Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

Love,

Vinceen.

What was this? The postmark was Mobile. Looking again, I saw the date was August, exactly a year to the day ago.

“Who could it be?”

“Thinking is making me sick. I said help me with this filth,” whined Fleece.

Bobby Dove meant it. Exams were on, it was not a good season for it, but he was having a dark fit again. He slept in his mother’s room and opened her drawers and held her articles. I saw that accidentally in the door-length mirror. I also saw him standing in front of his mother’s closet, peering in, for an overlong period. He went into the closet and I think he cast himself onto the clothes on the hangers.

After exams I let him have the house and left for Dream of Pines. He hadn’t spoken directly to me for two weeks. I didn’t want to become implicated in his mental condition.

The old man had been playing golf all summer and he was suntanned, with the gray hair a little longer than usual.

“A doctor in the house,” he said.

“If I can keep it up.”

“Do you think you’re finding your way? You know, you could still play your horn, all that wouldn’t be wasted. Doctor Israel plays the drums in his basement, you know, even as a G.P. Music can be a lifelong hobby.”

Ode was really betting on me as a doctor, and even though we had little to say to each other, it was fine with me to give my daddy that happiness. While I was at the house, my grades from Hedermansever came in. B’s in chemistry, a D in hateful German.

My mother had the beer in the icebox again. She wanted to know if I had a sweetheart. I told her I’d been casual with a few. She told me how important it was to meet someone with Faith. We were sitting at the kitchen table. I had never drunk liquor right in front of her before and was holding the can as if I weren’t interested in it. She told me to drink it, she knew I drank beer in college. After two cans, she looked at me. She wanted to know if I felt easier about talking now. Her eyes were moist and she had turned slightly breathless of voice. She asked me whether I thought they, Ode Elann and she, had instilled me with any things of the spirit when I was growing up.

“N—” Then I saw the trust she had in me, how hopeful she was, and said, “I know you did.”

“You’re bored here, aren’t you? All your college activities. You shouldn’t be always scowling though. You’re a nice-looking boy. Don’t spoil your face.” She’d seen the other children come home during the vacations from L.S.U. Their lives were not lived in her house. They had their sweethearts. They were on the phone or waiting for the mail, their lifeblood was in the telephone wires and the post office. Now I was home, but without a sweetheart, so she could talk to me.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked Ode.

“She’s gotten holy.” He talked to one side of me, as if some person next to me would understand. He didn’t like it anymore than I did, I don’t think.

“Your mother and I have read these magazine articles about how fifty-five is just middle age. That’s a lie. Even if you feel good. I feel good. But when you look down the end of the path, ‘Let this cup pass from me.’ You know who said that?”

“Jesus.”

“Even Him. He didn’t want it any more than I do. Let it pass on down the line to the other fellow who hasn’t taken care of his health and deserves it. It just isn’t fair that once you get fifty you have to worry about death any second. You start listening to sounds in your body. You see how lonely it will be. So you want a friend with you, you see. You have your children, you, your sister and your brothers. But a woman with religion, she wants much more sympathy than that. Even more than her husband. A woman hurts more times than ten men could ever take notice of. I can’t say anything about it.”

My mother was still a beautiful woman. There was either a great new absence or a great new presence in my mother. Her physique was perfectly fine, but now I looked at her knowing she was not eternal, was considering the possibility of her own death. Something slid out from under me.

“You pick out a rich girl, now,” said the old man the last day. “It’s all the same in the dark.”

I left Dream of Pines by the old greasy highway, seeing the new motel courts and a few pale boys on the diving board of their swimming pools. It was mid-September, and almost cold. They were having a good time. But everything and everybody was ghostly to me now. They were ghosts, they knew they were near death and they were having fun anywhere they could take it. Their old man had taken a job in a place that was still warmish in September and they were living here until they found a house. They stayed underwater as long as they could to get away from the stinking air of the paper mills. Their old man was back in the room using the motel ballpoint to figure up on the motel stationery how long they could last before the paycheck. I thought all this under the influence of my old man, who had told me how Dream of Pines was booming. “Booming!” I saw the swimmers in my dreams later. They were skeletons, shivering, smiling hugely with their gums, the last flesh left to them. Death was everywhere in Dream of Pines, since the old man first mentioned it. I didn’t even trust my own youth. My youth was an old sick pirate; there was a boy back there lying on the reefs, bleeding. The lad’s throat had been cut. I had cut it. “Push off, push off!” came an odd voice in my ear. I had no hometown, and Hedermansever was not my home. There was no real bed for me, not in thfe bunk at college, not in the gray stone house, not in Fleece’s house.

I knew Fleece would not be back at school and I was wondering who they would stick me with in the room. But there he was waiting for me, healthy as a berry. He’d put on some weight, in truth. I had an impression, however, that he was only simulating health. He was a mite frantic to cut a healthy figure, like a man skating casually while trying to balance a cantaloupe on his neck. He agreed with everything I said, everything I wanted to do. “Hell yes, Monroe!” Want to play some poker? Want to bet on the Colts? Want to play some snooker? He didn’t know how to do any of those things. “You bet, Monroe.”

Then his mouth became restless.

“Do you understand when I say that by the time it counts I’m afraid I won’t have enough energy to get my genius across? There are two people, professors on this campus, who once were geniuses, you can tell it in their faces, walking around with their wives and families, these men altogether sapped of power, with their caved-in smiles.” He was out late frequently with Bet. He acted as if he had just run along way.

“One thinks he can play with his own energy forever. Then she comes along, giving you every indication she means to be only your hobby, just wants to trail along as long as you let her. Always the flirting . And before you know it, you’re pouring your brains down her cunt. She isn’t smiling any more, nor flirting. She’s serious as death. She ought to be. Half your self lies in a pool at the backend of mons pubis.”

This went on the whole fall. Then in 1962, he wouldn’t get out of the rack for classes and slept like a rattlesnake hibernating in winter. One night the last of January he got out of bed, put his shoes on contrariwise, shut his eyes, and walked right into all his stacked-up material — the books, the cigar boxes, the metal stork, everything, it all tumbled over. I cannot define for sure what state he was in. He plunged sightless through the debris, kicking at it. He mounted a pile of books and stood there on top in blind idiocy. The books would not support him. He crashed on the end of my bed.