“Get your fingers off of him.”
Fleece let the pages flip by. He looked at the check-out slip in the back. “This book is two months overdue. You idiot.”
6 / Fazers
Driving home for Christmas, I passed the fields like dead palomino horses — winterset in Mississippi — the sun a cold bulb; and later, over the Vicksburg bridge, saw the river: a snake in throes, its belly up.
The raincoat, the scarf, the boots, the little pod of iron lying against my thigh — I was sticking with them. I had nothing to lose.
At last I was in Louisiana far enough and I picked up WWL in New Orleans. Bobby Blue Bland was tearing it up with “Letcha Light Shine!” Now what has happened to Bobby Blue Bland? He used to deliver enough raunch in one tune to get me through a whole day. But at this time, the Blue Bland band also rang up a sense of disgrace in me, for playing fourth-part trumpet in the Jackson Symphony Orchestra. This was really the hind tit of music, even if you were playing Beethoven.
I needed some solo Beauty in my life. There were my secret poems, all right. I would write out a whole ink cartridge in one night. I had tried them on index cards, on yellow paper, on unlined paper, on flyleafs, on onionskin. I had tried green and red ink, black, blue. In the mornings it was astonishing to find all those poem-looking things. Nothing had helped. It was all miserable. It was like visiting a site where ants had been killed — the dead flat sprawl of the words, the small kinked bodies of the letters.
The old man may have looked a bit dismayed at the scarf and the boots. I’m not sure. It began as a happy time, this first Christmas reunion. Harry is back.
Uncle Harry. My nephews are waiting for me with the football. I’m the passer and the star. There isn’t any telling how much I love my nephews and nieces. Ah, leaping for the high pass and crashing in the cane for a touchdown. Son of a gun. I remember my two little nieces on the front steps, at twilight, calling us in for the Christmas Eve supper. Inside we go for the oysters, the duck with sherry, the turkey, the ham. Afterwards, my nieces flock to me and sit in Uncle Harry’s lap. They’re wearing tiny maids of the Alps outfits. Their tender bottoms — the softest, most innocent flesh on God’s earth — are on my knees. I begin feeling like Jesus telling the parents to let the kids come to me. One of them kisses me and I know how unsullied and just slightly moist love can be. I wonder will it be like this when I marry. “I can count” says the baby. Then I watched them all tearing apart the presents. There’s nothing like seeing a kid yank his prize out of that colored paper. “This thing is mine, free and clear!” the eyes seem to say. Turns your old soiled heart around. If somebody could’ve stopped it there, it was my peace on earth.
In honor of me as a college man, there is beer in the refrigerator, for the first time ever. My brother, my foster-brother, my sister, and their families are here. The house is crammed with wonderful people and greenery and candles, the children are surging, and my old man is about to crack with pride. It’s me, it’s old wild Ode Monroe that filled this house up like this! he seemed to mean, wearing the Christmas sweater from me. I loved him. I had a four-beer glow on, but I would’ve loved him anyway. I loved him in his age. He had put on five years in the four months since I’d seen him. But he was a man. He could bear it.
My mother was pretty all over again. But though she still looked something like Elizabeth Taylor, she had aged and was on the down side of Liz Taylor’s beauty. I trailed her. I saw her in all the lights and shadows of the house. I couldn’t quit staring. I became long and rude in my stares. She didn’t understand me. She lowered her eyes, embarrassed at me. I was embarrassed at me. She sighed, she told me that smoking cigarettes made me look like a hoodlum. The fact was I couldn’t stand to see her lose out to that old simpleton Father Time. I hated it I hugged her and hugged her, at every decent opportunity.
When the rest of them left, and I was still there, it was hard to make talk at all. I took the pistol out in the back yard, and before I knew what I was doing, I was shooting at birds. The birds — robins, sparrows, thrushes — alit on the bare gray limbs. They weren’t used to being shot at. So even with the pistol I killed three of them. They would stay on the branch after I missed a shot, not understanding. I was learning the weapon. The last one I killed I hit him shooting four times from the hip. He burst apart in feathers and fell ten feet from me with feathers floating around his corpse. I reloaded and shot at the corpse in rapid fire from the hip. The corpse jumped about, its head vanished, sod flew up. I had the scarf and boots on. The old man had come up behind me sometime during the blasting. I never heard him.
“I believe he’s dead. What do you think you’re doing?”
“There’s nothing else to do,” I said.
“Do you realize that bullets travel? You shoot a twenty-two bullet in the air, it goes a half-mile until it hits something. I just got a phone call from Oliver Sink. One of your bullets came through a window in his dining room. Now isn’t that nice? He’s just a little damn bit upset.”
“Oh, God. I’m sorry. God knows. Listen. I’ll just leave. I’ll leave, go on back to the college.”
The old man told me he didn’t want me to leave. This was an accident; he never meant for me to leave—looking at me uncertainly. We could talk. We could get along fine. I drank beer and skipped supper. When he came in the den I was tight enough to call Lala Sink, see if she was home for Christmas. I was at the phone when the old man came in. The Sink’s phone was ringing; but I hung up.
The old man told me a couple of whore jokes. I thought they were corny, but I laughed. Missy and her missing husband, Edna in the barrel at the dude ranch, etc. The tone was ribald, words and laughter were passing between us. I told him one. It was one of the jokes from the front-steps crowd back at Hedermansever. After the punch line, I looked at the old man and knew I had crossed the line.
“What did she say?” asked the old man.
I knew I couldn’t do the old woman’s line again, and the trembling voice was important. I repeated the line flat: “Them weren’t no sack of potato chips. Them were scabs off my—”
“You think that is funny? My lord!”
“I didn’t make it up.”
“Think of this: your mother was in the house when you told that story.”
“But.. aw, Happy New Year, Father.”
“Are you drunk?”
Since then, very little has passed between us except money.
Fleece was late coming back to school. We were well into “dead week,” the free time before final exams. A boy from Morton whose father was a pharmacist was selling amphetamines in the hall. He wore a canvas jacket with the hide of a yellow cat — house cat — sewn on the back. Above the hide, written in Magic Marker, was “Dead Cat,” with quotation marks, just like that. Morton, Mississippi, was a nasty mudflat where they killed chickens and drove them out in trucks. So I don’t guess the fellow could help it. He pointed to one vial of yellow pills bigger than the rest. They cost two bucks. “Them are the Cadillac of bennies,” he said. Truck drivers were known to take one of these and drive from Morton to California and back without shutting an eye. I bought one of them off him. I was behind in everything except drama class. He noticed me eyeing him. He stunk, as a matter of fact. I don’t think the cat hide had been tanned well.