Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Huh?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How is it?” I asked him.

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

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