Geronimo Rex

1 / Our Lady of Mississippi

I made it to Hedermansever College, driving a Thunderbird which I’d been awarded through pressure on the old man by my mother. The car was three years old, a ’57, navy blue. There was a mashed fender on the right, and the interior was like an old garden glove, but it was tight and fast. It had a cockpit top you could unlatch, take off, and store in the dorm basement on good days, for the open ride and the sunglasses.

I felt very precious in the oily leather seat; I was a pistol leaking music out its holster. My horn was in the well behind my seat. I had an intense suntan and scorched hair. There were California license plates on the T-bird which I hadn’t bothered to remove: Malibu Harry. It was all right if boys and girls thought that about me. Sneering, using the car radio music as my own accompaniment, I thought I was quite a piece of meat.

I liked the shade and the neatness of the curbs and the olden greenery of the place. General Grant had been here in 1862 or so, and liked it enough to stable his horses in the Old Chapel, that beauty of Georgian architecture. That was in the days when the Yanks were getting fed up and a lot of edifices were being burned up. The Confederates at Vicksburg were starving, the city of Jackson was on fire, and Grant was coming back west at last to meet Pemberton in Vicksburg on solid turf, and swallow him.

There Grant was, for me, half-drunk, slouched in an ashy-blue jacket in a room of the Old Chapel, interviewing petitioners — flushed nubile belles of the South ding-donging back and forth like flesh clappers in their hoop skirts. “Please, Ginral Grant, spare, oh spare … I’m in my last and only dress, and it’s just so smoky-smelling. I feel like a smoked ham.” She steps back, opens her knees, and a Minié ball rolls out from her petticoats. She stares at it as it rolls on the floor; Grant sees it. She is all marvelously eye-lashed wonder. “Someone must have shot at me. Oh, I did not expect this”. She faints, with careful rustling of petticoats and outflung arms. Other women seek him, all of them using the word Christian on him in different ways. “You are Christian, then? No, I do not mind if you smoke. Now, I have made my concession, I have allowed you to smoke in my presence, so you can make your own decision about burning us down.” They all want to know if he’s fighting harmless family houses or fighting a war in Christian gentleman style, Grant behind the desk badly wanting to use the spittoon. Grant is hungry for whiskey, food, everything.

A blond teenage sultreen appears around lunchtime — and Grant is starving — and means to lay it on the line about his keeping soldiers and fire away from her mansion. Her mansion is her dead daddy’s and she and her big sister are trying to have a small Christian women’s college in it They do not want to give it up, not even during the war. This little college, back in 1826, gave the first degree to a woman ever in the United States, the blond girl, Lady Love Deuteronomy, declares to Grant. It had its history — early poverty but always Christian culture. There were only girls out there, Ginral. What else? Grant still holds his face in that spittoon-seeking screw. Lady Love Deuteronomy sees she’s getting nowhere, and becomes, in desperation, a legend. She steps back and shuts the door. (From above in the chapel come down the soft knocks of horse hooves.) “I see,” she says, “your lunch is waiting for you on a tray in the hall. You’re having a steak and, I believe, dumplings. It’s nice you can have steak while the girls at the college are having field peas, pork rind, and water … Now though, Ginral, regarding your appetite, how would you like to have, well, this… me?.” She raises her dress, uncovering a succulent white ankle, a fine calf, a naked stark knee. Grant whimpers and heaves up out of his chair. He creeps, he flaps his lips; a vile breath of whiskey and tobacco rolls off him; his unfastened suspenders, like the tail of a beast, trail him on the floor. Grant grunts! But suddenly Lady Love Deuteronomy releases the hem of her dress, stiffens her breast, and from some corner of her waist which got by the shy soldiers in the hall, she fetches out a pistol, a silvery little snout that means no play. “Did you dream that I — You tragic Union hog. Have your shame, yes, be shame, Ulysses S. Grant! I have had my moment. Now dare burn our harmless women’s college.” All this while, Grant was disarming her. But he never dared, out of shame, to give orders to raze that Christian women’s college. He passed the very mansion, riding at the head of his columns on the way to Vicksburg. Lady Love herself stood on the porch and curtsied to him, Grant, the deflated punk, slinking toward Champion’s Hill and his seat as President of the U.S. While in her basement, attic, in cupboards and closets on all three stories, under the beds and in the kitchen out back, Captain Hannah and fifty mean lean horse corps guerrillas of the Confederacy lay perilous, breathless, and safe. Hannah and his men had run through Union lines, coming from the siege at Vicksburg, and having eaten at the women’s college, they were poised to do great attrition to Grant’s supplies. Only they were all sick. They had eaten rats, and moths and crickets and grass in Vicksburg, and every one of them had dysentery, so they did not become a thorn in the guts of the invaders. They couldn’t even crawl away from their own odor. Nevertheless, Lady Love Deuteronomy had saved them. She was the legend.

So it happened that Lady Love and Captain Hannah, after blushing intimacies as she served his illness, got married and were president and wife of the women’s college through the dire years of Reconstruction. New students had to know all details of the anecdote concerning General Grant and Lady L., along with other directives about playing cards and what to do in case there is an atheist in the group or dancing is suggested. Both Hannah and his wife were Baptists. Lady L. D. Hannah was hallowed in those days when the sad folks of the South didn’t have much to live on but a good joke pointing up Federal stupidity.

She was put to earth one day in the nineteen teens. Her funeral took place just before her captain, husband, college president — who was so robed and hooded and encrusted with state, Southern, and even national honors in education he could barely raise his hand — bought the Old Chapel and its environs with funds from his denomination. His denomination loved him. He established a coeducational college here. But mainly, he now owned the Old Chapel. He taught in the room where his wife had had her moment with Grant. And perhaps, lecturing in Grant’s very footsteps, he saw the rising hem and the leg of the nineteen-year-old Lady Love revealed, time, time, time and again.

The name Hedermansever was given the college when it was saved financially in 1920 by the first of a long line of gloomy rich jingos by that name. No more was it Hannah College, though President Hannah still lived, and his denomination loved him.

Academically, he taught the Old and New Testaments.

He stood staunch against the short skirts of the coeds in the 1920s; and most of all, against automobiles. Surely he looked with horror upon the time when it would not matter a gnat to anybody which leg his wife had shown President Grant.

He saw students of his leave class and get in open cars with young women with bald knees and bangs, and he saw the automobile despoiling the family and community and church. He could imagine but one place for these couples to go in their automobiles, nowhere except to the peak of lust in some shade off the gravel road, with cigarettes, which he had also come out against after World War I. His denomination loved him.

And he was right. A farmer who could draw sent him a picture of a couple parked under some willows, on his land, he complained. The couple were mating in the car seat while cigarettes smoldered in their mouths. Hannah recognized the car, which was drawn unearthly well.

His age was eighty-six then. His heart was broken. He knew the young man who owned the car. He had taught him St. Paul on the afternoon in question. He recalled how beatific the young man had looked taking his notes. He recalled his dear wife, who gleamed with the treasure of the words he spoke to her — while these young gas-car people came alive only when he cleared his throat (or broke wind — the old deaf man never knew how loudly) or otherwise sounded like an automobile, pulling the lectern over or sliding the tin waste can with his foot.

He began raving. In his office he said, “They can send me fools to teach, and I will send them back educated fools; nobody can teach the fool out of them!” very many times the last week of his life. This statement bit and lasted. They had it cut into an epilogue on the marble tablet of the stone arch at the exit of the campus drive.

That dreary antique word fool lashed at me every time I drove under the arch. The tablet was muddy with veins now. Some days I was on my way to playing snooker over at the Twentieth Century Recreation in Jackson. Tuesday nights I was on my way to rehearsing with the symphony. Then there were the afternoons when I rode with a hag or roach: lonely, tacky girls I picked up in the coffee room or in the hall of the Fine Arts Building, girls wearing Ivy League outfits from Sears, Roebuck, girls with odd fannies, queer noses, and strange legs. Then one time, a positive beauty, begging to come with me and crash the Twentieth Century, where no women were ever seen, and then she opens her mouth to laugh and shuts it immediately, very sad now, looking out the window away from me, knowing I’ve seen them — her teeth, a brown nest of grubworms. “Take me back to the dorm,” she says. Then in front of the dorm she explains that her family had once lived in an Arkansas town where nobody knew the water was bad until their children got their permanent teeth. “It could have been something worse,” I said. Later I wanted to hang myself with shame. I wondered if I had begun some rotten subconscious habit last year with Tonnie Ray Reese. Why did I even approach these girls? Who was I to give them my backside when they didn’t suit my needs? How had I known there was some huge spoiling defect when I picked up this beauty with the teeth? I was sure I already knew, somehow, when my eyes took her in. Well, I was a fool, as the epilogue told me.

But the alternative to being a fool, and maybe a bastard, was staying on the campus of this forlorn asylum and being conscientious and being dead. Such choices, I think, have broken over this head of mine whenever I stopped to think.

I filled my space in the desks. I was looked through and talked through by all the Pee Aitch Dees, and I turned around to see just who they were looking at and talking to in the back of the room, and saw they were talking to nobody, but a thing: out there was the lawn, the olden greenery, the slow quietness, the recumbency, the ancient brick and the long, long history — everything you need for a cemetery.

We were dragged into Chapel three times a week to hear speakers of such interest as to make flies change place on a corpse. The Pee Aitch Dees checked roll for their sections and then sat down and slept the old eye-open snoozes of scholars. Up on stage would be a millionaire Christian from Texas, dramatizing life to us as a tennis game. There you were with the net of dread in front of you; but you had to keep serving; you fended, you sweated, you looked to see if your partner was still there and He was. It was Jesus. (The Savior favored a dogwood racquet with lambgut strings — a cheap joke on my part, but it matches the allegory of the millionaire evangelist.) Another morning we heard the anti-beer and anti-promiscuity specialist, a limp bachelor of fifty who was a huge personality among the denomination. He clung meekly to the lectern, paralyzed us for five minutes with memorabilia about vivid prudes we had never known, then he affected a madness like Hamlet’s and cannonballed — dry limp hands flying, wide stiff suit reminiscent of an iron lung — into a case history of two “young people” on a Saturday night. Hands wrapped together now, coming to it with dire breathlessness, holding the vowels in his mouth: “A dark night, a parked car, a can of beer, a fond embrace … a wandering hand … and sin entered the lives of these young people!” Oh, the dizzy sick mauling of it; oh, the vague sweaty pre-coital commotion; oh, the breaths of beer, that drink “akin to rat urine!” (so he pronounced it) — all we students perking up when he said that. Then he told us about seeing the rat swimming in the beer of the vat of a brewery down in New Orleans. The student body and I sat back then. We had thought we were going to hear about the whole act of love, but no, and we lay back in the seats. The boy right behind me was a famed athlete on the Hedermansever football team. They called him Mole-Digger. Mole-Digger struck me on the back of my head. I turned around. He leaned up on the back of my seat and whispered, “Why’ont you raise yo hand and ask him would he go on about them lovers …” Another athlete, sitting next to Mole-Digger, had a big, living snake in his hands. Covertly, he rammed the writhing thing under the back of Mole-Digger’s tee shirt. So Mole-Digger fell back, clutching his back, grinning, and that was my only contact with Mole-Digger, forever.

But the ministerial students, who were about thirty per cent of the student body, stood up and clapped for the bachelor at the podium who was such a great name among their denomination. In their ranks were the hard-lipped scowlers for Jesus and the radiant happy gladhanders for Jesus. You had Jesus coming at you in all styles at Hedermansever. You had people full of Jesus who dressed very costly in Ivy League and you had people full of Jesus who looked like they just ran out of a fire.

At eighteen years old, trying to come on strong in that herd of backs and cowlicks, female pageboy hairdos, pants-butts, bouffant hair, bare girls’ ankles in brown penny loafers, and skirts flairing up to show stocking latches, all of us making out of Chapel in our congested warm dumb way, I smelled in that crowd the odor of flowers and fish, together, the effluvium of real women somewhere in the crowd. The heavy magnolia and the sardines. I held to my books, becoming the very nose of lust.

I am a gift, so someone take me, I thought. Someone record me. Don’t lose me. What with my talents on the horn, my car, my suntan, my musician’s hair, my execution of the Vivaldi piece just recently in my music room … well, what about that? But carrying the slippery books alongside my hip, and sweating tactlessly like a slug snail, I looked in the face of a belle, some gal in her negligent blouse who had found a cool nook for herself and was leaning back as if saying, What can you show me, boys? She looked just as annoyed by Chapel as I was, but in some way I could not possibly touch, my hands were so full of sweaty books. The belles were there at Hedermansever, about ten of them in the two thousand of us there, and you would see them poising like statues in the alcoves, the shadows of the halls, and they knew how to lean, and how to be mildly reckless with their legs, cocking them out of their skirts so you saw, could imagine, both knees raised.

But the belles had learned to ignore by the time I got there. They knew how to look blissfully by one. What they were looking for is still unclear to me. I followed them up in the newspapers later and saw they’d married men like Air Force lieutenants and stockbrokers from Dallas and once-married rich lawyers from Atlanta, who seem like second-rate interlopers to me.

These belles were expert at ignoring me. They had developed such subtlety that my gleaming face did not occupy them. So there I was left with my books, yearning for my trumpet to play that Vivaldi strain brassy and direct into this belle’s face, working down her until the bell of my horn was perfectly crammed by her breast, the song going right to her heart; then moving down to the cup of her navel to delight her at the place she snapped off from her mother, making her tickle as she receives food there again, in the form of music this time, from the brass throat of my horn … But the belles looked away, and I was shocked to think suddenly how drear and antique the Vivaldi tune would seem to them, just like another Chapel meeting, sleepy, with another baba on stage drinking glasses of his own words, a wind blowing in and out of the cracks of dead Italian castles. So I removed my cold horn from the navels of the belles.

Thirty per cent of the student body was studying for the ministry or work in the church somewhere. You’d see every now and then a boy or girl — sometimes two together, holding hands — with unbreakable scowls, or on the other hand, jolting glassy smiles, looking like they had just set off a bomb in behalf of Jesus Christ somewhere.

In the dorms, the dorm-mothers watched the girls going out and called them back if their dresses were too short. Short dresses had come back in style, and it was President Hannah’s crisis over coeds’ knees all over again. The dorm-mothers were generally widows, and a couple of them were true monsters of piety. I know of one who borrowed a convertible, drove over to Jackson to a curb-service tavern, even lit a cigarette and ordered a beer to seem appropriate, and watched for girls from the college coming in with boys, and craned her neck to see whether the girl took beer. She couldn’t get the girl expelled for that, but she could get her confined to her room for a few weeks except for classes and meals. But this dorm-mother widow picked out the trashiest, dinkiest tavern for whites in Jackson, where nobody but roughnecks went — out on Highway 49—to watch for the girls.

I should say nobody went out there but me, and my poor date, a girl from Holly Springs who had had polio in one leg. Bonnie had one shriveled calf, but the other one was lovely, tan and firm. She was turning up a quart bottle of Busch Bavarian when we drove into the place and worked on it seriously the rest of the time we were there. And the widow saw us, my top down, her top down. I waved to her and yelled, “Have a ball, honey. He’ll get here soon, he’ll look like a Greek god” (thinking she looked like an old whore on the search). “You just have to wait on your prince, babe!” I’d been here before with Bonnie, and liked the place because it looked like the end of everything, a little upsurge of tin and asbestos shingles on the edge of a city dump, like somebody’s desperate artless hands had made a place just before everything turned into rubble. I hoped that one of the times Bonnie had to get out and walk through the lot to use the restroom, I would see just one of the clientele in the cars so much as raise an eye toward her slight limp and her small calf. I would jump on that son of a bitch with a sublime fury, I didn’t care how big he was or if he drove nails with his head; I wanted to pit the good I had left in me against him. But it was never that way with these folks of the lot. The guys noticed her and then looked straight at me with a nod of pity for her, or they ignored the bad calf and rubbernecked, watching her all the way, their eyes on her like she was any other piece of tail. These people were pretty bent and annihilated sorts themselves, even the teenagers, trying to look like hombres east of hombre-land with their hair greased and swung over the forehead, sideburns slick, sometimes combed down lower than they actually grew. Bonnie was all for the place, too; we’d talk and drink pleasurably, supping upon that air full of the smell of thousands of other beers served out here on the lot with every sip we took.

Bonnie was the best one I had, really, for a long while. Out there on Highway 49 I would be telling her something like “I don’t think anyone is old enough to perceive God until the minute they die,” and she would be dressed in a green fall outfit with a necklace and high heels, dressed for everything she was worth; she never went casual with me. And me in my jeans, tennis shoes, but still a white shirt and necktie, for her; Bonnie smelling like a magnolia in spite of her weekend quart of beer, weekend after weekend with me. Some nights she would drink more than that and get really in love with me, and also get very sick. I’d pull over on the grass off the highway and she’d ask me to put my hands over my ears, then she’d sob and retch in the weeds pitifully and come back with a handkerchief, looking bright although not pretty, smiling, ready to be returned to the dorm … Bonnie dressing to the hilt and doing the rest to go with me, to keep up with me; Bonnie tight on that beer she loved but couldn’t keep down, deliriously receptive to me, telling me I was truly profound, I was too smart for Mississippi and maybe the entire South; Bonnie and her tendency to cry briefly after every sentence she said — and not a blessed thing in her head (her head covered with heavy wonderful black hair which she had “frosted” with a bleach which gave her a look of champagne over licorice), nothing in that head but details of the romantic life of her late teens in Holly Springy, Mississippi. She told me she was a make-out in Holly Springs and had been the cause of a lot of breaking up among couples. She was the confidential friend between a lot of boys and girls, and the boys would take her out parking and begin describing to her what was wrong between them and their girlfriends. But before Bonnie knew it, this fellow would be glued on her lips, trying to force his tongue down her throat, while still trying to carry on a conversation about his girlfriend. For it was inconceivable that he be doing anything earnest with her, she was accepted so generally, in her crippled condition, as the go-between of Holly Springs; and she accepted this. She wore glasses then and didn’t have contact lenses as nowadays. But things always went cold with couples for whom she was the go-between. She had a certain appeal to the boys, she found out. She could kill the love between them and the fiancées, and she began to like it. Even the strongest, most fixed loves, even loves since the fifth grade. The boys took Bonnie out and fell on her like a buoy in the deep blue water of love. She became a regular witch at murdering love, but always very gay at it. (And she was gay and tearful with me in a new way, because for the first time in a long while she was out in a car with a boy who wanted no love destroyed.) Oh dear, she had had to do things eventually back in Holly Springs, things that would make the boy unable to look his girlfriend in the eye come Monday morning, things that would leave him barely able to look her in the eye Monday either, things that left the boy trying to ignore her and see her at the same time, so that his face was jig-sawed, fractioned apart oddly. One boy she told me about was the class secretary. When they had talked in the car awhile, he got bold and said to her that he didn’t see why Janine wouldn’t give him the whole hog when she knew they would be married the coming summer. Bonnie worked him up on the subject of sexual love very easily, and at the height she stroked him, as she had stroked others, but knowing this fellow wanted to undress and all, and wanting not to allow him the regular thing, not wanting to be pregnant especially, she waited until he was mad for rubbing anywhere and after feigning pain to her leg every surge he made, she turned over and told him if nothing else would content him, he could rub himself into joy on the contours of her fanny; anything else would kill her, she lied to him. Then she gasped and faked intense pain and at the last of this cold farce, she fell down to the floor with the pedals and the transmission hump in a seeming coma of injury, while he begged her to wake up and live and forgive him. He did not think he could live with his shame, and the broken romance with his sweetheart was the least of his worries. He was “too good-looking to live,” she said. She gave others the same scene, with the same ending. She saw hearts of the sweet and handsome crash in hot shame, saw the old boy of love sink like a rotting dummy; saw the boys themselves the rest of the year, lonely and mute with a sense of unconfessable crime. She limped a little more for them when they were near.

She was shyly proud of having vanquished love. I can’t reproduce it, but believe me, there was a way she told her history which made it not so perverse and unlovely as it might sound. Her face was too close to mine, the beer was too good, for me to remember well. “God forgive me, but I do believe all young love is wrong and I can’t say I mind about destroying it. But here I am eighteen years old and in love with you, Harry.” She told me that one night. I do remember that. Bonnie laid her left hand on the seat so our fingers touched, giving me a bare naked shock. She felt cold and brittle, she held her hand against the nerve-marrow of my bones; she did not sweat, and I felt like a damned walrus touching her, this odd sort of virgin. “I wouldn’t care if … well, I just wouldn’t care at all if I was with you. You rat. You think some girl better than me is out there in the future, don’t you? You’re in love with her already and I can’t do anything about some little priss-ass in your imagination. If I met her, I could do something about it.” She licked her teeth, the virgin crippled witch, so deadly sure.

Then she recognized the woman in the convertible next to us. It was her dorm-mother, the widow, who was a total success pretending to be an old whore. She had the country-and-western station up howling on her radio. She held her cigarette like a torch, this widow. Bonnie screamed to me who it was, and I backed out. The ride back wasn’t pleasant. Bonnie said she was done for at the college and wanted me to turn off at every dark road. What the deuce, she said; she might as well get pregnant by somebody she cared for, and live in some swamp hut with his infant, because, what the deuce, what was living going to be like now? Look up at the stars, Harry. There were so many of them out that night they seemed like an electric dust over us. The stars were urgent and careless, and the black air of the universe was advertising sheer rapturous multiplication. A man could imagine the million little people of his sperm lit up like that in the wide black endlessness of a womb. One could give in so easily and combine with the carelessness of the universe. I don’t know if Bonnie was thinking all that, but it was there to think of. I took her straight to the dorm. That ended Bonnie and me. The dorm-mother locked her in for half the year, and I got only one phone call from Bonnie telling me what it was like being at the mercy of the widow, who sat on the bed next to hers and taught her morals by exemplums from the life of her dead husband, the thirteenth disciple.

2 / Bobby Dove

But I do not readily admit that I had come to the wrong place. Hedermansever was ruesome in many ways, but I confess it was not all dead. There were a half dozen members on the faculty who did teach me there were alternatives between being a corpse and being an ass, and who bragged on me for very small feats — my poetry, for example. About D. and S. and the L’s. and Miss J., my teachers, I still give very much of a damn. There are others around the campus who’ll say I was honest in all the wrong places in this book. Bad shake to them.

My first roommate was a freshman preacher from South Carolina who wore quadrafocal glasses: Blind Tim, the Pastor, already a pastor at age eighteen, ordained by his church at sixteen. He woke me up more than a few nights listening to this late radio broadcast from Arizona. It was the sincere, true thing, he said. The man broadcasting was a college-educated Navajo converted from the medicine men and then from Roman Catholicism to a cult of angry Protestants in Phoenix. My roommate had a transistor radio with an aerial that let out two stories high. He’d hear a fragment of the sermon he wanted, cease thrusting up the aerial, and jam his ear to the box with its blue-lit band. This poor boy lived by his ears; he might have been going blind, in truth, with those quadrofocal glasses that weighed half a pound. When he got his radio sermon, though, his eyes boiled like grease through a hall of mirrors. His morguish white cheeks hung off his eyes and were covered with whiskers that sprouted like some sort of filth; you thought of a grapefruit rind somebody had used for an ashtray. He had the voice of a sissy nightwatchman.

“Navajo Ben is right! America is walking on cellophane paper over the pit of hell! For Americans there awaits a worse hell than for any people in the world. ‘To whom much is given, much shall be required!’”

He was packing in his aerial and glaring at me. I told him Navajo Ben didn’t know his butt from a tom-tom. I didn’t care for that fiery educated voice piercing through the static two thousand miles, nor for whoever had the money to build that powerful a radio station to air Navajo Ben’s message every night of the week. The fact is, that faraway Indian voice was unsettling me; there was a torment in it that cut too far into me. It had me facing life like I was plastered against the side of a stone cliff in Arizona and inching my way along a rim of rock a half-inch wide. Navajo Ben had gotten to me one night when he made a sermon on the body scars he’d received falling down nude at a peyote-eating ritual back on the reservation, and by the time he whispered, ‘God, the gentle Jesus Christ of scars, calling to me late in the evening to go out to His garden and compare scars…” I was ready to go with him. And now I resented Navajo Ben and his testimony of bruises; I did not want a male telling me about religion, because I can cut through male cant too easily, my mind hacks it like razors against hair; I know at the bottom of every male voice, no matter how detached- or firm-sounding, there is an old bald idiot screaming, “Save me!” But Navajo Ben almost dragged me out there with him.

Tim the Pastor and I broke up and he went to another room, with consent of the dorm-master. When he left I went about being wanton. I took my mattress off the bed frame, slept with it on the floor, taped up the pictures of all the models in Esquire magazine, girls dressed in silk and fur and slips and reckless sandals. My phonograph was always wailing. I brushed my teeth once a day and took a cigarette freely on impulse. On the back of my door was a picture of Maynard Ferguson, old scar-tissue-lipped Ferg, with his trumpet and wearing a purple sweater. Out of his mouth I had drawn a speech balloon enclosing the words “Practice, you bastard.” And all this is what passed for being a beatnik at Hedermansever. I’d already been thrown out of the student center twice for playing jazz with a few musician acquaintances. We drew a crowd of coeds itching to dance; the ex-preacher who had an easy loft here as a student dean came in to tell us loud dance music wasn’t the right thing at Hedermansever. This man held an office and drew a salary for such services. Like a social disease, he showed up on such occasions as involved clandestine pleasure; showed up, a raving, red-faced symptom, wherever joy became too unconfined — in his natty orlon shirt and loafers and his Ivy League crew-cut and his failing youth, just one of the boys, but God knows whose boys.

Two weeks went by before they threw in Bobby Dove to live with me. He took almost a week to truck in all the books and machinery that went along with him. His correct whole name was Robert Dove Fleece. He hadn’t made it with his roomie either. One thing I could see: he dragged in so much clutter that there wasn’t really room for anybody else to live with him. Fleece said little to me the first week. Then one afternoon I walked in on him and he broke open.

“You’re some counselor they’ve hired to live with me, aren’t you?” I had interrupted his reading at the long plywood table he had for a desk.

“No. I’m not. I’m in music.”

“Are you a genius?” Fleece asked me.

“No. I’ve never considered being a gen—”

“Just going to clog up the field of music, are you? I understand, I guess. I’d hoped we’d have some ideas transpiring around the room. I am a genius. I’m going to bring something forth, my brains are going to come up with something”. He caught me staring at him. “All right, rube, stare at me. I’ve got skinny limbs, I’m not Mister Muscle. Want to see me look like a puppet?” He stood up and formed himself into a slump which made him look exactly like a pale marionette out of work and hanging. Even sitting back down to his chair, he seemed to be worked from above by some cynical puppeteer. “Did you notice that fulgurant mother of a forehead I’ve got, though?” He tapped it. Then he put his little finger in one ear and hooked it up-wards lovingly: “Brains up there,” he said.

“I’ve got ideas. I don’t mean I don’t have any ideas,” I defended myself. “There is a lot of idea in music, you know. When I play the trumpet, for example—”

“No, I’m afraid that music is not idea. Music is instinct dignified by instruments or voice. Music is howling in tune. The guts come first, and there is no disinterestedness, as in actual Idea.”

“What would that be like?”

“Idea? An idea is something which exists already and does not care a shit whether you like it or not. You probably haven’t had any ideas, rube, not fonking away on a horn. Sorry. I have ideas, I live at the top of my brain. You look like somebody who’s looking out his navel. Oh ho! You want to get me don’t you, Ruben? You want a fistfight! You peer meanly at me! Oh yes, attack! Thinking I look like a limp dry pea-pod or the like, aren’t you? Some sort of fragile herb with hair on its arms. Go ahead, have a blast at me. Everybody else has. Easy stuff! Just one thing: I am a meatball at heart, a red meatball.”

“I wanted to get along,” I said.

“No matter how much you pound me, you can never defeat that meatball inside me. My manhood is sewed up inside me, courtesy of the Baptist Church. My mother cracked me over the head with the Baptist Hymnal. But my head grew, see. I won the State Science Fair … I surged, hating God and His house, which meant, you know, that I was insane. (Did you notice, rube, I said hating, not disbelieving? I never took the easy way out.) I let a few swearwords drop around the house. I was noticed to be standing in our open garage in only jock shorts by some women driving in from the grocery store who saw fit to call my mother about it; women astonished at how raw I had looked. If I’d had muscles and a tan, they wouldn’t have said anything. But not so with noodle man and all his thigh hair crawling out. Someone must be told. It’s so easy to call a frail man crazy. But you already know all about me, don’t you? Sent in here to practice psychology on me … you would’ve hit me by now if you weren’t hired to counsel me.”

“I don’t know a thing.” I didn’t know that the voice-major in hymnology had asked him to leave after a month of life with him. Fleece’s conscience did not hurt because of any of his crimes, such as threatening to alter the hymnolo-gist fellow’s voice pitch by an operation deft and silent while he slept (Fleece with his early knowledge of medical arts could do it, as the sleepless cantor knew), or ripping out a page of his expensive soft-leather Baptist Hymnal several times for use as he passed by his desk on the way to the commodes. What Fleece was concerned about was that his mother was close on his heels, consulting with men who had the power of throwing him in an asylum. He was always seeing her car around the dorm. Her car was green and black, and every time we neared a car with those colors, no matter what the make, on the way to the cafeteria or classes, Fleece hid behind me. He trembled, jumped up and down on his cigarette, and grabbed the collar of his shirt and buttoned the top button. He’d had bad bronchitis all his life and thought she’d catch him and have him shipped away on, say, three counts of inability to take care of himself. On the positive side, Fleece was sure he could forget all this once he’d “stolen pleasure” with a girl. In the meantime, his imagination was about to do him in.

“My mother can drive to this campus in five minutes if she wants to,” he said; his head rolled like a melon on a stick over his desk. “If you were wondering about my father, my biological father was killed on Tarawa. I have a stepfather who’s high horse in the National Guard; that’s his job, being Field General Creech standing by for flood, tornado, race riot, or direct attack from North Korea. The emergencies for this man are always doubtful in coming, but immense if they do. He and my mother love God but don’t really believe in miracles. Me, I hate God but believe in miracles, very much.

