by Barry Hannah
“Morning, gents,” said Wren to the three at the rail. They waited for his maiden lie of the day. Something impossible about his sleep, perhaps.
“A car hit him and that queer just flew away,” he said.
“Say it again?” asked Lewis.
“Oh, I rented a video of Last Exit to Brooklyn last night. A queer ran out in the road, a car hit him, and that queer just flew straight up in the air away.”
“Could I see that?” asked Ulrich, intensely concerned with the flight of human beings.
“I might have lost the tape.”
“Already lost it, Wren?”
“It could be in there among my volumes of Shakespeare. I’ve got all ninety-five of his stories and plays. Given to me by my grandson, who just adores me.”
Though he meant nothing by it, Sidney Farte was insulted, recalling the anathema of his own grandson last spring. This began his day vilely, even lower.
“You diarrhea-mouth cocksucker,” he said.
“Here now, so early,” objected Lewis. A ninety-one-year-old man didn’t want to hear such filth announcing the day. That was the sort of thing they did in that vicious far-north horror, New York City. The saintly Wooten had established a certain spirit on the pier that was not recanted at his death. Sidney heard nothing beyond a direct blast in the ear, which Wren was determined to give him. He actually began feeling better now, recovering his purchase on the island of unconscious profanity that was his.
“Puts me in mind of Icarus,” said Ulrich.
“Like everything,” said Sidney. “Shit, I knew a rat once could fly. Throw that sumbitch cheese in the air. Shit in the air too.”
“You look thin today, Sidney. What’s your weight?” asked Ulrich, lighting another Kent.
He jumped into something running parallel in his brain: “Thing to do is wait out the pain. Most times it’ll pass of itself. Modern man has not let the body heal itself. The downfall was aspirin.”
“What in hell are you talking about?”
“Rock and roll kills a lot of men early. We know for a fact that the presence of rock and roll electrons in the air causes plane crashes. Some of that hip-hop stuff will take the wing right off your jumbo jet. Even makes cancer, too. They’re looking into it.”
“These people you say ‘looking into’ shit. Count ’em, it just about leaves only us on the pier that ain’t doing a survey.”
“It’s the age of high-priced nosiness all right,” said Lewis, whose bobber was going under as if a sucking thing were on. He let out an audible breath in sympathy. “Something’s on my shrimp, gentlemen.”
“I want to see this sea creature,” said Peter Wren, throat red with prevarication.
The huge bobber submerged and disappeared in the blackish green, down to legend they hoped, and the men hovered together into one set of eyes three hundred and twenty-three years old. The bobber came back up again, but Lewis raised the line and the shrimp was gone. Wren began rigging for bluegill, excited.
“A turtle or a gator’d bite shrimp,” said Sidney.
“I suspect sturgeon,” said Lewis. “They can breathe both salt and fresh. And they migrate long distances.”
“Your human being is made like the shark. If he quits moving and doing, he perishes,” said Ulrich.
“Now shark. I’ll eat any shark you catch raw,” said Wren. Though a liar, Wren was a man of some sartorial taste. He suddenly observed Ulrich with a jump. Ulrich wore a brown Eisenhower jacket over blue-striped polyester bell-bottom pants—something truly ghastly from the seventies, such as on a boulevarding pimp. Through a flashback of several connected untruths, Wren was visited by a haze of nausea, for everything wicked had happened to him in the seventies. He had lost his wife, his business; thieves had stolen his collection of guns. Music was provided by those skinny, filthy Lazaruses, the Rolling Stones. Carter had given away everything to the blacks and hippies; brought blue jeans to the White House. Every adult became a laughingstock and fool. Old Ulrich here was dressing right into the part. How Wren despised him now for his encyclopedic near-information. The world was in such a sorry state, it made a man lie sometimes to be sane. He tossed his line out grimly. Ulrich had ruined the fishing.
The lake, just alive, now seemed bright warm and dead, just a stretch of empty liquid at midmorning. A bad quality of light had suddenly come over. All of them felt it, like that mean gloom one feels after a pointless argument with one’s wife. Nobody spoke for thirty minutes, hearing the call of an unnamed flat accidie.
