and help her.”

“You better come with us, Monroe.”

I looked back and saw the very same halfback who had had a date with Tonnie Ray that night after the spaghetti supper, the same guy who had called me a queer, the same one-hundred-sixty-pounder I’d beaten until he whimpered. Seeing him, I became a little more canny about the situation. I eased into the door of the boys’ room.

“Just a minute,” I said.

I went in and found a swimming suit hanging on a hook, shucked off my underwear, and got into it. I flexed around a second or two and breathed out hard to get the cigarette trash out of me, then waded out to the walkway scene. Others from the swimming pool had come in to congest the area.

I had a hard time getting the halfback fellow off to my-self. The crowd wanted to just cram the area until they understood every particle of the horror alleged against me. And the two boys wanted to hold me until somebody could get the law. I jumped free, however. Then the girls and boys backed up and gave us an area.

“All right, son of a bitch. Marquess of Queensberry rules!” I spoke to my halfback friend — his name was Everett. He saw me squaring off in my bathing suit and scamping up and down in front of him. He didn’t know what the hell I was getting at. He thought he was getting into some kind of strange, unholy fight; something even beyond no holds barred, or razor fighting. Fright took hold of his face. He put his hands on the lapels of his dinner jacket, but hesitated to take it off. I hit him one solid on the cheek.

Everett’s technique hadn’t improved much since our fight a year ago. He charged at me with a body block and cracked the boards of the dressing room missing me; then he got up to do the same thing again and I couldn’t help stomping him a scornful one in the ribs — it was like I owed him one for being so stupid.

He howled in pain.

Then the big guy with him who had been holding me, a first-string end, moved in on me, and when he wrapped around me, it occurred to me for the first time that they were not intending a fair fight. “You ain’t going to start slugging, buddy,” the big guy said. He was a weight-lifter and ate three pounds of food every meal. Before this, I’d always sort of admired his great, ugly strength.

Everett hovered up, and the big guy let me go, and they both came in on me with fists, while also trying to hold me in arrest in a formal way. I got a feeling of soft clubs falling on my head, then something sharp arching up deep in my stomach, and I passed out.

I woke up by the lake in front of the house. Tonnie Ray was with me, wearing an aqua swimming suit that I could see in the bright moon of the night. It seemed terribly cold to me. Cold gray sticks were set around us — the May willow trees on the bank. There was a group of ducks just now putting out in the pond right below us. Tonnie Ray was so wretchedly pale that she glowed. Thistles, I was lying on a carpet of thistles. The shore mud and pond scum gave off a fertile odor: like Coca-Cola poured over a heap of new cow manure.

“I thought you were dead,” says Tonnie Ray. She has been keeping watch over my corpse. Then I start seeing the yellow-greenness of the willow leaves, little things, on the limbs, and a hump of weed the same color in the pond, and hints of the same yellow-green color in the grass around us, in the inch of it right next to the ground. A huge fish or serpent wallows in the water under a willow tree for an amazing five seconds — some creature waking up and crazy, strutting like fury on the margin between the water and the air. Quite something to hear, this something with scales tearing, sloshing. Makes you afraid.

It’s wearing, it’s horrible to feel this. I have a nauseous, chalky sensation in myself, and I’m waking up with nature, and Tonnie Ray has my head in her lap and is holding me with her arms, telling me that Everett broke his hand when he missed hitting me and hit the wall and the other guy was ashamed of the way they beat me up. They became concerned about my having passed out, and Tonnie Ray came out dressed in her bathing suit all ready to go and told them in so many words that they had made a horrible mistake, and then she and Lala Sink had walked me around the yard many times.

“Lala?”

“Yeah. She just now left when she saw you were all right.”

I turn around and see little Lala, indeed, walking up the slope and just now making the hill in front of the picture window. I see her little body striving, and the hearth burns pink on the window. There leaning against the window is Sherry, her natural blond hair and her full but lean hips pushed out on the window, alone, the Tulane romeo is not with her and her backside looks lonely and broken off from that National Geographic scene with him I had seen earlier. I chuckle, and laugh, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Yet agony too. Lala goes into the house without a look back at me. She only wanted to make sure I was alive.

