Geronimo Rex

1 / The White of His Eye

Some days it seems to me I never knew any of them. I get sleepy thinking about them. It seems I was encapsulated in a dull glass ambulatory unit, and they were too, and we just happened to knock against one another and squinted through the glasses to see if the other was still insisting that he, indeed, existed. You see the arms pressed on the glass, and see their frowns squashed against it, and remember their flesh as if it appeared only in pink splotches, like a rash.

“When you think about it, it does shine forth as a little chemical miracle of rare device, doesn’t it?” Fleece was fondling the long pistol he’d given me, and looking wry. He was letting his hair grow out like Trotsky’s on the sides; his” forehead was even higher; the brains up there seemed to burst his hair away to both sides. “I believe I’ll take this one back.” He glanced out the window and then up the stairway. “A side arm makes one feel downright shrewd, don’t it? And my buddy-roll, we must be shrewd now, eh? What say?” He hadn’t asked about the bullets.

“You see her at school today?”

“Saw her yesterday. She didn’t see me.”

“She look worn out? She look eaten?”

“She looked like she was just plugging away at college like it was killing her. She was holding a copy of The Sound and the Fury and The Waste Land and Other Poems, and another book called Statistics and Appraisal.”

“You looked at her good, didn’t you?”

Poor Catherine. What was she possibly doing with “The Waste Land,” with The Sound and the Fury and The Stranger, The Brothers Karamazov in sophomore lit? What was she going to do about the junior English proficiency essay? With statistics and appraisal, with audio-visual education, and child psychology charging at her like monsters out of the fog. How, my Catherine? What will you do, what will you write, what will you say? At Heder man sever, which was so “rigid” and which they called the Harvard of the South, seventy-five per cent full of Pee Aitch Dees whose lives consisted of bringing bitter news to people like her — the dumb. Those Pee Aitch Dee people at the front of the room: “Look here, I’m Doctor so and so. The people that gave me the degree, they knew I’m not as narrow and stupid and boring as I seem. I spent years proving this!” Her bright black eyes on all that. Did she ever raise her hand in class? Of course not. I’d talked to Zak the other day, too. Catherine was assured of a place in the fall musical. So now, with also learning the tunes and the dance steps! And with Peter. How much could she keep in her mind!? I must’ve been showing my concern.

“Damn. You do care about her,” said Fleece.

“Care about her and don’t dare let her see me. I got the feeling if she saw me again, she’d remember who it was with the gun by their porch out there.”

“She didn’t see your face. They’ve got nothing, nothing. You know what he said.”

Fleece alluded to Peter’s statement in the article “Local Citizen Attacked Again” in the green edition of the Jackson Daily, which appeared two afternoons after Fleece shot Peter. Peter was quoted from a bed in St. Dominic’s Hospital.

I do not know any person or persons who should want to shoot me. If I have offended anyone in my public stand I would offer him debate and not bullets. Please let me meet you in the open.

I only hope that now that I am crippled and will be forced to make use of a cane as I walk, that person or persons will be satisfied. I have confidence in the Jackson police, who will be stationed at my house until they break this case. You ask me if I look forward to violence in the future, and I say if they get through the police, they had best creep softly because I carry now a stick of large nature in the name of two loaded automatic shotguns with double zero buckshot in them. This would tear a telephone pole apart. I am only protecting myself and my own. The villain or villains who attacked me know already that I shoot back. If you are quoting me, let it be known that I am not inviting them. I hope they are satisfied by crippling me. But let them know I am now armed to lay waste to them if they have ideas of sneaking about my house again.

He was whining now, like Fleece said. He might have his double-zero armory, but the guns were shaking useless in his hands. He was begging the villain please not to come again.

“I think I’ve made a sedate old racist out of him,” said Bobby Dove. “Nervous and absolutely immobile. I put age on him. I’ll bet he doesn’t reach for your sweetheart any more without thinking of bullets coming in the window. I bet she’s been dry for two months. The Jackson police, ‘until they break this case.’ Sheeit. He knows as well as we do that in Mississippi, all you have to do is be sure, when you strike, you strike by night, and you can do it free. They, or he, or it, shot Medgar in the back, that person isn’t ever going to see the wrath of the law.”

“Really,” I said, “you ought to realize how damn awful lucky you are even being alive, saying this. It was a miraculous fluke. I watched it.”

He smiled like a possum. He drew his hands back through his bursting Trotsky hair.

“I was so drunk, and it was so, so perilous. He saw me and shot at me, I could see a cloud break out of the end of his gun, nine or ten times. Then I pulled on him, the very first time I ever shot a weapon of any sort. I got him. I saw the puff on my gun, and I saw the bullet travel out of it and strike him.”

“You saw the bullet travel out of the gun?”

“Right to his knee. It was so certain. And all mine.”

It passed into autumn. We saw nothing in the newspapers. I’d been avoiding the house all summer, still a bit leery. I tried to do well in my studies. I’d get concerned about midnight and read my books until three or four, and leave the house at eight, feeling miserable, but passing the quizzes. I have a beard which grows exceeding slow but is thick when it finally gets out. When it was out, I thought the time was ripe to ride by and see the house again. I took Silas’s Pontiac. He wanted to go too.

There.were no policemen staked out around the place. The car tires crackled over the red and yellow leaves in the street. The wind was lukewarm. The house itself was surrounded by maples and oaks. It was a big stained Spanish house with a red tile roof and green wainscoting and a driveway of clay-colored rocks. Growing close to the house were yucca plants — green sharp Mexican-looking things. There were a number of Los Angeles villas like this in Jackson, but none of them quite so grand. It was furnished with a garage that also had a red tile roof and a steeple, altogether useless except for esthetics.

On the third trip by the house, around five o’clock, I saw Peter and Catherine getting out of the Buick in the garage. She had her books and he had his cane. He still wore the tall smashed cowboy hat. Catherine had her hair trimmed to pixie style. I hadn’t seen her for a month. I was driving the Pontiac. She dragged behind Peter slavishly, arms full, through with Heder man sever for another day. Her head hung to one side so that her throat was bared.

“The tires are on the curb, man! Get us off the curb!” said Silas.

“Did you see her?”

“I never thought she was such a cutey-pie.”

“She’s delicate.”

“Aw delicate, delicate. She reminds me of a TV dinner. Put a little aluminum foil around her. Can’t you see the old boy beating his cane on the floor in ecstasy.”

“I don’t need any help with my imagination.”

“Anyway, it was Whitfield Peter I was looking at. I’ve seen that old boy before somewhere,” said Silas.

“What the hell do you mean? At the musical, under his porch.”

“I didn’t see him good, though. I mean another time. He had on an overcoat like he was wearing just then.”

“At night? When? What was he doing?”

“I can’t tell you. Where was it? Come on, mind!”

When we got to Mother Rooney’s, supper was ready. The whole rear of the house glowed red and gold through the windows and you could hear merry-go-round music screeching away like an accordian run by a locomotive engine. The Mississippi state fair was in session right down the cliff in back of us. On the grounds nearest us were the cattle and swine exhibitions, with their dense stench. It was the same Royal American Shows fair that I’d seen back in Dream of Pines, and I felt right at home, though the others were cursing it. You could see the “Harlem in Havana” club, way over there to the right of the ferris wheel; could see the musicians playing on the balcony for the girls in their wraps on the stage, in the five-minute spot they did to invite you in to the real show, $1.50. Mother Rooney’s house sloped even more now, it seemed. You might sit down on those slick dark planks of the entrance hall and slide right through the house, out the back, and be hurled over the cliff into the fair like a tumbling angel; the sawdust and the hay of the animal barns would catch you. Then to hit, I thought, and roll briefly, bouncing up on the fly, being right in the middle of Dream of Pines Royal American Shows, 1957.

Mother Rooney was not at the table. I was the last to finish. The others had left. I took my plate to the kitchen and saw her. She was sitting in a chair next to the back window, which was open although the weather was very cool. Her hands were up to her ears and she looked distressed. I asked her what was wrong. Then she put her hands over her face.

“He’s dead. But last year when the fair came and now again, I hear his voice calling me. I don’t want to hear it but I have to.”

“Who?”

“Hoover Second, my son.”

“That was killed in the airplane crash?”

“I loved him so, but I never said I wanted any ghost calling me.”

She told me someone or something was calling to her, “Mother!” Over and over. She couldn’t stand to go in the back yard and see who it was, and she couldn’t stand not to hear the voice, either. It scared her, but she had to hear it. I gave her my arm and walked her to the ledge of the cliff where the kudzu began. Below us fifty yards was a truck with a ramp leading off it. There were a few cows in the truck. Some boys in blue corduroy FFA jackets were trying to drag the cows down the ramp. I didn’t know what she could be hearing. Then one of the boys hit a cow with a stick and yelled out, as I later explained to Mother Rooney, one of the graver profanities, denoting incest and including the word mother. She was disabused, but she didn’t seem overly relieved.

On the way back to the porch, she kept her eyes on my face. “Why would anyone find it necessary to use that word?” she asked me.

“It’s as old as the Greeks. It’s a cruel world, Mother.”

Her eyes were weak, but they shot wide and angry just then. “Don’t you tell me how cruel the world is, Mister Monroe.” I apologized. “Young men who learn a lot of knowledge should not be prissy little scholars.” Then she apologized. “I do thank you, dear. I thought I was losing my mind. Do, do thank you.”

I asked Fleece what he knew about Mother Rooney’s son. I felt wretched. Fleece had talked to her privately several times. He told me her son was a hero of almost suicidal bravery who piloted a B-25 bomber on deep flights into Germany. He’d come back home in 1945 with his legs full of shrapnel, but in Jackson he couldn’t stop. He bought a Piper Cub from the Civil Air Patrol, stole several boxes of toilet paper out of the basement of his old high school, St. Joseph’s, and flew over such things as the state capitol building, the governor’s mansion, and football games, cutting the engine and screaming something, as he cast out the toilet-paper rolls, which unwound and plummeted and scrawled in the air over these places. When the newspapers found out he was a famous veteran, they thought he was beautiful, with his sense of humor. He was Jackson’s high jolly aerobird. Then they found out he was not jolly, as Mother Rooney knew well, seeing him rush out to the airport every morning with only a half-cup of coffee in him for breakfast. He came down on some girls who were playing tennis over at Mississippi College, right at them, they said, and crashed against a practice board on the courts. Mother Rooney and her husband Hoover Rooney were called over to the college to see the black wreck.

“And her husband, if you can trust her, I’ll bet it’s been a cruel world for her. He was a plumbing contractor. His father and he had come from Ireland to Jackson. When his father died, Hoover was so crazy disoriented that Mother Rooney made him build this house so he could look at it and not mistake it for any other place in the world. And we’re living in it.”

I heard Silas coming down the stairs to my room. He called me. I went up, and Fleece followed.

“I’d like to speak to Monroe alone,” said Silas.

“We were talking,” said Fleece.

“Yes, you’re always talking, but I have something to say.”

Fleece framed Silas a moment with his glare. Then he went back down to his room.

Silas was almost berserk with information. He’d just recalled where and when he’d seen Whitfield Peter before. It was early in the morning at Oxford, Mississippi, the home of Ole Miss. It was the morning after the night when the FBI brought James Meredith, the first Negro to enter a white college in Mississippi, on the Ole Miss campus. Silas had driven up to see what was going on. Two men had been killed in the riot during the night. Random cars were burned. There was nothing especially new about what Peter was doing: Silas saw him dropping crossties off a rail bridge onto military trucks. Or rather, Peter was supervising the act. The story only made me want to see Catherine more. I’d been spying at her now for four or five months.

When my beard was out full, I got myself a pair of cosmetic spectales from Sears.

In early December I stood on their lawn. The trees were bare and looked outraged. I looked for the cops around the palm trees next to that garage with its bell tower. I carried no weapon. The house was as white as a bone and jarred out at me. It was Saturday, the deep edge of twilight. I felt all mushy and electric inside, this near it again. I had a keen feeling, too. I felt like only the eyes of a face hidden in ambush. Then I felt the presence of another face, not mine, waiting with me. I closed my eyes.

“Who is it?” Nothing moved. I thought for certain some person had the drop on me. A voice spoke in my head: “You’ve made one mistake. You may get in the door, friend, but you should never believe in yourself so much that you leave your weapon at home.” It was Geronimo. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him for months. He’d been lounging a long time inside me, and now he stirred. I loved him. The grunting old pouch-face. “Get on up to that door.” His voice carried with the melody of a raunchy old chum.

Catherine answered the door. I smiled and tried to be droll. At last she recognized me. She wanted to know what had happened to me. I asked her what had happened to her. I told her a friend of mine over at Heder man sever had given me her address. She was stunned.

“What friend?”

“I can’t tell you. Somebody who’s been sweet on you but didn’t have the nerve to come himself.”

“That’s some larkey.” She was teased. I told her I’d tried to look her up in the phone book but couldn’t remember her last name.

“All I remembered was Catherine. That was so pretty I couldn’t remember the rest.”

“Wrag,” she said.

I closed the door and we were in the dark vacant front room. There was a rug, and pieces of furniture sat twisted the wrong angle to each other in brown wet shadows. I followed her through a gangway to the rear of the house, passing over a furnace grate in the floor. The house was overheated. It got even warmer toward the back. We came into a small library sort of room with only one tiny window in it. Peter sat on a couch away from the window. The walls were palate-smoothed plaster, showing swirls and solid drops. This room, with the tiny window in the corner, looked like a fort. Peter lifted up a leg and put it over the other when I came in. He wore a yellowish robe but had on a white shirt and a black tie at his neck like a snake assaulting him. His hair was a shock of lightning gray-tan thrown back so as to make the face come forward like a wooden mask. I couldn’t look at the face yet. I saw his feet — thin socks in orange leather house slippers. He got up and walked into the kitchen.

“Who was that?” I asked her.

“My uncle.”

“Is he upset?”

“He’s been sick. Listen, did Gillis Lock tell you my address?”

“No. Who’s that?”

“He went to Heder man sever one semester. He known me. I had a speech class he was in. He calls me up all the time.” We sat on the couch Peter had left.

“Catherine, I’ve missed you so much. I’ve seen you.”

Suddenly her uncle was at the door again.

“Fidel?” he said.

“Sir?”

“Are you kin to Fidel Castro?” He thought this was rich. He was holding in a giggle. He stepped on into the room. He meant my beard and glasses. His hands were on his stomach. He was about to break a rib, laughing. When I caught on, I looked up smiling, but he was gone.

“Do I look like Fidel?” I asked Catherine.

“Naw. You look smart.”

Then he came back and stood in the door again.

“So you’re Mister Lock,” he said.

“No, sir.”

“He’s Harry Monroe. This ain’t Gillis,” said Catherine.

“That scoundrel has telephoned us. I finally told him off, myself. I said, ‘Boy, if you don’t have spunk enough to let us even see you, you’d better hang yourself up for good. I suggest a pine tree and a good rope.’ That’s what I told him.” He crouched, laughing again. I got the feeling he would drown you with jokes like this if you ever gained his confidence.

“I’m from pine country,” I told him.

“Fidel?” he said. “I grew a beard once at the University of Massachusetts. I wanted to look like my professors from Europe. I took myself to the barber within an hour of being apprised that the Jews and communists made themselves known by wearing beards.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. It seemed the thing to say. I looked at his face straight-on, getting courage, and saw the friendly smile out of the bleached hawklike features, with purple around the mouth and eyes. Then he left again, using his cane. “You finish supper, child. I will be back after I’ve had my medicine. You stay for supper,” he said in the next room, which was the kitchen; we could hear him creeping stridently away.

I went with Catherine to the kitchen, where pots were on the stove and the oven light was on. Some greens and peas were smoldering in the pots. She saw to them. I mentioned that home cooking was a wonderful new smell to me.

“I do it out of them frozen plastic bags.” She held up a dripping plastic sack from the top of the garbage bucket.

“He said for me to stay, but do you want me to stay?”

“I’s thinking I wouldn’t never see you again.”

She spoke with her back to me; she was at the sink. I was looking at her small shoulders. The dress she wore was a neat brown thing that touched her bottom alluringly.

“I’d be a boll of cotton if they made me into your dress,” I said.

“Oh lissen at Mister Mouth.” At least her voice was softer than I’d remembered.

“Your uncle stays on the move, doesn’t he?” I heard him easing around through the doors.

“He’s scared to death. Somebody likes to shoot at him. It was in the newspapers. Last year they shot ’at window in there all to pieces and hit him in the knee. Did you see his cane? The police didn’t turn up nothin’ at all. If somebody is drawin’ a bead on you, there isn’t nothin’ the police can do about it. The first house we lived in, they blew up his car and set afire to the house.”

“What did you do?”

Peter entered the kitchen. He dragged his knee behind him nimbly. He was adept at shooting the point of the cane out to hoist himself along. He passed into the forward room and threw a hand out to flick on the light. A plump round dining table sat in there. He caught me staring at him.

“I was shot in the knee, son! Shot! I’m a casualty of my convictions. I’m a victim of ‘peacetime’ America.” His eyes seemed gorged and red. I noticed on his finger, the little finger, he wore a dainty ring with a black pearl set atop it. I couldn’t linger on his face long.

“Just set two. I can’t eat now. Excuse me. You two young people …” he trailed off, leaving again for another part of the house.

The supper was quiet. Afterward, I asked Catherine to go with me to a movie at the Capri tomorrow night. I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask this, but I was nervous, and my visit to the house would seem pointless and more, suspect, if I didn’t pursue it. Catherine was pretty eating, her mouth shut. After a while she said all right, about the movie, but rather cautiously.

“What’s on?”

“Something European. I forget.”

“I caint even talk English well.” She smiled. Something between a joke and an abashed confession. I smiled. “You could be in one of ’em. Your beard, you look Victrolian.” I’m sure my smile drooped, but I brought it right back up. Peter caned into the dining room again. He said he would see me to the door, and Catherine went back to the dishes.

As I touched the doorknob myself, he began speaking softly at my back. “We know she isn’t bright of mind. But yet I know what a dear little self she makes altogether. I don’t want anything sly. Not to be presumptuous. But I imagine you might find her willing, hot”

“Sir?”

“Passionate. She’s near twenty-seven, you know.” Peter’s own breath struck me.

“My Lord.” I was shocked. “Why?” I don’t know what I meant. I was being an idiot.

“She didn’t have the best start. Don’t ask her about that Another thing is you must not talk about the violent events which have transpired within the last year. I can tell you she had nothing to do with them, certainly, and I will tell you I…” I was in the light of the steps; he was within the shadow of the foyer, his robe like hanging wings. But his voice began to constrict, became tiny all of a sudden, an airy sort of reed. “I am not dead yet. I am stubborn. I have ideals. I have had …”—he continued on as if unconscious of any change of tone, but his voice was even reedier, like the voice of a rodent in the movie cartoons—“have had… a wife. Hence I know the unutterable burning filth of a young male’s mind. You’d put yourself between the legs of a clock if you could.” Now the voice was coming back to a thin growl.

“The legs of a clock? No. I didn’t come here—”

“Horsepiss!” I turned to leave. “Please! I apologize. To presume … wait!” He inched the screen door open. “Your beard has made my head swim. Do know that you look ruthless, lad. Believe me that I’m not … that what I said… my undue sexual… eh, realism. At best. I’ve a mind which has sometimes frightened others.” His hand clenched on the door.

“I saw her in the musical. She’s pretty. I came by to ask her for a date. She said she’d go to the show with me tomorrow.”

“Certainly. But know this. You were the first.’

“She hasn’t had dates? She’s twenty-seven?”

“That boy Gillis Lock has called her on the telephone. But he is no college student. He could not ‘make the grade,’ as you youngsters say. He’s merely a clerk in a Krogers’ store over at Pearl. You have no competition. Perhaps that’s what alarmed me about you. So tell me something and I will remember it.”

“What?”

“What is your address?” I was off guard and gave him the right street, but thought in time to change the number to the one of a block which didn’t exist on little dead-end Titpea

“Your telephone number?”

Now here I was together enough to lie. But I didn’t lie well enough. I gave him the number of Fleece’s parents’ house, which was the only number in Jackson I’d ever memorized. This was an insane inadvertence too. If I’d been Italian, I’d have torn my hair on the way home. This girl, this girl, whom I’d seen, finally face to face for an hour. The minutes ticking by, my care for her turning to an impatient desire to yank her around until her secrets were out.

I didn’t tell Fleece or anybody I’d been over to that house. I was horrorstruck that Peter knew the street I lived on; couldn’t tell Fleece I had been so stupid, had bowed like a thoughtless chattering tongue to old Whitfield Peter’s urgent commands. Damn me. Now, to carry on with the girl seemed the only thing to do. I took her to that foreign movie. Wait. First, I stood out in their yard and held my beard and looked the place over again. I could sniff the brass pepper of fear, feel it reaching in my head all over again. Perhaps they’d remembered me from under the porch and in the shadows of the window. He had those shotguns and was so fractured and anxious he might pull the trigger on anything moving. But I rubbed my beard, thinking I was imperceptible and safe in my fur. And the spirit of Geronimo was still there with me, saying, “Push on in, push on in. Love what you can find and kick what you can’t.” As a matter of fact, he suggested I drive out to the wilds around the Ross Barnett Reservoir and ravish her until she admitted that, sure, Uncle Peter was quite a sport at lust, but she’d never had anything like this; then change my address and keep moving, making an impossible target.

I knocked on the door. She appeared alone and was all dolled up. She had her own true loveliness, still. She was thin, her limbs had their own soft glow, her eyes had their shy sparkle; the small fruit of her mouth, the two cool doves of her hands, the melted china of her throat. And she’d been all this in “The Boyfriend” just weeks ago, in her silk shimmy — shy, even in the wide-mouthed everybody-on-stage finale. You would take her to your breast, defend her. Hardly daring to think of making babies in her. Thinking of that as an incidental event in some far-off purple glow. I took her out for two years. Not regularly. I would time the dates so as not to create embarrassment over the length of time between them, and so as not to risk a phone call from Peter. I let it be known that, being in pre-med study, I had absolutely no time. And I pretended well. I did study. And oftentimes I’d pretend again that I loved her, when she was in the car. Pretend that, while attempting nothing physical with her whatsoever. It caused no special anguish to resist. I heard Peter’s voice in my mind while I was with her, but that isn’t why I was so chaste.

Even beyond her pitiful grammar — which improved over the months (she’d say words like apprehensive and veritably) — she was just another roach, after all. I knew the breed better than any. She had some tremendous incurable fault, even though at times she seemed perfect in make-up. Something in her being, something that made her slump her body walking across campus; something in her mind that made her fall away slack from the fine little body she had; something which some days made her so careless of her looks you would see a whole soapflake swashed over with makeup sticking on her skin; something in her, off the stage, out of the musical, which slunk, that I couldn’t ignore, told me. God knows how long it took me to see what every man on campus had seen first time he saw her. You should have seen the girl shrink, practically out of sight, into the corner of the seat of my old oily-smelling Thunder-bird. Like a whipped rat. Like a roach with all its exits well remembered before it ever ventures out. My dozen nights with her never approached romance, never approached anything. It would’ve been the same if I’d picked her up on the street. I had never met a roach that I couldn’t get a good bit of my marvelous self across to. I wanted to ask her all sorts of questions, of course. Sometimes I’d become excited over the fact that she was twenty-seven — and twenty-eight, twenty-nine! I never even saw my way clear to asking about her age. You’d look over there, and she’d be like a perfumed roach on its back, seeking its legs so it could flee to a crack in some filth, and all chance of intimacy would die choking.

Peter I didn’t see for over a year

She was at the door, opening it. That was fine with me. I asked how he was, on and off.

“He’s better. Everyday he’s better. He’s heavier. He’s put back on weight.”

“What does he say nowadays?”

“Like what?”

“Like anything.”

“He’s saying almost everything.”

“What does he say about you?”

“That I’m going to cut the mustard.”

“You got your hair fixed nice.”

“Cut it out.”

“If it’s fixed for me, I appreciate it.”

“It’s just fixed. Spray net.”

2 / Heart on the Tilt

I think it was at a time when I’d memorized so much, I’d smelled the hydrosulphur effluvium so much, I’d seen those green concrete canals so much, that my face and head were hateful to me. This was my senior year. I knew so many facts I never wanted to know, I’d seen the back of my dead cat stretched out on a board, I’d learned to lift out muscle layers with a scalpel, I’d made slides over and over, and never wanted to keep this in my head, but I was desperate and had to, so what I got was a week-long headache, and all I could see for relief in the future was me, picking up a book of Bobbie Burns’s poetry — the only poetry that ever took me in college — and pouring a glass of Scotch to seal myself with and celebrate the mind, body and soul of old Bobbie Burns, who brought them all together and made them sing — in a choir whose members are mad at one another, but who sing nevertheless, together — and I could see myself reading that book in some future office as a general practitioner, when my day was over, the lovely women of the town had all been naked before me revealing their hurt, and I had to brush the dollars out of my chair to sit down. But in the meantime, I had such a headache. And turned to simple beer at the Dutch Bar, with Silas next to me on the stools.

“Silas, you rich bitter disconsolate bulky hod-carrier; what’re you going to be? I been worried about you. Even rich bastards got to be something. I’m seeing three of you, and I been worried, what exactly you going to be. For instance, I’m going to be a doctor.”

“Monroe, my friend. I’m going to be in Art. I’m taking a position in Art. The only good course I had was with Sam Gourd. Art.”

We came in very late. Silas had been talking about how Mother Rooney flushed her commode every morning at six, on the minute. He was right in saying it made a detonation like the house was splitting; all the plumbing around us shuddered, and our tower shook. I woke up in fear many times myself. Well Silas was sick of this. He wanted to teach her. I followed him into her bathroom downstairs, and he turned on the light and stuck his finger down his throat. He threw up a flood of beer and something the substance of grits and whole dissolved fish. It was awesome, the amount of stuff he’d taken down this day. An entire boiled egg from the Dutch Bar. He vomited on the tile floor and never even tried to use the pot. I couldn’t bear it, only he’d told me to watch, so earnestly. He shaped up the mess into a pile and then worked from this source, with his foot. He made a big curved smile; then he dragged off some pieces and made two eyes. The pile became the nose of the face, with the egg at one nostril. When he was through, he had rendered a jack-o-lantern mask, with a yard-wide smile: a hideous culprit of one dimension, not counting the odor.

“She’ll think twice about that six o’clock tee-tee,” he said, pointing to his work solemnly. The secret gleam of the artist was in his eyes. He staggered past me.

“This is taking it too far,” I said. But I wasn’t going to clean it up, and I turned off the light. I followed him over to the tower. In my room, he stopped and grabbed me by the collar before he went up to his loft.

“You can’t say I’ve taken it too far. In matters of art you can never take things too far. Lurk me in the eye. You know it?” Then he rose up the stairs haughtily, but missing a step, falling; he rose again, with his solemnity intact, like a lord at the head of an expedition.

I was not awakened by the plumbing sounds that morning. Perhaps Mother Rooney just held it awhile after she saw the bathroom. Perhaps she just lay down in her bed again and pained away until a decent hour.

