Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“You bet.”

“More than that , man. I’ve also got to tell Mother Rooney about the disappearance of her favorite lodger.”

“All right.” He looked at the barbells. “You can have those too. You could use this room for a gym.”

“Are you crying, Silas?” He was the biggest man I’ve ever seen weeping, huge freckled hands wiping at his cheeks.

“Listen, if you could write a poem right now for me, I’d pay. I’d pay a lot.”

“About what?” I confess I was greedy, instantly, and already I felt cunning watching him cry.

“God, I don’t know. About love, about leaving, about being shot … Ignore me. Here.” He tossed a couple of twenties on the bed. Soon, he was gone, with my poem.

The next week Fleece moved back in. He asked me where I thought that sad bastard Silas was living now. I told him Silas had been in long enough to pick up his clothes and leave. Fleece continued straightening his room below. I hadn’t actually seen him yet. He yelled up.

“What did he say?”

I was dreading this. “He paid me to write him a poem.”

“You wrote him a poem?” still yelling. “What kind of poem?”

“It was ‘Where the Bee Sucks.’”

He quit moving. Then I heard him on the stairs. He was narrowing his eyes, sneering a bit.

“Where the bee sucks?”

“He was in a rush. I came down here and cheated it. Changed a couple of words, maybe. The lit book was right on my desk. He liked it and ran.” Fleece began an uncertain giggle. I showed him, in the book.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I;

In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

There I couch, when owls do cry:

On the bat’s back I do fly After summer merrily.

Merrily, merrily, shall I live now.

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough!

“He bought that? ‘there suck I’? Why? What did this have to do with anything?”

“The man was weeping, Fleece. He wanted a poem.”

Fleece sucked in as if to begin a howl.

“Wait,” I said. “He and Bet are married and they are in London.” It seemed the perfect time to hit him with it.

He held his breath, and then it left him unnoticeably. I thought he might be very, very slowly dilapidating, taking his glasses off, rubbing his eyes; then the tears came out bright on his cheekbones, and he didn’t move his hands to-ward them at all. He put his glasses back on and drew his hand over his head to get the ropy, straggling hairs in place. His forehead shone bald and hot orange.

“I didn’t know she’d marry him. Missus Silas?”

“She was a strange lady.”

“Dear yes, she was.”

“She bawled about losing you, you know.” Fleece seemed to have resumed the slow, slow sagging again. He began commenting on himself.

“The important thing is that I’m alive and well. My mind is perfectly all right. I haven’t lost anything. It had a lot to spare. The mind’s a paradise. In five minutes. Give me five minutes, I’m going to feel like I could be a choirboy or a wino and everything between. Still. Still ” He seemed to be restaturing himself. “Part of me is in the grave. Part of me can’t stand this. But that’s how magnificent the mind is. It can be there and up here too. In a minute I will see the freedom. I will no longer be a little VD spirochete with my tongue wrapped around myself. Did you hear that?”

“I’m listening.”

“No, I mean did you hear that image little VD spirochete with the tongue? Store that away, you lucky huncher. Have it, free! The genius is back in residence. Aw love it”

“You’re doing well.”

“I’m not going to oddball on you any more. Whatever there is left”—he pointed directly out the window—“I am here and I am whole! I can take it. God, I’m so happy for me. And you …” He turned directly at me as if angry. “You are my best buddy! You’ve stayed. Oh, let me mawk. Let an old man of twenty-six mawk on. You’ve kept me out of Whitfield, and Parchman. You’ve got the face of an Indian who knows the secret routes of the hills, and I trust you. Don’t hang your head like I was trying to grab your thing! Truth!” he shouted. It was my poem. You gave it to the wrong man, you miserable plagiarist. Where is it? My poem.” He tore through the pages. “‘There I couch, when owls do cry, On the bat’s back I do fly/After summer merrily … and there suck I!’ Lord love a duck!” He dashed the book on the floor.

Now for the first time in a long time I got a piece of real happiness. The University of Arkansas, up at Fayetteville, wanted me—$1200 and fees paid for the first semester, renewable contingent on my performance. As for Columbia, Iowa, and Chapel Hill, they were all too precious for me to enter and I say fuck them. Always later, I have been glad to read in the newspaper that the football teams of those schools have been thrashed into the sod.

I was holding my letter from Arkansas, rereading it on the couch in Mother Rooney’s diningroom, and Fleece was there; and Mother Rooney, both congratulating me. It was mid-afternoon. Fleece went to the front window. “Who is that?” he asked me. Across the lawn, parked on the other side of Titpea and to the north of us, was a Buick. The owner of it was up on the porch of the two-story house across the street The woman of the house was holding the screen door open and talking to him and pointing to our house.

“It’s Whitfield Peter,” said Fleece. “He hasn’t got any cane. He’s coming right over here!” This was true.

“Who?” asked Mother Rooney. She went with us to the lobby. We stood in the wooden shadows and saw Peter through the mottles of the glass doors. He pressed and pressed the doorbell. It activated the chime box behind us, which had two dead chimes and only a clink for the one working. He rapped on the door, and I saw his hat sweep down to his knee after each knock, expecting someone to open each time. He was a musketeer beating his knee with his hat, to no avail.

“Well, I must answer the door. What a polite man,” said Mother Rooney. I held her with my hand on her shoulder.

“Not for him,” I whispered.

He must have been on the porch ten minutes before he got back in the Buick and oozed around trying to get out of the dead-end street We watched him from the window.

“He knows where we are, Monroe. How does he know where we are? Sweet Jesus, I’ve got the creeps.”

“That was rude,” said Mother Rooney.

“That was a rude, ugly man we know,” I told her. “How could a handsome man like that with his manners be rude and ugly?” she asked me. Her seeing him as hand-some sickened me.

Only Delph, the pharmacist rooming in the other tower, and I were in that weekend. I picked up the phone Saturday morning late in the living room. It had rung fifteen or twenty times. Peter was on the other end. He was very polite. He wanted to know to whom was he speaking and was flowery in his apology over the number of rings. I asked him who he wanted.

“Does a medical student, Harry Monroe, still live there?”

“He died.”

“This was a young man with a beard and spectacles. He wouldn’t have died. Someone has told me, the gentleman I arrived at this number by, that he was living.”

“But he just died. This happens, that people die, of all ages.”

“To whom am I speaking?”

I thought he knew, and I hung up. Having seen him at the door of the house, I had an occult suspicion that he knew every step I took.

Sunday night I finally fell asleep, with Byron’s Don Juan held up to my chin like an old spicy blanket I’d read half of it and was floating on the possibilities of the rest of it Fleece shook me.