“I don’t smoke nor drink,” he said.
“You killed that cat?”
“My front yard right at noon Christmas day. I hate a cat. Now I love a dog, but I hate a cat.”
“Did you shoot him?”
“Naw. I choked her — it’s a female — I choked her with my hands. We had two birds, two bluejays which we made a feedbox for in our yard. She killed one of them birds which my mother loved”. He saw my disgust. “It didn’t hurt. I didn’t choke her all the way. I hit her head on a phone pole. She was scratching me something terrible. That did her.”
“It was a pretty cat.”
“I know it. I sewed her right on. I know it’s pretty.”
I was looking out the dorm window when Fleece entered the yard. He carried his suitcase. The rain was drizzling down. His suitcase broke open. A gift in Christmas paper tumbled out, with some clothes. He cursed and hurled the clothes back in. The gift he kicked. It scudded and broke apart, trailing the ribbon. Leaving it, he sloshed on into the dorm.
“Your present is getting wet,” I said to him. He didn’t even say “hidee” like he used to. He went straight to the bed, snorting and hacking. The Hudson Bay flu was on him. “I’d better go get your present.”
“You can have it. It’s your sort of thing.”
I put on my raincoat, went down to the muddy lawn. There in the rain was the mess of cardboard and ribbons and poking out of it, a.22 long-barrel revolver, black as coal. I presented the gun to Fleece. It was the kind of gun which if you missed your shot, you could go over to what you were shooting at and whip it to death.
“I don’t want the bastard. My grandmother gave me fifty dollars for Christmas. We went to Florida again. General Creech hauled me downtown to buy something with it. The pistol seemed to be the best bargain in town. It’s of some faultless German make that pierces the heart of a chipmunk from eighty feet. I tried to look fulfilled when I gave them the fifty. The goddam Christmas carols on the store radio were donging my head off. I finally made it as a son to General Creech at that moment, I did. Lucky me. I’m sick. I’ve been faking good health for six days so my mother would let me come back.”
“I can’t just take the pistol.”
“Yes, you can. I don’t want it. I’m sick, but I’m happy, in a way. Listen: When we were in the house in Florida, Creech’s glasses fell off in the commode. He was drunk and didn’t know it; he sat on the pot, flushed it, and the glasses caused a stoppage. His own horrible sewage backed up on him and filled up the bathroom. He wouldn’t let any of us know what was happening. He said he was taking a shower. I saw his fingers covered with toilet paper wiping up around the slit under the door. The odor coming into the house was dreadful. He was completely blind and didn’t even know where or what he was wiping up. But all the while he was yelling to us that there was no trouble, he could take care of it, even though he was blind. And he did. He found the PineSol in some cabinet, reached down the commode and drug out the clot, including his glasses, put the glasses back on, and by the time he opened the door, he was standing there normal as ever. The bathroom was clean as a pin and threw out a vapor of PineSol that would murder any germ from a mile away. Go ahead and laugh. I myself had to admire him a little.”
Fleece’s green irises lit up with a sort of bleak cheer. I asked him if any of his stories ended any better than that.
“Yes. I have some other endings now. I was looking at hairy Allen Ginsberg, in The New York Times, thinking of myself in the garage, naked, seeking ecstasy like him, about how publicly I sought it, what Creech would’ve done if my mother hadn’t taken such care to quieten it, even while calling one of the three psychiatrists in Jackson, who later called the house because I didn’t show up; add to that the minister that I was at least supposed to see. I turned off the lights in the living room, loving the dark — it was three in the morning — although catching a cold; it was chilly. I drew out old pedro and let him lay in the air on my thigh in a sort of warming-up ceremony to the second anniversary of the afternoon in the garage. The thing perked up halfheartedly, while I was thinking about Bet Henderson, this huge girl who takes the zoology lab I teach; she — at first, I didn’t think it could be true — seems to be making a play for me….”
I turned to my wall. At the wall I grinned and winked like a fool. I knew who Bet Henderson was; had an English class with her. I saw her in the Fine Arts Building, too. She was taking private voice lessons. The girl was one of those larger-than-life statues of a woman, at least six feet two. Perhaps if I called on her with Fleece riding piggyback, there would be enough man for her. She smiled at me; the moments passing her were full of puny wanting. Fleece, I pictured then; he would drown in her breasts. She went around with a group of three troubled-looking small men, one of them a real auntie sort, who seemed embarrassed that you might think they were adventuring with her in a romantic way. Her shoes, I’d noticed, were in the mode, but were such long, huge things they looked like some specially manufactured travesty of the mode. The same thing was true of her dresses. Me oh my! Right in style, Villager prints of geese and weathercocks, but an almost absurd expanse of cloth. I don’t mean Bet was a laugh. She was well-made; her ankles were dear long things; her lap, when she crossed her legs, was a trim valentine of muscles, which the cloth could not hide. She had narrow, damp eyes, and gazed mainly at her own lap during classes. Her nostrils were large and exciting; and her lips pouted out like a red cushion some fevered boy could lay his head on. She was shy! And she was an agony. It was as if, being horny, you had had a chance to blow up your dream-object of lust in the form of a balloon and blew it up, what a shame, just too big. I remembered particularly the day in English 101 when I saw her smile at me with a sliver of tongue between her teeth. As a matter of fact I had thought of calling her up to meet me at some withdrawn place. Fleece was ruminating on about her making a play for him.
“I know who she is,” I said. He was explaining her to me as if reporting on the wilds of some lost geographic scape. “Don’t be overexcited. She smiled at me the same way, tongue between the teeth. I think she wants a team of us.” He ignored me.
“I didn’t encourage it at first. I thought she was simple-minded, this huge girl making her need for me so apparent She’d stay late and watch me smoke a cig. Then one day we found out talking together that that naked girl I saw doing the Twist through my telescope was her! I perspired. I knew then she was saying take it or leave it. I left it like that at Christmas. But back now, if I can get hold of this conversation: I was thinking of Bet in the dark, catching the Hudson Bay flu in only my pajamas, concerned about ecstasy, how going for that big girl was as public an announcement of seeking ecstasy as one could make. I stood up and I was dizzy. Stars were in my eyes and I accepted them as the stars I was among, being in a rocket of desire. I couldn’t breathe well. But I took this as a symptom of being in the stars above the atmosphere.
“I took a chance, Monroe. As I left my house, ill, I shouted, ‘I am on the make, Mother!’
“Either you have to live in the uterus, or you have to slam it shut with an uppercut,” he said after a pause.
Fleece told me a new story during finals about an “upper cut.” I doubt if he’d swung his arm ever in his life in anger, but he was taken by the image of an uppercut, and I think he wanted to drag it back to his past to see if he could get some theme out of his miserable life with it.