Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

I called up Prissy before we settled nicely in the house. We kept it quiet from Tommy’s father, who was a god of a friend to me while I was there. Prissy answered at Ingall’s, and when I told her where I was calling from, she accepted me for the night.

She kissed me so wolfishly, with such an art of the tongue, and even the glottis, that the nerves of my stomach stretched out — an unbearable tickle. Then there was a kiss in front of her house, as we were leaving Mr. Neicase’s Imperial, that had to be the last one. I did not know that you could have an orgasm of the lips like this, which made you forget there was anything else you could do with a girl. When it was over, she collapsed on me, and we weaved together up the lawn to her dismal home. She had a way of leaning on the door, a way of being small and brown with her jumbled black hair; her eyes were dull and smoky, and she sighed out the smell of a bruised flower; the bones of her wrists, her knees, and her ankles had a childlike sharpness about them. I pitied her.

“This was so fine. Please don’t forget me. Please call me tomorrow,” she said.

The next night we were on the porch, kissing, the hell with the world, when Mr. Lombardo opened the door on us. He was a short man, happy, muscular in a stringy way, and poor. He was barefooted.

“Come on in, you kids. You can kiss on the setee. There’s some Jax in the icebox. College pistol. I know about you, Harry-o. Going to graduate school, you son of a gun.” When Prissy had gone back in the house, he said, “Yall just try not to wake Mamma. And don’t you pull her panties off in this house. College pistol.”

I knew there was a trace of Eastern accent in Mr. Lombardo’s speech. We sat on the lumpy, colorless couch, and Prissy explained to me that he had been moved down here in 1946 from a shipyard near Baltimore to work at Ingali’s. They had had her, Mr. and Mrs. Lombardo, two years after they got here — she was their only child — and Mr. Lombardo had been cured naturally of a disease that had to do with paint inhalation, and he thought Pascagoula was divine. He changed from Catholic to Episcopal. Prissy was lovely on that old couch, telling me this. Sometimes I would fall over and lick her neck.

I suggested we cut classes this week. Tom agreed. His father had procured him a lass out of a business college in Gulfport who called herself a “swinger.”

Prissy and I saw all the places up and down the beach from Pascagoula to Biloxi, Gulfport, Pass Christian, and across the bridge to Bay St Louis. We saw Jayne Mansfield at Gus Stevens. All the way, and quite a mass, Jayne. Prissy was cowed by her. I brought her to me, my hand around her dainty ribcage. Maybe I loved her first that night. She could do no wrong. She lay down in the sand of Biloxi beach next to me, in perhaps her best dress. She had hardly any bosoms at all, but she wore silver shoes, and she crossed her legs under her dress and dangled one of the shoes on her toes. The moon was between her heel and her shoe, and I saw the ridges of sand, with the tide out, and I suppose that did it.

“Listen. We have to get married and quit this fooling around.” She began sobbing. She couldn’t answer me except in high whimpers. She couldn’t find her voice.

We were on the couch together, late, three more nights. I hadn’t seen Prissy’s mother. She fled to the back of the house when I came in. I could hear her bare feet thudding. The newspaper, where she left it, would be falling apart But the old man continued to sport around as love’s chorus.

We were kissing once, and I thought I heard a smacking, smooching sound that we weren’t making. I pulled the door beside the couch open. There stood Mr. Lombardo in the hall. He was pursing his lips for another kiss, only he wasn’t kissing anything, just making the sounds. He gave a final leer, then disappeared into the back.

Another time, I had closed the front door and was headed for my car. I was sure the parents of the house were long asleep. It was about four in the morning.

“SSSStl SSSSST!” came a voice behind me. His head was out the front door. “What?” I asked.

“Good stuff? Good poon?” asked the man. Then he closed the door.

I saw her once again. I didn’t know when the wedding would be, but I knew it would be soon. She suggested a date.

For five days, Tommy’s father had been pushing ten-dollar bills on me constantly. He would put them in my wallet When I slept, if I wouldn’t take them outright I looked once when I was out with Prissy, and, counting the little I’d brought with me, there was a hundred and ninety dollars. It was a weird boon and a new vantage, having money accumulate right on your hip. I felt lucky and began trusting in my luck. Tommy and I went out on a pier to do some fishing, and I just threw out my hook and lay back on the wet planks, closed my eyes, and felt I was in a charmed boat, hearing the water lap under us. I asked Tommy what the swinger was like.

“I don’t know. Nice legs. Laughs when you put your hands on her,” said Tom, who was a shy citizen if the truth were known.

“Pietty like Prissy?”

“Nobody’s pretty like Prissy. You live in a tree, Monroe. And she’s got some growth left to do too.”

“I’d thought of that.”

Tommy’s old man finally knew who I was seeing. It was all right I think he felt exculpated, knowing I wanted to marry her. “I saw her the other day. She’s grown some, I think,” he told me. He shoved me a hundred dollars, right over the breakfast table. Mr. Neicase looked like a playboy whose eyebrows were graying, and I think these gestures meant a lot to him.

I left Mother Rooney’s on December 20th and entered Dream of Pines again. Pulling out of Jackson had been exhilarating. My parents had known I was getting married for a month. My mother was excited, thinking nothing which came from her home Mississippi could be ted. In her youth she had made some trips to the seashore near Biloxi. She adored the coastal region and trusted it completely.

The old man and I smoke hundreds of cigarettes together. Nothing really gets said. He wants to go out to the club and play golf. He loves to walk and he hits a pretty good ball. I walk around with him. I understand the beauty of a nine-iron shot, the smooth chop under the ball, seeing it rise and fall just over the bunker, plant on the green, and jump lazily on the slant toward the pin. We see Swell Melton, an old buddy of his, at a tee.

“This is my youngest son, Harry. Harry is getting married next week.”

“Well I’ll be.” The big roasted fingers coming after you in handshake.

I drove to Pascagoula three days before the wedding, having had Christmas with the folks. It was the same, just a little cooler. Prissy flew out in her yard and was on my lips. I had an engagement ting for her, which wasn’t much, but her mother was out in the yard too, looking at my T-bird. Her mother finally sneaked up and brushed my cheek, then rushed back in the house, then came out and stood on the porch, dark-eyed and skinny, and said, “Say!..” as if she had an idea. Then she went in again. I learned later that she was happy. Prissy was very much the babyishly tender thing that night. I hardly touched her. Once she called me “Darling,” but it came forced, like from reading a magazine article on love, she knew that at high peaks of emotion she must say it. She said it quickly.

It was then, afterwards in the motel — Mr. Neicase’s house was closed; he was in Los Angeles — I began to feel a bad edge inside, like a large tick I could feel settling his claws into my heart; the heart, my-heart, such a big, helpless organ, still beating along, but knowing the tick was there and had dug in. I developed a gaze, a numbed way of staring, say, at the edge of the motel rug, which made me deaf and stupid. And blind, in a way, because I saw nothing except the tiny geometry I was staring at.