“Sixteen years old, I saw my box garden of cacti bloom out with quills overnight. I was awed by what these plants could do in nothing but sand and quite ready to believe in dew-fairies or the Sand Man or any kind of heavenly intercession that could’ve made this possible, then in comes my mother, who scraws, ‘Now doesn’t that prove that God was here in this room? Oh, Bobby Dove, your little sand garden is a small Holy Land in Mississippi!’ She picks me up by the handle of my spine and rubs my face in the sand around the cacti, as much. Creech is near; he hears her. Thirty minutes later, I’m still in bed, thinking of miracles, reading a paperback Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Creech comes in, in uniform. He eases the book out of my hand and reads the pages I was reading. He keeps the book folded out like I had it, turns it over, and lays it pages down over my five cactus plants in the sand garden. He says, ‘I know you smoke even though she might not.’ I admit it ‘Where are your matches?’ I give him the box in my dresser. He doesn’t ask for the cigarettes. ‘What the Lord giveth, He taketh away,’ enounces Creech, striking the match and setting fire to the book. That’s the only scripture I ever heard from him. The book takes fire, like a burning roof over the cactus plants. They throb away eventually, little crumbling hairy little bulbs. The book collapses among the brown stumps, the blackened sand … the ashes puff up a little, as if Connie and the gamekeeper might still be humping away under them; pussy, with interludes of cigarette-smoking and studying of history and biology — that’s what I dream of. To steal pleasure like that, have it in spite of them that want to coop you up for good. Oh, after the fire I began hissing and they let me crawl off with a book and play with my doo-doo in the corner. That’s what they thought of me reading doubtful Christians like Joyce Cary, Aldous Huxley, and William Faulkner. You couldn’t get Henry Miller in Mississippi then, with which one masturbates feeling like an intellectual snob.

“I dream of my mother escorting me to an amphitheater crowded with castrated singers. Around my neck hangs a white tablet with my negligence and sin shown in black checkmarks. The crowd sings at me in wrath. My mother cries over me. ‘Mercy!’ she wails. She prevails, and we walk down to the bottom of the amphitheater, where there is a cave of exposed muscle tissue between two great male paps. This is God, His Bosom, just set there gigantesque. A wound, harsh, deep, and puckered. My mother and the crowd begin a humming of one of the church hymns they use for Invitationals, meaning that I should go on down into the wound and walk into the raw flesh of the Supreme Being. “But Mother, this hymn I despise is echoing in the wound-hole. This hymn, Mother, I heard it so much at the church, it got into my ears like an infection. I can’t go. I’ve had God speaking through those hymns so much, I’ve been immunized against him. God God, God, you always said to me at home. Is he simply this gruesome slit? You were so sure of Him, the hymns were so sure of Him. Look at the ‘no-smoking’ sign at the peak of the wound. Just like you said. And the bouncing ball over the words of ‘Amazing Grace’. You know I won’t sing the hymns.”

“It’s night. Too late to get to the cafeteria now,” I said. Fleece ignored me.

“Did you know, Monroe, there are damned few dull moments reading the Bible? You can’t say that for many works its size. I couldn’t put the Bible down; I read it between when I was fourteen and seventeen and hid it from my mother just like all the other books.”

Suddenly I was wary. “Fleece, you aren’t after all just another kind of preacher, are you?”

“You just can’t regard an idea, can you, Ruben?” He fell in the bunk, which he had placed behind a bamboo screen room divider. I heard him sigh, invisible. “I’d really like you to come beat me up like you want to,” he said. “I’d like to show you how I could live through it.” He sat up and put his head outside the screen. “You think men of ideas are going around trying to catch farts with a hook, don’t you? Come on, mash me. I’d like to show you how an idea, an essence, me, can emerge whole in spite of punishment.”

“You’re some sort of flit, aren’t you?” I knew this was stupid the minute I said it, remembering the episode with Lloyd Reese years ago. “I don’t mean that. I mean, what idea would you be if someone came over and—”

“Laid waste to me,” he broke in. “What would be remembered now as I’m twenty-one years old, free and white. What would survive me worth thinking about for long? Some idea, some essence … Well, honestly, I haven’t quite come up with it yet. But I’m on the verge. When I steal pleasure with a woman, probably, then …”

“Aw, look at all the billions of idiots who’ve done that—”

“Yes!” he shouted, holding his finger up next to his face. “Idiots! But look out when the man of ideas takes off his underwear! He is a log jam of throbbing pieces. He is Robert Dove Fleece, hearing his mother scraw through her nose about God at him; he has heard God scratch His fingernails across the blackboard; has heard those dirge-tune hymns curling out of the mouths from people moaning in that red brick church … with weeds and young kudzu vines up against the foundation, the old yellow pianos in the basement assembly rooms. The nandina bushes standing around the church with their berries that the little redneck kids rip off to throw at one another, leaving only the raw wood fingers of the nandinas … the leaves moldy and pissed-upon by all the dogs owned by people in asbestos-siding houses nearby the church. I slip out of church one night during the last hymn. ‘Just As I Am,’ the hymn, comes to my ears for the thousandth time, one hundred-odd dead hums of the buried from inside a cheap red brick sarcophagus, and I decide to become more detestable to God, Christ, the Holy Ghost. The hymn is running in my blood like a poison. But—”

“Stop talking … That’s enough, by God,” I came in. I didn’t want to hear all the throbbing pieces of experience.

“.. I allow myself to come to Hedermansever because my mother says Syracuse University, where I had the scholarship for winning the State Science Fair, is too far away and too cold. She’d rather write all the checks for me here. Then they room me with a guy who’s a major in hymnology. Is this to drive me into a barrel? Get me in there long enough to where, when I tumped it over and made a break for it, there would be a lot of them to get a shot at me.”

Fleece stood up out of his bunk and folded back the bamboo divider. There was nothing between us now. He was in a profuse sweat, very yellow around the collar of his white shirt. “Believe me, Mississippi is so boring you will find a lot of people doing with their noses what canines do to other canines. Studying you, understanding you, getting some smell off you, nodding their brown noses over you.

“You called me a flit a minute ago,” he said, looking at me warily, taking off his glasses and dropping them with his hand slack to his thigh. “Fuck ideas, by damn, I’ll fight you over that.”

“I didn’t mean it.” I really didn’t want to crush the boy. Right now I could see my fist go into his head as into a cantaloupe, and there was no victory in it.

“Sit down, then. What are you? Who have they put on me now? You play the trumpet. What do you play? Hymns? Do you play ‘There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood’ with that special tone like a zombie underwater? … Never mind. I’m going to sleep. Now, don’t you leave. You go to sleep, too. This is a fine damn time to go to sleep.”

Other nights Fleece explained to me how he had declared himself — he was going to be a doctor and study how “one suffers in the meat.” “I was always a meatball,” he said. “I’m going to be the best doctor Mississippi ever produced. They’ll bring in some whore whose boyfriend has shot her in the cunt pointblank with a shotgun and alongside her her boyfriend also, who thought he commited suicide putting the last shot into his navel, and I’ll put on my mask, wave my hands with some instruments, and bring them back Romeo and Juliet.”

Fine dreamy ambitions, but Bobby Dove had taken some insulting liberties with me and what used to be my room. Besides the plywood desk, he had brought in three cases of books, two lamps, a fishbowl into which he dumped cartons of Salem cigarettes, cigar boxes with pens, various single murdered insects, newspaper clippings, photographs, and, mostly, the letters. The letters were written by an inmate at Whitfield, the state sanitarium. In the stacks on his desk were some childish sketches of the police arresting Freedom Riders at the Jackson bus station, done by Fleece himself, who was on the spot and had had his camera grabbed off him and smashed in the dock; then there were marijuana leaves, which Fleece, as a former State Science Fair winner in botany, supposed he could keep with academic impunity; 200-proof lab alcohol in Dr. Tichenor’s Antiseptic bottles; and antihistamine tablets and cough syrups. Further, he had a stork in flight, made of iron, with two incense pots hanging on a chain from its beak. Set under the window was a hip-high radio console owned by his biological father. On its top was a wooden planter containing cactus plants big and vigorous like cucumbers with steel pins forking everywhere. The room was twelve by eighteen and his cargo occupied seven-eighths of it. About all I had was my bed and the telescope. Fleece had given me the telescope.

For a couple of weeks at the beginning of school, he had had some luck spying over at the girls’ dorm with it. He had seen some towering girl do the Twist naked in her room, but he said he was tired of only looking. He told me that late one night he had taken the scope down to the urinal intending to drop it out the window, but had noticed something odd down in a urinal on the first floor of the other wing. He pulled out the scope, looked, and there was old Leon, a boy he’d gone to high school with, flogging himself, sitting on the pot, in complete apathy. Fleece became ill watching Leon practice masturbation so casually. Leon had no pride or rapture; neither happy nor sad, he was simply getting it out of him. This sight depressed Fleece gravely. He threw the telescope on my bed and said I could have it. The vantages of the voyeur were bankrupt.

The equipment in the room made it hard to get out of bed and dress. My room was another man’s entire home. He meant to leave his family for good, taking everything which had ever touched him.

“Fleece,” I finally said, in October. “You know I’m paying, or rather my scholarship is paying, for half of this room. Now look where the screen is. Three inches from my bed. And I can’t get to the lavatory without knocking over something of yours.”

That evening I came in to find he had somehow drawn in his materials so that I had more than half of the room area. The bamboo screen was clutched around his tiny space. I heard Fleece rattling at his desk. His gear was stuffed and balanced to an extreme height behind the screen. On my side of the screen there was tacked a note: YOU WON’T LEAVE, WILL YOU? I looked around the screen. Fleece was huddled over a foot-square working area on his desk. His possessions were hurled up around him, trembling — the metal stork, the cigar boxes, the easel (Fleece did hidden art efforts, in Crayola, I believe), the books. He turned toward me, his study lamp shaking the light over his hands. He was angry.

“I have to beg, beg, to keep a rube like you to stay with me. Me. You know I have to keep you here, I can’t afford to break up with another roomie. They’d come get me. There would be reason.”

“I’m not concerned with that. I wasn’t saying I was going to leave.”

“You weren’t?” he asks sincerely.

Then we went ahead as normal. The screen crept over toward me inch by inch, day by day. He read by day and wrung out his thoughts on me by night.

“I want to do a little subjective-response quiz on you tonight, Monroe. I’ve written down some words: tally whacker, dong, peter, dick, tool, prod, root, member (more literary!), and dork. What adjective describes the whole set?”

“Silly”. He had read them in a prolonged Southern nasal way and there was no other answer.

“Right!” he cheered. “Or better: condescending, or mocking. You think men ever gave themselves those names? Never. Women named us. They saw it down there begging for lubrication from them. The woman sees him hunching beneath the throne of meat and fur, I don’t care if he’s Alexander the Great or Eric the Red, with some random shepherdess — she sees him, she names him. Caesar had to have it, Napoleon stooped for it, J.F.K. with his millions is not immune. But we look up when we see women, any woman. Cunt, we breathe out … delirious, obsequious to her … fuck, both words going deep, maybe all the way to the heart.”

Fleece took a breath and rubbed his glasses on his sleeve.

I told him what he had said was rousing and eloquent but doubtful. Fleece loved the noise of the words of his latest thoughts; I was always holding back because I didn’t have the words yet. I had the music, but not the words yet As a matter of fact, I expressed myself so badly, Fleece ignored me completely.

“I think of writing my mother,” he went on. “‘Well, I’ve done it with Judy Rut, a white whore over on Mulberry Street in Vicksburg. It’s done. I’ll be hard to catch from now on.’ She receives the letter during the day, while Creech is away rehearsing at the armory. She calls up the Dean of Men. This is one of my favorite dreams. The Dean of Men has me sewn up in a beanbag. Just captured, you see. In five minutes my mother is over here walking around the beanbag. I hear her footsteps. I’m lying in the bag they’ve stitched me up in, amongst hills of dried beans, utterly nude, having let nobody bathe me, no, madly satisfied with Judy Rut’s oil still on me. They’ve made a mistake. The stitching of the beanbag has been done too well. It’s unbreakable. They’ve captured me, but can’t get to me. My flag is in the air, my tally is stiff, trustworthy and cheerful as a lighthouse. I roll in the beans, creating harmless light avalanches upon myself. Just every now and then my mother’s voice gets through the cloth. ‘Are you telling God about this, Robert Dove? What is He thinking?’ I stop moiling in the beans and I do think of Him. ‘What do You think of a man lying naked in dried beans?’ I ask. And as usual complete silence socks me in the ear. I shout out, ‘Where is General Creech?’ I know this will send her away, wordless, creeping, drooped, down the dormitory stairs. Creech must never know about me.

“I believe she saw it as her duty to hide my exceptional quirks from Creech even more than she saw her duty to God. I had to seem normal when he was around. I saw him the night Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. For some reason, we weren’t at church that Sunday night Creech hated all music and couldn’t really tell any of it apart. But he wanted to crawl into the television and choke Elvis. Things I thought were just curious, Creech wanted to kill. He finally kicked the On knob off the set…. But it was secrets about my life that Mother and I were supposed to keep, such as the fact I was two years older than Creech thought I was. I pitched some fits I don’t even remember the first two years she tried to enroll me in school. I’m twenty-one now, freshman at college. But we kept this from Creech.

“She married him in Florida where she was in the subdivision close to an army base. She was a church-going widow; a card-carrying Christian. Met him at a dinner in the church basement; found herself romantic with bachelor Creech, who asked her to marry him before he’d ever looked in the house and seen me. Don’t think I haven’t meditated on that young postwar girl who has been molded by panic ever since she was nineteen. I’d get bronchitis trying to hold the tears inside. You didn’t cry in this house. We even kept my botany project for the Science Fair a secret from him, because she wasn’t sure how my excessive interest in plants would impress him.

“Some nights I even combed my hair and left the house on supposed dates, showing the normal interest in the opposite sex that comes to all good boys. This drew a wink out of Creech and thrilled my mother. She whispered to me at the door to go up the street and introduce myself to some awful sixteen-year-old girl whose body looked like frozen oatmeal. Some nights I would sense that Creech just wanted me out of the house. These nights I’d put on my whole brown suit, water down my hair, and leave the house with enthusiasm. Run out in the dark and beat off.

“The noise of my turning pages in my room drove him out of his mind, and also my whamming the slides of my microscope together. It interrupted Creech in drinking his gallon of coffee every night while pursuing his own original art form, that of violently ripping to shreds the newspaper of the day after reading every particle of it, about nine P.M. This had nothing to do with the contents of the paper. It was the theory put in practice that one should live each day as it came and forget, or in his case, destroy, the past. I wish I were kidding you.

“Creech is from northern Florida. Let me tell you how mean the town he grew up in is. We went down there one Christmas with him. In the history of this town, there had never been any snow. But it snowed that Christmas, about two inches, at night. I looked out the window the next morning and saw that already the kids on the street had scraped up the snow from four yards and in a vacant lot next to this defunct service station they had built a huge snow statue of a man having relations with a dog. Merry Christmas. What was it some professor said about Florida? … That Florida was unique in going straight from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilization.

“Getting back to my mother: I told her goodbye, wearing my suit. I went around to the dark of the back of the house and rang true as a normal adolescent by dropping my pants and having at it. Then I would fall asleep in that tall grass next to the house that the lawnmower never could reach. Wake up in two hours and stroll in mimicking the afterglow of a fine time with a girl. I had on my mind one of those dancers fom the Jackie Gleason show — a big-legged girl in jeweled brassiere and net hose, panting, at last contented by me her hero who was a sort of surprising churn upon her; her nipples still hard in excitement, lifted toward the moon. In those hours I had absorbed an arrogance, a privacy, a self, with crickets jumping around me. I could finally ignore Creech. I won the Science Fair, and in a little excess of pride, I appeared in the garage in nothing but my jock shorts. Proud of the hair on my body as if it were a fox coat. Then the women call and tell my mother.”

While Fleece was behind his screen, seeping out the biography, I was lying in bed eating an orange. Suddenly I noticed the screen had been pushed almost flush against my cot. Fleece was looking at me through a tear in the thatch.

“I said, Ruben, that I appeared in the garage in nothing but my jock shorts, and that the women called and told my mother.” He put his eye up to the hole closer. “But there were mitigating circumstances. I had been reading Walt Whitman. ‘Song of Myself,’ you know, the poet, Ruben?” I was weary of the Ruben theme.

“I know about Walt Whitman,” I said, lying.

“Lookie here.” He crooked his index finger through the screen hole, its end searching stupidly.

“What?”

“Man-root,” he said in that crimp-nosed redneck way.

“Oh Lord. This is diseased,” I said. “This is sick, an ob-session!”

“Yes!” Fleece brayed, doing the finger lungingly, mashing out the hole.

“What would your mother say?” I was really wondering. It was the wrong thing.

“She would say, ‘Aaaaaaaaa!’” He jumped up on the screen, shrieking, and he and the whole affair fell on me. He hit me through the screen on my face and back, me trying to squirm out. “Nasty boy! Ugly, ugly!” he said, hitting me. “Out in the garage, after all those years in God’s house!” I smelled the lab alcohol on his breath then, through the screen. I took account of this, and really it was a wide relief that he might be mostly drunk. “Monroe!” he hit me on top of the head a last time as I was turning him and the screen back. “Life is long, and so messy. I had to grow up, didn’t I? I get a chance to be messy too, don’t I?” I had knocked him over by then. He scrambled to the door. “I love it, I love life!”

Fleeing, he begged me, “Please don’t tell them. Don’t tell them.” Then he wavered swiftly down the dorm stairs. Who could chase that?

3 / Mondo Porno

Fleece was sharp of bone. His back almost cut through his shirt. He was my height, five ten, but weighed somewhere near 120. At twenty-one, the boy was losing his hair. He was left with the high, bald intimidating forehead of, well, of a genius. Already he was reading the Merck Manual as if there were patients calling him. Fleece was never bored by pain, his own or that of others. I presumed he’d make a good physician, but there was this cornered spider-monkey style of his that might give him some trouble at bedside. Also, he was prone to an attack of what he called Hudson Bay flu about once a month. Mucus would harden like antlers in his head and chest and he couldn’t get out of bed. He’d just lie down, smoking one Salem after another.

It was then that I would hum softly and earnestly one of the old hymns of the church, and another. I would become an endless seepage of fine old hymnal numbers. Fleece would turn his head on the pillow and look at me with his red flu-strickeneyes. “It takes a sorry white man to treat a sick genius like this. You bastard. Go on off and suck your trumpet, you bastard.” Then he’d cough like somebody raking out an iron tomb. I hummed on, sweetly smiling.

A day in December when I was at it again, he whispered to me why didn’t I smoke some of his marijuana, or drink some of his lab alcohol? Everything that was in the room that was his, was mine, he croaked. Why didn’t I read some of his terrible books? I could even read the letters. On his desk he had Justine, Fanny Hill, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and The Blind Mistress. But I went straight for the letters. He had been clutching them significantly now for a couple of months, and sort of patrolling the room with his eyes as he clutched them.

I took them out one by one from the three cigar boxes, sitting on my bed, reading right down to “love-milk” (the writer was strong on using quotation marks around anything he considered reckless), “the curlyfur purse of love’s jam,” and “the tongue that laps the yolk of your precious egg.” “Remember (said the writer) when we played early morning breakfast and you said, how sad we don’t have any cream along with those lovely eggs of yours under Sir Silly Limpness who was, shame on you, such a Bully Be-Hard last night. We could have eggs poached in cream, but I know you are too tired to go to the store for it now, and since necessity is the mother of invention, I’ll just… then Beloved you tittered and threw your head down full of your glorious hair — there is just no expression for your full lank hair lying in a thousand soft pricklings on my stomach, Oh how many gentlemen have felt that ever? And breakfasted upon it with your lips, then your whole drawing oralness, making your soft direct assault against the object you had been shy of before, with precious tears streaming down your cheeks, the meal so full, and so surprised was I, I spewed irregardless of your sacred throat or former earthly laws of love-conduct, Beloved. You sat up and laughed the laugh of wiser freedom that good God had given us. (me dropping this page, opening another envelope, finding) … the magic grape-heaven of your nipples, darling rare nipples and puckered buttons, the only things I know of that God has put on this earth that swell, widen and grow daily the more one puts his mouth to them and sups thereof. Was I too greedy the last opening of your bosoms? Splendrous sight! greedy at the brown buttons covering half your ideal breasts. Yet still you pushed them up with your hands — ah memory, memory of your fingernails painted heart-glow red which you always kept polished along with your toe-nails whatever hour I awoke and declared the timeless want of man for woman — true Beloved, you demanded of me I give you that hour’s ‘sucking’ time that I never not one day since I knew it was your sacred desire deprived you.”

(Me, lifting out another, reading into further sacredness, heartness, Belovedness) “… can you Beloved like I can away from you, can you have that holy liquid ‘Coming’ when you think of me, as I can as I imagine you postured upon the violet sheets of our marriage bed, what did we care if every window, every door of the house were wide open, having the north breeze wind upon your my Beloved’s soft thin legs, your eyes, elfin eyes, hoping unselfishly that this might be one of the times when you ‘pulsate’ too? Can you think yourself into love’s undeniable ‘release’? As your husband can do now? Last letter you said it was impossible. Beloved, you must believe in the psychic power channel between us. You must concentrate on me and find me in our most wanton duets of yesteryear. Picture your ecstatic flanks rubbing me, your little feet interlocking and kneading the base of my spine, that sitting position we assumed when we could spy more completely on one another’s mounting course of pleasure; picture me mounted, eyes greedy and agleam … I know so many of your thoughts must of needs be dismal by the mere existing day by day, but you must think through these weak chains of boredom to me, think through ‘impossible’—that’s a word a nigger would use. Beloved, don’t use it again. Let yourself into the deluxurious habitats of our psychic channel, and ‘COME, Come Please.’”

(Next letter.) “I have not been getting your letters. I have discovered that two of the doctors are Jew rascals. I cannot doubt they have made something happen to them. I couldn’t tell you what I have suffered at the hands of the niggers. If I thought one of their hands had ever touched an epistle of yours, or that one of those Iscariots had breathed on your precious script….”

(I keep opening.) “‘Doctor’ Eis thinks he has healed me. He asks me if I am keeping my hands off myself now. I said to him, unspokenly, keep your hands off me you unincinerated curd of Jezebel’s milk. Why don’t I hear from you? Send your letters Special Delivery, Darling.”

(Spotting the next one, losing desire.) “Can one look anywhere without seeing crowds of nigger orderlies? They creep through these halls as if they were in a haunted house. They peek in to see poor white men flat on their backs. Their eyes are like muddy eggs. They laugh. They are such things in their white uniforms; they cherish cleaning up the vomit of men who would thrash them if the odds were even…. I can not tell you (Oh, Beloved, now I don’t know for certain that you even hear my epistolary voice!) how I have suffered by these prissy niggers this Eternity, from the first day a year ago when one of them tied me to the bed with raw hemp rope, and told me to be ashamed of myself. But now that they know I’m getting out, they don’t come near me.”

(On into the last half of them.) “There is something devilish going on. The niggers are moving to positions of authority. The Jew doctors cavort with them and trust them. I have been silent for so, so long. The other afternoon the black scoundrels were running in the hall drinking beer. In a psychiatric hospital, celebrating Christ’s birth. There was a group of intoxicated black orderlies gathered around the bulletin board at the middle of the esplanade. They had a jackknife and they were throwing it to stick up in the bulletin board itself, piercing the official state and federal information sheets thereon. White men were close with them. It was ‘Doctor’ Eis and ‘Doctor’ Clyde, the Jews. They applauded when one of the bucks stuck a knife in an announcement sheet from twenty paces away. Foremost in congratulating the nigger was ‘Doctor’ Eis. I made as if I hadn’t seen them and was walking up to see the week’s menu on the board, but a biggish nigger wearing the badge of a nurse, turned me around with his mealy hands and said, ‘See you later, alligator. You got to wear some pants when you come out on the porch.’ I shook him off, knowing I had on my gown. I was furious to know what ‘Doctor’ Eis would do with this nigger ‘nurse,’ as I saw him coming on. ‘You have to watch yourself,’ Eis said. His breath was also revolting with beer. Then he drew out my gown and dropped it, and I realized that I had had the edge of my gown caught up inadvertently on the top of my penis, which I had not known was in an erective state. I am not now such a freak as to come out with niggers throwing jackknives, in such a condition, consciously. The suetty demons. The Jews abetting them. I was excruciatingly embarrassed. But there is some accounting due me too.”

(Reading another, written in the fastidiously brittle old ink like the rest, with the letters slim and high, as if someone had dipped a dry eyelash in the inkwell and gone to work) “I will undergo electricity this week. Not at the behest of Eis or Clyde. I do it on the advice of a marvelous Christian psychiatrist who hails from Raymond, Mississippi. He seems just a boy to me. Would you believe it, he studied at the University of Massachusetts, the same as yours truly? Then he went to Johns Hopkins and to Tubingen, as a Fulbright Scholar.”

(Letter after the electricity, apparently) “I have made investigations. Eis is a voluptuary. His wife is a nurse here and he can’t keep his hands off her. I’ve seen other things, such as at the Coca-Cola machine. Eis was making change for a colored woman custodian. I could tell he had designs on her. I gave the black slut her dime. I wouldn’t take her two nickels. I slashed Eis with a sneer. He wasn’t my doctor any more. He couldn’t keep his sexual ‘projections’ out of the public eye. I do hate Jews. I do. One of them invented this hateful psychoanalysis, you know. God damn him! and all their interloping, their prowling, their secret-killing. Oh, Christ, to strangle, to torture! Christ! that I could personally have assassinated Sigmund Freud. The Jews cannot live at peace with anyone they can’t put their cancer to. They will raise up the nigger, and teach him power and pride of position, and somehow too they will have to deal with that barbarous voodoo ‘Christianity,’ and they will fail. They will succeed only in making hordes of niggers atheist warriors. They will be too ‘kind’ to deport and dump the niggers back into Africa and make it again the continental monkey-house it was intended to be, as we were too ‘kind.’ We let the cannon be set against our skulls, while we smirked vainly at having unloaded it and made it a phantom with our ‘humanity.’ And there we will be, looking at armed phalanxes of those mumbo-jumbo blackamoors brought over to my green and golden America by fools three hundred years ago. But I will not be of those whining insects of inevitablists who would let this happen. I am pointed to action: TO TREAT EVERY NIGGER AS IF HE WERE A JEW AND EVERY JEW AS IF HE WERE A NIGGER.

“… I now know, Catherine, that you have been hearing me in every letter. I have heard also, in the cold tones of Dr. Eis, of your plans. Be out of the house, then, by Tuesday, since you will not live with me. If you have preserved my letters, leave them. I will enforce. Do not write another check on my account. Do not use my name in any transactions. You must burn our marriage bed. Take everything else you want with you. I beg you not to engage lawyers. Believe me, you would not want the sordid fraction of lucre you might desire after I countenanced you even at the distance of one corner of a courtroom to the other. I would be civil, not, as you might wish, frothing in manner fit to be reinserted at Whitfield. You would see me tearing you to pieces with a little smile. You were ever shy of the public eye, Catherine. You know that. Even the postman. You were made for existing in that drear rodential shade of lichens up in the New Brunswick rocks. As a Quaker girl, you were always hiding your ‘inner light’ under a bushel, weren’t you? Take what you are offered and run, run all the way back to New Brunswick, and take what’s left of your life with your parents, the shade-mongers, the coolish, the tapwater Quakers of the four-room house, where it will be safe to speak of me ever again. The Same [He always signed this way], Peter.”

As I put the last letter back in its envelope, I noticed my friend was asleep, his eyelids gathered together in a great creasing. I felt alarmed, nasty, tired, and most of all, curious. I shook Fleece.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“A man.”

“A real man? Is he out of Whitfield now?”

“I’m not going to tell you. You hummed those hymns, you bastard.”

“I won’t do it again.”

“All right. He lives. And he’s loose. The day I went down to take pictures of the police arresting the Freedom Riders, he was there at the bus terminal. I didn’t know who it was then. Two years ago. A man wearing a big almost sheriff kind of hat ran over and grabbed my camera out of my hands. The strap was around my neck, and he jerked it off, snapped the strap, and hurt my neck. He smashed the camera on the pavement in front of the bus. I was just getting ready to be very indignant, but the man then comes after me, very indignant. So I ran. And he chased me, through the bus terminal and out to the street, yelling at me. I thought, God, for sure, he’s one of our Mississippi lawmen, with that hat and all. But the moment I knew he wasn’t was when he unbuckled his belt as he ran after me and whipped it out, coming for me. There was something too unofficially personal about that And you know what he was saying?”

“What?”

“He was saying ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ while I was saying ‘Why? Why?’ legging it, knowing it was simply between me and him, him being of some odd independent strain of creature. Well, I outran him. I couldn’t see why he was angry, what interest he had. The police whose pictures I was ready to take weren’t being too vicious with the riders when they arrested them. Not yet. They beat them in the jail with rubber hoses later. Ralph, my friend the police station clerk, told me. But later. Other camera people were at the scene. He must have noted me as unofficial, too young or something. Came at me. The man was Peter the letter-writer himself. Whitfield Peter. I didn’t know. I hadn’t even seen the letters yet.

“Two weeks later I did. My teacher in botany was always seeking field trips for our class. She wrote letters to landowners down around the coast, over in the delta, and she wrote to one real estate baron up in Madison County who had a spot advertisement for ‘Canton Harbors’ on television. He wrote back saying he was overjoyed to let students use his property for hunting specimens. He’d seen some very interesting specimens himself on his acreage, had yearned for them to be classified by botanists. Being the leading brain of the class, I was shown the actual letter by the teacher. Written in skinny tall glances in brown ink like the ones you’ve just read.”

Fleece and the group went up to Madison County, near Canton, looked around in the fields and woods, and gathered at lunchtime around a big house, which was unlocked. They went into it, out of the sun, to use the commodes and water. There was only a little furniture in it. Fleece climbed up in the attic. There was a big crate full of letters. He had a field bag, and after reading a few, crammed in as many as he could. He backed down the attic stairs, dizzy as if from snakebite. He was on fire and the rest of the kids and the teacher were eating bologna sandwiches. Then out to the fields again, where there were some really rare flora. But what did he care. He picked up a four-leaf clover and spent the rest of the day trying to keep himself from ripping out of his shorts, rereading the letters in forest holes, getting himself amongst gloomy bushes, the words of sex memorizing him, it seemed, rather than the other way. Getting back in the bus a dangerous bulging thief. Getting a seat to him-self, which wasn’t hard. The rest of them had long since given up on Fleece as a social being. (Fleece hated all the males in his class because of the irrational hope in their faces. He disdained the female for the reason that none of them was a goddess with whom he could fall hopelessly in love.) He jerked the tops of a few letters out of his satchel. “Oh Catherine, Catherine, you are my naked breakfast, lunch, dinner. Well do I gain again that day, noon, as the language of your body aroused you helplessly to climb upon the table from which I was eating, open your robe, and lie back supine, your thighs begging me to perpetuate the holiday of love with you, forget my mere plate of food. And of course you won. Intercourse with you versus trilling food-hunger — never a contest! What did I care for politics, my inherited wealth, the possibility of being a senator in the state congress of Mississippi? Oh my lost sperm in you, oh happy, happy spewing away of ambition and power.”

I read this letter, finding it in the heap of thirty or so in the cigar boxes. Fleece’s voice had left him. He wanted to tell me, but the flu was on him too grimly for him to continue. Fleece’s eyes, as he lay back down, bubbled out as if in a hot yellow pie. He was in an alarming passion.

“So somehow you found out this Whitfield Peter was the same man who broke your camera and chased you?” Fleece nodded. “And did you find out why, or how, he got put away in Whitfield?” I asked, but I already knew, partway. “It wasn’t on account of his hating Jews and niggers, if he did before he went in. It was sex. She turned on him, Catherine.”

