Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“I have to beg, beg , to keep a rube like you to stay with me. Me . You know I have to keep you here, I can’t afford to break up with another roomie. They’d come get me. There would be reason.”

“I’m not concerned with that. I wasn’t saying I was going to leave.”

“You weren’t?” he asks sincerely.

Then we went ahead as normal. The screen crept over toward me inch by inch, day by day. He read by day and wrung out his thoughts on me by night.

“I want to do a little subjective-response quiz on you tonight, Monroe. I’ve written down some words: tally whacker, dong, peter, dick, tool, prod, root, member (more literary!), and dork . What adjective describes the whole set?”

“Silly” . He had read them in a prolonged Southern nasal way and there was no other answer.

“Right!” he cheered. “Or better: condescending , or mocking . You think men ever gave themselves those names? Never. Women named us. They saw it down there begging for lubrication from them. The woman sees him hunching beneath the throne of meat and fur, I don’t care if he’s Alexander the Great or Eric the Red, with some random shepherdess — she sees him, she names him. Caesar had to have it, Napoleon stooped for it, J.F.K. with his millions is not immune. But we look up when we see women, any woman. Cunt , we breathe out … delirious, obsequious to her … fuck , both words going deep, maybe all the way to the heart.”

Fleece took a breath and rubbed his glasses on his sleeve.

I told him what he had said was rousing and eloquent but doubtful. Fleece loved the noise of the words of his latest thoughts; I was always holding back because I didn’t have the words yet. I had the music, but not the words yet As a matter of fact, I expressed myself so badly, Fleece ignored me completely.

“I think of writing my mother,” he went on. “‘Well, I’ve done it with Judy Rut, a white whore over on Mulberry Street in Vicksburg. It’s done. I’ll be hard to catch from now on.’ She receives the letter during the day, while Creech is away rehearsing at the armory. She calls up the Dean of Men. This is one of my favorite dreams. The Dean of Men has me sewn up in a beanbag. Just captured , you see. In five minutes my mother is over here walking around the beanbag. I hear her footsteps. I’m lying in the bag they’ve stitched me up in, amongst hills of dried beans, utterly nude, having let nobody bathe me, no, madly satisfied with Judy Rut’s oil still on me. They’ve made a mistake. The stitching of the beanbag has been done too well. It’s unbreakable. They’ve captured me, but can’t get to me. My flag is in the air, my tally is stiff, trustworthy and cheerful as a lighthouse. I roll in the beans, creating harmless light avalanches upon myself. Just every now and then my mother’s voice gets through the cloth. ‘Are you telling God about this, Robert Dove? What is He thinking?’ I stop moiling in the beans and I do think of Him. ‘What do You think of a man lying naked in dried beans?’ I ask. And as usual complete silence socks me in the ear. I shout out, ‘Where is General Creech?’ I know this will send her away, wordless, creeping, drooped, down the dormitory stairs. Creech must never know about me.

“I believe she saw it as her duty to hide my exceptional quirks from Creech even more than she saw her duty to God. I had to seem normal when he was around. I saw him the night Elvis Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. For some reason, we weren’t at church that Sunday night Creech hated all music and couldn’t really tell any of it apart. But he wanted to crawl into the television and choke Elvis. Things I thought were just curious, Creech wanted to kill. He finally kicked the On knob off the set…. But it was secrets about my life that Mother and I were supposed to keep, such as the fact I was two years older than Creech thought I was. I pitched some fits I don’t even remember the first two years she tried to enroll me in school. I’m twenty-one now, freshman at college. But we kept this from Creech.

“She married him in Florida where she was in the subdivision close to an army base. She was a church-going widow; a card-carrying Christian. Met him at a dinner in the church basement; found herself romantic with bachelor Creech, who asked her to marry him before he’d ever looked in the house and seen me. Don’t think I haven’t meditated on that young postwar girl who has been molded by panic ever since she was nineteen. I’d get bronchitis trying to hold the tears inside. You didn’t cry in this house. We even kept my botany project for the Science Fair a secret from him, because she wasn’t sure how my excessive interest in plants would impress him.

“Some nights I even combed my hair and left the house on supposed dates, showing the normal interest in the opposite sex that comes to all good boys. This drew a wink out of Creech and thrilled my mother. She whispered to me at the door to go up the street and introduce myself to some awful sixteen-year-old girl whose body looked like frozen oatmeal. Some nights I would sense that Creech just wanted me out of the house. These nights I’d put on my whole brown suit, water down my hair, and leave the house with enthusiasm. Run out in the dark and beat off.

“The noise of my turning pages in my room drove him out of his mind, and also my whamming the slides of my microscope together. It interrupted Creech in drinking his gallon of coffee every night while pursuing his own original art form, that of violently ripping to shreds the newspaper of the day after reading every particle of it, about nine P.M. This had nothing to do with the contents of the paper. It was the theory put in practice that one should live each day as it came and forget, or in his case, destroy, the past. I wish I were kidding you.

“Creech is from northern Florida. Let me tell you how mean the town he grew up in is. We went down there one Christmas with him. In the history of this town, there had never been any snow. But it snowed that Christmas, about two inches, at night. I looked out the window the next morning and saw that already the kids on the street had scraped up the snow from four yards and in a vacant lot next to this defunct service station they had built a huge snow statue of a man having relations with a dog. Merry Christmas. What was it some professor said about Florida? … That Florida was unique in going straight from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilization.

“Getting back to my mother: I told her goodbye, wearing my suit. I went around to the dark of the back of the house and rang true as a normal adolescent by dropping my pants and having at it. Then I would fall asleep in that tall grass next to the house that the lawnmower never could reach. Wake up in two hours and stroll in mimicking the afterglow of a fine time with a girl. I had on my mind one of those dancers fom the Jackie Gleason show — a big-legged girl in jeweled brassiere and net hose, panting, at last contented by me her hero who was a sort of surprising churn upon her; her nipples still hard in excitement, lifted toward the moon. In those hours I had absorbed an arrogance, a privacy, a self, with crickets jumping around me. I could finally ignore Creech. I won the Science Fair, and in a little excess of pride, I appeared in the garage in nothing but my jock shorts. Proud of the hair on my body as if it were a fox coat. Then the women call and tell my mother.”

While Fleece was behind his screen, seeping out the biography, I was lying in bed eating an orange. Suddenly I noticed the screen had been pushed almost flush against my cot. Fleece was looking at me through a tear in the thatch.