Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

At eighteen years old, trying to come on strong in that herd of backs and cowlicks, female pageboy hairdos, pants-butts, bouffant hair, bare girls’ ankles in brown penny loafers, and skirts flairing up to show stocking latches, all of us making out of Chapel in our congested warm dumb way, I smelled in that crowd the odor of flowers and fish, together, the effluvium of real women somewhere in the crowd. The heavy magnolia and the sardines. I held to my books, becoming the very nose of lust.

I am a gift, so someone take me, I thought. Someone record me. Don’t lose me. What with my talents on the horn, my car, my suntan, my musician’s hair, my execution of the Vivaldi piece just recently in my music room … well, what about that ? But carrying the slippery books alongside my hip, and sweating tactlessly like a slug snail, I looked in the face of a belle, some gal in her negligent blouse who had found a cool nook for herself and was leaning back as if saying, What can you show me, boys? She looked just as annoyed by Chapel as I was, but in some way I could not possibly touch, my hands were so full of sweaty books. The belles were there at Hedermansever, about ten of them in the two thousand of us there, and you would see them poising like statues in the alcoves, the shadows of the halls, and they knew how to lean, and how to be mildly reckless with their legs, cocking them out of their skirts so you saw, could imagine, both knees raised.

But the belles had learned to ignore by the time I got there. They knew how to look blissfully by one. What they were looking for is still unclear to me. I followed them up in the newspapers later and saw they’d married men like Air Force lieutenants and stockbrokers from Dallas and once-married rich lawyers from Atlanta, who seem like second-rate interlopers to me.

These belles were expert at ignoring me. They had developed such subtlety that my gleaming face did not occupy them. So there I was left with my books, yearning for my trumpet to play that Vivaldi strain brassy and direct into this belle’s face, working down her until the bell of my horn was perfectly crammed by her breast, the song going right to her heart; then moving down to the cup of her navel to delight her at the place she snapped off from her mother, making her tickle as she receives food there again, in the form of music this time, from the brass throat of my horn … But the belles looked away, and I was shocked to think suddenly how drear and antique the Vivaldi tune would seem to them, just like another Chapel meeting, sleepy, with another baba on stage drinking glasses of his own words, a wind blowing in and out of the cracks of dead Italian castles. So I removed my cold horn from the navels of the belles.

Thirty per cent of the student body was studying for the ministry or work in the church somewhere. You’d see every now and then a boy or girl — sometimes two together, holding hands — with unbreakable scowls, or on the other hand, jolting glassy smiles, looking like they had just set off a bomb in behalf of Jesus Christ somewhere.

In the dorms, the dorm-mothers watched the girls going out and called them back if their dresses were too short. Short dresses had come back in style, and it was President Hannah’s crisis over coeds’ knees all over again. The dorm-mothers were generally widows, and a couple of them were true monsters of piety. I know of one who borrowed a convertible, drove over to Jackson to a curb-service tavern, even lit a cigarette and ordered a beer to seem appropriate, and watched for girls from the college coming in with boys, and craned her neck to see whether the girl took beer. She couldn’t get the girl expelled for that, but she could get her confined to her room for a few weeks except for classes and meals. But this dorm-mother widow picked out the trashiest, dinkiest tavern for whites in Jackson, where nobody but roughnecks went — out on Highway 49—to watch for the girls.

I should say nobody went out there but me, and my poor date, a girl from Holly Springs who had had polio in one leg. Bonnie had one shriveled calf, but the other one was lovely, tan and firm. She was turning up a quart bottle of Busch Bavarian when we drove into the place and worked on it seriously the rest of the time we were there. And the widow saw us, my top down, her top down. I waved to her and yelled, “Have a ball, honey. He’ll get here soon, he’ll look like a Greek god” (thinking she looked like an old whore on the search). “You just have to wait on your prince, babe!” I’d been here before with Bonnie, and liked the place because it looked like the end of everything, a little upsurge of tin and asbestos shingles on the edge of a city dump, like somebody’s desperate artless hands had made a place just before everything turned into rubble. I hoped that one of the times Bonnie had to get out and walk through the lot to use the restroom, I would see just one of the clientele in the cars so much as raise an eye toward her slight limp and her small calf. I would jump on that son of a bitch with a sublime fury, I didn’t care how big he was or if he drove nails with his head; I wanted to pit the good I had left in me against him. But it was never that way with these folks of the lot. The guys noticed her and then looked straight at me with a nod of pity for her, or they ignored the bad calf and rubbernecked, watching her all the way, their eyes on her like she was any other piece of tail. These people were pretty bent and annihilated sorts themselves, even the teenagers, trying to look like hombres east of hombre -land with their hair greased and swung over the forehead, sideburns slick, sometimes combed down lower than they actually grew. Bonnie was all for the place, too; we’d talk and drink pleasurably, supping upon that air full of the smell of thousands of other beers served out here on the lot with every sip we took.

