Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

However, one day in September Butte got low. It was after work, and he got to feeling blue about not being in Grell now when it was starting, and about being married and expectant with his wife so quick, and not having that old unboundaried feeling he had during free time in the army, and being in the rotten mill air of Dream of Pines again, living in a house on the outer edge of niggertown, where the clouds from the mills were sometimes just too heavy and juicy to float and fell on an individual homesite with an acidic fog that would peel the paint off the floor. Harley had drunk a little beer in the army. He was sure Sousa had done it at one time or another, because Harley found out he could write grand marches under the influence of a few beers. So he got home, told his wife something, and walked down the road to the bottom of a hollow where the Black Cat joint was.

He sat on a stool and treated himself to a few Regals, which were going for 200 in those days. He was the only drinker there as it turned night. By the third beer, he was really enjoying his newlywed melancholy, feeling hopeless and yet sure something would turn up.

“As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to play that moaning on the machine,” he said to the barman and owner.

“That’s Fats Domino,” said the barman.

“I said I don’t want to hear it. I’m your only customer here.”

The barman went to the juke and turned down the voice to nothing.

“Fats Domino’s from New Orleans,” the barman said.

“You mean that fucking stuff has gotten over here, too?”

“Was you in the service?” The barman chuckled, opening another Regal for Butte.

I was riding down the gravel of the Black Cat road a minute before this. I owned a black Chevy station wagon with a big console speaker for bringing in such cats as Elvis, Mickey and Sylvia, Little Richard, and Fats Domino, fixed in a pecan frame behind the second seat My radio, with this speaker, brought in these singers like they were alive and struggling in the back of the car. You could hear the grace note of one of those cat’s sighs. My wagon had 350 horsepower, moon hubcaps on the wheels, and was called a Snatch-Wagon by all the envious pubes round my high school. I guess it was sort of a sad affair, since I could drive it in, sure enough, and be the prince of the Dairy Dip for fifteen or twenty minutes, but had never touched the flesh of a girl; no girl’s backend had ever warmed the seat beside me. I listened to Elvis and Fats, and was assured by all their groaning around in unsuccessful love, that I had touched lots of girls, and had a special Love who always put me down, didn’t phone, had some guy newer and richer. I was fourteen, and this Chevy wagon was supposed to be my mother’s car, but I usurped it from her. The old man took a taxi to work and let her have the Buick. By this time, he was running scared of me. I’d broken out with a pepperish acne and lugged back and forth in the hall as if I was inventing ways to destroy myself; it was as if somebody had caught me in the hall and blasted off a shotgun loaded with BB’s at my face, two or three BB’s making it into my brain and festering there for years to make me crazy. I don’t deny I was a case in the teen years. I didn’t always know what I was up to.

I had this box of M-80 Salutes on the seat beside me. An M-80 is a brand of firecracker that explodes about like an eighth of a stick of dynamite. It’ll take the bottom out of a new zinc garbage can, and goes off under water. They’re illegal everywhere now, though you might pick up some out at a combination service station and grocery way in the sticks. Throw them anywhere, nothing defeats the use on these babies. I had a few left over from July Fourth which I’d been saving for a purpose of indefinite evil. Actually, I wanted to lodge one up the skirt of the school librarian and watch her rave off in pain and smoke. She’d called my un-satisfactory personality to attention a couple of times. Also, I had a few keen visions from television movies working on my mind: such feats as the GI lucking a grenade into the slit of a pillbox and smiling as fire was hes the Japs off the hill.

I lit an M-80 off a cigarette and tossed it down the gulley onto the porch of the Black Cat, then floored the Chevy away, showering gravel. I don’t know, the Black Cat was lit so dull and looked like such a lovely place to toss in one. It was a wooden joint which might really fall over with the blast, with great shrapnel tearing out because of the rusty tin signs around the door. I was feeling wonderful at the moment when I heard the terrific charge go off behind me. I winked to myself. “You’re supposed to be at the football game, Harriman,” I laughed out loud. It was such fun I vowed to do it again, and turned the Chevy around when I got to the highway pavement.

“That Fats Domino mess has gotten too loud again,” Harley was saying to the barman.

“Man, you got some ears I can’t eem hear it.”

Gah Dimmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! went the little item on the porch. Smoke rushed in through the screen door. The barman fell with a beer in front of the jukebox. Then they heard a car zinging away.

“I thought I uhs dead,” said the barman. “What was it?”

Butte went to the window.

“A car racing off. Somebody is throwing firecrackers.”

“I tell you what…” said the barman. He walked over to the bar and lifted up a short shotgun. “That was too much firecracker.”

“What you goin’ to do?”

“See if he does it again.” Then he put the gun back.

“Come here with it. I believe he’s turned around and coming back. Give me the gun,” pleaded Butte.

“Really, man. I don’t want you to shoot nobody … be some trouble for me, now.”

Butte snatched the gun. “I don’t like anybody scaring me like that,” he said. “Look out! He’s pitchin’ one down!”

“Watch it! God d….”

Gah Dimmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

“Got damn! You come back here, man!”

Gurraw Dimmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! went the shotgun in Butte’s hands. He fired from the porch. Then he went back in.

“I didn’t kill anybody, honcho.” He smiled sickly and laid the gun on the bar. “I got a rear light and lots of the backend of a station wagon, though.”

“It was a white man, wasn’t it?” said the barman.

“It was a white child.”

“Chile?…”

“Yes sir. I do believe it was my boss’s son, little Harry.”

“You in for it, man.”

“I think I can handle it.”

Butte and the old man got along. The mulatto really had nothing against making mattress frames. Where he worked was a wide concrete shop with twenty men spread into four job groups. Harley liked to hear the music of the hammers and springs, and he liked to see the mattresses take shape through the glass where the women were working with sewing machines alongside his area. See them get stuffed and stacked up on the dock behind the tremendous doors, and the automotive lorries taking them out twelve high. Butte got along well with his innerspring squad, too. Two of them were Negro, and two white, and all they did while they framed was make jokes. It got to where the jokes went round to every man in a regular circuit, and you got booed if you came in some day without a good joke or only had a half-ass joke. Butte had plenty of stories from the army he didn’t even know he’d remembered. He and the on-and-off wino white fellow competed for laugh king. His squad knew he was clever and fast on the frames. He turned in more tickets than anybody at five o’clock, and the old man paid them by the piece after a certain number. He was always ready for overtime. He liked the way his wife treated him when he got home late and tired in the arms. She respected that he was weary, and helped herself to him in gentle ways. The old man saw how Butte was succeeding with his squad in the shop. Harley came into his office one day and told the old man he’d like to buy one of those innersprings for his own bed, and he was wondering if the price of it couldn’t just be taken out of his check this time. It seemed easier that way.