Fleece had found a pen and was scribbling on the flyleaf of a textbook. He gave me the book, and I read “Right, rube. You don’t get Whitfielded for hate in Mississippi. Apparently she gave out during the honeymoon sometime. She made a phone call, one would guess. But I know by his other letters that when the Whitfield squad got to his house, he was upstairs, naked, hunching every crease he could find in the pillows, curtains, his own torn-off underwear.” Fleece finished another note on the back of one of Peter’s letters. I took it. “Peter speaks proudly of this in one letter. Like he thought it was marvelous for him to be continuing on in passion for her even when she wasn’t even there any more. Maybe he didn’t go crazy until they had him in Whitfield itself and he became sane enough to know that he didn’t even have access to the proximity of sex with Catherine. If you can believe him, one unfortunate thing did happen when he got to Whitfield. A couple of the Negro orderlies were cruel to him. They.tied him to a bed with raw hemp rope. He was still going to town on the sheets, still trying to simulate sex in any given crease once he woke up again, and the orderlies let these colored maids come in to watch the white man straining at it regardless of the ropes on him. Peter lists this as a grievance he will never forget, the Negro eyes beholding him in his compulsion on the sheets. He had one bright horrified sane eye on all that happened to him in Whitfield, along with his blind, squirming insanity.”

It was four A.M. and I was muddy of sight myself, sleepy, but exhilarated. I was glad I’d stuck it out with Fleece.

“She wrote him, too, I guess. I’d like to see some of her letters,” I said.

“They must be down in that crate in his attic,” whispered Fleece. “I want them. If you’ve got the guts, we’ll go steal them.”

4 / The Theft of Her Letters

Bobby Dove was better the next day, coming out of the flu. He could talk again, when I saw him in the room at noon.

“Sure we’ll steal them, Monroe. We’ll whiz over there in your little sports car, we’ll be up in that attic, we’ll steal them. This morning I was lying here thinking: every thing good in life is stolen. Knowledge is stolen, pleasure is stolen, all art is stolen from time; ideas are stolen from events. None of them wanted us to find them out. Life has done her damned best to keep us away from her secrets. She may be afraid, you see, that when we know Her too well we will hate Her. She is afraid of the master thieves, like me. Yes, we’ll steal those letters!”

I had never thought of it in such large terms, but I was ready to go steal the letters. I had never stolen anything that I knew of. Except, briefly, perhaps the trumpet that night with Lloyd Reese. I held the trumpet in my hands and looked at it anew in the afternoon over in the Fine Arts Building, with Dr. Livace instructing. Well, indeed, it was a fine new wound-up golden thing to me. I could steal music from the dumb muteness of the air. What did Adolph Sax, inventor of the saxophone, what did he think when he made that instrument, wonderful thing, that finally made it into jazz and let loose the rambling reedsweet moan we needed? Stolen, stolen. The reed growing in the swamps, the metal ores underground, and between them the buried dead who had needed the sound but never knew it was possible, needed the Master Thief, even if he never knew he was a Master Thief. I myself was letting loose on the subject of theft. I believed in theft and could almost sing a song to it. And so I got back to Fleece very ready to steal almost anything.

“When do we go after the letters?” I said.

“We’re not going after any letters.” He looked at me coldly and stood up to study the dreary iron skyscape out the window. Today it had been seeping a little cold mist.

“This morning we were going after the letters. To steal them.”

“But since then I’ve gotten afraid. You see, he offered his fields to our botany class. If he looked in that crate in the attic, he would know somebody in the class took the letters. The house was open, but he never said we could go in it. The teacher didn’t know we were in the house until after I took the letters, and then she ran us out. The next Monday, he was over at her house. He was polite but very angry. Something had been stolen from his house. She knew I’d been in the house and called me to come over. A friend of mine drove me over to her house. He wasn’t in the house. She told me he was sitting in his car out front and wanted to see me. I walked out and leaned on the car at the window across from him. The street light was barely catching him, and the fear I had already was nothing like what I had when. I recognized him, vague as he was. He wore the same big hat, leaning toward me. The same man who broke my camera and came at me with his belt. His name was Peter Lepoyster. He had wavy tan hair. ‘You were in the house. Do you know what I want?’ he asked me. I said I didn’t. ‘Well if you are the class leader, I tell you, you’d better get what has been stolen back to me, and very quick. I think thieves and their collaborators should be shot.’ I was so scared I suddenly got bold. I asked him who he thought he was. I told him my father was a general of the National Guard who would come against him anytime he showed force against me, and would cram him so far back into Whitfield he’d never see enough light to find his own dick. He stared back, his teeth apart like some big biting jackass, and he drove away with my hands still on his window. Did you ever see somebody fifty years old who wanted to kill you? Christ, what a mistake I’d made. He knew I’d seen the postmarks of Whitfield on the letters, but I knew he knew who I was and could find out where I lived.”

I took this into account. Fleece, feeble and nervous in his robe, seemed to be looking around the parking lot for Peter as well as for the old demon, his mother.

“Did he ever come around?” I asked him.

“Never. I suppose the threat of the National Guard held him off, maybe.”

“But now there are two of us against him, Fleece. If it came down to it, we could beat him up and steal the letters. We could wear masks. We could disguise our whole bodies, even.”

“No. I didn’t want you in on it. It’s all mine, whatever it is. I was sick. I don’t want you a part of it. It’s mine.”

“I have the car.”

“You have the car, but you don’t have the address.”

He made me mad, letting me down. I went behind the screen, took the three cigar boxes off the shelf, and stole them from him, the letters.

“You saw what I did. I’ve taken them. Now they’re mine. There’s no way you can get them back. I’d hurt you if you tried it”

Fleece looked amazed at the boxes in my hands.

“You don’t even know what you have,” he said. “You can’t imagine how … snorty you look holding those boxes to your breast.”

“Well, I have his address now, on every envelope. I’m willing to steal her letters. I want them.”

Fleece was shocked right in the eyes. He seemed not to have thought of the envelopes.

“They’re mine. I love them. I love the old brown ink on them so much. Those quotation marks around lush vigilant digit, your clitoris …” Fleece paused reverently, cutting in with a smile of pure glory.

“I know,” I said, smiling also.

“The anguish of the joy of the words …” Fleece eased the boxes out of my hand. I had made my point and didn’t care. He seemed to absorb a nervous power in the repossessing of the letters, holding them. I would never have denied him that.

“What I want to hear is the woman speaking back. We’re going to steal those letters, Fleece,” I said.

He laid the boxes in place on the shelf. “I guess we have to. But you know what I want more than the letters from her? They could be dull little notes. I imagine they are. What I want is her. Herself. To steal pleasure with her, or from her, I don’t care. Somewhere in New Brunswick, the lush vigilant digit of her clitoris, I don’t care if it’s forty years old, which is about the age I’d make her, somehow.”

5 / Mean Times

However, nothing happened. Fleece became concerned again about his classes and labs and his medical career, I saw little of him, and I — well, God, there was nothing else to do — was becoming an intellectual. This gave misery a little class. I became concerned, concerned, concerned. I went to the library and checked out The Sound and the Fury and War and Peace, hiding the books from Fleece, because I knew he must be long beyond these. Also, while in the library, I thought it might be true to the manner of a scholar to pluck off two or three random plums which caught my eye, and what caught my eye were two books on Geronimo, the Apache. I went for the name, Geronimo, for one thing, and opening one book I read this piece of advice from an Apache father to his son:

My son, you know no one will help you in this world. You must do something. You run to that mountain and come back. That will make you strong. My son, you know no one is your friend, not even your sister, your father, or your mother. Your legs are your friends; your brain is your friend; your eyesight is your friend; your hair is your friend, your hands are your friends; you must do something with them. … Then you will be the only man. Then all the people will talk about you. That is why I talk to you in this way.

The passage came alive in my hands. You must do something … your legs, brain, eyesight, hair, hands are your friends. You must do something with them. The father himself saying even he is not your friend. At the same time my eyes fell on the word, name, Geronimo, again and I realized that my last name could be found mixed up in it. It was silly but true. Monroe could be found in Geronimo. I was delighted — even more so because I didn’t know what the hell was giving. But it was all a high throb.

My condition as an intellectual became even lonelier. I wanted to read the Geronimo books straight through, but when I saw the photograph near the front of one of the books I stopped cold. Geronimo was the least-favored hero as regards looks that I’d ever seen. This man was really just a bit too ugly. He was furious. He held the rifle with a terrifying claim on it. There was no glib negligence here as in the portrait of your ordinary romantic hero. There were no stars in his eyes, only a narrow cross-focused anger. His mouth frowned, and here it was uncertain whether he meant to frown or frowned involuntarily through loss of teeth. And there at his neck the filthy scarf. The single handsome thing in the picture was his left knee, brown and bare above his boot. It was a good knee. He propped it up, had his elbow resting on it. (My son … your legs are your friends, I remembered.) Perhaps his legs were the only feature which hadn’t betrayed him. But then back up to the face. It was too akin to senile lunacy, too much the old desperate male idiot we would all come to. So I put the books away, disheartened. I knew Geronimo was a part of my private, intellectual life, I couldn’t imagine who else would be interested in him besides me and the authors of these books — I even went over and checked out all the other books on him, although with no special happiness. Fleece saw the books stacked up by my bed and assumed I was writing a term paper on Geronimo for English or history. I simply shrugged. I didn’t know why I had them. Having the books — it was like being related to some mad bore in town whom you would have to visit sooner or later.

Yet, from reading that piece, the father’s advice to his son, I was drunk with freedom to do anything. I sat on the dorm steps among this pack of other miserable boys. Some of them were like Earl and Bob back at Dream of Pines High and a couple of them were intellectuals, and there was one twenty-year-old alcoholic — I mean to the extent that he would pour a shoe-polish bottle full of bourbon over his slice of watermelon and eat that for breakfast. The alcoholic always suggested things we could do, while the rest of the group discussed his proposition for thirty minutes, the intellectuals coming in at the end to discard it as worthless. Essentially they held that all motion was worthless. There was nothing possible to do. The others were beaten down, since they could not get their thoughts into the King’s English. Some days Zak, the drama teacher, would drive by in his Edsel station wagon, see us out there, and join us. Zak was about thirty and had grayish-blond hair. There was a rumor that he had been a beatnik somewhere and also that he was engaged hopelessly to a beautiful crippled girl in Denver. One evening he was out there and organ music was coming out of the auditorium across from us, Bach, I guess — something sacred yet mathematical — and we were looking across the yard beyond the concrete pool with the defunct fountain and the slimy water at the unlighted windows of the auditorium. I was thinking of the organ-player alone in the ranks of seat shadows of the huge auditorium. His music at this hour of the day was enormously depressing. It was like gloom in little shrieks. All else was quiet — suppertime. I thought of the organist, he or she, thinking of himself or herself as so grand and prissy with the loneliness, and the Bach, and, who knows, God. I couldn’t take it. Neither could Zak, apparently.

“Damn that organ!” he said, in a sudden blast. “This time of the evening.” I had seen Zak express a lot of phony emotion in the drama class, but now he seemed to be real. “This time of the evening …” He held his hands to his ears and burst out, “This time of evening I tried to make love to her in the wheelchair … oh, it’s all just a horror and a gloom! … and she farted, dear sweet Linda. What kind of earth is this?” Even as he said this — and I was shocked along with the others — the organ shrilled up in a torrent, triumphant. It mocked Zak, his sudden confession; it drew the gloom out of you and then mocked the gloom. I made a decision and ran in the dorm up three flights of stairs to my room.

I pulled out a drawer and yanked aside the tee shirts. I hadn’t seen the pistol, the one the old man gave me, since I’d put it in the bottom of the drawer the first day at Hedermansever. It was a joy to find, a brutish little Italian hero. I got my raincoat, dumped the gun in the pocket, and put on the raincoat. Before I left the room I picked up one of the books and looked again at the photograph of Geronimo holding his gun. Looking at the filthy scarf around his neck, I wanted it.

When I made it back to the front steps, Zak and the others were saying nothing to each other. The organ was still going, and the group was still paralyzed in depression by it. The night had almost come down. Then I saw Fleece walking past the auditorium, coming from his lab, toward us. He was looking backward toward the windows of the auditorium. As he came up to us, his face was full of pain.

“Who needs that goddam organ?” he said.

“Let’s stop it. Stop him, whoever it is,” I said.

The alcoholic boy rubbed his hand through his forlorn crewcut and stood up and assented. Zak, with all his biography, began walking, Fleece joined us, and the rest of them fell in. By God, I thought, we are in motion, this pack of misery all together. I couldn’t feel the ground under my feet. It was trancelike. I thought of what Zak had said about his lover in a wheelchair. Thinking of the wheels themselves, I moved along at the head of them, rolling. In the auditorium windows I could see the tiny light of the music viewer of the organ. The player was still fingering zealously and to my mind the sound was like monstrous dominos of tin falling. I told the group we would go in by this side door, and we did. We went by the basement class-rooms and climbed the stairs, went to the left through a door, to the stage. The organist was undulating, by himself, below the other end of the stage. We drew up, over him, and saw him waddling away on the pedals in his sock feet. We were in the total darkness of the stage and he was down there alight from the tiny lamp over his music. I put my hand on the pistol in my pocket. I knew then I would use it. The pistol felt so automatic. And mechanically, it was. I felt high and loose. I took a book out of Fleece’s hands. I pitched the book onto the keys of the great wooden organ. The organist was in a fit of holy music and barely recognized the event.

“Stop,” I said. He stopped and looked up toward us. “Get out of here. Keep your eyes down. Or you’ll get hurt.”

“I have permission,” he said.

“You didn’t get permission to depress us with that damned organ.” I spoke; the rest were completely silent. “You’d better stop. We can’t stand the organ.”

“Can’t stand Bach, well, I …” started the organist.

“I know it’s Bach. I know you wanted it to sound like it was coming out of some cathedral. I thought about you in here thinking you were so lonely and holy. I was thinking about you looking at your own fingers moving on the keys. You thought you were the final word.”

He picked up his music, stepped into his shoes, and flicked off the music light on the organ. Still, he really didn’t want to leave, not seeing me yet, trying to see the rest of the group on stage too. He was dallying, I saw, even in the brown gloom. I really couldn’t stand him. I saw him put his hand on a seat and turn to try to discern who we were and my patience was at end. “Get out!” I told him. I had forgotten the pistol. I was ready to leap off the stage and grab him with my hands. This time of the evening, like Zak said; this time of the evening, that organ falling down on you like the wreck of some old tinny car, the gray tin pieces of it going right in your brain, releasing, God knows, all the horrible streams of your life. Gaf! Oh, me!

The organist was nearing the doors of the auditorium. I saw his wobbling shadow near the windows; there were lights in the lobby outside. His form was nearing the lights. He was reaching the end of the auditorium, where we all were commanded to sit down three times a week. Where in the seats and on the floor were the fingernail dirt, the plucked eyebrows, the scratched-off scalp particles — the germy castoff of the bored, during those speeches; where now, I saw, pulling out the pistol and aiming it at his back, the gloom came in brown as your very sweetheart’s fart. At the last second I pulled the gun over to the right and shot the wall next to the door, as he went out. Pooooooom. Then all the echoes, a screech in the lobby, a sort of trance filled with clangs for me.

“Monroe had a gun!” someone behind me yelled. Then I heard them bolting for both wings off the stage. Someone took me by the arm. It was Fleece.

“If we get out of here quick, it’ll be all right. He couldn’t have recognized us,” he said. I noticed Zak was still on the stage too. He wanted to run, I think, but had been frozen. He was very concerned. We passed him going out. Fleece asked him if he didn’t want to leave too. Somebody would be back soon, and it would be curious to see the drama professor still on stage, with his arms frozen in a posture of flight like that. He touched Zak.

“Monroe. You weren’t aiming at our organ friend, were you?” asked Zak.

“No, no, no.” I shook like the devil. I was cold.

“He had left the organ. He had stopped playing … yet you pulled a gun, you shot… after all, a harmless organist …,” Zak said.

“Was not harmless,” I chattered. “Don’t forget …” We opened the basement door and were out of the building. I grew warm suddenly, lying to Zak, all flushed out in a false cause. “I had to. I did it all for your fiancée in Denver.”

Zak himself was a harmless queer, and believed in heightened moments of friendship. He looked at me with ineffable gratitude as he went off to his car. Zak had a lot of grayish blond hair which he tossed around emotionally, true to drama.

Another day, a week later or so, I was still tingling in my head, feeling that I was in danger. My mind pounded, for the first time in my life, as if it was a thing distinct from me. And in my body I experienced cold sprays of nerves. Life shot through me as if existence really meant something. Before pulling the trigger in the auditorium, I seemed to be only verging toward life — say, like a man eating color photographs. But now the excitement was hounding me. I was thinking about Adolph Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, listening to Sonny Stitt on the phonograph. Then I heard David Newman, the sax-player in Ray Charles’s band. What a thing, to have invented, finally, the horn that actually talks? I shouted. Fleece looked over at me snidely.

“Sounds like a nigger who’s been made into a bagpipe,” said Fleece. Thinking back just then, I realized my old friend Harley Butte might’ve said something like that. I remembered that Harley and I were in the same state. He was directing some band somewhere, surrounded by pine trees. I wondered if he had them out on the field now, under his baton. By now he had had several months with them. Were they as good as Jones’s band in 1950, ten years ago? How could they be? The bursting dust, the blue Napoleonic spades.

“Fleece, there’s so much that you don’t know. Let me take care of the music. I’ve been at it for ten years. A decade.”

“You can have music. Outside of a few very soft things on the piano, I hate almost all of it. As far as I’m concerned, you could take all your clarinets and operas and hymns and flush them down the commode.”

“What a narrow … what a bigot you are. You stupid bastard. I’ll tell you something. All art aspires to the condition of music.” I had heard Livace, who taught me trumpet, quote that the other day. In my case it was a grand thing to believe.

“All life, to which all art is at best a whining stepsister, aspires to the condition of sex,” said Fleece. I suspected he was also quoting, but couldn’t call him down for it with a very clear conscience.

Ashlet, the drunk, who had discovered Fleece kept lab alcohol in the room, looked up from his Pepsi-Cola high-ball.

“Hail, I’ll take sittin’ on the front steps over this. The wisdom around here, you could drown in it.” He went out the door with his drink. Then he came back in the door. “Monroe, you could get your gun out again. Now that there was entertainment.” He winked merrily.

Eventually I went back out to the front steps too. Fleece thought the front steps crowd was depraved, and it was. They told a brand of joke out there which was a true revenge attack on taste, beauty, and human emotion. They used sex only as a sort of springboard into horror and slime. From there on it was all scabs, fornication with the hairy nostril of a crone, the sow with the chastity belt versus Picklock Ned, and all that. The idea was to poison the audience, make them ashamed of having heard the thing. Then came the muddy laughter, the closing of the eyes. Then came another joke more meticulously vile than the last.

“Shoot him for telling that joke,” begged Ashlet, looking at me. You never knew how serious his despair was. The rest of them were not certain of me, either. Nobody would venture a joke right away. Came the pall, came some belle driving by us in a green Cadillac convertible, all of us — if the others were like me — wanting to jump on her wind-shield spread-eagled and beg her to let us in. Fleece walked in from his lab once, right in the midst of a pall. Ashlet was abjuring me to shoot something, anybody, anything. “Hit something! Knock it overl” I wore a kerchief around my neck now, and my raincoat, in whose pocket I indeed had the pistol. I thought all of it lent an air of handsome danger. Zak was there. He was all for the kerchief. I was making an A in the drama class, no sweat Fleece beckoned me with his finger. I left, walked to the room with him.

“What do you think you’re doing with that crowd? You standing there in that kerchief like you were their hero.”

“I am their hero. They need me. I have this pistol.” 1 drew it out and clumped it on the top of the chest, taking off my raincoat. I had taken the pistol with me a few times to chapel and to class, looking at the Pee Aitch Dees and dwelling on the enormous possibility that I might use it again. Ah, one wished that his enemies were less boring and more violent. I tugged the knot out of my kerchief and laid the kerchief across the pistol. This set a provocative little still life on the chest.

“Now off with the spurs,” said Fleece.

“Ah, no. I’m an Indian, not a cowboy.”

He hissed. I lay down on my cot with my raincoat. The coat I liked very much too. It had a certain secret amplitude to it, like a cape but not that wanton. The high calf boots, I confess, grew heavy as the day wore on. It was good to be off my feet.

“Goddam knee boots with his pants stuffed into them,” Fleece derided, observing my footwear. “Listen. Do you think you’ll ever get any pussy wearing that outfit?”

Fleece was exasperatedly taking off his jacket, one of those old shiny Occupation affairs with a luminous yellow map of Japan on the back. At the shoulders Japan was stitched in the same luminous thread in that choppy style which evokes the Orient. There was a smaller rendering of the same idea at the front breast pocket. He wore the jacket constantly. It was a little big for him, but he had got his hands on it somewhere, and wore it, I think, to commemorate his true father, who had died fighting the Japanese. Otherwise, he wore white shoes — in the dead of winter — pleated pants which, since he hadn’t gained a pound since he was fifteen, he’d worn for six years; and usually, white shirts and blue or black dingy ties under the jacket. Another failure of style, I noticed as he began to undress for the shower, was that his socks had been drawn down almost out of sight by the backs of his shoes. The revealed ankle was hairy and chafed.

“With his pistol too.” He picked it up like it was a smelly thing, then opened my drawer and flung it in. “Hero of the criminally stupid.” Fleece pored over me again. “I ought to call the cops. I really ought to call the cops.”

“By the time they got here, I’d have put on my loafers and combed my hair. The pistol wouldn’t be in the room. I’d call your mother and tell her you’re berserk. She’d be here faster than the cops, and when they all got together, you wouldn’t stand a—”

“You deliberating, taking-advantage son of a bitch. You know my mother must never, never come in this room.” He meant it very seriously. I was sorry I had pushed it to this degree. He went on, “What do you think you’re up to? Please. Don’t think I haven’t seen the picture.”

He reached under my cot and pulled out a couple of the books. He opened the right one to the photograph of Geronimo. His dirty fingernaillay right against the soiled kerchief. The old chief seemed to have taken fresh offense at this new finger upon him. He was cross-eyed with rage. I hadn’t seen him for two weeks. I was absorbed by the rage.

“Get your fingers off of him.”

Fleece let the pages flip by. He looked at the check-out slip in the back. “This book is two months overdue. You idiot.”

6 / Fazers

Driving home for Christmas, I passed the fields like dead palomino horses — winterset in Mississippi — the sun a cold bulb; and later, over the Vicksburg bridge, saw the river: a snake in throes, its belly up.

The raincoat, the scarf, the boots, the little pod of iron lying against my thigh — I was sticking with them. I had nothing to lose.

At last I was in Louisiana far enough and I picked up WWL in New Orleans. Bobby Blue Bland was tearing it up with “Letcha Light Shine!” Now what has happened to Bobby Blue Bland? He used to deliver enough raunch in one tune to get me through a whole day. But at this time, the Blue Bland band also rang up a sense of disgrace in me, for playing fourth-part trumpet in the Jackson Symphony Orchestra. This was really the hind tit of music, even if you were playing Beethoven.

I needed some solo Beauty in my life. There were my secret poems, all right. I would write out a whole ink cartridge in one night. I had tried them on index cards, on yellow paper, on unlined paper, on flyleafs, on onionskin. I had tried green and red ink, black, blue. In the mornings it was astonishing to find all those poem-looking things. Nothing had helped. It was all miserable. It was like visiting a site where ants had been killed — the dead flat sprawl of the words, the small kinked bodies of the letters.

The old man may have looked a bit dismayed at the scarf and the boots. I’m not sure. It began as a happy time, this first Christmas reunion. Harry is back.

Uncle Harry. My nephews are waiting for me with the football. I’m the passer and the star. There isn’t any telling how much I love my nephews and nieces. Ah, leaping for the high pass and crashing in the cane for a touchdown. Son of a gun. I remember my two little nieces on the front steps, at twilight, calling us in for the Christmas Eve supper. Inside we go for the oysters, the duck with sherry, the turkey, the ham. Afterwards, my nieces flock to me and sit in Uncle Harry’s lap. They’re wearing tiny maids of the Alps outfits. Their tender bottoms — the softest, most innocent flesh on God’s earth — are on my knees. I begin feeling like Jesus telling the parents to let the kids come to me. One of them kisses me and I know how unsullied and just slightly moist love can be. I wonder will it be like this when I marry. “I can count” says the baby. Then I watched them all tearing apart the presents. There’s nothing like seeing a kid yank his prize out of that colored paper. “This thing is mine, free and clear!” the eyes seem to say. Turns your old soiled heart around. If somebody could’ve stopped it there, it was my peace on earth.

In honor of me as a college man, there is beer in the refrigerator, for the first time ever. My brother, my foster-brother, my sister, and their families are here. The house is crammed with wonderful people and greenery and candles, the children are surging, and my old man is about to crack with pride. It’s me, it’s old wild Ode Monroe that filled this house up like this! he seemed to mean, wearing the Christmas sweater from me. I loved him. I had a four-beer glow on, but I would’ve loved him anyway. I loved him in his age. He had put on five years in the four months since I’d seen him. But he was a man. He could bear it.

My mother was pretty all over again. But though she still looked something like Elizabeth Taylor, she had aged and was on the down side of Liz Taylor’s beauty. I trailed her. I saw her in all the lights and shadows of the house. I couldn’t quit staring. I became long and rude in my stares. She didn’t understand me. She lowered her eyes, embarrassed at me. I was embarrassed at me. She sighed, she told me that smoking cigarettes made me look like a hoodlum. The fact was I couldn’t stand to see her lose out to that old simpleton Father Time. I hated it I hugged her and hugged her, at every decent opportunity.

When the rest of them left, and I was still there, it was hard to make talk at all. I took the pistol out in the back yard, and before I knew what I was doing, I was shooting at birds. The birds — robins, sparrows, thrushes — alit on the bare gray limbs. They weren’t used to being shot at. So even with the pistol I killed three of them. They would stay on the branch after I missed a shot, not understanding. I was learning the weapon. The last one I killed I hit him shooting four times from the hip. He burst apart in feathers and fell ten feet from me with feathers floating around his corpse. I reloaded and shot at the corpse in rapid fire from the hip. The corpse jumped about, its head vanished, sod flew up. I had the scarf and boots on. The old man had come up behind me sometime during the blasting. I never heard him.

“I believe he’s dead. What do you think you’re doing?”

“There’s nothing else to do,” I said.

“Do you realize that bullets travel? You shoot a twenty-two bullet in the air, it goes a half-mile until it hits something. I just got a phone call from Oliver Sink. One of your bullets came through a window in his dining room. Now isn’t that nice? He’s just a little damn bit upset.”

“Oh, God. I’m sorry. God knows. Listen. I’ll just leave. I’ll leave, go on back to the college.”

The old man told me he didn’t want me to leave. This was an accident; he never meant for me to leave—looking at me uncertainly. We could talk. We could get along fine. I drank beer and skipped supper. When he came in the den I was tight enough to call Lala Sink, see if she was home for Christmas. I was at the phone when the old man came in. The Sink’s phone was ringing; but I hung up.

The old man told me a couple of whore jokes. I thought they were corny, but I laughed. Missy and her missing husband, Edna in the barrel at the dude ranch, etc. The tone was ribald, words and laughter were passing between us. I told him one. It was one of the jokes from the front-steps crowd back at Hedermansever. After the punch line, I looked at the old man and knew I had crossed the line.

“What did she say?” asked the old man.

I knew I couldn’t do the old woman’s line again, and the trembling voice was important. I repeated the line flat: “Them weren’t no sack of potato chips. Them were scabs off my—”

“You think that is funny? My lord!”

“I didn’t make it up.”

“Think of this: your mother was in the house when you told that story.”

“But.. aw, Happy New Year, Father.”

“Are you drunk?”

Since then, very little has passed between us except money.

Fleece was late coming back to school. We were well into “dead week,” the free time before final exams. A boy from Morton whose father was a pharmacist was selling amphetamines in the hall. He wore a canvas jacket with the hide of a yellow cat — house cat — sewn on the back. Above the hide, written in Magic Marker, was “Dead Cat,” with quotation marks, just like that. Morton, Mississippi, was a nasty mudflat where they killed chickens and drove them out in trucks. So I don’t guess the fellow could help it. He pointed to one vial of yellow pills bigger than the rest. They cost two bucks. “Them are the Cadillac of bennies,” he said. Truck drivers were known to take one of these and drive from Morton to California and back without shutting an eye. I bought one of them off him. I was behind in everything except drama class. He noticed me eyeing him. He stunk, as a matter of fact. I don’t think the cat hide had been tanned well.

“I don’t smoke nor drink,” he said.

“You killed that cat?”

“My front yard right at noon Christmas day. I hate a cat. Now I love a dog, but I hate a cat.”

“Did you shoot him?”

“Naw. I choked her — it’s a female — I choked her with my hands. We had two birds, two bluejays which we made a feedbox for in our yard. She killed one of them birds which my mother loved”. He saw my disgust. “It didn’t hurt. I didn’t choke her all the way. I hit her head on a phone pole. She was scratching me something terrible. That did her.”

“It was a pretty cat.”

“I know it. I sewed her right on. I know it’s pretty.”

I was looking out the dorm window when Fleece entered the yard. He carried his suitcase. The rain was drizzling down. His suitcase broke open. A gift in Christmas paper tumbled out, with some clothes. He cursed and hurled the clothes back in. The gift he kicked. It scudded and broke apart, trailing the ribbon. Leaving it, he sloshed on into the dorm.

“Your present is getting wet,” I said to him. He didn’t even say “hidee” like he used to. He went straight to the bed, snorting and hacking. The Hudson Bay flu was on him. “I’d better go get your present.”

“You can have it. It’s your sort of thing.”

I put on my raincoat, went down to the muddy lawn. There in the rain was the mess of cardboard and ribbons and poking out of it, a.22 long-barrel revolver, black as coal. I presented the gun to Fleece. It was the kind of gun which if you missed your shot, you could go over to what you were shooting at and whip it to death.

“I don’t want the bastard. My grandmother gave me fifty dollars for Christmas. We went to Florida again. General Creech hauled me downtown to buy something with it. The pistol seemed to be the best bargain in town. It’s of some faultless German make that pierces the heart of a chipmunk from eighty feet. I tried to look fulfilled when I gave them the fifty. The goddam Christmas carols on the store radio were donging my head off. I finally made it as a son to General Creech at that moment, I did. Lucky me. I’m sick. I’ve been faking good health for six days so my mother would let me come back.”

“I can’t just take the pistol.”

