Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“It’s night. Too late to get to the cafeteria now,” I said. Fleece ignored me.

“Did you know, Monroe, there are damned few dull moments reading the Bible? You can’t say that for many works its size. I couldn’t put the Bible down; I read it between when I was fourteen and seventeen and hid it from my mother just like all the other books.”

Suddenly I was wary. “Fleece, you aren’t after all just another kind of preacher, are you?”

“You just can’t regard an idea, can you, Ruben?” He fell in the bunk, which he had placed behind a bamboo screen room divider. I heard him sigh, invisible. “I’d really like you to come beat me up like you want to,” he said. “I’d like to show you how I could live through it.” He sat up and put his head outside the screen. “You think men of ideas are going around trying to catch farts with a hook, don’t you? Come on, mash me. I’d like to show you how an idea, an essence, me , can emerge whole in spite of punishment.”

“You’re some sort of flit, aren’t you?” I knew this was stupid the minute I said it, remembering the episode with Lloyd Reese years ago. “I don’t mean that. I mean, what idea would you be if someone came over and—”

“Laid waste to me,” he broke in. “What would be remembered now as I’m twenty-one years old, free and white. What would survive me worth thinking about for long? Some idea, some essence … Well, honestly, I haven’t quite come up with it yet. But I’m on the verge. When I steal pleasure with a woman, probably, then …”

“Aw, look at all the billions of idiots who’ve done that—”

“Yes!” he shouted, holding his finger up next to his face. “ Idiots! But look out when the man of ideas takes off his underwear! He is a log jam of throbbing pieces. He is Robert Dove Fleece, hearing his mother scraw through her nose about God at him; he has heard God scratch His fingernails across the blackboard; has heard those dirge-tune hymns curling out of the mouths from people moaning in that red brick church … with weeds and young kudzu vines up against the foundation, the old yellow pianos in the basement assembly rooms. The nandina bushes standing around the church with their berries that the little redneck kids rip off to throw at one another, leaving only the raw wood fingers of the nandinas … the leaves moldy and pissed-upon by all the dogs owned by people in asbestos-siding houses nearby the church. I slip out of church one night during the last hymn. ‘Just As I Am,’ the hymn, comes to my ears for the thousandth time, one hundred-odd dead hums of the buried from inside a cheap red brick sarcophagus, and I decide to become more detestable to God, Christ, the Holy Ghost. The hymn is running in my blood like a poison. But—”

“Stop talking … That’s enough, by God,” I came in. I didn’t want to hear all the throbbing pieces of experience.

“.. I allow myself to come to Hedermansever because my mother says Syracuse University, where I had the scholarship for winning the State Science Fair, is too far away and too cold. She’d rather write all the checks for me here. Then they room me with a guy who’s a major in hymnology . Is this to drive me into a barrel? Get me in there long enough to where, when I tumped it over and made a break for it, there would be a lot of them to get a shot at me.”

Fleece stood up out of his bunk and folded back the bamboo divider. There was nothing between us now. He was in a profuse sweat, very yellow around the collar of his white shirt. “Believe me, Mississippi is so boring you will find a lot of people doing with their noses what canines do to other canines. Studying you, understanding you, getting some smell off you, nodding their brown noses over you.

“You called me a flit a minute ago,” he said, looking at me warily, taking off his glasses and dropping them with his hand slack to his thigh. “Fuck ideas, by damn, I’ll fight you over that.”

“I didn’t mean it.” I really didn’t want to crush the boy. Right now I could see my fist go into his head as into a cantaloupe, and there was no victory in it.

“Sit down, then. What are you? Who have they put on me now? You play the trumpet. What do you play? Hymns ? Do you play ‘There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood’ with that special tone like a zombie underwater? … Never mind. I’m going to sleep. Now, don’t you leave. You go to sleep, too. This is a fine damn time to go to sleep.”

Other nights Fleece explained to me how he had declared himself — he was going to be a doctor and study how “one suffers in the meat.” “I was always a meatball,” he said. “I’m going to be the best doctor Mississippi ever produced. They’ll bring in some whore whose boyfriend has shot her in the cunt pointblank with a shotgun and alongside her her boyfriend also, who thought he commited suicide putting the last shot into his navel, and I’ll put on my mask, wave my hands with some instruments, and bring them back Romeo and Juliet.”

Fine dreamy ambitions, but Bobby Dove had taken some insulting liberties with me and what used to be my room. Besides the plywood desk, he had brought in three cases of books, two lamps, a fishbowl into which he dumped cartons of Salem cigarettes, cigar boxes with pens, various single murdered insects, newspaper clippings, photographs, and, mostly, the letters. The letters were written by an inmate at Whitfield, the state sanitarium. In the stacks on his desk were some childish sketches of the police arresting Freedom Riders at the Jackson bus station, done by Fleece himself, who was on the spot and had had his camera grabbed off him and smashed in the dock; then there were marijuana leaves, which Fleece, as a former State Science Fair winner in botany, supposed he could keep with academic impunity; 200-proof lab alcohol in Dr. Tichenor’s Antiseptic bottles; and antihistamine tablets and cough syrups. Further, he had a stork in flight, made of iron, with two incense pots hanging on a chain from its beak. Set under the window was a hip-high radio console owned by his biological father. On its top was a wooden planter containing cactus plants big and vigorous like cucumbers with steel pins forking everywhere. The room was twelve by eighteen and his cargo occupied seven-eighths of it. About all I had was my bed and the telescope. Fleece had given me the telescope.

For a couple of weeks at the beginning of school, he had had some luck spying over at the girls’ dorm with it. He had seen some towering girl do the Twist naked in her room, but he said he was tired of only looking. He told me that late one night he had taken the scope down to the urinal intending to drop it out the window, but had noticed something odd down in a urinal on the first floor of the other wing. He pulled out the scope, looked, and there was old Leon, a boy he’d gone to high school with, flogging himself, sitting on the pot, in complete apathy. Fleece became ill watching Leon practice masturbation so casually. Leon had no pride or rapture; neither happy nor sad, he was simply getting it out of him. This sight depressed Fleece gravely. He threw the telescope on my bed and said I could have it. The vantages of the voyeur were bankrupt.

The equipment in the room made it hard to get out of bed and dress. My room was another man’s entire home . He meant to leave his family for good, taking everything which had ever touched him.

“Fleece,” I finally said, in October. “You know I’m paying, or rather my scholarship is paying, for half of this room. Now look where the screen is. Three inches from my bed. And I can’t get to the lavatory without knocking over something of yours.”

That evening I came in to find he had somehow drawn in his materials so that I had more than half of the room area. The bamboo screen was clutched around his tiny space. I heard Fleece rattling at his desk. His gear was stuffed and balanced to an extreme height behind the screen. On my side of the screen there was tacked a note: YOU WON’T LEAVE, WILL YOU? I looked around the screen. Fleece was huddled over a foot-square working area on his desk. His possessions were hurled up around him, trembling — the metal stork, the cigar boxes, the easel (Fleece did hidden art efforts, in Crayola, I believe), the books. He turned toward me, his study lamp shaking the light over his hands. He was angry.