At last Lewis, back to his daybreaking thought about what he regretted having never done, his sin of omission, spoke. He asked the others what bothered them in this area. Lunchtime loomed—pleasant ritual of the hungry sun. More and more they talked about food, except for Sidney Farte, often too sick to eat.
“I guess what I missed most was having a significant pet,” said Lewis. “I was always talked out of them. Would be nice to have an old dog hearkening toward the end with me.”
“I guess I missed the Big Money,” said Ulrich. “That could have been sweet. Imagine the studies one could pursue. Perfecting one-man propulsion. I could have been the Howard Hughes of individual flight.”
“I wish I’d had a heart,” blurted Sidney Farte. “I didn’t even cry at my wife’s funeral. Knew I should, but I just couldn’t. My children looked long and expectant at me. Hell, I was like that as a little boy. Look on the worst things without a blink, eyes so dry they hurt. Something left out of me at birth. Begun lying ’cause there wasn’t nothing in true life that moved me.”
The confession was so astounding to the rest, who had known Farte for a decade and a half, that reply was occluded. His health must be sincerely bad. They all felt a surrender. Now noon, it became darkly clouded; something dangerous and honest seemed to be in the air. Peter Wren had a fish on, but was just ignoring it, reckoning on Sidney Farte. But it was Wren’s turn.
“That I could have sex with a child,” he said.
“My ugly God,” said Lewis.
“I mean a youngish girl, say fourteen. That she would adore me. I would be everything to her.”
Was he now adjusting himself to a public? they wondered. Or was he inwardly a vile old criminal, collecting photographs and near to wearing a garter belt? Fourteen was suddenly too legitimate, hardly a story at all. In their youth, fourteen was open season. There were many mothers at age fifteen, already going to fat. Four memories raked through the deep ashes of their desire.
“Shit, I had that,” said Sidney.
“Was she tight? Did she cavort for you?” asked Wren.
“Yes and yes. Couldn’t get enough. I tell you—”
“Shhh!” said Lewis.
Behind them, someone had lightly shaken the pier. In her tennis shoes, she had crept up unheard. The small vibration of the boards was all the warning Lewis had of her. She was right behind Sidney, attentive. It was Melanie, Wooten’s widow, the only woman ever to insist on coming among the men at the end of the pier. Farte despised having her near. The others could not quite decide. Something was always suspended when she came around. A sort of startled gentility set in, unbearable to Farte, like sudden envelopment by a church.
“We were talking horses, Mrs. Wooten,” said Lewis.
She’d brought them a snack of homemade sugar cookies. You could smell vanilla on her. She was an industrious person who had begun blowing glass animals after the death of her husband. That she came out there was somewhat aggressive, they felt, and she had begun talking a lot more since Wooten passed, finding a hobby and her tongue at about the same time.
“No, you weren’t talking horses. Don’t mind me, don’t you dare. I like man talk.”
“Cloudy noon,” Ulrich offered.
“Aren’t you going to pull your fish in?” the old lady asked Wren.
When he got the fish reeled in, they saw it was a Gaspergou, a frog-eyed crossbreed of bass and bream nobody had seen in ages. Everybody but the sulking Farte was fascinated.
“That’s your unlikely combination, a mutant, absolutely,” said Ulrich, “the predator and the predatee, crossbred. The eater and the eaten.” As Wren unhooked it and laid it out on the planks, Ulrich continued, in an excess of philosophy: “An anomaly of the food chain, hardly ever witnessed. We’ve got the aquatic equivalent of a fox and a chicken here, on your food chain. Reminds you of man himself. All our funereal devices are a denial of the food chain—our coffins, our pyres, our mausoleums, our pyramids. Pitifully declaring ourselves exempt from the food chain. Our arrogance. But we aren’t, we’re right in it. Nits, mites and worms will have us. Never you doubt it.”
They munched the sugar cookies and Ulrich was confident he had produced a deep silence with his gravity.
“I’m not that innocent, lads,” said Melanie Wooten. “I’ve cavorted. I was a looker, my skin they said seemed not to have any pores at all. Wootie was lucky. The man stayed grateful, all his life.”
“Is that what made him so kind?” asked Lewis.
