After the review was over, he found himself restored and happy. He knew what he would do when he got out. He’d go to Grell A. & M. and get a degree in music, which ought to be easy, with what he knew already. He’d hold down a job somewhere and maybe do it in odd hours, but he’d do it. Then he’d look around the states, choose the high school band he thought had the most potential, and offer to direct it. Naturally he’d get the job; wasn’t any other colored cat knew as much about march as he did. They’d love him: some big dead-serious band. He’d write a few pieces for them during concert season. He’d have them crowded around him like an orchestra on the stage of some city auditorium. He’d come down with the baton, and the breathable air in the place would just quit. The spectators would faint for a minute because the band was using all the air of the place to hit that first, oceanic note; then they’d revive, getting used to the thin oxygen of the place, and hear the band going big, high, low, but never thin, on something like “The Liberty Bell”—his band as ponderous, frightening at ebb and storm tides, as the Atlantic Ocean, which Butte had seen, once. Then talk about march season. He’d be dressed in a neat, simple tunic, and maybe be wearing a German artist’s beard, and flick his baton in the gridiron lights, and genuinely bring those mothers in green uniforms out of the surrounding pine trees, playing. It would be a surprise assault on the musical world the first fall he showed them.
So Butte went to work at my old man’s mattress factory last of the summer. Something he didn’t count on was getting married, but he did, to this moderately good-looking mulatto girl who was a native of Dream of Pines. The girl got pregnant immediately, and Butte never conceived of anything but that she’d go in the hospital at retail rate. If he’d taken her in at the charity price, he might have been able to start at Grell night school right away. As was, Butte concerned himself with saving a hundred and fifty dollars out of what the old man gave him during that period of fall semester at Grell. It wasn’t completely disheartening to him. He knew he’d start to Grell in January and make a name there. He didn’t despise the frame-making position the old man gave him at the factory. Matter of fact, he was lucky as loaded dice to get it. He could have gone to the mills.
However, one day in September Butte got low. It was after work, and he got to feeling blue about not being in Grell now when it was starting, and about being married and expectant with his wife so quick, and not having that old unboundaried feeling he had during free time in the army, and being in the rotten mill air of Dream of Pines again, living in a house on the outer edge of niggertown, where the clouds from the mills were sometimes just too heavy and juicy to float and fell on an individual homesite with an acidic fog that would peel the paint off the floor. Harley had drunk a little beer in the army. He was sure Sousa had done it at one time or another, because Harley found out he could write grand marches under the influence of a few beers. So he got home, told his wife something, and walked down the road to the bottom of a hollow where the Black Cat joint was.
He sat on a stool and treated himself to a few Regals, which were going for 200 in those days. He was the only drinker there as it turned night. By the third beer, he was really enjoying his newlywed melancholy, feeling hopeless and yet sure something would turn up.
“As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to play that moaning on the machine,” he said to the barman and owner.
“That’s Fats Domino,” said the barman.
“I said I don’t want to hear it. I’m your only customer here.”
The barman went to the juke and turned down the voice to nothing.
“Fats Domino’s from New Orleans,” the barman said.
“You mean that fucking stuff has gotten over here, too?”
“Was you in the service?” The barman chuckled, opening another Regal for Butte.
I was riding down the gravel of the Black Cat road a minute before this. I owned a black Chevy station wagon with a big console speaker for bringing in such cats as Elvis, Mickey and Sylvia, Little Richard, and Fats Domino, fixed in a pecan frame behind the second seat My radio, with this speaker, brought in these singers like they were alive and struggling in the back of the car. You could hear the grace note of one of those cat’s sighs. My wagon had 350 horsepower, moon hubcaps on the wheels, and was called a Snatch-Wagon by all the envious pubes round my high school. I guess it was sort of a sad affair, since I could drive it in, sure enough, and be the prince of the Dairy Dip for fifteen or twenty minutes, but had never touched the flesh of a girl; no girl’s backend had ever warmed the seat beside me. I listened to Elvis and Fats, and was assured by all their groaning around in unsuccessful love, that I had touched lots of girls, and had a special Love who always put me down, didn’t phone, had some guy newer and richer. I was fourteen, and this Chevy wagon was supposed to be my mother’s car, but I usurped it from her. The old man took a taxi to work and let her have the Buick. By this time, he was running scared of me. I’d broken out with a pepperish acne and lugged back and forth in the hall as if I was inventing ways to destroy myself; it was as if somebody had caught me in the hall and blasted off a shotgun loaded with BB’s at my face, two or three BB’s making it into my brain and festering there for years to make me crazy. I don’t deny I was a case in the teen years. I didn’t always know what I was up to.
I had this box of M-80 Salutes on the seat beside me. An M-80 is a brand of firecracker that explodes about like an eighth of a stick of dynamite. It’ll take the bottom out of a new zinc garbage can, and goes off under water. They’re illegal everywhere now, though you might pick up some out at a combination service station and grocery way in the sticks. Throw them anywhere, nothing defeats the use on these babies. I had a few left over from July Fourth which I’d been saving for a purpose of indefinite evil. Actually, I wanted to lodge one up the skirt of the school librarian and watch her rave off in pain and smoke. She’d called my un-satisfactory personality to attention a couple of times. Also, I had a few keen visions from television movies working on my mind: such feats as the GI lucking a grenade into the slit of a pillbox and smiling as fire was hes the Japs off the hill.
I lit an M-80 off a cigarette and tossed it down the gulley onto the porch of the Black Cat, then floored the Chevy away, showering gravel. I don’t know, the Black Cat was lit so dull and looked like such a lovely place to toss in one. It was a wooden joint which might really fall over with the blast, with great shrapnel tearing out because of the rusty tin signs around the door. I was feeling wonderful at the moment when I heard the terrific charge go off behind me. I winked to myself. “You’re supposed to be at the football game, Harriman,” I laughed out loud. It was such fun I vowed to do it again, and turned the Chevy around when I got to the highway pavement.
“That Fats Domino mess has gotten too loud again,” Harley was saying to the barman.
“Man, you got some ears I can’t eem hear it.”
Gah Dimmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! went the little item on the porch. Smoke rushed in through the screen door. The barman fell with a beer in front of the jukebox. Then they heard a car zinging away.
“I thought I uhs dead,” said the barman. “What was it?”
Butte went to the window.
“A car racing off. Somebody is throwing firecrackers.”