“Yes, you can. I don’t want it. I’m sick, but I’m happy, in a way. Listen: When we were in the house in Florida, Creech’s glasses fell off in the commode. He was drunk and didn’t know it; he sat on the pot, flushed it, and the glasses caused a stoppage. His own horrible sewage backed up on him and filled up the bathroom. He wouldn’t let any of us know what was happening. He said he was taking a shower. I saw his fingers covered with toilet paper wiping up around the slit under the door. The odor coming into the house was dreadful. He was completely blind and didn’t even know where or what he was wiping up. But all the while he was yelling to us that there was no trouble, he could take care of it, even though he was blind. And he did. He found the PineSol in some cabinet, reached down the commode and drug out the clot, including his glasses, put the glasses back on, and by the time he opened the door, he was standing there normal as ever. The bathroom was clean as a pin and threw out a vapor of PineSol that would murder any germ from a mile away. Go ahead and laugh. I myself had to admire him a little.”

Fleece’s green irises lit up with a sort of bleak cheer. I asked him if any of his stories ended any better than that.

“Yes. I have some other endings now. I was looking at hairy Allen Ginsberg, in The New York Times, thinking of myself in the garage, naked, seeking ecstasy like him, about how publicly I sought it, what Creech would’ve done if my mother hadn’t taken such care to quieten it, even while calling one of the three psychiatrists in Jackson, who later called the house because I didn’t show up; add to that the minister that I was at least supposed to see. I turned off the lights in the living room, loving the dark — it was three in the morning — although catching a cold; it was chilly. I drew out old pedro and let him lay in the air on my thigh in a sort of warming-up ceremony to the second anniversary of the afternoon in the garage. The thing perked up halfheartedly, while I was thinking about Bet Henderson, this huge girl who takes the zoology lab I teach; she — at first, I didn’t think it could be true — seems to be making a play for me….”

I turned to my wall. At the wall I grinned and winked like a fool. I knew who Bet Henderson was; had an English class with her. I saw her in the Fine Arts Building, too. She was taking private voice lessons. The girl was one of those larger-than-life statues of a woman, at least six feet two. Perhaps if I called on her with Fleece riding piggyback, there would be enough man for her. She smiled at me; the moments passing her were full of puny wanting. Fleece, I pictured then; he would drown in her breasts. She went around with a group of three troubled-looking small men, one of them a real auntie sort, who seemed embarrassed that you might think they were adventuring with her in a romantic way. Her shoes, I’d noticed, were in the mode, but were such long, huge things they looked like some specially manufactured travesty of the mode. The same thing was true of her dresses. Me oh my! Right in style, Villager prints of geese and weathercocks, but an almost absurd expanse of cloth. I don’t mean Bet was a laugh. She was well-made; her ankles were dear long things; her lap, when she crossed her legs, was a trim valentine of muscles, which the cloth could not hide. She had narrow, damp eyes, and gazed mainly at her own lap during classes. Her nostrils were large and exciting; and her lips pouted out like a red cushion some fevered boy could lay his head on. She was shy! And she was an agony. It was as if, being horny, you had had a chance to blow up your dream-object of lust in the form of a balloon and blew it up, what a shame, just too big. I remembered particularly the day in English 101 when I saw her smile at me with a sliver of tongue between her teeth. As a matter of fact I had thought of calling her up to meet me at some withdrawn place. Fleece was ruminating on about her making a play for him.

“I know who she is,” I said. He was explaining her to me as if reporting on the wilds of some lost geographic scape. “Don’t be overexcited. She smiled at me the same way, tongue between the teeth. I think she wants a team of us.” He ignored me.

“I didn’t encourage it at first. I thought she was simple-minded, this huge girl making her need for me so apparent She’d stay late and watch me smoke a cig. Then one day we found out talking together that that naked girl I saw doing the Twist through my telescope was her! I perspired. I knew then she was saying take it or leave it. I left it like that at Christmas. But back now, if I can get hold of this conversation: I was thinking of Bet in the dark, catching the Hudson Bay flu in only my pajamas, concerned about ecstasy, how going for that big girl was as public an announcement of seeking ecstasy as one could make. I stood up and I was dizzy. Stars were in my eyes and I accepted them as the stars I was among, being in a rocket of desire. I couldn’t breathe well. But I took this as a symptom of being in the stars above the atmosphere.

“I took a chance, Monroe. As I left my house, ill, I shouted, ‘I am on the make, Mother!’

“Either you have to live in the uterus, or you have to slam it shut with an uppercut,” he said after a pause.

Fleece told me a new story during finals about an “upper cut.” I doubt if he’d swung his arm ever in his life in anger, but he was taken by the image of an uppercut, and I think he wanted to drag it back to his past to see if he could get some theme out of his miserable life with it.

The time was a couple of years ago at that red brick Baptist church that he was expected to attend. The invitational hymn started, and he sneaked out to the front steps in a sort of adventuresome hate of the music and everything. He fell upon these redneck children who had sneaked out of church before him. Their shirttails were ripped out and their hooked-on neckties were barely hanging on, because they were going crazy tearing the berries off the nandina bushes and throwing them at each other. Fleece took offense and demanded that they stop, but they wouldn’t One of them threw a wad of berries in his face. He could not help himself. He dove at the child and crushed him with a tackle. The others came up, thinking it was a game, Fleece all dusty with one shoe off, but he was for real. He hurled a smaller one back in the bushes, and, spotting some long white neck, he drew back and hit this boy’s chin with an “uppercut” in a full wheel of his body. As he did that, church was over and General Creech and his mother were the first out on the steps. Hence, they saw him socking heedless at the children. The pastor came out and separated the angry parents of the children from Fleece. Fleece maintained that he would fight for the beauty of the nandina berries, and that he would hit other children and their parents if anybody wanted to tear off any more berries.

When he finally got to the car, with his lost shoe, his mother was crying piteously. She wanted General Creech to leave her and Fleece at the church so that they could see the pastor, who might, she cried, if it was not in the realm of the spirit, arrange a psychiatrist for Bobby Dove. It was then that Creech came through on Fleece’s behalf, suddenly and strangely. He explained to her a rule of life; number one: Contention is always going to break out. Number two was a point of legal description: there were many against one. True, Bobby was almost an adult, but opposing him had been at least seven human beings, small, but army ants are small and so is the coral snake. His mother dried her tears to this speech.

“And here I drive in that priceless free ‘uppercut’ to that kid,” said Fleece. He demonstrated the actual “uppercut.” It was a stilted, finicky gesture, but there was great passion in his eyes. His glasses had slipped down to the end of his nose, uncaging the happy evil in his eyes. I thought he looked like a puppet, again, some renegade puppet which had begged for human life so persistently that he got it.

Then later, in February or March, all clear of the Hudson Bay flu, he brought in a bottle of Mogen David wine — tart & greasy — and some paper cups. We drank the first glass, and he took off his Japan coat.

“Why are you here? I thought you practiced your horn this time of the afternoon. As a matter of fact, I didn’t want to share this wine. Didn’t want to open it yet, really.”

“I hate it, practicing any more. Give me another dip there. It’s not good but you feel it already.”

“I can’t. It’s for later tonight, with someone else.”

“Gimme some, you bastard. I need it. We finish this, then I take you out and I buy something else. I know I was rude last week when I said I didn’t want to listen to you any more. And listen, you’re not a bore. You’re interesting. C’mon, gimme. I think the problem is, you … speak above me. Hand her over, swear to God. You can say anything. I’ll just listen and drink.” I’d been thinking for an hour, all dry and bored.

He was holding and shielding the bottle from me. He’d given me the telescope, the pistol, the marijuana (which I was afraid of and hadn’t used), and, in fact, the freedom of his lab alcohol which was right there in one of the cigar boxes. But the wine was a more kindly thing and I was enraged that he wouldn’t give it to me. I darted at it, Fleece holding it high and low.

“It’s for her and me! A rendezvous at midnight. An actual rendezvous … to sip.”

“I’ll hit your little ass, then!”

He turned his back and I hit him angrily. He huddled over the wine. “She approached me today.” The huddling little coot was speaking on, and rather evenly, while I pounded his back like a spike. “She was in a wasted condition, wild and desperate. And, Monroe … stop beating me!” I stopped. “She asked. And I said: ‘Yes!’ I said ‘Yes!’”

I began pounding his back again. I told him he was a liar, a bag of hot air, that he lived in the realm of boring snot, etc. He only huddled there, uncomplaining, so I came to a disgusted rest, not even wanting the wine any more. But of course he spoke.

“I pity you, Monroe. Such a sad person. Just a violent drunk. You could take your place at any roadhouse in Mississippi and nobody would even look up. Just a violent tight is what you are. A one-cup-of-wine gladiator. Mississippi really needs more people like you. You could join the Ku Klux Klan and ride around at night beating up girls who teach the theory of evolution, or maybe stab a Negro imbecile in the back. Oh, and you’ve got your scholarship practically paying you to be like this, you’re such an investment to the college, because all the Hedermansevers and the other trustees of the school want out of you is that you become a weapon for the Lord, and you for sure with your style, with those kneeboots and your scarf and, oh certainly, carrying that pistol around, looking at it like it was a scientific breakthrough! and all this alongside that half-ass lease on music you think you have, being a creature of moods, you’re just more of a body than Mississippi could invent”

“Leave me alone. I’ve been mooning around for a month. I don’t know what to do.”

“One thing I still say,” said Fleece, capping the bottle, at ease. “You aren’t going to attract any nookie if you wear those boots and scarfs and costume. Now that I’ve got a little on the line, let me give you a little advice. Be a doctor. There isn’t any trade outside of being a minister that attracts nookie like a doctor. You could quit mooning around wanting to hit people. You could put all that mean funk of yours behind a microscope for a few years. It takes no great mind, really. Look at all the stupid doctors.”

“Thank you very much,” I said.

But I took the advice seriously later.

7 / “Fight! Fight! / Nigger and a White!”

— ANONYMOUS ALARM, c. 1956

In April one day I went to the post office. Every now and then there would be a free sample of soap or hair oil or the Dream of Pines newspaper, which I had never asked for. But I got a surprise. It was a formal invitation on a gold border.

The Beta Camina High School (Colored) Marching and Concert Band solicits the honor of your presence at Capitol Street, Jackson, Mississippi, for review of the Gladiators in formal parade competition, April the ninth, nineteen hundred and sixty-one, ten o’clock ante meridian.

H. J. Butte, Director

The Gladiator Band

Beta Camina, Mississippi.

That prosperous-sounding middle initial gave me a pause. Then I knew who it was. I wondered who else he had mailed these fine invitations to. Who were the big followers of jig bands in America? I thought of Harley penning that note, and I pitied him. The time he’d spent. Yet who gave a fig?

Fleece had been home the past weekend. When I saw him I invited him to go over and see the band with me. He told me that if he had to pick out the one variety of music he despised the most, it was Sousa. It was all just a wad of Prussianism and trombones. Then I told him that it was a Negro band which ought to be awfully good; that they were marching in a contest on Capitol Street. He perked up oddly. He took a newspaper clipping out of a book on his table.

“Look at this. I ripped it out before Creech got to it the other afternoon.”

The piece was a letter from “Our Reader’s Viewpoint” in a Jackson paper:

Honorable Mayor and City Council:

The parade permit you have granted to the Afracoon marching bands is a mistake. Mr. Mayor, you with your degree in Greek should of all people know that Jackson cannot do with having the projected parade and the swarms of irresponsible young negroes it is bound to attract along Capitol Street. Every sighted scholar of history and that race knows what an Afracoon festival generally turns into before the day is over. I am not so namby-pamby as not to mention that the cooties and lice will be fighting it out for predominant pestilence, which will linger behind for weeks, you can be sure. They will be hopping in our socks on the very steps of the grand Old Capitol we citizens reached in our tax-pockets to restore.

I wonder if even the Governor’s Mansion will be spared. I wonder if the Afracoon “fieamales” would not take time out from open fornication on the street and the Governor’s lawn to storm the doors and find the guest chamber and the pillow upon which Senator Kennedy once laid his head as a guest of Governor Coleman, (For once, don’t we Mississippians regret our famous hospitality?) so they might kiss this memento of their “celebrity” president. (Or has some official of integrity burned it, hopefully?)

I suggest incidentally that the Kennedys use their whiskey-millions and buy our Afracoons their own island and construct a swine-wallow the size of Capitol Street down the middle of it for parades. Perhaps some of our “Neegro” bandsmen and their camp followers would march on into the deep blue sea. I am confident that a navy of the Orkin exterminators could deal with the raft of cooties and louse-ridden banjos remaining afloat. Of the resulting slick of Royal Crown hair-straightener, we could only hope the wretched pollution would eventually find its way back to the beach of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and that Bobby and Jackie and Johnny and Teddy would see what it is like to sailboat in the voodoo sewage with which they want to drench this land.

With those who would rise and say “Never,”

Col. P. D. Lepoyster.

“It’s Whitfield Peter,” said Fleece. “Of the letters.”

“You never said he was a colonel. Colonel of what?”

“Oh, he was an honorary ‘colonel’ in Fielding Wright’s governorship years ago. I guess he gave money and influence to the campaign, whatever. When I saw his picture in the paper, this was explained under it”

“What picture?”

“A picture of him making a citizen’s arrest on some group of sit-in demonstrators outside of Walgreen’s, Capitol Street. He was just holding them until the police got there; as a matter of fact, a cop was advancing in the edge of the picture. Peter was planted there like a rock, rather states-manly. Oh, he’s quite a citizen, when anything ‘racial’ comes up. You’d think he’d had an operation where they put a police radio in his head. But do you realize this is the first time since?”

“The first time since?”

“That letter is the first time I’ve heard him speak directly since that night in front of my teacher’s house he threatened me about having the letters.”

The day of the parade we drove over in the morning and made a little affair out of it. Fleece had his camera, a Japanese mistakeless thing that looked damn near like a typewriter. I was carrying my hardware also, the pistol. I’d had a wild hair about the day, and so I’d brought it. I wasn’t sure why Fleece had come. He bit his hands. We were passing the Hickory House on West Capitol. I told him really, Harley’s band ought to be good. He could stand it.

“Oh, no. Oh, simple ass,” he said. “I was thinking about my camera. I was thinking about where or when I might see him to get a shot, looking around at the goddam miserable light in case I could get one anywhere, and I just saw that bastard.” He slapped my coat pocket. “Let me out.”

I pulled over and stopped the car. I didn’t care. It was all right with me just then if I never heard the moaning or the disgust or the imprecations from Fleece ever again.

“You can’t walk around with a pistol, you rube.”

Then I told him to get out. He seemed surprised, but tried to hide it by slumping carelessly in the seat. He wasn’t getting out. And when he spoke, after I drove on, he changed his voice into a more equable tone.

“The pistol is just there, Fleece,” I said. “I don’t have to use it. It makes me feel like something may be coming any minute. I walk around, you understand, watching out turn after turn, like I was in a wild country. It sets a light on the things or people I see. I see what I see in the light of what it might be if I pulled out the gun, and what things would do, how things would change.”

“You talk like you want to discover a country, is the hopeless thing,” said Fleece, in the new tone of an impartial observer. “You’ve been reading about that Indian. But, although it’s true you look like Hernando DeKotex with the swamp boots, you ought to know that Mississippi has already been discovered, and that… it’s enough of a rectangle of poor woe without you putting on that costume and pistol roaming around out of some pageant of gunslinging. They could use you in the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a salute-shooter at the cemetery in their birthday of the Civil War service. I thought it was funny you scaring that organist with a pistol. But I don’t think it’s funny you carrying it around ever after.”

“Another thing I want to settle,” I said. I was fed up. “Whichever tone of voice you take, I don’t want to hear so much of it, for godsake.”

We’d just passed the King Edward Hotel. Fleece had been almost deathly quiet. Suddenly he said to pull over. I could go where I wanted to but he was where he wanted to be. I found a parking space. Bobby Dove took out a pair of snap-on sunglasses and fixed them on his regular hornrims.

“All right.” He urged his nose up to test them, and I could tell he was unable to see much. As he’d complained a few minutes ago, the light today was dismal; there were odd cloud strands the color of coal in the sky — odd for April, I mean. “I bale out. See me at Al’s Half Shell in an hour if you want to see a scared mother.”

“Where do you think you are?”

“Just beyond Peter’s real estate office. There was an ‘open’ sign on it. He might remember me, but I want a shot of him head-on, to go with the letters. I’ve almost forgotten what the old pecker looks like.” Fleece embraced the camera and opened the door.

“He ran at you with a belt, Bob,” I told him, getting out myself. Fleece looked terribly small with that elaborately sensitive camera clutched to him, and in the sunglasses.

“No gunslingers. Go on.”

I sat back in the car, took out the pistol, put it under the seat, with Fleece watching. All ready to escort. I wanted to look at the man myself. Fleece began walking toward the narrow box of glass which was Peter’s office front, and I came up. In the window was a showcase, with reading material laid on a display board. One item invited you to buy a lot on a lake in beautiful Canton Harbors, Madison County, and here is the number you dial; to one side of the other display literature was the front page of a newspaper called “The Paleface Roll-Caller.” Nearby it was an outstretched page of the Jackson paper with the letter in “Our Reader’s Viewpoint” circled in brown ink, the same shade as in the letters from Whitfield, but I’d already read the newspaper letter and went back to “The Paleface Roll-Caller.”

Half of the front page was occupied with a history of “The Paleface Roll-Caller.” The editor was a simple gentleman farmer from Alabama who had never thought of putting a newssheet together until one winter he was at a convention of Big Dutchman farm machinery dealers in Chicago and was walking along minding his own business when a Negro dope addict asked him for five dollars, and when he refused, in his natural Alabamian accent, the Negro pulled out a sharpened “church-key” on him and called him a “paleface.” The Negro told him to call his friends too, because he wanted to cut them up as well. The Alabamian began shouting for his life, but, though the opposite sidewalk was covered with white citizens, no man came to his aid. The Negro laughed and told him he had no friends. He told the Alabamian that he wasn’t worth cutting, and, leaving casually — this criminal — he told the Alabamian that he knew some “intelligent” palefaces that, before the day was over, would not only give him the money he needed, but would, one of those women palefaces, remove his sordid rags and kiss him all over the duration of his heroin spell. This was in Chicago, U.S.A. The editor had never seen the Situation like this before. He’d been too simple. Now he had seen the Situation. Even though he lost money on “The Paleface Roll-Caller,” it must appear.

It was time to go in if we were going in, and we did. Fleece had the camera up ready to snap and run, but there was no one in the front room. There was a carpet and three chairs and a table, with more reading matter on it, but no Whitfield Peter. I sat down and took up another copy of “The Paleface, etc.” The same history was on the front page. Apparently a permanent space was given over to it every issue. On the rest of the front page, I read about JFK, how Secret Service men had to drag him out of one Harlem brothel after another; and about a “certain gynecologist” in D.C. who had performed a number of abortions while Jackie was a gadabout reporter, pre-JFK. Other articles spoke of grassroots upheaval in the Catholic Church if it continued to hang the threat of excommunication over certain white patriots in Louisiana. Another harked back with some incoherent curse against Eleanor Rooseveltstein. The last returned to Jackie. Her nose was as “Semitic” as the nose of Lady Bird Johnson, wife of a key traitor among the Democrats. There was some bad spelling in the paper, but it was a wonder of consistency. Bobby Kennedy, who had so many children he didn’t know what to do besides dance and sleep with Jackie, had recently met with Negro “leaders,” and made a secret promise of billions to them. Jackie had had her influence.

“Somebody’s back there,” said Fleece. There was a room off the narrow hall in the back. I hadn’t noticed the light. A shadow burst out against the opposite wall. I was frightened too. I started bellowing, putting it on.

“Shitfire, finally the truth! Everything in this paper’s the real god rightout trooth! All of it, ever shitfire comma!”

Peter came out in a wide, lank wool suit colored like a speckled eggshell. It was in a style which had never either come or gone, as far as I knew. At last I saw his face. There were locks of grayish tan hair, parted high, and the actual face was flushed like a doll’s, red cheeks and lips and also the ears. There was the mask of a pretty, babyfat boy behind the whiskers, the crow’s-feet wrinkles at the eyes, and the liver spots; there was a vulgar trapped boy in his face, and he horrified me. I couldn’t move. I saw he was thinking that we were rednecks.

“The truth always has good manners,” he said. This was the first time I heard him speak. He was scolding me. But his voice was so pleasant it would put you to sleep. There was none of that hateful Southern yap in it. We got up and left, in fact, to the soothing ring of it.

Out on the street, Fleece was shivering. I was such an amateur about cameras, I thought the camera might’ve worked somehow by itself. I asked Fleece if he had gotten the shot.

“Hell no. When he came in, I turned the thing upside-down.”

I drove up to Lamar Street, couldn’t find a space, and finally found one on Pearl, behind the post office building. We walked around the porch of the building. Being on Capitol Street again, we sat down, on the post office steps. On the curbs it was solid spades, young and old. Fleece was wearing his camera in case he saw something, but he was not hopeful. As for me, knowing his mind was still on Peter, I’d slipped the gun out from under the carseat and dropped it in my raincoat.

I’d never seen so many Negroes together at one time. You could smell a high character of smoking fish in the air. We stood up when the first band came down. On the steps like this we could see. The colored girls would walk with the bands. They had on sweaty bobbysox and pointed witch lace-ups like the fad at Dream of Pines two years ago. I was looking at their ankles as they tried to break into the line of spectators to see their band. Some just followed the band on the sidewalk. One group was four-across, doing the skip-and-kick for school spirit, and they created a jam coming down the sidewalk.

The first four bands had snaky ranks and played very loud, with majorettes desporting on their own, each a star in a separate audition; and this held true for some of the musicians too. I saw a tuba man doing a private jazz ballet and skiffle to the march, his eyes closed, and dancing off into the spectator ranks before he opened his eyes and found out where he was. Then we saw him and his huge instrument running after his band. A small boy ran after him slapping his pants like he was a stray dog. The crowd in front of the post office put up a cheer. Up till now it had been Count Basie set to march-time, and shallow in arrangement.

“This is awful!” said Fleece. “You hear that a nigger has rhythm, and these bands are making a fraud out of that.” I was absorbed in the way the bands kept tooting away and falling apart One drum major who was using his band as a moving, undulating yellow backdrop was hopping and slithering and even doing flips on the pavement, grinning, and confident that we were seeing him in black relief, as we were. At the peak of arrogance he would throw his baton.

There were quite a few whites standing on the steps with us. That arrogant drum major’s baton shot up some forty feet in the air, spinning, and we watched it come down at his skinny body, wishing — if the crowd was with me — that it would crash on his teeth and take some of that prissiness out of him. But he caught it mid-twirl in an even more arrogant act, looking sideways away from it and catching it in a strut, as if ignoring it altogether.

“Look at them jump! Look at the niggers jump!” said a man on the higher step behind me. This man wore a big felt hat The hat seemed to have started out as a full cowboy venture, had a wide brim, but it was crushed deep across the crown like somebody had slammed it with a crowbar. It was beige with a gray band. The fellow’s suit was a speckled beige sort of wrap. The pants rolled out like curtains. Then I caught the face. I jerked my face away. Then I nudged Fleece.

“Look behind me.”

“Great God. Him. How fast did he fly this far up Capitol Street.” Fleece put on the snap-on sunglasses again. “I’ m going to step up two steps and see if I can shoot a profile. Don’t move or look his way.”

Peter had been hollering all the while.

“Give that coon a spear!” he called, about the drum major. “Did you ever think you’d see Jackson so full of jungle bunnies?! I’ll tell you what the problem is going to be. The problem is going to be getting this trash out of town once this honky-tonk jamboree is over. It’s going to be dogs and hoses, my friends…. You call that out there marching? What we’re looking at is a Mau-Mau rehearsal. These Afra-coons have been given dope, you can tell by their eyes. You know who’s in town?” I felt his hand brush my shoulder. I felt ill. Kept my face forward. “Martin Luther Coon, that’s who. Don’t tell me I didn’t see a black Cadillac full of silk-suit jigaboos riding up and down Capitol this morning,” he challenged me. I did not swerve. Out of the corner of my eye, his hat and suit seemed frighteningly large. The suit seemed to flare at me. All I could tell was that he appeared to have no special friends on the steps. But there was a cop leaning on the pole at the curb, and he turned around, looking over the Negro heads at the bands. Peter made a motion and the cop gave him a smile and put his hands up to his ears.

“You know who that is?” Peter had drawn right up to my ear, although I looked away. His breath touched my neck. “That’s Victor. He knows me.”

“Magnificent,” I said. By then Victor was not there any more. Peter stood on the step directly in front of me. Over his big hat, I could see the hats of the bandsmen and little else.

“I got old Pete. Twice,” whispered Fleece, stepping down next to me. “Once he took his hat off and I caught him. The fruity-cheeked old soldier of Eros, bellowing away.” I pointed to the hat in front of me.

A band came on with rowdy syncopated drumming and choreographed trotting and sudden oblique marching, with the majorettes doing swaggers and shimmies that they would never repeat the same way again. I moved over to watch them. There was a fellow with a clipboard kneeling on the pavement I suppose he was a judge. When the end majorettes saw him, they went berserk, doing the mashed potato, rearing up and down so as to reveal faded sateen panties under their uniforms. Peter howled something charged with revulsion, took off his hat, and waved it back and forth across my field of vision, as if to knock down the musical notes like flies.

A small black-uniformed band came down then. They had the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Mississippi State flag flying out front. They were a meek little unit, all boys, and they gave out a lonely, thin sound, “Onward Christian Soldiers,” stressfully, but flat and wheezing. Fleece elbowed me.

“A hymn on the march?! I’m absolutely limp. Where’s the organ? If my mother ever led a band this would be it Look at that slave playing oboe! That’s her musical dream of me! This has to be the Gladiators. You ass. I don’t think they’re funny.”

“No, they aren’t.”

Whitfield Peter was standing at brace, following the American, Christian, and Mississippi flags with his eyes. He held his big felt hat over his heart in the layman’s salute. I had seen earnest old fellows do it when the flag appeared in the Shriner’s parade in Shreveport.

Peter was braced there, nobody around him owned a hat, and his pants whipped as a cold wind blew downstreet from the Old Capitol. Somebody laughed at him. There was a long gap in the parade, then along came some more bands, sincere but puny. You could imagine them as the heralds corps for a Moorish children’s crusade. Peter had apparently been preparing a speech to the crowd of whites on the post office steps. He dropped the hat to his side and addressed himself to the right, where the laugh had come from.

“No, gentlemen, I am not ashamed to salute the flag of my country. The heartbreak and the shame is that you and I have less of a choice every day about who holds that banner. Yet we stand here…. Yet we are constrained … we are the constrained …” Either he had been weeping or his eyes were purple with emotion. He put a handkerchief to his mouth. From this side he looked older. His left hand was hanging down at his watchchain like a punctured udder. I was sure I could knock him around if I wanted to,

“Another letter to the editor,” said Fleece. Then we forgot him.

Harley’s tremendous green band swung around the corner in front of the pinkish bricks of the Old Capitol. That’s three blocks from where we stood, but up a slope, and I saw Harley with them, like a tan lollipop in an all-white suit and, sweet Jesus, a short-billed British helmet of canvas. Easy, easy, they came down, the lazy dragon-body of them almost never finishing its turn down toward us. The shakos and the plumes stood ten across. Spectators on both sides of the street had to retreat to the sidewalks, and I saw Harley using his arms to spread the crowd back as the band marked time. There was no music from them yet. Just the drums. The patient boiling holocaust of the drums. They went deep into the concrete and you could feel them through your shoes. I noticed the fine sand of the street gutters rise in a sheen. There were three other bands in front of Harley’s, knocking and tooting their hearts out, but his drums were going right through them and under them.

Then the Gladiator band had its way cleared free and wide. Harley made a motion to the drum major, and the band oozed down towards us, no hurrying this green monster, still leisurely, eight steps to five yards, the drums still holding back, but like a hungry tiger in a rotting net; and yet no music. Harley walked with them on the opposite side from me. He was not in step, this being the director’s privilege. Neither did he seek any lead or spotlight, merely escorting the head rank of brass in this green-suited musicians’ army. We saw at last its people and its beaming metal. Brass mirrors in phalanxes, and on back in the multitude, waves of tubes at arms, three lines of every kind of percussion and behind them the three lines of tubas, like caves about to spout fire, walking toward you. They had the faces of a dead-eyed Ethiopian corps, so damned certain about the outcome of whatever they were marching toward, or against, that they hadn’t even raised their weapons yet You did not think of sixteen-year-old boys and girls of the colored high school when they came down.

All of them were snobs. They were such snobs a delicate judge might have counted off for it: they were too stiff, too certain, too proud, and too callused from being proud, riding too casually along, too confidently with that corps of drummers bombing down on what sounded like a hide stretched over the Grand Canyon.

My eyes went back to Harley. He had brought them down to the head of our block now, still their humorless lackey, Director Butte. But — maybe his white suit and helmet put this across — you saw his short red-brown beard and the mouselike cunning in the eyes, and you saw now the control he bore over this green immensity of snobs: the control of a mouse over an elephant, say. Then he proved it. He put his right hand in the air.

A piece of chrome jumped up in the air, some cannons erupted down the mouth of a cavern, the brassware pipes stood up all at once, and we were looking up throats of gold and silver as far as we could see. The bottom fell out of the street.

I had that lonely, stranded, breathless feeling I’d had once before, watching Jones’s band from under the bleachers, when I was a sneak and a twerp, in 1950. But it was much changed now, now that I knew music, now my heart had room for it, now I had grown an ear that could pick out mistakes of technique and tone, and I could not be washed clear off my post by fear of music as in the old days.

I tell myself this fraudulent blab about my musical progress. The verities are that I was washed away again, ripped off, out, away, and that for me even to name the march they let loose is impossible, the same as it’s impossible for a man drowning, waves blasting him, to pronounce the name of the ocean he’s in. When I got back to my post with my mind, they were half through the march and almost upon us. One resents being knocked out by musical teenaged children when one has earned oneself a purchase on cool, and I came back very skeptical about the Gladiators. But still they were a scare, a magic scare, even if you hated Sousan music. They were not overcharged or too tinny or loud in the brittle way bands are when they’re trying to make up for shallow talent. Talent went deep in this band. The third-part harmony boys were making it on trumpet and trombone; the clarinets, saxophones, and flutes were all making it. The basses were making it, way under everything, with restrained mastery, so you never heard them pumping at the notes but sensed something moving wild at the bottom of the world. A few trumpet men played a melody of sixteenth notes an octave over everything, and all in tune (which H. Monroe, trumpet man, would have been hard-pressed to do, sorry to confess). They were cutting Jones’s band. They were as thorough an orchestra as I’ve ever seen or heard off the stage. Music so big; and they were, incredibly, carrying it down the street with them.

“The idea of a contest is a farce with them here, isn’t it?” Fleece said.

I was concentrating on Harley again. He was a bit forward of the band. How, Harley? I wanted to know, what kind of threat have you hung over them in so few months to get these pubes to play like this? Harley was less nonchalant than he had been. He had his eyes closed; in fact, he smiled, and was enjoying the hell out of his band.

