Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“Wow! Golleeeeee! Yes! Do it again! Oh, you have been to New York to study music …”

What do you mean “Yes?” I thought. Oh, ugly, ugly, nauseous ugly … When would you ever stop? You’re a roach. You have been some serious roach … have been away to some foul garbage lair in the basement of the filthiest most monstrous city dump in the country to study being a serious roach. Her feet turned together in the wad of stockings and panties. Ugh. The crabshells of her knees rattled together.

“… and now it’s all over, Harry. Can you believe it? Our best days are over?” God save me, then. “The parties and the friends and the good times,” she went on, still lying flat. I leaned over to check out her face. All the beauty parlor glow had sweated off of it, and the original pasty shell with nose-holes expanding showed, the chin clopping away. “Oh, Harry! I think I’m sick. I’m going to …”

“No, Tonnie Ray, don’t, please. Sit up. We were going to change together, remember?” I helped her up.

Then I saw a pair of girl’s horn-rimmed glasses lying by a bundle of clothes on a table. I grabbed them and wore them; they were extremely thick. I saw a haze of brown and gray, and Tonnie Ray hovering four feet off the ground in it.

“Oh, Harry, silly … Uuuuuuuuurrrrrppp!” Curdled Seven-Up broke out of her. A speck hit my spectacles. I jumped in the air and my pants knees got really washed.

“Aaaah!” I screamed in horror. “Stop!” But she wouldn’t. The sheeny mound of white fell off the bench. Then it moved off low. This was Tonnie Ray, saying, “I feel better.”

I commenced ripping off my clothes. It was unbearable that I had Tonnie Ray’s muck on me. But it was so beautiful not to be seeing Tonnie Ray clearly. And the world of these thick glasses was rather delightful. Everything waved by me. I didn’t really know where I was. The vodka was working on me too. I got down to my shorts and tee shirt.

“Yoo hoo! I am naked!” sang Tonnie Ray’s voice off to a corner, near the board shield of the girls’ bathroom. I made out the exit door through the edge of the spectacles and rushed that way with hands out, fearing slightly that I would bang a shin on something metal, but keeping on. I felt on a table some girl’s slip and grabbed it.

I dipped down with it to swab off the vomit that had globbed onto me through my pants. Successful at that, I brought the slip up to get the speck off my left spectacle, which was glowing yellow and carrying a small but rancid stench — right from Tonnie Ray’s abdomen — over the rim and into my eye, which was watering. I also had my other hand out still trying to get to the door. I made it, opened it, and a refrigerator-size bright light from the walkway with the boys’ door on the other side burst on me.

But there were persons on the walkway. There were human voices, almost in my face. I never dared to take off the spectacles to see who it was, but there were boys and girls.

“He’s in his underwear in the girls’ dressing room.”

“He is wearing girl’s glasses! He is slobbering on a … girl’s slip. Sssst. He is slobbering on a girl’s slip!”

“A-ummmm!” clucked a girl’s voice.

“It’s Monroe.”

“He was with Tonnie Ray Reese,” called an athlete’s voice. “Check her out! He had done something to her!”

Some bodies knocked me out of the way and coursed past into the dressing room. Immediately they came out, bumping me violently into the walkway. My borrowed spectacles fell off and shattered on the concrete. I was looking at Lala Sink, standing there in her pink pants outfit and holding her neat swimming bundle at her stomach. One boy held my arm from behind.

“Tonnie Ray is sick. She looks … wounded … in some way. She is lying on the floor … (he gulped and whispered) … without no clothes on.”

“You girls go on in there and help her.”

“You better come with us, Monroe.”

I looked back and saw the very same halfback who had had a date with Tonnie Ray that night after the spaghetti supper, the same guy who had called me a queer, the same one-hundred-sixty-pounder I’d beaten until he whimpered. Seeing him, I became a little more canny about the situation. I eased into the door of the boys’ room.

“Just a minute,” I said.

I went in and found a swimming suit hanging on a hook, shucked off my underwear, and got into it. I flexed around a second or two and breathed out hard to get the cigarette trash out of me, then waded out to the walkway scene. Others from the swimming pool had come in to congest the area.

I had a hard time getting the halfback fellow off to my-self. The crowd wanted to just cram the area until they understood every particle of the horror alleged against me. And the two boys wanted to hold me until somebody could get the law. I jumped free, however. Then the girls and boys backed up and gave us an area.

“All right, son of a bitch. Marquess of Queensberry rules!” I spoke to my halfback friend — his name was Everett. He saw me squaring off in my bathing suit and scamping up and down in front of him. He didn’t know what the hell I was getting at. He thought he was getting into some kind of strange, unholy fight; something even beyond no holds barred, or razor fighting. Fright took hold of his face. He put his hands on the lapels of his dinner jacket, but hesitated to take it off. I hit him one solid on the cheek.

Everett’s technique hadn’t improved much since our fight a year ago. He charged at me with a body block and cracked the boards of the dressing room missing me; then he got up to do the same thing again and I couldn’t help stomping him a scornful one in the ribs — it was like I owed him one for being so stupid.

He howled in pain.

Then the big guy with him who had been holding me, a first-string end, moved in on me, and when he wrapped around me, it occurred to me for the first time that they were not intending a fair fight. “You ain’t going to start slugging , buddy,” the big guy said. He was a weight-lifter and ate three pounds of food every meal. Before this, I’d always sort of admired his great, ugly strength.

Everett hovered up, and the big guy let me go, and they both came in on me with fists, while also trying to hold me in arrest in a formal way. I got a feeling of soft clubs falling on my head, then something sharp arching up deep in my stomach, and I passed out.

I woke up by the lake in front of the house. Tonnie Ray was with me, wearing an aqua swimming suit that I could see in the bright moon of the night. It seemed terribly cold to me. Cold gray sticks were set around us — the May willow trees on the bank. There was a group of ducks just now putting out in the pond right below us. Tonnie Ray was so wretchedly pale that she glowed. Thistles, I was lying on a carpet of thistles. The shore mud and pond scum gave off a fertile odor: like Coca-Cola poured over a heap of new cow manure.

“I thought you were dead,” says Tonnie Ray. She has been keeping watch over my corpse . Then I start seeing the yellow-greenness of the willow leaves, little things, on the limbs, and a hump of weed the same color in the pond, and hints of the same yellow-green color in the grass around us, in the inch of it right next to the ground. A huge fish or serpent wallows in the water under a willow tree for an amazing five seconds — some creature waking up and crazy, strutting like fury on the margin between the water and the air. Quite something to hear, this something with scales tearing, sloshing. Makes you afraid.

It’s wearing, it’s horrible to feel this. I have a nauseous, chalky sensation in myself, and I’m waking up with nature, and Tonnie Ray has my head in her lap and is holding me with her arms, telling me that Everett broke his hand when he missed hitting me and hit the wall and the other guy was ashamed of the way they beat me up. They became concerned about my having passed out, and Tonnie Ray came out dressed in her bathing suit all ready to go and told them in so many words that they had made a horrible mistake, and then she and Lala Sink had walked me around the yard many times.