Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

Five minutes, and a new black Cadillac full of colored men in suits drove out of a lot across the street and entered the hotel driveway, coming to rest in front of me. The glass went down, the driver spoke.

“Did you see a colored man with a helmet and white uniform, with a beard? Look like a band director?”

“He’s inside with the law and another man.”

“That white man with that hat?”

I told them yes. They rolled up the glass. After a minute they drove back across the street and parked at the mouth of the lot. Deeper in the lot sat the four long yellow buses full of the Gladiators.

Harley finally came out, by himself. He saw me and he looked miserably weary, with a tiny sneer, like that was all he had left. He flicked the helmet; some snap of disgust for me in that, I thought.

“I wanted to stay but I couldn’t—”

“I didn’t need you, little Harry. One of those cops, named Victor. He saw the man push the kid at me, and he told it. There wasn’t anything to it That was all, except for that Whitfield man.” Harley smiled. “He went crazy all over again when I told that cop, Victor, I understood this man had been in Whitfield and I was ready to call it even. That man went all to raving, swinging that hat, wanting to know just how I thought I knew that”

For the first time I got Peter’s face together with the Whitfield letters in my mind: the purple bruise of the forehead, the severe hat, among the lines of brown ink prose, and there, his wife lying on the prose as if on thorns, tortured all to moving every which way.

“—but you just think about that horn. You don’t need to get in trouble,” Harley was saying. That black Cadillac in the parking lot honked. I walked over with him.

“That slick one, he owns that car. He’s the principal of the school. Now you know what he wants? My band, he wants my band. The man couldn’t find the key of C if it came in a bag, but he sure do want this suit I got on. We drove a hundred miles up here with the air conditioning on, all us freezing, while that genius was explaining the principle of why we needed it, said science dictated that a number of bodies together gave off heat which the air conditioner was equalizing, and he wants to take over my band.”

When we got to the car, they were holding up their hands for us to be quiet. I could hear the radio announcer out of the rear speaker, recognized the station as WOKJ, the colored station in Jackson. You could get B. B. King and a lot of other fine pluckers and honkers on it, and on Sundays, “Ain’t No Flies on my Jesus,” “Little More Jesus, Little Less Rock-and-Roll,” and “Crazy Stranger, Where Yo Home?”

While the announcer was still going, Butte whispered, “I made the band. Now he says he wants me to go off for two years to earn my Master of Music degree so as to deserve this band. Try to get a hold of that He took a correspondence course in music over the Christmas holidays, so he says he could fill in, in my absence. He also told me I might be outlined for a better place than Beta Camina.”

“I think he’s right, there.”

The people in the car began applauding lightly.

“The man said it. We won again,” said the principal. The radio had been announcing the parade winner. Harley got in the back seat, crowding over. One of the men shook hands with him. The principal, with his arm crooked over the door, looked me over before they rolled off.

“Who is that?” he said, speaking right at me.

“He’s from my home. A musician friend,” Harley spoke from the back seat.

“I thought it was Roy Rogers. He got boots. He got a pistol pokin’ out his pocket.”

I had been cramming the gun down in my raincoat so long to assure its secrecy, I guess I made a hole in the old thing. The whole barrel was out. The principal drove off in distaste, carrying Harley; then the buses rambled past me. In the back window of the last one, two of the Gladiators were giving me the finger.

I walked the long way up to my car. I cranked the motor and Fleece sat up in the well behind me.

“Guess what?” he said. Something precious was coming. “No, you guess what. I couldn’t help it. They came for me. I cut them down in flame, Peter first. Peter crawled over to the wall and wrote fuck on it in his own blood. It seemed to be an ultimatum.”

“Ass!.. but not bad, though. ‘An ultimatum.’ I was lying here telling myself, if Monroe gets back, we’ve got to steal the rest of his letters. Because I didn’t get him.”

“What?”

“I got no pictures of him. When I was running out of the hotel I was trying to take the roll out so no matter what happened, I’d have the pictures, but the spool got away from me and unrolled out on the sidewalk.”

“That wonderful camera, and you drop the film.”

“But at least we’ll get the rest of the letters. I don’t want to get close enough to him to take any more pictures … but we’ll figure out a day when he’s away from his house …”

I remembered that, in the hotel, I had avoided looking at Peter as often as I could. In fact, I’d held my hands to my face when he was there. It was too embarrassing a horror to see him directly, all beaten up, the face of the letters.

I was being faded out of music, “serious” music, I mean, and didn’t know it. The professors were running me out of the field. I bought a new coat made out of reptile leather over at a sale at Gus Mayer ($150, even so). And I wore it, it was full spring and getting warmer, but I wore it, thinking now I am ready . I didn’t know for what, quite, but I suspected there was evil weather ahead. Fleece attempted to ignore the coat for a week. I did wonder about the figure I was cutting, and asked him what he thought. He told me I looked like an endlessly mean queer, which he had been patiently waiting to say that week, I bet, knowing I was uncertain about the coat. However, there was a bleached-blond girl who played flute in the Jackson Symphony who was excited about the coat and declared to me, during the symphony recess, that I looked like an Indian prince. This was Patsy Boone, a freshman at Millsaps College, and she was nobody’s beauty — after the popping blue eyes and the nice teeth, just a piece of skirt, it seemed — but she had pleasant, stunning things to say about me. I took the solo of the “Habanera” once, in the absence of the first-chair trumpet. During the recess she found me and pressed my arm. She said she almost couldn’t stand it while I was playing. Something had happened to her, body and soul, which she couldn’t discuss just now.

So, at the next rehearsal, I was playing along at fourth part, swelling with new zest, and I got in trouble with the violist who sat in front of the trumpets. He was a professor of music at Belhaven College, a girls’ school in Jackson. He told his other violist friend that I sounded like a cow stepping in its own pies. I heard this, and told him I would get him for it. He had a loud voice and others had heard him. The jackass was six foot three and could’ve beaten me to a pulp just defending himself. But he called the police about my threat, and I got a call on the floor telephone in the dorm from the captain at the Jackson police station telling me this violist had bolted his doors and was trembling in his house with a shotgun.

He never showed up at rehearsals as long as I came. Manino, the conductor — a lean sissy who’d made a reputation down South on the violin — decided he needed the violist more than me and kicked me out with a quiet explanation about how, if the truth were known, I did every now and then sound like a Mexican calling the bulls. I packed up and told symphony work goodbye. I walked out of Murrah auditorium, heard the orchestra plunge into “Polovtsian Dances” without me, and with no lacking in the brass section; heard no dismay over my absence; everybody was bright on his notes, the percussion were ripping and jangling in my bones so I felt like a drunk gypsy, the French horns were husky and Slavic, and the strings carried the dances with that sadness strings still carry, no matter what gay dance they play.