Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

I lay down on the car horn. I had quite a horn. It was loud, and by some accident at General Motors, played a whole harmonic chord, like C against E and G. It sounded like a band tuning up. It pierced, was rather regal, and could not be ignored except by the deaf. All right. Ann gave up and walked back to my car and got in, leaving her door open. She was the first girl I’d had in the car.

“Ann. Why aren’t I good enough for you?” I said right off. I knew good and well that wasn’t the issue. All the signs were that I was too good for her and was bending down to her heroically.

“You do talk , don’t you?” I asked her further.

“I know a guy that would kill both of us if he knew we were together,” she said. God, she’d spoken to me. She looked beautiful in the sunset at five-thirty — thatwas when I was talking to her. Her raincoat came apart.

“You don’t wear a brassiere, do you, Ann?”

“Don’t you talk like that.” Her voice was steady. It had a low harsh music in it. That pleased me.

“I’m sorry, Ann.”

“Don’t write me notes. Don’t follow me around. You’re not big enough or old enough. You wouldn’t want me if you knew you might get killed for wanting me.”

“I heard you had a baby. Did you?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“You did, didn’t you? I don’t care. I had a dream about us. You liked me and took off your clothes…” I stuttered this out.

“Oh yeah?” she took it up. “What’d you do in this dream?”

“I just stared. Looked at you.”

“You see. You’re not ready to do anything yet, you see.” She looked away from me toward the sunset, and then all around at the scraggly pines growing outside her lawn; she seemed to be inspecting the whole globe. It was just a minute before night, and very red in the sky. “You know I’m the best piece of ass at Dream of Pines that has ever been, don’t you, Harry?”

“No, mam,” I got out. No, I didn’t know she was anything as deluxe as that. Ann laughed.

“They say I am. I am the girl whose butt don’t often hit the mattress, they say. Some guy was looking in a window and observed that when I didn’t know it.”

While she was saying that she was taking me all in, probably for the first time. I was exhausted by all I’d found out about her. I’d always thought of her as my private discovery.

“You come back around when you grow up some,” Ann said. “I haven’t got anything against you.” She got out of the car.

“What do you think of Malibu, California? I’ve got love for you. I’ve got money !” I yelled when she seemed to be leaving the car. She came back and put her red-haired head in the window.

“Don’t think I ain’t dreamed of all that money with you … Harry … Everybody knows love is the loveliest word there is, also. Don’t throw it around like you do.”

She went in. By God, I wanted her more than ever. She had a little intelligence, which surprised the daylights out of me. You bet I’d wait around and grow until I was man enough for her. I’d grow hair all over. I’d seen what a woman she was when I talked to her. All set Ann and I would wait on each other. An enormously profitable way to spend your spare time, waiting, growing, for Ann.

Two weeks later I drove the car up in the garage and there was the old man. It was twilight. He was sitting on the hood of his Buick. I knew by his weak smile that he was after me.

“That’s the way to park that old caroobie,” he yelled. I knew something was on his mind, like a ton of bricks. The old man gets friendlier than a faggot Japanese when he approaches me on bad trouble. He wants to establish that all is normal except one tiny thing, and that thing is the business at hand.

“Guess what Mr. Mick told me the other day?” he says. No relation to anything. I am alarmed. Mr. Mick is Ann’s wino father. Her name is Ann Mick.

“He said the reason he gave up wine the last time was that the air from the paper mills in Dream of Pines was so bad it cut into his wine and ruined it the minute he pulled the cap off. It was like mixing wine with raccoon dung, he said.” Big laughing in the garage. I’m struggling toward the house but the old man has got a great humorous cuff on me.

“It’s a shame about Mr. Mick,” I say. Let me go, old man.

“His daughter goes to your high school,” says my father. His voice has the crisp delight of profundity in it. What am I supposed to do? Deny that she attends the school? “She works for me on the sewing machines. She’s the worst worker I have. She smokes in the shop. Somebody told me she does something worse than that with somebody else back of the stacks at coffee break. I’m thinking of letting her go.”

“You know I have a crush on her,” I admit.

“I’ll say a crush. With dreams abut her, and singing songs to her.” He lifted out of his vest pocket the very note I gave her in the Film Room. It was the blue-lined note-book paper with ripped ringer holes, and then it was very crumpled and folded and almost yellow. “You don’t want me to read it, do you?”

I snatched it out of the old man’s fingers.

“You put our phone number in there,” he mused.

“Did Ann give this to you?” I asked.

“No. It’s been through several people before it got to me. You’ll be happy to know that. First, she gave it to her father, and he thought it was such a precious joke that he handed it over to Harley Butte, his foreman. Then Harley kept it a week, thinking about it, and finally decided I ought to see it He gave it to me. He said he thought I wouldn’t think it was very funny, and he was right. I don’t think this note’s very funny. With all the fine girls you could be interested in…”

He had me down. He began accusing me of trying to embarrass him. He said he didn’t need that, and that my mother Donna, who was a very fine lady, didn’t need that He said it was a slander to her name that Ann Mick was the first girl I chose to show any interest in, because (he whispered) Ann Mick was a little “harlot” that everybody knew about. He finally got so upset, saying we wouldn’t mention any of this to Mother, and that this matter was “Closed. Closed, you hear?” I couldn’t understand him. I’d agreed to everything he said long ago, out of sheer fright and humiliation. But he was forcing himself into a nervous panic, still holding onto my arm, and looking out into the dark back yard as if there was some specter there which yet threatened his life and family. I do believe he was holding to me protectively and not just to keep me from running in the house. I’d seen the old man nervous and full of clamor before, but never like this.

The old man was a converted Presbyterian and was occasionally flooded by the idea of being morally circumspect He’d quit smoking and use up a bottle of Listerine in one week trying to expunge every hint of the weed within and without his body. He’d begin drinking worlds of milk and throw out the one bottle of sherry in the house, which he and my mother touched only about twice a year anyway. He’d walk to work and back, a distance over all of five miles, with his hair combed neat and slick and a modest pin-on bow tie at his throat — other days he despised bow ties as menial-looking — and he would have some book in his hands: a dictionary, or a book of poems by a Presbyterian missionary to China, what did it matter. He never cracked it, but made sure to have his name signed gloriously on the flyleaf, and all he wanted out of it was the sober sanction that a piece of literature in the hands gives one. He’d get home drunk on sunshine, goodness, and his own sweat. He would be concerned about his family name, which meant that he was concerned about me. He called me into the kitchen, where he’d have two glasses waiting. There he began, “Well. Tell me what you’ve been doing,” and engaged me in a sort of contest at milk-drinking while we waited for the answers to come out. It all ended with our drinking so much milk we were ready to puke; the old man churning himself into a dull butter of meditation about my life. Not one understandable sentence having passed between us.