Then Fleece and I gave her the high-lace leather sneakers, to make up for it; because the house was tilting back even steeper, and I’d seen her come in the front door and almost skid down the lobby in the black slick-heeled patent leather ones that looked a little young on her. This takes us on into the early days of med school, when I seemed to be making it, and spent my spare time in being aware of possible injuries and hazards to everyone around me. I’d quit smoking, and was a regular health officer with my head full of air. But it was Fleece who found the shoes. When you’re a freshman in med school, the big thing is to hang around the emergency room and see what they bring in on the ambulances. I myself never sought this. I went down a few times and saw some poor women who’d waited till the last minute to give birth, but it wasn’t my cup of tea. Fleece was there the night they brought in the dead lady wrestler from the city auditorium. Her feet seemed to be about the right size, and Fleece brought back the shoes. We told Mother Rooney they were refined orthopedic models, already broken in. She popped then right on. She expressed a little concern about their ugliness, that her feet didn’t seem to breathe very well in them. But the next day she said they did make her feel stabler in the world. I was awed by their perfect fit on her. Silas saw them on her one night at supper.

“Where did you get those old-timey goddam pugilist shoes? Are you wearing your husband’s shoes? Are you going loony?”

She told him where she got them. On the same night she announced that there would be no more open consumption of alcohol in her presence, since Mississippi law forbade hard liquor. Smoking would be allowed. She said she would like to hear someone, if he could, play the piano in the room, and the rest of us would gather around it and sing. This would be a good thing to do after supper every night. Her spirit was on the rise.

“Shit,” said Silas.

Then she said that some days she heard so many bad words in this house that it gave her a headache. Silas told her to take an aspirin. She took a sort of stance and declared that she had never taken an aspirin in her life. Silas clapped boredly, but I was impressed. Later, he wanted to know, “What did you mean, giving her those shoes?” I left him groping.

Once a month, an old priest with a look of off-balanced kindness and patience would visit Mother Rooney at the house. He came in at supper once and the two of them sat on the divan. I was eating, always the slow man at a meal, left at the table and trying not to hear the two of them talking. Then Silas walked in from the tower with only his jockey shorts on. He knew damn well who was visiting the house. He went and opened the front door, asking loudly where the evening paper was. In a minute he came back in with it, opening it. He looked at me as if trying to find Mother Rooney.

“I tell you! Have you looked at that crack between the porch and the foundation lately? Six inches of black humping air! Have you smelled what’s coming out of there? It’s sperm under there’s what it is! Nature will always scandalize. Damned sperm is what I smelled!” He pretended to just now see them on the couch and ran away, dropping pages out of the paper. A slice of the old priest’s tongue fell out through his teeth, and he had become more intensely cross-eyed.

“Mister Silas is an athlete,” chimed Mother Rooney.

“Of what game?” said the priest. He had a cranky worn Boston accent.

“He lifts barbells,” I said.

Then came a voice from the area of the tower. It was Silas again. “Help! Help! Mother Rooney. Please!” She got up and excused herself, padding away in the leather sneakers.

I couldn’t think of anything else to say to the old Catholic man, so I began discussing the assassination of the President with him. I’d liked Kennedy, as you might like a shy handsome foreigner you saw at a party, and I always imagined that he might like me, and I told the priest this. The priest said, Ah, yes. I could hear stone-deaf cross-eyed clerics all over the world saying this.

Mother Rooney padded back to us.

“Mister Silas said he had found a fish-eater crawling in the house.”

“You mean a silverfish,” I said.

“No. He said a fish-eater, that he saw a fish-eater crawling in the house, that he would strangle him if he found him in here again.”

“That he would mangle it…”

“No, his arms and hands …” She held her frail beige arms out and clutched her fingers in and out. “But of course his arms were so full of muscles. He’s such a nicely made boy, but what could be in his mind? What…”

“Some use that as an epithet, against Catholics,” said the priest. He was leaving, hurriedly. “As a joke.”

The next time I saw Silas, he was well gone at the Dutch Bar. He worked at Wright’s, a music store on Capitol Street. Being in the arts, you know. He was in conversation with a flushed old drunkard at the end of the bar. As I sat down, he told me he’d run all the way from Mother Roo-ney’s to here for punishment. He explained to me that he had taken out Bet Henderson two times this week. He held up two fingers. I asked, How was she? He reiterated that he had taken Bet out two times. She worked in a surgical supply house in Jackson now, and he had taken her out two times. He said he felt luck was coming to him now, but his conscience was sore over Mother Rooney, how he’d treated her, and he wanted to clear it up because he had an omen his good luck wouldn’t stand if he didn’t. Silas then talked to the sinking old fellow to his right.

“This is a lonely intelligent man. He says he doesn’t want to sleep another night alone,” he turned to me. “We could, see, just introduce them tonight. I already told him she was a beautiful older rich woman. Meet them together, see? Happy old people.”

“I’m not in on this.”

“Whataya mean?” He grabbed my tie. “You got the car!”

At twelve I opened the bar door and Silas kept the old man in ambulation to the car. Silas bragged on Mother Rooney some more, and the man seemed to sober up a bit as he listened. He said he wanted to go by a service station. I stopped at one, thinking he wanted to vomit in the rest-room, but when he came out, he had fluffed up the Hollywood kerchief at his throat, pulled his pants up, buttoned his coat, and combed his hair with water. He had age spots around his hairline. Now he wanted just one more slug, and Silas gave him one of the quarts we’d bought.

We got to the porch together, with no help from me. I was only tight. I thought about the hour of the night, Mother Rooney tucked in her bed. There were no lights on downstairs, not even for the porch, and this was strange because Mother Rooney always kept this bulb on for us late voyagers. The old guy was scared stiff. He kept swabbing at his mouth and his hair and edged behind Silas. Silas told me to go wake her up. I entered the long vestibule and switched on the light. She was not asleep. She was lying on the slick boards, hurt. A grocery sack from the Jitney Jungle lay ripped and strewn over to one side, as if there’d been some violence. I locked the door, hearing Silas protest on the porch.

“Finally you get here!” she said. She’d taken off the wrestling shoes. Her bunions twinkled through her stockings. She was wearing a floppy silk dress with blue flowers figured on it. Her hair, yellow, was in the wreck of a bun. “I’m gone. I’ve been in this state since five o’clock … afraid to move and make it worse.”

She had fallen coming in the door with the groceries. A brooch the size of an Easter egg was standing out at the cleavage of her breasts. The dress was pinioned by it. I saw that the whole length of the pin of the brooch was buried in her chest. It had unclasped and stabbed her as she hit the floor. On entrance it made a nasty purple slit. There was only a little Blood. God knows how long the pin was. “You were the right one to come in and find me, unless Bobby Fleece …” she said with a meager hope for life.

I stared at the wound. I didn’t know what to do. I was in medical school, and it was disgraceful, but I couldn’t remember what to do, if I’d ever known it. I ran over to the tower and got Fleece’s Merck Manual off his desk. I turned the pages and tore them trying to get to the Punctures section.

“Is that Jerry Silas out on the porch?” she asked. “I’d like to see him. He’s such a nicely made boy. He could hold my head.” Then she sat up and glared at me. “Don’t you know what to do?” Either the page for the incised wounds had been torn out, or I couldn’t find it. I found half a page which discussed débridement, “… making the depths of the wound ideal for the propagation of infective…” I turned to Gangrene, anything. Then I went and made a phone call to the University Hospital, to the same building where I was going to school.

“Isn’t that Jerry Silas out there trying to get in? Open the door.” I could hear him twisting the knob and battering the door. I didn’t want her to see the old guy. The door to the porch was a double-winger with no middle frame, and I knew that if Silas rammed it much more, it would give. Mother Rooney began to stand up. She was hissing, as if losing air right out of the lung. I rushed over and brought her back to earth. I took hold of the brooch and jerked it out, stood up, and threw the thing at the back shadows of the hall, slipping down on those slick boards as I did so.

“My heart is tilting!” she cried. I thought I’d killed her. Then I heard the siren yawling up Titpea. Silas made a last attack on the doors, and they broke apart. He staggered in, crouched over. The old man was riding piggyback on him. The old man had closed his eyes in fear.

“What’s going on? I have the lover here,” Silas demanded. I hauled back and hit Silas square in the eyes. He went down, and the old man abandoned him and crashed on the boards of the vestibule. When Silas stood up again, he was raising his hands to kill me. I had my arms over my face. But nothing came. I stole a glance down. Silas was watching too. The old guy’s body was slipping down toward Mother Rooney. He was such a red ancient drunk, his white hair had popped out like a sparse wig, his Hollywood cravat had flown apart, and he slid down the boards, out cold, his head coming to rest on her knee, his rough-out Hush Puppy shoes retarding the slide.

Then Mother Rooney really let bellow. She couldn’t stand him. She hipped away from his touch and shook her hands.

The ambulance crew — I knew one guy — thought it was a family fight, and took the old guy out first. I walked Mother Rooney out through the front yard, although Silas wanted to lift her along all on his own. The boy I knew looked at her wound in the red lights of the back end of the ambulance.

“Did the old man stab her?” he asked me.

Wouldn’t you know it, I had to go back in the house, turn on all the lights, kick the furniture around, until I found the brooch. Drove with that czarina’s bauble to the emergency room, to furnish proof that we didn’t need an inquest, walked around like a wondering queen with the jewel out forward in my palm, until I found the right doctor.

Then got back, landing on Fleece, Bet, and Silas, all standing with arms folded on the porch, Fleece and Bet having arrived recently in Fleece’s new Renault. I suppose Fleece was taking Bet to his room, but met Silas on the porch waiting for my return and exploding with the tale of Mother Rooney and the old drunk. I heard Silas reeling off a monologue and went right through them to my bed.

3 / Age 22

I got out of my car in the north parking lot and pulled my microscope box out of the back seat. Rain was threatening. The Choctaws were sitting on the grass between me and the door of the school wing. The Ole Miss medical center lifted up like a monstrous sandy brick. Saturday the same group had tried to collar me, but I ignored them. I didn’t know anything. I was no doctor and they saw my jacket and thought I was.

The women wore dresses that looked like the flag of some crackpot nation. I’d seen two Choctaw women come in at the last minute to deliver. When they had their legs in the straddles, you could see the dye rings on their thighs which came off the dresses. Their vaginas were fossileums of old blood. Their babies came up in a rotten exhumation; then the baby was there, head full of hair, wanting to live like a son of a gun. It almost belied the germ theory of disease. The mothers did not cry out for Jesus like the Negro women. They bawled in shorter shrieks, but higher, as if in direct, private accusation against some little male toad of a god. It made my blood crawl.

The men on the lawn wore big soiled shirts of red and blue. These Choctaws would sleep together on the lawn until whoever they were waiting for came out or died. A woman came up to me with a bunch of papers in her hand. She motioned toward the back of the cafeteria, and I saw the pick-up truck parked in one of the slots. She said a sick man was in there. I took out my pen. What she had were BIA forms. “Have you applied for BIA medical aid before?” Questions like that from the Bureau. I made several jag marks on them and signed my name at the bottom, Harriman Monroe, M.D. She barked to the group sitting on the lawn, and two men got up and walked toward the truck. I was late for class already, So I waited. The men pulled a limp man out of the front seat and carried him toward us. His arms hung down to the ground. The squaw told me that the man had eaten a dead terrapin he had found in the woods near the frontage road at 51 Highway. They thought he was poisoned. She was very thankful, this squaw. “Docotor,” she called me. I agreed that he was probably poisoned and then hurried off. The hospital treated him and cured him. I checked that out. My signature had helped. Sometimes even now, I’ll put M.D. after my name when I sign a check and get a warm old kick from it.

I went straight to the basement lounge and got two milks out of the machine, which I drank for my breakfast, as I sat in the ping-pong room. The serious players were there, and they noticed me. They were all residents, two of them from Japan, one from South Korea, and the big slammer, from Germany, who was a head in the field of cervix cancer. With them was an M.D. from Malta, of unknown function in cytology. He didn’t play the game, but like to call the points, with a deep bold British accent. He was almost a midget in a small lab coat, but he liked to hang around and shout out the scores, for hours. “A point, a clean point! Eighteen-fifteen.” Since almost all the points in ping-pong are obvious, you might think it was silly to have him around. But not at all. When you made a big shot — a blurring slam, an unreturnable english on the ball — he would practically knight the damn thing. “An absolutely clean point!” If Dr. Eaver were still calling the points, I could do nothing but play ping-pong, today. Apparently he was not much needed upstairs. I was in the same boat.

The finest game, competitively, was between Dr. Völl and Dr. Shibata. Völl (Verl, we said) would slam the ball and Shibata would return it with a kind of apologetic scoop, so the ball dropped just over the net and flung out to the side of the table like a ball bearing dropped out of a jet plane, and Völl would have to leap out to get it back. I said the finest game, competitively, because when I was there the game was not competitive. I could slam Völl’s slam, I could put stuff on the stuff Shibata hit at me. You get this good with practice. Nobody could be quite this good and be serious at anything else. My heart was in the ping-pong room. I was winning nowhere else.

In anatomy, I had Monique, my female cadaver, whom I had fought for down at the vat. There were few girls of any sort in the freshman vat. In anatomy I was taught by a stately old buzzard named Potter who had slugged up out of the Depression in Mississippi and let us all know how proud he was of his situation as anatomy professor. He was a humble man. He had an immense respect for the King’s English. He talked very slowly and seemed to be recollecting some rule for every word he spoke. I impressed him with my English. I was working late one afternoon on Monique, and Potter saw my shoes under the curtains when he came in.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“It is I,” I answered.

After a while, Potter drew the curtain back. We were alone. I was hacking away, too lazy to change scalpel blades.

“I like that,” said Potter. “It is I. You’ve had an education, haven’t you young man? I’ve been grading the quizzes, Monroe.”

“No good news for me.”

“You’re the type who won’t write down an answer unless you know it perfectly and can spell it perfectly, aren’t you? What you got, you got right with an exact veritude that I admire. I wish you could have answered more of the questions. But there was a high certainty in the answers you had, though there were only three, that I can see in your handwriting. What kind of pen do you use, by the way?”

“A Scripto.”

“It carries an authority with it I can’t deny… I refuse to fail you. I am going to let you take the trimester test.”

I thanked him. I tried being literary in other classes, but it didn’t work out so well. In pharmacology there was a poem in the textbook where the author had attempted to be witty—“Histamine/The knavish son of Histadine”—which I pointed out as execrable, but the professor and the class ignored me. For better or worse, the chairman of pharmacology seemed to take to me, though. He was the one who came to my aid when all the chips were down — when I didn’t make my probation the second trimester — and gave me a job injecting granulated nerve gas into dogs and let me in the pharmacology graduate program. Dr. Holland was dedicated to reconstructing such M.D. dropouts as me into doctoral candidates so that we would not be lost to medical science. And he was a good man, as was Dr. Briggs, my professor, who treated me as if I were not a fool and a loser. This is always nice. Holland’s charity was so immense, I took the English Oval cigarettes out of the tin in his office when he was out, feeling that he’d want me to have them anyway. My apologies, but now, for the first time in my life, the money press was on. The old man was not sold on my being a Ph.D. in pharmacology and the money tree at home was drying up. Nobody ever told me how the old man took the news when I got the boot from med school, but I had to write the letter about it, and I could imagine him going into his study for hours, holding my letter up, and writing me a check, carefully, for $125—what he figured this letter was worth, to the dollar. His signature on the check was limp, like a wet shoelace draped on a fence. So there were the days of deciding between a hamburger out at T-Willie’s and a pack of Marlboros with coffee downstairs in the cafeteria. And my hundred-a-month job, recording the respiration, the pupillary responses to light, responses to pinprick in the lumbar region and the other regions I’ve forgotten, and the more obvious physical dispositions, of hundreds of dogs, after you’d pumped up the femoral vein and let them have it, which wasn’t always easy when you got a big rowdy animal. Invariably, right after injection the dog would wobble around pitifully, evacuate his bowels all over the room, and faint, lying dead for a whole day. I proved that they did this in my reports, incontestably. At five o’clock they woke up. I’d take them to the freight elevator. They looked normal, but the ordeal seemed to have increased their affection for me. You hated to turn them back into that reeking catacomb of pens in the basement, beyond Experimental Surgery, where there were ten other dogs lying on stainless steel tables. These dogs, eyes closed, were trembling to pieces; they had long sutures along their stomachs, which I asked about. The experiment was to open up the dog, wound him internally in subtle ways, sew him up, and time him as to how long it took him to die. Herdee, a graduate of Hedermansever whom I had hated particularly, told me this. He had this neat summer job of holding the clock and marking down the expiration times to the minute. If another man had told me about it, it would have been better. It’s pointless to mope around animal labs with your hands on your heart But here was Herdee, having finished his first year of med school, so neatly, with his neat summer research job. He was using his time so wisely. He had acquired a hard sage smile, very serious, although all the hell he was doing was walking among the tables and holding a clock. He was stupid and had been compensating for this fault terrifically all his life. By all rights, he should have been lying sutured-up on one of the tables while one of the dogs held the clock and looked sage.

One day Herdee wanted to sit by me in the cafeteria.

“Sorry, I’m waiting on my friends.”

“This table seats six. You have a lot of friends.”

“And all of them hate your guts.”

He sat down, with that same smile. He was uninsultable. One of the ways these sort of people make it is, they have absolutely no pride. Fleece came over with his tray and sat down.

“What’s the nerve gas doing to the dogs nowadays?” Fleece said. I really was interested in just how stupid Herdee was. I whispered so he could hear.

“You know well that this is a secret. We aren’t even supposed to know this is nerve gas. If the army heard me, they’d jerk my thirty-thousand-dollar grant right out from under me. Fleece, they really have something. As soon as I inject, they, their fur becomes gray, then white, then clear. In sixty seconds, the animal simply isn’t there. Only its functions are left behind. And the functions, per se, are tripled. A mound of dung two feet high appears within the hour; you can see the saliva dripping out by the pint, and every thirty minutes the unseen animal urinates, so the floor is a damned wading pool of moving liquids, and you smell rotten dog breath all in the air. I just sit there with my stopwatch and my pin, searching for the animal, who can not be found. Long hairs begin falling in the room on the flood and defecation. I’m still looking for a corpus. Eight hours after injection, this tiny, whimpering semblance of a dog appears, rubbing against my leg. He is wild with love. When I pick him up he hugs me with his paws around my neck. I take the dog down to the basement and put it in the hutch. When I come to see it the next morning, its little heart has burst.”

“Same as last week,” says Fleece, who sees that Herdee’s ear is driven toward me, and food parts are hanging on his nether lip.

I stare into my cigarette coal. “I think that is what Man is: a ghost with amplified functions, a body stolen away by its functions, and discovered at last as a tiny cur, crazed with impossible affections.”

“This man makes all of medicine his allegory, Herdee,” says Fleece.

“No. I think he’s actually brilliant at it. Unless he was quoting Shakespeare or somebody. You weren’t quoting Shakespeare, were you? You keep it up, Monroe. We need people like you too.”

“What do you mean, too? Kiss my ass.”

A second goes by, then I pitch the live cigarette over the table into Herdee’s lap. He rears up bowlegged and swats himself about the crotch. “This is something you’d expect from a … a … a!” but he won’t finish. I’d love for him to tell me what I was. Yet he wouldn’t quit stuttering.

“Nobody likes a thug,” says Fleece, after Herdee has taken himself away. “That was a hell of a fine moral, but it was a stupid jerk-off story. Oh, it took in Herdee. It was worse than Edmund Spenser, for an allegory.”

“I didn’t ask you for literary criticism. I do all right on my own.” I got up and left to dump my tray, but I caught Fleece looking, well, concerned about me. I think he was still feeling guilty about having drawn me into med school, and I confess I played with this guilty concern the few times I saw him.

The lined record manuals that I used on the job were rather splendid little logs with pale green sheets, faint rosy lines, all bound in fake purple morocco leather. The pages yearned for a Harry who would raise his pen and come down with everything he’d always wanted to say. There were long vacant hours in the lab waiting on my dogs, hearing the eels slosh around in the tank across the way, where a team of two doctors from Chile and New Jersey were adding tiny solubles of this and that to see how the eels would take it. And I would write in the logs.

Fleece came down one afternoon when I was out for ping-pong in the basement. He was sitting on the stool reading the log, in my specially partitioned room which I was supposed to keep locked at all times, as the stipulation in the army grant said. I was working with the same #227 with the dogs, and the room was full of costly luxuries of research, like the five-hundred-dollar mixer, which was only a deluxe milkshake-making apparatus with a built-in heater to make solutions out of compounds that resisted being soluble, like #227. Fleece had a summer job in biochemistry, a couple of floors away, but I hadn’t seen him much since June.

“What’re these things on pages by themselves? Hey! These are poems, aren’t they?” I reached for the log. Fleece was overjoyed; he had a smile on, the size of his waist. ‘“This one is really creamy. Like ‘diamonds lying in gravy,’ huh? And this one is dirty, ha! Let me get on my muff-diver goggles. No, let me read it!” He turned a page. “An acrostic poem! A poem written in the shape of a trumpet! Gawd!”

This one did embarrass me. I tore the book away from him.

“What’s the army going to think about your poems? Some of them you’ve got written right in the middle of a report. I guess you’ll rip them out. Or you could just cross out the poems, or something. What are you going to do about them? — is what I mean. The ‘diamonds in gravy’ wasn’t bad.”

“You aren’t supposed to be in here.”

Fleece looked over at the black drugged dog in the corner. Dung and dried urine were all over the floor. “You want to go on observing what the nerve gas does to dogs for three more years, till you have the Ph.D.?”

“Hell, it’s fine with me. I don’t mind helping the army develop this. It’s better than shooting a man with a bullet They wake up alive … not a one of ‘em has died on me yet.”

“I’m not talking about the nerve gas. I mean you, do you want to sit here watching what it does for three years? I just don’t know, can hardly wonder, what a person like you would do with that Ph.D. in pharmacology when he got it.”

“I know one wonderful thing about it. The army won’t draft me into Vietnam while I’m here. If I get out I’m one-A.”

“You’d go if they drafted you?”

“Sure!” I said. That was in the days when I thought they were bringing in American soldiers to help shoot communist fanatics who were blowing up children on school buses and walking into harmless restaurants in Saigon with explosives strapped to their backs. I don’t mean the Viet Cong never did that. I mean that at the time, I thought that was all the war amounted to. My dream was that, if they got me to Saigon, even unwillingly, I would see some skinny bastard trying to place a bomb under a school bus full of children and be possessed with enough knowledge about my machine gun to sight on and scatter that champion all over South Vietnam; that the children in the bus, helpless darling little black eyes, would blow kisses to me, and I would show them the wizened smile of old democracy on the march, reloading. A simple dream, taken right out of the movies. But that’s what I had in my mind. One boy, Anderson, had been drafted right out of the pharmacology graduate program by the army; Anderson was slow, squat, and had bad vision. If they wanted him, I knew they were thinking about me. I’d thought about the draft a good bit.

“Monroe, you’ve got to get out of here. I know. There’s nothing here for you.”

I’d known that too, for three or four months. But it was hard to quit. Things were rather easy in the department. Everyone smiled at everyone, as a matter of form. We had thousands of dollars of equipment around us, and there was a technician, Jimmy, who could make any harebrained dream of an experiment into a reality — glycerinated guinea pig uterine fibers, chick embryos, damn the cost. There were two secretaries transmitting it all into publication, reading the earphones of the pocket-size tape recorders: “Caffeine on Rat Tongue” and “‘Retreating’ Magnesium in Rabbit Skeletal Muscle Suspensions Treated with Violin Lacquer.” It had all the hum of a factory, and I was sure I’d be cast out as a Ph.D. within the decade.

But I knew the day I walked out a Ph.D., I would drive home, hear the old man call me Dr. Monroe, then come back to the lab and shoot myself full of #227 itself, and let them watch me shudder, faint, and piss. Or might as well. I hated every minute of every effort of every bit of what I was doing, when I wasn’t writing poems in the log.

4 / Christmas Drummers

I have to back up in that year several months and tell about the first Christmas I did not go home to Dream of Pines. The radiator on my T-bird had rusted out, I could drive it for twenty minutes before steam came out of the hood, but this wasn’t the only reason I didn’t go home to see my brothers, my sister, my nephews and my nieces. It pained me not to be there. I thought about the mistletoe way up in the oak trees around the house; I could smell the spice of the pine needles. My sister had a new infant boy I’d never seen. To the truth, they all cared about me dearly and I’d failed in med school so quickly, I just couldn’t face them. My failures had all been vague before, but now I had one, an expensive one, as definite as a wrecked Oldsmobile. At the time, I was so low, I can only look back and congratulate myself on one thing: I was not carrying the pistol around with me any more. Even though I wore the sinister reptilian coat.

Gad, what to do? All was aimless. I went down to Wright’s, where Silas worked, and played a few records in the booths. I watched Silas, who stayed busy being himself. I admired his energy. He watched out for drab and puny girls entering the store. Instantly, he was their helper. He would make a date with them right on the floor, perhaps selling them a record as he did it. The girls with dry hair and impure complexions, the girls wearing glasses with rims upswept like steer horns. Once, I saw him put his hand on the shoulder of an especially odd girl, and came out of the booth.

“That girl was damn near a pygmy!”

“Hands off,” Silas warned me. “All mine.”

One afternoon a mulatto with flint-like patches under his eyes walked in and went straight to the revolving rack where the band scores were. It was Harley Butte. He had aged. His wife was with him, and his four boys. The wife was his same color. She looked pleasant, but was somewhat old before her time. The boys were of a fresher pumpkin color. They kept around the mother. Silas saw them and rushed over to draw a piano bench out for some of them to sit on. I was in the glass booth and heard nothing. I only saw Silas mouthing at them, with words of great courtesy, and saw the woman pull the baby boy up in her lap. The baby boy wanted to climb up in the showcase of the window and touch the drum set, an exotic collection from Slin-gerland all bright with an oyster and pearl finish. I had an impulse not to come out of the glass booth and show myself to Harley. I don’t understand why I just watched him as long as I did. All I know is, it seemed proper and cozy in the booth, hearing nothing, and it took almost a revolutionary effort for me to open the door and give him my hand.

“Where’s your band?” I said.

“And what the hell’re you doing here?” said Harley. “I been looking for you on TV. Everybody likes those Beatles. I thought you mighta got in with them.”

“It’s been a long time. I’ve been in med school.”

“Who told you to do that?” He seemed angry.

“On my own. I haven’t played my horn for three years.”

“What’d they tell you in college?”

“I told him, Harley. He was playing good trumpet,” Silas jumped in.

“I know he was playing good trumpet. He got a scholarship on playing his trumpet.” He hung down his arms, disappointed, disappointed in me almost to the point of wrath. “I’ll bet somebody told you music doesn’t usually make money. Yeah, I’ve heard that enough times, them telling me.”

To change the subject, I asked Harley what brougiht him to town. He said there was a parade on Capitol Street this afternoon. He didn’t think much of the parade. It was a penny-ante affair with a Negro Santa Claus in it. In fact, he’d put his foot down, saying he could not drag the Gladiators off to every occasion and anybody’s parade. He said it was his opinion that this practice would dilute the class of his band. But the principal of Beta Camina said he was wrong. The principal told him, “Your trae school spirit has been tested and you have received a negative grade.” The principal said, Well then, he’d walk with the band this time. Harley replied he didn’t care about the walking in the white suit and that business, but it was still his band. The principal told him future events would determine that. Then the principal was in his own white uniform and helmet — which he had been hiding in his closet for months — fast as a wink. He told Harley that he might redeem his school spirit by, certainly, traveling to the parade with the Gladiators, directing them as to what music, in what order, they were playing — since the principal did not quite yet comprehend all the details like that — and walking on the sidewalk with the band, primarily to spy out for the threat of that lunatic white man who had pushed the child at him the last time he was in Jackson.