And I’m stuck here seeing spring come on yellow-green, the ducks, the smell of manure and cola, the writhing of the unslumbering creature, and the waking of the earth, with Tonnie Ray, falling on me with her plastic aqua swimming suit, tickling me with her roach antennae.

“You are such a character. Who else could be beat up and wake up laughing?!” she says.

“I don’t feel good at all.”

“Oh, don’t you?”

“I feel worse than I have in my life.”

“Oh, do you? Now, now. We’ve hit it off so good together. Listen, Harry. Let’s get married.” She made some kind of Southern twirl out of that word married. I’m sure she wanted to sound fetching as a siren. Bless her heart, after all. She wanted me forever, something awful. And it was do or die for her. She was not going to college. She smiled, knowing she’d failed with the voice; then, clutching her underlip in a desperate bashfulness, she tried the last bravest thing, and eased her hand under my trunks with trembling, awkward fingers. By the way I looked at her, she must have known it was No all the way. She bent her head down, squeezed me lightly, and fell into a crumple into her own lap.

I got up and went walking up the slope. We were in the gray of the rising sun. I made it halfway up the slope and looked back at her. She rose up and really shook. God knows what new self she was putting on, but she got straight — she had put it on, whatever new self this was she was coming back with — and I grabbed her hand.

We went up and had pleasant conversation between one another while we ate that greasy house-party breakfast of burned undone pork. I remember Tonnie Ray held her piece out and squeezed it like a sponge, and we saw the grease drip out in an unbelievable amount, on the rug. We thought it was very funny.

10 / This Boy Sheds Dream of Pines

In 1960 Dream of Pines began turning into plastic. The Sink boys put up a corrugated aqua fiberglass fence around the mills. The tracks ran in two lanes into and out of the mill yards. The sun was scalding that summer. It boiled out the heart of everything you looked at and you could sense the hot ooziness of innards breaking out of wood, brick, and even glass. Intestinal slime burst out in tears on the steering wheel of your car if you left it in the sun any time.

What had happened to me? I lived in a woodsy glen in a nice wet shade, where late in the afternoon the deep cane patch and the overhanging oaks manufactured their own breeze, and strange blasts of almost frigid air blew through our house. I never had to suffer. I could lie in bed all day, naked, and will myself into one hard-on after another, detumesce (an unstudied pleasure all in itself), maybe go over to the desk and write my name over and over, lift up the stack of records and let them go again — Cannonball Adderly, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Mose Allison: new heroes — or take a cup of coffee, sit at the kitchen table, and wait for Tonnie Ray to call. She made out like every call to me caused her a crisis. She always took up five minutes apologizing for having called. Was I busy? She would just die if she were interrupting something. She must’ve called a hundred times that summer. Oh, Tonnie Ray knew we were not lovers, but couldn’t we be friends? I never agreed to anything.

Fifty times she wanted me to assure her everything was going to turn out right for her. She had some secretarial position lined up in New Orleans. She was going out with a business-major greaser from the nearby junior college who was after her to “prove her love.” What should she do? What should she do when her brother Lloyd stared at her for a whole minute one morning, then went outside the kitchen, down the steps, and came back with a teaspoon full of soil and dumped it in her coffee? What was her life turning into, that…

One afternoon she asks me, “Harry, do you think God is really keeping up with me? Most of the time I feel like I’m just not… watched.”

“There are so many trillions of people on the earth,” she told me. Her self-esteem increased considerably when I mentioned, by way of fact, that there were really only a couple of billion. This was generally the kind of smart-aleck consolation I gave her. Her calls were a bore, but on the other hand, they weren’t. When nobody else was in the house, I’d come to the phone wearing nothing but a sheet draped around me, like a monk-bard. Why? Just for the irony and fun, I suppose. I’d hold the phone out and peel off a shattering belch while she was weeping away at some story of crucial disappointment; then I’d come back to the speaker and make a tiny faraway voice, like at the bottom of a well, reading names passionately out of the phone book. Sometimes I’d hang up, flat. Nothing turned her away. She was always so concerned that she’d called while I was practicing my trumpet. I waited for her call, lifted the receiver off the hook, put the bell of my horn over the speaker end, and blasted off several bars of “On Wisconsin!” I answered then with a mild hello.

