Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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