Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“What’s this? Friday night he called my stepfather asking for you . How did he know to call General Creech’s house? Creech gave him the number for this house. I was six feet away from the phone and … The bastard comes to the door, he now knows our telephone number. How? I was talking with Creech, I was beginning to like him, and the phone rings. It was Peter . Creech was fifteen minutes on the phone. Peter told him that, in light of the fact he was talking to a general, he himself was a colonel in the governor’s corps years ago. This really disgusted the General. When he hung up, he told me that, whatever esteem I held him in, he had won his stripes, and not by marching in a herd of influential men past the governor’s mansion, being waved to and coloneled right on the spot by the governor. We were talking, and the phone rang again . Creech picked it up. The same man. He wanted to know why the phone kept ringing at the number the General had given him. The General gave him the same number again, more carefully.” Fleece had had a ruined weekend.

“Now you ought to know it all,” I said. “How does the cut on your stepfather’s head look? He was talking to the man who put it there. Did he tell you about what happened at Oxford, the truck turning over and all that?”

“Yes.”

“Peter was the one that dropped the crosstie. Silas saw him with a bunch of local kids, doing it”

“ Silas !” Fleece spat out.

“He happened to see this. Hate him, but he was the one who told it to me, and he didn’t know who your father, Creech, I mean, was. He simply happened to be there. And I should tell you,” and I told him so much my jaw ached, about taking Catherine out on dates, about having seen and heard Peter face to face, about inadvertently giving Peter the phone number and as much as the address of the house.

“’Well, I’m relieved. I thought he was a spirit. I thought We were being closed in on by a phantom. You’ve had such secrets! ” he snarled. “Such secrets. But I’m glad to know there is an explanation.”

Later in the night, I heard the phone in the living room ring, six times at least. I heard Mother Rooney open her door and try to make it to the phone before it quit, but she didn’t, and the last ring clung around my room.

Wednesday, I found this one, a letter in the “Our Reader’s Viewpoint” of the paper.

Mississippians who care:

The State Fair is here. I do not want to take away any of the excitement of it. It is October cool days the time we all like the sawdust under our feet at the Fair. The Royal American Shows here giving their temptations to the Mississippian in every facet.

There is one point is wrong, however, I want to point it out It is the Harlem in Havana Show which is here again. Who is pretending there is anything to Havana, Cuba anymore than Castro’s Communism?

It is the same thing when we let Negro mammies be the raiser of our white babies while we are at a cocktail party not knowing what is being whispered in the infant’s ear.

Thus Harlem in Havana is here, girls of mulatto breed undressing themselves to the eyes and to the tune of rock and roll and other Negroid music. They are a mockery and a accusation on the white race that they have bred with a black woman. That is what the Liberal Press loves. To point out hypocrisy.

Let us boycott Harlem in Havana and close it down as a loss to Royal American. Tell them to carry it back home to the millionaire of the North that is having a “ball” seeing us pay money for an idea that deep in our hearts we hate. I myself will be enjoying the Fair, but Friday night, the night it is well known the high yellow girl stands all the way nude, I wonder if you readers knew this has been going on, some people pay two dollars to see this? But I am one who will be looking in the face of the people who go in and come out of it. I wonder what those peoples faces are going to look like? Can they look me in the face?

Gillis Lock

Pearl, Miss.

“Like a sophomore in Whitfield Peter’s Academy of Letters,” I told Fleece. “Do you remember this son of a bitch? He was at Hedermansever shortly. The one who was beating my time with Catherine, you know.”

“Yes, I know, but I don’t know who he is. I’il tell you one thing. Peter has talked to his boy. You know he has. Is he right?”

“What?”

“Does the girl take off all her clothes?”

“Yes, she does. She was doing it years ago in the same show at Dream of Pines. My first glimpse of a real nude, in fact”

“Let’s go. I need the fun.”

I thought I might see Catherine with Lock, if he was standing where he said he would be. And really, I wanted to leave the house without my gun, but once on with the old reptilian coat, looking at my bare shaved face in the mirror, I was back with Geronimo again, and when I reached in the drawer for the pistol, the scarf was lying right by it, and I tied it on. I felt silly, but at home and warm too. When Fleece saw me, he said, “You got the pistol too, don’t you?” I nodded.

“That’s perfectly all right with me,” he said.

The sand gullies behind Mother Rooney’s were full of ledges under the kudzu vines, and you could feel for them and climb down as if on a ladder with every fourth rung in-tact, and even if you missed the place to put your foot you would land in a soft obliging mass of kudzu which would drag you to the next ledge with no harm. You just had to forget the idea that there were snakes sleeping underneath, grip on to what you could, and actually it was easy, landing, hanging on the vines and putting down foot softly as the vines broke. Fleece was above me, inching down. When I was at the bottom, I looked up and saw him forty feet up, missing every foothold and stripping off leaves and falling, all of a sudden, with the benevolent vines he held on to, and smacking back first on the ground beside me. It could have been worse. I looked up the mean hundred-foot drop of the cliff. But he didn’t land that easy, either, with his arms full of vines and leaves like some aeronaut who had bailed out of a flying watermelon. He lay horrified a moment, then found his glasses.

“We got in free,” I consoled him.

“Lead on. I’m all right.”

We talked through the shadows of the truck trailers. Walked over the flattened dusty grass, made it to the saw-dust. The Fair was just an expanded version of the Royal American in Dream of Pines years ago. Now they had the Astro-this and Astro-that, and the World War Two Atroci-ties show was no longer around, but Stalin’s Rolls Royce was, and the barkers, hating everybody, on the microphones with Yankee accents made of tin and cinders. Puerto Rican hoods stared at you like they would kill you if you passed by their skill-booth and would cheat your fanny off if you did stop. The air was cool, you could smell the Pronto Pups — wieners in batter — frying, and the sawdust by its nature gave you a soft falling and rising sense under your feet, tempting you to walk on air. I fell down.

“What was that? Get up!” said Fleece.

I brushed the sawdust off, and we walked on toward the midnight show of “Harlem in Havana.” It was down at the end of the fairgrounds beside the giant ferris wheel, as usual, and the crowd got thicker and thicker. I saw they still had the freak shows, with the big flapping cartoon murals of what you might find inside. I was a little surprised. I thought the freaks wouldn’t have made it this long as an attraction. I thought some law might have been passed. But then I realized that for the real freaks there can never be any laws. You cannot prevent the man who swallows snakes, you cannot deny employment to the world’s tiniest cow, you can make no law either for or against the lady with hairs growing on her gums, and the same goes for the limbless soprano and the Siamese twins, who are engaged to be married, one wearing a diamond ring on its finger. You can’t, any more than pass a law for or against death. Especially not when the people who pay to see them — I remember all the creeps at Heder man sever who loved the freak show and saw nothing else — come away feeling like crowned wonders in comparison.