I had my thrill in the restroom, climbed out the window, stole the books. A campus cop would’ve had a nice shot at me as I was wriggling out of that roll-out window. That was hard. I got down and ran through the Fine Arts parking lot. Livace’s old DeSoto was there. I spat at it and crossed the highway. I think this was a high point in my physical health. I felt clean, fit, and mad as an elk.
Up a hill was the century cedar, a dull evergreen hanging shaggy, as seen in the lightpost glow in the middle of it. Underneath was a stone lovers’ bench. I burst right in on a couple, who were going to it with all the lust a mouth can get at. They got up and ran off together. The girl, Blakey Newman, so I saw by her name inside, left a book, The Story of the Old Testament, on the bench. And on it was a flattened Doublemint wrapper, which I used as a bookmarker later along with the book, and made a B in the required Old Testament course.
I did have quite a pile of books in my hands now. I seemed to be gathering an energy from them as I sat on the bench I’d won by ambush. I turned to the picture I hadn’t seen in a while. There he was, captured by the camera. Preserved by the saltwind off the Gulf in Fort Pickens, on the island of Santa Rosa. I put my face on his outraged face and looked cross-eyed at him. Hard as it was, I bent my eyes and laid them on the rifle in his hand. It was close and dark with my face on his picture like this. In this dark there were no friends, no women, no speaking, no songs, no tobacco, no drink, only the cheated anger, the unused bullets, and cutthroats and spleenstabbers in every corner.
What I especially liked about Geronimo then was that he had cheated, lied, stolen, mutinied, usurped, killed, burned, raped, pillaged, razed, trapped, ripped, mashed, bowshot, stomped, herded, exploded, cut, stoned, revenged, prevenged, avenged, and was his own man; that he had earned his name from the Mexicans after a battle in which he slipped up close enough to shoot their senior officer with an arrow; that the name Geronimo translated as “one who belches” or “one who yawns” or both at the same time; that he had six wives all told; that his whole rage centered around the murder of his first wife and three children by the Mexicans; that he rode with the wind back and forth across the Rio Grande and the Arizona border and left be-hind him the exasperated armies of the moonlight. I thought I would like to go into that line of work. I would like to leave behind me a gnashing horde of bastards. And I did have on my action boots.
I stood up. The campus was meek and depopulated. Then I saw the cars packed along the curb outside the auditorium. Something special was going on. Lights were on in-side it The bigwigs, the trustees, and the constant preacher-saviors of the college, the ashen-cheeked deans, were in meeting, I thought. But the administration office lights were not on. Only the auditorium was lit. I thought I heard a piano inside. I was standing beside a skyblue Cadillac. You pretentious whale, you Cadillac, I thought.
I jumped up on the hood of it I did a shuffle on the hood. I felt my boots sinking into the metal. “Ah!” I pounced up and down, weighted by the books. It amazed me that I was taking such effect on the body. I leaped on the roof and hurled myself up and pierced it with my heels coming down … again, again. I flung outward after the last blow and landed on the sidewalk, congratulating myself like an artist of the trampoline. I spun to the next one, a Lincoln. With my boots only I stove in a fender, flamp, flamp. The paint came off inflakes. Once more to see the top of a car. I was dancing for real now. Doing the spurs. The dance floor bent and gave through, raw blades of tin reared up. I pounced off all the way over to the grass. The Lincoln looked diseased … caved-in, speckled with leaden marks. Hundreds of dollars’ worth, already. I hiked along jubilantly. I simply walked over the Buick. I mounted it at the rear bumper and tramped into the back windshield. The safety glass popped out in a web, no shattering, just a hole and a burst of crystal. I gained the top. I had another floor. My boots did their duty. The steps that cost. Five dollars a heel and toe, at least And at that rate, I planted my boots down on the top and held my books to me, looking at the stars. There was no paint left when I sprang off the hood. I kicked out the lights with happiness and faced the next car. It was an older Chrysler, white, dirty, with sailfish tails and a sunken trunk, a ‘59 model. What did it deserve? What could I treat it to? I was a little out of wind, but stepped up on the trunk. I squatted down. This trunk was a little sturdier than the others, with the sunken continental kit.
A good thing I looked through the rear windshield. Somebody was on the front seat, asleep, perhaps waking now. I slipped off the trunk. The man was already looking around. He knew someone had been on his car, damn every-thing I could do slipping off the trunk. He opened the door, and there we were looking at each other across the roof of the Chrysler. I spoke first, in fright.
“I’m the campus police.”
“Would you know what time they usually end the rehearsal? I’m waiting for my niece. She’s in the musical. I know I’m parked in a faculty place, but at night, I thought …”
My frozen eyes and ass, it was Whitfield Peter. He stood there with his head full of tan hair, under the streetlamp. I took off running.
“You aren’t the police!” He yelled. He also demanded, “Stop! Stop!” and he was chasing me. I made it to the bell-house next to Crestman. They had this bell that they rang when Hedermansever won a football game, and this is what I was behind. I kept to the shadows and reached the basement of Crestman. I ran through the game room, the TV lounge, past the milk machines. The athletes had ripped all the phones off the walls and had turned over all the candy and drink machines upstairs and if they saw a sluggish man, they would attack him, so I ran. At the steps on the other side of Crestman, I had twenty feet of grass between me and my dorm. I kicked it Safe! Home free, with all the freewheeling strange sorts of my dorm. I loved all of them. Safe, walking by their rooms, I saluted them, at their desks, playing cards, hunched on their beds, looking regretfully into their mirrors. They seemed strong in their afflictions. And the ones with the completely ordinary faces — all these were my friends. They all formed a thick sanctuary of bodies around me.
I got up to the first floor and there halfway down the hall, talking to Dave the dorm-counselor, his hat off, seeming perfectly respectable, was Whitfield Peter. He was raising a hand to indicate my height. I took to the stairs.
Fleece was at his desk. The room was cleaned-up but crowded as usual. He had a glint in his eyes.
“What a machine that T-bird of yours is! I’ve learned how to drive tonight, my friend. You didn’t care if I took her down Raymond Road a ways, did you? Monroe, I took that whore up to seventy-five miles an hour! She responds to the old foot, doesn’t she?”
I got back my breath. Opened the top drawer and gazed at them, cold and oiled and wrapped in towels. I plunked them down on top of the chest to see if they were still loaded from the day of the Cuban missile crisis.
“Whitfield Peter’s in the dorm. He saw me sitting on his car. He and Dave are coming up here. I know it.”
“Sitting on his car?”
“What’s going on in the auditorium? His niece is in it.”
Fleece kicked the door and turned out the light.
“Put the guns up. What’d you do to him?”
“I jumped on the trunk of his car. He was in it. He scares the hell out of me.”
There was some time to talk before someone came to the door. Fleece told me they were rehearsing for “Oklahoma!” in the auditorium. He knew this because Bet had tried out for it and hadn’t made it and had been melancholy for a week. The spring musical was a big thing at Hedermansever.