Fleece looked over at the black drugged dog in the corner. Dung and dried urine were all over the floor. “You want to go on observing what the nerve gas does to dogs for three more years, till you have the Ph.D.?”
“Hell, it’s fine with me. I don’t mind helping the army develop this. It’s better than shooting a man with a bullet They wake up alive … not a one of ‘em has died on me yet.”
“I’m not talking about the nerve gas. I mean you, do you want to sit here watching what it does for three years? I just don’t know, can hardly wonder, what a person like you would do with that Ph.D. in pharmacology when he got it.”
“I know one wonderful thing about it. The army won’t draft me into Vietnam while I’m here. If I get out I’m one-A.”
“You’d go if they drafted you?”
“Sure!” I said. That was in the days when I thought they were bringing in American soldiers to help shoot communist fanatics who were blowing up children on school buses and walking into harmless restaurants in Saigon with explosives strapped to their backs. I don’t mean the Viet Cong never did that. I mean that at the time, I thought that was all the war amounted to. My dream was that, if they got me to Saigon, even unwillingly, I would see some skinny bastard trying to place a bomb under a school bus full of children and be possessed with enough knowledge about my machine gun to sight on and scatter that champion all over South Vietnam; that the children in the bus, helpless darling little black eyes, would blow kisses to me, and I would show them the wizened smile of old democracy on the march, reloading. A simple dream, taken right out of the movies. But that’s what I had in my mind. One boy, Anderson, had been drafted right out of the pharmacology graduate program by the army; Anderson was slow, squat, and had bad vision. If they wanted him, I knew they were thinking about me. I’d thought about the draft a good bit.
“Monroe, you’ve got to get out of here. I know. There’s nothing here for you.”
I’d known that too, for three or four months. But it was hard to quit. Things were rather easy in the department. Everyone smiled at everyone, as a matter of form. We had thousands of dollars of equipment around us, and there was a technician, Jimmy, who could make any harebrained dream of an experiment into a reality — glycerinated guinea pig uterine fibers, chick embryos, damn the cost. There were two secretaries transmitting it all into publication, reading the earphones of the pocket-size tape recorders: “Caffeine on Rat Tongue” and “‘Retreating’ Magnesium in Rabbit Skeletal Muscle Suspensions Treated with Violin Lacquer.” It had all the hum of a factory, and I was sure I’d be cast out as a Ph.D. within the decade.
But I knew the day I walked out a Ph.D., I would drive home, hear the old man call me Dr. Monroe, then come back to the lab and shoot myself full of #227 itself, and let them watch me shudder, faint, and piss. Or might as well. I hated every minute of every effort of every bit of what I was doing, when I wasn’t writing poems in the log.
4 / Christmas Drummers
I have to back up in that year several months and tell about the first Christmas I did not go home to Dream of Pines. The radiator on my T-bird had rusted out, I could drive it for twenty minutes before steam came out of the hood, but this wasn’t the only reason I didn’t go home to see my brothers, my sister, my nephews and my nieces. It pained me not to be there. I thought about the mistletoe way up in the oak trees around the house; I could smell the spice of the pine needles. My sister had a new infant boy I’d never seen. To the truth, they all cared about me dearly and I’d failed in med school so quickly, I just couldn’t face them. My failures had all been vague before, but now I had one, an expensive one, as definite as a wrecked Oldsmobile. At the time, I was so low, I can only look back and congratulate myself on one thing: I was not carrying the pistol around with me any more. Even though I wore the sinister reptilian coat.
Gad, what to do? All was aimless. I went down to Wright’s, where Silas worked, and played a few records in the booths. I watched Silas, who stayed busy being himself. I admired his energy. He watched out for drab and puny girls entering the store. Instantly, he was their helper. He would make a date with them right on the floor, perhaps selling them a record as he did it. The girls with dry hair and impure complexions, the girls wearing glasses with rims upswept like steer horns. Once, I saw him put his hand on the shoulder of an especially odd girl, and came out of the booth.
“That girl was damn near a pygmy!”
“Hands off,” Silas warned me. “All mine.”
One afternoon a mulatto with flint-like patches under his eyes walked in and went straight to the revolving rack where the band scores were. It was Harley Butte. He had aged. His wife was with him, and his four boys. The wife was his same color. She looked pleasant, but was somewhat old before her time. The boys were of a fresher pumpkin color. They kept around the mother. Silas saw them and rushed over to draw a piano bench out for some of them to sit on. I was in the glass booth and heard nothing. I only saw Silas mouthing at them, with words of great courtesy, and saw the woman pull the baby boy up in her lap. The baby boy wanted to climb up in the showcase of the window and touch the drum set, an exotic collection from Slin-gerland all bright with an oyster and pearl finish. I had an impulse not to come out of the glass booth and show myself to Harley. I don’t understand why I just watched him as long as I did. All I know is, it seemed proper and cozy in the booth, hearing nothing, and it took almost a revolutionary effort for me to open the door and give him my hand.
“Where’s your band?” I said.
“And what the hell’re you doing here?” said Harley. “I been looking for you on TV. Everybody likes those Beatles. I thought you mighta got in with them.”
“It’s been a long time. I’ve been in med school.”
“Who told you to do that?” He seemed angry.
“On my own. I haven’t played my horn for three years.”
“What’d they tell you in college?”
“I told him, Harley. He was playing good trumpet,” Silas jumped in.
“I know he was playing good trumpet. He got a scholarship on playing his trumpet.” He hung down his arms, disappointed, disappointed in me almost to the point of wrath. “I’ll bet somebody told you music doesn’t usually make money. Yeah, I’ve heard that enough times, them telling me.”
To change the subject, I asked Harley what brougiht him to town. He said there was a parade on Capitol Street this afternoon. He didn’t think much of the parade. It was a penny-ante affair with a Negro Santa Claus in it. In fact, he’d put his foot down, saying he could not drag the Gladiators off to every occasion and anybody’s parade. He said it was his opinion that this practice would dilute the class of his band. But the principal of Beta Camina said he was wrong. The principal told him, “Your trae school spirit has been tested and you have received a negative grade.” The principal said, Well then, he’d walk with the band this time. Harley replied he didn’t care about the walking in the white suit and that business, but it was still his band. The principal told him future events would determine that. Then the principal was in his own white uniform and helmet — which he had been hiding in his closet for months — fast as a wink. He told Harley that he might redeem his school spirit by, certainly, traveling to the parade with the Gladiators, directing them as to what music, in what order, they were playing — since the principal did not quite yet comprehend all the details like that — and walking on the sidewalk with the band, primarily to spy out for the threat of that lunatic white man who had pushed the child at him the last time he was in Jackson.