Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“Kill me,” he said. He pushed up with his arms and stood. The wound, the only one, was on the back of his neck. The blood ran down the back of his shirt and flooded out in his coat. The stain just behind his neck burst out sop-ping and purple. I was still kneeling. His blood began to drip on the floor.

“Kill me!” he bellowed at Lariat, who held the big cowboy pistol negligently. “I knew there were others here! I know.

“Get his gun off the floor,” said Fleece.

When I leaned out to catch up the gun, Peter wheeled around and saw me. He kept his arm cocked behind his head with a hand on his wound. He staggered away, examining me. His face was a horror: a mask of bruises all yellow and purple like hematomas. His eyesockets seemed to have been mauled and crushed. His lips were folded in-wards. He had lost his false teeth. He began that curious squeaking voice, the voice of a cartoon rodent. “I knew . You were not a ghost. You were real. I knew you were in this, knew, knew you knew …”

“Shut upl” squalled Fleece. “I’ve been hearing that goddam squeaking all afternoon. Look at youl You had that wonderful University of Massachusetts education, you had good health, you had money. Look what you did with it! Look at herl Look at you in the mirror! You look like a shrunken dick!”

Fleece passed out. I thought he was dead. Lariat and I took off his shirt. There was a tiny red hole just above his right hip. Three inches away, down near his hip socket, the bullet itself could be seen under the skin. The bullet was black as coal. The skin above it was brown and puffy.

“Don’t shake him. What’s down there?” asked Lariat.

“The liver. I don’t know.”

“Did you get to the phone? You, sit down,” Lariat said to Peter. “Why don’t you get a blanket for the old woman?”

I went back to Mother Rooney’s bedroom and pulled off her bedspread. Mother Rooney was not unsightly, dead. There was the hole in her forehead. But she had had time to compose herself. I noticed she had patent leather dollies on, no longer the wrestling shoes.

We sat there, waiting. Peter sat on the floor and held his neck, squeaking, sometimes rocking. Fleece breathed deeply. His pants and hands were bloody, but he was not bleeding any more. The other bullet was in his calf. I caught only one word in the rest of Peter’s squeaking: “Never.”

When Fleece revived again he shouted at Peter to shut up.

The police came in with the ambulance squad. They looked around the room at Peter, me, and Fleece. Lariat’s suit was dirty from the climb up the cliff, and he was still holding the long pistol. I had taken mine out in the back yard and thrown it over the cliff. The police ganged around Lariat, snatched the gun away, and two of them hoisted him under the armpits to carry him off.

“Not him. Him ,” Fleece said, pointing at Peter.

“This one’s hurt. What’s wrong with him?” asked one officer about Peter. I saw Peter was incapable of answering.

“He tried to kill himself after he saw what he’d done” I said.

“Shot himself across the back of his neck?”

“He’s crazy. He knew how to kill her but he didn’t know how to kill himself. Or didn’t try hard enough.”

An older officer, who apparently knew Peter, supported the opinion that Peter was crazy. They collected around him and dragged him out violently. Then the older officer got our names.

We had to stay in town a week. We visited Fleece at the hospital, and I talked to two men at the coroner’s. Then an-other one at the police station. My story was one-sided. All I confessed to was bringing the loaded gun to Jackson in possible defense of Fleece. I lied concerning every issue where it was possible Fleece or I might be seen in a bad light. I defended myself as a passive citizen into whose hand fate had thrown a gun and a plea for decency in a cul-de-sac of terror. I was exonerated to the extent that my name never even got in the papers. I made them understand that I had just come from Mother Rooney’s funeral.

Lariat and I attended the struggling little ceremony. We saw the coffin into the Catholic graveyard. We shook hands with two widows. The old cross-eyed priest recognized me and took my hand. “Ah, yes.” She had taken time to will the house to the Robert Dove Fleece boy, the very boy who was shot defending her. Did I know that? “She had a rich long life,” I told the priest “And a painless death.” I looked at Lariat “This is a man who came to help too.”

“Why haven’t you left?” I asked Lariat. All the while he had been extremely quiet and mild. “Why don’t you say something, then?”

“You were the one who thought you brought a wise man down here with you. Not me.”

I apologized to him constantly about putting him through this. He just shook his head, and finally he told me to shut up, looking bemused and a bit haggard. I got the feeling he was lost in the longest Lariat pause ever.

The last day we saw Fleece at the hospital The bullet had missed his liver by a half a hair, and he had been priding himself on simply being alive forfivedays.

“You know who was here this morning? Bet. You know who was here just before you came in? The D.A. We are going to be clean as a pin, Monroe. Peter is in Whitfield; he’s still squeaking; sometimes he breaks out with some-thing they can understand. Catherine, he talks about. The first Catherine. We came as close—” He lifted up the pincers of his thumb and forefinger, showing the tiny gap between them. “But look how clean that little gap is. Came as close as that bullet to my liver. By damn! You want to see where that mother went in?” He lifted his smock and peeled down the tape and gauze to show the little swollen red point. Lariat moved away. He was urping. Lariat was throwing up. He tried to make a clean blow of it into the room lavatory, but the wave came too fast. It dashed off the side of the enamel and drenched all the area by the window.

“Do sayl” said Fleece.

“I’m sorry.” Lariat already had his handkerchief out “That’s been coming on me for a week.”

“This man needs some beauty. He hasn’t seen too much down here. Give mefiveminutes.” I found the phone in the gift shop downstairs and called Harley in Beta Camina. I got him.

“Harley says he’s got the best band he ever had. He’s rehearsing them for the International Lions Convention parade in New York. Would you like it if I said let’s take Fleece’s car and drive down to Beta Camina? I’d like you to see them and meet him.”

“A nigger marching band?” said Lariat.

When we arrived at the high school in Beta Camina the Gladiators were marching on the football field full blast They had newer uniforms, a heavy green tending toward black. We joined Harley on the top bleacher. He was sweating. The day was hot, high, blue and golden. He had several folded index cards in his shirt pocket. I say Harley was sweating, but he was rather peaceful. He was not directing or conducting them at all.

“That’s it ” he said. “What does anybody want? They’re beyond me. I can’t help them any more. They got guts and grace. Thirty of them already have scholarships in music. Six of them going to Juilliard.”

“Would you listen to that?” said Lariat. “They are superb. That is the best; well, you just forget they’re a marching band at all. Whose music are they playing?”

“Mine,” said Harley.

We left for the car. The band had quit but was still in our ears. Lariat put a hand on my shoulder.

“That was it. Good, good heavens. We’re in the wrong field. Music!”