by Barry Hannah
What he loved was his son.
What was love but lack of judgment?
So if God judged, he was not love, eh?
This sort of stuff was the curse of the thinking class. You went away to college and came back with such as that to nag your sleep till you dropped.
Best to shut up and live.
Best to shoot anonymous innocent citizens with an air rifle and shut up about it. The delicious thing was that the stricken howled and bore the indignity as best they could, never to have an answer. He saw them questing through the decades for the source of that moment. He saw them dying with the mystery of it. Through the years the stricken had looked up at the top of buildings, sideways to the alleys, and directly at passersby. Once he had looked directly at a policeman, beebeed, rubbing his head and saying something. Twice people had looked deeply at Ross and his car—another year, another Riviera—but Ross was feigning, of course, sincere drivership. What a rush, joy nearly pouring from his eyes!
In Newt’s neighborhood his car was blocked briefly by some children playing touch football on the broken pavement. They came around and admired his car and the two-seater boat towed behind as he pulled in between dusty motorcycles in front of a dark green cottage, his son’s. Already he wanted away from it, on some calm pond with the singing electric motor easing the two of them into cool lily-padded coves, a curtain of cattails behind their manly conversation. They had not fished together in ages. Newt used to adore this beyond all things. Ross had prepared his cynicism, but he had prepared his love even more. The roving happy intelligence on the face of little Newt, age eleven, shot with beauty from a dying Southern sun as he lifted the great orange and blue shellcracker out of the green with his bowed cane pole—there was your boy, a poet already. He’d said he had a new friend, this fish, and not a stupid meal. He’d stroked it, then released it. You didn’t see that much in the bloody Southern young, respect for a mere damned fish. He’d known barbers to mount one that size, chew and spit over it for decades.
They seemed to have matched Ross’s care in his presents with (planned?) carelessness about his arrival. This sort of thing had happened many times to Ross in the homes of celebrities, even in the midst of his projects with them. Somebody would let him in without even false hospitality: “Ah, here is the pest with his notes again,” they might as well have said, surprised he was at the front door instead of the back, where the fellow with their goddamn mountain water delivered.
The girl indicated somebody sitting there in overalls who was not Newt, a big oaf named Bim, he thought she said. Yes, there always had to be some worthless slug dear to them all for God knew what reasons hanging about murdering time. Bim wore shower shoes. He did not get up or extend a hand. Ross badly wanted his cynicism not to rise again, and made small talk. The man had a stud in his nose. He dressed like this because the school was a cow college, Ross guessed. It was hip to enforce this, not deny it, as with Ivy League wear, etc.
“So where do you hail from, Bim?”
“Earth,” said the man.
Drive that motherfucking stud through the rest of your nose, coolster, thought Ross. Ross looked straight at Bim with such bleak amazed hatred that the man rose and left the house as if driven by pain. Ross stood six feet high and still had his muscles, though he sometimes forgot. There wasn’t much nonsense in him, and those who liked him loved this. The others didn’t. He might seem capable of patient chilly murder.
“I don’t know what you did, but thanks,” said Ivy Pilgrim. “He’s in Newt’s band and thinks he has a title to that chair. Can’t bear him.”
“Bimmer has a fine sensitivity. Hello, Dad.” Newt had entered from the back. There were only four rooms. “Where’d Bimmer go?”
Newt did not have a ponytail. He had cut off almost all his hair and was red in the face around his beard. He wore gold-rim glasses set back into his black whiskers, and his dark eyes glinted as always. His head looked white and abused, as just shoved into jail. The boy had looked a great deal like D. H. Lawrence since puberty. Here was the young Lawrence convicted and scraped by Philistines. But he didn’t seem drunk. That was good.
“I don’t believe Bimmer liked me,” said Ross.
“He moves with the wind,” sighed his son.
“Mainly he sits in the chair,” said Ivy Pilgrim.
Ross looked her over. She was better than the photograph, an elfin beauty from this profile. And she wasn’t afraid of Newt.
“You have the most beautiful hair I’ve seen on a man about forever. That salt and pepper gets me every time,” she said to Ross.
