Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“Lala?”

“Yeah. She just now left when she saw you were all right.”

I turn around and see little Lala, indeed, walking up the slope and just now making the hill in front of the picture window. I see her little body striving, and the hearth burns pink on the window. There leaning against the window is Sherry, her natural blond hair and her full but lean hips pushed out on the window, alone, the Tulane romeo is not with her and her backside looks lonely and broken off from that National Geographic scene with him I had seen earlier. I chuckle, and laugh, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Yet agony too. Lala goes into the house without a look back at me. She only wanted to make sure I was alive .

And I’m stuck here seeing spring come on yellow-green, the ducks, the smell of manure and cola, the writhing of the unslumbering creature, and the waking of the earth, with Tonnie Ray, falling on me with her plastic aqua swimming suit, tickling me with her roach antennae.

“You are such a character . Who else could be beat up and wake up laughing?!” she says.

“I don’t feel good at all.”

“Oh, don’t you?”

“I feel worse than I have in my life.”

“Oh, do you? Now, now. We’ve hit it off so good together. Listen, Harry. Let’s get married.” She made some kind of Southern twirl out of that word married . I’m sure she wanted to sound fetching as a siren. Bless her heart, after all. She wanted me forever, something awful. And it was do or die for her. She was not going to college. She smiled, knowing she’d failed with the voice; then, clutching her underlip in a desperate bashfulness, she tried the last bravest thing, and eased her hand under my trunks with trembling, awkward fingers. By the way I looked at her, she must have known it was No all the way. She bent her head down, squeezed me lightly, and fell into a crumple into her own lap.

I got up and went walking up the slope. We were in the gray of the rising sun. I made it halfway up the slope and looked back at her. She rose up and really shook. God knows what new self she was putting on, but she got straight — she had put it on, whatever new self this was she was coming back with — and I grabbed her hand.

We went up and had pleasant conversation between one another while we ate that greasy house-party breakfast of burned undone pork. I remember Tonnie Ray held her piece out and squeezed it like a sponge, and we saw the grease drip out in an unbelievable amount, on the rug. We thought it was very funny.

In 1960 Dream of Pines began turning into plastic. The Sink boys put up a corrugated aqua fiberglass fence around the mills. The tracks ran in two lanes into and out of the mill yards. The sun was scalding that summer. It boiled out the heart of everything you looked at and you could sense the hot ooziness of innards breaking out of wood, brick, and even glass. Intestinal slime burst out in tears on the steering wheel of your car if you left it in the sun any time.

What had happened to me? I lived in a woodsy glen in a nice wet shade, where late in the afternoon the deep cane patch and the overhanging oaks manufactured their own breeze, and strange blasts of almost frigid air blew through our house. I never had to suffer. I could lie in bed all day, naked, and will myself into one hard-on after another, detumesce (an unstudied pleasure all in itself), maybe go over to the desk and write my name over and over, lift up the stack of records and let them go again — Cannonball Adderly, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Mose Allison: new heroes — or take a cup of coffee, sit at the kitchen table, and wait for Tonnie Ray to call. She made out like every call to me caused her a crisis. She always took up five minutes apologizing for having called. Was I busy? She would just die if she were interrupting something. She must’ve called a hundred times that summer. Oh, Tonnie Ray knew we were not lovers, but couldn’t we be friends ? I never agreed to anything.

Fifty times she wanted me to assure her everything was going to turn out right for her. She had some secretarial position lined up in New Orleans. She was going out with a business-major greaser from the nearby junior college who was after her to “prove her love.” What should she do? What should she do when her brother Lloyd stared at her for a whole minute one morning, then went outside the kitchen, down the steps, and came back with a teaspoon full of soil and dumped it in her coffee? What was her life turning into, that…

One afternoon she asks me, “Harry, do you think God is really keeping up with me? Most of the time I feel like I’m just not… watched.”

“There are so many trillions of people on the earth,” she told me. Her self-esteem increased considerably when I mentioned, by way of fact, that there were really only a couple of billion. This was generally the kind of smart-aleck consolation I gave her. Her calls were a bore, but on the other hand, they weren’t. When nobody else was in the house, I’d come to the phone wearing nothing but a sheet draped around me, like a monk-bard. Why? Just for the irony and fun, I suppose. I’d hold the phone out and peel off a shattering belch while she was weeping away at some story of crucial disappointment; then I’d come back to the speaker and make a tiny faraway voice, like at the bottom of a well, reading names passionately out of the phone book. Sometimes I’d hang up, flat. Nothing turned her away. She was always so concerned that she’d called while I was practicing my trumpet . I waited for her call, lifted the receiver off the hook, put the bell of my horn over the speaker end, and blasted off several bars of “On Wisconsin!” I answered then with a mild hello.

“Were you playing your trumpet?”

“No. Not today.”

She said something had harmed her eardrums. I got an inspiration. “Say, is old Lloyd around? Put him on a minute. Don’t say who it is.”

Lloyd answered. I heard him make a nice couch out of his ear. Eased the receiver down to the end of my horn and Watted into “The Marines’ Hymn” for all I was worth. Tonnie Ray picked up the phone over there.

“Oh, you really got Lloyd! He is holding his head and is turning red! Hee hee hee hee hee! Ow! Lloyd … now!! Lloyd is hitting me. He is using fists! Oh, oh, awroh! He has his fists made! unnnngh! … Oh, Harry, he hit me on the face! Can’t you do something? Can’t you say some-thing? Harry!”

She kept calling me. Tonnie Ray amazed me, how she kept on, and kept on. I never had anything to say. Then I realized I was God to Tonnie Ray. She was using me as God. I was the closest to handsome that she would ever touch; I was Music and Higher Art; I had fought twice with her old boyfriend in her presence; we had drunk the mysterious vodka together; I had put my finger into her at the moment she thought she was at her loveliest; she had had her spasm with me hovering over her like an angel.

Yes, I could’ve just hung around the house and lain naked in the sheets, caressing my own paps, hearing Mose Allison on the phonograph, and being cool, and being Tonnie Ray’s God all summer. I could’ve locked the door, a little ashamed, got out my old faithful Daisy BB gun, set up some rubber soldiers from the closet where my boyhood stuff was kept, put them on the bookcase, lain behind a pillow and potted the soldiers, ducking the visible BB’s from the old, not-so-powerful gun, as they ricocheted off the wood back at me. The word ricochet: what Frenchness, what powerful romance; I remember when I first heard it back in 1951. Pick up the phone from Tonnie Ray and catch her frantic stream, then intone the cynical boredom of God or act out something astonishing and cryptic to her. Or at last resort, pick up my horn and practice it. (After the first six months on that horn, I was sick of the whole concept practicing . Maybe I should’ve known I was done for as a serious musician then. But I heard Miles Davis, and wanted to be like him. And every time I brought the horn to my lips wanting to be big and original and have some style , I felt Dr. Perrino’s dick lying on my shoulder blade. Oh, Mother, the funk; the sticky feeling of some merciless expert lying on your back.) Or I could’ve spent the whole summer mooning over Lala Sink. I never called her because I was afraid of her answering the phone, very kind, very sweet, very soft and tiny, and telling me No, don’t come by tonight around six-thirty, thank you so much for calling. I learned through Tonnie Ray at the end of the summer that Lala had been in love with me for about two months; that she lay sick the last week of her love with my annual photograph in her little pink fingers. Aw, Christ Jesus! The Sink millions! The Sink Mansions! The rooms with pink fur floors. Lala … Away to Stevens College in Missouri, and I never set eyes on her again. For that matter, I never laid eyes on Tonnie Ray all summer either. Strange, but true. She never even hinted trying to see me again.