“I might go on back to the army,” said Harley. “You don’t get cut in the back.”

“Ah! Not the army, man,” said Silas.

“I liked the army. Everybody gave such a damn. More people were honest. I think you meet a better breed of people in the army.” He looked awfully tired around the eyes then. He thumbed the music on the stand dismally. Beyond him I saw his wife and kids, all of them sitting patiently except the baby. He wanted to get at those drums.

“I don’t think I know your wife,” I said.

“That’s Miriam.” He made no move to introduce us.

“You have good music here.” Harley suddenly pulled out a band piece called “Charlemagne.” Lower on the page was the composer’s name: H. J. Butte. “This is yours truly.” I examined the score. It was a march, full of runs. In the margins were directives; I should say imperatives, with exclamation points, and inside the cover was a short, exhorting essay on how this piece must be played. The publisher was a New York firm.

“I can’t think right off of any band that could cut this,” I said.

“My band can cut it,” said Harley.

He said goodbye. The family arose and followed him. “Get little Harley, John Philip,” the wife said. The older boy took the baby’s hand and led him out the door.

After they left, a tubby clerk came up and straightened the music on the revolving stand.

“Were you having a family reunion with that nigger?” he said.

“How well is ‘Charlemagne’ moving?” Silas asked. “That nigger wrote ‘Charlemagne.’”

“Well, nobody is buying it. One band director was interested in it. But he said it was too difficult. And I no more believe that nigger wrote it than I believe the moon is the North Wind’s cookie.”

When the parade began, Silas and I went out and found a place next to a lamp post. There was only a thin crowd. A bum leaned against the post itself, taking stock of the two leading floats. Behind them, where we couldn’t see, a band was playing “Silent Night” in march time. The bum turned around. He was tickled pink.

“Nigras!” he said. He was smoking the hell out of a roll-your-own and his eyes were wide as clocks.

“God damn!” shouted Silas. He’d just caught the wind off the bum. I’d been holding my breath.

“I might use tobacco, but I would not take the name of the Lord my God in vain,” said the bum.

“Move out,” said Silas. The bum drifted away, protesting. “Look at the creeps and yokels gawking at the parade. They all think it’s so very amusing. Look at those goddam Central High hoodlums giggling,” Silas demanded.

“Wait. Just wait a bit.” I heard, or felt, the shudder of a certain drum corps putting into action a hundred yards away. “Wait for the big green band.”

“Who is that?” he asked me. “That’s him, that’s who it is! And that girl.” I looked, and right across the street, on the corner, was Catherine. She had seen me and was waving timidly now. Uncle Peter stood by her. He was squinting and lifting himself up on his toes, with the cane rammed behind him on the sidewalk. I felt disarmed without my cosmetic spectacles, but I had my beard as usual.

“Yeah, I know him. I know you, old snake. He’s looking at us, Monroe. I wonder if that cockhead remembers me. Fil drop something on your head, buddy!” Silas shouted across the street at him. Luckily, for me, a band was close on us and the shout was unavailing; as the band passed I jerked Silas back.

“Shut up, shut up!”

“He better watch it. I’ll crown him. I’ll lay some kind of dent in that buckaroo hat for him.”

The next band was Harley’s. I nodded wisely.

“Gawdamighty! Tremendous!” yelled Silas.

The yokels along the street cringed back a bit and looked askance lonesomely. This thrilled Silas. He threw out his arms and greeted the band with his outstretched chest. I didn’t recognize what the band was playing, at first. It was somehow, in a clashing, agonizing way, Moorish and Christian both: medieval feast music. Then I knew it was “Charlemagne”—gloomy in its brass, in minor key, harsh and radiant in its woodwinds, with a crowning tinkle of bell lyres at the top, all of it lifted up by a whirlpool of bass, trombone, and drum muscle. Then I picked out an odd sound: tambourines. I kept listening for the Sousa. It wasn’t there.

“Magnificent!” shouted Silas, as we began walking. He was right. In front, on the other side, strode the principal in the white uniform and helmet. Now this man could walk. Was he smug and imperial.

“That Ethiopian’s having fun, ain’t he?” This was Harley talking to me. He was walking along too. Some ways in back of him were his wife and boys, walking too, but slower. The baby boy was toddling vigorously, with an apple in his hand. The band cut off with a grand weird chord. The drummers rolled like an engine that had cranked up underground and was going to drive off with the whole city.

“That ‘Charlemagne’ is really a horse. That’s the best thing I ever heard on the march,” I told Harley.

“I’ve made a hundred and five dollars on it. It’s the best thing I ever heard, too. And to this date, that’s how much … uh oh! Lookit there.” We’d gotten out some twenty feet in front of the band. There were Peter, Catherine, and a skinny man with a potbelly in a white shirt, tie, plastic penholder at the pocket. A clerkish greaser, he was. They were all walking parallel with us on the other side of Capitol Street. Peter had his eye on the man in a white uniform. We were getting into a thicker crowd of Negroes on the sidewalks now. Peter touched his cane to the backs of people to get a clean view, moving them aside, thrusting his head and wide hat over the curb.

Harley got a pert, scandal-bent look on his face. “You don’t reckon he’ll use that stick on our principal?”

“I’d be surprised. He—” At that time, Peter reached the cane out and tapped the principal on the arm. Just tapped him, just a flick of cane, so as to make the man look his way. The principal didn’t notice, though. He was blowing the whistle and nodding to the drum major as he made inept directing motions with his arms, wanting the band to play. At last the drum major understood and the band was into an intimidating new march.

Silas rushed up to me, really furious, throwing his arms up and down. “Did that son of a bitch hit him? Did you see?!” I didn’t see Silas run back up the sidewalk and borrow the apple from Harley’s baby. Next thing I knew he was in front of us at the curb, making his way through the Negroes. We were at the intersection of Farrish Street, and there seemed to be hundreds of tall men in hepcat clothes around us.

“Don’t let him do that,’ Harley said in my ear. He had a firm grip on my arm. The Negroes were backing away from Silas, who was walking in the gutter. When I reached him and looked across the street, of course it was Peter, his niece, and the other man, walking ahead of the band too, Peter studying the man in white. Silas threw the apple at him with everything he had, and it was rising when it got to him. The apple missed Peter but struck Catherine directly in the face and flew to pieces. A scream went up. I caught a view of her down on her knees, holding her face, just as the band came between. Silas turned toward me, hands on his hips, eyes down. We, Silas and I, passed Harley and his family on the sidewalk. Harley would not look at Silas. He was gesturing in anger to his wife. Then we passed them. I saw two policemen running down the sidewalk on the other side, toward Peter’s vicinity. There was commotion over there. The last rank of the band went by and I saw the enormous hat waving back and forth, and heard, even over the band, a man screeching. Then an arm went up, pointing to the Negroes across the street from it. The potbellied thin man ran across the street in front of a float. Then came a cop waddling after him. Whoever the man in the white shirt was, he drove into a group of tall hepcats, and they gave for a second. Then the cop drew up, and suddenly jumped to one side. Somebody in the crowd had laid one on the fierce boy and he was hurtling out in the parade like somebody trying to lift off and fly by running backwards. He fell flat out under another float — snowy-looking flannel hanging all over it — and the rear wheel of the float rolled over him. It was only a flat-bed trailer being towed behind a car, but there were several Negro girls in evening dresses sitting on it, and my stomach sank when I saw one side of the flat lift up and unseat a couple of the girls. The cop went back out in the street toward the, well, at least, outraged form. The big Santa Claus float rolled down and obscured my view.

“You got to go back down and—” I turned to Silas. He was gone. He hadn’t seen any of this. I walked back up to Wright’s.

“Hero,” I said to him.

“You know damn well I wasn’t throwing at the girl.”

“You left a lot of innocent people standing around back there.”

“You wanted me to hang around and be arrested? I told you about that son of a bitch and what I saw him doing. I’m fed up with the people in this state like that walking around free. He hit the man with that cane, didn’t he? Tell me, did he hit him?”

“No. He touched him with it.”

“Touched him? Well what kind of touch was that? You want people touching you with a fucking stick?” Then he went on, reviewing me again on what he’d seen Peter doing at Oxford during the Ole Miss riots over James Meredith; the night Kennedy made his appeal to Mississippi on television, the night they set cars on fire and students attacked the Lyceum Building, where they had the FBI hemmed in; the night the tear gas flew and one student would have driven a bulldozer against the door of the Lyceum except he ran out of gas; the night a jukebox-supplier and a Canadian journalist were murdered by unknown snipers; when the local reporter said FBI men had attacked a girls’ dorm with tear-gas guns, when the Mississippi Highway Patrol was indignant; when General Edwin Walker was alleged to have led a crowd of student quasi-lancers against the FBI; the night Silas missed, driving into town in the early morning of the next day, seeing something curious on an overpass of the railroad between the town and the campus. Parked his car and walked up there. He walked up to the scene of a group of busy adolescents with a grown man ordering them around. Some of them were scouting the traffic and others were moving crossties toward the rail. It was still gray and foggy. “Here’s one!” one of the kids yelled. The older man clapped his hands and directed them to get the crosstie on the rail. “Be ready!” he said. It was Colonel Lepoyster, using his hat that way, sleepless, as at Cold Harbor or some other perimeter above Richmond, 1864, reduced to boys and no ammunition. Coming under the bridge was an olive truck with canvas over the trailer. The boys dropped the crosstie over the rail and the huge beam fell on the trailer. Then the other group dropped another crosstie on the windshield of the truck as it emerged. The crosstie hit end down and plunged into the cab as if into water. The truck roared across the wrong lane of the road and smacked into a telephone pole. The pole broke and fell back on the canvas, full of wires. The truck rolled over on its side. There was a cheer on the rails. A man with a star on his helmet put his head up out of the cab window. The soldiers who weren’t hurt were angry, and squirmed out the back. Colonel Lepoyster told the teenagers to run, and they did, down the railroad in both directions and off into the high weeds. The man in the starred helmet had a.45 in his hand but was still dizzy.

“This is the Mississippi National Guard!” cried the man. “Who would do this to us?” He looked up at the rail embankment; his face was bloody. Peter turned to Silas with a cowed, sick face.

“I thought they were the United States Army. I didn’t know they were the National Guard. Those boys are from Mississippi,” he said.

Silas went down the hill to report to them who was responsible for that crosstie being dropped through the windshield. By the time he and the man with the.45 lumbered back up, Peter was gone into the weeds too.

This was the story. There was no reason Silas should know the final end of it, that it was General Creech, Fleece’s stepfather, who had the bloody face and the.45. Fleece had seen the scar from the windshield glass which the general still carried, and I had not told Fleece, either, about who was leading the troops who dropped the crosstie.

I was concerned enough on my own and of my own. Did not tell them something else: that I’d been taking out Catherine roughly every two months, until this last three months, for two years. I’d seen her the first time in maybe an overlong time, out there on Capitol Street.

5 / Last Date

What do I say? The very same night I fell to dreaming about her. I dreamed about her Christmas night; dreamed one of those mesmerizers, where every sense you have is sharp-edged and you sleepwalk toward the déjà-vu as if the palm of a hand is pushing you from behind. You couldn’t tell the sex of the hand. It could be Geronimo’s hand; it could be Catherine’s. I awoke with my tongue on my cold pillow. In three weeks I was at their house, after telephoning. Peter answered the door.

“I’ve been buried in my books.”

“You do look haggard. Come in. We saw you on Capitol Street. I was about to make a call to you, but she wouldn’t let me.” The place was dark. He led me through the den. The glass peeped through the break of the curtains. I walked over and drew one of them back, wanting to look through the glass and see what one could see outside.

“We don’t open those,” said Peter. I sat down next to the hearth.

“Where is she?”

He hung over me and said nothing for a moment. What I caught of his face was something like a Santa Claus who had been assaulted and shaved and who was angry.

“Don’t stare at her nose. She had it broken playing volleyball at the college.” The lie clung about the room for a while; he didn’t follow it up immediately.

“You know, I really covet your freedom,” he said. “You sit there without one enemy in the world, enjoying your youth and your beard. Soon a doctor of medicine.” This lie clung about the room with the other one. He clutched one of the curtains, and kneaded it, looking out the split through the glass which he’d just told me not to look out. “You would never understand the term lover, would you? I can’t hope you could ever comprehend the term lover. No time. Too fast a pace.” I believe he had been making tiny, almost undetectable loin-movements against the curtain, but this may have been only his agitated way. “My wife never had even a high school degree. She had an endowed body which was timid, but she learned to speak with it. She had no speech until I came to her. She was not a being until I came. She learned a dialect in the language of love. Months, it took. She would moan out her own name, Catherine!, so happily when at last her praise and wonder thrilled up. Then she led me, me! into a humility, an immersion, not foreseen by one so proud as I. She “—Catherine walked into the kitchen, but he did not see her, and she receded, but only just out of sight—“saw me below her, trying to throw my failing wet bridges, my webs, up to connect with her being, having as much as burned my own bridges of the practical world. It was then she betrayed me. ‘You have to eat,’ she would say. The niggers might wander through the yard and see us. What a cold stare from her, at the last. What dry mechanical lifting up of her fingers on the hem of her skirt. But,” he came away from the curtain, not looking at me, though, “pthis Catherine will finish college soon. Did you know that? She’ll have some education to appreciate the one who takes her.”

He might have had me in a spell, almost to the point where I saw his own old brown script on the letters, except I’d seen that unconscious mincing hunch against the curtains and knew Catherine was standing back in the shadows of the kitchen, hearing.

“Lock has come,” he said. I lit a cigarette and shook the match. If he would look my way I would signal that she was back there. The fact is, I never saw the man eye to eye. “You are far and away the most appealing, with your medical school.”

“That isn’t necessarily paradise,” I said.

“Would you tell her about Lock for me?”

“Tell her what?”

“Tell her Lock will not—”

Catherine walked right in and cut him off. Her nose did look a fraction flat. What a shame. It was a nice nose. She still looked fetching. She wore a green and yellow plaid dress. Her legs were very lovely in stockings. She had gold rings in her ears, after the pierced-ear fad with coeds. On her feet were brown patent-leather shoes with one strap over the top of her foot This was similar to the way Bet Henderson dressed, and Bet was always the precursor of style.

Peter simply walked out of the room.

I had in mind taking her to the Subway, a night club in the basement of the Robert E. Lee Hotel where you could take in your own bottle, buy mixers from the bar, and every now and then catch a good band, a soft one, so you could talk to your lover over the drinks and look around at a sort of wooden purple cloister. I’d been faithful to this girl, in my way. I’d had no other dates. We sat down and I ordered the soda for the Scotch I’d brought. She said she’d like that. When she got her glass, she sank down in the chair in that bent slouch she always had in the car. This posture robbed her of almost anything romantic. I heard her mouth make a slight sucking noise as she was drinking.

“You heard Peter tell about him and his wife,” I said.

“Peter, he’s so sweet to me. I knew his wife, it was my blood aunt, she got some notion where she wouldn’t be normal with him in bed. He turned her out. I don’t blame him. He gave her everything and she wouldn’t let him go the normal way at all.”

“He told you that?”

“Change the conversation to another topic.”

“He told me not to notice your nose. What’s wrong with it? I don’t see anything.”

“You get me into daylight and it shows all right. The niggers threw an apple and it broke my nose. I saw you at the parade and you waved? It happened on down the street. We got down amongst a bunch of niggers and one of ‘em across the street threw a apple. Yes sir.”

We drank more than a pint together of the fifth I’d brought, Catherine taking a drink more often than I did. The band tonight was fine, keeping guard over the mellowness, even when they played bop. I noticed that the trumpet man was getting away with a lot of bad notes playing through a steel mute.

“I can play a trumpet about four times better than the man in the band.”

“Hotty toddy,” she said. I had not expected this hostility. She went on to say she had noticed a lot of snoots in this place; she said she wouldn’t have picked this place if she’d known what it was. She enjoyed the Scotch, though, thank you.

I was all planned to tell her how she was wrong, how I knew the person who’d thrown the apple, when she came out with this, looking at the ceiling, rather smugly: “I’ve had Scotch and soda before with another person.” She wanted me to inquire about this person. It was so tacky I couldn’t let it pass. Also, I knew who she meant.

“You mean Gillis Lock? I saw him with you at the parade, didn’t I? I thought you detested him,”.

“I never said that.”

“You implied it.” She drew even lower down, looking surly. I don’t think she understood the word implied. “At school Lock was known as a merde accompli, if you know what I mean.” This drove her into a rage of silence. I confess I was only pursuing this game out of the rotten delight of seeing her cringe even more than she usually did.

“He doesn’t think all that much of you either, brother. He said you are a over-interlectuall playboy that thinks of yourself all the time.”

“That son of a bitch never saw me that I know of.”

We left.

I parked in the driveway at Peter’s; the garage with its false steeple was above the nose of the car. I thought she would jump right out of the car immediately, but she didn’t. She sat up in good posture and crossed her arms over her breasts. She had said nothing, but her anger had brought her out of that perpetual crouch. It would have been good if I could tell her how pleasing she was, out of that slouch, but I couldn’t. I could imagine her as all sorts of pomped-up lovely women of thirty.

She was looking out the other window and I put my mouth to the back of her neck. She uttered a crooning sound and made her neck unavailable by bending back her head. I sought her cheek then, kissing as much of it as I could, and I put our lips together for a few seconds before her hands reached my chest and pushed off.

“That beard don’t feel good, unh-uh! No hand stuff either. Who you think you are? You don’t see me often enough to think you can do that.”

So she called me to a halt. Again, I expected her to jump out of the car. But she didn’t.

“What’re you staying here for? Why don’t you ran on in the house to Peter? I’il bet I’m boring you, humh?”

She just sat there, stiff as a bust. “Run in the house!” I told her. All right, I did jam my hand up to her thigh, searching for the silk. She giggled.

“Are you giggling?” I asked her. I opened my hand and one finger touched a string. I had no idea what it was. Then she pushed my hand off and straightened up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Have you had an operation, or something?”

“Don’t be slimy. Them snappers out at the ninth grade that I practice-teach on, they’re slimy. You haven’t ever been slimy around me before. Being tricky-devious on me.”

I was outraged. “That was Tampax, wasn’t it? Does he buy that too? Your panties, your toenail polish, your Tampax.”

“Okay, Uncle Peter did buy the panties and he gaven me the money to buy the unmentionable item I have on too. I don’t feel shamed. I say I have on these things and I’m a lucky girl to say it, in case anybody was so nosy to ask me, if they wanted to pry out those kind of secrets. He give me … everything I am now.” She looked at me cool and proud.

“So go on and get in bed with him,” I said. I took the Cutty Sark bottle out of the well and brought it around to my mouth. “Get out of the car. Go on.” But she stayed as I drank.

“You’re a little bit slimy but you’re really a silly old boy. We could’ve had a lot more fun.”

I pretended I was drinking, swigging it neat. I never could do this. Even pretending, my eyes watered up and my throat snarled up, protesting. She asked for the bottle and I handed it away. In the corner of my eye I saw her plant it on her lips and give herself a large douse of it.

“Harry!” she cried to me. Her voice was choked and faint. “I’m on fire! Don’t let me throw up!” I clapped my hand over her mouth. She twisted under it wildly, and I bore down harder with it. She quit squirming finally, opened her eyes, and nodded. I took my hand off.

“Oh, now my heart’s like a electric blanket around it. I wish I could feel like this all the time. I feel so sleepy but I want to do just everything.”

I moved in and put my arm on the seat behind her. “The most wonderful thing in the world is the meeting of two bodies, in the night,” I said. I was tight as a coot What did I have on my mind?

“You silly old boy.”

“Don’t be afraid when I touch you. It is a disease to be afraid of being touched.”

“If it’s a free country you can still pick out the one you want to touch you, isn’t it?”

“Give me your lips.”

“You thought I was waiting on that? I know who I want. to kiss me. You imagine you going to teach me a lot of stuff, treat me like a virgin that sponged up ever word you said, but if you think I’m a virgin, you’re pitiful.”

Now, one o’clock, she got out of the car and slammed the door. As she passed the fender, a light went on in the house. I put my head out the window. “Come here.” She came back and dragged her foot around.

“I just wonder if dear old Peter honors your monthlies in any way or just humps on through with no vacations. Just watch it. I happen to know that somebody is going to get him. You wouldn’t want that moment to find you …” Her face snapped up.

“I lie!” I cried. I crank the car and backed out, thinking never to see her again.

Driving the T-bird to Mother Rooney’s, I had the sense of someone wanting to be let out of the car when I stopped for the lights. I do not invite ghosts; so far I’ve never needed them. But this was real. I thought I might still be imagining Catherine sitting in the seat by me. But when I parked in front of the rooms, it had not diminished and it was no afterimage of Catherine, I knew. I reached over and opened the opposite door. Of course there was only silence. Then a voice spoke in my head: “That wasn’t even mean. That was petty. I’m leaving.” Ah, Geronimo! I begged him to give me the definitions distinguishing mean from petty. I didn’t quite know. I pronounced the name, Ge Ron I Mo. Two iambs, rising at the last with a sound which might be blown forever through some hole in a cliff in Arizona by the wind. A name which in itself made you want to cast off, even being landlocked, and kick off the past history that sucked you down. This wasn’t petty, this Indian, Apache. I knew that. Oh, I knew that at the last he joined the Dutch Reformed church, grew watermelons, and peddled the bows and arrows that he made. But at the very last, he’d been kicked out of the church for gambling, he’d had six wives, and died of falling off a wagon, drunk, in his eighties. And that was not petty, whatever. But I was petty. All the letters of Monroe could be found in his name, a coincidence which would have bored him extremely, as did most language and English especially. He’d give a belch and a yawn.

I walked to my bed feeling like a tick, a something which scuttled around in the sheets, waiting on the body of a true warm man.

6 / So In July

The afternoon I quit the pharmacology school, I rode out to the Ross Barnett Reservoir, north of Jackson. I wore my lab coat. It was a windy day, so I kept the coat on. I’d called her, asked her out, and she seemed happy to hear from me in a remote, incredulous way. I wanted to say at least one more thing to her. I wanted to reclaim myself from being the tick I was that night with her. But she said her daddy and mother were up from Mobile spending the week with them and that they were out at the Reservoir every night till nine and then they were up to eleven cleaning the fish. That was all her daddy wanted to do while he was in Jackson. I asked where they fished, and she told me.

I parked just below the dam and walked down the hill to the spillway. Through my sunglasses, the water was a foggy boiling green, hissing down the dam wall, pooling in the deep basin of rocks, and rushing down in the Pearl River bed. The pool water was full of suds. Boats full of fishermen wallowed around at the foot of the dam; other people were fishing from the big rocks on the shore.

I saw her with her family. Only the old man was fishing. Her mother sat on a piece of slag a few feet from the water, watching the man. He had a cane pole and flicked it toward the dam, trying to get the cork way out. He leaned over the water. Her mother was jabbering at him and motioning with her hand. Catherine sat up the rise and in back of them on a piece of slag rock. She sat with her arms around her knees. She had on sky-blue tapered pants and a white blouse. Down here, five-thirty in the evening with the vapor from the dam blowing on you like a sea breeze, it was cool, as if you’d found a pit of chill in the smoldering heat. I made it down the rocks unnoticed and looked over her shoulder. Her bare forearm was frail, a little sunburned, and covered with chilly-bumps, and the downy hair on it was erect. This moved me. I came up right next to her. She’d been out here five afternoons straight.

“Hello,” I said.

“You silly old boy,” she said. She didn’t turn around. But she knew who was behind her. I sat down by her. I asked her how the fishing was going. She said her daddy had caught a lot of white perch all week; that he was fishing with minnows.

“You need this coat. You can keep it,” I said. I took off the lab coat and draped it on her.

“Thank you, honey,” Catherine said. She’d never called me that before. She was never so easy with me. I asked her what kind of time she was having. She said, “I do love the water. I don’t care about catching fish out of it like my daddy does. I like the waterfall on the dam. We eat supper out here and everything.”

“It beats the heat.”

The water slapped down loudly just a few yards away. You couldn’t hear things the first time they were said. She pulled me up so I could speak right in her ear. I’d never known her to do anything like this. She pulled the lab coat close to her and nestled her cheek against the shoulder of it. She turned her face toward me, her hair blowing. “Harry the doctor. With that beard you look cut out to be a famous doctor on a rocket ship to Mars. With those sunglasses.”

In this rocky valley where it was so shady and cool, I didn’t care if it never changed. I asked her if her mother and daddy ever turned around or if they watched the cork like that all week. I asked her didn’t she want to introduce me to her folks. They were just a few feet down from us. She said she didn’t want to. I asked her, What if they turn around? She seemed scared, and in reply she took off my coat and handed it back.

Over the noise of the falling water, I could barely hear her mother talking. But she had been harganguing the old man ever since I’d been there. He had been moving out farther into the water, holding the pole in a strained way. He wore leather shoes and the water was over his ankles. The back of his head was balding in a messy way, with gray and brown strands losing out to pale splotches of scalp. The woman stood up, and I took the hint from Catherine and moved off as if I was not with her. Her mother’s cheek, the left one, was burned, I mean fire-burned, from some accident, and the other was covered with tiny freckles. Her teeth were brown, and she was clamping down on a Pall Mall — the pack was in her hand — one eye shut to the smoke. She saw me standing twelve feet or so from Catherine. I was trying to get a grip on the rock incline. I’d put my coat back on, and I was showing an innocent disregard for Catherine.

“Arrrrrrrr!” the woman said as she sat down by her daughter. Then she broke wind, helplessly. Almost simultaneously, she cranked her face toward me to stare and check on my reaction. She had a hurt look. I gazed away like a statue. She drew her shoe down, scraping the rock in front of her to make a fartlike noise so if I’d heard I would understand that this is what made the noise when she sat down.

“Is he a Fish and Game man?” I heard her ask Catherine. She reached in the sateen high school athletic jacket on her and pulled out a paper. She said overloudly to Catherine, that in case I was, here was the fishing license if I was looking for it. She said that it was paid for. He wouldn’t see it any other way, she said. Uncle Peter had paid for it. She hollered it out, so that if I knew the man — and I ought to know the man — I would know who bought the thing; hollering with pride. Then she began mumbling with Catherine, keeping an eye out for me. I saw Catherine’s forehead nodding. Then her mother flew into a shrieking declamation, which seemed to be her natural style.

“Royce — you know what he doin’? Yo daddy doin’? He said he saw a normost basst feedin’ on the toper thet water a piece out an’ yo daddy is wadin’ out on thet drop to catch in. He ain’t usin’ no minner. He usin’ a live brim on his hook that we caught when we was catchin’ all them little white perch. He sez he want to catch somethin’ big an’ this ud be a perfet vacation. I been a-tellin’ him git back in off thatere dropoff. He caint swimb atall.”

All this while Catherine, leaning backwards of her mother, was appealing to me with her hands and her eyes to please leave. I pretended not to understand her. I watched the old man.

