Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“This is the Mississippi National Guard!” cried the man. “Who would do this to us?” He looked up at the rail embankment; his face was bloody. Peter turned to Silas with a cowed, sick face.

“I thought they were the United States Army. I didn’t know they were the National Guard. Those boys are from Mississippi,” he said.

Silas went down the hill to report to them who was responsible for that crosstie being dropped through the windshield. By the time he and the man with the.45 lumbered back up, Peter was gone into the weeds too.

This was the story. There was no reason Silas should know the final end of it, that it was General Creech, Fleece’s stepfather, who had the bloody face and the.45. Fleece had seen the scar from the windshield glass which the general still carried, and I had not told Fleece, either, about who was leading the troops who dropped the crosstie.

I was concerned enough on my own and of my own. Did not tell them something else: that I’d been taking out Catherine roughly every two months, until this last three months, for two years. I’d seen her the first time in maybe an overlong time, out there on Capitol Street.

What do I say? The very same night I fell to dreaming about her. I dreamed about her Christmas night; dreamed one of those mesmerizers, where every sense you have is sharp-edged and you sleepwalk toward the déjà-vu as if the palm of a hand is pushing you from behind. You couldn’t tell the sex of the hand. It could be Geronimo’s hand; it could be Catherine’s. I awoke with my tongue on my cold pillow. In three weeks I was at their house, after telephoning. Peter answered the door.

“I’ve been buried in my books.”

“You do look haggard. Come in. We saw you on Capitol Street. I was about to make a call to you, but she wouldn’t let me.” The place was dark. He led me through the den. The glass peeped through the break of the curtains. I walked over and drew one of them back, wanting to look through the glass and see what one could see outside.

“We don’t open those,” said Peter. I sat down next to the hearth.

“Where is she?”

He hung over me and said nothing for a moment. What I caught of his face was something like a Santa Claus who had been assaulted and shaved and who was angry.

“Don’t stare at her nose. She had it broken playing volleyball at the college.” The lie clung about the room for a while; he didn’t follow it up immediately.

“You know, I really covet your freedom,” he said. “You sit there without one enemy in the world, enjoying your youth and your beard. Soon a doctor of medicine.” This lie clung about the room with the other one. He clutched one of the curtains, and kneaded it, looking out the split through the glass which he’d just told me not to look out. “You would never understand the term lover , would you? I can’t hope you could ever comprehend the term lover . No time. Too fast a pace.” I believe he had been making tiny, almost undetectable loin-movements against the curtain, but this may have been only his agitated way. “My wife never had even a high school degree. She had an endowed body which was timid, but she learned to speak with it. She had no speech until I came to her. She was not a being until I came. She learned a dialect in the language of love. Months, it took. She would moan out her own name, Catherine! , so happily when at last her praise and wonder thrilled up. Then she led me, me! into a humility, an immersion, not foreseen by one so proud as I. She “—Catherine walked into the kitchen, but he did not see her, and she receded, but only just out of sight—“saw me below her, trying to throw my failing wet bridges, my webs, up to connect with her being, having as much as burned my own bridges of the practical world. It was then she betrayed me. ‘You have to eat,’ she would say. The niggers might wander through the yard and see us. What a cold stare from her, at the last. What dry mechanical lifting up of her fingers on the hem of her skirt. But,” he came away from the curtain, not looking at me, though, “pthis Catherine will finish college soon. Did you know that? She’ll have some education to appreciate the one who takes her.”

He might have had me in a spell, almost to the point where I saw his own old brown script on the letters, except I’d seen that unconscious mincing hunch against the curtains and knew Catherine was standing back in the shadows of the kitchen, hearing.

“Lock has come,” he said. I lit a cigarette and shook the match. If he would look my way I would signal that she was back there. The fact is, I never saw the man eye to eye. “You are far and away the most appealing, with your medical school.”

“That isn’t necessarily paradise,” I said.

“Would you tell her about Lock for me?”

“Tell her what?”

“Tell her Lock will not—”

Catherine walked right in and cut him off. Her nose did look a fraction flat. What a shame. It was a nice nose. She still looked fetching. She wore a green and yellow plaid dress. Her legs were very lovely in stockings. She had gold rings in her ears, after the pierced-ear fad with coeds. On her feet were brown patent-leather shoes with one strap over the top of her foot This was similar to the way Bet Henderson dressed, and Bet was always the precursor of style.

Peter simply walked out of the room.

I had in mind taking her to the Subway, a night club in the basement of the Robert E. Lee Hotel where you could take in your own bottle, buy mixers from the bar, and every now and then catch a good band, a soft one, so you could talk to your lover over the drinks and look around at a sort of wooden purple cloister. I’d been faithful to this girl, in my way. I’d had no other dates. We sat down and I ordered the soda for the Scotch I’d brought. She said she’d like that. When she got her glass, she sank down in the chair in that bent slouch she always had in the car. This posture robbed her of almost anything romantic. I heard her mouth make a slight sucking noise as she was drinking.

“You heard Peter tell about him and his wife,” I said.

“Peter, he’s so sweet to me. I knew his wife, it was my blood aunt, she got some notion where she wouldn’t be normal with him in bed. He turned her out. I don’t blame him. He gave her everything and she wouldn’t let him go the normal way at all.”

“He told you that?”

“Change the conversation to another topic.”

“He told me not to notice your nose. What’s wrong with it? I don’t see anything.”

“You get me into daylight and it shows all right. The niggers threw an apple and it broke my nose. I saw you at the parade and you waved? It happened on down the street. We got down amongst a bunch of niggers and one of ‘em across the street threw a apple. Yes sir.”

We drank more than a pint together of the fifth I’d brought, Catherine taking a drink more often than I did. The band tonight was fine, keeping guard over the mellowness, even when they played bop. I noticed that the trumpet man was getting away with a lot of bad notes playing through a steel mute.

“I can play a trumpet about four times better than the man in the band.”

“Hotty toddy,” she said. I had not expected this hostility. She went on to say she had noticed a lot of snoots in this place; she said she wouldn’t have picked this place if she’d known what it was. She enjoyed the Scotch, though, thank you.

I was all planned to tell her how she was wrong, how I knew the person who’d thrown the apple, when she came out with this, looking at the ceiling, rather smugly: “I’ve had Scotch and soda before with another person.” She wanted me to inquire about this person. It was so tacky I couldn’t let it pass. Also, I knew who she meant.