Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“Let’s not make it cheap. Risk is beauty. Besides—” He opened the refrigerator, which boiled out frost; the shelves were crammed solid with Lowenbrau. “Look what the house furnishes. Cue up. Lag for break.”

“All right.” I chalked my stick, a new, already talced one, an 18-weight; one of five he had to choose from. Lariat of course owned a jointed stick with its own case. I believed he wanted me to notice the leather case as he joined the stick. “Dr. Lariat; you have fourteen red balls. I’ve never seen that. Down at Roger’s, you know, there are only nine. You have an extra row.” Lariat shook his head.

“This is the original snooker set. This is real snooker of the old days. What are you moaning about? Look at all the points you can make.”

Look at all the points you can make, I thought. A shark could run the score up out of sight on you with the extra red balls. I had been in a few games with real sharks. These people were fearsome, cool maniacs. They made points as if easing a knife in a woman, slowly and impassively.

Lariat broke the balls and brought the cueball back down the rail behind the two ball — a snooker right off. I tried to rail for the red balls, but my tip glanced off the top of the cueball. Four points—800. I had two dollars in my wallet. He beat me thirty points the first game. Lariat swore like a wounded man every time he missed a shot or failed to get exquisite position. I was talking to the balls a good bit myself. Lariat knew a few of the old tricks, but he could not exercise them consistently. It was just that I was somewhat scared and played miserably. At one o’clock he cut off the light. I was almost thirty dollars to him.

“I can’t pay now,” I said.

“You’ll be back next week. Well let it ride. You will be back next Sunday?”

Sure. He said almost nothing to me that first night. I think he was really too happy to talk.

Then Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, with the big rains pounding his basement windows, and then the warm grip, the extra light, of summer coming on. I made, about the second time we played, an allusion to his being a bachelor. I was tight and told him I wondered if he ever thought about the fact that the only literary figures he was interested in were celibates. I asked him if he believed in a literary procession of fornication-proof people. That those were the real writers. He sneered at me. He looked at me like he was very sorry I’d spoken. His hair had broken away from its severe, scratched-apart combing — the part almost like a wound. He peered out the window of the basement, pausing. Would he ever speak?

“I’m not a bachelor, boy. I’m a widower.”

Not even Hoyd knew this. But Lariat had married, during the first season of rest after the war, a woman from Switzerland. She was blond, and older than Lariat; she was bumptious and athletic, and loved the sun. She made Lariat promise her that they would live at Key West like Ernest Hemingway for a while. On the boat back to the States, Lariat’s wife and some other foreign girls found a tall creosoted beam on deck, and prepared it for a May pole. It wasn’t May, but the girls had missed celebrating the last May Day and wanted to re-enact it. The pole did not stay in its stand when they danced around it pulling on the ribbons. It fell on Lariat’s wife and killed her. Dr. Lariat showed me the last poem he’d written, at age twenty-nine, six months after his wife’s death. The poems begins.

It wasn’t May

But the fools thought they

Could bring back prettiness and play.

The pole,

The artificial May Pole, told them:

No. And fell

On artificial Switzerland…

at which point in the reading, Lariat took the poem away from me. Lariat went on to Columbia to teach a year, recovering from the tragedy.

“Or under that guise,” he said. “Actually I had nothing to recover from. The only thing I missed about her was her German accent, which was pleasant and almost sleep-inducing. I heard it so often over the radios during the war, calling my name, and was charmed by the accent then. So I married it when I could. But it was only the woman, walking around naked, making dinner naked; she would have shopped naked. She was trying to play a woman in D. H. Lawrence’s books. Then, I didn’t know what she was trying to play. I hadn’t read any of Lawrence. I was happy for her that she was dead, in that way. The blow was quick, probably painless, not very bloody. It’s what happens to all farm animals at the height of their beauty. She was thirty-five, losing the beauty she had when I found her — just the time for the blow. With her perpetual suntan, she was most likely due for skin cancer had she lived; an actual visible flaking away. Neither she nor I could have borne it.”

I held my tongue. What would I have said, anyway?

Another night we were talking esthetics. “Death may be the mother of beauty, and sorrow and frustration are usually tied up in beauty some way. But the pause , the pause between impulse and action; that makes beauty more times than you’re aware of. My wife never paused, never. Never reflected, never poised, never held a tentative position. She was always straight into the action, and that’s the way you always saw her — acting, moving, engaged in something. Her esthetic, if she had one, must’ve been that beauty is energy. And that’s false as a wooden nickel. If you want to get a C in my class, just write about how energetic somebody’s work is.” And later. “And furthermore, if you want to talk about honesty . Such a premium on that word. Being absolutely honest , come on: the vagina is the ugliest, ungainliest natural creation in the blown world. Perhaps when they land on Mars they might find something uglier. It is a nightmare. That it gives pleasure, my friend, is an outright paradox , a sort of serendipity out of foulness. Hell, women know this. What a laugh to read all these lyrical hypocrites shouting that this is not true. Men , most of them! Willfully blind with those wide honest eyes.”

I felt I ought to speak up in behalf of his dead wife, but didn’t know the way to do it. I was still shy of him. Should I keep calling him Dr. Lariat? His first name was Gregory.

I thought that if I called him that, he might peer at the window and wait for me to clear out The third night, when we quit, I owed him seventy dollars. This was another anguish. Of course I would be back the next Sunday. During the week I skipped two of his classes and practiced like a wildcat on the tables. Finally I got my game back. When I played the next Sunday, I stayed loose and shot for snookers. And I had luck too. One time I ran three red balls and the rest of the numbers.

Lariat spoke to me as I shot “What is it like back home?”

I took a rest “I’ll tell you what I think of it First of all, if you mean the real town, where you used to live, it looks like the remnants of a pretty village,” thinking, trying to get it perfect for Lariat, “that was bombed with tin. They have paved over your mother’s grave…”

“Don’t try out your poetry on me. I wasn’t asking for that.” He was angry. Mainly over my winning, I think.

“I was trying to give you an impression. According to you, Dream of Pines today…”

“Shoot the ball, snooker man.”

From then on I won, although slowly. I cut my debt to forty dollars; we played one night even; the next I cut it to five dollars. The next I went wild, I had a mystic stroke, and he owed me nine. We did not speak to each other at school any more. In his basement he could barely keep back his rage, waiting on me as I made the balls. What could I do? I drank the expensive Lowenbraus with guilt. I said, “Aw, too bad!” when he missed a shot and it was my turn.