Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

Back at the dorm, I asked Fleece what possibly she could have meant. He was so avid to know everything he didn’t even laugh. I think he sort of fell in love with Patsy, hearing about her. He said she was just a little mixed up in her terms, was all.

“Do you remember in Peter’s letter, ‘the lush vigilant digit of your clitoris’?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well then.”

He gazed off amazedly. “She said that?”

Exam time came around the next week. Fleece’s parents went to Europe for four months. General Creech wanted to live in all the places he’d helped shoot to pieces, said Fleece. He imagined Creech all blown up like a toad with his memories. Fleece’s board was paid for at the college through summer and fall, and the house was locked tight, but we broke in and set up. The grass was already high in the yard, high around the cool mimosas, which were every-where. It was a ranch home, with bricks and green boards. Fleece felt terribly good, at first, being in the place. He read like a monk. We had the air-conditioning and the free telephone. For me it was free board for the summer. I was finished with college music and thought I might indeed try medicine. Fleece made it sound easy, and at the same time glorious. The idea was that his own knowledge was so large that just being around him, enough would rub off on me to make the basics, even starting from scratch. Beyond that, there was only memory work, and my memory had always been fine when it needed to be. So I was going into chemistry, German, and algebra this summer, and I felt like a swashbuckler of the mind.

Saturday evening I called Patsy and Fleece was on the extension.

“I’m going into pre-med,” I told her.

“My baby a doctor ?” said Patsy. “Then you can come right over and cure me! I’ve got bruises everywhere where you grabbed me the other night. Honey… no!.. I love all my bruises. You were my poor drunk Harry … I love you more! When I see your face tomorrow.”

“Darling, do you want to have intercourse with me?” I said.

“Yes! Yes! I’M FAINTING WHEN YOU SAY THOSE WORDS. Oh, darling. I didn’t know you loved me enough to say intercourse and darling to my face!” I was doing all this for the benefit of Fleece, of course. She was a great joke.

“Now that I’ll be in medicine, and thinking of what you said the other night about our act, you know, in the clear light of reason, I think now I should say words like intercourse and, well, vagina and penis. And feces , even, certainly!”

“Oh, yes! And our children, too, well teach them that! All of the Latin words! My honey Harry. Let me ask you this. Will you not smoke, will you not bring your cigarettes tomorrow? I don’t want those clouds of smoke coming from my darling’s mouth. We don’t want the room cloudy or smoky in any way, do we?”

“For you,” I volunteered.

“Would you let me call you something that is not very scientific? I saw a movie once, I know it’s girlish, but you with the horn … when I saw you and heard you playing that Mexican solo — please, I know, I hope you’ll go on playing your horn. But—”

“What?”

“My Apache Valentine !” She sighed. “T’ve said it.” She hung up. Now, I knew what Fleece would do with this, and I did wish she hadn’t said that. She had peered in so close to me that she’d gotten as close as the right tribe.

I waited a while, but he was still in his parents’ bedroom, holding the phone. He looked askance at me through his horn-rims. His sideburns were wet and curling.

“Ain’t she keen? Does she come on strong?” I said.

“That was wrong for me to be hearing her. She’s real. You don’t deserve her. Shut the door.”

I read a bit of my chemistry and went to bed in Fleece’s room, a brown room with varnished pine, black knotholes in it, thinking of the queer blotches around me. I woke up with my cheek hurting. A thick book was lying on the sheets. Fleece had hit me with it.

“Open the eyes. Don’t be mad, now. That’s The Brothers Karamazov you’re looking at. I could’ve stacked all the books I had to leave behind in this house on your chest, and you’d be crushed to death . So, see, you’re alive, and don’t be mad. I want to talk about my girlfriend, Bet”

“I’ve seen Bet at least once a day all semester and I’ve never seen you with her. I don’t believe in this; I think she barely knows your name. Don’t ever hit me in my sleep like that.”

“She’s from Rolling Fork. A Delta woman. She is six feet, one inch. Her father is taller, her mother is even taller, and she is little Bet to them. She has a brother who is taller than all of them who played basketball at Mississippi State. Her daddy was a Marine in the Pacific in World War Two. He lived through the same battle my father died in. I really do have to make a choice. She has several strikes against her. Don’t laugh, but she sings hymns , spontaneously, with all her heart. Our first date was up to the Hilltop Theater. We were walking to the movie under that arch of oak trees, neither one of us could think of anything to say, and she breaks into ‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me….’ At the moment I was taking mark of the white insides of her toes where her suntan hadn’t covered. She had sandals on. I can see her feet by the lightning of the spring storm that’s breaking over us. Her dress was blowing between her legs. I let go of her hand when she started ‘Amazing Grace.’ I went over to the side of the road and looked at the weeds; I almost threw up. I’d taken in some lab fumes that afternoon. My body was throwing out an alarm. I told her I was dizzy, I hadn’t eaten supper. ‘No supper!’ I’m quoting her. She stroked the back of my head. How can I tell her it’s the hymn that really made me sick? But it was good, really. She said she hadn’t even made the concert choir, but screw you people over in Fine Arts. It was good. For the first time in five years I felt like I was a sinner, when she sang. We went on up to the movie, and I took hold of her hand about midway through. She liked that.. I’ll tell you, to sweat hands together in the Hilltop …”

I appeared at Patsy’s apartment on time. She met me, clutching together a purple robe that looked like a piece of rented costumery for a male actor in college Shakespeare, and she did tell me she’d been in two campus plays, showed the photograph taken under a proscenium which revealed her as an inscrutable female extra in Elizabethan wraps. We had such common interests, she said. The lights of reason were truly up; there were extra lamps. On her wall was a fishnet holding all her flute music and other things meaningful to her — menus and stolen wine glasses and her diary. She pulled the robe apart and sailed it away, and leaving no moment for examination, she was nude, hurling herself on the bed.

What a feast of sight I’ll make, I thought. I peeled off. I went over to the old dresser with the tall three-way mirror and picked up the pistol she kept, a ten-dollar.22 revolver for protection against rapists. What a laugh. I had pity for her. I glanced over at the wire screen of her window. He breaks through there, a raw pink craver, and the dyed-blond horrorstruck princess of the roaches shoots blue holes in his stomach. Then claws out his eyes if the bullets didn’t stop him. Saving herself for me. I pitied him too, maybe more than her.

I’d done some push-ups every other week, and knew there were some muscles apparent on me. I turn, blinded to her by the effect of my own body. Look what you are getting for free, Patsy.

“Lord! Wow! You’re so ugly ! Men are so ugly, at last I see! Doesn’t it hurt to be like that? Don’t you dare turn away, though. Get on the bed. My lord, it looks like you’ve been wounded! Something they rammed through you from behind … I have to help that swollen thing, don’t I? Yeah, ah, yeaaaahasssss! Aw, is this right? Is this it? Aw, Be ugly in me, be ugly … Don’t you quit!”