Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“They let him go,” I said.

“Yeah. They don’t think he did it. They just knew how much he wanted to’ve done it. And who knows; he might have .”

I saw her. She came in by herself and sat down on the other side of the brick divider with the rubber foliage across the top of it. I was in the grill. She drank her coffee and went out the glass door by herself. She had a huge stack of books in her arms. She looked meek. The load was killing her. I followed her, saw her calves; just under the skin behind her kneecaps, she had a shadow of baby-blue veins. I caught up to her.

“You don’t know me, do you?”

“Nart!” She made a surprised sound.

“You were good in the musical.”

“Wasn’t anynothing especial. You uz with the horn, wuzn’t it? I uz just hardly in it.”

“Let me carry some of those books. Listen. We could have a date this Friday night,” I beseeched her. She jerked back the books I’d taken from her. Nothing mean in the action, just panic. Like a fox you tried to pet.

“Nart!” She shied off with her burden. I opened the door of the Student Union for her. She didn’t appreciate it too much. She made anxious squirming sounds.

What a piteous animal Catherine was, and so lonely. To class, and then home to Uncle Peter. Ralph of the police station had told us where they were. I’d driven by the house already — an old Spanish plaster thing near Meadowbrook Mart which we could see any night on the way to the Dutch Bar. And what did Peter say to her in that house? What did they do when the books were put away and Uncle Peter was home from the office?

As I watched her going across campus I wanted her still, with a trollish spasm. I loved her fear and wanted to bring it to me. And I suppose — I’m not sure — I thought if I could love her I would be a nice boy like my mother always wanted me to be. Perhaps, say, if I could kill someone who insulted her.

I whistled, wheep! Another day. This time sitting on the steps of the Education and Psychology Building, and she was coming down them from class. She wanted to be a schoolteacher.

“You have to give me a chance.”

“Now let go my hem of my dress.” I saw a paper sticking out of her book. It had D - on it in red. She pulled loose but didn’t go anywhere.

“You waiting on your boyfriend to pick you up?”

She looked at me with an expression of tearful horror. Catherine looked a bit like Claire Bloom at times.

“Is this serious, between you and him? Don’t you get any time off? And Catherine? …”

“Aw whut ?” Such a delicate hug-able thing until you heard the voice.

“Would you say your whole name for me?”

“I cain’t.”

“Why not?”

“I ain’t got time.”

She stepped down to the sidewalk, and I saw she was watching the black Buick turn toward us around the horse-shoe. I stood my ground. At least I had on my sunglasses and they gave me some confidence. Catherine walked out in the road to get on the right side of the Buick. Peter was be-hind the wheel, studying me from ten feet away as he stopped. He had a cordial grin on his face. I’d seen his face since the night of the fire. Silas had a television in his room and we watched a broadcast of the funeral march for Medgar Evers which showed Ralph Bunche and other dignitaries, like old Peter himself, standing on the sidewalk of Farrish Street with his big hat most positively on; a little riot broke out later, as was telecast. We didn’t see him then.

By the time he got a good look at me, I was being a complete and craven chicken-ass thespian. I had drawn in my lower lip and a good bit of my chin to my mouth, and I let my top teeth hang out bare; I also dropped my shoulder down and turned out my hand in the posture of mournful dystrophy. I beat my teeth on my chin and ran my tongue around as if unable to say the passionate thing I wanted to say. I nodded up and down and stamped my foot. Peter became embarrassed and turned to his niece in the car.

“Who is that young man?” I heard him ask her.

“That’s Harry Monroe,” she said to him. Peter nodded to me hesitantly. His rival. So she had found out my name! Catherine saw me being the muscular dystrophy pretender on the steps. What awful humiliation. As they left I saw them in conversation with each other and saw them craning around to look at me as the car went down the hill to the highway. I waved to them then, bending out of the guise. I vowed then that Peter would never frighten me again. The next time he saw me, he would meet Harry Monroe and all that that boy really was.

We sat at Mother Rooney’s evening table. She had served us fried chicken with mashed potatoes and dark pan gravy, with turnip greens and a lettuce salad, plus her own rolls, and there wasn’t a crumb left in the room. The pharmacist, Delph, had left, and we were lying forward on the table, just mumbling. Silas had eaten two entire chickens and Mother Rooney had loved it. For a while Mother Rooney had sat at the end of the table, watching her food being eaten, taking nothing herself. She’d been lightly chiding Silas about the other evening. He’d sent her to the Roy in a taxi, telling her there was an epic of the Catholic faith showing called “The Blood and the Cross,” which was an Italian vampire movie featuring the indecent exposure of five women just before the fiend bent them over in silhouette to slake his need, with an old coughing priest and his crucifix the hero at the end. Silas was so stoned with food he didn’t even answer her, or perhaps he did. He commenced heaving out long rending belches, and she got up and left.

“What sort of parents would let her stay with Peter?” I said.

“They aren’t alive. Either that, or they’re so low they can’t afford to think. My theory is,” said Fleece, “they don’t know he was in Whitfield. If somebody wrote them, and if they can read, what they read was he had tuberculosis or something all that time. They think she’s with some man who has recovered because he’s such a fine man he deserved to recover. They think he’s weak but has a lot of money. She’s in a Christian college. She’s in their dream they never ever thought of hoping for.”

“That’s something like my theory,” I said.

“I’ll tell you. My theory is …” said Silas. He was dead with food, and belched again. “My theory is that the meat of Pete is her treat . And that was a poem, mothers.”

“I want to go over there and stay in the yard for half an hour and see what I can see,” I said.

“I’ll go with you,” said Silas, with no enthusiasm.

“I’ll take you over,” said Fleece. He stood up.

Fleece had just been issued a license from the State Highway Patrol. Silas lifted a hand and fell asleep.

It proved out that Fleece and I hadn’t eaten so much that we couldn’t do with a six-pack at the Tote-Sum. We parked in Peter’s front yard and finished it off — ten o’clock by the clock of the T-bird. The T-bird was getting to be an old car, and it was surprising the things that still worked in it.

He got out with me and we walked right up to the show window of the right rear of the house. “This would be a living area,” said Fleece. He was drunk. He suggested that we climb up on the roof and dive down the chimney together and land in the fireplace and show them something. He called me by name several times, afraid he would forget me, I suppose. “Zersus? Zersus Christ? What was his first name?” “Jesus.” “Jesus Christ!” We were looking at Peter and Catherine and they were popping corn over a fire in this huge room. Catherine held the wire contraption and Peter was leaning on the mantle, expressing himself blissfully. You could tell he was using some art in whatever he was saying. It was long out of season for a fire, but there it was, going. Catherine was covered with a chaste robe of turquoise flannel, but, nevertheless, you could see her thigh-line, and her breasts sat forth very plainly in it, though she was buttoned up to the top. What seemed really compromising was that she was barefooted. Peter was getting to see the line of those pretty ankles and feet Catherine, holding the stem of the popper with both hands, moved away awkwardly from the fireplace suddenly. Some of the corn seemed to have taken flame. Peter swirled around and leaned over her shoulders with his arms around her, to take it. His head fell to the side and he was a long time at the back of her neck.