Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“You made a lot of money this month, didn’t you, Harley?” the old man said.

“I think I’ve got in enough for a little more than three forty this time.”

“Good for you. You look like a man who’s going somewhere, to me. Don’t think I don’t like that.”

“Mucha blige,” said Harley.

In December he asked the old man couldn’t it be arranged for him to take some college work in the afternoons over at Grell starting mid-January. It would mean he could still work till two o’clock. The old man fell into his study for about two weeks of fake mental hernia, at home, and hollered at anybody who disturbed him, thinking we were out to spoil his mental life; but sneaking in the den behind the couch and standing breathlessly still, the old man watched Jack Paar late at night. He thought, as regards the intellectual life, Paar was the last word. Then at the factory he finally called in Harley and told him that Grell arrangement would be all right. He could keep his job. The old man told Harley he wanted to see him make A’s. Winkadoo.

My old man looked something like Paar, and nourished the hell out of that fact.

Harley went to Grell. The college amounted to an exploded quad of three-story ocher buildings. The band room was in a mossy basement of one of them. He was a smash his first semester, what with all that overwhelming cognizance about instruments and Sousan music. By next fall, he took over the unofficial leadership of the thirty-piece band, the old director perfectly willing to let Butte drill and play them, and take the football trips in the yellow bus with them. At Grell, it so happened that football was inmidst of its first golden age since the school was founded. Butte took what he got.

He wore pith helmet, whistle, and sunglasses in the late afternoons. As director, he was a hard man. In a month he was marching perhaps the best twenty-piece band in the nation. And at the end of football season, there were fourteen of them left — hard-bitten Sousa-lovers every one.

Butte would take trombone, flute, trumpet, or sousa-phone along and fill in what absent parts he could, when they sat in the bleachers. Once, at a game between Grell and Alcorn A. & M., he played a trumpet with one hand, beat the bass drum with the other, and directed the group by use of an elbow.

This was one of the weekend nights when his wife, who was not a member of the Grell student body, sat with the band, one baby on an upright mobile board beside her and another one active in her womb, while she played bell lyre, and pretty decent bell lyre. Her stomach was too big for her to hold the instrument in her lap, so she perched it on a bleacher and sat sideways, tapping the tone bars, with one eye on the director, her husband. Butte would see her wrapped in her old woolen coat, a Scotch plaid scarf tied under her chin, and see his son asleep on the padded board beside her, and his wife’s eye on his conducting, and the weather was nipping cold. But the Disciples-size band would be playing, say, “Washington Post” especially well, and the air around his ears would be warm. He’d look on the wife he’d trained to bell lyre, and the kind of love that leaves no room for anything else in the soul and body would take hold of him.

It goes without saying that Butte never told the old man just how interested he was in band. Ode Elann Monroe thought Harley was grooming his life around being a foreman of the innerspring shop. You don’t tell an employer who’s giving you a raise every month that your real mental existence is somewhere else entirely. Harley did eventually make foreman, over a horde of protests — two illiterate letters from Dream of Pines racists which the old man read to us in an ironic redneck voice one morning at breakfast. And the old man felt a wee bit ill-used when Butte quit him two months after he got his Bachelor of Music degree at Grell and moved his wife and four boys over to Mississippi, where he’d happened to land on a vacant directorship of one of the biggest Negro high school bands in six states, counting Texas.

He didn’t tell me quite all of this poop about himself, either. But he told me most of it. When things got to where Harley and I could talk — behind the factory or leaning on the fence of that neat yard of his on the edge of niggertown (Harley’s yard was as neat as any yard that grew nothing but Johnson grass as I’ve seen, and he had the lattice fence, which was an absolutely revolutionary improvement out that way), or even in my own room out at Pierre Hills that he came to as a detour off mattress business with the old man — I and Harley knew that we were in for at least forty-five minutes of talk, peripherally of music and mostly about his life. Harley had a fine middle-range voice. He never emphasized any of his troubles to me, and went over the facts of his life like they were just that, facts; no whining. This man knew his dream was taking him somewhere.

But Butte always had some problem he felt required a 9:00 P.M. interview with the old man at our house. I don’t know but what he felt guilty about succeeding at the factory and with the Grell band at the same time and wanted to talk it out with the old man, though he’d kill himself before he told all about his progress out Grell way. He told that part of it to me.

The halls of my high school were wooden and olden. The maids used uncountable tins of wax and bottles of furniture oil on the halls and rooms every weekend. I enjoyed the waning smell of cleansers and polishers Monday to Friday. You could count the days by what your nose told you. By Friday, the school was filthy all over again. In sunlight, you could see a ragged trench down the middle of the wax on Thursday, but the channels underneath the lockers were always bright as newly buffed 1920 oak.

We had open lockers. Nobody stole, except now and then a sad case who’d swipe your compass for geometry and then sit right by you and use it in class — so screwed-up he didn’t think of hiding things he’d stolen. Twice a crazy boy from out in the sticks brought a loaded pistol into class, but they caught him both times. All he wanted to do was show and tell. Then they caught him exposing himself in the back row of civics class and shipped him. Then there was a scandal in the library over this bunch of greasers who were tearing the brassiere advertisements out of the magazines and taking them home. I also remember another boy who sewed a tiny square picture of a Kotex box on the front of his tee shirt. He’d walk down the hall, get in front of some lovely and popular girl coming the other way, then throw open his jacket and flex his chest, a broken grin on his face as she saw and shrieked. Then there were the football guys, half of them mill boys and rednecks, the other half boys from middle-class subdivisions stuck around town. If they were sure of the slightest secrecy in the halls, they’d cram you in a locker, or hold you by the throat and twist out your tee shirt so you were left with embarrassing female protrusions where your paps were supposed to be, or maybe they’d just come up behind you and swat the back of your head with a flat hand. All this was just pure bliss for them. It wasn’t malevolence or bullying. They did it to each other. They’d cold-cock some buddy, then wink and grin slyly, and say, “Uh oh!” like a hand had come out of the blue and done it and they didn’t have anything to do with it. One day when I was a freshman I was writing a Latin test as a big hand curled around the crook of my desk and I commenced being dragged along in my desk sideways through the aisle. I looked over and saw one of those foot-ball scoundrels pulling me beside him with one arm, his face beaming with pleasure. The teacher had gone out of the room. When he had my desk top crammed against his, he fell to cheating off my paper with an open, completely guileless face. A moment later, he shot me scooting back to my rightful row with a terrific push from his left leg. It was a beautiful feat of strength, and I don’t think his main point was to cheat. Real depravity at Dream of Pines was rare. And the principal tried to run a pretty tight ship. You could get busted for smoking a cigarette in the basement head; for profanity or insubordination; for setting fire to a waste-basket.