Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“You mean Gillis Lock? I saw him with you at the parade, didn’t I? I thought you detested him,”.

“I never said that.”

“You implied it.” She drew even lower down, looking surly. I don’t think she understood the word implied . “At school Lock was known as a merde accompli , if you know what I mean.” This drove her into a rage of silence. I confess I was only pursuing this game out of the rotten delight of seeing her cringe even more than she usually did.

“He doesn’t think all that much of you either, brother. He said you are a over-interlectuall playboy that thinks of yourself all the time.”

“That son of a bitch never saw me that I know of.”

We left.

I parked in the driveway at Peter’s; the garage with its false steeple was above the nose of the car. I thought she would jump right out of the car immediately, but she didn’t. She sat up in good posture and crossed her arms over her breasts. She had said nothing, but her anger had brought her out of that perpetual crouch. It would have been good if I could tell her how pleasing she was, out of that slouch, but I couldn’t. I could imagine her as all sorts of pomped-up lovely women of thirty.

She was looking out the other window and I put my mouth to the back of her neck. She uttered a crooning sound and made her neck unavailable by bending back her head. I sought her cheek then, kissing as much of it as I could, and I put our lips together for a few seconds before her hands reached my chest and pushed off.

“That beard don’t feel good, unh-uh! No hand stuff either. Who you think you are? You don’t see me often enough to think you can do that.”

So she called me to a halt. Again, I expected her to jump out of the car. But she didn’t.

“What’re you staying here for? Why don’t you ran on in the house to Peter? I’il bet I’m boring you, humh?”

She just sat there, stiff as a bust. “Run in the house!” I told her. All right, I did jam my hand up to her thigh, searching for the silk. She giggled.

“Are you giggling?” I asked her. I opened my hand and one finger touched a string. I had no idea what it was. Then she pushed my hand off and straightened up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Have you had an operation, or something?”

“Don’t be slimy. Them snappers out at the ninth grade that I practice-teach on, they’re slimy. You haven’t ever been slimy around me before. Being tricky-devious on me.”

I was outraged. “That was Tampax, wasn’t it? Does he buy that too? Your panties, your toenail polish, your Tampax.”

“Okay, Uncle Peter did buy the panties and he gaven me the money to buy the unmentionable item I have on too. I don’t feel shamed. I say I have on these things and I’m a lucky girl to say it, in case anybody was so nosy to ask me, if they wanted to pry out those kind of secrets. He give me … everything I am now.” She looked at me cool and proud.

“So go on and get in bed with him,” I said. I took the Cutty Sark bottle out of the well and brought it around to my mouth. “Get out of the car. Go on.” But she stayed as I drank.

“You’re a little bit slimy but you’re really a silly old boy. We could’ve had a lot more fun.”

I pretended I was drinking, swigging it neat. I never could do this. Even pretending, my eyes watered up and my throat snarled up, protesting. She asked for the bottle and I handed it away. In the corner of my eye I saw her plant it on her lips and give herself a large douse of it.

“Harry!” she cried to me. Her voice was choked and faint. “I’m on fire! Don’t let me throw up!” I clapped my hand over her mouth. She twisted under it wildly, and I bore down harder with it. She quit squirming finally, opened her eyes, and nodded. I took my hand off.

“Oh, now my heart’s like a electric blanket around it. I wish I could feel like this all the time. I feel so sleepy but I want to do just everything.”

I moved in and put my arm on the seat behind her. “The most wonderful thing in the world is the meeting of two bodies, in the night,” I said. I was tight as a coot What did I have on my mind?

“You silly old boy.”

“Don’t be afraid when I touch you. It is a disease to be afraid of being touched.”

“If it’s a free country you can still pick out the one you want to touch you, isn’t it?”

“Give me your lips.”

“You thought I was waiting on that? I know who I want. to kiss me. You imagine you going to teach me a lot of stuff, treat me like a virgin that sponged up ever word you said, but if you think I’m a virgin, you’re pitiful.”

Now, one o’clock, she got out of the car and slammed the door. As she passed the fender, a light went on in the house. I put my head out the window. “Come here.” She came back and dragged her foot around.

“I just wonder if dear old Peter honors your monthlies in any way or just humps on through with no vacations. Just watch it. I happen to know that somebody is going to get him. You wouldn’t want that moment to find you …” Her face snapped up.

“I lie!” I cried. I crank the car and backed out, thinking never to see her again.

Driving the T-bird to Mother Rooney’s, I had the sense of someone wanting to be let out of the car when I stopped for the lights. I do not invite ghosts; so far I’ve never needed them. But this was real. I thought I might still be imagining Catherine sitting in the seat by me. But when I parked in front of the rooms, it had not diminished and it was no afterimage of Catherine, I knew. I reached over and opened the opposite door. Of course there was only silence. Then a voice spoke in my head: “That wasn’t even mean. That was petty. I’m leaving.” Ah, Geronimo! I begged him to give me the definitions distinguishing mean from petty . I didn’t quite know. I pronounced the name, Ge Ron I Mo . Two iambs, rising at the last with a sound which might be blown forever through some hole in a cliff in Arizona by the wind. A name which in itself made you want to cast off, even being landlocked, and kick off the past history that sucked you down. This wasn’t petty, this Indian, Apache. I knew that . Oh, I knew that at the last he joined the Dutch Reformed church, grew watermelons, and peddled the bows and arrows that he made. But at the very last, he’d been kicked out of the church for gambling, he’d had six wives, and died of falling off a wagon, drunk, in his eighties. And that was not petty, whatever. But I was petty. All the letters of Monroe could be found in his name, a coincidence which would have bored him extremely, as did most language and English especially. He’d give a belch and a yawn.

I walked to my bed feeling like a tick, a something which scuttled around in the sheets, waiting on the body of a true warm man.

The afternoon I quit the pharmacology school, I rode out to the Ross Barnett Reservoir, north of Jackson. I wore my lab coat. It was a windy day, so I kept the coat on. I’d called her, asked her out, and she seemed happy to hear from me in a remote, incredulous way. I wanted to say at least one more thing to her. I wanted to reclaim myself from being the tick I was that night with her. But she said her daddy and mother were up from Mobile spending the week with them and that they were out at the Reservoir every night till nine and then they were up to eleven cleaning the fish. That was all her daddy wanted to do while he was in Jackson. I asked where they fished, and she told me.

I parked just below the dam and walked down the hill to the spillway. Through my sunglasses, the water was a foggy boiling green, hissing down the dam wall, pooling in the deep basin of rocks, and rushing down in the Pearl River bed. The pool water was full of suds. Boats full of fishermen wallowed around at the foot of the dam; other people were fishing from the big rocks on the shore.