The gallery on his side was solid black skin, five deep. The smallest children were in the front row, and they were scared to death but having a fine time. I observed a big strange hat moving up behind the kids. Next thing I knew there was Whitfield Peter, with his hands over the shoulders of a tiny Negro. The child shot out of the spectator line at an odd angle, turning like a top. He knocked into Harley’s legs and both Harley and the child went down on the pavement. You knew the kid had been pushed then. The big hat of Whitfield Peter rioted up and down and I saw him trying to get back through the blacks, but he was held there by the mass of them. In fact, he was bounced out in the gutter, and by that time Harley was on him, head to head, he knew who had pushed the child, and he back-handed Peter in the face, knocking the big hat a long ways back into the gallery, then stopped abruptly in the middle of the next blow. By then the band cut us off from the scene, but they gave in our direction, marching around the fight. Then a euphonium was raised by a player on the other end of the line, and the thick horn fell like an ax. I saw the eggshell-suited body sprawl at the end of the euphonium line. Harley flashed out ahead of the band, double-stepping and adjusting his helmet. He had sooty marks on the back of his uniform. I looked for Victor the cop, who was not at the pole any more.

Fleece and I caught up and began walking alongside the Gladiators, as I’d planned anyway, so as to meet Harley at Parade’s end in front of the King Edward. We were hustling. Fleece told me he’d shot twice at the fight, but he didn’t know what would come out, he didn’t have the shutter-speed for an actual fight.

About at the Heidelberg Hotel, I looked across the street and — I’d thought I caught something disturbing the gallery — there was old Peter walking parallel to Harley too, screaming. Peter had found the hat, but his face was botched and you could tell he’d been wocked by that horn. His suit was smudged and ripped. Peter got in step with Harley and mimicked his posture, but Butte was the heedless Prussian. Peter couldn’t stand this. The gallery was much thinner now, and I saw every move. Peter was gathering his mouth to shout something at Harley but just then the band lit into “Washington Post” inhumanly, a drastic sound that blurred sight and made human voices into a squeak. I thought I could pick out Peter’s squeaking across the street, as he stayed even with Harley.

All at once Whitfield Peter put his hand into the breast of his coat. I knew he was going for a gun; it did not occur to me that he could be reaching for anything but a gun, my forehead was hot with knowing this; but something could be done because he had missed yanking his gun out the first time, whereas I already had mine out and was almost to the middle of the street since I knew I could hit nothing from the distance I was from him on the sidewalk, and if I got there in time there might be no gunfire at all. Then Peter saw my gun out, and his not even drawn. Fleece was right with me—“Don’t! Idiot!”—huffing away. It was a mistake. Peter had nothing, or only a big handkerchief, on his second draw. Fleece knelt and pretended to be getting some camera shots of the Gladiator band, and I passed the gun very subtly back into my coat pocket. Apparently no one had seen. We faded back off the street. Fleece’s trifurcated chrome-ringed instrument aided in the ruse. He seemed to be railing technical observations to me, when of course what he was doing was scolding me to blister a slut I had nothing to say. There were cops all over down here at the end of the parade. They had billy clubs at the casual. Whitfield Peter was gone.

We made our way to the front of the King Edward. The Gladiators treaded time to the drums, whose volume ballooned out into the Illinois Central overpass. Finally they cut off, whoooommmpp! and you could’ve sliced the silence with a knife. Harley signaled the disbandment. The players turned toward us and massed at the hotel door. I couldn’t believe how ordinary and small they looked. They pranked around and barked at each other in that private nigger English you couldn’t understand. There were several girls among the Gladiators, too, jammed into green pants and double-breasters with the rest of them. The sweat on a couple of necks was another surprise. Then Harley came up. He held his helmet. With the other hand he had a euphonium-player in tow. The boy was telling Harley, “I gan outa control,” almost crying. “You little sonuvabitch, you’da been watchin the music … you don’t mind about me, you hear?” The boy was a head taller than Harley. Harley cast him away violently, and the boy ran ahead to the door. Harley turned back to look again.

I told Harley we’d seen everything. “He’s crazy. He’s been in Whitfield.” He seemed consoled a bit to see me. Then we went through the hotel door with him.

“Wherever he is, his head ain’t any better now. That boy busted him on it with his horn, I mean hard, and he fell down on the road and right on his head.”

“You hit him,” said Fleece. “I took a picture of that” Fleece was only making a technical point, as he often did. But Harley looked at the camera distraughtly. “No, I mean he deserved it. I guess,” said Fleece.

“What the hell you mean by I guess?” I demanded of Fleece.

“I didn’t know he was a white man till I hit him,” said Harley.

“All I meant was that a fight is unfortunate. Somebody’ll carry it on,” said Fleece, trying to make up. “This damn place was built out of long memory.”

“He knows. That boy knows,” said Harley. “That Whitfield man followed me for a mile screaming at me.”

“What’d he say?”

“Ah, all about my daddy, my daddy, who was my daddy? Everybody thinks they’re the first sonuvabitch to notice I’m not a true nigger.”

The pause after this was charged with gloom all around. Harley’s beard was almost black with sweat. The helmet seemed to hang at his leg like a wilted trophy.

“He was so crazy he was stone-deaf, that man,” Harley broke the gloom. “Anybody that heard that band, they couldn’t … You heard my band.” He smiled dreamily, beyond me.

“Yes—”

“Aw, my ass. Look in there.” He put the helmet on. What he meant was that his bandsmen were standing all over the edge of the lobby and jamming up the hotel walk-through instead of moving on to the buses waiting outside as they were supposed to. The Gladiators, tubas set on the floor and brass and woodwinds jabbing around, brown faces wandering, were crammed everywhere, back to the plate glass of the souvenir shop and down the granite hall flush against the registration counters, on back to the airlines service. We passed some white couples holding newspapers who were getting out, in a rage. Some of the girls sat in the old plush chairs and couches; a few bandsmen were flirting with the water fountains — for whites only, like the whole hotel. Harley found the drum major, a big boy with his fur hat still on, dragging his braid-wound baton on the carpet. He dressed the boy down in some quiet gnashing language. The boy blew the whistle and made an epical gesture with the baton, shagging toward the rear revolving door. The Gladiators gathered into file quietly; there had never been much noise, anyway. Now they were a sagging retreat of children barely able to hold up their brass. Harley seemed satisfied with them again.

We were next to the men’s room. The door flew open and Peter rammed out He’d cleaned himself up. His hair was oily with water, his nose was bright, but he was purple about the forehead and an ear. The big hat he fended about was more of a bag now. I wet my pants when he came out shouting.

“You fellows help me get these cooties out of this hotel. Do they think this is Washington Dee Cee? Kick into them. Thrust them!” he said, doing unfinished demonstrations of these acts. Then he saw Harley, whom he had overrun. He jerked back.

“Mutt! Treacle!”

He began swatting Harley with his hat “What did you say, you banjo?”

Fleece was at my ear, hand on my arm. “Don’t,” he said. The fact was it seemed like a sissy theater performance. Harley waved at the blows glibly, as if Peter was a gigantic gnat, but only a gnat. Some of the bandsmen were looking back and halting. At the height of the attack, Harley somehow jerked his head and they shuttled on.

“What did you say? Liar! Smuthead! Coon-beard!”

“I said if you would turn around you could see my band was nearly ‘bout out of this hotel and I said I never meant them to stop here. And if you’ll put your hat back on your head, I’ll put mine on too and we’ll never see one another again, Mister White Man. I’m sorry that we ran in—”

“That thing?!” shouted Peter, sneering at the helmet “Yes, do put that fancy thing on your head.” Harley did. “But did you hear the ed-u-kay-shun squirt out of the high-yellow tadpole? Would you look at that helmet? Look at that beard. This one’s hardly left a place for being a nigger.” He struck off the helmet with his hat. Harley caught the helmet. Six or seven white people were looking at them from the Delta Airlines booth. Harley began edging away. I looked beyond the people at the booth, and here were two cops coming in the front, being led by one of those women with newspapers. Peter saw them. He reached out and caught Harley. “No, sir, Mister Neegro. I believe you’ll stay until the police—”

“We can’t stay,” Fleece whispered to me. “You won’t keep your mouth shut and they’ll get you with the pistoL We can’t.”

I told him I was staying. Fleece hightailed it along the edge of the hall, then rode the revolving door out, disappearing like spun-off slat from the door — a hilarious thing, actually. But my own nerves broke with the cops approaching. I felt the gun was murmuring like a toad in my pocket I couldn’t wait here, not even silently. So I did much the same thing as Fleece, even more breathlessly, because I knew the cops were closer on my back. I was thinking about being caught by them in the slat position against the revolving door, maybe being unable to detach from the door and whirling around again, pistol slinging out and clattering right under their feet… but I got out free, and by the time I was out there, I was feeling utterly lousy about the whole thing. Fleece was nowhere around the rear driveway. I decided, all right, I’ll stay here. No further.

Five minutes, and a new black Cadillac full of colored men in suits drove out of a lot across the street and entered the hotel driveway, coming to rest in front of me. The glass went down, the driver spoke.

“Did you see a colored man with a helmet and white uniform, with a beard? Look like a band director?”

“He’s inside with the law and another man.”

“That white man with that hat?”

I told them yes. They rolled up the glass. After a minute they drove back across the street and parked at the mouth of the lot. Deeper in the lot sat the four long yellow buses full of the Gladiators.

Harley finally came out, by himself. He saw me and he looked miserably weary, with a tiny sneer, like that was all he had left. He flicked the helmet; some snap of disgust for me in that, I thought.

“I wanted to stay but I couldn’t—”

“I didn’t need you, little Harry. One of those cops, named Victor. He saw the man push the kid at me, and he told it. There wasn’t anything to it That was all, except for that Whitfield man.” Harley smiled. “He went crazy all over again when I told that cop, Victor, I understood this man had been in Whitfield and I was ready to call it even. That man went all to raving, swinging that hat, wanting to know just how I thought I knew that”

For the first time I got Peter’s face together with the Whitfield letters in my mind: the purple bruise of the forehead, the severe hat, among the lines of brown ink prose, and there, his wife lying on the prose as if on thorns, tortured all to moving every which way.

“—but you just think about that horn. You don’t need to get in trouble,” Harley was saying. That black Cadillac in the parking lot honked. I walked over with him.

“That slick one, he owns that car. He’s the principal of the school. Now you know what he wants? My band, he wants my band. The man couldn’t find the key of C if it came in a bag, but he sure do want this suit I got on. We drove a hundred miles up here with the air conditioning on, all us freezing, while that genius was explaining the principle of why we needed it, said science dictated that a number of bodies together gave off heat which the air conditioner was equalizing, and he wants to take over my band.”

When we got to the car, they were holding up their hands for us to be quiet. I could hear the radio announcer out of the rear speaker, recognized the station as WOKJ, the colored station in Jackson. You could get B. B. King and a lot of other fine pluckers and honkers on it, and on Sundays, “Ain’t No Flies on my Jesus,” “Little More Jesus, Little Less Rock-and-Roll,” and “Crazy Stranger, Where Yo Home?”

While the announcer was still going, Butte whispered, “I made the band. Now he says he wants me to go off for two years to earn my Master of Music degree so as to deserve this band. Try to get a hold of that He took a correspondence course in music over the Christmas holidays, so he says he could fill in, in my absence. He also told me I might be outlined for a better place than Beta Camina.”

“I think he’s right, there.”

The people in the car began applauding lightly.

“The man said it. We won again,” said the principal. The radio had been announcing the parade winner. Harley got in the back seat, crowding over. One of the men shook hands with him. The principal, with his arm crooked over the door, looked me over before they rolled off.

“Who is that?” he said, speaking right at me.

“He’s from my home. A musician friend,” Harley spoke from the back seat.

“I thought it was Roy Rogers. He got boots. He got a pistol pokin’ out his pocket.”

I had been cramming the gun down in my raincoat so long to assure its secrecy, I guess I made a hole in the old thing. The whole barrel was out. The principal drove off in distaste, carrying Harley; then the buses rambled past me. In the back window of the last one, two of the Gladiators were giving me the finger.

I walked the long way up to my car. I cranked the motor and Fleece sat up in the well behind me.

“Guess what?” he said. Something precious was coming. “No, you guess what. I couldn’t help it. They came for me. I cut them down in flame, Peter first. Peter crawled over to the wall and wrote fuck on it in his own blood. It seemed to be an ultimatum.”

“Ass!.. but not bad, though. ‘An ultimatum.’ I was lying here telling myself, if Monroe gets back, we’ve got to steal the rest of his letters. Because I didn’t get him.”

“What?”

“I got no pictures of him. When I was running out of the hotel I was trying to take the roll out so no matter what happened, I’d have the pictures, but the spool got away from me and unrolled out on the sidewalk.”

“That wonderful camera, and you drop the film.”

“But at least we’ll get the rest of the letters. I don’t want to get close enough to him to take any more pictures … but we’ll figure out a day when he’s away from his house …”

I remembered that, in the hotel, I had avoided looking at Peter as often as I could. In fact, I’d held my hands to my face when he was there. It was too embarrassing a horror to see him directly, all beaten up, the face of the letters.

8 / Sliding

I was being faded out of music, “serious” music, I mean, and didn’t know it. The professors were running me out of the field. I bought a new coat made out of reptile leather over at a sale at Gus Mayer ($150, even so). And I wore it, it was full spring and getting warmer, but I wore it, thinking now I am ready. I didn’t know for what, quite, but I suspected there was evil weather ahead. Fleece attempted to ignore the coat for a week. I did wonder about the figure I was cutting, and asked him what he thought. He told me I looked like an endlessly mean queer, which he had been patiently waiting to say that week, I bet, knowing I was uncertain about the coat. However, there was a bleached-blond girl who played flute in the Jackson Symphony who was excited about the coat and declared to me, during the symphony recess, that I looked like an Indian prince. This was Patsy Boone, a freshman at Millsaps College, and she was nobody’s beauty — after the popping blue eyes and the nice teeth, just a piece of skirt, it seemed — but she had pleasant, stunning things to say about me. I took the solo of the “Habanera” once, in the absence of the first-chair trumpet. During the recess she found me and pressed my arm. She said she almost couldn’t stand it while I was playing. Something had happened to her, body and soul, which she couldn’t discuss just now.

So, at the next rehearsal, I was playing along at fourth part, swelling with new zest, and I got in trouble with the violist who sat in front of the trumpets. He was a professor of music at Belhaven College, a girls’ school in Jackson. He told his other violist friend that I sounded like a cow stepping in its own pies. I heard this, and told him I would get him for it. He had a loud voice and others had heard him. The jackass was six foot three and could’ve beaten me to a pulp just defending himself. But he called the police about my threat, and I got a call on the floor telephone in the dorm from the captain at the Jackson police station telling me this violist had bolted his doors and was trembling in his house with a shotgun.

He never showed up at rehearsals as long as I came. Manino, the conductor — a lean sissy who’d made a reputation down South on the violin — decided he needed the violist more than me and kicked me out with a quiet explanation about how, if the truth were known, I did every now and then sound like a Mexican calling the bulls. I packed up and told symphony work goodbye. I walked out of Murrah auditorium, heard the orchestra plunge into “Polovtsian Dances” without me, and with no lacking in the brass section; heard no dismay over my absence; everybody was bright on his notes, the percussion were ripping and jangling in my bones so I felt like a drunk gypsy, the French horns were husky and Slavic, and the strings carried the dances with that sadness strings still carry, no matter what gay dance they play.

I lay down in my T-bird. My eyes were wet, and I had to drag out the old handkerchief, looking out at those silvery streetlights on Highway 51, and over at the Ole Miss medical center, its new spring campus rising toward the lights, its big lazy trees, its rolled green. You felt that the moon in the blue was the old drawing master of it all. Goodbye Bach, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Manfredini, Mozart, Vivaldi, Purcell, and Borodin, I was thinking. Then I sat up and told all European music to go to hell.

I had jazz and miles of blues and an endless trek of rhythm in me. I got my shades out of the glove compartment and put them on, even in the night Then I went sailing away, in a thunder of leaking mufflers. Let the gas and the ass spill, no top on my car. The young May wind took all sweat and all tears off me, and Jackson was a deep greenery with intersections of orange and gray, by what showed through my shades.

I didn’t tell Livace about being kicked out of the symphony. He was my instructor and he’d gotten me the place. He used to be first chair with the symphony, but now he didn’t have the time. When he sent me over, he told me what I ought to do was listen for a couple of years. I asked him why I would need to carry my horn over with me. He said I should finger the notes and think the tones. I could actually play at forte markings and above. This was the way he had learned, with the Minneapolis Symphony, and when he’d begun actually playing, he never missed a note or was out of tune and moved swiftly up to first chair. Among the musicians of Minneapolis, it was known that he had never missed a note or tone. I thought of Livace as a statue of a man with a trumpet to his lips in some cold Minneapolis park.

At first I couldn’t figure why Livace didn’t have the time to play with the symphony any more. He was another Italian who dragged his darling fathomlessly intricate culture around with him, like a tail; he was Catholic, he had to drive to Jackson for mass, since there was no Catholic church near Hederman sever, and his weak old De Soto stalled out on him perpetually, but further than that, he was scared, and I knew it One day in his office, he was so scared that he spoke to me as if I was his last friend. To get his doctorate in music he had borrowed money from the Mafia. Now he had a family and could afford to pay back, at the most, only two-thirds of the monthly note they wanted; there was quite an interest on the loan. He knew he wasn’t sending his payments to people who sat around in offices writing letters to him about how much he was lacking. He expected that, at the least, one day he would come to this office and there would be an angry muscular creature laying for him. Livace kept one of those giant economy bottles of aspirin on his desk and ate from it — he always ran a fever, you could see it in his ears. He looked something like Sid Caesar, the comic, and like Sid, sweat and fever were his realm. One afternoon he wanted me to take his monthly payment to the post office; it was a heavy envelope, packed with green cash, I could tell. After I got back, he asked me if I knew what I’d done. I said I’d mailed a lot of money for him, is what I’d done.

“What you have just done is mail the money I needed to pay for a hernia operation on my baby son.”

Aside from this sort of thing, though. Livace could play the fanny off a trumpet. He’s the best straight virtuoso I’ve ever heard. When he taught, it was by a glib performance by the one and only Livace himself. Try to match me, he said. His eye would lie on the music like the dead eye of a fish, he would take in the music by that one eye, and out the end of the horn came a spray of notes not only correct, but sweet, spangling. I’d be in the practice cell across from him, blasting away at a passage, and hear steps coming my way. He’d have his own horn, a Bach Stradivarius, and give me the courtesy of a chuckle, then bend that dead eye down and render the passage so well you wanted to retire to comb and tissue paper.

But one day I’d forgotten him, tooting away, thinking I was lovely, I was in the stars in my own Milky Way. Somebody grabbed my ears and jerked them outwards painfully. I could smell the aspirin on his breath.

“Aren’t you hearing all those bad notes? Don’t you know you must have ears to be a musician? You’ve been out of tune on every note above middle C for the last fifteen minutes.”

“Get your hands off my ears.”

Then there was nothing between Dudi and me. I didn’t care if he had believed in my promise ever since hearing me at the contest in Shreveport, that I was supposed to transmute into a genius under this care. Just no more hands on my ears, please. Stuff his care. Some afternoons I sat in the cell and stamped out as many cigarette butts as possible in front of the wire stand with the page of music Livace set up for me. Sometimes he’d insult me by putting up some whole-note exercises from the Baldwin primer; next it would be a piece so black with runs it was impossible, in a freakish key, five flats and such. When I felt like it, I’d just play jazz, play the blues loud and watery with the door open. Dudi gave up then. I’d hear him locking up with great assertion; lights went out in the nearby rooms. When I heard him on the stairs, I moved out to the top of them and bellowed and blatted to give him a fine sopping echo—“La Cosa Nostra Blues,” had he asked me. Probably he was afraid to ask about my progress in the Jackson Symphony.

Patsy Boone had not given up on me. I took her out. One night in the parking lot of the Dutch Bar, having kissed most of her visible body and bored to tears, I was lying dismally face-down in her hair. She told me how she missed me at rehearsals, she told me she wanted me and me only in her hair. I poured off some of the beer over her head. “Oh, my valentine, anything!” as I fell into the matted strands.

I was Romeo of the Roaches again, eating the lamb patties of her hands, licking her yellow hair. I grabbed her thigh ruthlessly, put my hand around the ankle of the other leg. I need you, I said. Bored, but having at it as the male of the species. I’d been trained. My owner was crying, Get out there and perform, you simple hairball; finger out of the nose, now, no lifted hindfoot, no dicking off! Everyone’s paid to see you! Up on the trike! Ride! Be a man. Flick of the whip there about the scrot to give yer a little spirit. El Humanoido, the trained link of evolution! I’d fallen into the floor pedals and was sprawled over the gear-hump of the T-bird, yanking at her skirt Not here in the parking lot with the top down, she cried. Besides, it was starting to rain.

On the way to her apartment, she had second thoughts. She told me she was virginal and wanted to have passion with me in the clear light of reason. It should be no drunken thing like this. Touching was too precious. I should come to see her on Sunday. The light in her room would be on and she might bring in other lamps.

It seems I exuded an exotic melancholy — her words — that undid her. When I’d played the “Habañera,” sob, she’d kissed my heart. How long she’d been trying to meet her eyes with mine! She’d gone out with another boy who sort of looked like me. But he had no heart like she wanted to put her tongue on.

“And then many nights I’d think of you while I was lying in bed, and I’d have an erection,” she said.

I just turned my face and looked up in the blue night when she said that. I didn’t know about going to her place Sunday, although I was flattered to the point of torment by her confession of love. I let her out at an old white house on Titpea, off North State, and she ran, like an injured lark, alone, to her apartment, as she said she wanted to.

Back at the dorm, I asked Fleece what possibly she could have meant. He was so avid to know everything he didn’t even laugh. I think he sort of fell in love with Patsy, hearing about her. He said she was just a little mixed up in her terms, was all.

“Do you remember in Peter’s letter, ‘the lush vigilant digit of your clitoris’?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well then.”

He gazed off amazedly. “She said that?”

Exam time came around the next week. Fleece’s parents went to Europe for four months. General Creech wanted to live in all the places he’d helped shoot to pieces, said Fleece. He imagined Creech all blown up like a toad with his memories. Fleece’s board was paid for at the college through summer and fall, and the house was locked tight, but we broke in and set up. The grass was already high in the yard, high around the cool mimosas, which were every-where. It was a ranch home, with bricks and green boards. Fleece felt terribly good, at first, being in the place. He read like a monk. We had the air-conditioning and the free telephone. For me it was free board for the summer. I was finished with college music and thought I might indeed try medicine. Fleece made it sound easy, and at the same time glorious. The idea was that his own knowledge was so large that just being around him, enough would rub off on me to make the basics, even starting from scratch. Beyond that, there was only memory work, and my memory had always been fine when it needed to be. So I was going into chemistry, German, and algebra this summer, and I felt like a swashbuckler of the mind.

Saturday evening I called Patsy and Fleece was on the extension.

“I’m going into pre-med,” I told her.

“My baby a doctor?” said Patsy. “Then you can come right over and cure me! I’ve got bruises everywhere where you grabbed me the other night. Honey… no!.. I love all my bruises. You were my poor drunk Harry … I love you more! When I see your face tomorrow.”

“Darling, do you want to have intercourse with me?” I said.

“Yes! Yes! I’M FAINTING WHEN YOU SAY THOSE WORDS. Oh, darling. I didn’t know you loved me enough to say intercourse and darling to my face!” I was doing all this for the benefit of Fleece, of course. She was a great joke.

“Now that I’ll be in medicine, and thinking of what you said the other night about our act, you know, in the clear light of reason, I think now I should say words like intercourse and, well, vagina and penis. And feces, even, certainly!”

“Oh, yes! And our children, too, well teach them that! All of the Latin words! My honey Harry. Let me ask you this. Will you not smoke, will you not bring your cigarettes tomorrow? I don’t want those clouds of smoke coming from my darling’s mouth. We don’t want the room cloudy or smoky in any way, do we?”

“For you,” I volunteered.

“Would you let me call you something that is not very scientific? I saw a movie once, I know it’s girlish, but you with the horn … when I saw you and heard you playing that Mexican solo — please, I know, I hope you’ll go on playing your horn. But—”

“What?”

“My Apache Valentine!” She sighed. “T’ve said it.” She hung up. Now, I knew what Fleece would do with this, and I did wish she hadn’t said that. She had peered in so close to me that she’d gotten as close as the right tribe.

I waited a while, but he was still in his parents’ bedroom, holding the phone. He looked askance at me through his horn-rims. His sideburns were wet and curling.

“Ain’t she keen? Does she come on strong?” I said.

“That was wrong for me to be hearing her. She’s real. You don’t deserve her. Shut the door.”

I read a bit of my chemistry and went to bed in Fleece’s room, a brown room with varnished pine, black knotholes in it, thinking of the queer blotches around me. I woke up with my cheek hurting. A thick book was lying on the sheets. Fleece had hit me with it.

“Open the eyes. Don’t be mad, now. That’s The Brothers Karamazov you’re looking at. I could’ve stacked all the books I had to leave behind in this house on your chest, and you’d be crushed to death. So, see, you’re alive, and don’t be mad. I want to talk about my girlfriend, Bet”

“I’ve seen Bet at least once a day all semester and I’ve never seen you with her. I don’t believe in this; I think she barely knows your name. Don’t ever hit me in my sleep like that.”

“She’s from Rolling Fork. A Delta woman. She is six feet, one inch. Her father is taller, her mother is even taller, and she is little Bet to them. She has a brother who is taller than all of them who played basketball at Mississippi State. Her daddy was a Marine in the Pacific in World War Two. He lived through the same battle my father died in. I really do have to make a choice. She has several strikes against her. Don’t laugh, but she sings hymns, spontaneously, with all her heart. Our first date was up to the Hilltop Theater. We were walking to the movie under that arch of oak trees, neither one of us could think of anything to say, and she breaks into ‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me….’ At the moment I was taking mark of the white insides of her toes where her suntan hadn’t covered. She had sandals on. I can see her feet by the lightning of the spring storm that’s breaking over us. Her dress was blowing between her legs. I let go of her hand when she started ‘Amazing Grace.’ I went over to the side of the road and looked at the weeds; I almost threw up. I’d taken in some lab fumes that afternoon. My body was throwing out an alarm. I told her I was dizzy, I hadn’t eaten supper. ‘No supper!’ I’m quoting her. She stroked the back of my head. How can I tell her it’s the hymn that really made me sick? But it was good, really. She said she hadn’t even made the concert choir, but screw you people over in Fine Arts. It was good. For the first time in five years I felt like I was a sinner, when she sang. We went on up to the movie, and I took hold of her hand about midway through. She liked that.. I’ll tell you, to sweat hands together in the Hilltop …”

I appeared at Patsy’s apartment on time. She met me, clutching together a purple robe that looked like a piece of rented costumery for a male actor in college Shakespeare, and she did tell me she’d been in two campus plays, showed the photograph taken under a proscenium which revealed her as an inscrutable female extra in Elizabethan wraps. We had such common interests, she said. The lights of reason were truly up; there were extra lamps. On her wall was a fishnet holding all her flute music and other things meaningful to her — menus and stolen wine glasses and her diary. She pulled the robe apart and sailed it away, and leaving no moment for examination, she was nude, hurling herself on the bed.

What a feast of sight I’ll make, I thought. I peeled off. I went over to the old dresser with the tall three-way mirror and picked up the pistol she kept, a ten-dollar.22 revolver for protection against rapists. What a laugh. I had pity for her. I glanced over at the wire screen of her window. He breaks through there, a raw pink craver, and the dyed-blond horrorstruck princess of the roaches shoots blue holes in his stomach. Then claws out his eyes if the bullets didn’t stop him. Saving herself for me. I pitied him too, maybe more than her.

I’d done some push-ups every other week, and knew there were some muscles apparent on me. I turn, blinded to her by the effect of my own body. Look what you are getting for free, Patsy.

“Lord! Wow! You’re so ugly! Men are so ugly, at last I see! Doesn’t it hurt to be like that? Don’t you dare turn away, though. Get on the bed. My lord, it looks like you’ve been wounded! Something they rammed through you from behind … I have to help that swollen thing, don’t I? Yeah, ah, yeaaaahasssss! Aw, is this right? Is this it? Aw, Be ugly in me, be ugly … Don’t you quit!”

I was fed up with her calling me ugly. I quit and dressed. The window screen seemed the right place to go out. She began sobbing; she drew up the yellow sheet around her. It was all very well to me that I’d quit at the time she started needing me. I didn’t like that loud screech calling me ugly, ugly, ugly.

She sobbed, unfulfilled, teats abob. As I was leaving I caught sight of her kicking off the sheets in some sort of fit. Then, the first time, I saw her nude and whole. I’d never seen the whole body of a female from this range. The lights of the room seemed to jump up even brighter. A magical flare-burst is what it was, over Patsy. I saw her lovely waste of breasts, even though they were small, and her navel, a pink whirlpool of flesh, her pale brown cup of hairs, her thighs and her toes all together. Her hair was glistening wet and thick. My word, I wanted another chance at that, but I was one leg out of the window already. I fell out, on the nasty stems of a hedge. Oh, let me back, but I was too much a fool to climb back up.

My mouth hurt. She had sucked my tongue when we kissed. And I had that stupid wilt of pain below. But I clambered back to my car, as if the ham muscles of one leg had been cut. My face was hot as the rash. And behind me, in the yard, I could feel something yet to pull into the car, like a kinked tail, as if my ass had unraveled off me and was caught in the hedge under her window.

9 / The Theft of Her Letters

Fleece could not drive a car. When he went out alone at night, he called a taxi. Sometimes the taxi would back out of the driveway and head west — toward Hedermansever — and sometimes east — toward Jackson, about which he was mysterious. Bet was at Hedermansever, I knew. But what was in Jackson?

“I’m going diving,” he said about one trip. I thought he might be swimming at the YMCA to build up his body. This was possible. He took ho swim trunks or towel with him, and at the Y, you swam in the raw. I was trapped in one weekend and found that out. It was in Shreveport, the night before the solo contest. Old Mr. Medford — who “was going to accompany me on piano — and I thought a swim in the heated pool might be nice before supper. We went out and bought us some swimsuits. Then we went down to the pool and everybody was in naked. This put me off. Old Medford didn’t know what to do, and I felt for him. For him it had taken guts to even get in the swimsuit. I told him it looked damned odd to me. We forgot the swim and went out to supper.

But this had nothing to do with Fleece. He meant dive in the sense of tavern. What Fleece was doing was going out to meet and talk with the people, I guess for the first time in his life. I found this out later. The fact was, Fleece told me sometime during college, that he wanted to be a doctor for about ten years, then he wanted to run for governor of the state of Mississippi. It seems his ambition increased after he met Bet Henderson. However, Fleece was no drinker. Three beers almost took him away. His drinking partners, angered by the line of debate he took, would often spit at him and strike him.

It was nice to sleep late every morning of the weekend in Fleece’s house, to have your coffee at noon. I think I was made for that. I’d been up an hour one morning when Fleece came into the kitchen. His hands were locked in front of him. He told me it was time to visit the king cat’s house. We had to steal Catherine’s letters, had to, soon. Somewhere in the house there must be something from her.

