Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

I was fed up with her calling me ugly. I quit and dressed. The window screen seemed the right place to go out. She began sobbing; she drew up the yellow sheet around her. It was all very well to me that I’d quit at the time she started needing me. I didn’t like that loud screech calling me ugly, ugly, ugly.

She sobbed, unfulfilled, teats abob. As I was leaving I caught sight of her kicking off the sheets in some sort of fit. Then, the first time, I saw her nude and whole. I’d never seen the whole body of a female from this range. The lights of the room seemed to jump up even brighter. A magical flare-burst is what it was, over Patsy. I saw her lovely waste of breasts, even though they were small, and her navel, a pink whirlpool of flesh, her pale brown cup of hairs, her thighs and her toes all together. Her hair was glistening wet and thick. My word, I wanted another chance at that, but I was one leg out of the window already. I fell out, on the nasty stems of a hedge. Oh, let me back, but I was too much a fool to climb back up.

My mouth hurt. She had sucked my tongue when we kissed. And I had that stupid wilt of pain below. But I clambered back to my car, as if the ham muscles of one leg had been cut. My face was hot as the rash. And behind me, in the yard, I could feel something yet to pull into the car, like a kinked tail, as if my ass had unraveled off me and was caught in the hedge under her window.

Fleece could not drive a car. When he went out alone at night, he called a taxi. Sometimes the taxi would back out of the driveway and head west — toward Hedermansever — and sometimes east — toward Jackson, about which he was mysterious. Bet was at Hedermansever, I knew. But what was in Jackson?

“I’m going diving,” he said about one trip. I thought he might be swimming at the YMCA to build up his body. This was possible. He took ho swim trunks or towel with him, and at the Y, you swam in the raw. I was trapped in one weekend and found that out. It was in Shreveport, the night before the solo contest. Old Mr. Medford — who “was going to accompany me on piano — and I thought a swim in the heated pool might be nice before supper. We went out and bought us some swimsuits. Then we went down to the pool and everybody was in naked. This put me off. Old Medford didn’t know what to do, and I felt for him. For him it had taken guts to even get in the swimsuit. I told him it looked damned odd to me. We forgot the swim and went out to supper.

But this had nothing to do with Fleece. He meant dive in the sense of tavern . What Fleece was doing was going out to meet and talk with the people, I guess for the first time in his life. I found this out later. The fact was, Fleece told me sometime during college, that he wanted to be a doctor for about ten years, then he wanted to run for governor of the state of Mississippi. It seems his ambition increased after he met Bet Henderson. However, Fleece was no drinker. Three beers almost took him away. His drinking partners, angered by the line of debate he took, would often spit at him and strike him.

It was nice to sleep late every morning of the weekend in Fleece’s house, to have your coffee at noon. I think I was made for that. I’d been up an hour one morning when Fleece came into the kitchen. His hands were locked in front of him. He told me it was time to visit the king cat’s house. We had to steal Catherine’s letters, had to, soon. Somewhere in the house there must be something from her.

We drove to the house the next day, Monday, around ten in the morning. Peter would be at the real estate office in Jackson. I had the hard top on the T-bird. At Canton, we turned off on a gravel road. The house itself was two miles down this road. It had an overgrown gravel turnaround in the yard. The house was a large thing; the white paint was falling off its boards, and it had a swollen gray aspect. I kicked through a window, and we climbed in with no trouble. We were looking for the attic, but I noticed that the downstairs was sparse of furntiture, the floorplanks were bare, and there was a desk standing right out in the middle of the biggest room. At the top of the stairs, before you got to the attic stairs, there were other rooms on both sides. I saw a made bed in one, and a pair of aqua-blue nylon fur house slippers resting by the front leg of it. A woman was living in this house, now.

We had two duffel bags. The crate was there. We pulled all the rest of the letters out. They stunk, like a mixture of spice and dung. They got yellower toward the bottom. My hands were rancid, with flecks of orange on them. We had them all and it was time to go, down the attic stairs, past the room with the house slippers. We were in a hurry, but when we got to the main room downstairs, I saw some more envelopes on the big desk in the middle of the room and ran over to them. I saw one with a letter in it stuffed into one of the cubby holes and took it. We were at the front door going out when I saw the back door of the house opening, hard. I caught a glimpse of Peter and then showed him my back. Peter hollered out. “Yaaaaaaaa!”

We barreled for the T-bird, but I saw there was a white Chrysler parked sideways across the drive right in front of it. We threw the bags into the well of the car and I tore down on the key of my T-bird. I would have to back up into some huge growth of briars to get out of here. The car wouldn’t start. I bent the key again.

“Here he comes around the house!” said Fleece.

Then the T-bird reared back on pure fire into those briars, the back end of the car rose up in the air, I was getting no soil with the wheels; then the wheels came down and I steered out of the yard, framming his car with gravel and red dust Fleece said he was in his car now, coming after us. We made the hardtop on the outskirts of Canton, then got on the four-lane of Highway 51, and he was still trying, though way back there. I put the accelerator down the last quarter-inch, and left him out of sight. Fleece thought he might’ve taken down the license plate number. But I still had the old California plates on the car. I’d take them off and get new Mississippi ones.

The letters, the yellower they were, the more unspeakable. The last one fell apart in your hands. It was still Peter writing to his wife Catherine. There were no letters from Catherine in the crate. The last letter set another scene, this time out on the front porch of the house, in the open air. The two of them seemed to have gotten out here from the upstairs room in some method which allowed them to make their way while at no moment uncoupled. There was a potted fern on the porch which was a sort of shrine and destination. Around this fern they emitted climactic fluids, blood included, and somehow they collected most of these fluids into one offering, which was poured on the fern in the last gasps of exhaustion. The letter ended in an undiminished mating call: “Let us see, beloved Catherine, how the fern will dol ”

All over Fleece’s house lay letters. The duffel bags sat tumbled over on the couch. The house smelled like swamp gas. Your hands were brown from handling the last letters. It wouldn’t wash off. Your hands stank; you couldn’t eat a sandwich with your hands that way.

Fleece handed me a page which consisted of nothing but a crescendo of spelled-out grunts.

“It’s not fun any more,” he said. “He doesn’t have any style any more. Let’s build a fire. Get this filth out of my house, I do believe I’m going nuts with him, Monroe.”

The other letter, the one I’d gotten off his desk, was post-marked last year—

… taken poor me unner you wing like this I caint hardily thank you eneough, Uncle Peter, I just do hope Im sharp enough for college.