He acknowledged, looking at her firmly for the first time, that she was no liar. Her skin was still fine for a woman in her seventies. There was a blonde glow to her. Her lips were full and bowed—quite beautiful, like a lady in films. The way she broke into life here toward the end he found admirable too. Many women of his generation remained huddled mice. You could not even imagine them straight in their coffins.
“I hope so,” said Melanie. “His gratitude. Without, I hope, sounding proud.”
“Not at all,” said Lewis. “Gratitude is what marks the higher being, doesn’t it?”
“But the thing came over him toward the end, which I’ve never much discussed. It came on just like diabetes. My love had nothing to do with it. In his seventies he turned gay. Isn’t that something? All those male students—he had a different infatuation every week. Poor Wootie. They fired him from the college. He couldn’t control himself.”
“What?” asked Sidney Farte, rather meanly. She knew the problem.
“He turned homosexual. Homosexual,” she emphasized, as if in a lecture to a pupil.
“Is it true?” asked Lewis.
They were not looking anywhere in particular, the others, when they noticed Lewis was weeping. He shook a little, and his long white face was drawn up in hurt.
“What is it?” Ulrich and Wren begged. “What’s wrong?”
“I want a dog. I want a dog. I get so lonely, nothing anybody can do about it,” Lewis cried out like a child.
“Well now, a dog can be had. Let’s be about getting you a dog,” said Ulrich.
“Certainly,” Melanie said, taking Lewis’s hand. “Did I upset you?”
“Just a dog,” Lewis sniffled.
“By all that pukes, get the man a dog,” said Sidney.
“That’s a dream you hardly have to defer,” said Wren. “That can be most painlessly had.”
They went back up the pier together, Melanie indicating the way to her station wagon. All in, they set out over to Vicksburg to find Lewis a dog.
Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other
THE OLD MAN OFF FORTY YEARS OF MORPHINE WAS FASCINATED BY guns. He was also a foe of dogs everywhere. They were too servile, too slavering, too helplessly pack-bent when not treacherous. The cat was the thing. Coots cut at the evening with his cane and wanted to “see a death” in the big city. He had been crazy for death these many years, writing about it and studying it in thick manuscripts. Many, hordes, died in his fictions. He dressed in a suit, often a three-piece, and looked to be a serious banker, with a Windsor knot in his tie. The scratch of the lower Midwest was in his voice. He was looking for a billiards parlor in Manhattan. In these blocks he had heard one rumored.
He knew of an afflicted man playing billiards—Latouche, ninety, a barely retired surgeon. The grofft was getting him. It was a rare Central American disease, making one hunt like a dog, bark and whine, the face becoming wolfish. The old man, Coots, despised the even older Latouche. There was just something, something—what?—about the man, perhaps his comfort, an obtuseness. And, sealing it, he owned a proud Hungarian sheepdog. The thing had gruesomely licked Coots at an underground firing range where he and Latouche shot their exotic weapons. It was their only similarity, this love of handguns. The old men would ardently blast away for hours, exchanging Italian, German, South African and Chinese pieces, barrels all heated up so that they would have made a pop of steam if tossed in water. Hunting and ordering correct calibers was a main part of their lives. Latouche was more the weapons technician, while Coots revered the history of each piece, or even more precisely, what kind of hole in what men in what time, entrance and exit; what probable suffering.
In Mexico once when he was young, Coots had shot his wife “inadvertently when the black thing was on me” as they were sporting around with the idea of William Tell, a glass on her head. Coots was drunk, but he insisted on “the black thing.” He believed in spells and even more in guns as he got old. He believed he could think spells on enemies and bring hideous luck to them, or so he wrote in his chilly fictions, where homicide and orgasm were inevitably concurrent and hundreds died in rages of lust and murder; a holocaust of young men perishing was always at least in the background, like wallpaper in a shrine. It was an ancient and beloved tyranny of the cosmos in which desirable bodies were given up religiously.
Coots, queer not gay, was an old-timer who hated “fairies” almost as much as women, or so he wrote. “Queens” were anathema, down there with the dreaded “cunts.” His manly Midwestern prose would scratch out at them. Physically he was a coward, and as he aged in the big city, his paranoia had a field day and became quite adorable to Coots cultists, who were always at him for interviews. His prose was no hoax. He wrote beautifully, especially when he was telling a straight clean story—something “linear.” But too much of this thirties stuff annoyed him and he was apt to launch off into his “genius”—spiteful incoherence, cut-up blather, free-floating time pirates corn-holing each other, etc. He was, though, dead accurate about the century often in this “shotgunning”—it seemed to thousands anyway—as only, perhaps, an old shy queer full of hate can be.
