“Were you playing your trumpet?”
“No. Not today.”
She said something had harmed her eardrums. I got an inspiration. “Say, is old Lloyd around? Put him on a minute. Don’t say who it is.”
Lloyd answered. I heard him make a nice couch out of his ear. Eased the receiver down to the end of my horn and Watted into “The Marines’ Hymn” for all I was worth. Tonnie Ray picked up the phone over there.
“Oh, you really got Lloyd! He is holding his head and is turning red! Hee hee hee hee hee! Ow! Lloyd … now!! Lloyd is hitting me. He is using fists! Oh, oh, awroh! He has his fists made! unnnngh! … Oh, Harry, he hit me on the face! Can’t you do something? Can’t you say some-thing? Harry!”
She kept calling me. Tonnie Ray amazed me, how she kept on, and kept on. I never had anything to say. Then I realized I was God to Tonnie Ray. She was using me as God. I was the closest to handsome that she would ever touch; I was Music and Higher Art; I had fought twice with her old boyfriend in her presence; we had drunk the mysterious vodka together; I had put my finger into her at the moment she thought she was at her loveliest; she had had her spasm with me hovering over her like an angel.
Yes, I could’ve just hung around the house and lain naked in the sheets, caressing my own paps, hearing Mose Allison on the phonograph, and being cool, and being Tonnie Ray’s God all summer. I could’ve locked the door, a little ashamed, got out my old faithful Daisy BB gun, set up some rubber soldiers from the closet where my boyhood stuff was kept, put them on the bookcase, lain behind a pillow and potted the soldiers, ducking the visible BB’s from the old, not-so-powerful gun, as they ricocheted off the wood back at me. The word ricochet: what Frenchness, what powerful romance; I remember when I first heard it back in 1951. Pick up the phone from Tonnie Ray and catch her frantic stream, then intone the cynical boredom of God or act out something astonishing and cryptic to her. Or at last resort, pick up my horn and practice it. (After the first six months on that horn, I was sick of the whole concept practicing. Maybe I should’ve known I was done for as a serious musician then. But I heard Miles Davis, and wanted to be like him. And every time I brought the horn to my lips wanting to be big and original and have some style, I felt Dr. Perrino’s dick lying on my shoulder blade. Oh, Mother, the funk; the sticky feeling of some merciless expert lying on your back.) Or I could’ve spent the whole summer mooning over Lala Sink. I never called her because I was afraid of her answering the phone, very kind, very sweet, very soft and tiny, and telling me No, don’t come by tonight around six-thirty, thank you so much for calling. I learned through Tonnie Ray at the end of the summer that Lala had been in love with me for about two months; that she lay sick the last week of her love with my annual photograph in her little pink fingers. Aw, Christ Jesus! The Sink millions! The Sink Mansions! The rooms with pink fur floors. Lala … Away to Stevens College in Missouri, and I never set eyes on her again. For that matter, I never laid eyes on Tonnie Ray all summer either. Strange, but true. She never even hinted trying to see me again.
Or I could’ve been a cool slob in other ways.
But I wasn’t. I was drawn out of the house. I drove downtown and saw all the sweaty Jaycees in the streets. The way I see it, people in the subdivisions of Dream of Pines started noticing the pine trees were beginning to grow up a little bit in their yards from that devastation twenty years ago when the Sink boys hit town and went into the lumber business — the Sinks had everything but the stumps razed in five years, then they turned on the stumps them-selves and made a fortune making them into paper when the war broke out, but of course pine cones fell off every’ where and accidentally there was quite a new little forest coming up in the subdivisions now — and these people in the subdivisions became very self-conscious about there being Beauty, after all, within the city limits of Dream of Pines. All of the younger men, some of them even Yankees and Midwesterners, turned into Junior Chamber of Commerce personnel. The entire basketball squad graduating from Dream of Pines joined the Junior Chamber of Commerce. They met, and did all that parliamentary procedure hockey. Garbage cans looking like green stubby policemen began appearing on the streets and on what the new signs called avenues. A monthly Yard Award was called into being by the Jaycees.
A bunch of beery good old guys went out and hacked away the vines and trash from a monument. It was a monstrous boulder with a tiny, almost unreadable brass plaque up front. Three soldier’s names. Lost in World War I. Back in that heap of blackberry bushes and ancient rotting pine needles behind the high school. With the cool snakes, the slug slime, cobwebs, and the rock moss and ferns hugging it close. The Jaycees found it. Earl, Bob, and I always knew it was back in there; we hadn’t read the plaque and didn’t want to. We knew it was to the Dead, back in there; somebody’s Dead. It was … gloomy, gorgeous, and deep: oozy, even. With the Dead dignified with the spookiness they deserve. With the spiders and scaly, repugnant creatures, back in the mossy shadows and sordid growth, touching it, wrapping around it adoringly. “Its ours, ours,” they hiss. Not everybody knew it was there. It was in the bottom of an odd scoop — as if real bodies were in the ground in front of the monument — which appeared in the old thicket that scratched us as we passed on the sidewalk from the gym to the classrooms. Earl saw it first one morning about ten. I stared a long time before I picked it out. “God damn. It’s a tomb,” Bob said. I saw the boulder go on back in the shadows, and I knew it wasn’t a tomb; I could see the chisel chips all over it — a scaly living thing, itself. “We won’t tell anybody about it.” “You know everybody’s seen it” “Nobody’s ever said anything about it.” “Why’s it next to the high school?” “It crawled up here.” “Monroe, you dopey fucker.” I can tell you that I didn’t walk that walk alone at night, even when I was eighteen.
One night I couldn’t get to sleep thinking about it. I thought of how nice it would be to disappear — Lost! — into World War I and then come back underground to lie under the noses of the high school students, back there in that serpent gloom. To get out of Dream of Pines, and yet to haunt it! This was the best idea I’d ever been given.
The Jaycees found it, peeled off the moss, killed the snakes, poisoned the thicket, and the monument lay at the bottom of the hill now like a big bone in the sun. I read only the first name on the plaque — something Smith. I was sitting on the stone at noon and the sun was like a fluorescent lamp leaning against me. The temperature was a hundred degrees. I tried to feel something. God of the shade and sleeper that I am, I did open my eyes wide as I could and try to feel something here on the stone of the three lost men. I got a hot profound nausea and a headache.