Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

It would’ve all been disaster for Butte if he hadn’t seen the movie he had the night before and still had the martial symphonia of it rushing in his head. He’d gone into a movie house on Pennsylvania and seen the premiere of Stars and Stripes Forever , the life story of John Philip Sousa, with Clifton Webb. Webb wore a German artist’s beard, and a pith helmet, and played many instruments, as Butte knew he had to, to be able to compose the works he had. Butte saw Sousa lead a band of deluxedly white-uniformed men down a street in Pennsylvania, and the movie house where he saw it was on a street named Pennsylvania, and, well, GOD, looking like Clifton Webb and Sousa together, got into his very blood all over again. Harley saw the movie just three times, being habitually a moderate man when it came to entertaining himself. Sousa was leading the band down the streets of somewhere like Haiti when Butte’s mind blanked out in pure joy.

Harley had had a bad moment as tentative director of the company band in North Carolina, and he remembered this in Washington. When he was with the band in Washington, it was indeed a disgrace for him to be merely in the ranks as only another cornetist. This novelty music had done it to him. He’d gotten busted out of his director’s position for having an uncouth band at Review Day in North Carolina. This was just after all his glory as sergeant director at Fort Sill. Butte re-enlisted because he thought he was famous as an army musician; he’d written a couple of numbers after the manner of Sousa, dedicating both marches to the old boy himself; then they shipped him to North Carolina, where he got this band that was predominantly Negro. They were all kids who hadn’t been at their instruments over a year, and they thought it was all a joke. They got out of drill because Harley told the CO the band needed rehearsal by section. Harley told the kids it wasn’t a joke. But these cats didn’t dig a Sousa march. Eight of them got together secretly in the band hall with this one cat who played on the broken-up piano that was there for no clear reason — maybe officers’ dances years ago. They did boogie-woogie on the sly. Harley walked in one day and caught them red-handed doing that. Trumpet, tuba, drums rigged into what the guilty fellow called a trap set , with pennies taped loosely to the cymbal to make it friz, and a high, yearning Negro on clarinet who just wouldn’t be denied. Harley despised boogie-woogie as frivolous, and he didn’t know what Dixieland was . That’s what the fellow on clarinet claimed to be doing, when he wasn’t playing this melancholy murk called blues. Harley told him to stop that. He feared the clarinetist was insane, and he knew the man could destroy a march, by himself; so wild a screech the man could lift in the air if he got the spirit. Harley was right. When he got the band out to play in place at Review Day, they were less than best — everybody going his own way on the tunes, and the clarinetist wailing an alien part to the trio of “Washington Post” like he was playing solo on the moon. He hit blues notes at the top range of the horn, and loud. All this, with the besodden khaki troops marching by to strict drill. The CO didn’t like that stuff either; his boys were out there in dress uniform drilling it as seriously as they could, and the moment required serious music. Harley was demoted and shipped as a cornetist to another company band at D.C.

Harley hated and feared this novelty stuff. He called it all juking and trash bop .

Then rock-and-roll broke out.

He was at Fort Shelby, Mississippi, back down South, for the last three months of his service life. Nothing had gone right for him since back at Fort Sill, except he didn’t have to go to Korea. Now it was 1956. They had him playing tuba, a concert tuba with a strap on it for marching. That big rascal was no fun to carry, either. It was scalding green summer in the southern Mississippi pines. He knew this scene. Looking at a hot pine tree long enough made him nauseated.

On the day of his twenty-fourth birthday, he was sitting on a cot in a hot barracks. His colored buddy who played euphonium in the company band switched on the radio between their cots. A certain Negro rock-and-roll screamer from Georgia named Little Richard came on howling something about somebody that saw his uncle coming and jumped back in the alley. This was followed by panther sounds.

Butte sat up, closed his eyes, and nodded incredulously.

“Don’t that make you proud now? Shhh — Sounds like somethin’ from Africa,” he said to his buddy.

Next day, playing in place with the band for the last formal military review he ever saw, the strap on his tuba broke, and he almost fainted from heat exhaustion trying to keep it on his knee. He fingered the huge valves and tried to be resonant on his instrument, as usual, while the be-sweated plungers slipped off his fingertips and crushed his knuckles springing up, and the bathtub weight of the horn dragged down his arms and cut his thighs where it rested. Harley was only a thin, middle-height mulatto. The sun worked on him, and he found himself having to stare at a stand of six-foot pines across from the parade ground.

This time it was different, looking at those pines. He didn’t get sick, but his waking sense left him. The rows of pines began moving like people, corridors of them, in step. Then they had instruments, and were a limitless horde of bandsmen in green uniforms, but made no sound. They were dreadful and glorious in silence, though there was all the pumping and stepping and setting to, and awesome flashes of brass, silver woodwind keys, and white drum hide. So then Butte thought he could hold on in this sun and not faint. What a secret, roaring sight he’d seen.

After the review was over, he found himself restored and happy. He knew what he would do when he got out. He’d go to Grell A. & M. and get a degree in music, which ought to be easy, with what he knew already. He’d hold down a job somewhere and maybe do it in odd hours, but he’d do it. Then he’d look around the states, choose the high school band he thought had the most potential, and offer to direct it. Naturally he’d get the job; wasn’t any other colored cat knew as much about march as he did. They’d love him: some big dead-serious band. He’d write a few pieces for them during concert season. He’d have them crowded around him like an orchestra on the stage of some city auditorium. He’d come down with the baton, and the breathable air in the place would just quit. The spectators would faint for a minute because the band was using all the air of the place to hit that first, oceanic note; then they’d revive, getting used to the thin oxygen of the place, and hear the band going big, high, low, but never thin, on something like “The Liberty Bell”—his band as ponderous, frightening at ebb and storm tides, as the Atlantic Ocean, which Butte had seen, once. Then talk about march season. He’d be dressed in a neat, simple tunic, and maybe be wearing a German artist’s beard, and flick his baton in the gridiron lights, and genuinely bring those mothers in green uniforms out of the surrounding pine trees, playing. It would be a surprise assault on the musical world the first fall he showed them.

So Butte went to work at my old man’s mattress factory last of the summer. Something he didn’t count on was getting married, but he did, to this moderately good-looking mulatto girl who was a native of Dream of Pines. The girl got pregnant immediately, and Butte never conceived of anything but that she’d go in the hospital at retail rate. If he’d taken her in at the charity price, he might have been able to start at Grell night school right away. As was, Butte concerned himself with saving a hundred and fifty dollars out of what the old man gave him during that period of fall semester at Grell. It wasn’t completely disheartening to him. He knew he’d start to Grell in January and make a name there. He didn’t despise the frame-making position the old man gave him at the factory. Matter of fact, he was lucky as loaded dice to get it. He could have gone to the mills.