He had something on the pole; he had something big, too; it was running back and out. The line was zipping around, and the pole bent like there was an automobile under the water. The man backed up, but the fish was too big to allow that. Then the man was pulled in, slipping down the grade of the pool to where his hips were underwater. He wanted the fish very much. His head bowed to the fish every time it moved. I wanted to see that creature myself.

The man lurched backward into the shallows in a decisive move. He fell backward all of a sudden, throwing the pole up in the air. His head hit a rock on the shore, and his back followed it, giving out a sundering thud you could hear over the sound of the dam. I saw that, but my eye was still on the pole. It hit the water, stood up like a limber weed, and was drawn down, waving in circles, until the butt itself went under. I waited for it to pop up, but it never did. The fishermen in the nearest boat paddled over to the spot where it disappeared. The pole did not come up again. The men in the boat looked over at us full of awed respect.

The old man lay with his feet in the water. There was blood on the rock under his neck. His wife and his daughter were over him on both sides. I walked down and knelt at his head. He was out cold, but he was breathing big and healthy.

“Hold one of his eyes open and let me look at the pupil,” I said. The wife did this and I saw that the pupil was dead to light; the tadpole didn’t jump. The man had a pretty face like a blind queen.

“Royce. Royce. Royce,” his wife repeated. Then she asked me, “You mean you are a doctor right here on the spot?”

“The man’s … serious,” is all I could stay. I was trying to make all the few facts I knew stick together into something. It was a disgraceful position to be in. From the facts I knew, I couldn’t come upwith anything.

She picked up his head in her arms. Catherine clutched one of his hands. He had groaned yet, even. Catherine hadn’t looked my way. I was glad of that. I didn’t care for her to see me again in the lab coat. She didn’t know I’d busted out of med school, of course; didn’t know I was a fraud right here on the spot, had come to prove that I must be remembered as something besides the tick I was that night in the car. To be mean, to be kind, to be anything else. I hung my head. The thought came to me that I had not touched the man.

“It could be a concussion,” I blurted out.

“You mean Royce he won’t know my face when he come out of it?” Mrs. Wrag was breaking down. She began singing “Won’t know my face!” as a refrain, and hugged Royce’s head up and down.

Then Catherine looked at me sadly and jerked her head toward the incline. She wanted me out of there. “Not necessarily amnesia,” I said, trying to save myself from inept-ness.

Catherine shrieked, in a voice very much like her mother’s, “Don’t sit there writin’ a essay about it!”

A speedboat rammed up on the rocks beside Mr. Wrag’s feet. It came in almost full blast. It was red and white and greasy. A concerned man scorched by the sun stood in the bow. “Doctor Ainsworth is fishing down in the river,” he shouted, pointing backwards, studying me. He and his buddy in the speedboat had scared the hell out of me. He crouched in the bow ogling Mr. Wrag shyly.

“Well, go get him, you dumb greaser!” I shouted, rising. He stumbled back in the boat, still eyeing my coat and beard as he fell. His buddy reversed the boat, and they blew down the river leaving a swath in the water like the river was jumping apart.

Mrs. Wrag had recovered a bit. “That man wudn’t a nigger. He was a white man with a suntan. He wudn’t a nigger.” She spoke rather carefully at me.

Mr. Wrag woke up. “I’ll kill you … you hawrble bitch. You come down there an’ trip me up, didn you? I’ll see you dead. You seen the fish I had, couldn you see? You come down there an’ trip me up.” He cut his words moistly — some of his teeth were missing — and struggled up toward his wife’s face. She still cradled his head in her arms. He fell back spent, and she looked beyond me cracked open with a smile of purple gums and brown teeth that barked and snapped for glee at the sky. Down the river, I saw the speedboat appear in the bend, wallowing and skipping toward us, with a third man in the, middle.

“You leave,’ said Catherine to me. This was easy to do. As I walked up the incline, I heard her shrieking, like her mother. “Who was you? Who was you? What did you think you was?” I wasn’t certain till I glimpsed back that she was shrieking at me.

In the parking place I leaned on the little new Volkswagen that Peter no doubt had bought for her. In the backseat were some overturned worm boxes. There was also a styro-foam picnic box; but in the driver’s seat there was a teacher’s manual with an Eskimo Pie stick marking the page to which she’d read. Getting ready for those slimy snappers in junior high. Incredibly, she’d graduated.

I looked down the hill and observed the tiny group of them. Royce was sitting up. The red and white speedboat idled and rocked out in the shallows, raising smoke like an old car. The doctor got Royce to his feet, and the four of them began creeping up the rocks. Catherine put her hand to her eyes. She saw me. She brushed her arm back and forth as if dusting me off the hill. I believe I heard her shriek again.

So in July I saw her the last time.

I still think about that — perhaps — two minutes, when I saw her arms slightly sunburned and covered with goose-pimples in the cool wind of the dam; the odd, sudden affection she had for me—“Honey”—and her shoulders in the lab coat draped on her, her hands crossing outside it, her pulling me nearer so I could hear what she said over the sound of the water; my own love for her delicate vulnera-bility reviving instantly, damn near tears. This surprising butterfly of sentiment with both of us — never mind what followed — I remember, even after the disasters, as one of the strangest interludes of my time.

I was absorbed for days in trying to forget the afternoon, forget them all, kick them off. I knew if I thought of it too much more, it would fall around my neck like a noose and hang me.

I had a letter to write. The old man, for one more semester of money. And I had to read the one he wrote back to me, and whatever the sum of the check enclosed, I’d bleed out the whole amount in pennies, nickels, and dimes of misery. Maybe I’d take a job and read books on the job. I had a way to go, had to take it. It seemed to be the last one.

Thinking of the old man, I read the Columbia University bulletin on the wad outside the English office at Hederman-sever. My idea was to return and take the English hours I needed at Heder man sever to get into graduate school. Just slip into a graduate school come January. As for Columbia, I could imagine those mean bastards up there reading Finnegans Wake upside-down and beating you over the head with their pipes. But the old man would be proud of me up there. So I took down the address and some others and went to see the chairman. When school started in September, I’d reread my Bobbie Burns and rediscovered my hatred for Pope and Henry James, and was ready to make the last dash toward a profession.

One day I was reading “The Leech-Gatherer,” stopped, smiled, and realized I’d forgotten Catherine, Peter, and the Wrags for three weeks.

7 / The Old Boys at Mother Rooney’s

This is the fall that Fleece was leading his class as a sophomore at the med school, Silas was still the leading ass on Capitol Street — at Wright’s — and I was accepted in graduate school. It was 1965, the year I got married and the year of a lot else.

Silas had taken a trip to Europe during summer. One thing he had done was force himself into an art class at the Sorbonne. Some group of artists there told him that the West was finished and that they spat on all Old World art because it was elitist. Silas caught a terrible cold in Spain which enabled him to spit on every church, icon, and masterpiece in southern Europe from a range up to twenty feet. This was really Silas’s cookie.

“More to the point, Europe scared the hell out of you, didn’t it?” said Fleece. Silas was thoughtful.

“That’s true.” Silas turned red and took the stairs up to his room.

“You got him,” I said.

“What’s wrong with the bastard? He’s so mild.”

A week or so later, late at night, I saw Silas come down the stairs through my room and slip down to Fleece’s room. I heard Silas waking up Fleece, heard Fleece swearing. Then the light went on down there, and I could hear the low tones. I went to sleep while the tones kept on.

The next afternoon Fleece emerged into my room. I was reading The Ambassadors by Henry James for a report and was just about fainting with boredom. It was Saturday and Silas was gone.

“You want to know what he said to me last night?” I dropped the book. Bobby Dove looked rather feeble and ill. He sat on the bed.

“He woke me up to confess to me that he couldn’t help it, he was in love with Bet. That he’d gone to Europe so as to forget her. He also wanted me to know that she seemed to be falling in love with him. He asked me if she’d told me she had gone out with him, and I said no, I hadn’t talked to her in a week and a half. This was the time he was concerned about. ‘I don’t want to hurt you. I think a lot of you. But she seems to be coming over my way, Bob,’ he said. I asked him why he thought she was falling for him. You know what he said? ‘Because I have changed. I’ve learned to be humble.’ I told him maybe this was the first time he’d ever been pitied by a woman. He’s so sincere looking at me; this tribulating little smile on his mouth. I told him to get out.”

“Did you call her?”

“I’m not going to call her. Sometimes I don’t call her or see her for weeks. Some time ago we found out this made it all sweeter. That maybe it would never wear out if we kept it like so. She knows I always have a lot to do, and always will. What she does in her own time… I wouldn’t be mad if she let the rich jerk-off buy her a couple of suppers. Me, I’ve bought Brenda the X-ray technician coffee more than a few times. But, Bet knows about that silly tool, the things he is, does, like dragging those mousy little drabs up to his room to hear them squeak over him; like bringing that drunk over as a gift to Mother Rooney. And now he says he’s learned to be humble. I’m sure the confession that at last he knows what a dipshit he is bowled her over.” He smirked and stood up, with his hands at the small of his back, refreshed by the irony of it. Let me comment on how Fleece had changed, physically, in the last couple of years. He was twenty-six, was twenty pounds heavier than he was at Heder man sever, was less nervous, and had replaced the horn-rim glasses with some steel ones, which opened up his face, his bald high forehead, so that he looked like a less-cringing genius who would know what to do if, say, a fire broke out in his room. When he was sick, he was more like a healthy man who’d been knocked down temporarily than someone at rest in his natural disposition, as of old.

“Love,” said Fleece. “And then marriage. We’re married, Bet and me.”

“When did you get married?”

“About at the first of last summer, out at the Alamo Plaza Motel Courts, which we’ve been to again several times. The ceremony went like this: I woke up with my hand on her nipple. She left the bed and went to the television and then got back in bed. She replaced my palm on her nipple, and on the television came a gospel show, the Blackwood Brothers, because it was Sunday morning. These boys were singing in earnest, the bass man with his moustache, the slick skinny man singing high, the blind man with sunglasses on piano. So holy, you know; they’d never made a cent out of doing this. ‘I take this man,’ she said, lifting up the sheets, ‘while these men look on and sing.’ Then she kicked the sheets back and raised her toes to the ceiling, and I enjoyed her, while she hummed with the quartet on TV with her eyes closed. I happened to be on my knees holding onto her ankles above me. It was the condition of being in an ascending chariot. I cherished the music I heard behind me and the music under me. Everyone agreeing, everyone celebrating.”

“But no actual marriage certificate and so on,” I said.

“What do you want?” I felt like a hated skeptic as he left. He’d taken his glasses off. Since his back was to me, I couldn’t tell. But he was weeping or emoting in some way.

The next weekend Fleece was supposed to be in Houston, Texas. He’d told me he was going to fly over and witness some heart surgery by DeBakey and Cooley. Saturday afternoon late I ate some hamburgers at the Krystal. When I came back to the room, going up the stairs through his quarters, I glanced down and saw him sitting in a wooden chair in the shadows by one of the octagonal windows. He hadn’t made a sound. But he was following me with his eyes — otherwise, a manikin. I went on up. I knew he was in a bad state. It was something new and horrifying. I’d never seen him atrophy himself like this. I tried to convince myself to go down there, but couldn’t. I watched his room grow dark as the night came on. I clicked my reading lamp on and took a book.

At ten-thirty, Silas and a girl eased onto the steps below. As they came up, I looked over the edge of my book to get a load of her. She had tousled hair. I expected her feet to be about where her waist was, as she kept coming, kept getting taller, behind Silas, who had one of her hands, leading her politely. She held her shoes in the other hand. I put the book in front of my face immediately when I saw the girl was Bet Henderson. I sank back on the bed.

“Harry looks asleep,” she said.

“That’s right. He’s out for good.”

“Look what you can see up here!” she said as they got to Silas’s room.

I stared at the ceiling, wondering what Fleece was going through downstairs. If he was awake, he’d seen them. Silas shut the door at the top of my stairs. The two of them creaked on the boards above my head. There was a lot of weight up there. In a while I heard Silas’s coffee percolator sighing.

There was a movement below in the dark of Bobby Dove’s room, the sliding of a drawer. Then the crash of a shoe.

He came noiselessly up the stairs, one pause for every step. He gave the appearance of someone who had been laid out by the funeral home but was up and about, taking a breather from death — in complete black suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. He had given a brush stroke to his hair. There was a red spot on his crown where perhaps the brush had been drawn. He licked his lips on his way over to my bed. The fool was carrying that long-barreled.22 with both hands.

“I wonder where one might find a bullet or two in this room” he whispered’ “I pulled the trigger to test this thing. There isn’t anything in it” I shook my head.

“Don’t try to look wise at me.”

“I’m just wishing I didn’t have to be in the same room — my room — with a crazed person.”

“Get out,” said Fleece. He flickered a cold merriment behind the glasses.

“What’s the suit for?”

“I’m going to Houston. I already bought the ticket. I have a feeling Houston is my kind of town.”

The light went off in Silas’s room, I saw through the un-derchink of the door. There was a stomp on the floor overhead. Then his bed wrenched. The merriment left Fleece’s eyes. He tried to hold his face together in a sneer. But his glasses fell forward to the end of his nose, his eyes watered, and his mouth came apart with an intake of air. He dropped the gun on the bed.

“I know where the good one is,” he said. He eased out my dresser drawer — had the gun, and it was loaded — before I could get off the bed. I stood up but made no advance. The way he was, I didn’t think I should.

“I’m not going to shoot you. I’m not out of my mind, roomie, old Harry, believe me. This is the one,” still softly, merrily again, “You realize I never have missed with this gun?”

“Crime is wrong; I got out “No right to—”

“How do I look?” He pulled his lapels forward.

Above us, the light was on again. It had only been off a couple of minutes. We heard their voices. Then there was a crash on the floor. Fleece glared straight at me as if nothing had happened.

“Don’t worry about me, man. You don’t think I’d really shoot either one of those pitiful creatures up there? Would I go to the trouble? Those are two sad people up there,”

“I think maybe she just hit him,” I said.

“Look me in the eye and see if you think I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I did, and he did look sane and familiar, the blue eyes coming to life. He looked fine.

“What I want to see is the two of them coming down from there. I’m going to be sitting on the bed, instead of you. Move the light a little, see. I want it to fall over my hand with the gun. I’m going to twirl it a few times on my finger and then pitch it on the bed. I’m going to be giggling. This will show them they’re not even worth shooting. You laugh too, now. We’ve heard their rendezvous, and this is what we think of it, how sad and trashy it was … laugh! or this isn’t going to make its effect.”

We had to wait thirty minutes, with absolute silence up there. Then the door opened, and Bet’s hand appeared, carrying her shoes. Silas escorted her down four steps or so and they peered over at my lighted bed, I started laughing, hoping, but it was no use.

Fleece yanked the pistol up off the bed and fired it at Silas. I could see he was shooting at Silas’s ass. I moved, with my own laugh still ringing in the room, and jerked the pistol out of his hand. The shot fell flat against the wall and was not much louder than a cap gun. Silas didn’t know he had been hit and laughed himself, before he saw it was Fleece sitting on the bed.

They had walked several steps below the spray of blood on the wall before Silas fell backwards on the stairs and cried hoarsely, “Awwwrrrr!” Bet crouched by him.

“It wasn’t me,” I told them, trying to keep the fun in it.

“It was me,” said Fleece. He walked over to the stairs and held to the supports like somebody looking into a cage. “Where did it get you?”

Silas gave a fatal moan.

“I was low. It just crosses over the bottom of his thigh.”

“Were you aiming at his heart?” asked Bet. “Bobby!”

“What’s her name?” Fleece said, not looking at her. Then he fainted, like a suit flopping off a coathanger.

“I don’t blame him. He didn’t know what he was doing,” said Silas. “I forgive you, Bob. I understand it.” He talked with his head thrust through the banister, looking down at the body of Fleece. He sort of waved at Fleece.

“We have two choices,” I said. “We can take you to the hospital, which will bring about an investigation. Or we can wake up Fleece and see if he can’t clean it out for you so you won’t get gangrene. You see it’s not even bleeding much. It looks like more of a burn.”

Silas had taken off his pants and sat there holding the underside of his thigh. It is my guess he wasn’t too, too unhappy to be doing this. Bet looked straight down the stairs, sitting on the step below him with her hands in her lap.

“Of course, we don’t go to the hospital. But can we count on Bobby Dove?”

Bet’s eyes enlarged and she pointed behind me to Bobby. Fleece was crawling across the floor toward my bed. He achieved the bed and picked up the pistol lying on the covers. Silas got up and Bet screeched.

“That one isn’t loaded,” I said.

“Don’t, please don’t shoot me!” cried Silas. He gimped down the stairs and dropped into Fleece’s room. Fleece staggered away from us to my bathroom.

“He’s going to kill himself,” said Bet.

As I got to the bathroom the door whammed to. There was no lock on the inside. I called him. I heard him heaving away inside. When I opened the door I saw him holding himself up with his hands spread out on the bare pot, the top of his head just showing over the rim. “HaarrfffI”

“Where’s the gun?”

He rolled over on his side, pink-faced, tears rolling. “Did you drop your glasses in the commode?” He held up the glasses. But in the commode I noticed the barrel of the pistol sticking out of the barf and water.

“Flush it,” he told me.

“You know this pistol isn’t going to flush.”

“Flush it.”

I hit the handle. The pistol didn’t go down. All that happened was the barrel moved across and lay on the other side.

“Try it again.”

“Be sane, damn yon.”

“I shot two people now. I haven’t missed yet. What am I doing with guns?” He was crying. His tie was wet from the bowl water.

“You can throw yours in the river any day you want to.”

“Throw yours in too?”

“Nope. I like mine,” I said.

Bet and Silas came to the door quietly.

“This man has been shot, you remember,” I said.

“What do I need, Bob? A tetanus shot? Can you get me one?”

“Turn around,” said Fleece. Silas did. “You. Big useless thing. You get out of his light.” He waved Bet over. “Well, look at that. Couldn’t you get this girl to even wash it out for you? That would’ve been hunky-dory for him, in his Tarzan underwear. I don’t remember blowing his pants off. Course if I’d hit him in the ear, he’d probably have them off to make a tourniquet or something.”

Silas went upstairs to get some more pants. Fleece picked himself up off the floor. “Yes sir, it’s old Doctor Fleece. Y’all come into the right place. I know ever’ truth of the human body.” He shuffled like an old man. He stopped and reached back for the gun in the commode, yanked it up dripping. “And I brought this from the water baptized, ‘cause I live by this now. The die is cast. What you say, podnah? It puts a fine edge on things of the future? Put a little edge on Silas, didn’t it?”

“Bobby, you’re so hard!” said Bet.

Silas and Fleece left for the med center together. Fleece had said he could purloin a tetanus shot and phenol. Bet stayed in the room with me. She took a seat in the wire drugstore chair beside my desk. Actually, she didn’t seem so huge when she sat down. She was put together well. Her face was that of a child actress whose looks might soon change to ugly. She had on a short skirt. One toe had plunged out the end of her left stocking; she put the shoes on.

“I saw you carrying your shoes in your hand. You realize how pretty that looked to Fleece.”

She made poo-pooing kisses toward me with her mouth.

“What are you, a whore?

“Could I see that?” she asked me. She wanted the wet pistol I’d gotten from Fleece when he left. I was still holding it.

“My mercy!” she sighed, turning the gun around naively. “Pow! Why didn’t Bobby use this one? It’s more cute.”

“He was sitting with me right here, hearing the two of you going at it on the bed up there. You knew I was here, anyway.”

“Oh, he did not. Jerry just took off his shirt and told me he wanted me to see this thing, that he was going to stand on the bed so that the street light caught his image in silhouette on the window. He wanted me to see if this was classic, as a pose. It seemed to be classic to me, so he jumped off the bed and was so relieved and happy. He put his shirt back on, and that was all that happened.”

“That wasn’t queer to you?”

“Well, you can tell whose side you’re on. Wasn’t it a tiny bit queer when Bobby shot Jerry?”

“Well—”

“But I love this place, this inside of an old tower. I love you boys in it. You could’ve called me. I would’ve gone out with you. Would you have had a gun too tonight?”

“I know some other guys I could call up. You could love them too. I’d tell them to bring over some firearms; we could have the Millsaps football team pose in silhouette on the bed up there.”

“What you mean?”

“I think you liked it.” She made those poo-pooing kisses again.

“I didn’t like it when it happened. I might like it a little now. Nobody was really hurt. I feel all drained, but it feels like I had fun. It does.”

“Look,” I said. I reached in the drawer and got the little automatic out. I came back and sat on the bed and knocked the safety back. “This is the really cute one.”

I shot it a couple of times at the stair wall. “Now how ‘bout a old kissy-kissy!” I came toward her all smoochy-mouthed. I really was interested in seeing how much gun-fire excited her.

“Harry!” She stood up.

“What? The thrill is gone, huh?”

“Yes. The thrill is gone. Stop.”

“When they get back I’ll take them both on. We’ll bust up the lamps and make awful hooks and preens out of them and hack at each other in the dark. The winner will climb up into the light of Silas’s room, and there you’ll be waiting for him. Would that get the thrill back?”

“No …” she was pouting. “Oh, Bobby Dove! I’ve lost him!” She put her hands to her face and really broke down, bawling.

For a week both Silas and Fleece spent the night some-where else. Then I got a phone call. Silas wanted to know if Fleece was there, and I told him no, and hadn’t been. He said he was coming over to pick up his stuff. When he got to the house, he was a very wary man; and a very sweet man.

“Bet and I are getting married,” he whispered. “Tonight I’m taking her up to Yazoo to meet the folks. They’re going to love her!”

“Speak out. Nobody’s here, not even Mother Rooney.”

“The night I hooked up with you, remember the night I had that cello and you on trumpet? I knew I was being led to a beautiful life. Thank you. Just thank you.” He wanted to shake hands.

“You are in love. Are you sure you want to marry Bet after Fleece has banged it going on six years?”

“Don’t… please.” He still looked at me sweetly, humbly, though he was making a sort of curled club with his hand. I followed him up and watched him pack the foot-lockers. Suddenly he nudged me.

“What?”

“London. The honeymoon. Then all the rest of Europe, with Bet this time.” He opened his jacket, revealing the ticket packet. I saw his wallet also.

“Silas. Could you give me some money?”

“For what?”

“For I don’t have any and I’m hungry. And me telling Fleece about this ought to be worth something.”

“You bet.”

“More than that, man. I’ve also got to tell Mother Rooney about the disappearance of her favorite lodger.”

“All right.” He looked at the barbells. “You can have those too. You could use this room for a gym.”

“Are you crying, Silas?” He was the biggest man I’ve ever seen weeping, huge freckled hands wiping at his cheeks.

“Listen, if you could write a poem right now for me, I’d pay. I’d pay a lot.”

“About what?” I confess I was greedy, instantly, and already I felt cunning watching him cry.

“God, I don’t know. About love, about leaving, about being shot … Ignore me. Here.” He tossed a couple of twenties on the bed. Soon, he was gone, with my poem.

The next week Fleece moved back in. He asked me where I thought that sad bastard Silas was living now. I told him Silas had been in long enough to pick up his clothes and leave. Fleece continued straightening his room below. I hadn’t actually seen him yet. He yelled up.

“What did he say?”

I was dreading this. “He paid me to write him a poem.”

“You wrote him a poem?” still yelling. “What kind of poem?”

“It was ‘Where the Bee Sucks.’”

He quit moving. Then I heard him on the stairs. He was narrowing his eyes, sneering a bit.

“Where the bee sucks?”

“He was in a rush. I came down here and cheated it. Changed a couple of words, maybe. The lit book was right on my desk. He liked it and ran.” Fleece began an uncertain giggle. I showed him, in the book.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I;

In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

There I couch, when owls do cry:

On the bat’s back I do fly After summer merrily.

Merrily, merrily, shall I live now.

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough!

“He bought that? ‘there suck I’? Why? What did this have to do with anything?”

“The man was weeping, Fleece. He wanted a poem.”

Fleece sucked in as if to begin a howl.

“Wait,” I said. “He and Bet are married and they are in London.” It seemed the perfect time to hit him with it.

He held his breath, and then it left him unnoticeably. I thought he might be very, very slowly dilapidating, taking his glasses off, rubbing his eyes; then the tears came out bright on his cheekbones, and he didn’t move his hands to-ward them at all. He put his glasses back on and drew his hand over his head to get the ropy, straggling hairs in place. His forehead shone bald and hot orange.

“I didn’t know she’d marry him. Missus Silas?”

“She was a strange lady.”

“Dear yes, she was.”

“She bawled about losing you, you know.” Fleece seemed to have resumed the slow, slow sagging again. He began commenting on himself.

“The important thing is that I’m alive and well. My mind is perfectly all right. I haven’t lost anything. It had a lot to spare. The mind’s a paradise. In five minutes. Give me five minutes, I’m going to feel like I could be a choirboy or a wino and everything between. Still. Still” He seemed to be restaturing himself. “Part of me is in the grave. Part of me can’t stand this. But that’s how magnificent the mind is. It can be there and up here too. In a minute I will see the freedom. I will no longer be a little VD spirochete with my tongue wrapped around myself. Did you hear that?”

“I’m listening.”

“No, I mean did you hear that image little VD spirochete with the tongue? Store that away, you lucky huncher. Have it, free! The genius is back in residence. Aw love it”

“You’re doing well.”

“I’m not going to oddball on you any more. Whatever there is left”—he pointed directly out the window—“I am here and I am whole! I can take it. God, I’m so happy for me. And you …” He turned directly at me as if angry. “You are my best buddy! You’ve stayed. Oh, let me mawk. Let an old man of twenty-six mawk on. You’ve kept me out of Whitfield, and Parchman. You’ve got the face of an Indian who knows the secret routes of the hills, and I trust you. Don’t hang your head like I was trying to grab your thing! Truth!” he shouted. It was my poem. You gave it to the wrong man, you miserable plagiarist. Where is it? My poem.” He tore through the pages. “‘There I couch, when owls do cry, On the bat’s back I do fly/After summer merrily … and there suck I!’ Lord love a duck!” He dashed the book on the floor.

8 / Harlem in Havana

Now for the first time in a long time I got a piece of real happiness. The University of Arkansas, up at Fayetteville, wanted me—$1200 and fees paid for the first semester, renewable contingent on my performance. As for Columbia, Iowa, and Chapel Hill, they were all too precious for me to enter and I say fuck them. Always later, I have been glad to read in the newspaper that the football teams of those schools have been thrashed into the sod.

I was holding my letter from Arkansas, rereading it on the couch in Mother Rooney’s diningroom, and Fleece was there; and Mother Rooney, both congratulating me. It was mid-afternoon. Fleece went to the front window. “Who is that?” he asked me. Across the lawn, parked on the other side of Titpea and to the north of us, was a Buick. The owner of it was up on the porch of the two-story house across the street The woman of the house was holding the screen door open and talking to him and pointing to our house.

“It’s Whitfield Peter,” said Fleece. “He hasn’t got any cane. He’s coming right over here!” This was true.

“Who?” asked Mother Rooney. She went with us to the lobby. We stood in the wooden shadows and saw Peter through the mottles of the glass doors. He pressed and pressed the doorbell. It activated the chime box behind us, which had two dead chimes and only a clink for the one working. He rapped on the door, and I saw his hat sweep down to his knee after each knock, expecting someone to open each time. He was a musketeer beating his knee with his hat, to no avail.