“Thank you, Ivy.” Watch it, old man, Ross thought. Other profile suggests a kitten, woo you silly.
“What instrument does Bimmer play?” he asked.
“Civil Defense siren, bongos, sticks,” said Newt seriously.
“So you’re in earnest about this band?”
“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.” Since Newt was twenty, Ross was wary of asking him any questions at all. He’d get the wild black glare of bothered pain.
Who could tell what this meant? Though with his bald head it seemed goony and desperate.
Ross was parched from the road. He sat in Bimmer’s chair, big and tweedy. The place was not so bad and was fairly clean. There were absolutely no books around. He wondered if there were a drink around. He’d planned to share some iced beer with Newt, by way of coaching him toward moderation, recovering what a man could be—healthy in a beer advertisement. He was throwing himself into the breech, having lost the taste for the stuff years ago.
“I’m either going to sing or go into the marines,” said Newt. Was he able to sit still? He was verging in and out of his chair. Akathisia, inability to sit, Ross recalled from somewhere. It was a startling thing when one’s own went ahead and accumulated neuroses quite without your help. Ross looked at the girl, who’d come in with a welcome ginger ale, Dr. Brown’s.
“Newt remembered you liked this,” she said.
This was an act that endeared both of them to him. At last, a touch of kindness from the boy, though announced by his wife.
“Well, I need a splash with mine,” said Newt. He went to the kitchen and out came the Rebel Yell, a handsome jug of bourbon nearly full. However, this was histrionic, Ross was sure. Newt did not look like he needed the drink. He had affected the attitude that a man of his crisis could not acknowledge ginger ale alone. Ross, having thought more than usual on the way up to Auburn and presiding too much as father to this moment, sincerely wanted to relax and say to hell with it. He wasn’t letting anybody live. The marines, singing? So what? Give some ease. He himself had been a marine, sort of.
Where was it written in stone, this generational dispute? Are fathers always supposed to wander around bemused and dense about their young? Wasn’t it true old Ross himself had nailed the young diva, weeping runt, with her heavy musical titties bobbling, right in the back door? While Nabby, loyal at home—source of Newt right in front of him—was shaking her mirror so a younger face would spill out on it? Not very swell, really, and his guilt did not assuage this banal treachery. Old, old Ross, up the heinie of America’s busty prodigy. Awful, might as well be some tottering thing with a white belt and toupee, pot, swinging around Hilton Head. What a fiend for one of Newt’s poems, but really beneath the high contempt of them.
“So how’s the poetry making, anyway, sport?”
Newt was tragic and blasé at once, if possible, gulping down the bourbon and ginger.
“Nothing. It’s the light. Light’s not right.”
“But you’re not a painter, Newton. What light?”
“He means in his brain,” explained Ivy.
“My love for Ivy has killed the light.”
Newt had to give himself his own review, this seriously? Good gad. Save some for the epitaph.
“I like it that way,” Newt added hurriedly, but just as direly.
Ivy seemed upset and guilty, yearning toward Ross for
help. “I didn’t want to be any sort of killer.”
He liked this girl. She had almost not to say another thing in her favor. She had the pigtail, pleasant down the nice scoop of her back.
“Well, can’t we open the shroud a little here, Newton? Look outside and see if you can see a little hope. Maybe some future memories, son.”
Newt shuffled to the door and looked at the car and boat a whole minute, too long. Ivy got Ross another Dr. Brown’s. The last thing Ross might say in a hospital room someday in the future, nurse turning out of the room: “Nice legs.” Good for little Ivy. Would it never stop? Ross had long suspected, maybe stupidly but as good as any genius, through life and his biographies, that women with good legs were happy and sane. Leg man as philosopher. Well, Nabby’s seemed to persuade mostly joy out of the day, didn’t they? Even given the sullen, jagged life he sometimes showed her. Get out of my skin and look, he thought: Was I ever as, oh, difficult as Newt myself? Probably, right after he’d fired himself from the war, though he hid it in Chase’s house in San Pedro.
“So what do you see, Newt?”
“No wonder Bimmer left,” said Newt.
“Now, can you explain that?”
“Bimmer’s father is a man of . . . merchandise.”
