We were next to the men’s room. The door flew open and Peter rammed out He’d cleaned himself up. His hair was oily with water, his nose was bright, but he was purple about the forehead and an ear. The big hat he fended about was more of a bag now. I wet my pants when he came out shouting.
“You fellows help me get these cooties out of this hotel. Do they think this is Washington Dee Cee? Kick into them. Thrust them!” he said, doing unfinished demonstrations of these acts. Then he saw Harley, whom he had overrun. He jerked back.
“Mutt! Treacle!”
He began swatting Harley with his hat “What did you say, you banjo?”
Fleece was at my ear, hand on my arm. “Don’t,” he said. The fact was it seemed like a sissy theater performance. Harley waved at the blows glibly, as if Peter was a gigantic gnat, but only a gnat. Some of the bandsmen were looking back and halting. At the height of the attack, Harley somehow jerked his head and they shuttled on.
“What did you say? Liar! Smuthead! Coon-beard!”
“I said if you would turn around you could see my band was nearly ‘bout out of this hotel and I said I never meant them to stop here. And if you’ll put your hat back on your head, I’ll put mine on too and we’ll never see one another again, Mister White Man. I’m sorry that we ran in—”
“That thing?!” shouted Peter, sneering at the helmet “Yes, do put that fancy thing on your head.” Harley did. “But did you hear the ed-u-kay-shun squirt out of the high-yellow tadpole? Would you look at that helmet? Look at that beard. This one’s hardly left a place for being a nigger.” He struck off the helmet with his hat. Harley caught the helmet. Six or seven white people were looking at them from the Delta Airlines booth. Harley began edging away. I looked beyond the people at the booth, and here were two cops coming in the front, being led by one of those women with newspapers. Peter saw them. He reached out and caught Harley. “No, sir, Mister Neegro. I believe you’ll stay until the police—”
“We can’t stay,” Fleece whispered to me. “You won’t keep your mouth shut and they’ll get you with the pistoL We can’t.”
I told him I was staying. Fleece hightailed it along the edge of the hall, then rode the revolving door out, disappearing like spun-off slat from the door — a hilarious thing, actually. But my own nerves broke with the cops approaching. I felt the gun was murmuring like a toad in my pocket I couldn’t wait here, not even silently. So I did much the same thing as Fleece, even more breathlessly, because I knew the cops were closer on my back. I was thinking about being caught by them in the slat position against the revolving door, maybe being unable to detach from the door and whirling around again, pistol slinging out and clattering right under their feet… but I got out free, and by the time I was out there, I was feeling utterly lousy about the whole thing. Fleece was nowhere around the rear driveway. I decided, all right, I’ll stay here. No further.
Five minutes, and a new black Cadillac full of colored men in suits drove out of a lot across the street and entered the hotel driveway, coming to rest in front of me. The glass went down, the driver spoke.
“Did you see a colored man with a helmet and white uniform, with a beard? Look like a band director?”
“He’s inside with the law and another man.”
“That white man with that hat?”
I told them yes. They rolled up the glass. After a minute they drove back across the street and parked at the mouth of the lot. Deeper in the lot sat the four long yellow buses full of the Gladiators.
Harley finally came out, by himself. He saw me and he looked miserably weary, with a tiny sneer, like that was all he had left. He flicked the helmet; some snap of disgust for me in that, I thought.
“I wanted to stay but I couldn’t—”
“I didn’t need you, little Harry. One of those cops, named Victor. He saw the man push the kid at me, and he told it. There wasn’t anything to it That was all, except for that Whitfield man.” Harley smiled. “He went crazy all over again when I told that cop, Victor, I understood this man had been in Whitfield and I was ready to call it even. That man went all to raving, swinging that hat, wanting to know just how I thought I knew that”
For the first time I got Peter’s face together with the Whitfield letters in my mind: the purple bruise of the forehead, the severe hat, among the lines of brown ink prose, and there, his wife lying on the prose as if on thorns, tortured all to moving every which way.
“—but you just think about that horn. You don’t need to get in trouble,” Harley was saying. That black Cadillac in the parking lot honked. I walked over with him.
“That slick one, he owns that car. He’s the principal of the school. Now you know what he wants? My band, he wants my band. The man couldn’t find the key of C if it came in a bag, but he sure do want this suit I got on. We drove a hundred miles up here with the air conditioning on, all us freezing, while that genius was explaining the principle of why we needed it, said science dictated that a number of bodies together gave off heat which the air conditioner was equalizing, and he wants to take over my band.”
When we got to the car, they were holding up their hands for us to be quiet. I could hear the radio announcer out of the rear speaker, recognized the station as WOKJ, the colored station in Jackson. You could get B. B. King and a lot of other fine pluckers and honkers on it, and on Sundays, “Ain’t No Flies on my Jesus,” “Little More Jesus, Little Less Rock-and-Roll,” and “Crazy Stranger, Where Yo Home?”
While the announcer was still going, Butte whispered, “I made the band. Now he says he wants me to go off for two years to earn my Master of Music degree so as to deserve this band. Try to get a hold of that He took a correspondence course in music over the Christmas holidays, so he says he could fill in, in my absence. He also told me I might be outlined for a better place than Beta Camina.”
“I think he’s right, there.”
The people in the car began applauding lightly.
“The man said it. We won again,” said the principal. The radio had been announcing the parade winner. Harley got in the back seat, crowding over. One of the men shook hands with him. The principal, with his arm crooked over the door, looked me over before they rolled off.
“Who is that?” he said, speaking right at me.
“He’s from my home. A musician friend,” Harley spoke from the back seat.
“I thought it was Roy Rogers. He got boots. He got a pistol pokin’ out his pocket.”
I had been cramming the gun down in my raincoat so long to assure its secrecy, I guess I made a hole in the old thing. The whole barrel was out. The principal drove off in distaste, carrying Harley; then the buses rambled past me. In the back window of the last one, two of the Gladiators were giving me the finger.