“Were you playing your trumpet?”

“No. Not today.”

She said something had harmed her eardrums. I got an inspiration. “Say, is old Lloyd around? Put him on a minute. Don’t say who it is.”

Lloyd answered. I heard him make a nice couch out of his ear. Eased the receiver down to the end of my horn and Watted into “The Marines’ Hymn” for all I was worth. Tonnie Ray picked up the phone over there.

“Oh, you really got Lloyd! He is holding his head and is turning red! Hee hee hee hee hee! Ow! Lloyd … now!! Lloyd is hitting me. He is using fists! Oh, oh, awroh! He has his fists made! unnnngh! … Oh, Harry, he hit me on the face! Can’t you do something? Can’t you say some-thing? Harry!”

She kept calling me. Tonnie Ray amazed me, how she kept on, and kept on. I never had anything to say. Then I realized I was God to Tonnie Ray. She was using me as God. I was the closest to handsome that she would ever touch; I was Music and Higher Art; I had fought twice with her old boyfriend in her presence; we had drunk the mysterious vodka together; I had put my finger into her at the moment she thought she was at her loveliest; she had had her spasm with me hovering over her like an angel.

Yes, I could’ve just hung around the house and lain naked in the sheets, caressing my own paps, hearing Mose Allison on the phonograph, and being cool, and being Tonnie Ray’s God all summer. I could’ve locked the door, a little ashamed, got out my old faithful Daisy BB gun, set up some rubber soldiers from the closet where my boyhood stuff was kept, put them on the bookcase, lain behind a pillow and potted the soldiers, ducking the visible BB’s from the old, not-so-powerful gun, as they ricocheted off the wood back at me. The word ricochet: what Frenchness, what powerful romance; I remember when I first heard it back in 1951. Pick up the phone from Tonnie Ray and catch her frantic stream, then intone the cynical boredom of God or act out something astonishing and cryptic to her. Or at last resort, pick up my horn and practice it. (After the first six months on that horn, I was sick of the whole concept practicing. Maybe I should’ve known I was done for as a serious musician then. But I heard Miles Davis, and wanted to be like him. And every time I brought the horn to my lips wanting to be big and original and have some style, I felt Dr. Perrino’s dick lying on my shoulder blade. Oh, Mother, the funk; the sticky feeling of some merciless expert lying on your back.) Or I could’ve spent the whole summer mooning over Lala Sink. I never called her because I was afraid of her answering the phone, very kind, very sweet, very soft and tiny, and telling me No, don’t come by tonight around six-thirty, thank you so much for calling. I learned through Tonnie Ray at the end of the summer that Lala had been in love with me for about two months; that she lay sick the last week of her love with my annual photograph in her little pink fingers. Aw, Christ Jesus! The Sink millions! The Sink Mansions! The rooms with pink fur floors. Lala … Away to Stevens College in Missouri, and I never set eyes on her again. For that matter, I never laid eyes on Tonnie Ray all summer either. Strange, but true. She never even hinted trying to see me again.

Or I could’ve been a cool slob in other ways.

But I wasn’t. I was drawn out of the house. I drove downtown and saw all the sweaty Jaycees in the streets. The way I see it, people in the subdivisions of Dream of Pines started noticing the pine trees were beginning to grow up a little bit in their yards from that devastation twenty years ago when the Sink boys hit town and went into the lumber business — the Sinks had everything but the stumps razed in five years, then they turned on the stumps them-selves and made a fortune making them into paper when the war broke out, but of course pine cones fell off every’ where and accidentally there was quite a new little forest coming up in the subdivisions now — and these people in the subdivisions became very self-conscious about there being Beauty, after all, within the city limits of Dream of Pines. All of the younger men, some of them even Yankees and Midwesterners, turned into Junior Chamber of Commerce personnel. The entire basketball squad graduating from Dream of Pines joined the Junior Chamber of Commerce. They met, and did all that parliamentary procedure hockey. Garbage cans looking like green stubby policemen began appearing on the streets and on what the new signs called avenues. A monthly Yard Award was called into being by the Jaycees.

