“.. I have had too much in too short a time. My brains are turning to mud. I need to put my foot on some rock, and you may be that rock, Thomas.”
“What are you wanting to tell me?” demanded Thomas. “You’ve got genius and you’re getting it regular and you’re lying in your bed moo-cowing? Why’m I kneeling here? I got a ninety I. Q., I been wandering around in a funnybook for six years being hooked by every sharpie in the pulpit, I got this looking at me in the mirror, I couldn’t find twat if I paid for it, and I’m led down here by a guy that hates my guts to babysit his roommate that can’t live with his own luck, well I’m getting back to sleep and that for your information is the only fun I have!”
Thomas waded out of the room and smashed the door to. Fleece let out a prolonged swoony sort of groan.
“Look who was here!” I said, leaping out of the curtains. Fleece started in fright. Then he tried to settle himself into a sort of corpse stiffness again, his back to me. “I heard, I heard. He would not be your rock, the rock ran, eh?” Fleece would not respond. “I was surprised. Thomas. My God! I can foresee the day when nobody’s a pastor any more. All the rocks’ll be wandering around in a funnybook. Matter of fact, they’ll be pissed-off when a simple soul comes to them with his guilty little diary.” If you know Gleason, with his Reggie Van Gleason the Third voice, I was talking like that, the dandified baron with a cold. But nothing from Fleece. I knew he’d been serious with Thomas, that he had not known I was there. “Why don’t you get your ass up, Fleece?”
There was another whole day of silence yet. I came in at a late hour. Fleece was sitting on his bed. He had brewed himself a cup of instant coffee with hot tap water from the lavatory. He gave me advice.
“You need to have at it with one girl for a length of time, my friend. Buy presents, work her delicately. Hold hands in the movies. Pet. Neck. Begin begging. See her slip her underwear off with tears in her eyes …
“Be under standing yet press on. After some days, hear her beg with another kind of tears in her eyes. She has built her house around you. Meet Daddy, who thinks you’re someone she’s hired to take up her luggage to the dorm and is surprised to find out you are her spark, as Mommy calls you in letters to her daughter. But know the reality (outside, the mob howling that you can’t have this girl); minutes after Daddy and Mommy have driven off back to Rolling Fork, she can’t wait for dark to fall. Drags you across the highway along the path laid out for the cross-country team, by the orange markers on trees and cloths tied on limbs, your shoes hitting all the roots in the wood-path. Down a hill to the pond. Through the blackberry bushes on the dam, seeking the smaller path veering down on the back of the dam, in moonglow. Through the rotten leaves, the snails, the snakes, to a shelf. See and hear the dress fall lightly, see that movement of hands to her back, see the brassiere cast afloat, watch her bend, pull off the wispy hose from her legs, the brilliant white panties torn up off her feet, because she’s lying down now. See the long fingers on your belt buckle. Have that, my friend. Have the zipper zipped down for you. See your watch taken off, feel your pants clink down with the wallet and your belt buckle weighting them. Feel air on your thighs, my friend. Then save your woman, cover her moans, fill her. Be an eel in waves of soup. Try to swim until you evaporate. You were her hero. Then the next morning see her all crisp, combed, new dress, sprayed hair. Glancing by you as if the competition for her had not been settled. Other men might make a play. So she tries to look pretty because they must all hurt knowing she is owned by you.”
Fleece seemed enchanted, telling this. It was so strong that, a couple of nights after it, I went to sleep trying to dream of a loved one. I forced it, I got the dream, but she was a woman at the bottom of a swimming pool. She wore hose, nothing else, and she was giving a lecture on sex. With a pointer she rapped on her sex and pushed it out a bit. You could barely see, because she had hair like a sheepdog, but you could see, as through the eye of a needle, two cooked hamburgers rammed together. Your eyes went up in horror to see her chest, where there were two suit-buttons sewed on her, bleeding. Her lips were moving in a cold lecture all the time.
It was a stunning dream I couldn’t do anything with. I think I almost always sleep too deep for dreams. Then one comes, like that old dream of Ann Mick naked, and it does nothing but ruin my waking time for a month.
11 / In Vicksburg
On a clear warm day I told Bobby Dove I was driving over to Vicksburg. He said wait, he wanted to go too. It was a Sunday. Fleece was still inching out of his mental spell. He had wanted me to hit him in the stomach again, and this time I did not hold back. He spat up a peck of odorific gobs and passed out. But he wanted to go out now. He’d also lived through another bout of the Hudson Bay flu. He put a towel around his neck.
We went west on 80—the top down — past Bolton, Ed-wards, Bovina, and into the deep-slit hills and trees covered with kudzu vine. Eighty was a thin, cracked road full of tar repairs. There was a big sun, but the wind was so cool it was like taking a fine spray of water on your skin. I dialed the radio, was going to pass by a white church service, when Fleece hit my hand. They were singing the invitational hymn. It was noon.
“Can you hear her singing?” I slowed the car to hear. “Whatever church it is, my mother’s there. She wants to go down the aisle. She thinks whatever is wrong in her home might come to her when she’s in front of the congregation.”
“My mother might be there too,” I said.
“I can’t hate her. I can’t hate somebody who starched and ironed all those shirts for me. (This isn’t your mother, god damn it, it’s mine!) All I remember are the light blue ones. They had so much starch in them the arms stuck out like wings. I had to strike through to get into them. I went out to the bus stop feeling like a kite. The wind actually moved me around, I had to hold on to the bench. That damn button up against my neck to ward off colds … It would be easy to wish I was a kite, I’d take off, with my mother holding on to the string. Kick those fluffy clouds with my shoes, stay up there and just report on what the weather was, all my life.”
I told him I was glad my mother would never have been satisfied with that little baby blue dream of me.
“There’s a sweet wolf in everybody’s past,” he said.
“You’re quoting somebody.”
“Me. Myself.”
I parked below the Illinois Memorial, and started following the markers. We went into the marble halls, saw the busts and read the bronzes, saw the bas-reliefs of the armies squirming flab bergasted, the pretty long-haired bullies they had for officers; the sober yet flamboyantcolonels on their bronze horses rampant; the green vegetating bronzes worked on by the rain. I pitied the idiots who cared for such scenes. I was among the idiots who cared for such scenes. I lay my head down on an old brass hoof. I bit it when Fleece turned away. It tasted like my useless trumpet mouthpiece. We saw the names of the dead, we saw the kudzued hollows and walked the fields where the earth was still low in the old trenches.
“The South isn’t dead,” said Fleece, beginning to run down a hill.
“Hot damn! Gawd no,” I said.
“We’ll strike in the deep of the night!”
“The deep of the hot damn night!” Fleece was having a good old time. He whipped off the neck-towel and slung it around.
“Follow met” I ignored him. He ran a ways, then came back. “I said follow me! I’ll break you ovuh the code of the Confedrasee, boy.”