“Well, I must answer the door. What a polite man,” said Mother Rooney. I held her with my hand on her shoulder.

“Not for him,” I whispered.

He must have been on the porch ten minutes before he got back in the Buick and oozed around trying to get out of the dead-end street We watched him from the window.

“He knows where we are, Monroe. How does he know where we are? Sweet Jesus, I’ve got the creeps.”

“That was rude,” said Mother Rooney.

“That was a rude, ugly man we know,” I told her. “How could a handsome man like that with his manners be rude and ugly?” she asked me. Her seeing him as hand-some sickened me.

Only Delph, the pharmacist rooming in the other tower, and I were in that weekend. I picked up the phone Saturday morning late in the living room. It had rung fifteen or twenty times. Peter was on the other end. He was very polite. He wanted to know to whom was he speaking and was flowery in his apology over the number of rings. I asked him who he wanted.

“Does a medical student, Harry Monroe, still live there?”

“He died.”

“This was a young man with a beard and spectacles. He wouldn’t have died. Someone has told me, the gentleman I arrived at this number by, that he was living.”

“But he just died. This happens, that people die, of all ages.”

“To whom am I speaking?”

I thought he knew, and I hung up. Having seen him at the door of the house, I had an occult suspicion that he knew every step I took.

Sunday night I finally fell asleep, with Byron’s Don Juan held up to my chin like an old spicy blanket I’d read half of it and was floating on the possibilities of the rest of it Fleece shook me.

“What’s this? Friday night he called my stepfather asking for you. How did he know to call General Creech’s house? Creech gave him the number for this house. I was six feet away from the phone and … The bastard comes to the door, he now knows our telephone number. How? I was talking with Creech, I was beginning to like him, and the phone rings. It was Peter. Creech was fifteen minutes on the phone. Peter told him that, in light of the fact he was talking to a general, he himself was a colonel in the governor’s corps years ago. This really disgusted the General. When he hung up, he told me that, whatever esteem I held him in, he had won his stripes, and not by marching in a herd of influential men past the governor’s mansion, being waved to and coloneled right on the spot by the governor. We were talking, and the phone rang again. Creech picked it up. The same man. He wanted to know why the phone kept ringing at the number the General had given him. The General gave him the same number again, more carefully.” Fleece had had a ruined weekend.

“Now you ought to know it all,” I said. “How does the cut on your stepfather’s head look? He was talking to the man who put it there. Did he tell you about what happened at Oxford, the truck turning over and all that?”

“Yes.”

“Peter was the one that dropped the crosstie. Silas saw him with a bunch of local kids, doing it”

“Silas!” Fleece spat out.

“He happened to see this. Hate him, but he was the one who told it to me, and he didn’t know who your father, Creech, I mean, was. He simply happened to be there. And I should tell you,” and I told him so much my jaw ached, about taking Catherine out on dates, about having seen and heard Peter face to face, about inadvertently giving Peter the phone number and as much as the address of the house.

“’Well, I’m relieved. I thought he was a spirit. I thought We were being closed in on by a phantom. You’ve had such secrets!” he snarled. “Such secrets. But I’m glad to know there is an explanation.”

Later in the night, I heard the phone in the living room ring, six times at least. I heard Mother Rooney open her door and try to make it to the phone before it quit, but she didn’t, and the last ring clung around my room.

Wednesday, I found this one, a letter in the “Our Reader’s Viewpoint” of the paper.

Mississippians who care:

The State Fair is here. I do not want to take away any of the excitement of it. It is October cool days the time we all like the sawdust under our feet at the Fair. The Royal American Shows here giving their temptations to the Mississippian in every facet.

There is one point is wrong, however, I want to point it out It is the Harlem in Havana Show which is here again. Who is pretending there is anything to Havana, Cuba anymore than Castro’s Communism?

It is the same thing when we let Negro mammies be the raiser of our white babies while we are at a cocktail party not knowing what is being whispered in the infant’s ear.

Thus Harlem in Havana is here, girls of mulatto breed undressing themselves to the eyes and to the tune of rock and roll and other Negroid music. They are a mockery and a accusation on the white race that they have bred with a black woman. That is what the Liberal Press loves. To point out hypocrisy.

Let us boycott Harlem in Havana and close it down as a loss to Royal American. Tell them to carry it back home to the millionaire of the North that is having a “ball” seeing us pay money for an idea that deep in our hearts we hate. I myself will be enjoying the Fair, but Friday night, the night it is well known the high yellow girl stands all the way nude, I wonder if you readers knew this has been going on, some people pay two dollars to see this? But I am one who will be looking in the face of the people who go in and come out of it. I wonder what those peoples faces are going to look like? Can they look me in the face?

Gillis Lock

Pearl, Miss.

“Like a sophomore in Whitfield Peter’s Academy of Letters,” I told Fleece. “Do you remember this son of a bitch? He was at Hedermansever shortly. The one who was beating my time with Catherine, you know.”

“Yes, I know, but I don’t know who he is. I’il tell you one thing. Peter has talked to his boy. You know he has. Is he right?”

“What?”

“Does the girl take off all her clothes?”

“Yes, she does. She was doing it years ago in the same show at Dream of Pines. My first glimpse of a real nude, in fact”

“Let’s go. I need the fun.”

I thought I might see Catherine with Lock, if he was standing where he said he would be. And really, I wanted to leave the house without my gun, but once on with the old reptilian coat, looking at my bare shaved face in the mirror, I was back with Geronimo again, and when I reached in the drawer for the pistol, the scarf was lying right by it, and I tied it on. I felt silly, but at home and warm too. When Fleece saw me, he said, “You got the pistol too, don’t you?” I nodded.

“That’s perfectly all right with me,” he said.

The sand gullies behind Mother Rooney’s were full of ledges under the kudzu vines, and you could feel for them and climb down as if on a ladder with every fourth rung in-tact, and even if you missed the place to put your foot you would land in a soft obliging mass of kudzu which would drag you to the next ledge with no harm. You just had to forget the idea that there were snakes sleeping underneath, grip on to what you could, and actually it was easy, landing, hanging on the vines and putting down foot softly as the vines broke. Fleece was above me, inching down. When I was at the bottom, I looked up and saw him forty feet up, missing every foothold and stripping off leaves and falling, all of a sudden, with the benevolent vines he held on to, and smacking back first on the ground beside me. It could have been worse. I looked up the mean hundred-foot drop of the cliff. But he didn’t land that easy, either, with his arms full of vines and leaves like some aeronaut who had bailed out of a flying watermelon. He lay horrified a moment, then found his glasses.

“We got in free,” I consoled him.

“Lead on. I’m all right.”

We talked through the shadows of the truck trailers. Walked over the flattened dusty grass, made it to the saw-dust. The Fair was just an expanded version of the Royal American in Dream of Pines years ago. Now they had the Astro-this and Astro-that, and the World War Two Atroci-ties show was no longer around, but Stalin’s Rolls Royce was, and the barkers, hating everybody, on the microphones with Yankee accents made of tin and cinders. Puerto Rican hoods stared at you like they would kill you if you passed by their skill-booth and would cheat your fanny off if you did stop. The air was cool, you could smell the Pronto Pups — wieners in batter — frying, and the sawdust by its nature gave you a soft falling and rising sense under your feet, tempting you to walk on air. I fell down.

“What was that? Get up!” said Fleece.

I brushed the sawdust off, and we walked on toward the midnight show of “Harlem in Havana.” It was down at the end of the fairgrounds beside the giant ferris wheel, as usual, and the crowd got thicker and thicker. I saw they still had the freak shows, with the big flapping cartoon murals of what you might find inside. I was a little surprised. I thought the freaks wouldn’t have made it this long as an attraction. I thought some law might have been passed. But then I realized that for the real freaks there can never be any laws. You cannot prevent the man who swallows snakes, you cannot deny employment to the world’s tiniest cow, you can make no law either for or against the lady with hairs growing on her gums, and the same goes for the limbless soprano and the Siamese twins, who are engaged to be married, one wearing a diamond ring on its finger. You can’t, any more than pass a law for or against death. Especially not when the people who pay to see them — I remember all the creeps at Heder man sever who loved the freak show and saw nothing else — come away feeling like crowned wonders in comparison.

The band on the balcony of “Harlem in Havana” was careless and shrill, playing the Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand” while three girls in wraps and brassy sandal highheels shuffled in unison on the stage below, to warm up the crowd for the midnight show. The crowd below the stage was so thick I couldn’t see anybody in particular. When the barker announced that tickets were now on sale, you had to move with the mass, up the steps toward the ticket counter. A quiet mob, is what Fleece and I were in. Buying my ticket, I saw a face close to the right edge of the stage. This was Lock. It was the man who had been run over by the float last Christmas. I had thought that was probably who Lock was. I searched the space around him for Catherine as I walked on the stage into the show. Lock pushed back from the stage and took me in. We were six feet apart All I saw was his head and his hands on the edge of the stage.

“I know who you are!” he yelled.

“Where’s your sweetheart?” I yelled back. Then Fleece pressed me from behind; people were waiting behind him.

“That was Lock. I have seen him before,” he said.

We sat down next to a man and his wife, a young married couple. The wife was complaining about the seats, which were simply planks bolted to supports, sawdust underneath. It was the same long tent, maybe bigger, of the Harlem in Havana show back in Dream of Pines. The lights went down, the spotlight centered on the meeting of the curtains, and a master of ceremonies, who was white, darted out of the curtain, took the mike, and straightaway told the filthiest joke I’ve ever heard. ‘There was a girl from Seattle/ Who loved to fellatio cattle” and worse. The wife next to us stood up and pulled her husband along, and they found their way out.

Then there appeared a line of yellow girls in these sort of tinsel bathing suits. They danced well and seemed to know about the extra price of the tickets. You could see their navels jump out from under the tinsel. They were so smooth as a group, it was impossible to pick out the one who aroused you the most. The band was also good, playing on a stand to the right of the stage — a big deep band of some twenty Negroes. When the girls left the stage, the spot raced to one side and planted on this man standing up, taking the solo on trumpet.

“He’s good, isn’t he?” asked Fleece.

For ten seconds he had been good, many high blue notes to the measure, but the same moment I recognized him as Harley Butte, in a blue satin jacket like the rest of the band, he began failing on the solo. He punched out a few very high notes, which would impress a musical amateur like Fleece, but he folded all of a sudden from even doing that. His face looked hurt as he put the horn down. I know I saw tears on his face, and he sat down, or fell back in his seat right in the middle of his ride, as if struck by some-thing. Even Fleece knew something had gone wrong. Only the rhythm and piano were going, and the spotlight ducked off of Harley and went back to the bare black center of the curtain. It was a collapse in a show everybody had paid for to be gorgeously slick. The crowd murmured. I saw Harley get up and jump off the back of the stand in the shadows. The band picked up again. Me, I had gotten off my seat and was walking toward them, and Fleece was trailing me, calling to me. I got the blast of the band right in the face, heard the keys of the saxes clicking, saw the Negroes bearing down on the mouthpieces. When I passed the band a lone girl was on stage. She was rolling her stomach out with enough violence to throw her organ right off her and into the audience.

Harley was under the bandstand putting his horn in its case. The band grew mellower over us. They were doing a snaky Turkish number now. The only light we had was the overflow from the spot and the yellow dimness cast down from the bandstand lights. The bandstand was a unit of mo-bile bleachers, and you could see the shoes of the musicians.

“Harley Butte?” I whispered.

“You got an aspirin? You got to have an aspirin. I got a headache.” He held his hands to his ears.

“This is Harry.”

“My ass. Oh, my ass. You aren’t wearing the beard any more. Do you just have an aspirin?” He jerked his thumb up toward the band. “That’s a whole drugstore up there, they got anything you want. But all I want’s an aspirin. I’m the only healthy one here, and I’m sick.”

“It’s hard to believe,” I said.

“Nothing’s hard to believe.”

“I have two aspirins,” said Fleece, reaching in his coat pocket. Fleece was always having headaches. Harley took them down dry. He stood up and we walked toward the back of the stage. Back here there were a lot of trailers with wooden steps at their doors. In one of the trailers I saw a number of girls in bikinis and robes and caps with huge peacock feathers attached.

“I’ve got a gfrlfriend in that trailer. I don’t believe it, but I do,” said Harley.

“Monroe.” Fleece nudged me. A man was coming to-ward us around the narrow walkway behind the backdrop; he came down the stairs like he had urgent business with me. He was white. Harley said that this was the road man-ager.

“Back up front, up front, boys. Is this man pimping? What are you pulling, Butte? Why aren’t you in the band? Mother Nature. Shit.”

“Get your finger out of my face,” said Harley.

“This thing is going to fall apart if we don’t have rules, Mr. Butte. I thought you were one of my leaders. I trusted you.”

“I’m quitting.”

The man looked at me angrily. “What’s your business with this man? Butte, do you know where you are? You can’t just jump off the tour. We need you. Please.”

“I live near here. I got a wife and kids in this state. Don’t touch me, Shamburger. I got an awful, awful head-ache.” The man looked even more hatefully at me and Fleece.

“What kind of deal have you made here? Are you using this man’s wife and children?”

“Not making anything,” said Harley. “Getting away to the place I won’t have any more headaches like this one. Get out of the way.”

About that time a long line of girls came out of the trailer weiring those skullcaps and plumes. They mounted the steps and one by one broke out to the stage through the flap in the backdrop. The manager went over to time them. The band was popping and screaming now. Harley put his hands to his ears as we made our way around toward the exit. I carried the horncase. He was really hurting. He stopped. “Come on, aspirin,” he said. Apparently he couldn’t go any farther. “Come on.” You had to root for the aspirin.

Five minutes later the girls poured out of the flap and across the sawdust to the trailer. Last of all came a mulatto woman with paint melting off her eyes. She was greasy with sweat. She had gotten a robe on but wore it negligently. It parted and showed her totally bare. Her feet were veiny and dirty. In her hand were two silvery high heels. Then she went on into the trailer, taking her time, not noticing us. Fleece uttered a wounded sound.

“Well, that was a buck’s worth, about, I guess.”

“Ahhh! Land of Jesus! Come on, aspirin!” Harley was getting relief from the aspirins. He still had the jowl beard and the mustache and looked like a man in a drug ecstasy now. Around the way, you could hear the people filing out.

“Let’s go.” He took off the coat and tossed it on the stage, leaving himself in white ruffled shirt and bow tie. The show was over and we were the last in the exit. It was weakly golden here, the lights were down, and the ropes around us were still vibrating in a lingering effect from the show. The sawdust was much-trampled and compact, in the exit.

Gillis Lock was waiting for us, and standing by him, Peter. Otherwise, the fair was dead at this end; the ferris wheel had stopped, the freak show lights were out, and far away you could hear a forlorn calliope, like a lone berserk bagpiper.

“Look at the last ones crawling out!” said Lock. “Wonder what they got Mustard doing for them. You carrying her suitcase for her too?” looking at me and past me. I turned around. Next to the canvas flap in the exit stood a girl the color of a tan egg; she had thrown a stage wrap over herself. Her wrists crossed, holding the wrap at her throat. She was cocking her head sideways, making some message to Harley. Harley gave her a short goodbye salute. This gal was a grief-causing beauty.

“You boys forget what you came after?” said Lock; he was tall, with thin hips but a soft pot out front. He favored the hairstyle of a high arch groomed to one side, which makes a person look headlong and earnest at all moments. “Or couldn’t you afford her, Monroe?”

“I saw your letter. Come over here in the light, and bring the ancient cocksman over here too.” I beckoned to Peter and was sick in my stomach as I did. “Bring your cowboy hat. See how you make out.” Lock came right toward me. I may have backed up. Harley groaned something.

“Stop!” yelled Peter.

“Why? Why?” asked Lock.

“Because Monroe has a gun,” said Fleece.

Lock stopped, looking suddenly limp, as if his spine had been jerked out of him. His arms fell to his sides useless and I believe he was just before begging me not to use a gun on him. “I have one too,” said Fleece. I caught his big golden forehead out of the side of my eye. His head seemed about to burst in fire.

“I have a gun in the pocket of my car,” said Lock whiningly, his lip sulking.

“Aw hell,” said Harley, moving up between me and Lock. “Crying out loud! We got a meeting of a gun club here? You people—”

“Shut up, mustard-face!” said Lock. “I’ve seen you before too.”

Peter eased up slowly, examining Harley. “The band-director nigger gentleman?” he said.

“He was at the parade amongst them niggers. I couldn’t forget that beard,” said Lock.

“I know, I know, I know, I know,” Harley threw out his hands. “You hear now, you two. You’re the one that pushed that child out at me, you’re the one the police told, baby. And you’re the one come across the street and got hit, didn’t you? and got run over by that Christmas float? I recognize you. That’s who recognizes who, goddam it. Every time I been in this town I had to look at one of you. I been all over the United States with this ‘Harlem in Havana,’ and the first time I hit the open air of this Jackson and this Mississippi, who do I see? Who’s waiting there saying Shut up, Mustard, and like that.”

“Shut up,” said Lock. He had a certain courage.

“Don’t look at Harry when you say shut up. Say, look at me. I don’t need no damn gun. I am who I am and I’m tired of you. Look at me. All right.” Harley hit Lock on the jaw with a tight abrupt punch. He had an absolutely clear shot because Lock would not take his eyes off me. Lock — I saw his closed eyes and his nose, knocked upright — went down tearing the sawdust. Then he just lay there, with his legs pulled up to his stomach. I began trembling. But Harley only watched him a moment. Kneading his right fist with his other hand he walked right up into Peter’s face and braced his legs.

“Don’t hit him,” said Fleece, rather calmly, in the way of advice. “He’s too old, and he’s crazy. Don’t.” At that moment Peter did seem such a cheap shot for Harley to take; he was wearing that severe bronco-cavalier hat, maybe a new one of that line, and he looked like a scowling propped-up dummy you’d throw balls at in one of the skill booths. But Harley was committed. He seemed to have just heard Fleece in the middle of his swing, and slowed it, hitting Peter with a sort of loose fist in slow motion. Peter turned his face with the blow and took a helpless step back. Then he put a hand to his cheek, like he’d been merely stung, and repostured, looking straight at me. He looked at Fleece.

“Who is this young man? Should I know him?” he asked me. “He seems to know me.”

“The letters from Whitfield,” said Fleece. I wouldn’t have said that, myself. Peter became very strange in his face, and bore down at Fleece. His eyes were like red dark sightless caves; they seemed to feel toward Fleece; they lay on him lingeringly.

Lock had stood up, and now he looked at Harley, in amazement. He lifted one finger in front of his eye.

“You won’t live, Mustard. Take my word. You had people with a gun on me when you did that. That was nigger, nigger, nigger, what you—”

“You shut up,” said Peter, talking to Lock.

“I’ve got friends,” Lock went on.

“Yes, your friends, fool, your secret agents. Shut up. If you do have a gun, Mister Monroe, I wish you’d use it now. I wish you would show him what a bullet feels like.” Peter said this, but at the same time, he threw his arm over Lock’s shoulders, as if he were Lock’s real uncle. Lock shrugged the arm off, still glowering at Harley. “Very well. Ask them to shoot you,” said Peter.

Gillis Lock seemed to be turning his fist back and forth and studying the occurrence of his bicep muscle through his shirt. “Have you really got a gun? You’d better have a gun,” he said, snarling.

I took the gun out of my pocket. In my mind I heard an eruption of barking, yelping laughter. Oeronimo. Hearing it, I had to restrain myself from shooting him on the spot.

“Get out of my sight, both of you,” I said.

I put the gun back, and walked toward the far gates. Harley was right astride me. He wanted me to give him a ride to Beta Camina. Fleece told me the two of them were still back there, staring at us. I was feeling foul, in all the ways you can feel. But I told Harley certainly I would give him a ride home. Beta Camina was only sixty miles south-west of us, so we went through the gates, around and up to the house, and Fleece got in the well of the T-bird, and I drove, on 80 toward Vicksburg, taking a left somewhere. I’ve never felt sleepier. It was like having a hangover without ever having had any fun.

We passed weeds and a number of dirty asbestos-siding houses close to the road; through the yellow caution lights, with the lone policeman asleep in his car under the service station port, the towns flyspecked and chilled in gray, the lonely hound with heavy teats moving out of the headlight beam, the fogbound Nehi signs, over the highway with its tarred creases, sometimes beside watery ditches, sometimes seeming to be on a concrete tightwire, sometimes cutting ahead like the point of a hurtling plow, tossing houses and trees to each side. On your right a delta mansion, on your left a brick ranch-mode house, in the middle of brown low fields. Then we crashed over some sunken railroad tracks. My car, I thought, broke apart on them. It kept going, but something had been opened in the muffler. There was a new sound inside the car, like constant, violent hail.

Harley talked the whole while. He still couldn’t get over the fact that Peter and his friends were the first humans he’d seen coming out of the tent. I was bewildered too. But I said very little, I was so sleepy. Also he couldn’t get over what luck it was to meet me. In a sluggish dull gloom, I tried to sympathize with the excitement of meeting myself. After the railroad tracks, the perilous sounds of the car kept me awake as he talked. Some months ago he had made a trip to New York to see his publishing firm. They got him an agent. In three days he was out of money and was phoning his agent. Now he didn’t know if he had a job at Beta Camina or not. He’d written a letter to the army but they had not replied. He had committed certain acts interpretable as grave marks on his professional record, such as being absent the last two months of the school year; then there was his absentation the first two months of this school year. They might hold this against him, especially the principal, but they knew his value, as he did. He wasn’t going to beg for his job back. He had invented that job. The publishers in New York had assured him of his value as the band director of Beta Camina. He knew that when he left Beta Camina it was not that a position had been vacated. The position had moved away. He sometimes thought of the kids waiting for him in the band room. He wondered whether, if he could get over this period, this hump, which was not a hump really but a whole range of dismal mountains of funk, he might not like to be in that band room forever. He didn’t know yet, even as we traveled toward Beta Camina. He had sent money home. Sometimes he had wanted to get in the letters he sent and be the face in the hundred-dollar bill, smiling at his wife when she opened the mail, putting a leg over the edge of the envelope, the boys rushing to him. Daddy, Daddy. He could barely compose himself enough to write a note to go along with the money. All he wanted was the time and opportunity to be great. He wanted to be far away from the principal and Beta Camina. Some day he wanted to call his wife and his children to a place which would give them a grandeur of comfort and ease. He did not want to simply come back to the house — I’m old me, tee hee — where they would curse you after the surprise had worn off. And another part of him wanted to commit suicide against everything in his mind, and simply fly, stroke away, nothing but muscles, nameless. Then again he wondered to what dire condition the principal had led the Gladiators in his absence. The poor kids.

We circled through a village of old bricks and launched onto a road freshly laid with red gravel.

“This will be fine,” said Harley. He wanted to know if we wouldn’t come in and take some coffee. Fleece had been asleep since Jackson. I was too groggy to get out of the car. I told him I’d just open a window here for a minute.

The last thing he wanted to know was whether I was pretty sure he wouldn’t see Peter around if he happened to see me again. Could he count on maybe seeing me again without seeing Peter. Because maybe he would like to see me some time and talk about how this literary plan of mine was coming on.

“See if you find out you’re a poet. We’d have a lot to talk about if you were. I might give you some stories.”

“Sure.”

“But they might not rhyme.”

“Sure.”

“Well?” and he went in the house.

9 / The Phone Pleadings

This was in December. I had a fiancee. I wasn’t in the house much, and spent a good bit of my time riding up and down the highway, sometimes pulling off to read a piece out of a book. I’d made a trip to Fayetteville to get the feel of the place and locate a house.

The mountains around Fayetteville, the Boston Mountains of the Greater Ozarks, you bet, give me those, especially Highway 23, with the tops of the trees right up next to the highway, the trees themselves growing from sheer drops, the highway tilting, spiraling up and down, 15 mph or meet your maker, use second gear, watch for falling rocks; under the ledges dripping snow-water, then looping down to Fayetteville past the rock houses, past the cold river, past such signs as Rainbow Trout, Cider, See The Valley At Absolutely No Cost, and this one in front of a store: Trading Post and Son. Yes, give me the hillbillies for a change; give me a new sea level. Give me Fayetteville, too — a sort of flatland bum’s dream of San Francisco, a sort of lost Bowery of Denver — five hundred miles northwest of Jackson. Give me all those miles away.

The days were really a nuisance when I got back, like an intolerably long train in front of you at a railroad crossing. Mother Rooney caught me going out of the room one night.

“The man called you several times last week, Mr. Monroe. Couldn’t you clear your business with him so he wouldn’t have to call so much? Sometimes he calls very late at night.”

“I know. But I can’t clear up the business. I’ve tried. I told him. As far as I’m concerned, there is no business.”

“You aren’t making book, are you, child? You aren’t in the numbers racket? I wouldn’t want anything to damage your literary career.”

“No.” Fleece had bought her a television.

“And listen now. I want your marriage to be just perfect.” Her hands were clasped and she drew them down-wards as she said this, the old blue eyes moist.

“She would love you,” I said.

“Mr. Fleece said that she is.a technical virgin.” I looked instantly to catch her eyes — the same moist blue. “In my day we let certain things go unsaid but I realize this must be sweet for you.”

“Mr. Fleece runs at the mouth, Mother Rooney. He has a lot of cute medical phrases that don’t mean anything at all.”

“The medical. It’s so very nice to have an almost doctor in your very own house, being aged. He bought a television set for me.”

“I know he did that. But in other ways he stinks.” “Television has opened up a whole new world for me. Bless his heart. Did you see it the afternoon the young man dove off the hundred-foot platform into the ring of balloons in the pool?”

“No, mam.”

“Oh I could have just taken him into my bosom.”

Fleece came in the front door. He looked like a surgeon who had seen several inoperable cases today and had turned cynical about them. You could see him as the red-eyed master under the lights. Of course, keeping the charts in the geriatric ward, he had seen those that had their eyes open but were not awake in the morning. He had begun holding Mother Rooney in a kind of reverence. He watched television with her. He told me, in case I shared the common notion that the old deserved death, it was hardly ever true. He had seen and heard a man recite verbatim five Damon Runyan stories, with beautiful gestures, and be cold dead in thirty minutes. He wanted me to understand how the supreme organ, the mind, leaped onward and had so much left when the body fell away from it like a sack. Some of them saw heaven, some of them saw big lovely moments of their past, and some of them saw things like ocean liners on the hospital lawn. He told me he was glad he had his pistol, for the moment when he even had an inkling that his mind was trapped by his body. Those are the foul ones, he said. The others are so magnificent, you could understand how an attending pastor might speak of the soul. And what you see in Mother Rooney, he said, is a damned brave tooth-and-nail fight to keep her mind several lengths ahead of her body. Glorious.

“Don’t leave,” he said. “Let’s see how your poems are coming along. We could have the old lady make us a pot of tea. She told me she would like to see you in the act of writing a poem.”

“The man’s been calling me again.”

“We’ll tell him you’re out, as usual.”

“I don’t want to even hear the phone ring. You talk about old minds. What do you think is going on in his?”

“I’ll answer, I’ll talk. Stay home tonight”

Not long after that, the phone rang. I went to my room and, to tell the truth, I got under the bedspread and put my head under my pillow. I wondered about what Catherine was doing in the house as her uncle made the phone calls. I blanked out my sight, holding my eyes open against the sheet, looking straight at the black unreasonableness that this Peter thing should be going on this far. It had been years. Fleece touched me.

