Geronimo Rex by Barry Hannah

Author:Barry Hannah
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780802135698
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 1971-12-31T21:00:00+00:00

8 / Sliding

I was being faded out of music, “serious” music, I mean, and didn’t know it. The professors were running me out of the field. I bought a new coat made out of reptile leather over at a sale at Gus Mayer ($150, even so). And I wore it, it was full spring and getting warmer, but I wore it, thinking now I am ready. I didn’t know for what, quite, but I suspected there was evil weather ahead. Fleece attempted to ignore the coat for a week. I did wonder about the figure I was cutting, and asked him what he thought. He told me I looked like an endlessly mean queer, which he had been patiently waiting to say that week, I bet, knowing I was uncertain about the coat. However, there was a bleached-blond girl who played flute in the Jackson Symphony who was excited about the coat and declared to me, during the symphony recess, that I looked like an Indian prince. This was Patsy Boone, a freshman at Millsaps College, and she was nobody’s beauty—after the popping blue eyes and the nice teeth, just a piece of skirt, it seemed—but she had pleasant, stunning things to say about me. I took the solo of the “Habanera” once, in the absence of the first-chair trumpet. During the recess she found me and pressed my arm. She said she almost couldn’t stand it while I was playing. Something had happened to her, body and soul, which she couldn’t discuss just now.

So, at the next rehearsal, I was playing along at fourth part, swelling with new zest, and I got in trouble with the violist who sat in front of the trumpets. He was a professor of music at Belhaven College, a girls’ school in Jackson. He told his other violist friend that I sounded like a cow stepping in its own pies. I heard this, and told him I would get him for it. He had a loud voice and others had heard him. The jackass was six foot three and could’ve beaten me to a pulp just defending himself. But he called the police about my threat, and I got a call on the floor telephone in the dorm from the captain at the Jackson police station telling me this violist had bolted his doors and was trembling in his house with a shotgun.

He never showed up at rehearsals as long as I came. Manino, the conductor—a lean sissy who’d made a reputation down South on the violin—decided he needed the violist more than me and kicked me out with a quiet explanation about how, if the truth were known, I did every now and then sound like a Mexican calling the bulls. I packed up and told symphony work goodbye. I walked out of Murrah auditorium, heard the orchestra plunge into “Polovtsian Dances” without me, and with no lacking in the brass section; heard no dismay over my absence; everybody was bright on his

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