Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“I was shot in the knee, son! Shot! I’m a casualty of my convictions. I’m a victim of ‘peacetime’ America.” His eyes seemed gorged and red. I noticed on his finger, the little finger, he wore a dainty ring with a black pearl set atop it. I couldn’t linger on his face long.

“Just set two. I can’t eat now. Excuse me. You two young people …” he trailed off, leaving again for another part of the house.

The supper was quiet. Afterward, I asked Catherine to go with me to a movie at the Capri tomorrow night. I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask this, but I was nervous, and my visit to the house would seem pointless and more, suspect, if I didn’t pursue it. Catherine was pretty eating, her mouth shut. After a while she said all right, about the movie, but rather cautiously.

“What’s on?”

“Something European. I forget.”

“I caint even talk English well.” She smiled. Something between a joke and an abashed confession. I smiled. “You could be in one of ’em. Your beard, you look Victrolian.” I’m sure my smile drooped, but I brought it right back up. Peter caned into the dining room again. He said he would see me to the door, and Catherine went back to the dishes.

As I touched the doorknob myself, he began speaking softly at my back. “We know she isn’t bright of mind. But yet I know what a dear little self she makes altogether. I don’t want anything sly. Not to be presumptuous. But I imagine you might find her willing, hot”

“Sir?”

“Passionate . She’s near twenty-seven, you know.” Peter’s own breath struck me.

“My Lord.” I was shocked. “Why?” I don’t know what I meant. I was being an idiot.

“She didn’t have the best start. Don’t ask her about that Another thing is you must not talk about the violent events which have transpired within the last year. I can tell you she had nothing to do with them, certainly, and I will tell you I…” I was in the light of the steps; he was within the shadow of the foyer, his robe like hanging wings. But his voice began to constrict, became tiny all of a sudden, an airy sort of reed. “I am not dead yet. I am stubborn. I have ideals. I have had …”—he continued on as if unconscious of any change of tone, but his voice was even reedier, like the voice of a rodent in the movie cartoons—“have had… a wife. Hence I know the unutterable burning filth of a young male’s mind. You’d put yourself between the legs of a clock if you could.” Now the voice was coming back to a thin growl.

“The legs of a clock? No. I didn’t come here—”

“Horsepiss!” I turned to leave. “Please! I apologize. To presume … wait!” He inched the screen door open. “Your beard has made my head swim. Do know that you look ruthless, lad. Believe me that I’m not … that what I said… my undue sexual… eh, realism. At best. I’ve a mind which has sometimes frightened others.” His hand clenched on the door.

“I saw her in the musical. She’s pretty. I came by to ask her for a date. She said she’d go to the show with me tomorrow.”

“Certainly. But know this. You were the first.’

“She hasn’t had dates? She’s twenty-seven?”

“That boy Gillis Lock has called her on the telephone. But he is no college student. He could not ‘make the grade,’ as you youngsters say. He’s merely a clerk in a Krogers’ store over at Pearl. You have no competition. Perhaps that’s what alarmed me about you. So tell me something and I will remember it.”

“What?”

“What is your address?” I was off guard and gave him the right street, but thought in time to change the number to the one of a block which didn’t exist on little dead-end Titpea

“Your telephone number?”

Now here I was together enough to lie. But I didn’t lie well enough. I gave him the number of Fleece’s parents’ house, which was the only number in Jackson I’d ever memorized. This was an insane inadvertence too. If I’d been Italian, I’d have torn my hair on the way home. This girl, this girl, whom I’d seen, finally face to face for an hour. The minutes ticking by, my care for her turning to an impatient desire to yank her around until her secrets were out.

I didn’t tell Fleece or anybody I’d been over to that house. I was horrorstruck that Peter knew the street I lived on; couldn’t tell Fleece I had been so stupid, had bowed like a thoughtless chattering tongue to old Whitfield Peter’s urgent commands. Damn me. Now, to carry on with the girl seemed the only thing to do. I took her to that foreign movie. Wait. First, I stood out in their yard and held my beard and looked the place over again. I could sniff the brass pepper of fear, feel it reaching in my head all over again. Perhaps they’d remembered me from under the porch and in the shadows of the window. He had those shotguns and was so fractured and anxious he might pull the trigger on anything moving. But I rubbed my beard, thinking I was imperceptible and safe in my fur. And the spirit of Geronimo was still there with me, saying, “Push on in, push on in. Love what you can find and kick what you can’t.” As a matter of fact, he suggested I drive out to the wilds around the Ross Barnett Reservoir and ravish her until she admitted that, sure, Uncle Peter was quite a sport at lust, but she’d never had anything like this; then change my address and keep moving, making an impossible target.

I knocked on the door. She appeared alone and was all dolled up. She had her own true loveliness, still. She was thin, her limbs had their own soft glow, her eyes had their shy sparkle; the small fruit of her mouth, the two cool doves of her hands, the melted china of her throat. And she’d been all this in “The Boyfriend” just weeks ago, in her silk shimmy — shy, even in the wide-mouthed everybody-on-stage finale. You would take her to your breast, defend her. Hardly daring to think of making babies in her. Thinking of that as an incidental event in some far-off purple glow. I took her out for two years. Not regularly. I would time the dates so as not to create embarrassment over the length of time between them, and so as not to risk a phone call from Peter. I let it be known that, being in pre-med study, I had absolutely no time. And I pretended well. I did study. And oftentimes I’d pretend again that I loved her, when she was in the car. Pretend that, while attempting nothing physical with her whatsoever. It caused no special anguish to resist. I heard Peter’s voice in my mind while I was with her, but that isn’t why I was so chaste.

Even beyond her pitiful grammar — which improved over the months (she’d say words like apprehensive and veritably ) — she was just another roach, after all. I knew the breed better than any. She had some tremendous incurable fault, even though at times she seemed perfect in make-up. Something in her being, something that made her slump her body walking across campus; something in her mind that made her fall away slack from the fine little body she had; something which some days made her so careless of her looks you would see a whole soapflake swashed over with makeup sticking on her skin; something in her, off the stage, out of the musical, which slunk, that I couldn’t ignore, told me. God knows how long it took me to see what every man on campus had seen first time he saw her. You should have seen the girl shrink, practically out of sight, into the corner of the seat of my old oily-smelling Thunder-bird. Like a whipped rat. Like a roach with all its exits well remembered before it ever ventures out. My dozen nights with her never approached romance, never approached anything . It would’ve been the same if I’d picked her up on the street. I had never met a roach that I couldn’t get a good bit of my marvelous self across to. I wanted to ask her all sorts of questions, of course. Sometimes I’d become excited over the fact that she was twenty-seven — and twenty-eight, twenty-nine! I never even saw my way clear to asking about her age. You’d look over there, and she’d be like a perfumed roach on its back, seeking its legs so it could flee to a crack in some filth, and all chance of intimacy would die choking.