Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

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

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

“I’ll hit your little ass, then!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you very much,” I said.

But I took the advice seriously later.

— ANONYMOUS ALARM, c. 1956

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

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

H. J. Butte, Director

The Gladiator Band

Beta Camina, Mississippi.

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

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

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

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

Honorable Mayor and City Council:

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

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

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

With those who would rise and say “Never,”

Col. P. D. Lepoyster.

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

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

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

“What picture?”

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

“The first time since ?”

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

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