Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

We circled through a village of old bricks and launched onto a road freshly laid with red gravel.

“This will be fine,” said Harley. He wanted to know if we wouldn’t come in and take some coffee. Fleece had been asleep since Jackson. I was too groggy to get out of the car. I told him I’d just open a window here for a minute.

The last thing he wanted to know was whether I was pretty sure he wouldn’t see Peter around if he happened to see me again. Could he count on maybe seeing me again without seeing Peter. Because maybe he would like to see me some time and talk about how this literary plan of mine was coming on.

“See if you find out you’re a poet. We’d have a lot to talk about if you were. I might give you some stories.”

“Sure.”

“But they might not rhyme.”

“Sure.”

“Well?” and he went in the house.

This was in December. I had a fiancee. I wasn’t in the house much, and spent a good bit of my time riding up and down the highway, sometimes pulling off to read a piece out of a book. I’d made a trip to Fayetteville to get the feel of the place and locate a house.

The mountains around Fayetteville, the Boston Mountains of the Greater Ozarks, you bet, give me those, especially Highway 23, with the tops of the trees right up next to the highway, the trees themselves growing from sheer drops, the highway tilting, spiraling up and down, 15 mph or meet your maker, use second gear, watch for falling rocks; under the ledges dripping snow-water, then looping down to Fayetteville past the rock houses, past the cold river, past such signs as Rainbow Trout, Cider, See The Valley At Absolutely No Cost, and this one in front of a store: Trading Post and Son. Yes, give me the hillbillies for a change; give me a new sea level. Give me Fayetteville, too — a sort of flatland bum’s dream of San Francisco, a sort of lost Bowery of Denver — five hundred miles northwest of Jackson. Give me all those miles away.

The days were really a nuisance when I got back, like an intolerably long train in front of you at a railroad crossing. Mother Rooney caught me going out of the room one night.

“The man called you several times last week, Mr. Monroe. Couldn’t you clear your business with him so he wouldn’t have to call so much? Sometimes he calls very late at night.”

“I know. But I can’t clear up the business. I’ve tried. I told him. As far as I’m concerned, there is no business.”

“You aren’t making book, are you, child? You aren’t in the numbers racket? I wouldn’t want anything to damage your literary career.”

“No.” Fleece had bought her a television.

“And listen now. I want your marriage to be just perfect .” Her hands were clasped and she drew them down-wards as she said this, the old blue eyes moist.

“She would love you,” I said.

“Mr. Fleece said that she is.a technical virgin.” I looked instantly to catch her eyes — the same moist blue. “In my day we let certain things go unsaid but I realize this must be sweet for you.”

“Mr. Fleece runs at the mouth, Mother Rooney. He has a lot of cute medical phrases that don’t mean anything at all.”

“The medical. It’s so very nice to have an almost doctor in your very own house, being aged. He bought a television set for me.”

“I know he did that. But in other ways he stinks.” “Television has opened up a whole new world for me. Bless his heart. Did you see it the afternoon the young man dove off the hundred-foot platform into the ring of balloons in the pool?”

“No, mam.”

“Oh I could have just taken him into my bosom.”

Fleece came in the front door. He looked like a surgeon who had seen several inoperable cases today and had turned cynical about them. You could see him as the red-eyed master under the lights. Of course, keeping the charts in the geriatric ward, he had seen those that had their eyes open but were not awake in the morning. He had begun holding Mother Rooney in a kind of reverence. He watched television with her. He told me, in case I shared the common notion that the old deserved death, it was hardly ever true. He had seen and heard a man recite verbatim five Damon Runyan stories, with beautiful gestures, and be cold dead in thirty minutes. He wanted me to understand how the supreme organ, the mind, leaped onward and had so much left when the body fell away from it like a sack. Some of them saw heaven, some of them saw big lovely moments of their past, and some of them saw things like ocean liners on the hospital lawn. He told me he was glad he had his pistol, for the moment when he even had an inkling that his mind was trapped by his body. Those are the foul ones, he said. The others are so magnificent, you could understand how an attending pastor might speak of the soul. And what you see in Mother Rooney, he said, is a damned brave tooth-and-nail fight to keep her mind several lengths ahead of her body. Glorious.

“Don’t leave,” he said. “Let’s see how your poems are coming along. We could have the old lady make us a pot of tea. She told me she would like to see you in the act of writing a poem.”

“The man’s been calling me again.”

“We’ll tell him you’re out, as usual.”

“I don’t want to even hear the phone ring. You talk about old minds. What do you think is going on in his?”

“I’ll answer, I’ll talk. Stay home tonight”

Not long after that, the phone rang. I went to my room and, to tell the truth, I got under the bedspread and put my head under my pillow. I wondered about what Catherine was doing in the house as her uncle made the phone calls. I blanked out my sight, holding my eyes open against the sheet, looking straight at the black unreasonableness that this Peter thing should be going on this far. It had been years. Fleece touched me.

“I won’t do. I’m afraid it’s only you he wants. I told him I’d seen the letters, I’d stolen them. He called me a ‘cruel interloper.’ I told him I knew he oversaw the dropping of the crosstie on my father’s face, then. That silenced him a minute. I told him he was disturbing an old lady over here. Then he asked me to appeal to you. I told him I wouldn’t. He said then he had no other recourse but to come to this house, and look you up. I told him not to do that. I was scared, Monroe. I told him if he came over here I would, one of us, might shoot him. I told him this whole house was a hair-trigger. At the last, he wanted me to tell you this: this concerned Catherine. He said he would call at eleven, and hung up.”

“Was he crazy?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What would you say about his mind?”

’The words come out a little strangled, but they come out perfectly clear.”

“He wants me to come over and see Catherine, doesn’t he? I picked up the phone once, he knew who he was talking to by my breath, damn him, and he asked me to please come talk to her.”

“He didn’t say that. Say. You didn’t knock up young Catherine, did you?”

“I told you the truth. The Tampax string.”

“Maybe he just wants to kill you with that shotgun he mentioned in the letter. And maybe Gillis Lock is there too. Gillis has a pistol in the pocket of his car.” Fleece chuckled, wiping his glasses with his tie. “One day when things get really slow, I mean when we are bored to tears, we could go over there and have the end-all shoot-out with them. That’s somehow pleasant to have in back of one’s mind. Because I know I would be exquisite with my pistol.”

Mother Rooney made a pot of tea for us. I brought my poems down and we talked them over under the unforgiving light of the dining room. Fleece and I sat at the end of the long table. My typed poems lay on the papers like little clusters of charred fish bones. Mother Rooney left the television to come in and watch us from the couch.