Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“Don’t worry about me. Shoot,” he said.

The worst night was the night he didn’t answer the door I opened the door myself and heard the shower going in the back. I went over to the windows. There was more light in the evenings now. You could see his pool and the boy statue, poised on one toe, his arms out, at some position between dancing and flying. At his crotch was the whiter stone where the organ had been knocked off. It seemed awfully funny to me. I know that in the back of my mind I had thought it was, at least, risible, and had been stifling my humor. Now it looked like a little baby fop who had been taken down by flak on his first attempted launch from the earth. I giggled, then couldn’t stop laughing; my stomach hurt, tears flooded out of me. I must’ve been laughing loudly. I was broke, final exams were over; I felt hopeless and free at the same time. No telling how long Lariat was be-hind me. He was in his shower robe, with dripping feet, and when I turned I saw him as the dickless grown-up version of that cherub out there, and howled even more, right in the face of his stare. I did want to stop, and was embarrassed.

“ You did it, didn’t you? That was your hammer I found in the pool.”

“No, sir. No. My God. No.”

“If you didn’t, you wish you had.”

“Believe me—”

He turned around and walked back to dress. “I read your final,” he left me with. I went on down to the basement.

While we were about midstride in the first game, he tapped my hand with the end of his cuestick as I was lining up a six ball shot. “I read your final. I’m giving you a C for the course.”

“Oh come on !”

“You despise James. You despise Proust. The way you despised them was ignorance. You are a fool, boy.”

“I wrote a good final for you. I said I couldn’t stand to read sentences three times to make sense of them.”

“ What three times? Who has to read them three times? You’re a fool.”

“Dotft say that again,” I said. I was blushing, I know. I looked out the window away from him.

“Look at me if you want to threaten me.”

“You’re treating me unfairly, Gregory. Damn you. You will not give me a C. That’s robbery. You know it.”

“What would you do?”

“That’s nasty, asking that. You know it is. I’d take the nine dollars you owe me and hate you. You know that’s all I could do. I didn’t know you would turn into a son of a bitch like this.” I looked at the black grass pushed against the basement window, trying to crack the glass with its full growth now: grass at its black-green peak. If Lariat gave me a C, I was through. They would take the assistantship away from me. I had made another C, or rather Leslie Bill Harrow had given me a C in his class. “I liked you. I went to all your classes except a few, didn’t I? I was in your fan club.”

“Are you begging?” said Lariat.

“No. Go to hell.” I threw my stick away and started up the stairs.

Lariat called to me. “Come back. How about a B?”

“I need a straight A.”

“All right. Shoot Your shot on the six ball.”

As we played on, with me-winning twenty, fifty, sixty dollars, feeling like a gentleman for not pressing for what he owed me — a damned odd feeling for one who was ruined and broke — the basement became an attractive, fluidsituation for me. Lariat spoke to me as I made the balls, and I could speak and shoot accurately at the same time. I told him about Peter, Catherine, Fleece, Silas, Mother Rooney, Bet Henderson. Lariat kept the crisp smile up all the while. I went back in time, described Harley.

“Some of that I almost believe,” said Lariat. This was on the date of my publishing my first poem in a tiny booklet sort of magazine in New Orleans. Which Lariat lauded. “Success!” he cheered. I would have brought the magazine over with me, but I suspected he very urgently wanted never to have to read it.

She had been sick in the mornings. Some days she was sick all the way through the afternoons. We got a $250 check from Mr. Lombardo during this period. He wrote it out in a whipping festive script Prissy had mentioned in the letter that she might be pregnant. Lombardo thought even the idea of it was worth money.

Most of it went to buy off the creditors. We had fifty dollars left. I looked around and finally got a job at the Ralston Purina plant up at Springdale. I started at four-thirty in the afternoon and worked till about three at night This was a plant where they processed roasts and gravy plates. They killed several thousand turkeys a day. The birds’ feet were hung in the conveyor chain. They were stunned with an electrical shock. Then, a lone man with a bunch of sharp knives who had been at it twenty years cut their throats. The fluttering corpses were run through an alley of ovens which singed off their feathers. They came around to an aluminum trough where other people gutted them and cut off their heads. The trough ran a stream of water which took the gravel that the turkeys had swallowed to a de-pressed box. The corpses were taken on through hot water sprayers and seen to by other people. The guts and extras were the business of my crew. We came in when the others knocked off. We had steam hoses, shovels, squeegees, steel wool, and mops. The uniform was boots and yellow rubberoid aprons. The place was as big as ten gymnasiums. Canals ran everywhere and were loaded with a sluggish ooze of crops, heads, and bowels when we got there. A USDA man wandered around, and the idea was, you should be able to eat off the floor of the canals when you left This is the sort of work that is supposed to make you a man of some past, you know; make you rugged and plucky. What a bunch of moonshit First day on the job, the foreman on this shift took me and some other new blood around the areas. “One thing you got to get over,” he said. Then he jumped down into a canal thigh-high in the gut muck, holding his hands up and winking with a tough smile. Some of the regulars, who were Okies and crazy sergeants and people who wore hats with earflaps in the summer, and like that, had really vile assignments. Like the man in the pipe to the dogfood plant next door, who was a sort of human plumber’s friend. As far as I know, there is no worse work in America. $1.65 an hour. And the smell, oh my. You faded away to seek the restroom and get a nose full of the deodorant bar in the toilet And there would be another guy in there, eating a sandwich. Outside again. Somebody has to do this, somebody has to do this, I told myself. This is probably quite true, and I was comforted, really, by living with a truth. An absolute.

When I got home, it was sublime. Maybe any home would have been sublime, but I was so tired and Prissy was as sweet as sleep. I can never get out of my memory the pleasure of falling asleep as she talked, cooed to me with her head on my pillow. My daddy, daddy, daddy’s home. And mommy, mommy, mommy’s here too. And so is baby, baby, baby, but he can’t see us and we can’t see him; Prissy herself, as she cooed, I felt her thin shoulder and saw her in her rare beauty, Prissy herself — the mommy and baby both, in one body. I never knew what I had until she was pregnant.

I was sleeping late, Saturday morning, the last of June. Prissy told me Fleece was on the phone from Jackson.

“How are you?” asked Fleece.

“Waking.” I could tell he was rushed.

“Do you know anything? Catherine and Lock. I suppose you would’ve called me . It wasn’t in the newspapers or on the TV up there?”

“My TV’s broken. What?”

“Both of them are dead. The police killed them in Beta Camina. They were trying to plant a bomb on your friend Harley’s front porch. They tried it once before but the bomb didn’t go off. The newspapers are full of it. Lock shot a policeman right in the heart. The bullet was still lodged in his heart when they flew him to Houston. Lock had a sub-machine gun. Are you on the phone?”