Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

I saw her with her family. Only the old man was fishing. Her mother sat on a piece of slag a few feet from the water, watching the man. He had a cane pole and flicked it toward the dam, trying to get the cork way out. He leaned over the water. Her mother was jabbering at him and motioning with her hand. Catherine sat up the rise and in back of them on a piece of slag rock. She sat with her arms around her knees. She had on sky-blue tapered pants and a white blouse. Down here, five-thirty in the evening with the vapor from the dam blowing on you like a sea breeze, it was cool, as if you’d found a pit of chill in the smoldering heat. I made it down the rocks unnoticed and looked over her shoulder. Her bare forearm was frail, a little sunburned, and covered with chilly-bumps, and the downy hair on it was erect. This moved me. I came up right next to her. She’d been out here five afternoons straight.

“Hello,” I said.

“You silly old boy,” she said. She didn’t turn around. But she knew who was behind her. I sat down by her. I asked her how the fishing was going. She said her daddy had caught a lot of white perch all week; that he was fishing with minnows.

“You need this coat. You can keep it,” I said. I took off the lab coat and draped it on her.

“Thank you, honey,” Catherine said. She’d never called me that before. She was never so easy with me. I asked her what kind of time she was having. She said, “I do love the water. I don’t care about catching fish out of it like my daddy does. I like the waterfall on the dam. We eat supper out here and everything.”

“It beats the heat.”

The water slapped down loudly just a few yards away. You couldn’t hear things the first time they were said. She pulled me up so I could speak right in her ear. I’d never known her to do anything like this. She pulled the lab coat close to her and nestled her cheek against the shoulder of it. She turned her face toward me, her hair blowing. “Harry the doctor. With that beard you look cut out to be a famous doctor on a rocket ship to Mars. With those sunglasses.”

In this rocky valley where it was so shady and cool, I didn’t care if it never changed. I asked her if her mother and daddy ever turned around or if they watched the cork like that all week. I asked her didn’t she want to introduce me to her folks. They were just a few feet down from us. She said she didn’t want to. I asked her, What if they turn around? She seemed scared, and in reply she took off my coat and handed it back.

Over the noise of the falling water, I could barely hear her mother talking. But she had been harganguing the old man ever since I’d been there. He had been moving out farther into the water, holding the pole in a strained way. He wore leather shoes and the water was over his ankles. The back of his head was balding in a messy way, with gray and brown strands losing out to pale splotches of scalp. The woman stood up, and I took the hint from Catherine and moved off as if I was not with her. Her mother’s cheek, the left one, was burned, I mean fire-burned, from some accident, and the other was covered with tiny freckles. Her teeth were brown, and she was clamping down on a Pall Mall — the pack was in her hand — one eye shut to the smoke. She saw me standing twelve feet or so from Catherine. I was trying to get a grip on the rock incline. I’d put my coat back on, and I was showing an innocent disregard for Catherine.

“Arrrrrrrr!” the woman said as she sat down by her daughter. Then she broke wind, helplessly. Almost simultaneously, she cranked her face toward me to stare and check on my reaction. She had a hurt look. I gazed away like a statue. She drew her shoe down, scraping the rock in front of her to make a fartlike noise so if I’d heard I would understand that this is what made the noise when she sat down.

“Is he a Fish and Game man?” I heard her ask Catherine. She reached in the sateen high school athletic jacket on her and pulled out a paper. She said overloudly to Catherine, that in case I was, here was the fishing license if I was looking for it. She said that it was paid for. He wouldn’t see it any other way, she said. Uncle Peter had paid for it. She hollered it out, so that if I knew the man — and I ought to know the man — I would know who bought the thing; hollering with pride. Then she began mumbling with Catherine, keeping an eye out for me. I saw Catherine’s forehead nodding. Then her mother flew into a shrieking declamation, which seemed to be her natural style.

“Royce — you know what he doin’? Yo daddy doin’? He said he saw a normost basst feedin’ on the toper thet water a piece out an’ yo daddy is wadin’ out on thet drop to catch in. He ain’t usin’ no minner. He usin’ a live brim on his hook that we caught when we was catchin’ all them little white perch. He sez he want to catch somethin’ big an’ this ud be a perfet vacation. I been a-tellin’ him git back in off thatere dropoff. He caint swimb atall.”

All this while Catherine, leaning backwards of her mother, was appealing to me with her hands and her eyes to please leave. I pretended not to understand her. I watched the old man.

He had something on the pole; he had something big, too; it was running back and out. The line was zipping around, and the pole bent like there was an automobile under the water. The man backed up, but the fish was too big to allow that. Then the man was pulled in, slipping down the grade of the pool to where his hips were underwater. He wanted the fish very much. His head bowed to the fish every time it moved. I wanted to see that creature myself.

The man lurched backward into the shallows in a decisive move. He fell backward all of a sudden, throwing the pole up in the air. His head hit a rock on the shore, and his back followed it, giving out a sundering thud you could hear over the sound of the dam. I saw that, but my eye was still on the pole. It hit the water, stood up like a limber weed, and was drawn down, waving in circles, until the butt itself went under. I waited for it to pop up, but it never did. The fishermen in the nearest boat paddled over to the spot where it disappeared. The pole did not come up again. The men in the boat looked over at us full of awed respect.

The old man lay with his feet in the water. There was blood on the rock under his neck. His wife and his daughter were over him on both sides. I walked down and knelt at his head. He was out cold, but he was breathing big and healthy.

“Hold one of his eyes open and let me look at the pupil,” I said. The wife did this and I saw that the pupil was dead to light; the tadpole didn’t jump. The man had a pretty face like a blind queen.

“Royce. Royce. Royce,” his wife repeated. Then she asked me, “You mean you are a doctor right here on the spot?”

“The man’s … serious,” is all I could stay. I was trying to make all the few facts I knew stick together into something. It was a disgraceful position to be in. From the facts I knew, I couldn’t come upwith anything.

She picked up his head in her arms. Catherine clutched one of his hands. He had groaned yet, even. Catherine hadn’t looked my way. I was glad of that. I didn’t care for her to see me again in the lab coat. She didn’t know I’d busted out of med school, of course; didn’t know I was a fraud right here on the spot, had come to prove that I must be remembered as something besides the tick I was that night in the car. To be mean, to be kind, to be anything else. I hung my head. The thought came to me that I had not touched the man.

“It could be a concussion,” I blurted out.

“You mean Royce he won’t know my face when he come out of it?” Mrs. Wrag was breaking down. She began singing “Won’t know my face!” as a refrain, and hugged Royce’s head up and down.