A bunch of beery good old guys went out and hacked away the vines and trash from a monument. It was a monstrous boulder with a tiny, almost unreadable brass plaque up front. Three soldier’s names. Lost in World War I. Back in that heap of blackberry bushes and ancient rotting pine needles behind the high school. With the cool snakes, the slug slime, cobwebs, and the rock moss and ferns hugging it close. The Jaycees found it. Earl, Bob, and I always knew it was back in there; we hadn’t read the plaque and didn’t want to. We knew it was to the Dead, back in there; somebody’s Dead. It was … gloomy, gorgeous, and deep: oozy, even. With the Dead dignified with the spookiness they deserve. With the spiders and scaly, repugnant creatures, back in the mossy shadows and sordid growth, touching it, wrapping around it adoringly. “Its ours, ours,” they hiss. Not everybody knew it was there. It was in the bottom of an odd scoop — as if real bodies were in the ground in front of the monument — which appeared in the old thicket that scratched us as we passed on the sidewalk from the gym to the classrooms. Earl saw it first one morning about ten. I stared a long time before I picked it out. “God damn. It’s a tomb,” Bob said. I saw the boulder go on back in the shadows, and I knew it wasn’t a tomb; I could see the chisel chips all over it — a scaly living thing, itself. “We won’t tell anybody about it.” “You know everybody’s seen it” “Nobody’s ever said anything about it.” “Why’s it next to the high school?” “It crawled up here.” “Monroe, you dopey fucker.” I can tell you that I didn’t walk that walk alone at night, even when I was eighteen.

One night I couldn’t get to sleep thinking about it. I thought of how nice it would be to disappear — Lost! — into World War I and then come back underground to lie under the noses of the high school students, back there in that serpent gloom. To get out of Dream of Pines, and yet to haunt it! This was the best idea I’d ever been given.

The Jaycees found it, peeled off the moss, killed the snakes, poisoned the thicket, and the monument lay at the bottom of the hill now like a big bone in the sun. I read only the first name on the plaque — something Smith. I was sitting on the stone at noon and the sun was like a fluorescent lamp leaning against me. The temperature was a hundred degrees. I tried to feel something. God of the shade and sleeper that I am, I did open my eyes wide as I could and try to feel something here on the stone of the three lost men. I got a hot profound nausea and a headache.

The Jaycees put triangles of shrubs or flowers around some new green brass historical markers. I was all for it. Wanted to pick up on this new history of my place. One of the new plaques was set on the median of a hot intersection; tin cars were flying everywhere and reflecting sprays of plastic colors like crazy. Ten thousand folks lived in Dream of Pines now; taxes in the parish were low, and three factories had set up in one year. This plaque was on the north side of town; perhaps I’m the only guy who’s read it. It remarks on the fact that just thirty miles south of here used to be this fellow of the late 1700’s, this Frenchman, Pisroin, whose accomplishment was … with all his heart … against a wild jungle … being French. Being French. That’s it. Damn, if I could make out anything else. That’s all they could dig up for Dream of Pines.

Well, still I was drawn around town, down to the old center of commerce, with the old one-story red brick shops from 1915, neither ugly nor beautiful, as I saw it, and the red brick streets, the same, all fading now with a brownish grime that I always took to be rather charming — easy on the eye, all the angles rounding, bending. Ladders were standing thick in the street. Negroes were ganged around watching. The shopowners were putting up striped aluminum awnings and fiberglass false fronts, at three in the afternoon, in front of everybody. Bricks were falling onto the raised sidewalk and crashing down into the gutter, where I was. Some workmen inside were getting rid of these bricks with a machine that went off like a shotgun. I jumped out of the way of a few powdery brick fragments from 1915. Finally I understood what was going on. The merchants were having the brick blown out of their front walls to make room for show windows. A week later they had them, and the drugstore on the corner where I charged cigarettes under the name of milk shakes let out a huge banner photograph of a Revlon model in its show window.

