Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

Then got back, landing on Fleece, Bet, and Silas, all standing with arms folded on the porch, Fleece and Bet having arrived recently in Fleece’s new Renault. I suppose Fleece was taking Bet to his room, but met Silas on the porch waiting for my return and exploding with the tale of Mother Rooney and the old drunk. I heard Silas reeling off a monologue and went right through them to my bed.

I got out of my car in the north parking lot and pulled my microscope box out of the back seat. Rain was threatening. The Choctaws were sitting on the grass between me and the door of the school wing. The Ole Miss medical center lifted up like a monstrous sandy brick. Saturday the same group had tried to collar me, but I ignored them. I didn’t know anything. I was no doctor and they saw my jacket and thought I was.

The women wore dresses that looked like the flag of some crackpot nation. I’d seen two Choctaw women come in at the last minute to deliver. When they had their legs in the straddles, you could see the dye rings on their thighs which came off the dresses. Their vaginas were fossileums of old blood. Their babies came up in a rotten exhumation; then the baby was there, head full of hair, wanting to live like a son of a gun. It almost belied the germ theory of disease. The mothers did not cry out for Jesus like the Negro women. They bawled in shorter shrieks, but higher, as if in direct, private accusation against some little male toad of a god. It made my blood crawl.

The men on the lawn wore big soiled shirts of red and blue. These Choctaws would sleep together on the lawn until whoever they were waiting for came out or died. A woman came up to me with a bunch of papers in her hand. She motioned toward the back of the cafeteria, and I saw the pick-up truck parked in one of the slots. She said a sick man was in there. I took out my pen. What she had were BIA forms. “Have you applied for BIA medical aid before?” Questions like that from the Bureau. I made several jag marks on them and signed my name at the bottom, Harriman Monroe, M.D . She barked to the group sitting on the lawn, and two men got up and walked toward the truck. I was late for class already, So I waited. The men pulled a limp man out of the front seat and carried him toward us. His arms hung down to the ground. The squaw told me that the man had eaten a dead terrapin he had found in the woods near the frontage road at 51 Highway. They thought he was poisoned. She was very thankful, this squaw. “Docotor,” she called me. I agreed that he was probably poisoned and then hurried off. The hospital treated him and cured him. I checked that out. My signature had helped. Sometimes even now, I’ll put M.D . after my name when I sign a check and get a warm old kick from it.

I went straight to the basement lounge and got two milks out of the machine, which I drank for my breakfast, as I sat in the ping-pong room. The serious players were there, and they noticed me. They were all residents, two of them from Japan, one from South Korea, and the big slammer, from Germany, who was a head in the field of cervix cancer. With them was an M.D. from Malta, of unknown function in cytology. He didn’t play the game, but like to call the points, with a deep bold British accent. He was almost a midget in a small lab coat, but he liked to hang around and shout out the scores, for hours. “A point, a clean point! Eighteen-fifteen.” Since almost all the points in ping-pong are obvious, you might think it was silly to have him around. But not at all. When you made a big shot — a blurring slam, an unreturnable english on the ball — he would practically knight the damn thing. “An absolutely clean point!” If Dr. Eaver were still calling the points, I could do nothing but play ping-pong, today. Apparently he was not much needed upstairs. I was in the same boat.

The finest game, competitively, was between Dr. Völl and Dr. Shibata. Völl (Verl, we said) would slam the ball and Shibata would return it with a kind of apologetic scoop, so the ball dropped just over the net and flung out to the side of the table like a ball bearing dropped out of a jet plane, and Völl would have to leap out to get it back. I said the finest game, competitively, because when I was there the game was not competitive. I could slam Völl’s slam, I could put stuff on the stuff Shibata hit at me. You get this good with practice. Nobody could be quite this good and be serious at anything else. My heart was in the ping-pong room. I was winning nowhere else.

