“He had left the organ. He had stopped playing … yet you pulled a gun, you shot… after all, a harmless organist …,” Zak said.
“Was not harmless,” I chattered. “Don’t forget …” We opened the basement door and were out of the building. I grew warm suddenly, lying to Zak, all flushed out in a false cause. “I had to. I did it all for your fiancée in Denver.”
Zak himself was a harmless queer, and believed in heightened moments of friendship. He looked at me with ineffable gratitude as he went off to his car. Zak had a lot of grayish blond hair which he tossed around emotionally, true to drama.
Another day, a week later or so, I was still tingling in my head, feeling that I was in danger. My mind pounded, for the first time in my life, as if it was a thing distinct from me. And in my body I experienced cold sprays of nerves. Life shot through me as if existence really meant something. Before pulling the trigger in the auditorium, I seemed to be only verging toward life — say, like a man eating color photographs. But now the excitement was hounding me. I was thinking about Adolph Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, listening to Sonny Stitt on the phonograph. Then I heard David Newman, the sax-player in Ray Charles’s band. What a thing, to have invented, finally, the horn that actually talks? I shouted. Fleece looked over at me snidely.
“Sounds like a nigger who’s been made into a bagpipe,” said Fleece. Thinking back just then, I realized my old friend Harley Butte might’ve said something like that. I remembered that Harley and I were in the same state. He was directing some band somewhere, surrounded by pine trees. I wondered if he had them out on the field now, under his baton. By now he had had several months with them. Were they as good as Jones’s band in 1950, ten years ago? How could they be? The bursting dust, the blue Napoleonic spades.
“Fleece, there’s so much that you don’t know. Let me take care of the music. I’ve been at it for ten years. A decade.”
“You can have music. Outside of a few very soft things on the piano, I hate almost all of it. As far as I’m concerned, you could take all your clarinets and operas and hymns and flush them down the commode.”
“What a narrow … what a bigot you are. You stupid bastard. I’ll tell you something. All art aspires to the condition of music.” I had heard Livace, who taught me trumpet, quote that the other day. In my case it was a grand thing to believe.
“All life, to which all art is at best a whining stepsister, aspires to the condition of sex,” said Fleece. I suspected he was also quoting, but couldn’t call him down for it with a very clear conscience.
Ashlet, the drunk, who had discovered Fleece kept lab alcohol in the room, looked up from his Pepsi-Cola high-ball.
“Hail, I’ll take sittin’ on the front steps over this. The wisdom around here, you could drown in it.” He went out the door with his drink. Then he came back in the door. “Monroe, you could get your gun out again. Now that there was entertainment.” He winked merrily.
Eventually I went back out to the front steps too. Fleece thought the front steps crowd was depraved, and it was. They told a brand of joke out there which was a true revenge attack on taste, beauty, and human emotion. They used sex only as a sort of springboard into horror and slime. From there on it was all scabs, fornication with the hairy nostril of a crone, the sow with the chastity belt versus Picklock Ned, and all that. The idea was to poison the audience, make them ashamed of having heard the thing. Then came the muddy laughter, the closing of the eyes. Then came another joke more meticulously vile than the last.
“Shoot him for telling that joke,” begged Ashlet, looking at me. You never knew how serious his despair was. The rest of them were not certain of me, either. Nobody would venture a joke right away. Came the pall, came some belle driving by us in a green Cadillac convertible, all of us — if the others were like me — wanting to jump on her wind-shield spread-eagled and beg her to let us in. Fleece walked in from his lab once, right in the midst of a pall. Ashlet was abjuring me to shoot something, anybody, anything. “Hit something! Knock it overl” I wore a kerchief around my neck now, and my raincoat, in whose pocket I indeed had the pistol. I thought all of it lent an air of handsome danger. Zak was there. He was all for the kerchief. I was making an A in the drama class, no sweat Fleece beckoned me with his finger. I left, walked to the room with him.
“What do you think you’re doing with that crowd? You standing there in that kerchief like you were their hero.”
“I am their hero. They need me. I have this pistol.” 1 drew it out and clumped it on the top of the chest, taking off my raincoat. I had taken the pistol with me a few times to chapel and to class, looking at the Pee Aitch Dees and dwelling on the enormous possibility that I might use it again. Ah, one wished that his enemies were less boring and more violent. I tugged the knot out of my kerchief and laid the kerchief across the pistol. This set a provocative little still life on the chest.
“Now off with the spurs,” said Fleece.
“Ah, no. I’m an Indian, not a cowboy.”
He hissed. I lay down on my cot with my raincoat. The coat I liked very much too. It had a certain secret amplitude to it, like a cape but not that wanton. The high calf boots, I confess, grew heavy as the day wore on. It was good to be off my feet.
“Goddam knee boots with his pants stuffed into them,” Fleece derided, observing my footwear. “Listen. Do you think you’ll ever get any pussy wearing that outfit?”
Fleece was exasperatedly taking off his jacket, one of those old shiny Occupation affairs with a luminous yellow map of Japan on the back. At the shoulders Japan was stitched in the same luminous thread in that choppy style which evokes the Orient. There was a smaller rendering of the same idea at the front breast pocket. He wore the jacket constantly. It was a little big for him, but he had got his hands on it somewhere, and wore it, I think, to commemorate his true father, who had died fighting the Japanese. Otherwise, he wore white shoes — in the dead of winter — pleated pants which, since he hadn’t gained a pound since he was fifteen, he’d worn for six years; and usually, white shirts and blue or black dingy ties under the jacket. Another failure of style, I noticed as he began to undress for the shower, was that his socks had been drawn down almost out of sight by the backs of his shoes. The revealed ankle was hairy and chafed.
“With his pistol too.” He picked it up like it was a smelly thing, then opened my drawer and flung it in. “Hero of the criminally stupid.” Fleece pored over me again. “I ought to call the cops. I really ought to call the cops.”
“By the time they got here, I’d have put on my loafers and combed my hair. The pistol wouldn’t be in the room. I’d call your mother and tell her you’re berserk. She’d be here faster than the cops, and when they all got together, you wouldn’t stand a—”
“You deliberating, taking-advantage son of a bitch. You know my mother must never, never come in this room.” He meant it very seriously. I was sorry I had pushed it to this degree. He went on, “What do you think you’re up to? Please. Don’t think I haven’t seen the picture.”
He reached under my cot and pulled out a couple of the books. He opened the right one to the photograph of Geronimo. His dirty fingernaillay right against the soiled kerchief. The old chief seemed to have taken fresh offense at this new finger upon him. He was cross-eyed with rage. I hadn’t seen him for two weeks. I was absorbed by the rage.