This Revlon model picture stung me in the guts. She was a skinny thing lying supine in a silk outfit, with a high-heel shoe dangling off her toe. Her face was big and just this side of weird, in her silvery Revlon eye and mouth makeup. She was lying on a pillow of sand and behind her, in twilight, was the whole Sahara desert. The top of one breast stretched above the neck of her gown; one thigh lifted under the dress, so you saw she wasn’t all that skinny. She was playing with a piece of her own black hair. I had to have her. What kind of cruelty was this to have her photograph lying there? What did I have to do to get her? Her eyes looked as if they bragged on all she’d seen and understood. I would understand, I would learn all of Culture, if that’s what it took. Tears came out of my eyes. I would go to college and study Culture.

God damn Madison Avenue … New York! Why do you have to make every woman you work on into an idol? Why does she have to be silver? Why does she have to be lying out on the Sahara desert like only the smoothest Arab who knew everything in the world could possibly deserve her? You made me marry her, that luminous teenager down at Pascagoula, Mississippi. That pubescent Arab-looking girl, Prissy Lombardo, the girl who had kissed everybody! She was an underdone fascimile of the gal in the Revlon photograph. I admit it heartily. The sand, the silvery shoe draping off her foot, the eyes as wide and cognizant as animated black pearls. I had this scene with her; asked her to marry me. Prissy didn’t have quite the body of the Revlon gal. The beach was white and rippled, but not the Sahara. It was the beach of Biloxi, Mississippi. However, this beach, stretching from Pass Christian to Biloxi, was then the longest manmade beach in the world. It may be still, for all I know. Doesn’t take away any of my anger.

One last time I drove into Dream of Pines to see how the aqua fiberglass fence around the mills was doing out in all this sun. I drove over the tracks and noticed that Ann Mick’s house had disappeared. The old shack wasn’t with us any more; there was only that hideously pounded-out earth where it used to be; a few dozer swaths, crushed wine bottles, dirty newspapers, flattened and yellow. I haven’t seen Ann or any of the Micks since then. Don’t know if they went to another city or straight to hell. Mr. Mick didn’t show up at work, and poof! The Micks were our only outright slum. My heart was out there in that hot field. I remembered my dream of Ann, of our love, of Malibu; I was still under the spell of it. I was a little ashamed of it, but it still had me; I always trusted my dreams before anything else. And now the vacant field, with the terrible noon sun above it and this plastic sweat on the steering wheel dripping on my hands, was bringing me awake, miserably, horribly, like somebody waking you up by pouring warm molasses on your eyes. Hell, I didn’t want Ann any more. I knew I could do better. But the familiarity of her in that hypnotic dream … The aqua fiberglass fence was running through the middle of their former shack. Through the middle of my dreamy heart. I could’ve coughed up a portion of that fence right out of my chest at the time.

I got out of the Chevy and looked up the hill in time to see a loaded train chug into the mill yards. Then I saw the boxcars move on in; I saw it through the hot, translucent aqua fence. The boxcars had their hump of pulpwood — the stump corpses of pine trees. These look like dead octopi, groping everywhere, strangled in the daylight. Then I got a big whiff from the wooden fart fog of the mill stacks again. Saw the aqua fence trying to shield me from the oily gears of the mill that I knew so well, and I said, “Jesus.”

“Jesus, take me out of this place.” I appealed to the divine Jesus of my church.

My mother comes in waking me up, waving a letter she’s already opened. I gather up the sheets around me. Have been sleeping naked, as usual, and my own body has become an immense bore to me. I have red welts all over me from standing nude with my air rifle and firing it against the wall almost pointblank, willfully suffering the riochets when they come back.

A distinguished little denominational college in Mississippi is offering me two years’ tuition on the basis of my musical talent. I’ve heard enough …

Mother, I don’t care about the rest, that a Dr. Livace, the chairman of the music department, happened to be sitting in on my performance last year at Shreveport with Mr. Medford. That this college is strong in music — believe me, says Mother. She was born in Mississippi and is wild for anything decent going on in that state. No, I’ve heard enough.

Never mind telling me … Mother confesses she wrote a letter to the college indicating I wanted to attend. She’s worried that she has intruded and has done too much in forcing me toward this one college. Not at all, Mother.

For, after all, the letters from Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Juilliard just haven’t been pouring in, have they? 118

I grab it I kiss her and thank her. I’m going to Hedermansever College, near Jackson, Mississippi. It sounds exotic to me. It means I am not going to be in Dream of Pines next year.