Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

Vicksburg simply weighed on my heart like lumber: all the old history, all the ravaged gun-toters, all of contemporary Vicksburg; Grandmother’s house, how it seemed like a boat rotting up in a bayou nobody would ever find.

We were walking back through a sparse line of trees. Fleece collapsed to the ground. I thought he was having a relapse. He was wrestling with something.

“Help me, Monroe! Let’s pull this boy out. Ufff!”

“What is it?”

The clod came up in his hands, shooting dust and grass. Fleece twisted his fingers around it. Something was showing through the turf.

“Mine, mine. You didn’t help. It’s all mine!”

It was an entire cavalry pistol. That lucky, needlessly lucky scoundrel. On any other given day he would have had his nose in the air, gabbling away. He was averse to pistols. Whereas for me, I’d love to put my hand around the dirty handle of it. I thought some feeling, some sense, might come to me if I did.

“Look. U.S.A . Sherman’s cavalry.”

“He was here?” I tried to grab the thing.

“Of course, Ruben. This is where he sharpened up for Georgia. Let me alone, it’s mine. It won’t shoot. You wouldn’t want it. On my soul, a whole gun!”

This pettiness — I hated the son of a bitch. I’d show him some petty. I took off running, for the car. I knew his lungs would kill him; I’d leave him.

“monroe!” “monroe!” came the tiny faroff shouts behind me. The last leg was a vertical slope. I got in the car dying for breath myself. Perhaps his heart would burst. In my own heart I felt the hard little tick of pettiness. Well, this was something, this feeling.

I thought of the organic chemistry lab, how I hated it, hated it even more than histology, or invertebrate anatomy, because Fleece was the instructor for it. Bet Henderson took the lab too. Fleece would drift into the big room, as if on some pompous unicycle, in his lab coat, his mental life so far beyond this room, with its cruddy stone canals and fumes; ignoring Monroe, who had expended so much of his imagination on excuses to the professor for Fleece’s absences; but deigning to hover around the shoulders of Bet to say the tritest, namby-pambyest words that ever came to my ears. “What are you doing, tee hee. Need some help, tee hee?” whispering, “Are you still my Bet-Bet? tee hee?” With me trying not to hear, but dragged up into it like some involuntary nauseated peeping Tom, since my set-up was right next to hers. Really he deserved to die of a rat bite.

As he appeared on the ridge, practically strangling, I began to ease the car away. Out in the road, I saw him limping after me in the rear-view mirror. How much can he take? I wondered, easing on faster. When will his heart burst? I suppose he gave a last effort. It must’ve been some-thing. I was shocked to see him holding to the door handle, being dragged along. He simply heaved over, face-first onto the seat. I stopped the car. I was outraged.

“Damn you! You know everything about Vicksburg, have it! Stay here and own it. Choke on the place. I didn’t want you to come over here. I had things to see.…”

“Marrrk!” he said.

“What?” Some sound, the beginning of some word.

“Maaarrrrrrrk!” He threw up all, all over the car — and me — trying as he was to wheel the spew around toward the road on his side. I suppose I sat there a minute in the vile after-puking calm. Then I ripped that towel off his neck. My life seemed so bleakly redundant, an amplifying farce. Here the boy had been wearing the towel, the exact thing you would carry if you knew your life was going to be a cycle of puke.

In the dorm halls we passed by those rooms here and there with the queer and the hapless in them: Thomas, Don Thing, Ashlet; a boy whose stomach swelled up periodically, a boy whose face had been jerked askew by polio, a boy with an enlarging wen whose head bucked, a boy with purple acne, a dwarf, a pale giant; then there were the sissies, the religious maniacs, the homosexuals, including the compulsive ear-to-tongue man of the Hilltop Theater, and last — I don’t mean there weren’t a bunch of good fellows and honest scholars around too (the president of the college was an honest scholar who learned my name and always wished me well) — last there were the ones who looked so ordinary it was morbid. A number of people seemed to have come to Hedermansever so as to use the college as a sort of proving ground for their afflictions, wanting to know how far they could push into the world before it spat them out. I hope they all had good luck, and I don’t feel heroic even recalling them but they were there, and I lay down to sleep a few cells away from them, perfect of body, good wind, good arm and leg, afflicted with a nervous gloom, feckless. I dreamed about old Geronimo, peering out miserably from a cage in the zoo of American history.

When Fleece left the next morning, I walked over to his radio console and picked up the cavalry pistol. I looked out in the dorm yard. I recalled that, back in the fall, my German teacher had announced to us that the Cuban blockade was on. Soviet ships were making toward it, lower Florida was full of soldiers, and only divine intervention could help now. So she led the class in prayer. I looked around; most of the class had their eyes closed. A special prayer service in the chapel had been called. I myself had on the reptilian coat and was fondling the pistol in my pocket. I felt no dismay. Let them come, let the Russians hit the coast, take Gulfport, up Highway 49, overwhelm Hattiesburg, Collins, Magee, Mendenhall, D’Lo, send a corps over to conquer Hedermansever, building by building. A few of us meaner men would get our share from the windows. I saw all the scurrying brown raincoats in the dorm yard, sighted down the cavalry pistol. It would be all quite keen and simple.

I rubbed off all the green. I slipped a handkerchief through the slides and yanked them loose. Then I rubbed them with Vaseline and treated the valves with Conn oil. I ran water in the bell and that ancient ferny sludge of ‘58 to ‘62 washed out Now I had a horn again. In with the Bach mouthpiece, on with the lips. Not bad. I did a few exercises I’d memorized from the Arban book and then went straight to jazz. It seems I could put more notes to the measure than ever before. I could play higher and brighter. Fleece wanted to know if I intended to practice in the room. I told him I had nowhere else. He checked out.

A drummer I knew down the hall, who was in the marching band and was a corny sort of fool, actually, heard me and brought down his snare drum, sat down, and began hitting for me. I couldn’t go long the first night. But by the fourth night I had built up a lip, and Joe the drummer from Texas was giving me time on a complete trap-set he had borrowed. A fellow from Yazoo City was doing the bass part on a cello. The cello was owned by his roommate, a student evangelist who wanted eventually to use the instrument as a part of his appeal, and who was out of town now on a revival circuit. Silas, who had the cello now, had learned his strings on country guitar and wasn’t very good plucking the thing, at first. But by the fifth night he was sounding the rhythms well enough and hitting a note every now and then. The sixth night, the hall people got Dave, the dorm counselor, and he pounded on the door. This man was blind in one eye, but enormous and hairy, a cycloptic wrestler sort. I never knew he was a physical coward until he came to the door.

“Nothing but crap and corruption comes out of this room. People are trying to study and sleep! Look at these crayon marks all over this door! I’m getting you for room deposit! What’s this, drums in here?” He didn’t see well and I think he thought he was screaming at Fleece alone.