“This morning we were going after the letters. To steal them.”
“But since then I’ve gotten afraid. You see, he offered his fields to our botany class. If he looked in that crate in the attic, he would know somebody in the class took the letters. The house was open, but he never said we could go in it. The teacher didn’t know we were in the house until after I took the letters, and then she ran us out. The next Monday, he was over at her house. He was polite but very angry. Something had been stolen from his house. She knew I’d been in the house and called me to come over. A friend of mine drove me over to her house. He wasn’t in the house. She told me he was sitting in his car out front and wanted to see me. I walked out and leaned on the car at the window across from him. The street light was barely catching him, and the fear I had already was nothing like what I had when. I recognized him, vague as he was. He wore the same big hat, leaning toward me. The same man who broke my camera and came at me with his belt. His name was Peter Lepoyster. He had wavy tan hair. ‘You were in the house. Do you know what I want?’ he asked me. I said I didn’t. ‘Well if you are the class leader, I tell you, you’d better get what has been stolen back to me, and very quick. I think thieves and their collaborators should be shot.’ I was so scared I suddenly got bold. I asked him who he thought he was. I told him my father was a general of the National Guard who would come against him anytime he showed force against me, and would cram him so far back into Whitfield he’d never see enough light to find his own dick. He stared back, his teeth apart like some big biting jackass, and he drove away with my hands still on his window. Did you ever see somebody fifty years old who wanted to kill you? Christ, what a mistake I’d made. He knew I’d seen the postmarks of Whitfield on the letters, but I knew he knew who I was and could find out where I lived.”
I took this into account. Fleece, feeble and nervous in his robe, seemed to be looking around the parking lot for Peter as well as for the old demon, his mother.
“Did he ever come around?” I asked him.
“Never. I suppose the threat of the National Guard held him off, maybe.”
“But now there are two of us against him, Fleece. If it came down to it, we could beat him up and steal the letters. We could wear masks. We could disguise our whole bodies, even.”
“No. I didn’t want you in on it. It’s all mine, whatever it is. I was sick. I don’t want you a part of it. It’s mine.”
“I have the car.”
“You have the car, but you don’t have the address.”
He made me mad, letting me down. I went behind the screen, took the three cigar boxes off the shelf, and stole them from him, the letters.
“You saw what I did. I’ve taken them. Now they’re mine. There’s no way you can get them back. I’d hurt you if you tried it”
Fleece looked amazed at the boxes in my hands.
“You don’t even know what you have,” he said. “You can’t imagine how … snorty you look holding those boxes to your breast.”
“Well, I have his address now, on every envelope. I’m willing to steal her letters. I want them.”
Fleece was shocked right in the eyes. He seemed not to have thought of the envelopes.
“They’re mine. I love them. I love the old brown ink on them so much. Those quotation marks around lush vigilant digit, your clitoris …” Fleece paused reverently, cutting in with a smile of pure glory.
“I know,” I said, smiling also.
“The anguish of the joy of the words …” Fleece eased the boxes out of my hand. I had made my point and didn’t care. He seemed to absorb a nervous power in the repossessing of the letters, holding them. I would never have denied him that.
“What I want to hear is the woman speaking back. We’re going to steal those letters, Fleece,” I said.
He laid the boxes in place on the shelf. “I guess we have to. But you know what I want more than the letters from her? They could be dull little notes. I imagine they are. What I want is her. Herself. To steal pleasure with her, or from her, I don’t care. Somewhere in New Brunswick, the lush vigilant digit of her clitoris, I don’t care if it’s forty years old, which is about the age I’d make her, somehow.”
5 / Mean Times
However, nothing happened. Fleece became concerned again about his classes and labs and his medical career, I saw little of him, and I — well, God, there was nothing else to do — was becoming an intellectual. This gave misery a little class. I became concerned, concerned, concerned. I went to the library and checked out The Sound and the Fury and War and Peace, hiding the books from Fleece, because I knew he must be long beyond these. Also, while in the library, I thought it might be true to the manner of a scholar to pluck off two or three random plums which caught my eye, and what caught my eye were two books on Geronimo, the Apache. I went for the name, Geronimo, for one thing, and opening one book I read this piece of advice from an Apache father to his son:
My son, you know no one will help you in this world. You must do something. You run to that mountain and come back. That will make you strong. My son, you know no one is your friend, not even your sister, your father, or your mother. Your legs are your friends; your brain is your friend; your eyesight is your friend; your hair is your friend, your hands are your friends; you must do something with them. … Then you will be the only man. Then all the people will talk about you. That is why I talk to you in this way.
The passage came alive in my hands. You must do something … your legs, brain, eyesight, hair, hands are your friends. You must do something with them. The father himself saying even he is not your friend. At the same time my eyes fell on the word, name, Geronimo, again and I realized that my last name could be found mixed up in it. It was silly but true. Monroe could be found in Geronimo. I was delighted — even more so because I didn’t know what the hell was giving. But it was all a high throb.
My condition as an intellectual became even lonelier. I wanted to read the Geronimo books straight through, but when I saw the photograph near the front of one of the books I stopped cold. Geronimo was the least-favored hero as regards looks that I’d ever seen. This man was really just a bit too ugly. He was furious. He held the rifle with a terrifying claim on it. There was no glib negligence here as in the portrait of your ordinary romantic hero. There were no stars in his eyes, only a narrow cross-focused anger. His mouth frowned, and here it was uncertain whether he meant to frown or frowned involuntarily through loss of teeth. And there at his neck the filthy scarf. The single handsome thing in the picture was his left knee, brown and bare above his boot. It was a good knee. He propped it up, had his elbow resting on it. (My son … your legs are your friends, I remembered.) Perhaps his legs were the only feature which hadn’t betrayed him. But then back up to the face. It was too akin to senile lunacy, too much the old desperate male idiot we would all come to. So I put the books away, disheartened. I knew Geronimo was a part of my private, intellectual life, I couldn’t imagine who else would be interested in him besides me and the authors of these books — I even went over and checked out all the other books on him, although with no special happiness. Fleece saw the books stacked up by my bed and assumed I was writing a term paper on Geronimo for English or history. I simply shrugged. I didn’t know why I had them. Having the books — it was like being related to some mad bore in town whom you would have to visit sooner or later.