Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“I’m the campus police.”

“Would you know what time they usually end the rehearsal? I’m waiting for my niece. She’s in the musical. I know I’m parked in a faculty place, but at night, I thought …”

My frozen eyes and ass, it was Whitfield Peter. He stood there with his head full of tan hair, under the streetlamp. I took off running.

“You aren’t the police!” He yelled. He also demanded, “Stop! Stop!” and he was chasing me. I made it to the bell-house next to Crestman. They had this bell that they rang when Hedermansever won a football game, and this is what I was behind. I kept to the shadows and reached the basement of Crestman. I ran through the game room, the TV lounge, past the milk machines. The athletes had ripped all the phones off the walls and had turned over all the candy and drink machines upstairs and if they saw a sluggish man, they would attack him, so I ran. At the steps on the other side of Crestman, I had twenty feet of grass between me and my dorm. I kicked it Safe! Home free, with all the freewheeling strange sorts of my dorm. I loved all of them. Safe, walking by their rooms, I saluted them, at their desks, playing cards, hunched on their beds, looking regretfully into their mirrors. They seemed strong in their afflictions. And the ones with the completely ordinary faces — all these were my friends. They all formed a thick sanctuary of bodies around me.

I got up to the first floor and there halfway down the hall, talking to Dave the dorm-counselor, his hat off, seeming perfectly respectable, was Whitfield Peter. He was raising a hand to indicate my height. I took to the stairs.

Fleece was at his desk. The room was cleaned-up but crowded as usual. He had a glint in his eyes.

“What a machine that T-bird of yours is! I’ve learned how to drive tonight, my friend. You didn’t care if I took her down Raymond Road a ways, did you? Monroe, I took that whore up to seventy-five miles an hour! She responds to the old foot, doesn’t she?”

I got back my breath. Opened the top drawer and gazed at them, cold and oiled and wrapped in towels. I plunked them down on top of the chest to see if they were still loaded from the day of the Cuban missile crisis.

“Whitfield Peter’s in the dorm. He saw me sitting on his car. He and Dave are coming up here. I know it.”

“Sitting on his car?”

“What’s going on in the auditorium? His niece is in it.”

Fleece kicked the door and turned out the light.

“Put the guns up. What’d you do to him?”

“I jumped on the trunk of his car. He was in it. He scares the hell out of me.”

There was some time to talk before someone came to the door. Fleece told me they were rehearsing for “Oklahoma!” in the auditorium. He knew this because Bet had tried out for it and hadn’t made it and had been melancholy for a week. The spring musical was a big thing at Hedermansever.

“Well, his niece is in it. She made it.”

“I don’t understand. Now you …”

The door rattled. The lock was old and the door-facing around it was splintery and rutted, and I was thinking about this because the door was being kicked, once, twice, and who could’ve expected this ? Fleece crawled into the closet in a low swift silhouette. I didn’t have the guts to release the safety on my automatic and just quavered, standing up, pulling on the dead trigger, the gun aimed at the floor. The door broke and swung in.

“Hi, weasel fuckers. I knew I heard you in here. I have something very, very damn happy for us!” It was Silas. “Is that a gun ?”

Some explanation had to be made. Fleece came out of the closet. Silas turned on the light and closed the broken door. I told Silas the complete history of it. He really caught on fire with the story. He demanded to see the letters. Fleece cursed. But I felt very safe with big Silas in the room. Fleece, of course, detested Silas and squirmed and smoldered, and sat in a rage the whole while. I went to the cigar box to get the letters. He told me to keep my filthy hands off his possessions, but I took them out, reminding him that I had stolen my share of the letters and it wasn’t my fault that we didn’t have the hundreds of them that went up in the fire behind his house. Silas sat there three-quarters of an hour, reading. Every once in a while, he’d look up and stare like a bursting demon at Fleece, who looked away.

“Have you men ever seen ten actual inches?” he wanted to know, standing up with the last three or four envelopes in his hand. He unsnapped his pants. I looked out the window. Then I glanced at Fleece. He was looking right at me, wagging his head in sick dismay. I agree it was a very perverse surprise.

“You people ashamed of the human body? Thinking I’m a faggot? You poor prig-trained people. I wanted you to see a real phenomenon, in and for itself — what letters! what letters! — and now it’s gone. Never have it like that again. Oh my, you two people. You read these letters in your dark little dirty minds. Giggling, I bet. Won’t look at the flesh of a man who loves both of you ! Never wanted to see the actual red flesh, did you? Couldn’t bear it! All your little rules say I’m queer. You’d love for me to be queer, wouldn’t you? I’m all dressed now. You can look at me.”

“I get ill enough looking at you with your pants on,” said Fleece. “Who are you, anyway? You look like somebody who’s taken exercises all his life so he could finally bend down enough to suck himself off.” Fleece was such a frail animal to be saying this to Silas.

“You expect me to haul off and hit him for saying that, don’t you?” Silas asked me. “That was honest, that was brave, what he said. I like him for it. I mean more. I know he’s a genius, I already respect him and like him for that. You people just can’t stand being liked , can you?” Well, there were some more friendly accusations from Silas.

He told us what he came down for. He had found us a cheap but extraordinary boarding house off North State in Jackson. Its landlady was Mother Rooney, an old Catholic widow who didn’t cook badly and stayed out of your way. He wanted us to move immediately; he meant tonight. Over at Mother Rooney’s, we’d have a separate room apiece, the rent was near nothing.

“We’ll be citizens of the world and not pigeons in this goddam roost,” he said. “I’ve got most of my stuff in my car already. This has to be fast, because these medical students want the rooms; Mother Rooney said she’d give us till midnight. I can get a trailer for all your stuff.”

I began getting my stuff together. Silas left. Fleece watched me packing and sorting. He was still snaky and sour. I told him we did need a new address, away from the college and Dave, and I was for it; told him that the place seemed fairly close to the medical school. I told him that, after all, Silas was not so bad. He’d made it so easy for us, he’d found the place.

“You son of a bitch. You know I won’t stay here by my-self,” said Fleece. He packed his clothes. Silas came back to help us with all of the cargo of artifacts and books which Fleece owned. It was five in the morning when we got it all in the trailer, which was hitched behind Silas’s Pontiac. Fog was all over the road to Jackson. Fleece hadn’t said a word for six hours. This was almost a shock to the ears. One thing to Silas’s credit: his presence caused long spells of silence in Fleece.

The house was on a little dead-end alley full of weed clumps. The alley was named Titpea; we passed the apartment house where Patsy Boone used to live. Our house was situated over the state fairgrounds. It leaned a little off its foundation, this house, toward the back yard, which didn’t amount to much and ran to a high cliff all grown over with kudzu vines that saved the back yard from further erosion. Nobody ever promised me or any of the other boarders that the house wouldn’t fall and crack apart as it tumped farther over the lip of the cliff. It was a preciously weird house, anyway. It amounted to two high silo-like towers attached to both ends of a two-story bungalow. The towers had yellow wood shingles; the middle bungalow had the same sort of shingles, but they were chocolate-colored; it had a porch with a banister, steep steps, glass doors, and white Victorian edging — grills and windows — like a fudge whorehouse. We would room in the southern tower. The old lady was already up when we got there.