Bonnie was the best one I had, really, for a long while. Out there on Highway 49 I would be telling her something like “I don’t think anyone is old enough to perceive God until the minute they die,” and she would be dressed in a green fall outfit with a necklace and high heels, dressed for everything she was worth; she never went casual with me. And me in my jeans, tennis shoes, but still a white shirt and necktie, for her; Bonnie smelling like a magnolia in spite of her weekend quart of beer, weekend after weekend with me. Some nights she would drink more than that and get really in love with me, and also get very sick. I’d pull over on the grass off the highway and she’d ask me to put my hands over my ears, then she’d sob and retch in the weeds pitifully and come back with a handkerchief, looking bright although not pretty, smiling, ready to be returned to the dorm … Bonnie dressing to the hilt and doing the rest to go with me, to keep up with me; Bonnie tight on that beer she loved but couldn’t keep down, deliriously receptive to me, telling me I was truly profound, I was too smart for Mississippi and maybe the entire South; Bonnie and her tendency to cry briefly after every sentence she said — and not a blessed thing in her head (her head covered with heavy wonderful black hair which she had “frosted” with a bleach which gave her a look of champagne over licorice), nothing in that head but details of the romantic life of her late teens in Holly Springy, Mississippi. She told me she was a make-out in Holly Springs and had been the cause of a lot of breaking up among couples. She was the confidential friend between a lot of boys and girls, and the boys would take her out parking and begin describing to her what was wrong between them and their girlfriends. But before Bonnie knew it, this fellow would be glued on her lips, trying to force his tongue down her throat, while still trying to carry on a conversation about his girlfriend. For it was inconceivable that he be doing anything earnest with her, she was accepted so generally, in her crippled condition, as the go-between of Holly Springs; and she accepted this. She wore glasses then and didn’t have contact lenses as nowadays. But things always went cold with couples for whom she was the go-between. She had a certain appeal to the boys, she found out. She could kill the love between them and the fiancées, and she began to like it. Even the strongest, most fixed loves, even loves since the fifth grade. The boys took Bonnie out and fell on her like a buoy in the deep blue water of love. She became a regular witch at murdering love, but always very gay at it. (And she was gay and tearful with me in a new way, because for the first time in a long while she was out in a car with a boy who wanted no love destroyed.) Oh dear, she had had to do things eventually back in Holly Springs, things that would make the boy unable to look his girlfriend in the eye come Monday morning, things that would leave him barely able to look her in the eye Monday either, things that left the boy trying to ignore her and see her at the same time, so that his face was jig-sawed, fractioned apart oddly. One boy she told me about was the class secretary. When they had talked in the car awhile, he got bold and said to her that he didn’t see why Janine wouldn’t give him the whole hog when she knew they would be married the coming summer. Bonnie worked him up on the subject of sexual love very easily, and at the height she stroked him, as she had stroked others, but knowing this fellow wanted to undress and all, and wanting not to allow him the regular thing, not wanting to be pregnant especially, she waited until he was mad for rubbing anywhere and after feigning pain to her leg every surge he made, she turned over and told him if nothing else would content him, he could rub himself into joy on the contours of her fanny; anything else would kill her, she lied to him. Then she gasped and faked intense pain and at the last of this cold farce, she fell down to the floor with the pedals and the transmission hump in a seeming coma of injury, while he begged her to wake up and live and forgive him. He did not think he could live with his shame, and the broken romance with his sweetheart was the least of his worries. He was “too good-looking to live,” she said. She gave others the same scene, with the same ending. She saw hearts of the sweet and handsome crash in hot shame, saw the old boy of love sink like a rotting dummy; saw the boys themselves the rest of the year, lonely and mute with a sense of unconfessable crime. She limped a little more for them when they were near.