“The important thing is that I’m alive and well. My mind is perfectly all right. I haven’t lost anything. It had a lot to spare. The mind’s a paradise. In five minutes. Give me five minutes, I’m going to feel like I could be a choirboy or a wino and everything between. Still. Still” He seemed to be restaturing himself. “Part of me is in the grave. Part of me can’t stand this. But that’s how magnificent the mind is. It can be there and up here too. In a minute I will see the freedom. I will no longer be a little VD spirochete with my tongue wrapped around myself. Did you hear that?”
“I’m listening.”
“No, I mean did you hear that image little VD spirochete with the tongue? Store that away, you lucky huncher. Have it, free! The genius is back in residence. Aw love it”
“You’re doing well.”
“I’m not going to oddball on you any more. Whatever there is left”—he pointed directly out the window—“I am here and I am whole! I can take it. God, I’m so happy for me. And you …” He turned directly at me as if angry. “You are my best buddy! You’ve stayed. Oh, let me mawk. Let an old man of twenty-six mawk on. You’ve kept me out of Whitfield, and Parchman. You’ve got the face of an Indian who knows the secret routes of the hills, and I trust you. Don’t hang your head like I was trying to grab your thing! Truth!” he shouted. It was my poem. You gave it to the wrong man, you miserable plagiarist. Where is it? My poem.” He tore through the pages. “‘There I couch, when owls do cry, On the bat’s back I do fly/After summer merrily … and there suck I!’ Lord love a duck!” He dashed the book on the floor.
8 / Harlem in Havana
Now for the first time in a long time I got a piece of real happiness. The University of Arkansas, up at Fayetteville, wanted me—$1200 and fees paid for the first semester, renewable contingent on my performance. As for Columbia, Iowa, and Chapel Hill, they were all too precious for me to enter and I say fuck them. Always later, I have been glad to read in the newspaper that the football teams of those schools have been thrashed into the sod.
I was holding my letter from Arkansas, rereading it on the couch in Mother Rooney’s diningroom, and Fleece was there; and Mother Rooney, both congratulating me. It was mid-afternoon. Fleece went to the front window. “Who is that?” he asked me. Across the lawn, parked on the other side of Titpea and to the north of us, was a Buick. The owner of it was up on the porch of the two-story house across the street The woman of the house was holding the screen door open and talking to him and pointing to our house.
“It’s Whitfield Peter,” said Fleece. “He hasn’t got any cane. He’s coming right over here!” This was true.
“Who?” asked Mother Rooney. She went with us to the lobby. We stood in the wooden shadows and saw Peter through the mottles of the glass doors. He pressed and pressed the doorbell. It activated the chime box behind us, which had two dead chimes and only a clink for the one working. He rapped on the door, and I saw his hat sweep down to his knee after each knock, expecting someone to open each time. He was a musketeer beating his knee with his hat, to no avail.
“Well, I must answer the door. What a polite man,” said Mother Rooney. I held her with my hand on her shoulder.
“Not for him,” I whispered.
He must have been on the porch ten minutes before he got back in the Buick and oozed around trying to get out of the dead-end street We watched him from the window.
“He knows where we are, Monroe. How does he know where we are? Sweet Jesus, I’ve got the creeps.”
“That was rude,” said Mother Rooney.
“That was a rude, ugly man we know,” I told her. “How could a handsome man like that with his manners be rude and ugly?” she asked me. Her seeing him as hand-some sickened me.
Only Delph, the pharmacist rooming in the other tower, and I were in that weekend. I picked up the phone Saturday morning late in the living room. It had rung fifteen or twenty times. Peter was on the other end. He was very polite. He wanted to know to whom was he speaking and was flowery in his apology over the number of rings. I asked him who he wanted.
“Does a medical student, Harry Monroe, still live there?”
“He died.”
“This was a young man with a beard and spectacles. He wouldn’t have died. Someone has told me, the gentleman I arrived at this number by, that he was living.”
“But he just died. This happens, that people die, of all ages.”
“To whom am I speaking?”
I thought he knew, and I hung up. Having seen him at the door of the house, I had an occult suspicion that he knew every step I took.
Sunday night I finally fell asleep, with Byron’s Don Juan held up to my chin like an old spicy blanket I’d read half of it and was floating on the possibilities of the rest of it Fleece shook me.
“What’s this? Friday night he called my stepfather asking for you. How did he know to call General Creech’s house? Creech gave him the number for this house. I was six feet away from the phone and … The bastard comes to the door, he now knows our telephone number. How? I was talking with Creech, I was beginning to like him, and the phone rings. It was Peter. Creech was fifteen minutes on the phone. Peter told him that, in light of the fact he was talking to a general, he himself was a colonel in the governor’s corps years ago. This really disgusted the General. When he hung up, he told me that, whatever esteem I held him in, he had won his stripes, and not by marching in a herd of influential men past the governor’s mansion, being waved to and coloneled right on the spot by the governor. We were talking, and the phone rang again. Creech picked it up. The same man. He wanted to know why the phone kept ringing at the number the General had given him. The General gave him the same number again, more carefully.” Fleece had had a ruined weekend.
“Now you ought to know it all,” I said. “How does the cut on your stepfather’s head look? He was talking to the man who put it there. Did he tell you about what happened at Oxford, the truck turning over and all that?”
“Yes.”
“Peter was the one that dropped the crosstie. Silas saw him with a bunch of local kids, doing it”
“Silas!” Fleece spat out.
“He happened to see this. Hate him, but he was the one who told it to me, and he didn’t know who your father, Creech, I mean, was. He simply happened to be there. And I should tell you,” and I told him so much my jaw ached, about taking Catherine out on dates, about having seen and heard Peter face to face, about inadvertently giving Peter the phone number and as much as the address of the house.
“’Well, I’m relieved. I thought he was a spirit. I thought We were being closed in on by a phantom. You’ve had such secrets!” he snarled. “Such secrets. But I’m glad to know there is an explanation.”
Later in the night, I heard the phone in the living room ring, six times at least. I heard Mother Rooney open her door and try to make it to the phone before it quit, but she didn’t, and the last ring clung around my room.
Wednesday, I found this one, a letter in the “Our Reader’s Viewpoint” of the paper.
Mississippians who care:
The State Fair is here. I do not want to take away any of the excitement of it. It is October cool days the time we all like the sawdust under our feet at the Fair. The Royal American Shows here giving their temptations to the Mississippian in every facet.