Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

So I thought after I left him in the garage that he was only being a Presbyterian again, with all this business about the family name and so on, but that was not it. Or that was only partly it. I think I saw into this matter later.

I went to his office again one afternoon to look at Ann. He did not see me come in. The old man was sitting on a stool near the shop window and peering down at someone very concentratedly. I walked over — I suppose quietly — and looked past his shoulder. There was Ann bent down at her machine. I know he wasn’t looking at the middle-aged women around her.

“You didn’t fire her, did you?”

He jerked around coming out of a very soulful smile. Then he seemed to become concerned over what he was doing. He squirmed around right-face on the stool. He bit his lips, closed his eyes, and failed once at crossing his arms.

“Who?” he said weakly.

Oh, Daddy, oh, Ode Elann Dupont. You’ve been in love with her too, haven’t you? Or at least you like to look at her very much, don’t you? I do not think I was wrong about it. The fishiest grin I’ve ever seen popped out on his mouth. I looked past his shoulder down to Ann on the floor, and seeing her, blooming heavily forward, unbrassiered, under her tee shirt as I’d never seen her before, her legs crossed, her hairstrands falling over into her eyes like wispy copper as she bent to the machine doing her little bit, I knew she was too much woman for me, for one thing, and for another, no man could look on her without becoming a slobbering kind of rutting boar; she did not enchant you: she put you in heat. You thought of a pig-run alley full of hoofmarks running between you and her — lots of hoofmarks, dried deep in the clay — for after all, she was known to have mated with others. She was at the edge of a water hole, bending down for a drink with her feminine parts up in the air. I thought of the old man looking at her.

He seemed depraved and perverse, this old boy who should’ve been out of the running years ago. I didn’t like him. I suspected him of really having tried something with Ann, of maybe keeping her in some kind of wagebondage lust. I thought of the old boy naked, using her like a trampoline. I’m sure he never did anything but look, like me, but uncertainty in me has always bred a phantasmagoric imagination.

Well, to the credit of his honesty, the old man instantly gave up the sham and said, “She’s quite a slut, isn’t she?”

We broke out laughing when he said that. The old man and I are both amused by the concept of a whore. The idea of women being gored for lucre by some poor man has al-ways been a joke to bring down the house between us. We heard it called the oldest profession, and then thought of a cavewoman doing it for a glowing coal, a piece of fire from his cracking wealthy bonfire; an Egyptian woman doing it for a leek; a Hebrew woman doing it for water; a Roman woman doing it for an acre of German tundra; a World War II woman doing it for a radio. The only contact the old man and I had for years was whispering whore jokes to each other. We started giggling when the word whore was first mentioned. The worst of them all was told by me during a terrible period of my college life. It was about a seventy-year-old whore thrusting a bag into a dark closet where her lover was hidden; he thought they were potato chips, but they were actually the scabs off her own body. The old man closed his eyes and edged away after I told that one, not knowing his own flesh and blood son all over again. I really hadn’t wanted to tell it, but it had gone around for bowelish laughs among the terribly unhappy crowd I ran with at college. My resources were low; in my crowd, whatever gagged a maggot passed for humor. After I’d told the old man that joke, the whore jokes between us stopped completely, and there was, as a matter of fact, no further communication between us. I did us in as father and son when I told that last rotten one.

However, now we laughed together. I forgot all the vile imaginings about the old man. I forgot everything and laughed with him till I cried. I do believe it was all because of the pleasure of finally forgetting Ann. He’d called her a slut, and I at last believed him. She was a comic whore. I told her goodbye. You’ll be waiting a long time for me to grow up enough for you, Ann, I thought. The old man and I got out our handkerchiefs and wiped the tears off our cheeks. He reached over and held my shoulder. Too bad for you, Ann, I thought, looking at her still, past him. She looked up and saw us in the office and her mouth fell open with some surprise. That’s the most I ever evoked from her. Too bad you don’t get to go to that cottage in Malibu with me, Ann. What kind of gimp did you think I was? You whore. How dare you?

What a farce! I had come to the office with my suitcase packed and in the bed of my station wagon. I was intending to draw out the $800 in my account that afternoon. I had come to the factory for no other reason than picking up Ann, persuading her, and driving straight to Malibu with her. I thought I’d drop in and see her through the glass window again, and see the old man too, for sentimental rea-sons. I was laughing over the ruins of my first dream. The facts were of course that Ann was not strictly a whore. She never took money, that I had heard of. She did it with mature athletes because she liked it. I knew that. But it was somehow less humbling to the old ego to think of her as a whore than as a woman of pleasure. There were too many muscles involved in that.

And sometimes things are so monstrous you can’t do any-thing else but laugh. The old man liked to have her around him; he liked to look at her and think of her putting out; he liked to think of that tee shirt rolled up to her chin and of that red hair writhing and of her yellow teeth biting her underlip and of her shut eyes and smile when she was getting her paroxysms. Great God, he was the same as me, and that was what was monstrous. He could not bear to be picturing the same woman that his son was. He thought it was depraved. All that he knew of Presbyterian decorum was brought into question. That’s why he got so upwrought at me in the garage.

There was a light rap on the office door, and then the door opened and in stepped that devil Harley Butte. Don’t think I hadn’t been thinking of this man for a couple of weeks. I’d never heard of such an officious nigger. I just couldn’t figure him, the man who handed my note to Ann to my old man. Mainly what I couldn’t figure was what the old man had said about Harley thinking for a week before he decided to hand the note over. I didn’t know anything about a thinking nigger at the time. I knew of wild niggers, romantic niggers, lazy niggers, comic niggers, fishing niggers, foxy niggers, even rich niggers, but I knew nothing about yellow thinking niggers.

Harley was colored more toward white than I’d imagined him. He was my size and handsome, with points of brown at the brows and eyes, and stiff hair; he had an orange pretty face. His eyes closed every other breath he drew. He was a baby bursting forth with dark points of maturity and had on his face a sort of amazement that all this growth had come to him so suddenly. He looked toward me, immediately shut his eyes, and talked only to the old man.

“I’m afraid they’ve scheduled another game on Friday afternoon. I’ll have to have Friday off again, Mr. Monroe. I can’t help it I’m the director of the band, and there isn’t any way I can get out of it”

The old man looked to me.

“Have you met Mister Butte, Harry?” The Mister threw me. Especially as used toward a man whose parents you wondered about first thing when you saw him. Yellow man. I made a point out of despising him as a mixed breed. I be-came an authority and a prophet about his certain doom. I gave him no more chances than the chances a child begat of human sperm and sheep egg had. I knew there were special laws against doing it with sheep, because something would produce — something unspeakable. I thought, Butte, you’ll probably die at thirty at the latest, of simple natural causes. Go ahead and be a foreman for the old man, be the band director out at Grell, hand in notes I wrote, kick around a few more years, then you’ll be gone , buddy. You look too strange to make it, my friend. It satisfied me to think such thoughts.