We drove to the house the next day, Monday, around ten in the morning. Peter would be at the real estate office in Jackson. I had the hard top on the T-bird. At Canton, we turned off on a gravel road. The house itself was two miles down this road. It had an overgrown gravel turnaround in the yard. The house was a large thing; the white paint was falling off its boards, and it had a swollen gray aspect. I kicked through a window, and we climbed in with no trouble. We were looking for the attic, but I noticed that the downstairs was sparse of furntiture, the floorplanks were bare, and there was a desk standing right out in the middle of the biggest room. At the top of the stairs, before you got to the attic stairs, there were other rooms on both sides. I saw a made bed in one, and a pair of aqua-blue nylon fur house slippers resting by the front leg of it. A woman was living in this house, now.

We had two duffel bags. The crate was there. We pulled all the rest of the letters out. They stunk, like a mixture of spice and dung. They got yellower toward the bottom. My hands were rancid, with flecks of orange on them. We had them all and it was time to go, down the attic stairs, past the room with the house slippers. We were in a hurry, but when we got to the main room downstairs, I saw some more envelopes on the big desk in the middle of the room and ran over to them. I saw one with a letter in it stuffed into one of the cubby holes and took it. We were at the front door going out when I saw the back door of the house opening, hard. I caught a glimpse of Peter and then showed him my back. Peter hollered out. “Yaaaaaaaa!”

We barreled for the T-bird, but I saw there was a white Chrysler parked sideways across the drive right in front of it. We threw the bags into the well of the car and I tore down on the key of my T-bird. I would have to back up into some huge growth of briars to get out of here. The car wouldn’t start. I bent the key again.

“Here he comes around the house!” said Fleece.

Then the T-bird reared back on pure fire into those briars, the back end of the car rose up in the air, I was getting no soil with the wheels; then the wheels came down and I steered out of the yard, framming his car with gravel and red dust Fleece said he was in his car now, coming after us. We made the hardtop on the outskirts of Canton, then got on the four-lane of Highway 51, and he was still trying, though way back there. I put the accelerator down the last quarter-inch, and left him out of sight. Fleece thought he might’ve taken down the license plate number. But I still had the old California plates on the car. I’d take them off and get new Mississippi ones.

The letters, the yellower they were, the more unspeakable. The last one fell apart in your hands. It was still Peter writing to his wife Catherine. There were no letters from Catherine in the crate. The last letter set another scene, this time out on the front porch of the house, in the open air. The two of them seemed to have gotten out here from the upstairs room in some method which allowed them to make their way while at no moment uncoupled. There was a potted fern on the porch which was a sort of shrine and destination. Around this fern they emitted climactic fluids, blood included, and somehow they collected most of these fluids into one offering, which was poured on the fern in the last gasps of exhaustion. The letter ended in an undiminished mating call: “Let us see, beloved Catherine, how the fern will dol”

All over Fleece’s house lay letters. The duffel bags sat tumbled over on the couch. The house smelled like swamp gas. Your hands were brown from handling the last letters. It wouldn’t wash off. Your hands stank; you couldn’t eat a sandwich with your hands that way.

Fleece handed me a page which consisted of nothing but a crescendo of spelled-out grunts.

“It’s not fun any more,” he said. “He doesn’t have any style any more. Let’s build a fire. Get this filth out of my house, I do believe I’m going nuts with him, Monroe.”

The other letter, the one I’d gotten off his desk, was post-marked last year—

… taken poor me unner you wing like this I caint hardily thank you eneough, Uncle Peter, I just do hope Im sharp enough for college.

Love,

Vinceen.

What was this? The postmark was Mobile. Looking again, I saw the date was August, exactly a year to the day ago.

“Who could it be?”

“Thinking is making me sick. I said help me with this filth,” whined Fleece.

10 / Shades of the Belly and Bean

Bobby Dove meant it. Exams were on, it was not a good season for it, but he was having a dark fit again. He slept in his mother’s room and opened her drawers and held her articles. I saw that accidentally in the door-length mirror. I also saw him standing in front of his mother’s closet, peering in, for an overlong period. He went into the closet and I think he cast himself onto the clothes on the hangers.

After exams I let him have the house and left for Dream of Pines. He hadn’t spoken directly to me for two weeks. I didn’t want to become implicated in his mental condition.

The old man had been playing golf all summer and he was suntanned, with the gray hair a little longer than usual.

“A doctor in the house,” he said.

“If I can keep it up.”

“Do you think you’re finding your way? You know, you could still play your horn, all that wouldn’t be wasted. Doctor Israel plays the drums in his basement, you know, even as a G.P. Music can be a lifelong hobby.”

Ode was really betting on me as a doctor, and even though we had little to say to each other, it was fine with me to give my daddy that happiness. While I was at the house, my grades from Hedermansever came in. B’s in chemistry, a D in hateful German.

My mother had the beer in the icebox again. She wanted to know if I had a sweetheart. I told her I’d been casual with a few. She told me how important it was to meet someone with Faith. We were sitting at the kitchen table. I had never drunk liquor right in front of her before and was holding the can as if I weren’t interested in it. She told me to drink it, she knew I drank beer in college. After two cans, she looked at me. She wanted to know if I felt easier about talking now. Her eyes were moist and she had turned slightly breathless of voice. She asked me whether I thought they, Ode Elann and she, had instilled me with any things of the spirit when I was growing up.

“N—” Then I saw the trust she had in me, how hopeful she was, and said, “I know you did.”

“You’re bored here, aren’t you? All your college activities. You shouldn’t be always scowling though. You’re a nice-looking boy. Don’t spoil your face.” She’d seen the other children come home during the vacations from L.S.U. Their lives were not lived in her house. They had their sweethearts. They were on the phone or waiting for the mail, their lifeblood was in the telephone wires and the post office. Now I was home, but without a sweetheart, so she could talk to me.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked Ode.

“She’s gotten holy.” He talked to one side of me, as if some person next to me would understand. He didn’t like it anymore than I did, I don’t think.

“Your mother and I have read these magazine articles about how fifty-five is just middle age. That’s a lie. Even if you feel good. I feel good. But when you look down the end of the path, ‘Let this cup pass from me.’ You know who said that?”

“Jesus.”

“Even Him. He didn’t want it any more than I do. Let it pass on down the line to the other fellow who hasn’t taken care of his health and deserves it. It just isn’t fair that once you get fifty you have to worry about death any second. You start listening to sounds in your body. You see how lonely it will be. So you want a friend with you, you see. You have your children, you, your sister and your brothers. But a woman with religion, she wants much more sympathy than that. Even more than her husband. A woman hurts more times than ten men could ever take notice of. I can’t say anything about it.”

My mother was still a beautiful woman. There was either a great new absence or a great new presence in my mother. Her physique was perfectly fine, but now I looked at her knowing she was not eternal, was considering the possibility of her own death. Something slid out from under me.

“You pick out a rich girl, now,” said the old man the last day. “It’s all the same in the dark.”

I left Dream of Pines by the old greasy highway, seeing the new motel courts and a few pale boys on the diving board of their swimming pools. It was mid-September, and almost cold. They were having a good time. But everything and everybody was ghostly to me now. They were ghosts, they knew they were near death and they were having fun anywhere they could take it. Their old man had taken a job in a place that was still warmish in September and they were living here until they found a house. They stayed underwater as long as they could to get away from the stinking air of the paper mills. Their old man was back in the room using the motel ballpoint to figure up on the motel stationery how long they could last before the paycheck. I thought all this under the influence of my old man, who had told me how Dream of Pines was booming. “Booming!” I saw the swimmers in my dreams later. They were skeletons, shivering, smiling hugely with their gums, the last flesh left to them. Death was everywhere in Dream of Pines, since the old man first mentioned it. I didn’t even trust my own youth. My youth was an old sick pirate; there was a boy back there lying on the reefs, bleeding. The lad’s throat had been cut. I had cut it. “Push off, push off!” came an odd voice in my ear. I had no hometown, and Hedermansever was not my home. There was no real bed for me, not in thfe bunk at college, not in the gray stone house, not in Fleece’s house.

I knew Fleece would not be back at school and I was wondering who they would stick me with in the room. But there he was waiting for me, healthy as a berry. He’d put on some weight, in truth. I had an impression, however, that he was only simulating health. He was a mite frantic to cut a healthy figure, like a man skating casually while trying to balance a cantaloupe on his neck. He agreed with everything I said, everything I wanted to do. “Hell yes, Monroe!” Want to play some poker? Want to bet on the Colts? Want to play some snooker? He didn’t know how to do any of those things. “You bet, Monroe.”

Then his mouth became restless.

“Do you understand when I say that by the time it counts I’m afraid I won’t have enough energy to get my genius across? There are two people, professors on this campus, who once were geniuses, you can tell it in their faces, walking around with their wives and families, these men altogether sapped of power, with their caved-in smiles.” He was out late frequently with Bet. He acted as if he had just run along way.

“One thinks he can play with his own energy forever. Then she comes along, giving you every indication she means to be only your hobby, just wants to trail along as long as you let her. Always the flirting. And before you know it, you’re pouring your brains down her cunt. She isn’t smiling any more, nor flirting. She’s serious as death. She ought to be. Half your self lies in a pool at the backend of mons pubis.”

This went on the whole fall. Then in 1962, he wouldn’t get out of the rack for classes and slept like a rattlesnake hibernating in winter. One night the last of January he got out of bed, put his shoes on contrariwise, shut his eyes, and walked right into all his stacked-up material — the books, the cigar boxes, the metal stork, everything, it all tumbled over. I cannot define for sure what state he was in. He plunged sightless through the debris, kicking at it. He mounted a pile of books and stood there on top in blind idiocy. The books would not support him. He crashed on the end of my bed.

“I’m a dirty boy. Hit me.”

I tapped him. His eyes were still shut.

“Hit me hard, Ruben. You know how fed up with me you are.”

I punched him. He slunk away and crawled back to his bed over the foot-high rubble. He put his hand in the plate I’d brought him from the cafeteria.

“I’m a dirty boy, dirty, dirty, dirty boy. Get me a preacher.”

I closed my book. “All right, I will.”

I went down two floors and got that Baptist from South Carolina that I used to room with. He was already asleep, nine o’clock at night, and came to the door in a brown robe. He couldn’t make me out. I went in the room to help him find his quadrafocals. A Chinese boy was sitting up sleepily on the other bunk. This was Don Thing, the poet from Hong Kong. He wrote a sort of timid new English set to poetry in the dart, the campus literary magazine. His poems were printed on the slant, with lines wide apart, so as to de-emphasize what utter banal coonshit they were.

“Don and I have taught each other a lot,” said Thomas, my old roommate, going up the stairs in his cloth skids. His tiny black eyes were so lost in his glasses, he seemed imprismed, and you thought he probably couldn’t hear you, either.

“I’ve brought Thomas,” I said to Fleece, who lay stiff on the bed, like an open-eyed corpse. He hadn’t eaten in two days and had seldom smoked. I was the one who had to explain to his professor in the lab. I backed to the door and told Thomas Fleece was ready for him. Thomas made his way over the collapsed library and knelt by the bed, being unable to find a seat. I shut the door as if I’d left, easing at the same time into the plaster cave of the closet. Thomas never even looked back.

“Monroe said you needed me.”

“Pastor, when you get as much as I have and you can’t quit getting it, but you know you’re robbing your mind—”

“Is this about a girl?”

“I won’t say her name.”

“Have you made her pregnant?”

“No. I want you to read the letters that led me down this sorry road. Pick up one of them. Look around the room for letters written in brown ink.”

Thomas bent around the room like some huge exiled rat with goggles. He waddled over a cigar box which was tumping out the letters we hadn’t burned. Then he picked up a wad and sat down to read. This took ten minutes. There was only the study lamp on, upended.

“This paper smells like a restroom. Is that the joke, that now I have smelly hands?”

“What he has done, Pastor, I think, is make an intellectual preoccupation out of sex. You see how much good grammar he spends on it. Sex wasn’t made for thought, was it? It’s only instinct and touch. As intellectual matter it is a swamp from which no man comes back whole. You go into the swamp with your mind — there seems to be so much to contemplate. And you come back, if you get back, with a few pubic hairs in your hand and a shriveled-up backbone.”

“Why do you need me here? You aren’t going crazy like Monroe said.”

“Yes I am! I’ve been theorizing on sex every minute since I found out it was possible that a lady might smile when she spread her legs. I get flashes of sexual visions as fast as you can open and close your hand. I read books and see flickering pictures, not a movie, but still-life photographs that … I know that when the mind plays variations on the same theme, you have lost part of it somewhere—”

“Well, you do have a lot of theories for everything you say, don’t you?” says Thomas. “Wait. Now you say you are getting it regular?”

“.. I have had too much in too short a time. My brains are turning to mud. I need to put my foot on some rock, and you may be that rock, Thomas.”

“What are you wanting to tell me?” demanded Thomas. “You’ve got genius and you’re getting it regular and you’re lying in your bed moo-cowing? Why’m I kneeling here? I got a ninety I. Q., I been wandering around in a funnybook for six years being hooked by every sharpie in the pulpit, I got this looking at me in the mirror, I couldn’t find twat if I paid for it, and I’m led down here by a guy that hates my guts to babysit his roommate that can’t live with his own luck, well I’m getting back to sleep and that for your information is the only fun I have!”

Thomas waded out of the room and smashed the door to. Fleece let out a prolonged swoony sort of groan.

“Look who was here!” I said, leaping out of the curtains. Fleece started in fright. Then he tried to settle himself into a sort of corpse stiffness again, his back to me. “I heard, I heard. He would not be your rock, the rock ran, eh?” Fleece would not respond. “I was surprised. Thomas. My God! I can foresee the day when nobody’s a pastor any more. All the rocks’ll be wandering around in a funnybook. Matter of fact, they’ll be pissed-off when a simple soul comes to them with his guilty little diary.” If you know Gleason, with his Reggie Van Gleason the Third voice, I was talking like that, the dandified baron with a cold. But nothing from Fleece. I knew he’d been serious with Thomas, that he had not known I was there. “Why don’t you get your ass up, Fleece?”

There was another whole day of silence yet. I came in at a late hour. Fleece was sitting on his bed. He had brewed himself a cup of instant coffee with hot tap water from the lavatory. He gave me advice.

“You need to have at it with one girl for a length of time, my friend. Buy presents, work her delicately. Hold hands in the movies. Pet. Neck. Begin begging. See her slip her underwear off with tears in her eyes …

“Be under standing yet press on. After some days, hear her beg with another kind of tears in her eyes. She has built her house around you. Meet Daddy, who thinks you’re someone she’s hired to take up her luggage to the dorm and is surprised to find out you are her spark, as Mommy calls you in letters to her daughter. But know the reality (outside, the mob howling that you can’t have this girl); minutes after Daddy and Mommy have driven off back to Rolling Fork, she can’t wait for dark to fall. Drags you across the highway along the path laid out for the cross-country team, by the orange markers on trees and cloths tied on limbs, your shoes hitting all the roots in the wood-path. Down a hill to the pond. Through the blackberry bushes on the dam, seeking the smaller path veering down on the back of the dam, in moonglow. Through the rotten leaves, the snails, the snakes, to a shelf. See and hear the dress fall lightly, see that movement of hands to her back, see the brassiere cast afloat, watch her bend, pull off the wispy hose from her legs, the brilliant white panties torn up off her feet, because she’s lying down now. See the long fingers on your belt buckle. Have that, my friend. Have the zipper zipped down for you. See your watch taken off, feel your pants clink down with the wallet and your belt buckle weighting them. Feel air on your thighs, my friend. Then save your woman, cover her moans, fill her. Be an eel in waves of soup. Try to swim until you evaporate. You were her hero. Then the next morning see her all crisp, combed, new dress, sprayed hair. Glancing by you as if the competition for her had not been settled. Other men might make a play. So she tries to look pretty because they must all hurt knowing she is owned by you.”

Fleece seemed enchanted, telling this. It was so strong that, a couple of nights after it, I went to sleep trying to dream of a loved one. I forced it, I got the dream, but she was a woman at the bottom of a swimming pool. She wore hose, nothing else, and she was giving a lecture on sex. With a pointer she rapped on her sex and pushed it out a bit. You could barely see, because she had hair like a sheepdog, but you could see, as through the eye of a needle, two cooked hamburgers rammed together. Your eyes went up in horror to see her chest, where there were two suit-buttons sewed on her, bleeding. Her lips were moving in a cold lecture all the time.

It was a stunning dream I couldn’t do anything with. I think I almost always sleep too deep for dreams. Then one comes, like that old dream of Ann Mick naked, and it does nothing but ruin my waking time for a month.

11 / In Vicksburg

On a clear warm day I told Bobby Dove I was driving over to Vicksburg. He said wait, he wanted to go too. It was a Sunday. Fleece was still inching out of his mental spell. He had wanted me to hit him in the stomach again, and this time I did not hold back. He spat up a peck of odorific gobs and passed out. But he wanted to go out now. He’d also lived through another bout of the Hudson Bay flu. He put a towel around his neck.

We went west on 80—the top down — past Bolton, Ed-wards, Bovina, and into the deep-slit hills and trees covered with kudzu vine. Eighty was a thin, cracked road full of tar repairs. There was a big sun, but the wind was so cool it was like taking a fine spray of water on your skin. I dialed the radio, was going to pass by a white church service, when Fleece hit my hand. They were singing the invitational hymn. It was noon.

“Can you hear her singing?” I slowed the car to hear. “Whatever church it is, my mother’s there. She wants to go down the aisle. She thinks whatever is wrong in her home might come to her when she’s in front of the congregation.”

“My mother might be there too,” I said.

“I can’t hate her. I can’t hate somebody who starched and ironed all those shirts for me. (This isn’t your mother, god damn it, it’s mine!) All I remember are the light blue ones. They had so much starch in them the arms stuck out like wings. I had to strike through to get into them. I went out to the bus stop feeling like a kite. The wind actually moved me around, I had to hold on to the bench. That damn button up against my neck to ward off colds … It would be easy to wish I was a kite, I’d take off, with my mother holding on to the string. Kick those fluffy clouds with my shoes, stay up there and just report on what the weather was, all my life.”

I told him I was glad my mother would never have been satisfied with that little baby blue dream of me.

“There’s a sweet wolf in everybody’s past,” he said.

“You’re quoting somebody.”

“Me. Myself.”

I parked below the Illinois Memorial, and started following the markers. We went into the marble halls, saw the busts and read the bronzes, saw the bas-reliefs of the armies squirming flab bergasted, the pretty long-haired bullies they had for officers; the sober yet flamboyantcolonels on their bronze horses rampant; the green vegetating bronzes worked on by the rain. I pitied the idiots who cared for such scenes. I was among the idiots who cared for such scenes. I lay my head down on an old brass hoof. I bit it when Fleece turned away. It tasted like my useless trumpet mouthpiece. We saw the names of the dead, we saw the kudzued hollows and walked the fields where the earth was still low in the old trenches.

“The South isn’t dead,” said Fleece, beginning to run down a hill.

“Hot damn! Gawd no,” I said.

“We’ll strike in the deep of the night!”

“The deep of the hot damn night!” Fleece was having a good old time. He whipped off the neck-towel and slung it around.

“Follow met” I ignored him. He ran a ways, then came back. “I said follow me! I’ll break you ovuh the code of the Confedrasee, boy.”

“I’m sitting down.”

“Butlsheeit Follow mel” Fleece really meant it. “Run for them, cocksucker. We over the ground of General Pemberton’s Rebel boys. They ate rats, right heah! Right heah they finely threw up their hands. Mortified by the stomach, but never licked by the gun!”

Fleece knew the history of the battle, which irked me. I didn’t know beans. He ran up the hills like a goat. At the top there were cannon sitting in concrete, facing the Mississippi. A mile below was the dull old snake herself, with barges creeping along, sand bars streaking here and there, and the bank of mud and scratchy-looking trees on the Louisiana side, while Fleece was explaining to me about when cotton was king in 1850, and what we had here was the struggling remains of riverside Pharaohism — the restaurants advertising fresh river catfish, the plasticolored motels, the antique shops, the bait and snack stores, featuring a rubberoid worm which kaught fish kwik; the four-story whorehouse on Mulberry Street, whose parlor Jayne Mans-field had visited, thinking it was “cute,” who, in fact, bared her breasts there for the house artist, on her way to Biloxi; and Louisiana, in a low strut of trees and mud beach, calling to me like she had missed me, even though I didn’t give a damn for her. Fleece held my arm. He told about Grant finally dragging his gunboats out of the Yazoo River and into the Mississippi, told me how the Rebels just laughed and tried to sink the boats with mortars for a while.

I noticed you could see much of the town of Vicksburg. I spotted the white banistered house of my grandmother. She was dead and this house was no longer a part of her. But that was where my mother had grown up. I told him this.

“She was the most-adored piece either side of the river. That porch was where she and the old man fell in love. He was …” I just thought through the rest. He was the Louisiana State handsome, but running out of money, wearing a straw hat and widepants, my old man thinking of taking this soft sweetie, Donna, back to that lovely village with its lake and towering pines, so many pines that the streets and walks were quiet with the needles they dropped, and children and lovers could fall down pleasurably, that Dream of Pines, Louisiana; the old man thinking he would take any job if he could take her there with him. She had a high skirt and beads, but she was shy: a caution and skidoo. She’s thinking about going to college. She’s backwater, a know-nought, and she’s pretty as a doe. He wants her to a degree nature or luck couldn’t refuse. She comes to him.

Here I was seeing the house she left behind her. Here where my grandmother stayed and died. Died remembering the birthdays of such jerks as me and mailing dollar bills in cards which cost fifty cents. Died of receiving the hurried ballpoint pen thank-you’s from me. She lay near a church I could not see.

There was the Sprague, an old paddlewheel they had made into a floating theater, which showed a melodrama with a trailing cancan each year; harking back to the really good times, the 1850’s, before the war. Come aboard. Don’t be a stick in the mud. Eat it. Lick it. This is Old Man River.

Fleece began singing “Old Man River” emotedly. This was a rare surprise. I’d never heard him so much as whistle before. He sought the tones lustfully. No wonder he despised hymns and most all music, if this is what he heard. But he was joyful as a hunchback jumping up and down in a loft with the bellrope. ‘Tote dat barge! Lif dat bale! Gets a litl drunk and ya lans in jail O!” trying to be the operatic nigger, but puny, sorry, afflicting me like somebody was scratching my teeth with a piece of aluminum. I asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t hear me.

Jesus mercy, I was sad. We went and saw the last sight, a football-field-sized green full of white graveblocks no more than six inches apart, with a gravel path which separated the Union from the Confederate dead. By then I was drooling blue. Close to the cemetery, a family was having a picnic. They threw the wrappers and the paper plates meekly into a barrel. It was almost the centennial year of the fall of Vicksburg. The strange silence, then, is what got me — as if you walked in a dream of refracted defeat. The horror was, I could think of nothing to say. I couldn’t think of even anything to think. I could not get “Dixie” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to play in my mind.

Vicksburg simply weighed on my heart like lumber: all the old history, all the ravaged gun-toters, all of contemporary Vicksburg; Grandmother’s house, how it seemed like a boat rotting up in a bayou nobody would ever find.

We were walking back through a sparse line of trees. Fleece collapsed to the ground. I thought he was having a relapse. He was wrestling with something.

“Help me, Monroe! Let’s pull this boy out. Ufff!”

“What is it?”

The clod came up in his hands, shooting dust and grass. Fleece twisted his fingers around it. Something was showing through the turf.

“Mine, mine. You didn’t help. It’s all mine!”

It was an entire cavalry pistol. That lucky, needlessly lucky scoundrel. On any other given day he would have had his nose in the air, gabbling away. He was averse to pistols. Whereas for me, I’d love to put my hand around the dirty handle of it. I thought some feeling, some sense, might come to me if I did.

“Look. U.S.A. Sherman’s cavalry.”

“He was here?” I tried to grab the thing.

“Of course, Ruben. This is where he sharpened up for Georgia. Let me alone, it’s mine. It won’t shoot. You wouldn’t want it. On my soul, a whole gun!”

This pettiness — I hated the son of a bitch. I’d show him some petty. I took off running, for the car. I knew his lungs would kill him; I’d leave him.

“monroe!” “monroe!” came the tiny faroff shouts behind me. The last leg was a vertical slope. I got in the car dying for breath myself. Perhaps his heart would burst. In my own heart I felt the hard little tick of pettiness. Well, this was something, this feeling.

I thought of the organic chemistry lab, how I hated it, hated it even more than histology, or invertebrate anatomy, because Fleece was the instructor for it. Bet Henderson took the lab too. Fleece would drift into the big room, as if on some pompous unicycle, in his lab coat, his mental life so far beyond this room, with its cruddy stone canals and fumes; ignoring Monroe, who had expended so much of his imagination on excuses to the professor for Fleece’s absences; but deigning to hover around the shoulders of Bet to say the tritest, namby-pambyest words that ever came to my ears. “What are you doing, tee hee. Need some help, tee hee?” whispering, “Are you still my Bet-Bet? tee hee?” With me trying not to hear, but dragged up into it like some involuntary nauseated peeping Tom, since my set-up was right next to hers. Really he deserved to die of a rat bite.

As he appeared on the ridge, practically strangling, I began to ease the car away. Out in the road, I saw him limping after me in the rear-view mirror. How much can he take? I wondered, easing on faster. When will his heart burst? I suppose he gave a last effort. It must’ve been some-thing. I was shocked to see him holding to the door handle, being dragged along. He simply heaved over, face-first onto the seat. I stopped the car. I was outraged.

“Damn you! You know everything about Vicksburg, have it! Stay here and own it. Choke on the place. I didn’t want you to come over here. I had things to see.…”

“Marrrk!” he said.

“What?” Some sound, the beginning of some word.

“Maaarrrrrrrk!” He threw up all, all over the car — and me — trying as he was to wheel the spew around toward the road on his side. I suppose I sat there a minute in the vile after-puking calm. Then I ripped that towel off his neck. My life seemed so bleakly redundant, an amplifying farce. Here the boy had been wearing the towel, the exact thing you would carry if you knew your life was going to be a cycle of puke.

In the dorm halls we passed by those rooms here and there with the queer and the hapless in them: Thomas, Don Thing, Ashlet; a boy whose stomach swelled up periodically, a boy whose face had been jerked askew by polio, a boy with an enlarging wen whose head bucked, a boy with purple acne, a dwarf, a pale giant; then there were the sissies, the religious maniacs, the homosexuals, including the compulsive ear-to-tongue man of the Hilltop Theater, and last — I don’t mean there weren’t a bunch of good fellows and honest scholars around too (the president of the college was an honest scholar who learned my name and always wished me well) — last there were the ones who looked so ordinary it was morbid. A number of people seemed to have come to Hedermansever so as to use the college as a sort of proving ground for their afflictions, wanting to know how far they could push into the world before it spat them out. I hope they all had good luck, and I don’t feel heroic even recalling them but they were there, and I lay down to sleep a few cells away from them, perfect of body, good wind, good arm and leg, afflicted with a nervous gloom, feckless. I dreamed about old Geronimo, peering out miserably from a cage in the zoo of American history.

When Fleece left the next morning, I walked over to his radio console and picked up the cavalry pistol. I looked out in the dorm yard. I recalled that, back in the fall, my German teacher had announced to us that the Cuban blockade was on. Soviet ships were making toward it, lower Florida was full of soldiers, and only divine intervention could help now. So she led the class in prayer. I looked around; most of the class had their eyes closed. A special prayer service in the chapel had been called. I myself had on the reptilian coat and was fondling the pistol in my pocket. I felt no dismay. Let them come, let the Russians hit the coast, take Gulfport, up Highway 49, overwhelm Hattiesburg, Collins, Magee, Mendenhall, D’Lo, send a corps over to conquer Hedermansever, building by building. A few of us meaner men would get our share from the windows. I saw all the scurrying brown raincoats in the dorm yard, sighted down the cavalry pistol. It would be all quite keen and simple.

12 / Return to Vicksburg

I rubbed off all the green. I slipped a handkerchief through the slides and yanked them loose. Then I rubbed them with Vaseline and treated the valves with Conn oil. I ran water in the bell and that ancient ferny sludge of ‘58 to ‘62 washed out Now I had a horn again. In with the Bach mouthpiece, on with the lips. Not bad. I did a few exercises I’d memorized from the Arban book and then went straight to jazz. It seems I could put more notes to the measure than ever before. I could play higher and brighter. Fleece wanted to know if I intended to practice in the room. I told him I had nowhere else. He checked out.

A drummer I knew down the hall, who was in the marching band and was a corny sort of fool, actually, heard me and brought down his snare drum, sat down, and began hitting for me. I couldn’t go long the first night. But by the fourth night I had built up a lip, and Joe the drummer from Texas was giving me time on a complete trap-set he had borrowed. A fellow from Yazoo City was doing the bass part on a cello. The cello was owned by his roommate, a student evangelist who wanted eventually to use the instrument as a part of his appeal, and who was out of town now on a revival circuit. Silas, who had the cello now, had learned his strings on country guitar and wasn’t very good plucking the thing, at first. But by the fifth night he was sounding the rhythms well enough and hitting a note every now and then. The sixth night, the hall people got Dave, the dorm counselor, and he pounded on the door. This man was blind in one eye, but enormous and hairy, a cycloptic wrestler sort. I never knew he was a physical coward until he came to the door.

“Nothing but crap and corruption comes out of this room. People are trying to study and sleep! Look at these crayon marks all over this door! I’m getting you for room deposit! What’s this, drums in here?” He didn’t see well and I think he thought he was screaming at Fleece alone.

Our cello man, Silas, stood up and crowded the door. Silas was also enormous. He was an athlete who had failed at Yale, his father’s alma mater. He lived in a constant rage over the general piety of Hedermansever and toadies like Dave, who kept the locks on it. His father had given thousands to Hedermansever, being a millionaire in chemical fertilizers and also a big Baptist. I suppose Dave knew some of this at least.

“We’re sitting down playing jazz music. This man”—Silas stood aside and pointed to me—“has a mute in his horn and is playing wonderfully. We are keeping it as down as we can. You … shitbound cocksuckers …” Silas dragged the cello like a piece of gorgeous trash, as Dave and the hall complainers minced back. “Who haven’t ever heard anything like this—”

“Get him for room deposit, I have to,” Dave was murmuring.

“You see this crayon picture on the door, Dave. That’s abstract art. You know why these boys made this picture? I’ll bet they did it because these white walls and halls and rooms were looking a little too much like a hospital for sanctimonious one-eyed fuckers, and for all the rest of you maggoty little finks around that one-eyed fucker.” He had lifted the cello.

“There are rules,” Dave said, against the other wall.

“I hope you mention some rules to me again, Dave. Me and you’re the biggest two men in this dorm. You mention rules again, I want to crack your cocksucking bones and let these little maggots watch me. I want you to make a phone call tonight, after you go downstairs, so somebody else will see me about some rules.”

