Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“Now come on, Harley. He’s only human, and most of the time he’s downright silly…. Did you notice what the old man was wearing tonight?” I giggled familiarly; I thought it would change Butte’s point of view. “When the time comes, why don’t you just tell him to go to hell, and leave?! You don’t owe him your future.”

Harley lit into me, I mean a full-blown scold. He wasn’t even very courteous about it, and I began to feel the grill, and squirm. Did I know how many people looked up to my daddy, did I? he wished to know. Did I know whose beautiful house I was living in? Did I know what man in Dream of Pines paid above the Minimum Wage years before he had to pay it by law? Did I know who air-conditioned first, who stayed out of the workers’ way and off their backs and didn’t hang up a lot of Don’t Do This signs around the factory? Who paid for more than one wino to dry out at the parish hospital? Who was phoned and stood in more times than once as collateral promisee for even a relative of a worker trying to be admitted to the medical clinic?

“You better think about putting your daddy down, boy. Wouldn’t this Dream of Pines mess be some hell without him.”

I’ve said it. The bastard’s function was to shame me. Brood on the thankless jackassism of my life for short periods. I’d never known quite all these tales about the old man. Or more: how they apparently seemed to Harley. I got out of the car wrung every which way.

The old man was by himself in the den watching the last bit of the Paar show. Still wearing his playboy cosmopolite rags and boots, worshiping Paar. I did love him all over again, but I can’t say loving him then made my life any surer, or even better. I was still sitting on the dry rim of a cornucopia, my back to this feeling of huge, socked-in, un-liberated plenitude. Along my back charges of danger and joy ran worrisomely.

Who’s to say exactly what I was senior year at Dream of Pines? I continued practicing the trumpet, but the introverted privacy of the musician bored me, and I stepped out to do things like act the second lead in the senior play. I did a solo in auditorium assembly one day, playing variations off “Down by the Riverside” with good old Mr. Medford chording me — the last thing he did before he died — delightedly on the piano. Mr. Medford discovered how much fun jazz was, and then he died the next week. I attended his funeral, and was seen by the class president, whose uncle Medford was, and my stature as a loyal fellow was increased around the high school. God forbid, but I profited by the death of this honorable old trumpeter from the Shriners’ band.

Tonnie Ray Reese went after me the whole length of the year. I walked down the hall and she was in front of me, winking with both eyes. She was still plain as a stick, but she’d had something marvelous done to her hair. It was all over her ears in upshot curls, and she had been down to Shreveport for some advice on cosmetizing her face, and came back with two bubbling coals for eyes and a wide pink swipe for her mouth. Also, her breasts got somehow hoisted to where she was making the impression of coffee cups under her sweater. Her legs could not be cured: they were poor as warped rice. She also had some odd heaviness around the stomach and hips. Tonnie Ray was not exactly a flower, but her hair and face were making toward it. I still hung with the group that ridiculed her above all others. She tried too hard. She was a roach dipped in paint, trying to make it as a famous class chum. But to her credit, she was so much in love with me that she was never mentioned once that year in the school newspaper. Bob and Earl teased me about her, and I felt compelled to suggest one halfhearted way of doing away with her.

“Set her still, ram a hook in her gums, and take off with a Corvette that’s got a line running from its bumper to the hook. Make sure it’s a gravel road.”

“Yank her brains out the top of her head,” continued Earl, dully.

But what did senior year come down to? It came down to senior prom, when you had to be a total failure not to have a date, and the only girl I knew that was even likely was Tonnie Ray Reese. The roach. The spittoon made out of the shell of a creepy insect. I phoned her three days before the weekend. Her brother Lloyd answered.

“Is Tonnie Ray there?”

“She’s here. She’s sitting on the commode, crying,” said Lloyd. A shriek came out of the back of the house. I heard it making toward the phone in frantic blurbs.

“This is Harriman Monroe,” I stated, for politeness.

Lloyd dropped the phone immediately. Then I heard a whining rancor on the other end. This was Tonnie Ray. She said “I don’t know” about five times, and finally gasped, “ Yes , Harry. I can get away from this other boy who asked me two weeks ago, I think.”

Earl and Bob had some really grotesque dates from an unknown junior high school two parishes away, and were in no position to ridicule me at the dance. It was held in the top loft of Dream of Pines’ only hotel. Earl and Bob both got there drunk, and thought I was lining up Tonnie Ray in order to kill her. I met them in the men’s room.

“You gon drive your car off a cliff and jump out it the last moment, innuh?” Earl asked me. He was near ready to pass out. His date was fourteen and all broken out with specks of acne.

Give Tonnie Ray the honor that she showed up in a manageable gown. It was white, with my corsage pinned on her side under her breasts. She could move in it to the beat of the band (five Negroes with expensive electric amplifiers who weren’t anything special, combined with a tenor singer who was good, especially on the blues and Memphis-sounding stuff) without causing any strangeness, like the other girls in their evening gown wads, crinoline petticoats; they were all like iron-lung victims trying to kick around. But not my girl. She got hot and sweaty, and before long wanted to kiss when we hit the floor for slow dances. Tonnie Ray’s gown was all silk and hung straight, like pants made into a gown. I’m telling you, putting my face back to the base of her neck and smelling her hair, odorized by a spray of peppery violets, I could almost forget she was a roach. My hand came off her waist full of sweat; I noticed the silk around her waist was wet.

“Let’s kick away,” I whispered. “We’ll drive in a roundabout way to the house party.”

There was a house party we were invited to, in a house built over a big lake, a modern house of open-face brick and cedar rafters owned by the father of one of the class-mates. The mother was an alcoholic, and it was rather sad, when we got there, to see her coddling the school drunk beside the fireplace and sympathizing with how sick he felt, while she reached for her own bottomless glass on the hearth and stroked the young drunk’s head in her lap. I looked away before things got too intimate and they began throwing up on each other.

Some college bucks were in the house, two old grads from Dream of Pines and a couple of others from L.S.U. and Tulane, all of them sold on themselves, looking at the ceiling or the baseboards and wearing those little titty-pins with chains on their sweaters as fraternity men are wont to do. Their penny loafers and their cultivated slouches; hair raked aside violently into a part; little fingers curled around the little fingers of their girls, college men enjoying their own smirks of careless possession. Their dates were girls who had not gone unnoticed by me during the last few years. They were girls who had been pretty so long they looked tired of it. Ah, the perfect medium-sized bosoms, the thin necks, the burning hair (they were wearing it short, then), the graceful legs, which demanded your hands around them and the long caress, from knee to ankle, like milking a cow. They weren’t for this boy — not yet. Rock-and-roll was pounding out of a speaker by the hearth — Ray Charles on “What’d I Say” and “Sticks and Stones”—a speaker as big as a giant Negro’s mouth. Couples slogged on the rug, with arms going up in the dim hearthlight. Over to the right, in a lighted dining room, the drabs and roaches were sitting in foursomes at tables playing bridge; this was the gang not too much on looks but high on spark, talent, or personality. This house party wasn’t for every senior at Dream of Pines. I understood it was for people who had become conspicuous in any conceivable way: homecoming queen to second-place winner in the state hundred-yard dash. I suppose there were forty of us there. Earl and Bob, my buddies, didn’t make it. Tonnie Ray Reese, of course, did. She looked around bug-eyed at all the celebrities under this single roof.