Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

It was a stunning dream I couldn’t do anything with. I think I almost always sleep too deep for dreams. Then one comes, like that old dream of Ann Mick naked, and it does nothing but ruin my waking time for a month.

On a clear warm day I told Bobby Dove I was driving over to Vicksburg. He said wait, he wanted to go too. It was a Sunday. Fleece was still inching out of his mental spell. He had wanted me to hit him in the stomach again, and this time I did not hold back. He spat up a peck of odorific gobs and passed out. But he wanted to go out now. He’d also lived through another bout of the Hudson Bay flu. He put a towel around his neck.

We went west on 80—the top down — past Bolton, Ed-wards, Bovina, and into the deep-slit hills and trees covered with kudzu vine. Eighty was a thin, cracked road full of tar repairs. There was a big sun, but the wind was so cool it was like taking a fine spray of water on your skin. I dialed the radio, was going to pass by a white church service, when Fleece hit my hand. They were singing the invitational hymn. It was noon.

“Can you hear her singing?” I slowed the car to hear. “Whatever church it is, my mother’s there. She wants to go down the aisle. She thinks whatever is wrong in her home might come to her when she’s in front of the congregation.”

“My mother might be there too,” I said.

“I can’t hate her. I can’t hate somebody who starched and ironed all those shirts for me. (This isn’t your mother, god damn it, it’s mine! ) All I remember are the light blue ones. They had so much starch in them the arms stuck out like wings. I had to strike through to get into them. I went out to the bus stop feeling like a kite. The wind actually moved me around, I had to hold on to the bench. That damn button up against my neck to ward off colds … It would be easy to wish I was a kite, I’d take off, with my mother holding on to the string. Kick those fluffy clouds with my shoes, stay up there and just report on what the weather was, all my life.”

I told him I was glad my mother would never have been satisfied with that little baby blue dream of me.

“There’s a sweet wolf in everybody’s past,” he said.

“You’re quoting somebody.”

“Me. Myself.”

I parked below the Illinois Memorial, and started following the markers. We went into the marble halls, saw the busts and read the bronzes, saw the bas-reliefs of the armies squirming flab bergasted, the pretty long-haired bullies they had for officers; the sober yet flamboyantcolonels on their bronze horses rampant; the green vegetating bronzes worked on by the rain. I pitied the idiots who cared for such scenes. I was among the idiots who cared for such scenes. I lay my head down on an old brass hoof. I bit it when Fleece turned away. It tasted like my useless trumpet mouthpiece. We saw the names of the dead, we saw the kudzued hollows and walked the fields where the earth was still low in the old trenches.

“The South isn’t dead,” said Fleece, beginning to run down a hill.

“Hot damn! Gawd no,” I said.

“We’ll strike in the deep of the night!”

“The deep of the hot damn night!” Fleece was having a good old time. He whipped off the neck-towel and slung it around.

“Follow met” I ignored him. He ran a ways, then came back. “I said follow me! I’ll break you ovuh the code of the Confedrasee, boy.”

“I’m sitting down.”

“Butl shee it Follow mel” Fleece really meant it. “ Run for them, cocksucker. We over the ground of General Pemberton’s Rebel boys. They ate rats , right heah! Right heah they finely threw up their hands. Mortified by the stomach, but never licked by the gun!”

Fleece knew the history of the battle, which irked me. I didn’t know beans. He ran up the hills like a goat. At the top there were cannon sitting in concrete, facing the Mississippi. A mile below was the dull old snake herself, with barges creeping along, sand bars streaking here and there, and the bank of mud and scratchy-looking trees on the Louisiana side, while Fleece was explaining to me about when cotton was king in 1850, and what we had here was the struggling remains of riverside Pharaohism — the restaurants advertising fresh river catfish, the plasticolored motels, the antique shops, the bait and snack stores, featuring a rubberoid worm which kaught fish kwik; the four-story whorehouse on Mulberry Street, whose parlor Jayne Mans-field had visited, thinking it was “cute,” who, in fact, bared her breasts there for the house artist, on her way to Biloxi; and Louisiana, in a low strut of trees and mud beach, calling to me like she had missed me, even though I didn’t give a damn for her. Fleece held my arm. He told about Grant finally dragging his gunboats out of the Yazoo River and into the Mississippi, told me how the Rebels just laughed and tried to sink the boats with mortars for a while.

I noticed you could see much of the town of Vicksburg. I spotted the white banistered house of my grandmother. She was dead and this house was no longer a part of her. But that was where my mother had grown up. I told him this.

“She was the most-adored piece either side of the river. That porch was where she and the old man fell in love. He was …” I just thought through the rest. He was the Louisiana State handsome, but running out of money, wearing a straw hat and widepants, my old man thinking of taking this soft sweetie, Donna, back to that lovely village with its lake and towering pines, so many pines that the streets and walks were quiet with the needles they dropped, and children and lovers could fall down pleasurably, that Dream of Pines, Louisiana; the old man thinking he would take any job if he could take her there with him. She had a high skirt and beads, but she was shy: a caution and skidoo. She’s thinking about going to college. She’s backwater, a know-nought, and she’s pretty as a doe. He wants her to a degree nature or luck couldn’t refuse. She comes to him.

Here I was seeing the house she left behind her. Here where my grandmother stayed and died. Died remembering the birthdays of such jerks as me and mailing dollar bills in cards which cost fifty cents. Died of receiving the hurried ballpoint pen thank-you’s from me. She lay near a church I could not see.

There was the Sprague , an old paddlewheel they had made into a floating theater, which showed a melodrama with a trailing cancan each year; harking back to the really good times, the 1850’s, before the war. Come aboard. Don’t be a stick in the mud. Eat it. Lick it. This is Old Man River.

Fleece began singing “Old Man River” emotedly. This was a rare surprise. I’d never heard him so much as whistle before. He sought the tones lustfully. No wonder he despised hymns and most all music, if this is what he heard. But he was joyful as a hunchback jumping up and down in a loft with the bellrope. ‘Tote dat barge! Lif dat bale! Gets a litl drunk and ya lans in jail O!” trying to be the operatic nigger, but puny, sorry, afflicting me like somebody was scratching my teeth with a piece of aluminum. I asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t hear me.

Jesus mercy, I was sad. We went and saw the last sight, a football-field-sized green full of white graveblocks no more than six inches apart, with a gravel path which separated the Union from the Confederate dead. By then I was drooling blue. Close to the cemetery, a family was having a picnic. They threw the wrappers and the paper plates meekly into a barrel. It was almost the centennial year of the fall of Vicksburg. The strange silence , then, is what got me — as if you walked in a dream of refracted defeat. The horror was, I could think of nothing to say. I couldn’t think of even anything to think. I could not get “Dixie” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to play in my mind.