It was amazing. Dave and the others simply rambled back to their rooms, stepping on each other quietly. I liked Silas. I liked his power over the college. I’d seen him up at the Hilltop a number of times and thought he was one of those football players who hadn’t made it at Ole Miss or Delta State and had come to Hedermansever for action in the small college league. He wore tee shirts with numbers front and back, and floppy jeans; he was freckled, his nose was broken or beaked, and he sprawled about. I found out he had not failed at Yale because of hate for it. I got the idea that he was so excited, being there, that he couldn’t write down anything in the classroom. On Yale, the East, Connecticut, and New York, he was still all babbling awe. He had had such Jewish and Polish and Greek friends. At Hedermansever he spent a good deal of his time lifting bar-bells, playing soccer with one other guy out on the football field, and searching for, as he said, meaningful group things. Never in my life had anybody taken up for me like he did against Dave and the hall people.

By, say, the eighth night, he was making a curious sort of progress on bass-part cello. He got a ripping, thrumming sound out of every note he made, no matter how fast we played, and I began dipping the tones, traveling with the bends of the cello sometimes; Joe the drummer fell on the tones and the thrums with great hustle — and Joe indeed could play. So I thought we might have something, just us three, no piano. It was odd, with no chording as you played. I suppose I thought of it as brave. It was intrepid, is what it was. I thought we were ready for the applause and the money. And I knew the club in Vicksburg. I wanted to have another chance at Vicksburg. The hills were fat and green, the ditches were steep, the houses hung on slants of old gloom, and the river was a rich ooze, like tears and whiskey. It would be fine to be happy in the cellars of this town, cutting away with some buddies on horn.

My school work was not going well lately. But there was a new kind of exhilaration in writing your name on the top of a mimeographed test sheet, handing it in blank, not having to sit there with your head in your hand. Back to the room. Silas was already there trying to do some phrases on the cello. Get the horn, the taste of fruity silver. Joe comes down at six. Ti-tat-di-ching, dinga, chingding achingdinga-ching, di oomp oomp. To blues and to jazz.

“Like, what we gon call ourselves,” said Joe. I told you he was a corny fool; also a bit of a liar. He said he’d studied at the Texas Conservatory of Jazz, which sounded like a place where cowboys play Glenn Miller.

“Call — man, you can’t name this. This band is too close to the truth to give a name. We are three individuals with a hell of a lot to say,” said Silas.

“Right.” Looking at the cello, you noticed Silas’s huge confident fingerson the neck.

“Well, like, will we phone up to warn them, like? Maybe we should.”

“That would take the sting out of us,” I said.

“We come as a surprise or not at all,” Silas agreed.

Bobby Dove came in at midnight. We musicians were sitting around, tired but merry.

“How’s that Amazon nookie?” Silas asked Fleece.

Fleece was sullen. After they left, he lay disgusted on the cot for a while.

“What does that big farthook Silas do, by the way? He looks like a jock but he doesn’t play sports. I hope to God he doesn’t think he’s playing that cello, either.”

“You wouldn’t know. He has some ideas on cello. I think it’s good, played like a bass.”

“I think you ought to fire Silas, then think about how in-finitely bad you still are.”

“Silas said I was terrific.”

“Well yes, compared to him. Has Silas asked you anything about Bet?”

I lied. Silas had told me he was calling Bet, but I didn’t want to get into this with Fleece.

“He’s telephoning her, you know. I hope you’re not sitting over there being an insect about this, thinking Silas is her secret telephone-lover. Don’t you think she told me? Don’t you know how we laugh over what he says? Tell me this. Has he ever said anything about me? C’mon.”

“Why should I tell?” I must have been smiling.

“I’d like to hear some of that farthook’s wit. Then I’ll leave you alone.”

“He said that you had better marry her quick so she could have some document to prove that you were making advances toward her.”

“You think that cheap little-vision is very funny, dont you?”

The club seemed to be three hundred Negroes, couples, packed up into an old butane gas tank. Perhaps it was a quonset hut of narrow dimensions. The façade was shingles with a peak arch and a Falstaff beer billboard off its stand, lit up by craning lights, waiting for you at the bottom of a hill steep and parallel with the nearby river. The façade looked landlocked, but once in the club, you didn’t know. The thing shook as if on weak stilts, and you could smell fish. The sign at the door mentioned a dollar cover charge. Because the Mean Men were playing. The hotshots and their dates were flocking here from all over Mississippi and even from Louisiana. The Mean Men had made records in Memphis and everybody knew it. All I knew about them was that they had been charmed to have a musician friend of mine back at Hedermansever sit in with them once.

We eased in, Silas and I carrying our cases, Joe hoping to use the traps of the Mean Men. We paid the dollar. The man in the box wasn’t certain about this. He just let the dollars pile up there and didn’t move his hand for them. Silas went right up to the stand after the number and explained to the band — all of them Negroes — how we thought we might take the stand and spell them. I saw him shake hands with the singer, and he seemed to’ve procured an introduction all round. The band had just finished a hot pinpointed arrangement of Negro-Latin jazz, eight instruments full, and my faith was sinking. But the singer took the mike and introduced, named us and our instruments, and we had to step up quickly so as not to seem like immobilized pink hams. The Mean Men broke by us like a school of dark cheerful fish. Joe the drummer proceeds to drag the traps nearer to center stand; I stand there with my horn out. The bandstand is aflame with pink lights, above and below, and I’m looking at the veins of my arms, thinking how bunny-nose pink I am, and how few men we are, above this crowd used to the Mean Men.

The fans were not hostile, but they weren’t going to cheer for just any noise. I looked down at them — restless cocoa pods of their faces, all of them drinking beer in two feet of space per couple. The waiters couldn’t reach the tables and there was some anger over this fact. We three had on our coats and tennis shoes — the I Vee League demands — but the crowd was much more casual than that. We seemed stiff as dolls. I was frozen up and barely made squeaks on the horn tuning with Silas. Silas’s cello clonked like a banjo, and Joe rapped preparatorily with doubt, like the drums were turning to oatmeal on him.

“We are ready. Sting like a wasp,” said Silas. He was sure of us. Good man, Silas. My throat grew warm and wet Joe began sounding like a drummer suddenly. We were standing by for an advent into “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

“Toot,” said a spade voice. So I went right to it.

We’d never been better. Coming in tight, I hit the flatted seventh of what I meant to hit, way up there, and came back “down in a baroque finesse such as I’d never heard from myself, jabbing, bright, playing the pants off Sweet Georgia, causing them to flutter in the beer and bacon smoke of the place. Silas began the dip-thrums and I unified with him while Joe locked the gates on the measures, back-busting that beautiful storm of hides and cymbals. Harry had found it and he began screaming with glee through the horn, every note the unlocked treasure of his soul — and things he had never had, yes, he hit an F above high C! What a bop the three of us were raising in there, what a debut, what a miracle. My horn pulsed fat and skinny. Oh, Harry was stinging them, but stinging them mellow. Didn’t I see out the corner of an eye that some spades were moving to us, see some eyes blissfully shut, heads pumping, grooving, digging us, seeing Sweet Georgia shriek after her panties? I gave Silas the solo bars, seeking that F again. Joe lowered the storm, and Silas, was he coming forward, was he backing the cello up the wall, did he have some ideas? Yes. The pianist of the Mean Men slunk by me with the devil’s own grin on his face. He wanted in on this, must have it.

As I lay out, I glanced over at the rest of the Mean Men, who were lining the bar, a glass of beer in the right hand of each man. I heard the pianist behind me ease in with Joe and Silas, still looking at the Mean Men. When I saw that even line of Negroes it came to me, a vision of Harley Butte’s band. They marched perfectly, those fifteen-year-old kids molded into impeccable musicians. Harley on the side in his white helmet, the years of band-work behind him displayed in the wafer-colored face of the man. The Beta Camina Gladiators dressed in green, as glorious, prosperous, confident, free, and arrogant as they would ever be, under Harley, keeping to that dream of perfect Sousan music for so long, under Harley, the hater of blues for so long; keeping that flame at Beta Camina, rehearsing those black germs without mercy, for the pure joy of having faultless geometry and faultless music at the same time. I did not want to get sappy about this, did not want to think, aw God, but I felt shoddy, unrehearsed. The applause was a fraud, the spades were drunk. I knew I had been at the peak of what I wanted, I might still be on the peak, but I couldn’t, couldn’t. It was my time to play again, but my horn was stuffed up, it was crammed with green uniforms, and I was smiling. I was not embarrassed.

“You just quit, didn’t you? What did you, why did you lay off when we were hotter than we ever were? You were stinging them. I was getting it on my part. I was soimding like the mother of music, then you fart off!”

“The back of that place was like about to shake off! I was playing real drums like for the first time in my life. The niggers were jumping up and down in that tube thing,” said Joe.

“I tell you what. I tell you it’s a good thing that piano man came up and finished the number or it woulda been total fucked ruin. Those people were kind to us to let us step and play. I made some friends in there.”

“It’s like forty miles over here to Vicksburg.”

Listen, Harry Monroe, I was thinking. Listen to these good men you brought down with you. Why why why in hell did you have to become a thinking person, what kind of baba are you to be thinking right in the middle of the best jazz you’ve ever played?

“Knowing of your big weekend appearance, I was interested to learn from this source”—Fleece was mild and clinical, always drawn in by pain—“that you folded rather mysteriously during the first song in Vicksburg. Believe it or not, I wanted you to make it over there because you wanted it so much. And being honest, I heard you through the door one night and thought you were pretty good. I like that mute-thing you played through in the end of the horn. It had a certain sound I was beginning to like. Fuzzy and sorrowful, in a darting way.”

“The whole night was fuzzy and sorrowful.”

“You say you’ve put up your horn for good?”

“Probably.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” He was perched on his rack like an owl.

“I think I should get back to thinking. On the books. Since I can’t quit thinking. The estate of the world never sleeps.” I repeated something I’d heard. “I got some catching up to do. Tomorrow I’ve got to smoke some graphs for my EDTA and ATP stuff.”

“You ought to keep up the horn, or something else. Because you don’t seriously think you’ll ever see the inside of med school, do you?”

“I’ll bet you one hundred dollars that I do.”

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars. I feel guilty. I know I got you into pre-med. Look. Sometimes I don’t think I’m going to make it. Have you added up the years? I mean lately.”

Well, I did win the bet.

13 / Rambler

I used to hang around the snooker hall in Dream of Pines, especially during those months when I was practicing trumpet so hard and wanted a couple hours’ breather. By being at the snooker hall I thought I was allaying some of the doubts that the guys had about me being the fabled queer who had molested Lloyd Reese. I played some fairly tough sharks and learned the game by needing to win, having my sexual reputation at stake. To be a queer in Dream of Pines was to be like an alligator wearing panties. I was an athlete in the snooker hall and defeated many a mill hick and rube, who could not really afford to pay for the games they lost.

So you see I was taking Fleece over to the 20th Century in Jackson three times a week and coaching him, giving him thirty points, just wanting a semblance of competition out of him, beating him, making him pay, until he got hooked on the game and had to play me, for money, a beer, for Bet, probably, if I’d pushed it. People of intelligence get hooked on snooker very easily. The pockets are so small they seem impossible. They notice all the red balls and the peculiar configuration of the snooker set; there is an ideal lawn of space — the felt — to their eyes. There is an invitingness in the problem of spheres and motion, there is little dumb luck as in pool. Compared, once you shoot a few games, pool seems a game of fat men hitting bowling balls with ax-handles. Fleece even broke dates with Bet to shoot with me. He bought himself a two-piece cue stick across the street at Hale and Jones. We finished up the evening by eating the red beans and rice plate at Al’s Half Shell—650—which Fleece generally owed me, plus up to four Millers. Tabasco on the rice, an extra sausage, and you had a fine growling meal inside you. These afternoons I played as if I had enemies watching me. These enemies were there back at the school. I could not name them, could not make out their faces, but there was a gallery of them in my mind, and it was swelling. Finally I saw two faces: Dave, the counselor, and Patsy Boone, whose face was in her stomach, with her breasts above it like a twin-peaked jester’s cap, and the scorning beard of light hairs on her chin. Patsy I had dreamed of like this, Dave was so ugly he had to appear, but there were others, swelling.

We were coming back one night when we hit the stop-light by the library and I thought of the books all of a sudden and jumped out of the car, telling Fleece to take it on to the dorm.

“I can’t drive,” he said.

I shouted for him to just ease down on the gas and keep a foot on the brake, everything was automatic. Bobby Dove flapped and protested, but I saw the car buck around the campus turn all right.

There was a mean gloom in the library; huge plaster rooms, green tiles on the floor. There were a lot of older night-school sorts here. I was about to burst. I wanted the basement restroom primarily. However, it was my idea to swoop across in the basement stacks and pick up the books on Geronimo, take them into the restroom with me, read about the old rogue in the ecstasy of relief, then perhaps climb out the restroom window possessing the books forever.

By the time I went down to the right row, I was humbled by agony. I gimped down the row, holding on the tier, and started parting the books. They were gone. I wanted Lieu-tenant Britton Davis’s Geronimo and Betzinez’s I Rode With Geronimo, and Geronimo’s Own Story. Somebody had them. I broke wind incredulously.

“My word,” says a prissy voice from one of the carrels at the end of the row. The sound had not been moderate. I was in sublime comfort. I mean the comfort of a wiener who has been a balloon. I made my way toward the voice.

“And who are you?” said the round monk graduate student. You knew none of the graduate students were any ac-count or they wouldn’t be at Heder man sever.

“What kind of person are you?”

He had my books. The red beans and rice had resurged with a little pain to me. I told him the books he had were mine. Including that one in his hand.

“I happen to be entertaining myself with the exploits of an Indian who may figure into my Master’s thesis. As a matter of fact I think I will use him.”

“Give. C’mon. I’m in a hurry.”

“Shall I see Mrs. Finger about graduate student priorities?”

“I’ll hit you in the face unless you give me the books.” Fair deal, he seemed to agree. He handed them over in a wise flabbergasted way.

“One bully after another,” he sighed. With this I knew he was queer. Just about bald, ring on his finger — a wife, kids, all of them bullies. Taking the Master’s degree just to get out of the house. Being argumentative in class, being as British and sardonic as he could be, trying like hell to abolish his Mississippi accent. I didn’t know all of this then, of course. But I sat down with the same types in my later schooling.

I had my thrill in the restroom, climbed out the window, stole the books. A campus cop would’ve had a nice shot at me as I was wriggling out of that roll-out window. That was hard. I got down and ran through the Fine Arts parking lot. Livace’s old DeSoto was there. I spat at it and crossed the highway. I think this was a high point in my physical health. I felt clean, fit, and mad as an elk.

Up a hill was the century cedar, a dull evergreen hanging shaggy, as seen in the lightpost glow in the middle of it. Underneath was a stone lovers’ bench. I burst right in on a couple, who were going to it with all the lust a mouth can get at. They got up and ran off together. The girl, Blakey Newman, so I saw by her name inside, left a book, The Story of the Old Testament, on the bench. And on it was a flattened Doublemint wrapper, which I used as a bookmarker later along with the book, and made a B in the required Old Testament course.

I did have quite a pile of books in my hands now. I seemed to be gathering an energy from them as I sat on the bench I’d won by ambush. I turned to the picture I hadn’t seen in a while. There he was, captured by the camera. Preserved by the saltwind off the Gulf in Fort Pickens, on the island of Santa Rosa. I put my face on his outraged face and looked cross-eyed at him. Hard as it was, I bent my eyes and laid them on the rifle in his hand. It was close and dark with my face on his picture like this. In this dark there were no friends, no women, no speaking, no songs, no tobacco, no drink, only the cheated anger, the unused bullets, and cutthroats and spleenstabbers in every corner.

What I especially liked about Geronimo then was that he had cheated, lied, stolen, mutinied, usurped, killed, burned, raped, pillaged, razed, trapped, ripped, mashed, bowshot, stomped, herded, exploded, cut, stoned, revenged, prevenged, avenged, and was his own man; that he had earned his name from the Mexicans after a battle in which he slipped up close enough to shoot their senior officer with an arrow; that the name Geronimo translated as “one who belches” or “one who yawns” or both at the same time; that he had six wives all told; that his whole rage centered around the murder of his first wife and three children by the Mexicans; that he rode with the wind back and forth across the Rio Grande and the Arizona border and left be-hind him the exasperated armies of the moonlight. I thought I would like to go into that line of work. I would like to leave behind me a gnashing horde of bastards. And I did have on my action boots.

I stood up. The campus was meek and depopulated. Then I saw the cars packed along the curb outside the auditorium. Something special was going on. Lights were on in-side it The bigwigs, the trustees, and the constant preacher-saviors of the college, the ashen-cheeked deans, were in meeting, I thought. But the administration office lights were not on. Only the auditorium was lit. I thought I heard a piano inside. I was standing beside a skyblue Cadillac. You pretentious whale, you Cadillac, I thought.

I jumped up on the hood of it I did a shuffle on the hood. I felt my boots sinking into the metal. “Ah!” I pounced up and down, weighted by the books. It amazed me that I was taking such effect on the body. I leaped on the roof and hurled myself up and pierced it with my heels coming down … again, again. I flung outward after the last blow and landed on the sidewalk, congratulating myself like an artist of the trampoline. I spun to the next one, a Lincoln. With my boots only I stove in a fender, flamp, flamp. The paint came off inflakes. Once more to see the top of a car. I was dancing for real now. Doing the spurs. The dance floor bent and gave through, raw blades of tin reared up. I pounced off all the way over to the grass. The Lincoln looked diseased … caved-in, speckled with leaden marks. Hundreds of dollars’ worth, already. I hiked along jubilantly. I simply walked over the Buick. I mounted it at the rear bumper and tramped into the back windshield. The safety glass popped out in a web, no shattering, just a hole and a burst of crystal. I gained the top. I had another floor. My boots did their duty. The steps that cost. Five dollars a heel and toe, at least And at that rate, I planted my boots down on the top and held my books to me, looking at the stars. There was no paint left when I sprang off the hood. I kicked out the lights with happiness and faced the next car. It was an older Chrysler, white, dirty, with sailfish tails and a sunken trunk, a ‘59 model. What did it deserve? What could I treat it to? I was a little out of wind, but stepped up on the trunk. I squatted down. This trunk was a little sturdier than the others, with the sunken continental kit.

A good thing I looked through the rear windshield. Somebody was on the front seat, asleep, perhaps waking now. I slipped off the trunk. The man was already looking around. He knew someone had been on his car, damn every-thing I could do slipping off the trunk. He opened the door, and there we were looking at each other across the roof of the Chrysler. I spoke first, in fright.

“I’m the campus police.”

“Would you know what time they usually end the rehearsal? I’m waiting for my niece. She’s in the musical. I know I’m parked in a faculty place, but at night, I thought …”

My frozen eyes and ass, it was Whitfield Peter. He stood there with his head full of tan hair, under the streetlamp. I took off running.

“You aren’t the police!” He yelled. He also demanded, “Stop! Stop!” and he was chasing me. I made it to the bell-house next to Crestman. They had this bell that they rang when Hedermansever won a football game, and this is what I was behind. I kept to the shadows and reached the basement of Crestman. I ran through the game room, the TV lounge, past the milk machines. The athletes had ripped all the phones off the walls and had turned over all the candy and drink machines upstairs and if they saw a sluggish man, they would attack him, so I ran. At the steps on the other side of Crestman, I had twenty feet of grass between me and my dorm. I kicked it Safe! Home free, with all the freewheeling strange sorts of my dorm. I loved all of them. Safe, walking by their rooms, I saluted them, at their desks, playing cards, hunched on their beds, looking regretfully into their mirrors. They seemed strong in their afflictions. And the ones with the completely ordinary faces — all these were my friends. They all formed a thick sanctuary of bodies around me.

I got up to the first floor and there halfway down the hall, talking to Dave the dorm-counselor, his hat off, seeming perfectly respectable, was Whitfield Peter. He was raising a hand to indicate my height. I took to the stairs.

Fleece was at his desk. The room was cleaned-up but crowded as usual. He had a glint in his eyes.

“What a machine that T-bird of yours is! I’ve learned how to drive tonight, my friend. You didn’t care if I took her down Raymond Road a ways, did you? Monroe, I took that whore up to seventy-five miles an hour! She responds to the old foot, doesn’t she?”

I got back my breath. Opened the top drawer and gazed at them, cold and oiled and wrapped in towels. I plunked them down on top of the chest to see if they were still loaded from the day of the Cuban missile crisis.

“Whitfield Peter’s in the dorm. He saw me sitting on his car. He and Dave are coming up here. I know it.”

“Sitting on his car?”

“What’s going on in the auditorium? His niece is in it.”

Fleece kicked the door and turned out the light.

“Put the guns up. What’d you do to him?”

“I jumped on the trunk of his car. He was in it. He scares the hell out of me.”

There was some time to talk before someone came to the door. Fleece told me they were rehearsing for “Oklahoma!” in the auditorium. He knew this because Bet had tried out for it and hadn’t made it and had been melancholy for a week. The spring musical was a big thing at Hedermansever.

“Well, his niece is in it. She made it.”

“I don’t understand. Now you …”

The door rattled. The lock was old and the door-facing around it was splintery and rutted, and I was thinking about this because the door was being kicked, once, twice, and who could’ve expected this? Fleece crawled into the closet in a low swift silhouette. I didn’t have the guts to release the safety on my automatic and just quavered, standing up, pulling on the dead trigger, the gun aimed at the floor. The door broke and swung in.

“Hi, weasel fuckers. I knew I heard you in here. I have something very, very damn happy for us!” It was Silas. “Is that a gun?”

Some explanation had to be made. Fleece came out of the closet. Silas turned on the light and closed the broken door. I told Silas the complete history of it. He really caught on fire with the story. He demanded to see the letters. Fleece cursed. But I felt very safe with big Silas in the room. Fleece, of course, detested Silas and squirmed and smoldered, and sat in a rage the whole while. I went to the cigar box to get the letters. He told me to keep my filthy hands off his possessions, but I took them out, reminding him that I had stolen my share of the letters and it wasn’t my fault that we didn’t have the hundreds of them that went up in the fire behind his house. Silas sat there three-quarters of an hour, reading. Every once in a while, he’d look up and stare like a bursting demon at Fleece, who looked away.

“Have you men ever seen ten actual inches?” he wanted to know, standing up with the last three or four envelopes in his hand. He unsnapped his pants. I looked out the window. Then I glanced at Fleece. He was looking right at me, wagging his head in sick dismay. I agree it was a very perverse surprise.

“You people ashamed of the human body? Thinking I’m a faggot? You poor prig-trained people. I wanted you to see a real phenomenon, in and for itself — what letters! what letters! — and now it’s gone. Never have it like that again. Oh my, you two people. You read these letters in your dark little dirty minds. Giggling, I bet. Won’t look at the flesh of a man who loves both of you! Never wanted to see the actual red flesh, did you? Couldn’t bear it! All your little rules say I’m queer. You’d love for me to be queer, wouldn’t you? I’m all dressed now. You can look at me.”

“I get ill enough looking at you with your pants on,” said Fleece. “Who are you, anyway? You look like somebody who’s taken exercises all his life so he could finally bend down enough to suck himself off.” Fleece was such a frail animal to be saying this to Silas.

“You expect me to haul off and hit him for saying that, don’t you?” Silas asked me. “That was honest, that was brave, what he said. I like him for it. I mean more. I know he’s a genius, I already respect him and like him for that. You people just can’t stand being liked, can you?” Well, there were some more friendly accusations from Silas.

He told us what he came down for. He had found us a cheap but extraordinary boarding house off North State in Jackson. Its landlady was Mother Rooney, an old Catholic widow who didn’t cook badly and stayed out of your way. He wanted us to move immediately; he meant tonight. Over at Mother Rooney’s, we’d have a separate room apiece, the rent was near nothing.

“We’ll be citizens of the world and not pigeons in this goddam roost,” he said. “I’ve got most of my stuff in my car already. This has to be fast, because these medical students want the rooms; Mother Rooney said she’d give us till midnight. I can get a trailer for all your stuff.”

I began getting my stuff together. Silas left. Fleece watched me packing and sorting. He was still snaky and sour. I told him we did need a new address, away from the college and Dave, and I was for it; told him that the place seemed fairly close to the medical school. I told him that, after all, Silas was not so bad. He’d made it so easy for us, he’d found the place.

“You son of a bitch. You know I won’t stay here by my-self,” said Fleece. He packed his clothes. Silas came back to help us with all of the cargo of artifacts and books which Fleece owned. It was five in the morning when we got it all in the trailer, which was hitched behind Silas’s Pontiac. Fog was all over the road to Jackson. Fleece hadn’t said a word for six hours. This was almost a shock to the ears. One thing to Silas’s credit: his presence caused long spells of silence in Fleece.

The house was on a little dead-end alley full of weed clumps. The alley was named Titpea; we passed the apartment house where Patsy Boone used to live. Our house was situated over the state fairgrounds. It leaned a little off its foundation, this house, toward the back yard, which didn’t amount to much and ran to a high cliff all grown over with kudzu vines that saved the back yard from further erosion. Nobody ever promised me or any of the other boarders that the house wouldn’t fall and crack apart as it tumped farther over the lip of the cliff. It was a preciously weird house, anyway. It amounted to two high silo-like towers attached to both ends of a two-story bungalow. The towers had yellow wood shingles; the middle bungalow had the same sort of shingles, but they were chocolate-colored; it had a porch with a banister, steep steps, glass doors, and white Victorian edging — grills and windows — like a fudge whorehouse. We would room in the southern tower. The old lady was already up when we got there.

“Now let’s get this straight. You do allow private nookie in the rooms. And we could practice music without fear of complaint,” said Silas to Mother Rooney.

“Music? Of course! I love music. I had hoped someone would room here who could play—”

“Never mind going on and on about it. Listen, I don’t want you even close to the south tower, don’t be dragging around when we’re over there. Leave this door open. We’re moving in.”

“Silas, God knows!” I implored.

“Now this is Sunday morning,” he continued. “We’re going to be sleeping all day, probably. Don’t wake us up making the sign of the cross or knocking your beads around and don’t slam the door leaving for Mass. You be a good girl and tonight Monroe here might take you down to the Royal for a movie and kiss your neck.”

“Lookahere,” I said. Mother Rooney was seventy.

“The movies? I love the movies,” she said, gazing at me fondly, which made me think she only heard certain hard nouns you said to her, especially the ones she wanted to hear and cherished.

“Let’s move in, men. Mother Rooney, you grab Fleece’s trunk. Watch the old arthritis. It weighs a ton.” I grabbed the trunk up quickly myself. The thin old lady was actually moving toward it.

On the way over to the tower, Silas, with his arms full of clothes, turned back to us.

“She loves me.”

“What is this place?” said Fleece.

“You just keep a smile on your face and. peer into her eyes with concern. She puts her hand on your shoulder. Let her do that. She loves that most of all.”

Silas went straight to bed. Fleece began yammering.

“What are we doing here? What is this place? We’re in the inside of a three-story tube. He forced us over here. We came over yanked along like damn puppets. He’s smooth. He’s mean. You heard him talking to that old woman. We have to pay extra money. How’s your old man gonna like that? You have to write a letter home just like me. But not that rich bastard up there!” Silas was in the top room, me in the middle, Fleece below. The rooms were perfectly round, and there was a light and double bed in each of them. I asked Fleece why didn’t he go down and enjoy his big bed like I was fixing to do. He went down the unpainted wood planks which were his stairway. The stairway to Silas’s room was planted in the north corner of my room. It was a narrow thing, had a wrought-iron banister, and hugged the wall.

But, say, if Fleece wanted to visit Silas — an unlikely wish — he would come up his stairs, walk to the right three feet, in full view of me if I happened to be in, to get the stairs to Silas’s room. I could see Silas descend, similarly, and go to his right to catch the stairs to Fleece’s room, which had a back door giving onto more black iron stairs that put you in the back yard. This is the route, these iron steps, we all used coming to and going away from our quarters.

The stairs coming through my room, I was fixed worse than anybody. I awoke on my bed and had to observe Silas escort his drunk hags up to his room. They were always little women, and I saw in the moonlight that they weren’t even as good as the roaches I’d been with. I think they must’ve been nurses and beauticians. We were near the nursing school and the beauty college. It was well known that the girls from these institutions would tear off their pants for anybody who gave off a hint of making ten thousand dollars a year. Silas’s bed walked all over his room. I thought of the tiny little mermaid he’d taken up there. Almost always, you would hear the girl weeping; hear her bare feet sliding. The ceiling was thin and the stairway was completely open. Silas would speak out, broad and jolly. What he liked best, I gathered, was for little girls to break into tears when he undressed. He would call them to sit on his lap, they would do this — I guess — and he would lecture them about how he would never force himself on them — I heard one of these talks — because he didn’t want to soil their plans to marry a smaller fellow with high principles. She must understand that she was only a naked pygmy on his lap, and that the kisses he was giving her were only for good luck.

Then they would come down fully dressed, Silas handling her with one wrist.

Silas read certain magazines and sent away for certain uncensored underwear and a bottle of red oil. He called me up to his room and explained this. The room was so bright you felt heat. He had two sunlamps on; the curtains were tied back so anybody on Titpea could see him. He wore this bikini which amounted to two strips of leather attached to a bandage covering his genitals; the idea was a sling made into a jockstrap. He talked, at ease, sitting on his bed, as if he had on nothing unusual.

“This is me. I can’t change it. It hurts me to put on a shirt It hurts my arms. It hurts me to wear pants, it binds me. And oh God, shoes. Nothing fits me. When I put on socks, it’s like, my feet, somebody’s twisting a tourniquet on them.”

“Fleece got in trouble wearing his underwear in his garage,” I said. I asked him if I ought to call Fleece up to talk it over with him. Yes, yes, Silas wanted to hear what Fleece had to say. I yelled down. Fleece wasn’t there. I’d told him he could use my car, and he was out with it now.

“I have to wear tennis shoes,” Silas was explaining, “and they’re bad enough, but if I wore leather shoes, they would strangle me. They’d kill me.”

14 / Catherine

It was nice to be in the double bed all to myself, nobody else in the room. I read several books in this bed that I would never have read in the dorm: Billy Budd, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, The Sun Also Rises, and The Great Gatsby, all of them pleasures which inflated me and upon which, on the exams, I could write for hours. I was taking a minor in English and was making A, no sweat, in the courses where these books were assigned.

One morning Fleece was coming up and Silas was going down. I was too sleepy to get what they said to each other. But I know the word-knives flew and the low blows of the tongue were traded.

When I was fully awake, Fleece was pulling out the drawers of my chest. He was looking for the gun he’d given to me. He said, One night when Silas was asleep, he would go up and shoot him through the head. I told him that would be cowardly. He said, No, it would be beautiful. He would come down and turn the gun over to me. I would make a citizen’s arrest on him. I didn’t know then that Bet had agreed to go out with Silas that night, on the terms that he would quit calling her.

