Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“It’s even nice and pink, for your scrapbook.”

“What more could a gunman or gunmen want?”

“You say you fired first, but up in the air. You just popped up and shot, twice. You didn’t say anything.”

“I never said that.” In truth, I’d just recalled that I had said something. “I yelled, ‘Stop!’ twice.”

“You don’t mean Peter yelled ‘Stop! Stop!’? Now he , that’s exactly his variety of …” Fleece held up a finger.

“I know. But it was me.”

“Stop what ? Was he pawing her?”

“No. Or not yet. But he had her under his wing, and that fern, that damn fern, was so large, spread out, it looked like they were in a jungle alone from where I was looking at them. They were drinking liquor; she could hardly drink it it was so strong, the girl. Remember he’d just seen her in the musical like I had. Remember the speed he drove over there…”

“Would you forgive me if I said I could understand all that? You love the girl, don’t you?”

I avoided that one for a moment. “No, I can’t forgive you for wanting to leave me. If I forgave you for that, where would it end, forgiving you? Vomiting on me, damn you, and—”

“Ah shut up! I don’t have to beg. I don’t have to apologize to anybodyl Silas heard that stupid slut you’re so hot for. He said she was a real spelling-bee queen.”

He stomped down the staircase to his room. I heard him rattling around, shaking the pieces of his portable Fleeceiana museum — the metal stork, the big useless radio console, the cavalry pistol, the framed, newer thing — a decree of high taste and decorum, a degree , in fact, which he had typed and awarded to himself, affixed with the seal of a prophylactic foil, Bet Henderson’s signature on the dotted line beneath, as she was the only attestor possible. Seeing the foil, I’d stopped there, not reading the document I think it was intended for Silas, anyway. Well this man of such staggering couth was down in his room, knocking around, having slandered the girl I loved.

But yes, that love . How was that doing? My Catherine! I couldn’t quite get those words in my mouth. There was a flinty little crab running over them: her words, her voice. I had been crouching there under that hedge bush, ready to hear anything she might have said and hide it away in the pleasure of my heart. She’d just come off the stage from singing and dancing, and I was waiting for the lazier sweet notes in her voice, and then came this bad whining illiteracy, not even good Alabama English; a sound, that if I had seen her speaking, I knew she’d be raising the side of one lip to get it out. And, damn me, I’d read so much good English poetry and prose and had developed such a sense of the exquisite — I thought — in grammar. James Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald were my masters then. I’d read Ulysses blind and knew about a fifth of what was going on, but the sentences stuck in my throat, spread like a cold to my ears, and I was diseased by elegant English sentences. Some days I had such a sense of the exquisite I wouldn’t speak at all. So, I asked myself, does her speech finish her off, murder her? This is how thudding stupid being literary can make you. Of course, she was alive. Don’t even think of course , ass. She has her arms, legs, breasts, and hair. She’s not waiting for anybody to say of course for her, like some combination obstetrician-grammarian giving her a spank on the bottom. I went up to Silas’s room, Silas being out: away with the curtain and you could see the lights of Jackson. I could see no rooms higher than this one in town. I was thinking about Catherine’s red bottom, what man spanking it? What parents waiting for her? Was she living within these lights? At the same time seeing her little arms and hands push outside the porch door with those guns, Peter grabbing them from her, I had her right in front of my eyes, in handwriting—

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

Love,

Vinceen.

had Vinceen, her own leaky ballpoint pen self in my hands, holding her letter; the rest of the letter was even worse, but what do we care, Vinceen? I know who you are and want to know at which point you became Catherine Marie Wrag, and what exactly you gave away when you gave away Vinceen , unless you have four legal given names knocking against one another, say, Catherine Vinceen Marie Wrag, four heavy boxcars like that And so what? You live, my Catherine, and you were so much when I first saw you, language couldn’t do you right, and you’re worth four different names, at least. if language tried.

I looked out at Jackson a last time and went back down the stairs, God help me, still trying to make those names into some audibly sweet order.

But she could not be found on campus. The semester was ending and I decided she had quit, or had been pulled out. I had an unendurable need to see her. I couldn’t read, sleep, or pay attention. I had an edge on constantly; I knew if I saw her I would touch her and she would look into my face.

Fleece was cleaning his room one day, and he yelled up to me, If I really wanted to break the law, why didn’t I smoke some of this marijuana he was throwing out? So I did, I smoked it in rolls made out of notebook paper, did it through the phase where your lungs hurt with a sagebrush fire that does nothing for you, to the phase when it takes hold, and you are an irresistible hero saying “Hot Dog!” and things like that. I would try to meet Catherine and eventually there she was, allowing herself to be caught in a green pasture. I am your rag, my name is Wrag, she said. Then the stone-deadend of sleep.

Fleece was in the Roman Rituals and Religion class with Ralph, who worked at a phone in the Jackson police station. He called the night Medgar Evers was shot in the back. Medgar was a field secretary for the NAACP. Some champion had killed him, in the dark, as he was walking from his car to his house. I suppose we were among the first in the world to hear about the murder, if that gains us anything. After Fleece put down the phone, he told me about it. He told me, if my gun was loaded, keep it that way. Silas came down to his room asking what was going on. Silas, when he heard, said he just wanted to be in the same room for thirty minutes with that champion, that champion shitlicker who could aim a gun in the dark at a man’s back. And the champions who were the bombers of the Sunday School in Birmingham could be this new champion’s managers; they could advise him what to do when his eyes were ripped out, when he was strangled with his own guts, and while they were thinking of what to advise him, the champion, Silas would already be falling on them, tearing each man’s stomach out and holding it up for his observation for a moment before he slashed their eyes out and they could not see their own selves dying. I liked that idea, and still do. Since then, the FBI has arrested the lead suspect, the champion-suspect has been freed in two hung jury trials, and the champion-suspect has run for Lieutenant Governor of the state, getting an insignificant vote of thousands.

But what Fleece meant about keeping my gun loaded is that Whitfield Peter was the first one the local police called up. Ralph had seen him at the station. The police wondered if he knew anything about it. Ralph didn’t know all that was said. Peter did a lot of laughing and came by Ralph’s desk clicking his mouth and looking sublimely amused. Ralph got up to stretch his legs. He’d already seen Catherine sitting in the car in the dock. It was a black Buick now. He saw Peter get in and saw his niece draw over to sit nearer him. He had Peter’s new address. It was a house in Jackson. They were in the same city with us.