Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“You can see what he has on his mind!” said Fleece. “What’s wrong? You’ve got your pistol. Shoot him! Look at him, still on her neck! Give me the gun!”

It happened that Catherine broke free of Peter, or the handle of the popper, and went hurriedly out of the room just then. Peter, still holding the contraption, mooing at her with a spread cupped mouth, inched her way. I brought up the pistol and shot through the window, into the fire. The window was made of twenty little panes or so. Patuda, patuda, patuda, patuda, patuda, patuda, patuda ! Shot out all but one shot. A number of panes fell away. Peter stood there in his robe and slippers, in full relief twenty feet from me, the center of an erupted shower of popcorn. He was trying to do something with the black pistol he’d pulled out of his robe pocket. “Let me take him,” said Fleece soberly. He was drunk but very serious. I gave him the gun and got out of the way.

Fleece aimed on Peter. Peter seemed to be making a lot of racket inside. I heard Catherine scream. Then I picked out the gunshot noises. Peter was blazing away from inside, and glass was flying past Fleece, and Fleece seemed to be poised there in the glow of the window light forever, a steady hand and pistol five feet off the ground. Then there was a yell as if a horse’s throat had been cut. Fleece walked quickly over to me and we were in the car before you knew it.

“I took him. It was fair. He saw me. I saw him. He shot at me nine or ten times. I took him down in the kneecap.”

“How you know you didn’t kill him?” I was trying to keep the T-bird together while we did eighty, hitting left from Northside Drive on to Delta Drive, which is very slick and bounded by ditches and greasy parking lots.

“I aimed at his knee for a whole minute, is how I know. And then when he fell I saw blood spurting outa his knee and he was holding his knee with both hands, is how I know.”

“He yelled like he was murdered.”

“I know he yelled…. You forgive me now for wanting to leave you at Canton, don’t you?”

“Yes. Yes. Fool.”

“All right, so you keep your mother fucking mouth shut about it.”

Such a hard all-square man then, Fleece. You should’ve seen him the rest of the week. He stayed in bed. He couldn’t eat the crust off a piece of toast; when he began starving, I brought him a piece of light bread, right out of the sack. Even this was too much; he couldn’t even nibble. He wanted me to keep a watch on his window. One afternoon a police car came up and backed around in our alley. He saw me stand up. “Who?” in this tortured gasp. I didn’t tell him. I thought he might be dying. My own heart had frozen seeing them.

I was in his room at the end of the week when Silas came through on the way to his own room.

“Dirty boy, dirty boy,” squeaked Fleece.

“Is he talking to me?” asked Silas, stopping.

“Somebody better hit me in the stomach hard, or I’m gonna die,” squeaked Fleece.

“He needs somebody to hit him in the stomach?” asked Silas.

“He’s said that before,” I said.

“He has ? Well, let’s see …” Silas went over to the bed. “You want something to bring you out of this?”

“Wait—”I began.

Silas raised his thick fist over his head and slugged Fleece in the belly so hard it made the bed move. I think it took the mattress down to the floor. Fleece’s tongue jumped straight up. I went on up to my room; I was shy of seeing what remained of the living Fleece, if anything. Then I heard Fleece calling me. When I went down, he was up walking in his pajamas, pointing up the staircase toward Silas’s room.

“That son of a bitch has had it!” he said.

Some days it seems to me I never knew any of them. I get sleepy thinking about them. It seems I was encapsulated in a dull glass ambulatory unit, and they were too, and we just happened to knock against one another and squinted through the glasses to see if the other was still insisting that he, indeed, existed. You see the arms pressed on the glass, and see their frowns squashed against it, and remember their flesh as if it appeared only in pink splotches, like a rash.

“When you think about it, it does shine forth as a little chemical miracle of rare device, doesn’t it?” Fleece was fondling the long pistol he’d given me, and looking wry. He was letting his hair grow out like Trotsky’s on the sides; his” forehead was even higher; the brains up there seemed to burst his hair away to both sides. “I believe I’ll take this one back.” He glanced out the window and then up the stairway. “A side arm makes one feel downright shrewd , don’t it? And my buddy-roll, we must be shrewd now, eh? What say?” He hadn’t asked about the bullets.

“You see her at school today?”

“Saw her yesterday. She didn’t see me.”

“She look worn out? She look eaten?”

“She looked like she was just plugging away at college like it was killing her. She was holding a copy of The Sound and the Fury and The Waste Land and Other Poems , and another book called Statistics and Appraisal.”

“You looked at her good, didn’t you?”

Poor Catherine. What was she possibly doing with “The Waste Land,” with The Sound and the Fury and The Stranger, The Brothers Karamazov in sophomore lit? What was she going to do about the junior English proficiency essay? With statistics and appraisal, with audio-visual education, and child psychology charging at her like monsters out of the fog. How, my Catherine? What will you do, what will you write, what will you say? At Heder man sever, which was so “rigid” and which they called the Harvard of the South, seventy-five per cent full of Pee Aitch Dees whose lives consisted of bringing bitter news to people like her — the dumb. Those Pee Aitch Dee people at the front of the room: “Look here, I’m Doctor so and so. The people that gave me the degree, they knew I’m not as narrow and stupid and boring as I seem. I spent years proving this!” Her bright black eyes on all that. Did she ever raise her hand in class? Of course not. I’d talked to Zak the other day, too. Catherine was assured of a place in the fall musical. So now, with also learning the tunes and the dance steps! And with Peter. How much could she keep in her mind!? I must’ve been showing my concern.

“Damn. You do care about her,” said Fleece.

“Care about her and don’t dare let her see me. I got the feeling if she saw me again, she’d remember who it was with the gun by their porch out there.”

“She didn’t see your face. They’ve got nothing, nothing . You know what he said.”

Fleece alluded to Peter’s statement in the article “Local Citizen Attacked Again” in the green edition of the Jackson Daily , which appeared two afternoons after Fleece shot Peter. Peter was quoted from a bed in St. Dominic’s Hospital.

I do not know any person or persons who should want to shoot me. If I have offended anyone in my public stand I would offer him debate and not bullets. Please let me meet you in the open.

I only hope that now that I am crippled and will be forced to make use of a cane as I walk, that person or persons will be satisfied. I have confidence in the Jackson police, who will be stationed at my house until they break this case. You ask me if I look forward to violence in the future, and I say if they get through the police, they had best creep softly because I carry now a stick of large nature in the name of two loaded automatic shotguns with double zero buckshot in them. This would tear a telephone pole apart. I am only protecting myself and my own. The villain or villains who attacked me know already that I shoot back. If you are quoting me, let it be known that I am not inviting them. I hope they are satisfied by crippling me. But let them know I am now armed to lay waste to them if they have ideas of sneaking about my house again.