Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“Mister Silas is an athlete,” chimed Mother Rooney.

“Of what game?” said the priest. He had a cranky worn Boston accent.

“He lifts barbells,” I said.

Then came a voice from the area of the tower. It was Silas again. “Help! Help! Mother Rooney. Please!” She got up and excused herself, padding away in the leather sneakers.

I couldn’t think of anything else to say to the old Catholic man, so I began discussing the assassination of the President with him. I’d liked Kennedy, as you might like a shy handsome foreigner you saw at a party, and I always imagined that he might like me, and I told the priest this. The priest said, Ah, yes. I could hear stone-deaf cross-eyed clerics all over the world saying this.

Mother Rooney padded back to us.

“Mister Silas said he had found a fish-eater crawling in the house.”

“You mean a silverfish,” I said.

“No. He said a fish-eater, that he saw a fish-eater crawling in the house, that he would strangle him if he found him in here again.”

“That he would mangle it…”

“No, his arms and hands …” She held her frail beige arms out and clutched her fingers in and out. “But of course his arms were so full of muscles. He’s such a nicely made boy, but what could be in his mind? What…”

“Some use that as an epithet, against Catholics,” said the priest. He was leaving, hurriedly. “As a joke.”

The next time I saw Silas, he was well gone at the Dutch Bar. He worked at Wright’s, a music store on Capitol Street. Being in the arts, you know. He was in conversation with a flushed old drunkard at the end of the bar. As I sat down, he told me he’d run all the way from Mother Roo-ney’s to here for punishment. He explained to me that he had taken out Bet Henderson two times this week. He held up two fingers. I asked, How was she? He reiterated that he had taken Bet out two times. She worked in a surgical supply house in Jackson now, and he had taken her out two times. He said he felt luck was coming to him now, but his conscience was sore over Mother Rooney, how he’d treated her, and he wanted to clear it up because he had an omen his good luck wouldn’t stand if he didn’t. Silas then talked to the sinking old fellow to his right.

“This is a lonely intelligent man. He says he doesn’t want to sleep another night alone,” he turned to me. “We could, see, just introduce them tonight. I already told him she was a beautiful older rich woman. Meet them together, see? Happy old people.”

“I’m not in on this.”

“Whataya mean?” He grabbed my tie. “You got the car!”

At twelve I opened the bar door and Silas kept the old man in ambulation to the car. Silas bragged on Mother Rooney some more, and the man seemed to sober up a bit as he listened. He said he wanted to go by a service station. I stopped at one, thinking he wanted to vomit in the rest-room, but when he came out, he had fluffed up the Hollywood kerchief at his throat, pulled his pants up, buttoned his coat, and combed his hair with water. He had age spots around his hairline. Now he wanted just one more slug, and Silas gave him one of the quarts we’d bought.

We got to the porch together, with no help from me. I was only tight. I thought about the hour of the night, Mother Rooney tucked in her bed. There were no lights on downstairs, not even for the porch, and this was strange because Mother Rooney always kept this bulb on for us late voyagers. The old guy was scared stiff. He kept swabbing at his mouth and his hair and edged behind Silas. Silas told me to go wake her up. I entered the long vestibule and switched on the light. She was not asleep. She was lying on the slick boards, hurt. A grocery sack from the Jitney Jungle lay ripped and strewn over to one side, as if there’d been some violence. I locked the door, hearing Silas protest on the porch.

“Finally you get here!” she said. She’d taken off the wrestling shoes. Her bunions twinkled through her stockings. She was wearing a floppy silk dress with blue flowers figured on it. Her hair, yellow, was in the wreck of a bun. “I’m gone. I’ve been in this state since five o’clock … afraid to move and make it worse.”

She had fallen coming in the door with the groceries. A brooch the size of an Easter egg was standing out at the cleavage of her breasts. The dress was pinioned by it. I saw that the whole length of the pin of the brooch was buried in her chest. It had unclasped and stabbed her as she hit the floor. On entrance it made a nasty purple slit. There was only a little Blood. God knows how long the pin was. “You were the right one to come in and find me, unless Bobby Fleece …” she said with a meager hope for life.

I stared at the wound. I didn’t know what to do. I was in medical school, and it was disgraceful, but I couldn’t remember what to do, if I’d ever known it. I ran over to the tower and got Fleece’s Merck Manual off his desk. I turned the pages and tore them trying to get to the Punctures section.

“Is that Jerry Silas out on the porch?” she asked. “I’d like to see him. He’s such a nicely made boy. He could hold my head.” Then she sat up and glared at me. “Don’t you know what to do?” Either the page for the incised wounds had been torn out, or I couldn’t find it. I found half a page which discussed débridement, “… making the depths of the wound ideal for the propagation of infective…” I turned to Gangrene, anything. Then I went and made a phone call to the University Hospital, to the same building where I was going to school.

“Isn’t that Jerry Silas out there trying to get in? Open the door.” I could hear him twisting the knob and battering the door. I didn’t want her to see the old guy. The door to the porch was a double-winger with no middle frame, and I knew that if Silas rammed it much more, it would give. Mother Rooney began to stand up. She was hissing, as if losing air right out of the lung. I rushed over and brought her back to earth. I took hold of the brooch and jerked it out, stood up, and threw the thing at the back shadows of the hall, slipping down on those slick boards as I did so.

“My heart is tilting!” she cried. I thought I’d killed her. Then I heard the siren yawling up Titpea. Silas made a last attack on the doors, and they broke apart. He staggered in, crouched over. The old man was riding piggyback on him. The old man had closed his eyes in fear.

“What’s going on? I have the lover here,” Silas demanded. I hauled back and hit Silas square in the eyes. He went down, and the old man abandoned him and crashed on the boards of the vestibule. When Silas stood up again, he was raising his hands to kill me. I had my arms over my face. But nothing came. I stole a glance down. Silas was watching too. The old guy’s body was slipping down toward Mother Rooney. He was such a red ancient drunk, his white hair had popped out like a sparse wig, his Hollywood cravat had flown apart, and he slid down the boards, out cold, his head coming to rest on her knee, his rough-out Hush Puppy shoes retarding the slide.

Then Mother Rooney really let bellow. She couldn’t stand him. She hipped away from his touch and shook her hands.

The ambulance crew — I knew one guy — thought it was a family fight, and took the old guy out first. I walked Mother Rooney out through the front yard, although Silas wanted to lift her along all on his own. The boy I knew looked at her wound in the red lights of the back end of the ambulance.

“Did the old man stab her?” he asked me.

Wouldn’t you know it, I had to go back in the house, turn on all the lights, kick the furniture around, until I found the brooch. Drove with that czarina’s bauble to the emergency room, to furnish proof that we didn’t need an inquest, walked around like a wondering queen with the jewel out forward in my palm, until I found the right doctor.