Coots had murdered nobody else (his wife’s accident had cost him a few days in a Mexican jail), but he was proud of the three dogs he had shot in a great city park one twilight, two German shepherds and a Rottweiler, just last year. Their hides were on the wall of the composing room in his “bunker,” a windowless warehouse apartment tremendously padlocked in a cheap nasty section of town. Coots had claimed an attack, and the young amanuensis with him (they were not lovers) did not deny it. There had been high adventure in secreting the gun, getting the animals back to the apartment in three separate taxis, and arranging for their skinning with a jubilant cultist now ten years on methedrine. The legend got out to everybody with whom the cultist had a beer, hundreds. Alcoholism was necessary to balance his speed habit, but nothing balanced his tongue. The story had all three animals, escaped from a wealthy high-altitude widow hag on Riverside Drive, tearing unprovoked at Coots’s legs, with the amanuensis sprawled in terror, and Coots fast-drawing a .44 from his Abercrombie & Fitch raincoat. Coots, swarmed by his interviewers and even by Time, demurred, but there were the three hides on the wall, head shots, no hole in the pelt. Of peculiar literary satisfaction was the fact that the methedrined skinner died a week later, as if taken off by a curse from the shy hermitic Coots.
Coots was now thinking he had successfully hexed Latouche, a man who at eighty-nine had never had a day of bad health, and now the grofft on him, horrible and unlucky. Latouche was of an almost alarming breed. He seemed never to have made a mistake. Neither with his surgery (famous), his wives (he had outlived two fine women devotedly in love with him), his clothes, his money, his charities (quiet and enormous), or his prosperous handsome doctor sons. At billiards he was a wizard and put away other wizards one fourth his age, some of them precocious millionaires of his pattern. The great violent, greedy and rude city h
ad not put one line of worry on his face. He had been a gallant chief of surgery in World War II, at forty-one, with Patton’s racing Third Army, but could have been queer Hitler’s Aryan model. Even in his forties he seemed to be the one for whom Grable showed her amazing legs; he could have been her kiddish admirer and our hope for Over There, Lucky Strike thrust into sidelips with the dash of veteranship forced on him. Latouche could have ridden on sheer image, but insisted instead on Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and the Sorbonne, to emerge a surgeon, powerful before age thirty: athlete (impossible endurance, perfect fingers), intellectual (four ontological approaches named for him), and doting lover, amazingly of his beautiful wives alone. Also he had written about guns, and could outshoot Coots, who was almost twenty years younger.
After retirement, Latouche became a student of man, fresh as a ten-year-old. It was the one thing he’d neglected, mankind. He was making fast time, of course, as usual. His Hungarian sheepdog, his curly pal, was allowed everywhere, even restaurants. Latouche was that kind of darling. Folks loved to have him around and hear his voice, kind and modest, and he could have lived free on what people bought for and gave him. He lived in an apartment on Wall Street very near the waterfront, where men loaded and unloaded international goods. Because he was such a distinguished widower, emblem of a nobler time, the owners of the building allowed him to stay on the top floor in a building where everything else was business. With more dedication than others with telescopes, he began watching the men on the docks, studying the poor, the bitter, the disheveled, the union apes, some with bursting muscles, some gone all punk and crooked with labor. He might have seen Coots down there, with his young amanuensis dickering for morphine, heroin, hashish, opium, or just espresso, Player’s cigarettes, and Stolichnaya, with a man of trade. Dr. Latouche knew nothing much of drugs. He had never done much biochemistry. Fifty years ago he had quit cigarettes. His three cold martinis every evening, no matter where he was, were the only rise he required. He had been close to being an addict of surgery but why not? He did not like drugs, even when he prescribed them in small amounts. Dr. Latouche had never even had a real headache. In his medicine cabinet were Epsom salts, Pepto-Bismol, iodine, and, for visitors, aspirin.
