Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“You know, you were a happy surprise to us. Daddy and I want you to turn out especially good,” she said. I slept on that.

The animals weren’t on the lawn as the old man and I came out at six. They’d gotten in the cane and smashed it up, wallowing. The mule was lying dead among some broken stalks. The dog lifted up his head in the foot-high pinplants on the edge of the cane. He smiled when the old man shot him with the twelve-gauge.

The man with the tractor was late. We just hung out between the cane and the porch and had ample time to study the corpses. A dead mule was such a big thing my mind couldn’t really gather it in. I had to think about him in pieces, like the dead feet, the dead eyes, the dead backbone. The wet pink scab of the dog, with the red shotgun dots on his skull.

The sun came up and we heard noises from the Sink mansions. At last, the man with the tractor came up the drive. His name was Swell Melton; he regularly was manager of the Self*Wash Laundromat in Dream of Pines, but that didn’t take all his time. All he did, as a matter of fact, was keep replacing the adhesive tape on the sign over the washers saying “Please Do Not Die In The Machines As It Colors Your Next Man’s Wash.” He was a lean, jaded fellow who got along with everybody, even the old man when he called him about the tractor at midnight. He wore the gray cotton pants and shirt which made you get the idea he was hovering about in a semiofficial position.

He didn’t hesitate a second about the dead animals. He backed up in the cane shallows, jumped off, and tied a chain around the mule’s rear feet, then strapped the dog’s corpse to the chain with a rope. Then he cranked up and towed them off. The dog hung off the load in a grotesque way as the tractor dragged him and the mule, scraping, out the drive and to the Pierre Hills road.

The old man and I were hypnotized by the sight. He held on to his shotgun by the barrel, and we both wandered out behind the tractor to the road. Ode, the old man, looked like a moronic recruit in the marines.

We were standing out in the road beholding the tractor disappear at five miles an hour as Ollie Sink crept up to our backs in his black Chrysler. He wanted by, and we were blocking his way. The old man turned around and did an inane thing: he tried to hide the gun against his side. Ollie, a big red face above white shirt collars and a black coat, glowered at the old man like, yes, he now knew how his peacock Bayard had disappeared, with this early morning gunner Monroe running around the hills. Ollie’s eyes were fixed, burning through his windshield, at the corpse-heap dragging behind the tractor ahead; then he observed the old man’s shotgun, and the old man’s guilty face, and ripped off in his car. The old man was trying to get up a neighborly sentence to shout to Ollie. But a dead mule and dog, seeming to be secretly spirited away in the early hours like this — he couldn’t say anything about the scene that Ollie was seeing.

I think he gave up trying to be a perfect neighbor to the Sink boys that morning. I don’t know what the deal was when the old man got us into Pierre Hills; what clause in the deed said if he was to buy from those land-scathing bastards, he had to like them reverently too. But he quit it that morning, and all I heard the rest of my years in the house was how depraved and ugly and destructive of the wood-land the Sink brothers were. My mother flew into them, after the old man let out the plug, beginning with how tacky their big houses were and how stupid their wives were, at the bridge dinner and other social events at the country club.

“That peacock Bayard needed killing,” said the old man, taking another cup of coffee with his Camel. “Don’t tell anybody else, Harry, but I was proud of you when you bashed him. I’m not for causing hurt to animals — you know that.” He let out a stream of smoke and closed his eyes so it made him look confident and handsome as Bogart. I could see Donna’s love for him in her eyes. After all, he was Ode Elann Monroe: slayer of the Spitz-setter. Puller of the trigger when the chips were down.

Harley went in the army two years as a bandsman. He was such a success he enlisted for two more, and two more again. He was a sergeant of music when he got out. He was company director sometime during his tour of duty, maybe at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which Harley thought was way up North, until he was stationed at D.C. He marched in a group playing “Hail to the Chief’ for Eisenhower’s inauguration. Then he waited at the parade’s end and got to see his old high school band, Dream of Pines Colored. Even the people who voted the bond for Jones’s school were proud that the band had gotten this invitation from the Inaugural parade committee. The old man and others thought it was very classy for Dream of Pines to be represented by Jones’s band in D.C. Even though they hadn’t voted for Ike. Even though the one coat of paint on the main building of the high school had weathered off and the place was too ugly to forget, again, and Jones was pushing band out there so feverishly that there really wasn’t anything to the school but the band and those sixteen bad-luck sluggards on the football team. Jones didn’t make the trip to D.C. with the band. He was in jail for floating a bad check at a Shreveport store in payment for two new sousaphones he thought his band had to have to play in style for Ike’s parade. The sousaphones made it up; he didn’t. Harley Butte, waiting on the band in formal army parade uniform, was tragically disappointed not to see his old director and spirit-father Jones with the band. He knew none of the kids playing in it now.

I do believe that Butte thought Jones was a black son of Sousa. Apparently there’s no overstressing how much Jones emphasized the music of that man John Philip Sousa, composer of such monumental marches as “Stars and Stripes Forever,” “Washington Post,” and scads of others. Novelist. Jones put the two novels by Sousa in the outhut they called the library at Dream of Pines Colored. Harley read them, the only two books he ever finished in his life, not counting a few theory and composition manuals he polished off as an undergraduate at Grell A. & M. later. I always thought Harley was lying to me about Sousa having written any novels, and I had to look in the encyclopedia to find out it was true. Well, it’s weakening it to say the fire of Sousa traveled from Jones to Harley Butte. Harley knew he was Sousa’s grandson, and liked to remark incidentally in a mystic way that he was born the year Sousa died. In D.C., there must’ve been a bleak absence in his heart when he found out Jones wasn’t along with the band. He was standing there, say, by a tree on Pennsylvania Avenue waiting to link up with the father of the whole thrust of his life, Jones, and to maybe have a few words with him, casually, and explain to Jones that this pupil of his was going somewhere, from those sessions that July in the pine clearing down in Louisiana. Harley was a mite proud of his army band uniform, and of the number of horns he had mastered during his tour in the service, and of having led that company band back at Fort Sill. He was playing cornet at this time.

But Dream of Pines came by him playing a novelty number, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” and there was no Jones in his simple white uniform with black shoes marching at the head rank a foot or two to the side and crying instructions, like there should have been. There was this hepcat Negro he didn’t know, some apostate sub for Jones who had taken over the band for the D.C. trip and rehearsed them in roadside parks on the way up, when the buses stopped in Tennessee and Virginia. He had tried to make them over in two days to a wailing hepcat band with tricky steps and freed rhythm. They’d all turned at Eisenhower’s stand and done a dance-bow to him, still playing, then all jumping back to the march with a sudden lope. The sub director thought the old Sousan military legend of the band ought to have something done to it. It was not eyeful enough; it needed some flashes. Their blue uniforms were getting drab and didn’t hold attention like they used to; they didn’t look like the scary celestial horde of old. But Butte disapproved of the acrobatic drum major, and of the addition of several more prissy majorettes, and of the complex mambo rebellion the drums were laying down. He thought Dream of Pines Colored looked like some group dragged out of a tonk.