Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

I took this into account. Fleece, feeble and nervous in his robe, seemed to be looking around the parking lot for Peter as well as for the old demon, his mother.

“Did he ever come around?” I asked him.

“Never. I suppose the threat of the National Guard held him off, maybe.”

“But now there are two of us against him, Fleece. If it came down to it, we could beat him up and steal the letters. We could wear masks. We could disguise our whole bodies, even.”

“No. I didn’t want you in on it. It’s all mine, whatever it is. I was sick. I don’t want you a part of it. It’s mine.”

“I have the car.”

“You have the car, but you don’t have the address.”

He made me mad, letting me down. I went behind the screen, took the three cigar boxes off the shelf, and stole them from him, the letters.

“You saw what I did. I’ve taken them. Now they’re mine. There’s no way you can get them back. I’d hurt you if you tried it”

Fleece looked amazed at the boxes in my hands.

“You don’t even know what you have,” he said. “You can’t imagine how … snorty you look holding those boxes to your breast.”

“Well, I have his address now, on every envelope. I’m willing to steal her letters. I want them.”

Fleece was shocked right in the eyes. He seemed not to have thought of the envelopes.

“They’re mine . I love them. I love the old brown ink on them so much. Those quotation marks around lush vigilant digit, your clitoris …” Fleece paused reverently, cutting in with a smile of pure glory.

“I know,” I said, smiling also.

“The anguish of the joy of the words …” Fleece eased the boxes out of my hand. I had made my point and didn’t care. He seemed to absorb a nervous power in the repossessing of the letters, holding them. I would never have denied him that.

“What I want to hear is the woman speaking back. We’re going to steal those letters, Fleece,” I said.

He laid the boxes in place on the shelf. “I guess we have to. But you know what I want more than the letters from her? They could be dull little notes. I imagine they are. What I want is her. Herself . To steal pleasure with her, or from her, I don’t care. Somewhere in New Brunswick, the lush vigilant digit of her clitoris, I don’t care if it’s forty years old, which is about the age I’d make her, somehow.”

However, nothing happened. Fleece became concerned again about his classes and labs and his medical career, I saw little of him, and I — well, God, there was nothing else to do — was becoming an intellectual. This gave misery a little class. I became concerned, concerned, concerned. I went to the library and checked out The Sound and the Fury and War and Peace , hiding the books from Fleece, because I knew he must be long beyond these. Also, while in the library, I thought it might be true to the manner of a scholar to pluck off two or three random plums which caught my eye, and what caught my eye were two books on Geronimo, the Apache. I went for the name, Geronimo , for one thing, and opening one book I read this piece of advice from an Apache father to his son:

My son, you know no one will help you in this world. You must do something. You run to that mountain and come back. That will make you strong. My son, you know no one is your friend, not even your sister, your father, or your mother. Your legs are your friends; your brain is your friend; your eyesight is your friend; your hair is your friend, your hands are your friends; you must do something with them. … Then you will be the only man. Then all the people will talk about you. That is why I talk to you in this way.

The passage came alive in my hands. You must do something … your legs, brain, eyesight, hair, hands are your friends. You must do something with them. The father himself saying even he is not your friend. At the same time my eyes fell on the word, name, Geronimo , again and I realized that my last name could be found mixed up in it. It was silly but true. Monroe could be found in Geronimo. I was delighted — even more so because I didn’t know what the hell was giving. But it was all a high throb.

My condition as an intellectual became even lonelier. I wanted to read the Geronimo books straight through, but when I saw the photograph near the front of one of the books I stopped cold. Geronimo was the least-favored hero as regards looks that I’d ever seen. This man was really just a bit too ugly. He was furious. He held the rifle with a terrifying claim on it. There was no glib negligence here as in the portrait of your ordinary romantic hero. There were no stars in his eyes, only a narrow cross-focused anger. His mouth frowned, and here it was uncertain whether he meant to frown or frowned involuntarily through loss of teeth. And there at his neck the filthy scarf. The single handsome thing in the picture was his left knee, brown and bare above his boot. It was a good knee. He propped it up, had his elbow resting on it. (My son … your legs are your friends , I remembered.) Perhaps his legs were the only feature which hadn’t betrayed him. But then back up to the face. It was too akin to senile lunacy, too much the old desperate male idiot we would all come to. So I put the books away, disheartened. I knew Geronimo was a part of my private, intellectual life, I couldn’t imagine who else would be interested in him besides me and the authors of these books — I even went over and checked out all the other books on him, although with no special happiness. Fleece saw the books stacked up by my bed and assumed I was writing a term paper on Geronimo for English or history. I simply shrugged. I didn’t know why I had them. Having the books — it was like being related to some mad bore in town whom you would have to visit sooner or later.

Yet, from reading that piece, the father’s advice to his son, I was drunk with freedom to do anything . I sat on the dorm steps among this pack of other miserable boys. Some of them were like Earl and Bob back at Dream of Pines High and a couple of them were intellectuals, and there was one twenty-year-old alcoholic — I mean to the extent that he would pour a shoe-polish bottle full of bourbon over his slice of watermelon and eat that for breakfast. The alcoholic always suggested things we could do, while the rest of the group discussed his proposition for thirty minutes, the intellectuals coming in at the end to discard it as worthless. Essentially they held that all motion was worthless. There was nothing possible to do. The others were beaten down, since they could not get their thoughts into the King’s English. Some days Zak, the drama teacher, would drive by in his Edsel station wagon, see us out there, and join us. Zak was about thirty and had grayish-blond hair. There was a rumor that he had been a beatnik somewhere and also that he was engaged hopelessly to a beautiful crippled girl in Denver. One evening he was out there and organ music was coming out of the auditorium across from us, Bach, I guess — something sacred yet mathematical — and we were looking across the yard beyond the concrete pool with the defunct fountain and the slimy water at the unlighted windows of the auditorium. I was thinking of the organ-player alone in the ranks of seat shadows of the huge auditorium. His music at this hour of the day was enormously depressing. It was like gloom in little shrieks. All else was quiet — suppertime. I thought of the organist, he or she, thinking of himself or herself as so grand and prissy with the loneliness, and the Bach, and, who knows, God. I couldn’t take it. Neither could Zak, apparently.