Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

Next to our house was old man Walker’s house with the “Worms” sign nailed on the tree hard by our driveway. Walker was retired from the mortuary stone trade and sold fish bat in milk cartons. The worm bins were in his basement. Our houses were crammed so closely together that we almost had to be friends, or move. I liked the old creep, anyway. He was near eighty and looked like a dwarf who had started as normal but had been ridden into old age by some terrible concern astride his neck. One stunning cold night in February, his face passed by close to the window of my study room. I was shivering anyway, wearing my overcoat because there was no heater in this room, and he scared the devil out of me. It was about three in the morning. He had had his teeth bared, like some gargoyle who had fallen off my roof and hit the ground alive and vicious. I went out through the living room, on out the back porch and intercepted him, coming around the rear of my house, and asked him what he thought he was doing. The cold really swatted me. Walker wore only a flannel shirt over another shirt, the flannel shirt misbuttoned.

“What are you doing up?” he asked me suspiciously.

“I was reading and writing. You scared me. You could get shot.”

“Well you know how it is when you don’t get on with the wife. You take the walk. To get rid of it. You can’t go to sleep like you are. It would give you a stroke.”

His wife was his age, and was yellow like the face of an old cheap clock.

“Every night it comes up something different you wouldn’t expect. She come in tonight got hair curlers in her hair and in that bathrobe I don’t like.”

“You couldn’t let that pass?”

“I lit a cigarette and she commenced shouting ‘bout it would break my health. She went inside the kitchen and come out with the hammer. I got an arm hold on her. You know.”

“What?”

“She said she was dying. You know women how they’ll mourn on you. I let go. And she hits me in the throat with the hammer and goes to calling for help.”

“Damn!”

“It ain’t not occurred to me about divorce. It goes on and on. I just saw your light. It didn’t look like you was doing nothing. You said you was reading and writing.’ You planning to make something?”

“You love your wife, Mr. Walker?” it occurred to me to say.

“It goes and comes. You know.”

He was out in the yard several nights later. This time he put his face against my study window and held the outer sill, examining me forlornly. I jumped out of my seat when I saw him. The expression did not change on the old man’s face. He looked at me with ghastly concern. One of his eyebrows was crusted with blood, I saw, as his facial heat defrosted the pane and his breathing made the glass clear. He prolonged his dead-eye scrutiny of me, and then drew off as if sucked away. I was furious. I went to the bathroom and threw up a small amount of something thin and bitter, from the bottom of my stomach. When I was settled down I picked up the phone and dialed his number. Prissy came down the stairs with a blanket around her and saw me with the phone.

“Who are you calling this late ?”

“Go on back to bed.” She ignored me and sat down on the bottom step with her bare feet crossed and the blanket over her head. The phone at Walker’s was ringing, six, seven times, no answer. When someone finally picked it up I’d lost my anger and set the phone down.

“I have a right to find out who you’re calling so late, don’t I?” said Prissy. “If you look at me with hate every time I want to do something you don’t like, how do you expect me to look on you with love every time you do something I don’t like?”

The ghastly face of Walker recurred to my mind. An old raw pirate’s voice, Cockney, gathered in my throat, and I drew up in a crabbed, one-legged way, the old pirate in heat, looking at her as if blind in one eye but bright in the other, one over compensating healthy boiling right eye. “My dearrrrriee dream!” I roiled out. Prissy hunched back, up a step, with her heels.

The house was frigid. There were two small space heaters downstairs and one upstairs in the bedroom, with a broken grate, letting a vapor of gas off so we had to keep the window cracked for safety. I threw off my overcoat and clawed at my snap, tearing off my shirt as the pants fell and heaving out my chest as if to disclose a beastly tattoo. “I takes my pleasure in the coldl” I swore. Prissy stood and ran upwards. I heard the blanket whizzing on the steps and the shutting of the door. There was no lock on the door. I hurled away my last shred and took the stairs naked. I was bitten by such cold that I had to take a crouching, even more sinister posture, thinking that if I ran up, the breeze would kill me. “Awrrr! Coming up the stairs to mingle with my dearie!” I proclaimed. “That maybe we could find a bit of warmth between us.” At the top of the stairs I was waddling in a dishonorable position not even worthy of an old pirate. I could form no more words. The cold had me like a crab of the Arctic who had only a nerve-life, and sought heat and light. I butted in the door, holding my knees, shutting the door with a side action, quickly, to keep the beloved warmth in. I was below the end of the bed. The room was dark; a weak flaring orange came from the heater.

“Where are you?” asked Prissy. “What can this mean to you? This is not entertaining.”

I waddled along the side of the bed, dedicated to this squatted position now. The numb gaze and the deafness were with me. I waddled up even with her form on the bed. My head came just over the level of the mattress. I laid it down beside her hand. She shrieked.

“I used to think you were well bred!”

“Wrong,” said I. “Take me or leave me—” tumbling like a crab from some height into the bed. I lay there stunned a while; then I could relax my hooked hands and straighten my legs.

“Harry, I don’t like this. Why must love take these forms?” she mourned. She shared the guilt with me. The heater was beating orange shadows up at the end of the bed. The wallpaper was fern green with crocus prints; we slept in the old half-finished attic our landlord once lived in. Leaks in the roof made brown stains on the wallpaper at the corners, and in spots the paper had fallen away. Over us was the tin roof, the best roof I’ve ever lived under. You hear the rain and the sleet just over your head and take in the weather very personally, take it into sleep with you. There were two dangling light sockets upstairs, but no electrical outlets. The house had the musk of forty years of human baggage. We had a huge bathtub with scrolled feet Prissy had made the curtains in my study out of burlap, and it smelled like a feed store. Across the street was the R&S, a twenty-four-hour grill for greasers, truckers, and hungover college boys. To our left was Walker, to our right a house the size of ours cut up into four apartments which rotated with different collections of the outright poor, loud sluts of the beautician’s college, and people like lonely barbers. The trucks put the air brakes on at the stoplight all night, coasting in to the R&S Grill. In our block, to the west, stood two high grain elevators which belonged to the Farmer’s Cooperative. The train wasn’t far off. I don’t know what was going on, but the neighborhood stunk like someone was dropping live chickens into a cauldron. And just beyond the boarding house to our left was a house-shop: “Nantiques.” A woman named Nan sold antiques, you see. This is when the money was suddenly all gone, and I’d spend hours in front of the television, trying to get stunned.

My TV broke at a terrible moment. I was watching the horror movie by myself; Prissy was asleep overhead. In the finest wino tradition, I’d bought myself a 990 bottle up at Mac’s Liquor with our last dollar. We had food, I mean, and the first of the month wasn’t long away. But here I was left with the last warm slug of the bottle and a dark room. I was rocked by the silence and the fact of my marriage, with only me, this Prissy upstairs, and the black quiet; too stupefied to think of anything else. I had a notion suddenly that I must marry her with my mind tonight. The die had been cast, we were alone in the house together, so we must make it together with locked minds somehow. I took the stairs. I did not want to be lustful, but I had the sensation of rising on a rolling cluster of hooks, my hands drew in like claws, and I had to fight against being a creature of pure nerves all over. The mind, the mind, I kept saying. This time she had the light on and was sitting on the bed, looking at me hard away.