Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“Fleece, there’s so much that you don’t know. Let me take care of the music. I’ve been at it for ten years. A decade.”

“You can have music. Outside of a few very soft things on the piano, I hate almost all of it. As far as I’m concerned, you could take all your clarinets and operas and hymns and flush them down the commode.”

“What a narrow … what a bigot you are. You stupid bastard. I’ll tell you something. All art aspires to the condition of music.” I had heard Livace, who taught me trumpet, quote that the other day. In my case it was a grand thing to believe.

“All life, to which all art is at best a whining stepsister, aspires to the condition of sex,” said Fleece. I suspected he was also quoting, but couldn’t call him down for it with a very clear conscience.

Ashlet, the drunk, who had discovered Fleece kept lab alcohol in the room, looked up from his Pepsi-Cola high-ball.

“Hail, I’ll take sittin’ on the front steps over this. The wisdom around here, you could drown in it.” He went out the door with his drink. Then he came back in the door. “Monroe, you could get your gun out again. Now that there was entertainment.” He winked merrily.

Eventually I went back out to the front steps too. Fleece thought the front steps crowd was depraved, and it was. They told a brand of joke out there which was a true revenge attack on taste, beauty, and human emotion. They used sex only as a sort of springboard into horror and slime. From there on it was all scabs, fornication with the hairy nostril of a crone, the sow with the chastity belt versus Picklock Ned, and all that. The idea was to poison the audience, make them ashamed of having heard the thing. Then came the muddy laughter, the closing of the eyes. Then came another joke more meticulously vile than the last.

“Shoot him for telling that joke,” begged Ashlet, looking at me. You never knew how serious his despair was. The rest of them were not certain of me, either. Nobody would venture a joke right away. Came the pall, came some belle driving by us in a green Cadillac convertible, all of us — if the others were like me — wanting to jump on her wind-shield spread-eagled and beg her to let us in. Fleece walked in from his lab once, right in the midst of a pall. Ashlet was abjuring me to shoot something, anybody, anything . “Hit something! Knock it overl” I wore a kerchief around my neck now, and my raincoat, in whose pocket I indeed had the pistol. I thought all of it lent an air of handsome danger. Zak was there. He was all for the kerchief. I was making an A in the drama class, no sweat Fleece beckoned me with his finger. I left, walked to the room with him.

“What do you think you’re doing with that crowd? You standing there in that kerchief like you were their hero.”

“I am their hero. They need me. I have this pistol.” 1 drew it out and clumped it on the top of the chest, taking off my raincoat. I had taken the pistol with me a few times to chapel and to class, looking at the Pee Aitch Dees and dwelling on the enormous possibility that I might use it again. Ah, one wished that his enemies were less boring and more violent. I tugged the knot out of my kerchief and laid the kerchief across the pistol. This set a provocative little still life on the chest.

“Now off with the spurs,” said Fleece.

“Ah, no. I’m an Indian, not a cowboy.”

He hissed. I lay down on my cot with my raincoat. The coat I liked very much too. It had a certain secret amplitude to it, like a cape but not that wanton. The high calf boots, I confess, grew heavy as the day wore on. It was good to be off my feet.

“Goddam knee boots with his pants stuffed into them,” Fleece derided, observing my footwear. “Listen. Do you think you’ll ever get any pussy wearing that outfit?”

Fleece was exasperatedly taking off his jacket, one of those old shiny Occupation affairs with a luminous yellow map of Japan on the back. At the shoulders Japan was stitched in the same luminous thread in that choppy style which evokes the Orient. There was a smaller rendering of the same idea at the front breast pocket. He wore the jacket constantly. It was a little big for him, but he had got his hands on it somewhere, and wore it, I think, to commemorate his true father, who had died fighting the Japanese. Otherwise, he wore white shoes — in the dead of winter — pleated pants which, since he hadn’t gained a pound since he was fifteen, he’d worn for six years; and usually, white shirts and blue or black dingy ties under the jacket. Another failure of style, I noticed as he began to undress for the shower, was that his socks had been drawn down almost out of sight by the backs of his shoes. The revealed ankle was hairy and chafed.

“With his pistol too.” He picked it up like it was a smelly thing, then opened my drawer and flung it in. “Hero of the criminally stupid.” Fleece pored over me again. “I ought to call the cops. I really ought to call the cops.”

“By the time they got here, I’d have put on my loafers and combed my hair. The pistol wouldn’t be in the room. I’d call your mother and tell her you’re berserk. She’d be here faster than the cops, and when they all got together, you wouldn’t stand a—”

“You deliberating, taking-advantage son of a bitch. You know my mother must never, never come in this room.” He meant it very seriously. I was sorry I had pushed it to this degree. He went on, “What do you think you’re up to? Please. Don’t think I haven’t seen the picture.”

He reached under my cot and pulled out a couple of the books. He opened the right one to the photograph of Geronimo. His dirty fingernaillay right against the soiled kerchief. The old chief seemed to have taken fresh offense at this new finger upon him. He was cross-eyed with rage. I hadn’t seen him for two weeks. I was absorbed by the rage.

“Get your fingers off of him.”

Fleece let the pages flip by. He looked at the check-out slip in the back. “This book is two months overdue. You idiot.”

Driving home for Christmas, I passed the fields like dead palomino horses — winterset in Mississippi — the sun a cold bulb; and later, over the Vicksburg bridge, saw the river: a snake in throes, its belly up.

The raincoat, the scarf, the boots, the little pod of iron lying against my thigh — I was sticking with them. I had nothing to lose.

At last I was in Louisiana far enough and I picked up WWL in New Orleans. Bobby Blue Bland was tearing it up with “Letcha Light Shine!” Now what has happened to Bobby Blue Bland? He used to deliver enough raunch in one tune to get me through a whole day. But at this time, the Blue Bland band also rang up a sense of disgrace in me, for playing fourth-part trumpet in the Jackson Symphony Orchestra. This was really the hind tit of music, even if you were playing Beethoven.

I needed some solo Beauty in my life. There were my secret poems, all right. I would write out a whole ink cartridge in one night. I had tried them on index cards, on yellow paper, on unlined paper, on flyleafs, on onionskin. I had tried green and red ink, black, blue. In the mornings it was astonishing to find all those poem-looking things. Nothing had helped. It was all miserable. It was like visiting a site where ants had been killed — the dead flat sprawl of the words, the small kinked bodies of the letters.

The old man may have looked a bit dismayed at the scarf and the boots. I’m not sure. It began as a happy time, this first Christmas reunion. Harry is back.

Uncle Harry. My nephews are waiting for me with the football. I’m the passer and the star. There isn’t any telling how much I love my nephews and nieces. Ah, leaping for the high pass and crashing in the cane for a touchdown. Son of a gun. I remember my two little nieces on the front steps, at twilight, calling us in for the Christmas Eve supper. Inside we go for the oysters, the duck with sherry, the turkey, the ham. Afterwards, my nieces flock to me and sit in Uncle Harry’s lap. They’re wearing tiny maids of the Alps outfits. Their tender bottoms — the softest, most innocent flesh on God’s earth — are on my knees. I begin feeling like Jesus telling the parents to let the kids come to me. One of them kisses me and I know how unsullied and just slightly moist love can be. I wonder will it be like this when I marry. “I can count” says the baby. Then I watched them all tearing apart the presents. There’s nothing like seeing a kid yank his prize out of that colored paper. “This thing is mine , free and clear!” the eyes seem to say. Turns your old soiled heart around. If somebody could’ve stopped it there, it was my peace on earth.