Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

I’m second-grader Harriman Monroe. My mind is full of little else but notes on the atrocities of World War II. I saw them all in photographs in a book compiled by a national magazine. It was on some playmate’s daddy’s shelf. Then I’m eight, third grade, and have in part understood what I saw. I’m not clever enough to be horrified yet.

The Sink brothers had two peafowl that came trespassing in our cane patch alongside the driveway. It did my old man no end of good to see the birds prissing around on his land. He wanted to be such neighborly chums with the Sink brothers. North of us was Sid, and south of us, Ollie. The peafowl also had two quaint names which I refuse to re-member. The female was a whore, and the male lived on her, and was jealous as hell. They went into the deeps of the cane and loved it up, and in between time, laid an inch-high carpet of green droppings back in the romantic, cavey places, and the cock ran me out when I tried to get in there to play, not knowing all the swell places were already floored with dung. A peacock, by the way, will drill your ass if he knows the odds are anything near equal. He got me a couple of times I won’t forget.

Then one day I got in the cane when they were gone, went back to the deeps, where the Jap snipers should’ve ideally been sitting in the high crotches and just ready to be potted by my air rifle. I hit a dip and slid off into that pea-fowl dung I didn’t know was there. It was all in my hair and up the barrel of my gun, and my lever had this unmentionable stalactite of green hanging on it. I looked around and saw there wouldn’t be any decent playing in here until maybe I was twenty.

I wasn’t thinking about the birds or the cane this other day, walking out for the papers at the end of the drive, when the peacock all of a sudden beats out of the deeps and starts hammering at my thigh. I ran and finally shook him off. Now I was afraid of him, but I wasn’t about to detour around the cane walking back on account of any bird. I picked up a piece of stick I’d thrown at the mailbox a week ago, pretending the stick was a grenade and the mailbox was a German’s mouth; it was a healthy length of hickory, never a very feasible grenade. I walked back on the cane edge of the drive, and got to where the cock ambushed me coming out. The old boy was roosting about four feet off the ground this time and jumped on me at head level, making a loud racket in the cane as he launched himself. This terrified me, but I stood still and swung on the peacock with both arms. I caught him on the head, and his beak swerved like plastic. He dropped on the bricks like a club, his fantail all folded in. I toed him. He was dead, with an eye wiped away.

The old man sails into the drive in his Buick. He’s overdue home from the factory, and thinks everybody is thrilled by his making the turn so perfectly into the narrow brick drive. He rams to a halt, seeing me and the dead peacock. Up beside me faster than the shadow of a passing airplane.

“It’s not dead, is it, son?” He leans over and peers at the cock’s head. “Pray to God. He is dead. Why would you kill a lovely bird like … You know who he belongs to, don’t you?”

“He came at me. Twice.”

“This small, beautiful bird came at you. You better tell the truth, buddy. What do you think we’re going to do about this?”

“Put some lime on that sucker, he’ll melt into the ground without a stink in three-four days.” The old man’s jaw dropped.

“Who taught you about lime ?”

“Aw, the Nazis used it on bodies in concentration camps.”

“Oh yeah? You’re really getting an education, aren’t you?”

“Yessir. You want me to handle it?” The old man was looking away at some hopeless horizon.

“I want what ?” he said.

“You want me to handle this peacock. I’ll drag him up in that cane. You get me a little lime, and nobody’ll know nothing.” Now the old man’s roasting me with a hard look.

“You get your little ass up to the bathroom and get your pants down. I’m going to handle you .”

But he snuck and got the lime, and lied to Ollie Sink when he called a few days later wanting to know if we’d seen Bayard. By then Bayard — God help me, I did remember the sucker’s name — was a crust back in the deeps.

No more than a week later the old man and I are standing at the bay window looking out at the leaves dropping from the trees and running north over the yard in an early cool autumn wind, while the old men is trying to explain the concept of a yard chore and what it had to do with Duty. He wants me to rake the yard, he means, every Saturday for the next ten years. He says a man gets to know the earth like that, but such simple acts as touching a yard rake to a decomposing nut. Quite incidentally, too, I’d haul away uncountable yellow tons of leaves in a wheelbarrow before I even got my growth. I personally always was of the school of let them lay and rot, and just imagining all the moldering beauty underneath they must be causing; I couldn’t bear to think of moving artificial rake against them. Meanwhile, I could learn about all this unspoiled earth grit by watching our female terrier, Maggie, go wild up against our screen door when she was in heat And her suitors — bird dogs, a spaniel, a Doberman, and two beagles looking gruesomely depressed by their own desire — standing politely on the porch for two days and then, fed up, mauling each other with high croaks, were the daily theater. Finally, only the Doberman was left, and he and Maggie would stare balefully through the screen at one another. He was a grand black thing, with somebody’s chain around his throat. Nobody went out the front door while he was still there. He saved me immediate Duty on the leaves; no child could’ve been expected to go out in the front yard with him there. The old man took it hard that the Dobe was doing a mountain range of turds round the front step. What if one of the Sink boys accidentally dropped by to see how our household was progressing? Even though neither one of them ever even sent a Christmas card?

But the old man couldn’t do anything about the Doberman, either. It was the gentleness of his that my mother always bragged on him about I didn’t see this side of him, or wasn’t ready to see it, until a couple of days later, when it was too sad to miss.

Toward the last pales of Maggie’s heat spell, there was a day when the Doberman was gone from the porch, and we thought it was all over. But the morning after, there was a new suitor-dog outside. He wasn’t on the porch. He was out in the edge of the cane. He was a sick, scabby, and practically hairless combination of Spitz and setter. From way over in the cane, he watched Maggie at the screen with wheat-colored rheumy eyes. You could see he was trying to respond more than he was; he just lay there nodding and raising his ears, then falling asleep unwillingly, it seemed. There was a mule with him. The mule was emaciated and showed burned, hairless marks where an old harness had been. His nosy face looked older than stone, and he crumbled around the knee knobs with tremens. This mule stood in the shadowed bend of the cane behind the dog. Apparently the mule and dog were friends, joined up to see the last of it together. They were both clearly terminal. A big mule like he was, by the way, is a sensational sight to be-hold when you get up early and just look for the usual cane and St. Augustine grass. He seemed to be looming back and sponsoring some last romantic wish of the Spitz-setter in front. I think the dog had brought them as far as they could go.

The old man and I saw them together at the bay window. Both of us were looking for the leaves, and then, surprise!

“All right, Daddy, I’ll go be getting the lime in the garage while you get the shotgun. Better put in some double-aught shells.”