Next day it was bright gray in the room. The windows were small octagonal portholes, and you had to turn on the bare overhead light to see anything. I hadn’t smoked for three days. When I woke up, I was ready to meet the classes I’d missed and attack them with the facts I’d memorized. One look at my twelve pages of histology and I knew it cold. I felt so healthy I could learn anything. I could swallow the world.

But then they showed me love, the love from afar that hurts the worst. Silas and I went to “Oklahoma!” and sat beside Fleece and Bet, who were holding hands. We all knew that Whitfield Peter’s niece was in the musical. I bought a coat for the occasion, a wild red madras plaid. I looked around for Peter in the audience. He didn’t seem to be there. I carried the little automatic in my coat pocket.

The student orchestra took the overture surprisingly well. I could’ve done better on the first trumpet part, but you can’t go through life adding up regrets like that. My old friend Livace was conducting, and Zak, the drama teacher, had coached the cast. Livace was waving the baton with big romance, his black tuxedoed back to us, and you saw he was conducting nobody but himself, saw he had forgotten the orchestra and was dwelling on his own histrionics. I thought of shooting him in the back to get him in line. Because he was what was wrong with the musical. He was not one to follow the singers on stage. They followed him, they sang to him. The singers kept their eyes glued to his baton.

Whitfield Peter’s niece was a minor dancer and chorus member. She was mama’s little darling. That’s how she looked. She was lithe and restlessly shy. Her hair was brown, pinched back, but strands fell over her ears in the heat of the dance. Just pretty enough to disturb you after a third look, and by then you wanted to take her to your chest and have her breathe on it. She was the one you came home to. She was your helpmate. I fell for her before I was certain who she was. You could tell she loved being in the musical. I felt sorry for her. The musical was such a wreck. It lunged on, a robot dream above the heads of the orchestra; people appeared and fled like costumed metronomes. Good old Livace.

Fleece passed a program down. He had underlined her name in the cast. Catherine Marie Wrag. She would be anxious to have her last name changed. Fleece had encircled Catherine. Yes. I’d read it often enough in the letters. His estranged wife. My stomach went cold. But her last name was not Lepoyster. I still loved her purely. My imagination was going crazy, but I hung on to my love for her. She held herself like she was accomplished in innocent talents that the musical was not making plain.

“Wouldn’t you love to tie that nice brown-headed piece across a barrel and work the old will?” Silas whispered in my ear during a scene that had her out front.

“No. Leave her alone,” I said.

When “Oklahoma!” was over we kept seated and let the crowd get out. A photographer was popping away at the cast. He told Catherine to move a little closer. I was even jealous of him. Watch your hands yanking her, you, you jaded bag.

Catherine ran off into the wings, and then down the aisle came her uncle. Peter had been waiting for her. He was a young pink fifty now. His hair seemed to have been waved and veneered by professional aid. And his profile — a matured fruity cupiedoll. I almost lost my supper when I saw him.

Catherine came back out with a little suitcase. Peter was at the footlights and she stepped down to him with his help. I was in the orchestra pit by then, losing myself among the musicians packing away their instruments, so I could observe her up close. I took time out to grab Livace by the elbow and tell him what I thought of his directing; Livace, still lost in his maestro-fever, was accepting it as praise, not recognizing me. I saw the first trumpet, Derrick, who used to fear me for my talent, and I clapped him on the back and asked him what he was playing nowadays. I tore his Conn Constellation out of his hands and ran my fingers over the keys, and poised there, because Catherine was just then coming by the pit ahead of Peter. She did look at me and in my eyes she must have seen the gravy of pure hopeful love because she kept looking at me until she went by. I kinked my head around then, not wanting to see Peter. When Peter passed, I set the horn down and followed.

“It was every bit simply lovely,” I heard Peter say to her. I was at his back and listened for her voice. Silas, Bet, and Fleece mobbed out into the aisle around me. Bet spoke in my ear, leaning down a bit. She had on long ear-drops and smelled like vanilla — ah, woman — which deterred me a moment.

“Bobby says to tell you ‘Please!’ He says you have a pistol, don’t your.

“I forgot the pistol. It’s the girl.”

She asked me why we were walking so fast. Go to Silas’s Pontiac, quick, everybody, I said. Peter led Catherine down the sidewalk going east, and I noticed the fins of his goosey Chrysler in a slot in the alley between buildings. I could catch him then. We were down the row just a bit. I asked Silas for the keys.

Peter eased out, and we gave chase.

On West Capitol, just beyond the Overhead Bridge, he seemed to notice us. He cut over to Woodrow Wilson, going by Livingston Park, and on the fly. But no, we sat behind his bumper, stopped at a light, and he nodded his head up and down talking delightedly to his niece. He didn’t know we were there. He was just in a terrible hurry to get home. With her.

He went over the speed limit getting up to Madison County. We hit the rougher blacktop. Then his lights swung left in a flurry of gravel. I stopped at the inception of the gravel road, pulled off, and cut the motor. The house was a half-mile down there, over a hill.

“She lives with her uncle,” said Bobby Dove.

I asked Silas wasn’t there anything to drink in that car pocket over there. There wasn’t. Well, I said, I’m going to walk on down there and see what I can see. I felt sickish and bespooked.

“I think she might need me.”

“I think it’s just great that Harry’s in love with that girl so much he’ll walk down there to see if she’s all right,” said Bet. Being an enchanted-tower sort of challenge herself, I guess she was bound to love high plights and things like that. Trysts.

“I think he’s more in heat,” said Fleece.

“Oh, uglymouth! Jerry, you go with him and don’t let anything happen to him.”

“No,” I said. “Alone is what I want.”

“Oh, marvelous,” cried Bet.

“We don’t want him to stay here,” said Fleece, meaning Silas.

This made Silas surly. He came with me. He asked me if I wanted to know a secret, by God. It was that Bet had promised to go out with him some night if he’d quit calling her. He told me it was hard to like that brittle little monkey, Fleece. I agreed. He could see that Fleece thought he had Bet trained. He wasn’t happy about their slobbering on the seatcovers of his car, whatever they did for lust together. I told him to please go back, then; he couldn’t imagine how much I didn’t want to hear about other peoples’ love careers.

‘That’s all right. I’m shutting up. That’s the shrine of love, just around the turn there, isn’t it? The honeymooners. What.. a bat? We’re really in the sticks, aren’t we?”

Yes, we were. The blackberry thickets hung on the road ledge. The moon showed foot-high corn sprouts in the field beside us. The land spoke of meager, desperation farming; of people who could not afford the machinery they did it with. We saw a weathered board house, leaning, empty. It held the souls of some sharecropper family who were burnt out to zombies before they left. We made the gate of Peter’s house and turned in to the yard, with its circular drive, high shaggy grass in the center, and otherwise the rabbit tobacco bushes, the neck-high milkweeds, and clover. We flushed out a covey of quail. Other creatures snuck away.

“What is it you want to see? There’s his car. All right, they’re here,” says Silas. Both stories of the house were alight. There was no light on the veranda, but the living room lights made it visible. “We’re not going up and knock on the door, are we?”

I told him I really did wish he would leave, now.

“You think they’d be going to it with all these lights on? What, you want to see them. That Catherine—”

“She was a sweet, teenage child. You saw her,” I said.

“She was older than that. I thought she had a good bit of knowledge how to move her body.”

I sunk down and sat in the weeds when he said that. We were in the shadow of the hedge of the veranda and, as things turned out, too close to it.

The doors opened and out came Peter and Catherine into the warm night They were holding glasses. I heard the ice tinkling. We had got caught under a sort of single bush of the hedge. What I had already noticed on the veranda was that potted fern, of the letter. It was a thriving giant, with arms falling all over the veranda and the banisters. They came out by this fern and weren’t ten feet above us.

“Now this is what I used to really enjoy, this porch,” said Peter. “Your aunt and I spent hours out here from May through September. Now that was leisure. Your generation is so busy, you will never understand that leisure. A musical tonight, another interest tomorrow. You bounce from one event to the next. You will piece yourself out, I fear, Cathy. You will not be able to set yourself still and focus. I’m not capturing your interest any longer, am I? You aren’t having a good time in this house.”

“Naw look, some days I get homesick for home and Mobile, but you ain’t… it isn’t you Peter that has anythin’ to do with it. I couldn’t ever forget how much you’ve did for me. This house is just fine, there isn’t nothing wrong with it I mean there isn’t any thing wrong with it.”

“I need to cut the grass. I was always one who hated to harm the greenery. Tomorrow I’ll get a nigger from Canton.” The ice tinkled above, again.

“This is a strong drink of gin,” Catherine said. There was a long pause. “I wonder don’t it make you sad to think about Aunt Catherine?”

“Now what did you say?” Peter corrected her. “It should be ‘I wonder, doesrit it make you sad.’ No, it doesn’t make me sad, as long as I have such company as yourself to talk to …”

Silas and I were hunched practically face to face under the bush. “She uses bad grammar, doesn’t she?” Silas whispered, loudly. It sounded like a scream to me. He’d given us away. I brought out the pistol in hopes it would give me some strength of position when Peter discovered us. Silas could not speak quietly; he tried, but that wasn’t his talent. “Not a gun! Sssssst! You aren’t going to shoot him, are you SSSSSSSSSSTl”

“Somebody’s right down there!” Catherine shouted.

I stood up, holding my pistol. I was on the border of the hedge shadow. Silas was crawling across the gravel like a crab, making for the deep weeds. I was stiff as a cork. My mouth and tongue clung together. To Peter and Catherine, I know, I must’ve seemed a wild pop-up dummy — thinking back on the scarlet plaid madras coat I had on. My hand went up in the air. I shot the gun twice straight up, and heard the two weak tark sounds it made. Then — why? — I yelled, “Stop! Stop!”

“He has a gun!” Catherine screamed.

“In the house, the house!” shouted Peten Peter backed through the porch doorway, as I did the same across the gravel drive. I heard him tell her to bring him something. Then he came right out to the banister again. This was damn brave. He threw out his arms, and began making a sort of speech. I was in the dark, but I had fallen in a coil of those same bushes in the middle of the driveway that the back end of my T-bird had been in.

“How many of you are there? Do you know there is a young woman here? What can you want? Show yourself! Are you such cowards?” and so on. I ran across the other side of the driveway then and got into the trees near the fence. He was still declaiming, framed perfectly in the light. He was in shirt and tie and his legs were far apart and his pants were baggy. God help him if there’d been somebody in the yard really wanting to shoot him. Then he met Catherine at the door. Her little arms were full of guns. I’d always known he had them. He came forth with a shotgun in one hand and a pistol in the other.

He began shooting at the hedge right down from him, and then toward the gate. I hoped Silas had made it out of the yard. I heard the bullets skinning the road outside the gate, nowhere near me. He snapped the pistol. He was empty. I think it was a.22. Then he walked off the veranda and pounced into the yard, in front of his car. I ran out the gate then. I’d waited too long, wanting to see her again. But I was always fast on my legs.

First thing I heard was a triumphant shout and a blast from the big gun, then another and another. Two more. Rooooooom, Rooooooom. Then there was a bigger ruff sound, and I looked around to witness a rose-shaped explosion of flame in the yard. The Chrysler seemed to lift, on fire. The flame was twenty feet high and awfully close to the veranda. I was making a dash, but even running I could guess what had happened. The bastard had shot the gas tank on his own car. There were more shotgun blasts. He’d reloaded. He was taking care of those of us who had not fled the light of the flames. He was flushing out the last coward.

The Pontiac wasn’t there when I got to the blacktop. Then it came toward me, from the direction of Canton, slowly. Silas was driving. I was hacked. They seemed on the verge of not even letting me in.

“Harry, Harry! What did you do?” asked Bet.

“Nobody was expecting this, with damn guns and fire. What’d you do, throw a match down the gas tank of his car, didn’t you. You killed him, you shot …” Silas said.

As we drove off I looked out, and what a scene over the little hill — there was a pulsing orange glow fifty feet over Peter’s house. They had been looking at this for several minutes. The house was burning.

I swore I had not done it. Really, honestly, believe me, trust me, I begged them. I told them they had to be on my side in this thing.

“Fleece wanted to leave you. He was the one. He said we should forget your damn name,” said Silas.

“He set it on fire himself,” I said. I stared at Fleece, and Fleece stared murderously at the back of Silas’s head.

While we were deciding what to do, the fire truck from Canton came screaming up the road behind us and Silas took us away.

“What you’ve got to do is simply forgive me for a simple act of cowardice.”

“I don’t have to do that. No I don’t.”

“I never said forget your name. Silas embellished that one on. Don’t just sit there on the bed cleaning your gun.”

“What would you do?”

“Throw it in a lake.”

“Nope.”

“Do real hombres say that? ‘Nope’?”

I kept rubbing the gun. If I rubbed long enough, Geronimo appeared in my head, like a genie. He sat down and lay back as if in some chair of my soul and said, What can you show me? What have you done with your hair, your leg, your arm, your fire power, your fire water? There was a fine, private, steady security having him there. How have you exasperated the man or men you despise? How are you going about getting your woman? He watched me, leaning back in his chair with the pleasure of an old ghost who had nothing to lose. And mainly he said: brood—that’s it, your natural state, not think, you know what a fraud that is for you; brood, and take my shape. Brood on the despair of not being me, that too; and brood on the fact that even though you ain’t me, cheap fame is some fame.

“Well, you do have this,” said Fleece, picking up the pink edition of The Jackson Daily, where on the second page it read.

gunman or gunmen he routed after a molotov cocktail type gasoline explosive was thrown on his porch, said Lepoyster. Lepoyster said he replied at first with his own pistol and then took his shotgun to the front yard, which was afire. “I revolved amid fire seeing that the house was an inferno and rushed back to assure the safety of my niece. My last act was to telephone the Canton fire house. Thank God the wires ran in back of the house and I was able to make fruitful connection. My niece and I withdrew to the old well with naught but clothes on our backs, myself armed, I assure you. They had taken to their heels, whoever they were.”

Lepoyster said his niece was upset and unavailable for comment. He said she saw a man “of indefinite race” in a bright multi-colored garment near the porch and sounded the alarm.

“Our home is half gone in flame and it was the home of fond memories for us both. We could not buy it back. I shall not mention our future quarters.”

Asked if he had any idea as to the identity of the attackers or their motives, Lepoyster replied, “I shall remain alert and armed.”

“That’s right,” I said. “No one can take that away from me.” I was beginning to feel easy in the cheap fame and the fear of it. I mean the fear of the police, and the fame of having ignited this baroque stream of fraudulent melodrama in Colonel Lepoyster. Getting his sentences all together, Peter had probably not had time to touch his niece for several days.

“It’s even nice and pink, for your scrapbook.”

“What more could a gunman or gunmen want?”

“You say you fired first, but up in the air. You just popped up and shot, twice. You didn’t say anything.”

“I never said that.” In truth, I’d just recalled that I had said something. “I yelled, ‘Stop!’ twice.”

“You don’t mean Peter yelled ‘Stop! Stop!’? Now he, that’s exactly his variety of …” Fleece held up a finger.

“I know. But it was me.”

“Stop what? Was he pawing her?”

“No. Or not yet. But he had her under his wing, and that fern, that damn fern, was so large, spread out, it looked like they were in a jungle alone from where I was looking at them. They were drinking liquor; she could hardly drink it it was so strong, the girl. Remember he’d just seen her in the musical like I had. Remember the speed he drove over there…”

“Would you forgive me if I said I could understand all that? You love the girl, don’t you?”

I avoided that one for a moment. “No, I can’t forgive you for wanting to leave me. If I forgave you for that, where would it end, forgiving you? Vomiting on me, damn you, and—”

“Ah shut up! I don’t have to beg. I don’t have to apologize to anybodyl Silas heard that stupid slut you’re so hot for. He said she was a real spelling-bee queen.”

He stomped down the staircase to his room. I heard him rattling around, shaking the pieces of his portable Fleeceiana museum — the metal stork, the big useless radio console, the cavalry pistol, the framed, newer thing — a decree of high taste and decorum, a degree, in fact, which he had typed and awarded to himself, affixed with the seal of a prophylactic foil, Bet Henderson’s signature on the dotted line beneath, as she was the only attestor possible. Seeing the foil, I’d stopped there, not reading the document I think it was intended for Silas, anyway. Well this man of such staggering couth was down in his room, knocking around, having slandered the girl I loved.

But yes, that love. How was that doing? My Catherine! I couldn’t quite get those words in my mouth. There was a flinty little crab running over them: her words, her voice. I had been crouching there under that hedge bush, ready to hear anything she might have said and hide it away in the pleasure of my heart. She’d just come off the stage from singing and dancing, and I was waiting for the lazier sweet notes in her voice, and then came this bad whining illiteracy, not even good Alabama English; a sound, that if I had seen her speaking, I knew she’d be raising the side of one lip to get it out. And, damn me, I’d read so much good English poetry and prose and had developed such a sense of the exquisite — I thought — in grammar. James Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald were my masters then. I’d read Ulysses blind and knew about a fifth of what was going on, but the sentences stuck in my throat, spread like a cold to my ears, and I was diseased by elegant English sentences. Some days I had such a sense of the exquisite I wouldn’t speak at all. So, I asked myself, does her speech finish her off, murder her? This is how thudding stupid being literary can make you. Of course, she was alive. Don’t even think of course, ass. She has her arms, legs, breasts, and hair. She’s not waiting for anybody to say of course for her, like some combination obstetrician-grammarian giving her a spank on the bottom. I went up to Silas’s room, Silas being out: away with the curtain and you could see the lights of Jackson. I could see no rooms higher than this one in town. I was thinking about Catherine’s red bottom, what man spanking it? What parents waiting for her? Was she living within these lights? At the same time seeing her little arms and hands push outside the porch door with those guns, Peter grabbing them from her, I had her right in front of my eyes, in handwriting—

taken poor me unner you wing like this I caint hardily thank you eneough, Uncle Peter, I just do hope Im sharp eneough for college.

Love,

Vinceen.

had Vinceen, her own leaky ballpoint pen self in my hands, holding her letter; the rest of the letter was even worse, but what do we care, Vinceen? I know who you are and want to know at which point you became Catherine Marie Wrag, and what exactly you gave away when you gave away Vinceen, unless you have four legal given names knocking against one another, say, Catherine Vinceen Marie Wrag, four heavy boxcars like that And so what? You live, my Catherine, and you were so much when I first saw you, language couldn’t do you right, and you’re worth four different names, at least. if language tried.

I looked out at Jackson a last time and went back down the stairs, God help me, still trying to make those names into some audibly sweet order.

15 / My Catherine

But she could not be found on campus. The semester was ending and I decided she had quit, or had been pulled out. I had an unendurable need to see her. I couldn’t read, sleep, or pay attention. I had an edge on constantly; I knew if I saw her I would touch her and she would look into my face.

Fleece was cleaning his room one day, and he yelled up to me, If I really wanted to break the law, why didn’t I smoke some of this marijuana he was throwing out? So I did, I smoked it in rolls made out of notebook paper, did it through the phase where your lungs hurt with a sagebrush fire that does nothing for you, to the phase when it takes hold, and you are an irresistible hero saying “Hot Dog!” and things like that. I would try to meet Catherine and eventually there she was, allowing herself to be caught in a green pasture. I am your rag, my name is Wrag, she said. Then the stone-deadend of sleep.

Fleece was in the Roman Rituals and Religion class with Ralph, who worked at a phone in the Jackson police station. He called the night Medgar Evers was shot in the back. Medgar was a field secretary for the NAACP. Some champion had killed him, in the dark, as he was walking from his car to his house. I suppose we were among the first in the world to hear about the murder, if that gains us anything. After Fleece put down the phone, he told me about it. He told me, if my gun was loaded, keep it that way. Silas came down to his room asking what was going on. Silas, when he heard, said he just wanted to be in the same room for thirty minutes with that champion, that champion shitlicker who could aim a gun in the dark at a man’s back. And the champions who were the bombers of the Sunday School in Birmingham could be this new champion’s managers; they could advise him what to do when his eyes were ripped out, when he was strangled with his own guts, and while they were thinking of what to advise him, the champion, Silas would already be falling on them, tearing each man’s stomach out and holding it up for his observation for a moment before he slashed their eyes out and they could not see their own selves dying. I liked that idea, and still do. Since then, the FBI has arrested the lead suspect, the champion-suspect has been freed in two hung jury trials, and the champion-suspect has run for Lieutenant Governor of the state, getting an insignificant vote of thousands.

But what Fleece meant about keeping my gun loaded is that Whitfield Peter was the first one the local police called up. Ralph had seen him at the station. The police wondered if he knew anything about it. Ralph didn’t know all that was said. Peter did a lot of laughing and came by Ralph’s desk clicking his mouth and looking sublimely amused. Ralph got up to stretch his legs. He’d already seen Catherine sitting in the car in the dock. It was a black Buick now. He saw Peter get in and saw his niece draw over to sit nearer him. He had Peter’s new address. It was a house in Jackson. They were in the same city with us.

“They let him go,” I said.

“Yeah. They don’t think he did it. They just knew how much he wanted to’ve done it. And who knows; he might have.”

I saw her. She came in by herself and sat down on the other side of the brick divider with the rubber foliage across the top of it. I was in the grill. She drank her coffee and went out the glass door by herself. She had a huge stack of books in her arms. She looked meek. The load was killing her. I followed her, saw her calves; just under the skin behind her kneecaps, she had a shadow of baby-blue veins. I caught up to her.

“You don’t know me, do you?”

“Nart!” She made a surprised sound.

“You were good in the musical.”

“Wasn’t anynothing especial. You uz with the horn, wuzn’t it? I uz just hardly in it.”

“Let me carry some of those books. Listen. We could have a date this Friday night,” I beseeched her. She jerked back the books I’d taken from her. Nothing mean in the action, just panic. Like a fox you tried to pet.

“Nart!” She shied off with her burden. I opened the door of the Student Union for her. She didn’t appreciate it too much. She made anxious squirming sounds.

What a piteous animal Catherine was, and so lonely. To class, and then home to Uncle Peter. Ralph of the police station had told us where they were. I’d driven by the house already — an old Spanish plaster thing near Meadowbrook Mart which we could see any night on the way to the Dutch Bar. And what did Peter say to her in that house? What did they do when the books were put away and Uncle Peter was home from the office?

As I watched her going across campus I wanted her still, with a trollish spasm. I loved her fear and wanted to bring it to me. And I suppose — I’m not sure — I thought if I could love her I would be a nice boy like my mother always wanted me to be. Perhaps, say, if I could kill someone who insulted her.

I whistled, wheep! Another day. This time sitting on the steps of the Education and Psychology Building, and she was coming down them from class. She wanted to be a schoolteacher.

“You have to give me a chance.”

“Now let go my hem of my dress.” I saw a paper sticking out of her book. It had D- on it in red. She pulled loose but didn’t go anywhere.

“You waiting on your boyfriend to pick you up?”

She looked at me with an expression of tearful horror. Catherine looked a bit like Claire Bloom at times.

“Is this serious, between you and him? Don’t you get any time off? And Catherine? …”

“Aw whut?” Such a delicate hug-able thing until you heard the voice.

“Would you say your whole name for me?”

“I cain’t.”

“Why not?”

“I ain’t got time.”

She stepped down to the sidewalk, and I saw she was watching the black Buick turn toward us around the horse-shoe. I stood my ground. At least I had on my sunglasses and they gave me some confidence. Catherine walked out in the road to get on the right side of the Buick. Peter was be-hind the wheel, studying me from ten feet away as he stopped. He had a cordial grin on his face. I’d seen his face since the night of the fire. Silas had a television in his room and we watched a broadcast of the funeral march for Medgar Evers which showed Ralph Bunche and other dignitaries, like old Peter himself, standing on the sidewalk of Farrish Street with his big hat most positively on; a little riot broke out later, as was telecast. We didn’t see him then.

By the time he got a good look at me, I was being a complete and craven chicken-ass thespian. I had drawn in my lower lip and a good bit of my chin to my mouth, and I let my top teeth hang out bare; I also dropped my shoulder down and turned out my hand in the posture of mournful dystrophy. I beat my teeth on my chin and ran my tongue around as if unable to say the passionate thing I wanted to say. I nodded up and down and stamped my foot. Peter became embarrassed and turned to his niece in the car.

“Who is that young man?” I heard him ask her.

“That’s Harry Monroe,” she said to him. Peter nodded to me hesitantly. His rival. So she had found out my name! Catherine saw me being the muscular dystrophy pretender on the steps. What awful humiliation. As they left I saw them in conversation with each other and saw them craning around to look at me as the car went down the hill to the highway. I waved to them then, bending out of the guise. I vowed then that Peter would never frighten me again. The next time he saw me, he would meet Harry Monroe and all that that boy really was.

16 / Oh My and Again

We sat at Mother Rooney’s evening table. She had served us fried chicken with mashed potatoes and dark pan gravy, with turnip greens and a lettuce salad, plus her own rolls, and there wasn’t a crumb left in the room. The pharmacist, Delph, had left, and we were lying forward on the table, just mumbling. Silas had eaten two entire chickens and Mother Rooney had loved it. For a while Mother Rooney had sat at the end of the table, watching her food being eaten, taking nothing herself. She’d been lightly chiding Silas about the other evening. He’d sent her to the Roy in a taxi, telling her there was an epic of the Catholic faith showing called “The Blood and the Cross,” which was an Italian vampire movie featuring the indecent exposure of five women just before the fiend bent them over in silhouette to slake his need, with an old coughing priest and his crucifix the hero at the end. Silas was so stoned with food he didn’t even answer her, or perhaps he did. He commenced heaving out long rending belches, and she got up and left.

“What sort of parents would let her stay with Peter?” I said.

“They aren’t alive. Either that, or they’re so low they can’t afford to think. My theory is,” said Fleece, “they don’t know he was in Whitfield. If somebody wrote them, and if they can read, what they read was he had tuberculosis or something all that time. They think she’s with some man who has recovered because he’s such a fine man he deserved to recover. They think he’s weak but has a lot of money. She’s in a Christian college. She’s in their dream they never ever thought of hoping for.”

“That’s something like my theory,” I said.

“I’ll tell you. My theory is …” said Silas. He was dead with food, and belched again. “My theory is that the meat of Pete is her treat. And that was a poem, mothers.”

“I want to go over there and stay in the yard for half an hour and see what I can see,” I said.

“I’ll go with you,” said Silas, with no enthusiasm.

“I’ll take you over,” said Fleece. He stood up.

Fleece had just been issued a license from the State Highway Patrol. Silas lifted a hand and fell asleep.

It proved out that Fleece and I hadn’t eaten so much that we couldn’t do with a six-pack at the Tote-Sum. We parked in Peter’s front yard and finished it off — ten o’clock by the clock of the T-bird. The T-bird was getting to be an old car, and it was surprising the things that still worked in it.

He got out with me and we walked right up to the show window of the right rear of the house. “This would be a living area,” said Fleece. He was drunk. He suggested that we climb up on the roof and dive down the chimney together and land in the fireplace and show them something. He called me by name several times, afraid he would forget me, I suppose. “Zersus? Zersus Christ? What was his first name?” “Jesus.” “Jesus Christ!” We were looking at Peter and Catherine and they were popping corn over a fire in this huge room. Catherine held the wire contraption and Peter was leaning on the mantle, expressing himself blissfully. You could tell he was using some art in whatever he was saying. It was long out of season for a fire, but there it was, going. Catherine was covered with a chaste robe of turquoise flannel, but, nevertheless, you could see her thigh-line, and her breasts sat forth very plainly in it, though she was buttoned up to the top. What seemed really compromising was that she was barefooted. Peter was getting to see the line of those pretty ankles and feet Catherine, holding the stem of the popper with both hands, moved away awkwardly from the fireplace suddenly. Some of the corn seemed to have taken flame. Peter swirled around and leaned over her shoulders with his arms around her, to take it. His head fell to the side and he was a long time at the back of her neck.

“You can see what he has on his mind!” said Fleece. “What’s wrong? You’ve got your pistol. Shoot him! Look at him, still on her neck! Give me the gun!”

It happened that Catherine broke free of Peter, or the handle of the popper, and went hurriedly out of the room just then. Peter, still holding the contraption, mooing at her with a spread cupped mouth, inched her way. I brought up the pistol and shot through the window, into the fire. The window was made of twenty little panes or so. Patuda, patuda, patuda, patuda, patuda, patuda, patuda! Shot out all but one shot. A number of panes fell away. Peter stood there in his robe and slippers, in full relief twenty feet from me, the center of an erupted shower of popcorn. He was trying to do something with the black pistol he’d pulled out of his robe pocket. “Let me take him,” said Fleece soberly. He was drunk but very serious. I gave him the gun and got out of the way.

Fleece aimed on Peter. Peter seemed to be making a lot of racket inside. I heard Catherine scream. Then I picked out the gunshot noises. Peter was blazing away from inside, and glass was flying past Fleece, and Fleece seemed to be poised there in the glow of the window light forever, a steady hand and pistol five feet off the ground. Then there was a yell as if a horse’s throat had been cut. Fleece walked quickly over to me and we were in the car before you knew it.

“I took him. It was fair. He saw me. I saw him. He shot at me nine or ten times. I took him down in the kneecap.”

“How you know you didn’t kill him?” I was trying to keep the T-bird together while we did eighty, hitting left from Northside Drive on to Delta Drive, which is very slick and bounded by ditches and greasy parking lots.

“I aimed at his knee for a whole minute, is how I know. And then when he fell I saw blood spurting outa his knee and he was holding his knee with both hands, is how I know.”

“He yelled like he was murdered.”

“I know he yelled…. You forgive me now for wanting to leave you at Canton, don’t you?”

“Yes. Yes. Fool.”

“All right, so you keep your mother fucking mouth shut about it.”

Such a hard all-square man then, Fleece. You should’ve seen him the rest of the week. He stayed in bed. He couldn’t eat the crust off a piece of toast; when he began starving, I brought him a piece of light bread, right out of the sack. Even this was too much; he couldn’t even nibble. He wanted me to keep a watch on his window. One afternoon a police car came up and backed around in our alley. He saw me stand up. “Who?” in this tortured gasp. I didn’t tell him. I thought he might be dying. My own heart had frozen seeing them.

I was in his room at the end of the week when Silas came through on the way to his own room.

“Dirty boy, dirty boy,” squeaked Fleece.

“Is he talking to me?” asked Silas, stopping.

“Somebody better hit me in the stomach hard, or I’m gonna die,” squeaked Fleece.

“He needs somebody to hit him in the stomach?” asked Silas.

“He’s said that before,” I said.

“He has? Well, let’s see …” Silas went over to the bed. “You want something to bring you out of this?”

“Wait—”I began.

Silas raised his thick fist over his head and slugged Fleece in the belly so hard it made the bed move. I think it took the mattress down to the floor. Fleece’s tongue jumped straight up. I went on up to my room; I was shy of seeing what remained of the living Fleece, if anything. Then I heard Fleece calling me. When I went down, he was up walking in his pajamas, pointing up the staircase toward Silas’s room.

“That son of a bitch has had it!” he said.