The time was a couple of years ago at that red brick Baptist church that he was expected to attend. The invitational hymn started, and he sneaked out to the front steps in a sort of adventuresome hate of the music and everything. He fell upon these redneck children who had sneaked out of church before him. Their shirttails were ripped out and their hooked-on neckties were barely hanging on, because they were going crazy tearing the berries off the nandina bushes and throwing them at each other. Fleece took offense and demanded that they stop, but they wouldn’t One of them threw a wad of berries in his face. He could not help himself. He dove at the child and crushed him with a tackle. The others came up, thinking it was a game, Fleece all dusty with one shoe off, but he was for real. He hurled a smaller one back in the bushes, and, spotting some long white neck, he drew back and hit this boy’s chin with an “uppercut” in a full wheel of his body. As he did that, church was over and General Creech and his mother were the first out on the steps. Hence, they saw him socking heedless at the children. The pastor came out and separated the angry parents of the children from Fleece. Fleece maintained that he would fight for the beauty of the nandina berries, and that he would hit other children and their parents if anybody wanted to tear off any more berries.
When he finally got to the car, with his lost shoe, his mother was crying piteously. She wanted General Creech to leave her and Fleece at the church so that they could see the pastor, who might, she cried, if it was not in the realm of the spirit, arrange a psychiatrist for Bobby Dove. It was then that Creech came through on Fleece’s behalf, suddenly and strangely. He explained to her a rule of life; number one: Contention is always going to break out. Number two was a point of legal description: there were many against one. True, Bobby was almost an adult, but opposing him had been at least seven human beings, small, but army ants are small and so is the coral snake. His mother dried her tears to this speech.
“And here I drive in that priceless free ‘uppercut’ to that kid,” said Fleece. He demonstrated the actual “uppercut.” It was a stilted, finicky gesture, but there was great passion in his eyes. His glasses had slipped down to the end of his nose, uncaging the happy evil in his eyes. I thought he looked like a puppet, again, some renegade puppet which had begged for human life so persistently that he got it.
Then later, in February or March, all clear of the Hudson Bay flu, he brought in a bottle of Mogen David wine — tart & greasy — and some paper cups. We drank the first glass, and he took off his Japan coat.
“Why are you here? I thought you practiced your horn this time of the afternoon. As a matter of fact, I didn’t want to share this wine. Didn’t want to open it yet, really.”
“I hate it, practicing any more. Give me another dip there. It’s not good but you feel it already.”
“I can’t. It’s for later tonight, with someone else.”
“Gimme some, you bastard. I need it. We finish this, then I take you out and I buy something else. I know I was rude last week when I said I didn’t want to listen to you any more. And listen, you’re not a bore. You’re interesting. C’mon, gimme. I think the problem is, you … speak above me. Hand her over, swear to God. You can say anything. I’ll just listen and drink.” I’d been thinking for an hour, all dry and bored.
He was holding and shielding the bottle from me. He’d given me the telescope, the pistol, the marijuana (which I was afraid of and hadn’t used), and, in fact, the freedom of his lab alcohol which was right there in one of the cigar boxes. But the wine was a more kindly thing and I was enraged that he wouldn’t give it to me. I darted at it, Fleece holding it high and low.
“It’s for her and me! A rendezvous at midnight. An actual rendezvous … to sip.”
“I’ll hit your little ass, then!”
He turned his back and I hit him angrily. He huddled over the wine. “She approached me today.” The huddling little coot was speaking on, and rather evenly, while I pounded his back like a spike. “She was in a wasted condition, wild and desperate. And, Monroe … stop beating me!” I stopped. “She asked. And I said: ‘Yes!’ I said ‘Yes!’”
I began pounding his back again. I told him he was a liar, a bag of hot air, that he lived in the realm of boring snot, etc. He only huddled there, uncomplaining, so I came to a disgusted rest, not even wanting the wine any more. But of course he spoke.
“I pity you, Monroe. Such a sad person. Just a violent drunk. You could take your place at any roadhouse in Mississippi and nobody would even look up. Just a violent tight is what you are. A one-cup-of-wine gladiator. Mississippi really needs more people like you. You could join the Ku Klux Klan and ride around at night beating up girls who teach the theory of evolution, or maybe stab a Negro imbecile in the back. Oh, and you’ve got your scholarship practically paying you to be like this, you’re such an investment to the college, because all the Hedermansevers and the other trustees of the school want out of you is that you become a weapon for the Lord, and you for sure with your style, with those kneeboots and your scarf and, oh certainly, carrying that pistol around, looking at it like it was a scientific breakthrough! and all this alongside that half-ass lease on music you think you have, being a creature of moods, you’re just more of a body than Mississippi could invent”
“Leave me alone. I’ve been mooning around for a month. I don’t know what to do.”
“One thing I still say,” said Fleece, capping the bottle, at ease. “You aren’t going to attract any nookie if you wear those boots and scarfs and costume. Now that I’ve got a little on the line, let me give you a little advice. Be a doctor. There isn’t any trade outside of being a minister that attracts nookie like a doctor. You could quit mooning around wanting to hit people. You could put all that mean funk of yours behind a microscope for a few years. It takes no great mind, really. Look at all the stupid doctors.”
“Thank you very much,” I said.
But I took the advice seriously later.
7 / “Fight! Fight! / Nigger and a White!”
— ANONYMOUS ALARM, c. 1956
In April one day I went to the post office. Every now and then there would be a free sample of soap or hair oil or the Dream of Pines newspaper, which I had never asked for. But I got a surprise. It was a formal invitation on a gold border.
The Beta Camina High School (Colored) Marching and Concert Band solicits the honor of your presence at Capitol Street, Jackson, Mississippi, for review of the Gladiators in formal parade competition, April the ninth, nineteen hundred and sixty-one, ten o’clock ante meridian.
H. J. Butte, Director
The Gladiator Band
Beta Camina, Mississippi.
That prosperous-sounding middle initial gave me a pause. Then I knew who it was. I wondered who else he had mailed these fine invitations to. Who were the big followers of jig bands in America? I thought of Harley penning that note, and I pitied him. The time he’d spent. Yet who gave a fig?
Fleece had been home the past weekend. When I saw him I invited him to go over and see the band with me. He told me that if he had to pick out the one variety of music he despised the most, it was Sousa. It was all just a wad of Prussianism and trombones. Then I told him that it was a Negro band which ought to be awfully good; that they were marching in a contest on Capitol Street. He perked up oddly. He took a newspaper clipping out of a book on his table.