“I won’t do. I’m afraid it’s only you he wants. I told him I’d seen the letters, I’d stolen them. He called me a ‘cruel interloper.’ I told him I knew he oversaw the dropping of the crosstie on my father’s face, then. That silenced him a minute. I told him he was disturbing an old lady over here. Then he asked me to appeal to you. I told him I wouldn’t. He said then he had no other recourse but to come to this house, and look you up. I told him not to do that. I was scared, Monroe. I told him if he came over here I would, one of us, might shoot him. I told him this whole house was a hair-trigger. At the last, he wanted me to tell you this: this concerned Catherine. He said he would call at eleven, and hung up.”

“Was he crazy?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What would you say about his mind?”

’The words come out a little strangled, but they come out perfectly clear.”

“He wants me to come over and see Catherine, doesn’t he? I picked up the phone once, he knew who he was talking to by my breath, damn him, and he asked me to please come talk to her.”

“He didn’t say that. Say. You didn’t knock up young Catherine, did you?”

“I told you the truth. The Tampax string.”

“Maybe he just wants to kill you with that shotgun he mentioned in the letter. And maybe Gillis Lock is there too. Gillis has a pistol in the pocket of his car.” Fleece chuckled, wiping his glasses with his tie. “One day when things get really slow, I mean when we are bored to tears, we could go over there and have the end-all shoot-out with them. That’s somehow pleasant to have in back of one’s mind. Because I know I would be exquisite with my pistol.”

Mother Rooney made a pot of tea for us. I brought my poems down and we talked them over under the unforgiving light of the dining room. Fleece and I sat at the end of the long table. My typed poems lay on the papers like little clusters of charred fish bones. Mother Rooney left the television to come in and watch us from the couch.

“Here’s another one,” said Fleece. “You think you can make music breed with language and you end up sounding like Edgar Allan Poe playing the tuba.”

I stood up and wrote in some amending words; Mother Rooney rose with me and gave out encouraging mists as I wrote. “Now it’s a good poem,” said Fleece. “Let’s go on to the next.” He read a few lines and raised his head. “This is deep, you get on down there. Nightmares. Let me tell you one I’ve had three times. I’m with four other men in a motel room. We kick Bet Henderson around. Then we agree to rape her.”

“Goodness!” said Mother Rooney, leaving the room. Fleece watched her, holding his tongue.

“We all sleep. She gets up and murders the other four, who are tall fellows. She chokes one, she drives a hatpin into another one, she smothers one with a pillow, she be-heads one with a cleaver. I hear their screams but just lie there. She has an opaque brassiere on. Lipstick is smeared all over her face. She comes toward me, not to hurt me, but to tell me how tired she is, she wants a kiss. I pick up a long knife and drive it in her breasts. I look down and see her hand holding mine, lightly, like on the first date. She speaks to me. She says she is giving me a choice of waking up or staying close to her with this hand in the dream.”

Fleece seemed to be appealing to me for some answer. He held the sheet with my poem about the crab to his chest. He smiled and nodded toward the kitchen. A piece of skirt was showing behind the door frame. She must’ve been huddled against the refrigerator.

“See you. Come on out, Mother Rooney.” She swept out, holding her hands, timid on being discovered, but wanting to say something.

“Dear boys,” she said. “Could I ask you if this writing about nightmares is what is poetry? I thought poetry was about man’s noblest aspirations.” She sat on the couch.

“Monroe has a poem in which a crab chewing peppermint gum is the hero.”

She settled into the couch. “Yes child, read it. I won’t say anything. I would just like to know how that one ends.”

The phone rang at eleven. Mother Rooney was bedded down. You could hear her bedside clock. Fleece took my manuscript on to his room. It was just me and the phone. I told him it was Harriman Monroe speaking.

“Catherine is not here. I never see her. She’s at the school or she’s with Lock. She doesn’t come in at night, and often several nights in a row. Lock has wanted your address. She knows your address. She carries these cards in her purse, the Ku Klux Klan and The Americans For The Preservation Of The White Race.”

“You taught her that kind of shit.”

“Not these organizations. I have said things I regret saying in Lock’s presence. He is the one who will take it out to foolishness. There is Catherine’s nose. It remains damaged so that she snores when she sleeps.”

“Are you saying Lock is after me? Make sense.”

“He is a different order. You remember in nineteen sixty-four, the summer the Northern boys were killed near Philadelphia, the Civil Rights killing—”

“Lock was in on that?”

“No. He says he has friends who knew something about it. I didn’t want to know what he was trying to tell me. There was the bombing of the real estate office here in Jackson. The same. His friends.”

“Everything you would want in a son-in-law.”

“He is not. You cared enough about her to see her at the Reservoir last summer. If you could be here one evening when she gets back from teaching. Not as her paramour, but as—”

“What? I don’t trust you. I’m not coming over. Don’t think of me. You do something about her.”

I hung up. I walked to Bobby Dove’s room.

“No peace has been made?” asked Fleece.

“Stay armed,” I told him.

Later, as I was packing all my bachelor things and moving out, I called Fleece up and gave him the remainder of the.22 shells in the box. He took the automatic pistol which he had been so deadly with, and I took his long revolver, which had never been shot.

10 / Ring Around Prissy

At Hedermansever, in the Chaucer class, was a good fellow named Tommy Neicase. We liked each other and generally drank coffee in the grill after class. Once a month or so Tommy would visit his father in Pascagoula. His father and mother were divorced, and his father owned a beach home walled with polished wood such as you might find in the steerhouse of an expensive boat His father always had him a girl waiting when he came home. The man had a job which allowed him to loiter hundreds of hours beside the desks of Pascagoula’s secretaries, who were mostly girls just out of high school. The old man had a sort of soft brassy manner, the action in Pascagoula was slow for the girls, so Tommy’s father didn’t have much trouble bringing even morally decent girls over to the house to meet Tommy. Tommy would get out of the car after the drive down from Hedermansever, and his father would put an iced drink in his hand and lead him out to the patio. Sitting on the chaise longue would be a girl he’d never seen before. She’d know what he was studying at college and be petting Tommy’s dog like it was an old friend.

The last time he’d gone to Pascagoula, the old man had put a drink in his hand but didn’t take him right out to the patio. He was worried, and took Tommy in the front of the house. He said something like “Well you see here, this little girl finished high school in two years, and she looks four-teen. I was just making talk with her over at Ingall’s Ship-yard, no idea she might, but I invited her, out of habit, and that was this afternoon and I didn’t have you a girl. She accepted and she’s out there drinking ginger ale waiting for you. I’m sorry. She’s too young. But be nice to her.”

When Tommy first saw her, she was sitting with one calf over a knee, petting his dog. She was what his father had said. She was a dago seeming about fourteen years old, very slight, and more than cute. He understood how his old man could’ve made the mistake. Her name was Prissy Lombardo. She fondled her ginger ale as if it was a very serious drink. She asked for a cigarette, and Tom’s father couldn’t get away quickly enough to avoid giving her one, though he did it with hesitation. The old man saw Tommy gazing at her. He saw Tom mixing a drink for two in the kitchen. “She makes me feel like a pimp, an awful one. Don’t you, as you are my son, start anything with her.”

At ten, Tommy drove her home. He found out she was almost seventeen. She lived in a rundown green-boarded house, mainly sand in the lawn; the driveway was made of oyster shells. She reached over and caught his cheeks and kissed him, longly. “Please call me up tomorrow, won’t you?” she said.

He intended to, but his old man caught him looking through the phone book. If Tom saw her again, he wouldn’t feel right about it. Mr. Neicase paid Tommy’s tuition and gave him enough extra money to make Tom feel obliged to him. This was the first and only time Mr. Neicase had tried to put any controls on him, and he respected it He did hate to see her go to waste, though.

I went down to Pascagoula an early weekend in October with Tom. Really a generous and splendid man, Tom, and so was his father. The house looked out to a hundred yards of gray sand and waves, coming in weakly like mopwater — the Gulf of Mexico, broken up by islands some miles out, smelling high of the marine dead. Breathing on the patio, that tepid breeze which filled your nose with salt and shrimp — I loved it. The house was like a ship broken apart here on the beach. We ate under a chandelier, the wallpaper was green and silver, and the light was always low. In Pascagoula, the town, there were cracked seawalls, gulls, avenues with palm-trees in the medians, and strange weather formations you could see out in the gulf; when you went downtown you saw a lot of dark men and women rattling to each other, and the shrimp-wind was pouring in all the time.

I called up Prissy before we settled nicely in the house. We kept it quiet from Tommy’s father, who was a god of a friend to me while I was there. Prissy answered at Ingall’s, and when I told her where I was calling from, she accepted me for the night.

She kissed me so wolfishly, with such an art of the tongue, and even the glottis, that the nerves of my stomach stretched out — an unbearable tickle. Then there was a kiss in front of her house, as we were leaving Mr. Neicase’s Imperial, that had to be the last one. I did not know that you could have an orgasm of the lips like this, which made you forget there was anything else you could do with a girl. When it was over, she collapsed on me, and we weaved together up the lawn to her dismal home. She had a way of leaning on the door, a way of being small and brown with her jumbled black hair; her eyes were dull and smoky, and she sighed out the smell of a bruised flower; the bones of her wrists, her knees, and her ankles had a childlike sharpness about them. I pitied her.

“This was so fine. Please don’t forget me. Please call me tomorrow,” she said.

The next night we were on the porch, kissing, the hell with the world, when Mr. Lombardo opened the door on us. He was a short man, happy, muscular in a stringy way, and poor. He was barefooted.

“Come on in, you kids. You can kiss on the setee. There’s some Jax in the icebox. College pistol. I know about you, Harry-o. Going to graduate school, you son of a gun.” When Prissy had gone back in the house, he said, “Yall just try not to wake Mamma. And don’t you pull her panties off in this house. College pistol.”

I knew there was a trace of Eastern accent in Mr. Lombardo’s speech. We sat on the lumpy, colorless couch, and Prissy explained to me that he had been moved down here in 1946 from a shipyard near Baltimore to work at Ingali’s. They had had her, Mr. and Mrs. Lombardo, two years after they got here — she was their only child — and Mr. Lombardo had been cured naturally of a disease that had to do with paint inhalation, and he thought Pascagoula was divine. He changed from Catholic to Episcopal. Prissy was lovely on that old couch, telling me this. Sometimes I would fall over and lick her neck.

I suggested we cut classes this week. Tom agreed. His father had procured him a lass out of a business college in Gulfport who called herself a “swinger.”

Prissy and I saw all the places up and down the beach from Pascagoula to Biloxi, Gulfport, Pass Christian, and across the bridge to Bay St Louis. We saw Jayne Mansfield at Gus Stevens. All the way, and quite a mass, Jayne. Prissy was cowed by her. I brought her to me, my hand around her dainty ribcage. Maybe I loved her first that night. She could do no wrong. She lay down in the sand of Biloxi beach next to me, in perhaps her best dress. She had hardly any bosoms at all, but she wore silver shoes, and she crossed her legs under her dress and dangled one of the shoes on her toes. The moon was between her heel and her shoe, and I saw the ridges of sand, with the tide out, and I suppose that did it.

“Listen. We have to get married and quit this fooling around.” She began sobbing. She couldn’t answer me except in high whimpers. She couldn’t find her voice.

We were on the couch together, late, three more nights. I hadn’t seen Prissy’s mother. She fled to the back of the house when I came in. I could hear her bare feet thudding. The newspaper, where she left it, would be falling apart But the old man continued to sport around as love’s chorus.

We were kissing once, and I thought I heard a smacking, smooching sound that we weren’t making. I pulled the door beside the couch open. There stood Mr. Lombardo in the hall. He was pursing his lips for another kiss, only he wasn’t kissing anything, just making the sounds. He gave a final leer, then disappeared into the back.

Another time, I had closed the front door and was headed for my car. I was sure the parents of the house were long asleep. It was about four in the morning.

“SSSStl SSSSST!” came a voice behind me. His head was out the front door. “What?” I asked.

“Good stuff? Good poon?” asked the man. Then he closed the door.

I saw her once again. I didn’t know when the wedding would be, but I knew it would be soon. She suggested a date.

For five days, Tommy’s father had been pushing ten-dollar bills on me constantly. He would put them in my wallet When I slept, if I wouldn’t take them outright I looked once when I was out with Prissy, and, counting the little I’d brought with me, there was a hundred and ninety dollars. It was a weird boon and a new vantage, having money accumulate right on your hip. I felt lucky and began trusting in my luck. Tommy and I went out on a pier to do some fishing, and I just threw out my hook and lay back on the wet planks, closed my eyes, and felt I was in a charmed boat, hearing the water lap under us. I asked Tommy what the swinger was like.

“I don’t know. Nice legs. Laughs when you put your hands on her,” said Tom, who was a shy citizen if the truth were known.

“Pietty like Prissy?”

“Nobody’s pretty like Prissy. You live in a tree, Monroe. And she’s got some growth left to do too.”

“I’d thought of that.”

Tommy’s old man finally knew who I was seeing. It was all right I think he felt exculpated, knowing I wanted to marry her. “I saw her the other day. She’s grown some, I think,” he told me. He shoved me a hundred dollars, right over the breakfast table. Mr. Neicase looked like a playboy whose eyebrows were graying, and I think these gestures meant a lot to him.

I left Mother Rooney’s on December 20th and entered Dream of Pines again. Pulling out of Jackson had been exhilarating. My parents had known I was getting married for a month. My mother was excited, thinking nothing which came from her home Mississippi could be ted. In her youth she had made some trips to the seashore near Biloxi. She adored the coastal region and trusted it completely.

The old man and I smoke hundreds of cigarettes together. Nothing really gets said. He wants to go out to the club and play golf. He loves to walk and he hits a pretty good ball. I walk around with him. I understand the beauty of a nine-iron shot, the smooth chop under the ball, seeing it rise and fall just over the bunker, plant on the green, and jump lazily on the slant toward the pin. We see Swell Melton, an old buddy of his, at a tee.

“This is my youngest son, Harry. Harry is getting married next week.”

“Well I’ll be.” The big roasted fingers coming after you in handshake.

I drove to Pascagoula three days before the wedding, having had Christmas with the folks. It was the same, just a little cooler. Prissy flew out in her yard and was on my lips. I had an engagement ting for her, which wasn’t much, but her mother was out in the yard too, looking at my T-bird. Her mother finally sneaked up and brushed my cheek, then rushed back in the house, then came out and stood on the porch, dark-eyed and skinny, and said, “Say!..” as if she had an idea. Then she went in again. I learned later that she was happy. Prissy was very much the babyishly tender thing that night. I hardly touched her. Once she called me “Darling,” but it came forced, like from reading a magazine article on love, she knew that at high peaks of emotion she must say it. She said it quickly.

It was then, afterwards in the motel — Mr. Neicase’s house was closed; he was in Los Angeles — I began to feel a bad edge inside, like a large tick I could feel settling his claws into my heart; the heart, my-heart, such a big, helpless organ, still beating along, but knowing the tick was there and had dug in. I developed a gaze, a numbed way of staring, say, at the edge of the motel rug, which made me deaf and stupid. And blind, in a way, because I saw nothing except the tiny geometry I was staring at.

The wedding brought a planeload of relatives from Louisiana, Texas, Atlanta, Ohio, and Virginia. These people treated me wonderfully, and I had the feeling of deep roots set down into the country. Hugging me, winking at me, smoothing me, the uncles and aunts and three cousins I hadn’t seen since I started to college. We all met at the Edgewater Beach hotel. My sister was chic and stunning, with her husband the handsomest expert at gynecology in the South. My brother was rich and friendly, had traveled hundreds of miles to see my wedding. Good old Robert smoked his pipe and kept his arm across my shoulders, like a warm happy branch with leaves of goodwill. He knew I needed support. I’ll never recover from the family loyalty they showed me the day before the wedding. Robert’s wife patting me on the back. Go get her, your bride. My mother wore a purple coat which evoked a royal aura around her I had never before seen. The old man himself was sharp as a dandy, liking his family all around him.

At the church, Lombardo brings Prissy down the aisle. Everybody in the church wears a dark suit. Yet Lombardo’s suit is light tan, of a summer weave, and he wears a screwy blue tie with a Kiwanis Club clasp across it His shoes are white; his coat is open, and his initial is on the belt buckle. Looking about, he buttons his coat while he comes down the aisle with Prissy.

Prissy looked like a pubescent Arab in her gown. The church grew quiet. My nieces were studying her and whispering to one another in the pews.

We got married. The man of the cloth, I believe, cut the service a little. It seems to me we were man and wife with blinding speed. Fleece stood Best Man. The girl who served as Prissy’s bridesmaid was named Cedar Polio, or something near that, a bucktoothed daughter of Sicily who sucked in and out with joy. In the reception line, she would grab Fleece and shriek when someone she knew came by. Several boys came by who shook hands with Prissy familiarly, looking me over all the while. They gathered under the limb of a huge oak tree draped with Spanish moss and looked me over again. They wore suits but still looked like punks.

We were on the lawn behind Mr. Lombardo’s supervisor’s house. The Lombardos furnished for the reception very well. On the table there was everything from the usual flaky wedding morsels to a case of Jack Daniels Black. Lombardo tended the bar himself. Every now and then he would come out from behind the table and hug someone he knew, and they would bark together. It was hard to believe this happiness had anything to do with me. I walked over to the bar table when I saw Mr. Neicase working toward it with his plate in his hand. The party wasn’t mixing. My father was talking to some of my relatives, out near the big oak and withdrawn from the others. He was looking iron-haired and significant in his black suit. I wanted to see Mr. Neicase. Lombardo put his arm over Mr. Neicase’s shoulders. Lombardo was tight. He hung jovially onto Mr. Neicase, seeing me come up to greet him.

“What was you daddy’s name?” Lombardo asked me.

“Ode Elann.”

“Both two?” he said, releasing Mr. Neicase and raising his hand, like people who are drunk do for balance. I nodded. He began shouting at my father and hooking his arm, inviting him over. My father was with his sister, many yards away.

“Hey Old Elaine! Old Elaine! Commere!”

“Daddy?” I called. He had heard Lombardo already. He looked at me distrustfully before meandering our way. The relatives were peering at us.

“Old Elaine, you know what this is?” said Lombardo, holding out his hand, as if the wrong answer would be: your hand. “It’s my damn hand. Give me five.” He took the old man’s hand and put his other arm around my shoulder. “This is your last son but let me tell you, that is my first and last daughter. I didn’t have a bunch like you to spare but you lookit her, that, see that, here she comes if that ain’t my darling.” Prissy walked to us, lifting her gown. “Want tell you somethin’ else. This is my friend.” He pointed to Mr. Neicase. “He is your son’s friend and I didn’t know if you met. He brought these two fine young people together. This is my friend Lance Neicase. He needs friends because he is divorced.”

The old man looked negatively at Mr. Neicase, who blinked and turned completely around toward the bar, avoiding scrutiny. The old man said, “The bride is lovely.” I knew he would have to take account of that. He smiled at her devotedly a couple of seconds. She looked a little older than his grand children. He didn’t know how to look at her. I didn’t either. The old man gave Lombardo a negligent scan, as if he would never be troubled to learn his first name. I wasn’t sure of it myself until we got the checks from him in Fayetteville. He had a hard and vigorous signature: Ted Lombardo.

We were through Biloxi and on the way to New Orleans for the honeymoon, my wallet was packed with wedding gift money; we were pulling a U-Haul-It trailer full of presents, and Prissy and I were rump to rump on the seat. She had an ungainly large corsage pinned on her and a tweedy nuptial-eve outfit. Her head fell over on me. She was sobbing. I pulled off in a curbed outlet of the highway and asked her what was wrong. She wouldn’t tell me. I got out and looked at the car. Some of her friends had written on the sides and the trunk in white shoe polish. “She Got Him Today He’ll Get Her Tonight” and “Hot Springs Tonight!” and “Watch Mississippi Grow.” And in a small neat script: “Hunch Without Fear.” I suspected Fleece of that one, but no telling. I took out my handkerchief and wiped off and smeared what I could, except for the neat scriptive I thought Fleece had put on. That was all right with me; I wouldn’t be ashamed to ride into New Orleans with that on my car.

“Wha’s the matter?”

“Y’all hated my daddy,” she said.

“No.”

“You did.”

“I think he’s a hell of a guy.”

“He was drunk and you were hateful toward him. I want you to turn this car around. He was scared of your daddy. I want to see you shake hands with him.” She broke down again. I backed up with the trailer again. This was tedious, trying to back up a trailer.

We got to the Lombardo house just when they were getting out of the old boxy Plymouth in the driveway. The reception must’ve just broken up. I got out of our car and advanced toward them. Mrs. Lombardo saw me and ran in the house like a shot. Mr. Lombardo was far gone. I don’t think he recognized me for a minute. He challenged me, in fact, and fell down on the back of his car.

“Who datch?”

“It’s Harry. I want to thank you for this lovely bride. I want to shake your hand.” He knew me then, and looked out at Prissy in the car and waved to her.

“Pretty good?” he said.

“We’re fine,” I said, not catching on.

“Pretty good pussy?” Then he started to weep. I let go of his hand and went back to the car.

We were at the Jung Hotel in New Orleans. The tick was on my heart and I had said nothing for hours. I knew something big and wrong would move against me shortly. I told her not to stand in view of the clerk when I registered for us. I almost jumped on the bellhop who was stealing glances at her. We got in the room, at last alone, around suppertime. I wanted to have love before we went out to eat.

“I don’t believe I want children this early,” she told me. She sat on the bed with her tweed dress and corsage in a pile around her waist. Her breasts hung out dead white like small balls with red points on them. So we went to Moran’s and I had my cigarette it by a Cajun waiter who seemed to be lamenting over how gauche the entire world was.

When we got back, she said, “I don’t think I’m going to like this.” She had come out of the bathroom. While she was in there, almost an hour, I was in that deaf and dumb gaze watching these circus horses on the television. But when I saw her I took to my feet. She was naked. She had her hands at her hips. What my eyes went to was the rich brown hair around her violently overmatured and split grape.

“Great God,” I said.

“Waitl” said my wife. She had her hand on the pillow. “Kiss my toe, hard! Oh that tickles too much. Kiss my mouth. Yum yum. So do you like how I kiss? I almost wore out my mouth kissing you. My lips were sore. I was sore all over thinking about getting somebody like you. And now I’ve got you. Owl Owwl”

11 / Dull Sobbing Drafts

In the big dirt-creased white house in the winter light of Fayetteville, she was the same brittle and young thing I had married. It was as if I’d assaulted a child who did not call the police but followed me with wild concern everywhere I went.

In the grocery store, she didn’t look old enough to be filling up the cart with such calculation. She looked like the eldest urchin in a crowd in Rome, buttoned up in cunning little adult-like clothes. I would walk a piece away from her and see the men pass by her with looks of shamed lust. The poor bastards. I knew exactly what it was like, and forgave them completely. Prissy was so cute, the dream of a dago high school, and here she was choosing a roll of toilet paper, the expensive and scented kind that you imagined they hurled over a blossoming orchard of peaches and apples to get the smell all through the tissue. This was when we still had a lot of wedding-gift money.

She wanted clothes. She established accounts at every clothing shop in town. We bought furniture, and a Zenith television. I wanted a good stereo. She bought everything in the way of fashion that Fayetteville could bring down from the East. The T-bird must be rebuilt, must have new mufflers so it wouldn’t sound like a redneck car. The twenty-dollar bills went over the counters and a dime and three dirty pennies came back. What we had the first month was a spending riot. My check for teaching the freshman class at the university was $216. You see the big gifts come at you at the wedding and you get the notion they’ll always be coming, and all the while the credit manager at Montgomery Ward is honing his pen for the first nasty note and the magistrate is drilling the police in procedures for the collecting of bad checks.

While you listen to Otis Redding on the stereo and dip the Johnny Walker and throw a couple of parties, in honor of what a fine heedless son of a gun you are.

She wanted me to take her out for something literary, so she could understand a little bit of what I was doing. Wyatt Fred, a poet almost seven feet tall, was giving a reading in the basement of the Episcopal Student Center. We sat in the folding steel chairs. There were about twelve in the audience, everybody so much his own man that he sat lone-some and away from everybody else. Prissy and I were the only two sitting together. Two professors of mine were there; the rest of them were people with thick glasses and distressed hair. Wyatt came on and read like a wizard. The poems were quite good, and we clapped after each one, sounding like fish flapping to death in a concrete garage.

I noticed Leslie Bill Harrow was there. I wondered why. Leslie Bill taught me. He was a novelist who hated poets, every one of them. He liked to invite visiting modern poets to his house of yellow pine beams and jalousied glass on the mountain. He liked to get them drunk and expose them as specious droolers, in full view of several people who worshiped the poet and worshiped poetry as an aloof science. First time I met him, in fact, he sent me a note asking to see my poems, and when I went to his office to pick them up, he said that he had lost them; then he admitted that he had thrown them away.

Also sitting there was Dr. Lariat He had a mild, groomed appearance, fifty years old, a bachelor, wearing a tame plaid jacket and a tie whipping askew casually. His hair was salted and thick, and he was a stiff, almost pretty sort of man. I admired him, first, for simply being a bachelor. He had the cleanliness of the life of pure mind about him. How had he made it, how had he read all the great venereal works of all literatures, as he had, without breaking down? Why didn’t he need the comfort, the warm constant flannel, of a wife? He’d taken his degrees at Columbia, before the war. He was a miserable teacher in a peculiar way; he controlled the misery of his classes. Lariat would stare out the window during a class for unbelievably long periods, sometimes up to fifteen minutes. Everyone knew he was supposed to be a cultural giant. He did the reviews for a Kansas City paper, and in 1950 he drew wide attention for an article describing all fiction since Henry James as “smelly.” Otherwise, he had not done so much, but he had done it right. He had published four articles on Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson, Jonathan Swift, and Bernard Shaw in the right literary quarterlies. I understood that he had once had a big student following. The students thought he was pausing after they said something because he considered any and every idea provocative and seminal. They thought he was a beatnik. Then, around 1959, they found out that those long pauses were swoons of utter contempt for any human voice except his own. His heart was not present in the room at all. You did not know where his heart was, but you had the feeling that if you ever went to that place, you would be laughed at.

The Arkansas sunlight seemed to hurt him. When sun-light and the student herd mixed, you would see Lariat, distraught-looking, toiling along the borders of the hall. When the students came out of his class, they looked distraught. There was fear in his classes. Some feared he would, say, strike, after those long pauses. Everyone was worn out waiting for the bell. After the pause, he would say something like: “Henry James did not write about anything so heinous as real life.” When you spoke to him, he was polite, but he seemed to be on the verge of running away to a shadowed, violet scene of warmer conversation with one of the Muses.

His hometown, I found out, was Dream of Pines, Louisiana.

Wyatt Fred read some very strong local-color things about butchery and coitus, car wrecks, and abortions. I looked at Lariat. The thinnest, but yes, smile. He merely put his hands together when the rest applauded. Perhaps he had attended to give modern literature still another chance.

Prissy touched at me all during the reading. When it was over, she hadn’t understood one iota of Wyatt’s poetry, I don’t think, but she was moved by the fact that Wyatt had read with such conviction. I hustled her out to the car. These were my teachers and I didn’t care for her to give voice around them.

