Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

Peter I didn’t see for over a year

She was at the door, opening it. That was fine with me. I asked how he was, on and off.

“He’s better. Everyday he’s better. He’s heavier. He’s put back on weight.”

“What does he say nowadays?”

“Like what?”

“Like anything.”

“He’s saying almost everything.”

“What does he say about you?”

“That I’m going to cut the mustard.”

“You got your hair fixed nice.”

“Cut it out.”

“If it’s fixed for me, I appreciate it.”

“It’s just fixed. Spray net.”

I think it was at a time when I’d memorized so much, I’d smelled the hydrosulphur effluvium so much, I’d seen those green concrete canals so much, that my face and head were hateful to me. This was my senior year. I knew so many facts I never wanted to know, I’d seen the back of my dead cat stretched out on a board, I’d learned to lift out muscle layers with a scalpel, I’d made slides over and over, and never wanted to keep this in my head, but I was desperate and had to, so what I got was a week-long headache, and all I could see for relief in the future was me, picking up a book of Bobbie Burns’s poetry — the only poetry that ever took me in college — and pouring a glass of Scotch to seal myself with and celebrate the mind, body and soul of old Bobbie Burns, who brought them all together and made them sing — in a choir whose members are mad at one another, but who sing nevertheless, together — and I could see myself reading that book in some future office as a general practitioner, when my day was over, the lovely women of the town had all been naked before me revealing their hurt, and I had to brush the dollars out of my chair to sit down. But in the meantime, I had such a headache. And turned to simple beer at the Dutch Bar, with Silas next to me on the stools.

“Silas, you rich bitter disconsolate bulky hod-carrier; what’re you going to be ? I been worried about you. Even rich bastards got to be something . I’m seeing three of you, and I been worried, what exactly you going to be. For instance, I’m going to be a doctor.”

“Monroe, my friend. I’m going to be in Art. I’m taking a position in Art. The only good course I had was with Sam Gourd. Art.”

We came in very late. Silas had been talking about how Mother Rooney flushed her commode every morning at six, on the minute. He was right in saying it made a detonation like the house was splitting; all the plumbing around us shuddered, and our tower shook. I woke up in fear many times myself. Well Silas was sick of this. He wanted to teach her. I followed him into her bathroom downstairs, and he turned on the light and stuck his finger down his throat. He threw up a flood of beer and something the substance of grits and whole dissolved fish. It was awesome, the amount of stuff he’d taken down this day. An entire boiled egg from the Dutch Bar. He vomited on the tile floor and never even tried to use the pot. I couldn’t bear it, only he’d told me to watch, so earnestly. He shaped up the mess into a pile and then worked from this source, with his foot. He made a big curved smile; then he dragged off some pieces and made two eyes. The pile became the nose of the face, with the egg at one nostril. When he was through, he had rendered a jack-o-lantern mask, with a yard-wide smile: a hideous culprit of one dimension, not counting the odor.

“She’ll think twice about that six o’clock tee-tee,” he said, pointing to his work solemnly. The secret gleam of the artist was in his eyes. He staggered past me.

“This is taking it too far,” I said. But I wasn’t going to clean it up, and I turned off the light. I followed him over to the tower. In my room, he stopped and grabbed me by the collar before he went up to his loft.

“You can’t say I’ve taken it too far. In matters of art you can never take things too far. Lurk me in the eye. You know it?” Then he rose up the stairs haughtily, but missing a step, falling; he rose again, with his solemnity intact, like a lord at the head of an expedition.

I was not awakened by the plumbing sounds that morning. Perhaps Mother Rooney just held it awhile after she saw the bathroom. Perhaps she just lay down in her bed again and pained away until a decent hour.

Then Fleece and I gave her the high-lace leather sneakers, to make up for it; because the house was tilting back even steeper, and I’d seen her come in the front door and almost skid down the lobby in the black slick-heeled patent leather ones that looked a little young on her. This takes us on into the early days of med school, when I seemed to be making it, and spent my spare time in being aware of possible injuries and hazards to everyone around me. I’d quit smoking, and was a regular health officer with my head full of air. But it was Fleece who found the shoes. When you’re a freshman in med school, the big thing is to hang around the emergency room and see what they bring in on the ambulances. I myself never sought this. I went down a few times and saw some poor women who’d waited till the last minute to give birth, but it wasn’t my cup of tea. Fleece was there the night they brought in the dead lady wrestler from the city auditorium. Her feet seemed to be about the right size, and Fleece brought back the shoes. We told Mother Rooney they were refined orthopedic models, already broken in. She popped then right on. She expressed a little concern about their ugliness, that her feet didn’t seem to breathe very well in them. But the next day she said they did make her feel stabler in the world. I was awed by their perfect fit on her. Silas saw them on her one night at supper.

“Where did you get those old-timey goddam pugilist shoes? Are you wearing your husband’s shoes? Are you going loony?”

She told him where she got them. On the same night she announced that there would be no more open consumption of alcohol in her presence, since Mississippi law forbade hard liquor. Smoking would be allowed. She said she would like to hear someone, if he could, play the piano in the room, and the rest of us would gather around it and sing. This would be a good thing to do after supper every night. Her spirit was on the rise.

“Shit,” said Silas.

Then she said that some days she heard so many bad words in this house that it gave her a headache. Silas told her to take an aspirin. She took a sort of stance and declared that she had never taken an aspirin in her life. Silas clapped boredly, but I was impressed. Later, he wanted to know, “What did you mean , giving her those shoes?” I left him groping.

Once a month, an old priest with a look of off-balanced kindness and patience would visit Mother Rooney at the house. He came in at supper once and the two of them sat on the divan. I was eating, always the slow man at a meal, left at the table and trying not to hear the two of them talking. Then Silas walked in from the tower with only his jockey shorts on. He knew damn well who was visiting the house. He went and opened the front door, asking loudly where the evening paper was. In a minute he came back in with it, opening it. He looked at me as if trying to find Mother Rooney.

“I tell you! Have you looked at that crack between the porch and the foundation lately? Six inches of black humping air! Have you smelled what’s coming out of there? It’s sperm under there’s what it is! Nature will always scandalize. Damned sperm is what I smelled!” He pretended to just now see them on the couch and ran away, dropping pages out of the paper. A slice of the old priest’s tongue fell out through his teeth, and he had become more intensely cross-eyed.