Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“Love,” said Fleece. “And then marriage. We’re married, Bet and me.”

“When did you get married?”

“About at the first of last summer, out at the Alamo Plaza Motel Courts, which we’ve been to again several times. The ceremony went like this: I woke up with my hand on her nipple. She left the bed and went to the television and then got back in bed. She replaced my palm on her nipple, and on the television came a gospel show, the Blackwood Brothers, because it was Sunday morning. These boys were singing in earnest, the bass man with his moustache, the slick skinny man singing high, the blind man with sunglasses on piano. So holy, you know; they’d never made a cent out of doing this. ‘I take this man,’ she said, lifting up the sheets, ‘while these men look on and sing.’ Then she kicked the sheets back and raised her toes to the ceiling, and I enjoyed her, while she hummed with the quartet on TV with her eyes closed. I happened to be on my knees holding onto her ankles above me. It was the condition of being in an ascending chariot. I cherished the music I heard behind me and the music under me. Everyone agreeing, everyone celebrating.”

“But no actual marriage certificate and so on,” I said.

“What do you want?” I felt like a hated skeptic as he left. He’d taken his glasses off. Since his back was to me, I couldn’t tell. But he was weeping or emoting in some way.

The next weekend Fleece was supposed to be in Houston, Texas. He’d told me he was going to fly over and witness some heart surgery by DeBakey and Cooley. Saturday afternoon late I ate some hamburgers at the Krystal. When I came back to the room, going up the stairs through his quarters, I glanced down and saw him sitting in a wooden chair in the shadows by one of the octagonal windows. He hadn’t made a sound. But he was following me with his eyes — otherwise, a manikin. I went on up. I knew he was in a bad state. It was something new and horrifying. I’d never seen him atrophy himself like this. I tried to convince myself to go down there, but couldn’t. I watched his room grow dark as the night came on. I clicked my reading lamp on and took a book.

At ten-thirty, Silas and a girl eased onto the steps below. As they came up, I looked over the edge of my book to get a load of her. She had tousled hair. I expected her feet to be about where her waist was, as she kept coming, kept getting taller, behind Silas, who had one of her hands, leading her politely. She held her shoes in the other hand. I put the book in front of my face immediately when I saw the girl was Bet Henderson. I sank back on the bed.

“Harry looks asleep,” she said.

“That’s right. He’s out for good.”

“Look what you can see up here!” she said as they got to Silas’s room.

I stared at the ceiling, wondering what Fleece was going through downstairs. If he was awake, he’d seen them. Silas shut the door at the top of my stairs. The two of them creaked on the boards above my head. There was a lot of weight up there. In a while I heard Silas’s coffee percolator sighing.

There was a movement below in the dark of Bobby Dove’s room, the sliding of a drawer. Then the crash of a shoe.

He came noiselessly up the stairs, one pause for every step. He gave the appearance of someone who had been laid out by the funeral home but was up and about, taking a breather from death — in complete black suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. He had given a brush stroke to his hair. There was a red spot on his crown where perhaps the brush had been drawn. He licked his lips on his way over to my bed. The fool was carrying that long-barreled.22 with both hands.

“I wonder where one might find a bullet or two in this room” he whispered’ “I pulled the trigger to test this thing. There isn’t anything in it” I shook my head.

“Don’t try to look wise at me.”

“I’m just wishing I didn’t have to be in the same room — my room — with a crazed person.”

“Get out,” said Fleece. He flickered a cold merriment behind the glasses.

“What’s the suit for?”

“I’m going to Houston. I already bought the ticket. I have a feeling Houston is my kind of town.”

The light went off in Silas’s room, I saw through the un-derchink of the door. There was a stomp on the floor overhead. Then his bed wrenched. The merriment left Fleece’s eyes. He tried to hold his face together in a sneer. But his glasses fell forward to the end of his nose, his eyes watered, and his mouth came apart with an intake of air. He dropped the gun on the bed.

“I know where the good one is,” he said. He eased out my dresser drawer — had the gun, and it was loaded — before I could get off the bed. I stood up but made no advance. The way he was, I didn’t think I should.

“I’m not going to shoot you . I’m not out of my mind, roomie, old Harry, believe me. This is the one,” still softly, merrily again, “You realize I never have missed with this gun?”

“Crime is wrong; I got out “No right to—”

“How do I look?” He pulled his lapels forward.

Above us, the light was on again. It had only been off a couple of minutes. We heard their voices. Then there was a crash on the floor. Fleece glared straight at me as if nothing had happened.

“Don’t worry about me, man. You don’t think I’d really shoot either one of those pitiful creatures up there? Would I go to the trouble? Those are two sad people up there,”

“I think maybe she just hit him,” I said.

“Look me in the eye and see if you think I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I did, and he did look sane and familiar, the blue eyes coming to life. He looked fine.

“What I want to see is the two of them coming down from there. I’m going to be sitting on the bed, instead of you. Move the light a little, see. I want it to fall over my hand with the gun. I’m going to twirl it a few times on my finger and then pitch it on the bed. I’m going to be giggling. This will show them they’re not even worth shooting. You laugh too, now. We’ve heard their rendezvous, and this is what we think of it, how sad and trashy it was … laugh! or this isn’t going to make its effect.”

We had to wait thirty minutes, with absolute silence up there. Then the door opened, and Bet’s hand appeared, carrying her shoes. Silas escorted her down four steps or so and they peered over at my lighted bed, I started laughing, hoping, but it was no use.

Fleece yanked the pistol up off the bed and fired it at Silas. I could see he was shooting at Silas’s ass. I moved, with my own laugh still ringing in the room, and jerked the pistol out of his hand. The shot fell flat against the wall and was not much louder than a cap gun. Silas didn’t know he had been hit and laughed himself, before he saw it was Fleece sitting on the bed.

They had walked several steps below the spray of blood on the wall before Silas fell backwards on the stairs and cried hoarsely, “Awwwrrrr!” Bet crouched by him.

“It wasn’t me,” I told them, trying to keep the fun in it.

“It was me,” said Fleece. He walked over to the stairs and held to the supports like somebody looking into a cage. “Where did it get you?”

Silas gave a fatal moan.

“I was low. It just crosses over the bottom of his thigh.”

“Were you aiming at his heart?” asked Bet. “Bobby!”

“What’s her name?” Fleece said, not looking at her. Then he fainted, like a suit flopping off a coathanger.

“I don’t blame him. He didn’t know what he was doing,” said Silas. “I forgive you, Bob. I understand it.” He talked with his head thrust through the banister, looking down at the body of Fleece. He sort of waved at Fleece.