Going home, we drove down that long fall of School Street to the eight-room house sitting next to Highway 71.

It was about a month later, the night after the big March snow, I was coming home drunk from Roger’s Recreation, and found myself on the top of School Street and could barely hold myself back from sliding on the ice all the way down to my house. I had two envelopes with letters from the police about two big bad checks and I’d just written another bad one to Roger — who never prosecuted me, bless him, and took my word — and I threw those envelopes on the ice, saw them take off down the hill on the ice, out of sight, lovely. I had also found this tin cup lying in the middle of a tire rut on Dickson Street, and I was carrying it, for what or to where, but I had an idea which gripped me. I would lay hand on myself and produce an audience of my own sperms in the cup, which would be a sort of amphitheatre, and lecture to them, and also pull out of my coat my new poem, and by God I would read the last drop of juice out of it, and in the cup by God there would be little ears that would hear it, and I put my ear over it; they were applauding already. But, unbuttoning my coat, I slipped and fell on the ice and took a dire lick on the back. I knew this was not a simple injury. I should be taken to a home for the hurt. The sleet was biting my face to pieces. In the air over me I saw a beam. A car with clinking chains stopped just in back of my head. Then a cop looked down at me out of a nylon and fur jacket. I told him to give me a shove, I could make it on down the hill. He told me I was drunk and told me not to tell him what to do. He said: “Lie out of the road.” I told him I was a student, a teacher, and poet in my spare time. I asked where my cup was. He held over me with the look of a dog pissing. Then he yelled to the other cop at the wheel. I got up, not hurt so bad as I’d feared. But I told him I was hurt very profoundly. The car drew up and they told me to get in. The inside of the car was hot and there was a grate between me and the two of them on the front seat. I was plotting my escape, how to yank the pistol from whose leg, because I could not see the disgrace of a cell. It passed my mind that they might not know I’d written the bad checks but were going to book me on a charge of attempted masturbation, plus lying in the road. I could not drag my name into this. Then the driver asked me where I lived, I told him, and they let me out at my front door.

Next to our house was old man Walker’s house with the “Worms” sign nailed on the tree hard by our driveway. Walker was retired from the mortuary stone trade and sold fish bat in milk cartons. The worm bins were in his basement. Our houses were crammed so closely together that we almost had to be friends, or move. I liked the old creep, anyway. He was near eighty and looked like a dwarf who had started as normal but had been ridden into old age by some terrible concern astride his neck. One stunning cold night in February, his face passed by close to the window of my study room. I was shivering anyway, wearing my overcoat because there was no heater in this room, and he scared the devil out of me. It was about three in the morning. He had had his teeth bared, like some gargoyle who had fallen off my roof and hit the ground alive and vicious. I went out through the living room, on out the back porch and intercepted him, coming around the rear of my house, and asked him what he thought he was doing. The cold really swatted me. Walker wore only a flannel shirt over another shirt, the flannel shirt misbuttoned.

“What are you doing up?” he asked me suspiciously.

“I was reading and writing. You scared me. You could get shot.”

“Well you know how it is when you don’t get on with the wife. You take the walk. To get rid of it. You can’t go to sleep like you are. It would give you a stroke.”

His wife was his age, and was yellow like the face of an old cheap clock.

“Every night it comes up something different you wouldn’t expect. She come in tonight got hair curlers in her hair and in that bathrobe I don’t like.”

“You couldn’t let that pass?”

“I lit a cigarette and she commenced shouting ‘bout it would break my health. She went inside the kitchen and come out with the hammer. I got an arm hold on her. You know.”

“What?”

“She said she was dying. You know women how they’ll mourn on you. I let go. And she hits me in the throat with the hammer and goes to calling for help.”

“Damn!”

“It ain’t not occurred to me about divorce. It goes on and on. I just saw your light. It didn’t look like you was doing nothing. You said you was reading and writing.’ You planning to make something?”

“You love your wife, Mr. Walker?” it occurred to me to say.

“It goes and comes. You know.”

He was out in the yard several nights later. This time he put his face against my study window and held the outer sill, examining me forlornly. I jumped out of my seat when I saw him. The expression did not change on the old man’s face. He looked at me with ghastly concern. One of his eyebrows was crusted with blood, I saw, as his facial heat defrosted the pane and his breathing made the glass clear. He prolonged his dead-eye scrutiny of me, and then drew off as if sucked away. I was furious. I went to the bathroom and threw up a small amount of something thin and bitter, from the bottom of my stomach. When I was settled down I picked up the phone and dialed his number. Prissy came down the stairs with a blanket around her and saw me with the phone.

“Who are you calling this late?”

“Go on back to bed.” She ignored me and sat down on the bottom step with her bare feet crossed and the blanket over her head. The phone at Walker’s was ringing, six, seven times, no answer. When someone finally picked it up I’d lost my anger and set the phone down.

“I have a right to find out who you’re calling so late, don’t I?” said Prissy. “If you look at me with hate every time I want to do something you don’t like, how do you expect me to look on you with love every time you do something I don’t like?”

The ghastly face of Walker recurred to my mind. An old raw pirate’s voice, Cockney, gathered in my throat, and I drew up in a crabbed, one-legged way, the old pirate in heat, looking at her as if blind in one eye but bright in the other, one over compensating healthy boiling right eye. “My dearrrrriee dream!” I roiled out. Prissy hunched back, up a step, with her heels.

The house was frigid. There were two small space heaters downstairs and one upstairs in the bedroom, with a broken grate, letting a vapor of gas off so we had to keep the window cracked for safety. I threw off my overcoat and clawed at my snap, tearing off my shirt as the pants fell and heaving out my chest as if to disclose a beastly tattoo. “I takes my pleasure in the coldl” I swore. Prissy stood and ran upwards. I heard the blanket whizzing on the steps and the shutting of the door. There was no lock on the door. I hurled away my last shred and took the stairs naked. I was bitten by such cold that I had to take a crouching, even more sinister posture, thinking that if I ran up, the breeze would kill me. “Awrrr! Coming up the stairs to mingle with my dearie!” I proclaimed. “That maybe we could find a bit of warmth between us.” At the top of the stairs I was waddling in a dishonorable position not even worthy of an old pirate. I could form no more words. The cold had me like a crab of the Arctic who had only a nerve-life, and sought heat and light. I butted in the door, holding my knees, shutting the door with a side action, quickly, to keep the beloved warmth in. I was below the end of the bed. The room was dark; a weak flaring orange came from the heater.

“Where are you?” asked Prissy. “What can this mean to you? This is not entertaining.”

I waddled along the side of the bed, dedicated to this squatted position now. The numb gaze and the deafness were with me. I waddled up even with her form on the bed. My head came just over the level of the mattress. I laid it down beside her hand. She shrieked.

“I used to think you were well bred!”

“Wrong,” said I. “Take me or leave me—” tumbling like a crab from some height into the bed. I lay there stunned a while; then I could relax my hooked hands and straighten my legs.

“Harry, I don’t like this. Why must love take these forms?” she mourned. She shared the guilt with me. The heater was beating orange shadows up at the end of the bed. The wallpaper was fern green with crocus prints; we slept in the old half-finished attic our landlord once lived in. Leaks in the roof made brown stains on the wallpaper at the corners, and in spots the paper had fallen away. Over us was the tin roof, the best roof I’ve ever lived under. You hear the rain and the sleet just over your head and take in the weather very personally, take it into sleep with you. There were two dangling light sockets upstairs, but no electrical outlets. The house had the musk of forty years of human baggage. We had a huge bathtub with scrolled feet Prissy had made the curtains in my study out of burlap, and it smelled like a feed store. Across the street was the R&S, a twenty-four-hour grill for greasers, truckers, and hungover college boys. To our left was Walker, to our right a house the size of ours cut up into four apartments which rotated with different collections of the outright poor, loud sluts of the beautician’s college, and people like lonely barbers. The trucks put the air brakes on at the stoplight all night, coasting in to the R&S Grill. In our block, to the west, stood two high grain elevators which belonged to the Farmer’s Cooperative. The train wasn’t far off. I don’t know what was going on, but the neighborhood stunk like someone was dropping live chickens into a cauldron. And just beyond the boarding house to our left was a house-shop: “Nantiques.” A woman named Nan sold antiques, you see. This is when the money was suddenly all gone, and I’d spend hours in front of the television, trying to get stunned.

My TV broke at a terrible moment. I was watching the horror movie by myself; Prissy was asleep overhead. In the finest wino tradition, I’d bought myself a 990 bottle up at Mac’s Liquor with our last dollar. We had food, I mean, and the first of the month wasn’t long away. But here I was left with the last warm slug of the bottle and a dark room. I was rocked by the silence and the fact of my marriage, with only me, this Prissy upstairs, and the black quiet; too stupefied to think of anything else. I had a notion suddenly that I must marry her with my mind tonight. The die had been cast, we were alone in the house together, so we must make it together with locked minds somehow. I took the stairs. I did not want to be lustful, but I had the sensation of rising on a rolling cluster of hooks, my hands drew in like claws, and I had to fight against being a creature of pure nerves all over. The mind, the mind, I kept saying. This time she had the light on and was sitting on the bed, looking at me hard away.

“Harry? Did you get drunk, Harry? Are you happy, honey?”

I wanted to speak but I gave out a disconsolate mating sound.

“Now darling,” she said. “You’re too handsome to sound like that. What are your hands doing? I have never liked that stuff. I want you to whisper …”

“Help me. Help me!” I moaned, looking at my hands, sinking to the posture of a crab, my mind drowning. Her voice always drowned my mind in one way or another. I tried to rise. Her heart feltness, I couldn’t stand it.

“I want you to whisper and to kiss. You know how to do that.”

“I can’t. I feel stupid and silly. To prime you and start you up like a motor. I feel like I’m reading directions to something.”

“But love isn’t any of that. Love is … romance. I’ve learned that, darling. Love is becoming softly intoxicated. Love is two hearts beating together. Love is sacred.”

“That sounds like a list, Prissy. Where did you get that?” I knew she read Cosmopolitan and maybe the labels on a couple of perfume bottles. I had hurt her feelings. She clouded up and cried, while she held her feet and rocked on her fanny.

“A list?! It was a Poem. For you.”

“Well it was a nice list, Prissy. Darling,” rolling my mind right down Valentine alley, “Love is holding hands, too.”

12 / Lariat

You were not supposed to know Dr. Lariat. He talked at length to advanced graduate students outside of class, occasionally, but you were supposed to wait in the wings for a couple of years, attending his classes, and try not to break wind during the lectures, as they say. Then he might begin speaking to you in full sentences. He might tell you of his war experiences.

At one point, in the taking of Italy, there were complaints about wanton destruction by artillery of precious structures of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Lariat had been in Italy before. They put him in a jeep and ran him around to vantage points and let him suggest what monuments to spare. He made the rank of captain doing this. He would tell them, hating the sun, making a roof over his eyes with his hands, that behind that wall there was a fine bust done by Vigoro Oleo. The Germans found out about him, and would crowd around precious Italian artworks and blast away joyfully. Some were taken prisoner hanging flat on these artworks like leeches and calling out Lariat’s name. The German radio called out his name as a noble exception to the swarm of ruffian hobos from America calling themselves an army. The jeep would also take him back to town councils and priests so that he could explain that everything was being done to spare the priceless heritage of Italy. He spoke Italian and French, and knew the essentials of German, Spanish, and Russian. Three of the languages he had learned, academically at least, while being bored at Dream of Pines high school. One night as he was walking on the street at dusk with his face in a book, some Dream of Pines person jumped out of an alley and slugged him.

“Is Oliver Sink still there?” asked Lariat.

“Our house is right next to his.”

“He’s the one who hit me. He was angry with me the afternoon before because I’d got so mad with him I blessed him out in French. The naughtier words.”

“Do you know my father? He would have been a little older.”

Lariat stole a direct glance at me. He could really scour one, with that crisp, temporary smile boosted on his lips. “His name was Ode Elann Monroe. That lingering name. Yes. What has he done besides have you?”

“Has the mattress factory.”

“He isn’t literary?”

“No. Well, I think he wanted to be.”

“He wanted very much to be,” said Lariat. I didn’t know what he thought of my father, and didn’t want to follow it up. I thought Lariat might despise him.

“And Oliver Sink, he has, or had, peacocks. They used to come over in our yard.”

Lariat, well, he struck his brow. His eyes were unbelieving.

“No! Peafowl! He can’t have them. I have peafowl. Yesterday the neighbor’s brats were shooting at them with an air rifle. I would have killed them if their mother hadn’t come out. I tore the air rifle into a thousand parts.”

I went in Roger’s Recreation Friday afternoon, as usual, to have a beer and read the Tulsa paper. Roger is a basket-ball player two and a half decades out of training. The trophies won by his team sit in a high clutter on a shelf over the bar; he only bets on his city-league team now. As I said before, he was a saint about holding my worthless checks until I could pay for them. His place was dominoes, pinball machines, and, mainly, snooker and pool tables going far back into the long gray and green. In there, my soul could sit down and expand.

Down past the bar I caught sight of Lariat. He was playing the tan-felted snooker table nearest the bar all by himself. On Roger’s color television, the FM station was going with a Rolling Stones tune played by an orchestra of ancient studio hacks. Lariat seemed unaware of anything but his shots. He bent and shot like he had known how to shoot very well at one time. Then he came over to the end of the bar and poured out a low amount of beer into a pilsner, from the bottle of Jax. Beside the bottle there was a pack of Picayunes. Picayunes, more than Camels, are cigarettes for men who want a real smoke.

“Dr. Lariat?” I said.

“Oh. Get a cue.”

“I’ve never seen you down here.”

“I’ve never been here before. What’s your first name — Ode?”

“Harry.”

“Oh. Do you know the game? This is a sport I used to love in Dream of Pines, and even more in the army. The red balls count one point. You must shoot in a red ball before each number ball you wish to shoot. Shoot for position on the higher numbered balls. When all the red balls are down, you play regular rotation on the two through seven balls. A snooker is made when—”

“I know.”

We shot five games and he beat me all of them. After the games he would shoot the old shark six-railer with the cue-ball and sometimes it would go in. We played for the price of the games—300—and I had to go up and write a counter check to Roger to cover the last two. And the beer. We drank the last one. Lariat kept the crisp smile on his face and said nothing. He had not taken off the coat of his suit.

Lariat had money. He flew to New York and London to see the theater. During the summer he would fly off and tour continents. Leslie Bill Harrow said he went to visit all the famous and little-known ruins of the world. No one knew what he did when he got to the ruins. He was one of the first tourists that the Soviet Union let in. He had seen the church over Tamburlaine’s tomb. Some years ago he was hurt in a jeep-wreck seeking some ruin in middle Africa and came back to Fayetteville in a cast. Further about the money, he had loaned money to a few graduate students who had been at the university many years. The ones I knew he lent to were aging fellows who somehow could not get the degree and detach themselves from Fayetteville.

Hoyd sat next to me in Lariat’s class. Hoyd was pockmarked and over thirty. He had let his hair grow out to the length of his shoulders and looked like a medieval tramp. He worshiped Lariat. Lariat had loaned him money. He would cringe and wrinkle his nose and lay his head on the desk, looking at me, after the boy up front asked Lariat a question. “Why is James like a cathedral?” Hoyd cut forth a strangled hoot out the side of his teeth and eyed me hysterically. Apparently he knew something about what Lariat would say. During Lariat’s pause he wrung his hands and pumped his face up and down. He loved the pause. “James wanted to be buried in the grave of his own church. The church was his fiction, his own writing. Nothing else was baroque or miraculous or, well, sanitary enough,” Lariat said. Hoyd squeaked with approval, looking at me for support.

The next time I saw Lariat outside of class was up at Leslie Harrow’s party in April. Leslie had lawyers, psychologists, librarians, theologians, hippies, art department camp-followers, and that crowd — all about to blow apart his place on Mount Sequoyah. When I got there, the booze had been working on them for an hour and a half. Some were dancing to the stereo — guitars and nigger-hollering. Wyatt Fred, the giant poet, was swerving about the area with six hours of whiskey in him. Hoyd passed us, smoking grass in a badly rolled paper that was falling apart in sparks all over him. Leslie was a thoughtful host. He took Prissy away from me and planted her over by the hearth between two girls who were all eyeglasses and cigarettes.

I went in the kitchen. Lariat was leaning by the refrigerator. Beside him was his Wild Turkey in a black crocheted cover. The kitchen looked over a counter to the room where many were dancing now. Lariat put his hand in the ice bag and came up with a handful that he dumped in a glass. He poured a nice potion from the black crocheted bottle into it. The drink was for me. I was astounded and honored.

“Who was that you came in with?” he asked.

“That was my wife.”

“Is she coon-ass?” This means Cajun in downhomé Louisiana idiom. I wouldn’t have thought Lariat would say that. I simply let it go by.

“She’s a nice little piece. I really wonder why you’re standing here with that drink with the music going on and that nice little piece out there. I’d think you wanted to dance with her.”

I looked out at the dancing mob.

“One thing I never did was dance,” he said.

I was feeling smug and above it. He poured me another drink. Then he left the kitchen and went out into the living room. I smiled at Hoyd and a few other people coming into the kitchen to make drinks. Thirty minutes later, Lariat came back. He had talked to her. We were the only ones in the kitchen.

“Is she stupid or is she sincere?” he asked. “Either way, she’s a nice little piece.”

“She’s sincere,” I said. I wasn’t sure on that point myself.

“What age is she?”

“Eighteen,” I lied.

“She is a darling. There was a blond boy telling her what a darling she was. He was saying he’d never seen anything like her. A student of mine. Divorced.”

I left the kitchen and lunged out into the crowd. Every-body was happy and forgiving. Some fell on the floor. A girl dancer was suddenly jerked out of my way. Prissy was not on the hearth where Leslie had set her, and the girls with eyeglasses were gone too. I looked behind me. Lariat had followed me over.

“Does she tend to run away?” he asked, right next to the stereo speaker.

“No.” I was very concerned.

“Does she ever have to go to the bathroom?”

“Yes!” I declared. Again I mashed through the dancers, seeking the bathroom door. I broke out of the crowd and ran to the first closed door of the hall. It was locked.

“That is one of the bathrooms,” observed Lariat. He had come back through the dancers too.

I kicked the door football-style. Then I turned the knob. It was locked but the door gave. I drove in. Some girl, not Prissy, jumped into the shower curtain of the tub and fell in, pulling up her hose.

“Who was that?” said Lariat.

“Not her.”

I led off toward the back bedrooms. Hoyd and two other men who looked like they were in a heedless fit, one of them a painter wearing overalls, seemed to be standing in a line outside a closed door.

“What are you doing?” I asked them.

“Waiting,” said the painter.

I elbowed through them and threw open the door. “Wait. You’ll have your turn,” came a voice from the shadows of the bed. A long-haired boy or man was squatting over the pile of coats on the bed with his pants down, alone.

“Pray to God she wasn’t in there,” said Lariat.

“No.” I wanted awfully to find Prissy. “Prissy! Prissy Darling!”

Back in the living room, the mob had grown fourfold. I pushed into the flank of the dancers. Then there was a shoulder on my hand. “Who is that?” said Lariat, who was pointing across a split in the dancers, having my hand on his shoulder. He had found her. Prissy was dancing halfheartedly with a blond man. She seemed to be the color of a new penny. I loved her, never before in this full and humble way loved her. I felt I would never be so lucky as to touch her. And would she remember me if I did? “Darling!” across the thighs and shins of the dancers. When she saw me she put out her hand, the blond man evaporated away through some slit of the house. I held her tiny moist hand with both of my hands. “Prissy, you can’t run away like this. I was looking all over for you, darling. I love you. Please be my wife.” I was damn near sobbing, and Prissy put her wet eyelashes against my throat.

I think Dr. Lariat had left the party. His crochet-covered bottle was still on the counter, but I never saw him again that night. Myself, I stayed in love for three months.

Lariat’s lectures changed a little. He talked more. He came out with anecdotes from his past. All of them were arid and pointless episodes and were introduced with no transition from the literary items at hand. Sometimes he tried out some stories he had heard from Cajun sages long ago, and tried to do the dialect, but his voice imitations were futile. They came from a man who had cherished none but his own voice, inviolate, for too many years. Hoyd laid his head on his desk and frowned at me.

“He’s down. He ain’t himself,” Hoyd said. “Something on his nerves. Did you hear what happened to him last week? In his side yard he’s got a goldfish pool with a boy, a cherub, sits up on the base in the middle of the pool. This cherub had a dick, an open dick; not much, but a dick, a minimalized Renaissance pecker. These people come by at night and knock the little thing off with a hammer. Lariat heard them in the water, but they ran off and got in a car and drove away.”

“I hadn’t heard.”

An afternoon in May I picked up this note in my box in the English office. Lariat wrote that if I was interested in playing snooker at 200 a point, I would be at his house Sunday night about seven. He’d bought a table. He wrote: “I’ll be disappointed if you don’t show up.”

He lived in the oak-covered section of Fayetteville at the flat meadow between the mountain and the highway. There were some rich homes here. His house was constructed of molasses-brown bricks. There was not much front yard; the pool and the willow trees sat in a rectangular basin to the south side of the house. On the other end of the house was the chipped-brick driveway and the garage. One of the pea-fowl picked around the house toward me as I waited at the door. “Watch it, watch it,” I said.

Inside, well, very nice — potted fronds and ferns, rugs from Turkey, a banana tree, a piano, lots of solitary chairs and small couches. The south end of the house was almost all glass, so you could look out on the pool and the willows.

“I heard you had some trouble. The statue,” I said.

“They waded right in and did it. I take it as a symbol of the South — I don’t know whom to suspect, the Baptist minister, high school punks, an angry ex-student, a drunk, or an Episcopal aunt.”

The table was in the basement. It had tan felt like the one in Roger’s, and was level. Lariat had fixed up a chromium reflector for the hanging light bulb. Also there was a blackboard, a child’s affair with the alphabet and corresponding animals, for scoring. Here was a man who took his gaming seriously.

“First of all,” I said, “I can’t afford twenty cents a point I’m used to playing for a nickel.”

The crisp, passing smile came on his face.

“Let’s not make it cheap. Risk is beauty. Besides—” He opened the refrigerator, which boiled out frost; the shelves were crammed solid with Lowenbrau. “Look what the house furnishes. Cue up. Lag for break.”

“All right.” I chalked my stick, a new, already talced one, an 18-weight; one of five he had to choose from. Lariat of course owned a jointed stick with its own case. I believed he wanted me to notice the leather case as he joined the stick. “Dr. Lariat; you have fourteen red balls. I’ve never seen that. Down at Roger’s, you know, there are only nine. You have an extra row.” Lariat shook his head.

“This is the original snooker set. This is real snooker of the old days. What are you moaning about? Look at all the points you can make.”

Look at all the points you can make, I thought. A shark could run the score up out of sight on you with the extra red balls. I had been in a few games with real sharks. These people were fearsome, cool maniacs. They made points as if easing a knife in a woman, slowly and impassively.

Lariat broke the balls and brought the cueball back down the rail behind the two ball — a snooker right off. I tried to rail for the red balls, but my tip glanced off the top of the cueball. Four points—800. I had two dollars in my wallet. He beat me thirty points the first game. Lariat swore like a wounded man every time he missed a shot or failed to get exquisite position. I was talking to the balls a good bit myself. Lariat knew a few of the old tricks, but he could not exercise them consistently. It was just that I was somewhat scared and played miserably. At one o’clock he cut off the light. I was almost thirty dollars to him.

“I can’t pay now,” I said.

“You’ll be back next week. Well let it ride. You will be back next Sunday?”

Sure. He said almost nothing to me that first night. I think he was really too happy to talk.

Then Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, with the big rains pounding his basement windows, and then the warm grip, the extra light, of summer coming on. I made, about the second time we played, an allusion to his being a bachelor. I was tight and told him I wondered if he ever thought about the fact that the only literary figures he was interested in were celibates. I asked him if he believed in a literary procession of fornication-proof people. That those were the real writers. He sneered at me. He looked at me like he was very sorry I’d spoken. His hair had broken away from its severe, scratched-apart combing — the part almost like a wound. He peered out the window of the basement, pausing. Would he ever speak?

“I’m not a bachelor, boy. I’m a widower.”

Not even Hoyd knew this. But Lariat had married, during the first season of rest after the war, a woman from Switzerland. She was blond, and older than Lariat; she was bumptious and athletic, and loved the sun. She made Lariat promise her that they would live at Key West like Ernest Hemingway for a while. On the boat back to the States, Lariat’s wife and some other foreign girls found a tall creosoted beam on deck, and prepared it for a May pole. It wasn’t May, but the girls had missed celebrating the last May Day and wanted to re-enact it. The pole did not stay in its stand when they danced around it pulling on the ribbons. It fell on Lariat’s wife and killed her. Dr. Lariat showed me the last poem he’d written, at age twenty-nine, six months after his wife’s death. The poems begins.

It wasn’t May

But the fools thought they

Could bring back prettiness and play.

The pole,

The artificial May Pole, told them:

No. And fell

On artificial Switzerland…

at which point in the reading, Lariat took the poem away from me. Lariat went on to Columbia to teach a year, recovering from the tragedy.

“Or under that guise,” he said. “Actually I had nothing to recover from. The only thing I missed about her was her German accent, which was pleasant and almost sleep-inducing. I heard it so often over the radios during the war, calling my name, and was charmed by the accent then. So I married it when I could. But it was only the woman, walking around naked, making dinner naked; she would have shopped naked. She was trying to play a woman in D. H. Lawrence’s books. Then, I didn’t know what she was trying to play. I hadn’t read any of Lawrence. I was happy for her that she was dead, in that way. The blow was quick, probably painless, not very bloody. It’s what happens to all farm animals at the height of their beauty. She was thirty-five, losing the beauty she had when I found her — just the time for the blow. With her perpetual suntan, she was most likely due for skin cancer had she lived; an actual visible flaking away. Neither she nor I could have borne it.”

I held my tongue. What would I have said, anyway?

Another night we were talking esthetics. “Death may be the mother of beauty, and sorrow and frustration are usually tied up in beauty some way. But the pause, the pause between impulse and action; that makes beauty more times than you’re aware of. My wife never paused, never. Never reflected, never poised, never held a tentative position. She was always straight into the action, and that’s the way you always saw her — acting, moving, engaged in something. Her esthetic, if she had one, must’ve been that beauty is energy. And that’s false as a wooden nickel. If you want to get a C in my class, just write about how energetic somebody’s work is.” And later. “And furthermore, if you want to talk about honesty. Such a premium on that word. Being absolutely honest, come on: the vagina is the ugliest, ungainliest natural creation in the blown world. Perhaps when they land on Mars they might find something uglier. It is a nightmare. That it gives pleasure, my friend, is an outright paradox, a sort of serendipity out of foulness. Hell, women know this. What a laugh to read all these lyrical hypocrites shouting that this is not true. Men, most of them! Willfully blind with those wide honest eyes.”

I felt I ought to speak up in behalf of his dead wife, but didn’t know the way to do it. I was still shy of him. Should I keep calling him Dr. Lariat? His first name was Gregory.

I thought that if I called him that, he might peer at the window and wait for me to clear out The third night, when we quit, I owed him seventy dollars. This was another anguish. Of course I would be back the next Sunday. During the week I skipped two of his classes and practiced like a wildcat on the tables. Finally I got my game back. When I played the next Sunday, I stayed loose and shot for snookers. And I had luck too. One time I ran three red balls and the rest of the numbers.