In anatomy, I had Monique, my female cadaver, whom I had fought for down at the vat. There were few girls of any sort in the freshman vat. In anatomy I was taught by a stately old buzzard named Potter who had slugged up out of the Depression in Mississippi and let us all know how proud he was of his situation as anatomy professor. He was a humble man. He had an immense respect for the King’s English. He talked very slowly and seemed to be recollecting some rule for every word he spoke. I impressed him with my English. I was working late one afternoon on Monique, and Potter saw my shoes under the curtains when he came in.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“It is I,” I answered.

After a while, Potter drew the curtain back. We were alone. I was hacking away, too lazy to change scalpel blades.

“I like that,” said Potter. “It is I . You’ve had an education, haven’t you young man? I’ve been grading the quizzes, Monroe.”

“No good news for me.”

“You’re the type who won’t write down an answer unless you know it perfectly and can spell it perfectly, aren’t you? What you got, you got right with an exact veritude that I admire. I wish you could have answered more of the questions. But there was a high certainty in the answers you had, though there were only three, that I can see in your handwriting. What kind of pen do you use, by the way?”

“A Scripto.”

“It carries an authority with it I can’t deny… I refuse to fail you. I am going to let you take the trimester test.”

I thanked him. I tried being literary in other classes, but it didn’t work out so well. In pharmacology there was a poem in the textbook where the author had attempted to be witty—“Histamine/The knavish son of Histadine”—which I pointed out as execrable, but the professor and the class ignored me. For better or worse, the chairman of pharmacology seemed to take to me, though. He was the one who came to my aid when all the chips were down — when I didn’t make my probation the second trimester — and gave me a job injecting granulated nerve gas into dogs and let me in the pharmacology graduate program. Dr. Holland was dedicated to reconstructing such M.D. dropouts as me into doctoral candidates so that we would not be lost to medical science. And he was a good man, as was Dr. Briggs, my professor, who treated me as if I were not a fool and a loser. This is always nice. Holland’s charity was so immense, I took the English Oval cigarettes out of the tin in his office when he was out, feeling that he’d want me to have them anyway. My apologies, but now, for the first time in my life, the money press was on. The old man was not sold on my being a Ph.D. in pharmacology and the money tree at home was drying up. Nobody ever told me how the old man took the news when I got the boot from med school, but I had to write the letter about it, and I could imagine him going into his study for hours, holding my letter up, and writing me a check, carefully, for $125—what he figured this letter was worth, to the dollar. His signature on the check was limp, like a wet shoelace draped on a fence. So there were the days of deciding between a hamburger out at T-Willie’s and a pack of Marlboros with coffee downstairs in the cafeteria. And my hundred-a-month job, recording the respiration, the pupillary responses to light, responses to pinprick in the lumbar region and the other regions I’ve forgotten, and the more obvious physical dispositions, of hundreds of dogs, after you’d pumped up the femoral vein and let them have it, which wasn’t always easy when you got a big rowdy animal. Invariably, right after injection the dog would wobble around pitifully, evacuate his bowels all over the room, and faint, lying dead for a whole day. I proved that they did this in my reports, incontestably. At five o’clock they woke up. I’d take them to the freight elevator. They looked normal, but the ordeal seemed to have increased their affection for me. You hated to turn them back into that reeking catacomb of pens in the basement, beyond Experimental Surgery, where there were ten other dogs lying on stainless steel tables. These dogs, eyes closed, were trembling to pieces; they had long sutures along their stomachs, which I asked about. The experiment was to open up the dog, wound him internally in subtle ways, sew him up, and time him as to how long it took him to die. Herdee, a graduate of Hedermansever whom I had hated particularly, told me this. He had this neat summer job of holding the clock and marking down the expiration times to the minute. If another man had told me about it, it would have been better. It’s pointless to mope around animal labs with your hands on your heart But here was Herdee, having finished his first year of med school, so neatly, with his neat summer research job. He was using his time so wisely. He had acquired a hard sage smile, very serious, although all the hell he was doing was walking among the tables and holding a clock. He was stupid and had been compensating for this fault terrifically all his life. By all rights, he should have been lying sutured-up on one of the tables while one of the dogs held the clock and looked sage.