“Shut up,” said Lock. He had a certain courage.
“Don’t look at Harry when you say shut up. Say, look at me. I don’t need no damn gun. I am who I am and I’m tired of you. Look at me. All right.” Harley hit Lock on the jaw with a tight abrupt punch. He had an absolutely clear shot because Lock would not take his eyes off me. Lock — I saw his closed eyes and his nose, knocked upright — went down tearing the sawdust. Then he just lay there, with his legs pulled up to his stomach. I began trembling. But Harley only watched him a moment. Kneading his right fist with his other hand he walked right up into Peter’s face and braced his legs.
“Don’t hit him,” said Fleece, rather calmly, in the way of advice. “He’s too old, and he’s crazy. Don’t.” At that moment Peter did seem such a cheap shot for Harley to take; he was wearing that severe bronco-cavalier hat, maybe a new one of that line, and he looked like a scowling propped-up dummy you’d throw balls at in one of the skill booths. But Harley was committed. He seemed to have just heard Fleece in the middle of his swing, and slowed it, hitting Peter with a sort of loose fist in slow motion. Peter turned his face with the blow and took a helpless step back. Then he put a hand to his cheek, like he’d been merely stung, and repostured, looking straight at me. He looked at Fleece.
“Who is this young man? Should I know him?” he asked me. “He seems to know me.”
“The letters from Whitfield,” said Fleece. I wouldn’t have said that, myself. Peter became very strange in his face, and bore down at Fleece. His eyes were like red dark sightless caves; they seemed to feel toward Fleece; they lay on him lingeringly.
Lock had stood up, and now he looked at Harley, in amazement. He lifted one finger in front of his eye.
“You won’t live, Mustard. Take my word. You had people with a gun on me when you did that. That was nigger, nigger, nigger, what you—”
“You shut up,” said Peter, talking to Lock.
“I’ve got friends,” Lock went on.
“Yes, your friends, fool, your secret agents. Shut up. If you do have a gun, Mister Monroe, I wish you’d use it now. I wish you would show him what a bullet feels like.” Peter said this, but at the same time, he threw his arm over Lock’s shoulders, as if he were Lock’s real uncle. Lock shrugged the arm off, still glowering at Harley. “Very well. Ask them to shoot you,” said Peter.
Gillis Lock seemed to be turning his fist back and forth and studying the occurrence of his bicep muscle through his shirt. “Have you really got a gun? You’d better have a gun,” he said, snarling.
I took the gun out of my pocket. In my mind I heard an eruption of barking, yelping laughter. Oeronimo. Hearing it, I had to restrain myself from shooting him on the spot.
“Get out of my sight, both of you,” I said.
I put the gun back, and walked toward the far gates. Harley was right astride me. He wanted me to give him a ride to Beta Camina. Fleece told me the two of them were still back there, staring at us. I was feeling foul, in all the ways you can feel. But I told Harley certainly I would give him a ride home. Beta Camina was only sixty miles south-west of us, so we went through the gates, around and up to the house, and Fleece got in the well of the T-bird, and I drove, on 80 toward Vicksburg, taking a left somewhere. I’ve never felt sleepier. It was like having a hangover without ever having had any fun.
We passed weeds and a number of dirty asbestos-siding houses close to the road; through the yellow caution lights, with the lone policeman asleep in his car under the service station port, the towns flyspecked and chilled in gray, the lonely hound with heavy teats moving out of the headlight beam, the fogbound Nehi signs, over the highway with its tarred creases, sometimes beside watery ditches, sometimes seeming to be on a concrete tightwire, sometimes cutting ahead like the point of a hurtling plow, tossing houses and trees to each side. On your right a delta mansion, on your left a brick ranch-mode house, in the middle of brown low fields. Then we crashed over some sunken railroad tracks. My car, I thought, broke apart on them. It kept going, but something had been opened in the muffler. There was a new sound inside the car, like constant, violent hail.
Harley talked the whole while. He still couldn’t get over the fact that Peter and his friends were the first humans he’d seen coming out of the tent. I was bewildered too. But I said very little, I was so sleepy. Also he couldn’t get over what luck it was to meet me. In a sluggish dull gloom, I tried to sympathize with the excitement of meeting myself. After the railroad tracks, the perilous sounds of the car kept me awake as he talked. Some months ago he had made a trip to New York to see his publishing firm. They got him an agent. In three days he was out of money and was phoning his agent. Now he didn’t know if he had a job at Beta Camina or not. He’d written a letter to the army but they had not replied. He had committed certain acts interpretable as grave marks on his professional record, such as being absent the last two months of the school year; then there was his absentation the first two months of this school year. They might hold this against him, especially the principal, but they knew his value, as he did. He wasn’t going to beg for his job back. He had invented that job. The publishers in New York had assured him of his value as the band director of Beta Camina. He knew that when he left Beta Camina it was not that a position had been vacated. The position had moved away. He sometimes thought of the kids waiting for him in the band room. He wondered whether, if he could get over this period, this hump, which was not a hump really but a whole range of dismal mountains of funk, he might not like to be in that band room forever. He didn’t know yet, even as we traveled toward Beta Camina. He had sent money home. Sometimes he had wanted to get in the letters he sent and be the face in the hundred-dollar bill, smiling at his wife when she opened the mail, putting a leg over the edge of the envelope, the boys rushing to him. Daddy, Daddy. He could barely compose himself enough to write a note to go along with the money. All he wanted was the time and opportunity to be great. He wanted to be far away from the principal and Beta Camina. Some day he wanted to call his wife and his children to a place which would give them a grandeur of comfort and ease. He did not want to simply come back to the house — I’m old me, tee hee — where they would curse you after the surprise had worn off. And another part of him wanted to commit suicide against everything in his mind, and simply fly, stroke away, nothing but muscles, nameless. Then again he wondered to what dire condition the principal had led the Gladiators in his absence. The poor kids.
We circled through a village of old bricks and launched onto a road freshly laid with red gravel.
“This will be fine,” said Harley. He wanted to know if we wouldn’t come in and take some coffee. Fleece had been asleep since Jackson. I was too groggy to get out of the car. I told him I’d just open a window here for a minute.
The last thing he wanted to know was whether I was pretty sure he wouldn’t see Peter around if he happened to see me again. Could he count on maybe seeing me again without seeing Peter. Because maybe he would like to see me some time and talk about how this literary plan of mine was coming on.