Lariat spoke to me as I shot “What is it like back home?”

I took a rest “I’ll tell you what I think of it First of all, if you mean the real town, where you used to live, it looks like the remnants of a pretty village,” thinking, trying to get it perfect for Lariat, “that was bombed with tin. They have paved over your mother’s grave…”

“Don’t try out your poetry on me. I wasn’t asking for that.” He was angry. Mainly over my winning, I think.

“I was trying to give you an impression. According to you, Dream of Pines today…”

“Shoot the ball, snooker man.”

From then on I won, although slowly. I cut my debt to forty dollars; we played one night even; the next I cut it to five dollars. The next I went wild, I had a mystic stroke, and he owed me nine. We did not speak to each other at school any more. In his basement he could barely keep back his rage, waiting on me as I made the balls. What could I do? I drank the expensive Lowenbraus with guilt. I said, “Aw, too bad!” when he missed a shot and it was my turn.

“Don’t worry about me. Shoot,” he said.

The worst night was the night he didn’t answer the door I opened the door myself and heard the shower going in the back. I went over to the windows. There was more light in the evenings now. You could see his pool and the boy statue, poised on one toe, his arms out, at some position between dancing and flying. At his crotch was the whiter stone where the organ had been knocked off. It seemed awfully funny to me. I know that in the back of my mind I had thought it was, at least, risible, and had been stifling my humor. Now it looked like a little baby fop who had been taken down by flak on his first attempted launch from the earth. I giggled, then couldn’t stop laughing; my stomach hurt, tears flooded out of me. I must’ve been laughing loudly. I was broke, final exams were over; I felt hopeless and free at the same time. No telling how long Lariat was be-hind me. He was in his shower robe, with dripping feet, and when I turned I saw him as the dickless grown-up version of that cherub out there, and howled even more, right in the face of his stare. I did want to stop, and was embarrassed.

“You did it, didn’t you? That was your hammer I found in the pool.”

“No, sir. No. My God. No.”

“If you didn’t, you wish you had.”

“Believe me—”

He turned around and walked back to dress. “I read your final,” he left me with. I went on down to the basement.

While we were about midstride in the first game, he tapped my hand with the end of his cuestick as I was lining up a six ball shot. “I read your final. I’m giving you a C for the course.”

“Oh come on!”

“You despise James. You despise Proust. The way you despised them was ignorance. You are a fool, boy.”

“I wrote a good final for you. I said I couldn’t stand to read sentences three times to make sense of them.”

“What three times? Who has to read them three times? You’re a fool.”

“Dotft say that again,” I said. I was blushing, I know. I looked out the window away from him.

“Look at me if you want to threaten me.”

“You’re treating me unfairly, Gregory. Damn you. You will not give me a C. That’s robbery. You know it.”

“What would you do?”

“That’s nasty, asking that. You know it is. I’d take the nine dollars you owe me and hate you. You know that’s all I could do. I didn’t know you would turn into a son of a bitch like this.” I looked at the black grass pushed against the basement window, trying to crack the glass with its full growth now: grass at its black-green peak. If Lariat gave me a C, I was through. They would take the assistantship away from me. I had made another C, or rather Leslie Bill Harrow had given me a C in his class. “I liked you. I went to all your classes except a few, didn’t I? I was in your fan club.”

“Are you begging?” said Lariat.

“No. Go to hell.” I threw my stick away and started up the stairs.

Lariat called to me. “Come back. How about a B?”

“I need a straight A.”

“All right. Shoot Your shot on the six ball.”

As we played on, with me-winning twenty, fifty, sixty dollars, feeling like a gentleman for not pressing for what he owed me — a damned odd feeling for one who was ruined and broke — the basement became an attractive, fluidsituation for me. Lariat spoke to me as I made the balls, and I could speak and shoot accurately at the same time. I told him about Peter, Catherine, Fleece, Silas, Mother Rooney, Bet Henderson. Lariat kept the crisp smile up all the while. I went back in time, described Harley.

“Some of that I almost believe,” said Lariat. This was on the date of my publishing my first poem in a tiny booklet sort of magazine in New Orleans. Which Lariat lauded. “Success!” he cheered. I would have brought the magazine over with me, but I suspected he very urgently wanted never to have to read it.

13 / 620 MPH to Jackson

She had been sick in the mornings. Some days she was sick all the way through the afternoons. We got a $250 check from Mr. Lombardo during this period. He wrote it out in a whipping festive script Prissy had mentioned in the letter that she might be pregnant. Lombardo thought even the idea of it was worth money.

Most of it went to buy off the creditors. We had fifty dollars left. I looked around and finally got a job at the Ralston Purina plant up at Springdale. I started at four-thirty in the afternoon and worked till about three at night This was a plant where they processed roasts and gravy plates. They killed several thousand turkeys a day. The birds’ feet were hung in the conveyor chain. They were stunned with an electrical shock. Then, a lone man with a bunch of sharp knives who had been at it twenty years cut their throats. The fluttering corpses were run through an alley of ovens which singed off their feathers. They came around to an aluminum trough where other people gutted them and cut off their heads. The trough ran a stream of water which took the gravel that the turkeys had swallowed to a de-pressed box. The corpses were taken on through hot water sprayers and seen to by other people. The guts and extras were the business of my crew. We came in when the others knocked off. We had steam hoses, shovels, squeegees, steel wool, and mops. The uniform was boots and yellow rubberoid aprons. The place was as big as ten gymnasiums. Canals ran everywhere and were loaded with a sluggish ooze of crops, heads, and bowels when we got there. A USDA man wandered around, and the idea was, you should be able to eat off the floor of the canals when you left This is the sort of work that is supposed to make you a man of some past, you know; make you rugged and plucky. What a bunch of moonshit First day on the job, the foreman on this shift took me and some other new blood around the areas. “One thing you got to get over,” he said. Then he jumped down into a canal thigh-high in the gut muck, holding his hands up and winking with a tough smile. Some of the regulars, who were Okies and crazy sergeants and people who wore hats with earflaps in the summer, and like that, had really vile assignments. Like the man in the pipe to the dogfood plant next door, who was a sort of human plumber’s friend. As far as I know, there is no worse work in America. $1.65 an hour. And the smell, oh my. You faded away to seek the restroom and get a nose full of the deodorant bar in the toilet And there would be another guy in there, eating a sandwich. Outside again. Somebody has to do this, somebody has to do this, I told myself. This is probably quite true, and I was comforted, really, by living with a truth. An absolute.

When I got home, it was sublime. Maybe any home would have been sublime, but I was so tired and Prissy was as sweet as sleep. I can never get out of my memory the pleasure of falling asleep as she talked, cooed to me with her head on my pillow. My daddy, daddy, daddy’s home. And mommy, mommy, mommy’s here too. And so is baby, baby, baby, but he can’t see us and we can’t see him; Prissy herself, as she cooed, I felt her thin shoulder and saw her in her rare beauty, Prissy herself — the mommy and baby both, in one body. I never knew what I had until she was pregnant.

I was sleeping late, Saturday morning, the last of June. Prissy told me Fleece was on the phone from Jackson.

“How are you?” asked Fleece.

“Waking.” I could tell he was rushed.

“Do you know anything? Catherine and Lock. I suppose you would’ve called me. It wasn’t in the newspapers or on the TV up there?”

“My TV’s broken. What?”

“Both of them are dead. The police killed them in Beta Camina. They were trying to plant a bomb on your friend Harley’s front porch. They tried it once before but the bomb didn’t go off. The newspapers are full of it. Lock shot a policeman right in the heart. The bullet was still lodged in his heart when they flew him to Houston. Lock had a sub-machine gun. Are you on the phone?”

“Yes. Go ahead.”

“Well, the police were hidden around Harley’s house. They saw Lock in the driveway with the bomb in a shoebox and yelled for him to stop. He ran back to his car and got a submachine gun and let go at them. When he got in the car the police riddled it and he drove into a ditch a block away. Lock ran in back of a house and two of them got him with shotguns. Catherine was dead in the car. You hear me?”

No use faking it. I don’t know what I said. ‘They are dead. Dead. They can’t be, but they are. I can’t stand to have known so much about them. But, listen, we know about them. I threw up when I read it”

“What do you mean? Are you going to the funeral?” I asked him.

“The funeral was yesterday. Of course I didn’t go. The leading mourner of the funeral is here. This is why I’m calling. He parked his car across the street late yesterday afternoon. Maybe he came right from the funeral. He stayed there all night. He got out of the car this morning and walked over to our sidewalk. His face is torn like he’d been gouging his face all night. He has his big hat kneaded to a pulp. He just stood out there and breathed at the house. Then he went back to his car, and when he opened the door I saw a shotgun lying on the seat. He sat down on the seat with his feet in the road, hanging his head, but he also has a pistol with him now.”

“Call the cops,” I urged him.

“I can’t I would have to stand for too much. This neighborhood is deserted. Two houses don’t even have anybody living in them any more. The woman across the street has gone to Florida. Titpea is a ghost town. Delph and the other boarder have gone. Mother Rooney and I are the only two around. I’m scared, Monroe. I’ve got the pistol loaded but I don’t want to use it But I’m afraid if he comes in here with a pistol I’ll kill him. Mother Rooney, I’ve got her practically a prisoner. I can’t let her out of the house, can’t let her call the police.”

“Use the phone, damn it. Call Silas.”

“He isn’t in town. He and Bet are separated and I’ve had a date with Bet”

“Call your daddy.”

“I’m calling you. Thirty minutes ago he came over and stood right in front of the porch here with that pistol in his hand calling for you, Harry. You never told him you were leaving town, did you?”

“Would you have?”

“I want you to get on a plane and fly down here. I need you. Please.”

“I’m broke.”

“You lousy goddam liar! You aren’t either broke. You told me you had a wad enough to live on for a year at that lousy goddam wedding / had to drive down for, and bought a new suit! You better be here….” I didn’t reply. “All right. I’m sick of hanging around watching him out the window. He’s out there to stay, I know that. I’m going out the front door with my damn never-miss pistol…”

“I’ll try toflydown.” Then he hung up.

I drove over to Lariat’s house. I knew he was packing up to travel to Yucatan. He was in. I asked him if I could have the snooker money he owed me, or at least the price of a plane ticket to Jackson. I didn’t know exactly what that would be. The last plane I’d been on was that one to New York back in high school. And what I needed was a jet.

“Are you in trouble? Has somebody died?”

“Yes. Catherine. That girl I … Whitfield Peter’s niece. The police shot her trying to—” and I told him the essentials.

“You’re simply pressing me for money, aren’t you?” Then the crisp smile fell down. He scoured me. How was I supposed to look so as to convince him? We got in Lariat’s Mercury after I called the airport. They had a plane leaving in an hour for Fort Smith. At Fort Smith I could catch a Braniff jet that went to Jackson with one stop at Little Rock. Lariat cashed a large check at the Palace drugstore, and we rushed back to his house; I had forty-five minutes. Lariat gave me a hundred. But as I was getting in my car, my eyes lit on Dr. Lariat’s back — the collar above his brown suit, especially, and the combed and parted gray hair. He had, I don’t know, the appearance of what? My only possible companion in trouble at the time.

“Gregory,” I said. “I would like very much for you to come with me. I need a wise man to go with me.”

“Oh Lord. Do I look that old? I guess I do. Go with you, on the plane? And get shot?”

“No, no. I’ll get the cab to let us off at the fairgrounds. We’ll go up the back way. Then we’ll simply use the telephone.”

“What the hell would I do?”

“Just be there. You would lend dignity.”

“Christ Jesus. Am I that old? Wait a minute.” He went back to his bedroom. I heard the coat hangers raking around. He was gone five minutes.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“What’s that?” I was stunned. Lariat was wearing a snap-brim cap, a green sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, and Big Mac blue jeans — the baggy, manual-labor sort. I’d never even seen him with his tie off, not even at snooker.

“We’re going to Mississippi, aren’t we?”

“Yeah. But we’re not going to a dog-kicking contest, damn it” His arms were so pale. He was completely ruined by this outfit. “Listen. You have to put the suit back on. I liked the suit.” He slung the cap off and cursed going back to his room. But he returned in the suit and tie, looking impatient; locked the front door; sat in the T-bird.

“Thank you,” I said.

He stood just inside the door of my house with his eyes fastened to Prissy, his smile rising and falling as I explained to her that my friend Fleece had a mental problem which I must see to. I gave her thirty dollars, Lariat coming up to make change for the twenty-dollar bill.

On the plane down to Fort Smith we sat silently. The Braniff jet was already docked at Fort Smith, and we had to hurry aboard. It had been such a race to this jet, my mind had been doing little at all. But when I sat down in it, my mind caught up with my eyes, and I was sure I was sealed up in a cartoon farce which was bound to explode with me inside it. The inside of the plane seemed to have been arranged by an interior-decorator wild about pastels and the Astro-Mod motif and I had an idea that the same man had designed the plane itself. There was a row of two seats across on one side and a row of three seats across on the other side. A fool would know that this arrangement, though novel and Mod, would make the plane dip sorely to one side, especially with a lot of people sitting in the three-seat side. Another concern was that there was almost nobody in the plane except Lariat and me. The two stewardesses were two just-too-beautiful blondes, in high leather boots figured like the crazy pastel seats. The wings of the plane were black and stubby; the body was gold; the tail was even another color. That we were in the air at all seemed a paradox of high cartoon fun. I had grown sick thinking of this veering craft when the pilot opened the address speaker and gave us his one message: “Ladies and Gentleman, we are twenty thousand feet in the air and we are making six hundred and twenty land miles per hour.” He had the voice of a Texas disc jockey, a real hot-rodding yokel.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Lariat.

I made my way to the restroom. It was a nicer place, duller, steadier. If I could stay in here, I could trust that I would not fly apart in a wreck of hot pinks, greens, and oranges, holding the boots of those blondes. I would not hail out with this thing like a roman candle. I saw myself in the mirror. You! I thought, shocked. Always you! You tick. The plane sat down in the air after making a rise. It sounded like every gear on board had fouled up. What did it matter?

I began seeing in my mind Mr. Wrag at the reservoir. He fell backward and hit his head on the rocks of the shore-line. He did it again and again. Then I saw Mr. and Mrs. Wrag. Mr. Wrag slumping between Mrs. Wrag and the doctor, walking up the slope toward me, toward the Volkswagen with fishbait in the back seat. Then Catherine, walking beside them in her sports outfit. Seeing me and waving to shoo me away, again and again. The chilly “breeze from the water mounting and falling. Doing it again and again. Now I began seeing the sunburned little forearm of Catherine, covered with goosebumps. The putting of the lab coat over her shoulders. “You silly old boy.” I saw it over and over. I began heaving and sobbing. Someone wanted in the rest-room. I went back to my seat. When I sat down I saw her all dolled-up for the last date, her foot in the shoe with one strap across it. I saw her singing in a minor role of the musicals. “She’s dead, dead.”

“Did you love the girl?” said Lariat.

“For a few weeks.”

When I looked at Lariat, he was staring out the window. He was slightly red-eyed himself. “Look at the sun in those clouds,” he said. “Oh God, if there is a God. That’s what my wife used to say. ‘Oh God, if there is a God!’”

In Jackson it was twilight The cabbie took us to the fair-ground gates. They were locked. We climbed over. We walked through the field to the kudzu vine cliff in back of Mother Rooney’s.

“You can’t climb that,” said Lariat.

We made it foot by foot on the ridges. At last we obtained the back yard. For me it was no easy thing, with the raincoat I had. After we got our breath, I eased around the side of the house and yes there was Peter’s Buick parked directly across the street from Mother Rooney’s sidewalk. I told Lariat. I knocked quietly at the back door. The house was alight in both towers but dark in Mother Rooney’s quarters. Nobody came. I saw a candle, held by someone, cross the archway to the dining room. We were on the tiny back porch behind the kitchen. We kept waiting at the door. I looked for the candle to reappear, but it didn’t. Fleece was telling the truth about the neighborhood. All the big houses on Titpea were closed up. No light came from them. Only the streetlights, making a fuzzy ribbon of illumination around the roof and edges of Mother Rooney’s house, and the yellowish light coming out of the window shades of the tower. Then I went back to the porch and knocked again. I knew I had seen a feeble light going around in the downstairs area. The porch was pitch dark.

“Kick the door in,” said Lariat. “Let’s take a chance. Wait. I’ll kick it in.” I took hold of the gun in my raincoat.

Just then we heard somebody trying to turn the lock. This door had only a small pane of glass at head level. You could see into the kitchen through the glass, but there was nobody to be seen. The doorknob was turning, and the door swung out.

Fleece was hanging on the inner knob. He fell out on the porch. I couldn’t see much but I knew it was Fleece. Something hard hit the floor alongside him.

“Get it,” he said. I bent down to him. He whispered again. “Get it.” He was hoarse. Lariat picked up the thing he was talking about, which was the Italian pistol. Now I could see his face. He was without his glasses, which meant that he was blind and that the moment was grave. He looked terribly pale.

“He killed Mother Rooney. I had my finger on my pistol when he came in the front door but I couldn’t pull it. Damn me. Couldn’t.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Twice. He shot me in the leg and in my back. I had my pistol.”

“Is that him with the candle?”

“Shhhhhl Not loud. Yes. He just went back to your room.”

I picked up Fleece’s arms and dragged him out, down the steps, to the back yard. Lariat came along with his feet.

“He shot her in the forehead. She’s lying by the telephone nook in the hall. First he shot me in the leg. Then he saw her with the telephone in her hand and shot her. I had turned away but I heard her being shot and I went over to her. He shot me again in the back while I was holding her. I passed out … when I came to I was lying on her face…. Who is that?” he asked.

“Dr. Lariat.”

“A doctor?”

“Professor of Literature.”

“Aw Jesus. Why did you bring him?”

Lariat did seem awfully useless at the moment. I took out the long cowboy pistol I’d brought down with me in my raincoat and gave it to him. Fleece’s big unshot pistol. I told Lariat all he had to do was pull the trigger.

“That’s right!” said Fleece. “Kill him. He’s looking for you, Harry. When I came to, he was talking to me. All afternoon he wants to know where you are. He sat on the floor and talked to me in this squeaky little voice. I asked him to call the hospital for me. He never even heard me. He looked at Mother Rooney. He kept squeaking for the night to come, please come the night, he said. Her corpse was driving him crazy.”

“The gun you gave me isn’t loaded,” said Lariat. Fleece lifted up one hand and gave Lariat several wet cartridges out of his palm.

“Well, is this one loaded?” I asked him.

“Oh yes. I had plenty of ammunition. I just couldn’t pull the trigger.”

“Peter doesn’t have the shotgun, does he?” I asked Fleece.

“Just a pistol. A black pistol, I hope it was only a twenty-two. I don’t hurt all that much.”

“I’ll get the ambulance here.” I knew I was the one. I ducked up to the porch and crawled in the house itself. I was hit by a cold wind at the kitchen door, but this was only my nerves spraying out all over me. I waddled across the kitchen floor to the cornice. I peeped around it to the hall. All was black, and smelled musty. I crept on to the tele-phone nook. I heard nothing and saw nothing, so I stood up and tiptoed two huge steps and put my hands on the phone. The receiver was not on the cradle. I picked up the wire and tried to lift it. It wouldn’t give. Mother Rooney had it in her hand. I reached down and felt the plastic and jerked the receiver out of her grip. I dialed the operator and whispered to her. The ambulance people said they would be over.

I suppose I was in a daze, looking down at the form of Mother Rooney. “Now get him,” said a voice, loud. “Don’t let him get you. Don’t lose your life to the man.” I knew the old corpse who was speaking to me. I knew I had left him behind in this house. His ghost, or whatever, rose and gasped from a corner of the living room: Geronimo. I heard the real noise then. I saw the glow of the candle filling out the room. Peter walked into the room holding a candle on a plate in one Land and a pistol in the other. “Help me, Indian!” I shouted. Peter careened toward me. I unloaded on him, right in his face. It seemed to me stray sparks and cinders jumped out of my wrist at him.

He bucked to the floor. The plate arid candle flew away; the plate shattered. He bellowed and writhed. When the gun was empty I threw it at him. My legs went useless and I fell down hard; I knelt there for a minute in the dark. Then I yelled for Fleece and Lariat to come in. They were already on the porch. Came the sound of a clearing of a throat, and a faint inquiry.

“Who got who?” said Lariat. But they kept coming. One of them hit the light. Fleece walked in bent over, Lariat helping him. Peter lay out in the middle with his hands flung out. He was bleeding from the neck, and the blood was pooling. His face looked at the floor. His hair was a shredded waxy yellow. I looked down the length of his body — a pinkish-tan suit, brown shoes — for other marks of blood. There weren’t any.

“You got itl You got it! You see! Here Harry was! You found him,” Fleece screamed at Peter. There was blood all over his left pants leg. He sat down on the couch. Peter raised his face.

“Kill me,” he said. He pushed up with his arms and stood. The wound, the only one, was on the back of his neck. The blood ran down the back of his shirt and flooded out in his coat. The stain just behind his neck burst out sop-ping and purple. I was still kneeling. His blood began to drip on the floor.

“Kill me!” he bellowed at Lariat, who held the big cowboy pistol negligently. “I knew there were others here! I know.

“Get his gun off the floor,” said Fleece.

When I leaned out to catch up the gun, Peter wheeled around and saw me. He kept his arm cocked behind his head with a hand on his wound. He staggered away, examining me. His face was a horror: a mask of bruises all yellow and purple like hematomas. His eyesockets seemed to have been mauled and crushed. His lips were folded in-wards. He had lost his false teeth. He began that curious squeaking voice, the voice of a cartoon rodent. “I knew. You were not a ghost. You were real. I knew you were in this, knew, knew you knew …”

“Shut upl” squalled Fleece. “I’ve been hearing that goddam squeaking all afternoon. Look at youl You had that wonderful University of Massachusetts education, you had good health, you had money. Look what you did with it! Look at herl Look at you in the mirror! You look like a shrunken dick!”

Fleece passed out. I thought he was dead. Lariat and I took off his shirt. There was a tiny red hole just above his right hip. Three inches away, down near his hip socket, the bullet itself could be seen under the skin. The bullet was black as coal. The skin above it was brown and puffy.

“Don’t shake him. What’s down there?” asked Lariat.

“The liver. I don’t know.”

“Did you get to the phone? You, sit down,” Lariat said to Peter. “Why don’t you get a blanket for the old woman?”

I went back to Mother Rooney’s bedroom and pulled off her bedspread. Mother Rooney was not unsightly, dead. There was the hole in her forehead. But she had had time to compose herself. I noticed she had patent leather dollies on, no longer the wrestling shoes.

We sat there, waiting. Peter sat on the floor and held his neck, squeaking, sometimes rocking. Fleece breathed deeply. His pants and hands were bloody, but he was not bleeding any more. The other bullet was in his calf. I caught only one word in the rest of Peter’s squeaking: “Never.”

When Fleece revived again he shouted at Peter to shut up.

The police came in with the ambulance squad. They looked around the room at Peter, me, and Fleece. Lariat’s suit was dirty from the climb up the cliff, and he was still holding the long pistol. I had taken mine out in the back yard and thrown it over the cliff. The police ganged around Lariat, snatched the gun away, and two of them hoisted him under the armpits to carry him off.

“Not him. Him,” Fleece said, pointing at Peter.

“This one’s hurt. What’s wrong with him?” asked one officer about Peter. I saw Peter was incapable of answering.

“He tried to kill himself after he saw what he’d done” I said.

“Shot himself across the back of his neck?”

“He’s crazy. He knew how to kill her but he didn’t know how to kill himself. Or didn’t try hard enough.”

An older officer, who apparently knew Peter, supported the opinion that Peter was crazy. They collected around him and dragged him out violently. Then the older officer got our names.

We had to stay in town a week. We visited Fleece at the hospital, and I talked to two men at the coroner’s. Then an-other one at the police station. My story was one-sided. All I confessed to was bringing the loaded gun to Jackson in possible defense of Fleece. I lied concerning every issue where it was possible Fleece or I might be seen in a bad light. I defended myself as a passive citizen into whose hand fate had thrown a gun and a plea for decency in a cul-de-sac of terror. I was exonerated to the extent that my name never even got in the papers. I made them understand that I had just come from Mother Rooney’s funeral.

Lariat and I attended the struggling little ceremony. We saw the coffin into the Catholic graveyard. We shook hands with two widows. The old cross-eyed priest recognized me and took my hand. “Ah, yes.” She had taken time to will the house to the Robert Dove Fleece boy, the very boy who was shot defending her. Did I know that? “She had a rich long life,” I told the priest “And a painless death.” I looked at Lariat “This is a man who came to help too.”

“Why haven’t you left?” I asked Lariat. All the while he had been extremely quiet and mild. “Why don’t you say something, then?”

“You were the one who thought you brought a wise man down here with you. Not me.”

I apologized to him constantly about putting him through this. He just shook his head, and finally he told me to shut up, looking bemused and a bit haggard. I got the feeling he was lost in the longest Lariat pause ever.

The last day we saw Fleece at the hospital The bullet had missed his liver by a half a hair, and he had been priding himself on simply being alive forfivedays.

“You know who was here this morning? Bet. You know who was here just before you came in? The D.A. We are going to be clean as a pin, Monroe. Peter is in Whitfield; he’s still squeaking; sometimes he breaks out with some-thing they can understand. Catherine, he talks about. The first Catherine. We came as close—” He lifted up the pincers of his thumb and forefinger, showing the tiny gap between them. “But look how clean that little gap is. Came as close as that bullet to my liver. By damn! You want to see where that mother went in?” He lifted his smock and peeled down the tape and gauze to show the little swollen red point. Lariat moved away. He was urping. Lariat was throwing up. He tried to make a clean blow of it into the room lavatory, but the wave came too fast. It dashed off the side of the enamel and drenched all the area by the window.

“Do sayl” said Fleece.

“I’m sorry.” Lariat already had his handkerchief out “That’s been coming on me for a week.”

“This man needs some beauty. He hasn’t seen too much down here. Give mefiveminutes.” I found the phone in the gift shop downstairs and called Harley in Beta Camina. I got him.

“Harley says he’s got the best band he ever had. He’s rehearsing them for the International Lions Convention parade in New York. Would you like it if I said let’s take Fleece’s car and drive down to Beta Camina? I’d like you to see them and meet him.”

“A nigger marching band?” said Lariat.

When we arrived at the high school in Beta Camina the Gladiators were marching on the football field full blast They had newer uniforms, a heavy green tending toward black. We joined Harley on the top bleacher. He was sweating. The day was hot, high, blue and golden. He had several folded index cards in his shirt pocket. I say Harley was sweating, but he was rather peaceful. He was not directing or conducting them at all.

“That’s it” he said. “What does anybody want? They’re beyond me. I can’t help them any more. They got guts and grace. Thirty of them already have scholarships in music. Six of them going to Juilliard.”

“Would you listen to that?” said Lariat. “They are superb. That is the best; well, you just forget they’re a marching band at all. Whose music are they playing?”

“Mine,” said Harley.

We left for the car. The band had quit but was still in our ears. Lariat put a hand on my shoulder.

“That was it. Good, good heavens. We’re in the wrong field. Music!”