Hold off, hang fire, with Henry James. Ross cut himself off. With a new enormous filtered Kool lit—stay with these and you’ve got at most twenty-five years, likely; we don’t have a clumsy century of discord to work it out, Newt, for heaven’s sake—he thought, Don’t give me that merchandise crapola, young man. I bred you in Nabby. You know very well my beach house and all of it could burn up and not impress me a great deal, never did. Let’s take off the gloves, then. I came here.
“Is that why your man Bimmer dresses like a laid-off ploughboy? Missing the fields and horse shit over to the back forty?”
Newt smiled. Maybe this was the real turf, here we were. The smile was nice, at last, but why did he have to destroy his head? His son’s hair was black and beautiful like his used to be.
“So let me declare myself and your mother finally. The quick wedding, there wasn’t any time for presents much.”
Ivy went with him to the Riviera. She saw the CD player inside and gave a gasp of pleasure. It was the piece of luggage full of CDs she wound up with.
“This wonderful suitcase. I’ll bet you want us to get out of this dump p.d.q.?”
Ross felt very mean for his previous plans for the bag.
“Where are you from, Ivy?”
“Grand Bay, close to Bayou La Batre. Right across the bay from you. The poor side, I guess. But I loved it. And I’m not broke.”
“Fine. Very fine.” Unnecessary, but necessary, on the other hand. She’d won him.
“So there we are. Boat, motor, the player. And voilà! (Ross opened the bag, nearly a trunk). Some late wedding music.”
“Must be fifty discs there!” cheered Ivy.
“Thought you and I might break in the boat and pursue the finny tribe this afternoon,” said Ross, brightly.
Christmas in May, he was feeling, was really an excellent idea. Look down, son.
Newt barely glanced into the suitcase.
“Fishing? That’s pretty off the point, Dad.”
“Oh, Newton!” Ivy jumped right on him.
“What’s . . .” Don’t, Ross. He was going to ask what was the point, you bald little bastard?
“I’ve promised the kids I’d play some touch with them. Just about to go out there. Then there’s the band tonight. You can come with Ivy if you want.”
“Newt takes the band very seriously,” said Ivy. This seemed to be a helpful truth for both the men. Ross forgot Newt’s rudeness. Or did he know? What part of loony Berryman or Lowell had he researched? Newt glanced at Ivy dangerously. This brought Ross’s nightmares right up, howling. This was the feared thing. His son seemed to want to beat on this strange idiot who’d just opened her mouth.
Ross couldn’t bear it. He went out with a fresh Kool and the remains of the ginger ale and stood in the yard near his sleek Buick, gazing through some cypresses to a man-provoked swamp behind the hideous cinder blocks of an enormous grocery, some kind of weeds native only to the rear of mall buildings, ripping up through overflowed mortar on the ground.
Here he was back in “life,” shit, man with twenty-five years to go, wearing a many-pocketed safari shirt next to a pimp’s car. What did an old American man wear rightly, anyway? Fifty-two was old. Cut the hopeful magazine protests. You spent half your time just trying not to look like a fool. What intense shopping. Hell, shouldn’t he have on a blazer, get real in a gray Volvo? Disconnection and funk, out here with his killer Kool, pouting like a wallflower; son inside wrecking the afternoon with bald intensity. Back to his nightmares, the latest most especially: Ross, as an adult, was attending classes in elementary school, somehow repeating, but bardlike, vastly appreciated at the school by one and all for some reason, king of the hill, strolling with the children, glib, but why? The school was paying him a salary while he was doing what? But at the school gate he was in a convertible with two girls, and two men—one of them Newt—jumped in the car and rammed long metal tongs through the skulls of the girls. Their screams were horrible, the blood and bone were all over Ross. Then policemen appeared and drove metal tongs through the skulls of Newt and the other man. The screams of Newt were unbearable, loud! He’d awakened, panting. Ross almost wept, looking at the back of that grocery now. But it was a dry rehearsal, with only a frown and closed eyes.
Ivy touched him on the arm. “Sometimes you’ve just got to ignore him. I’ll go fishing with you. Please, I’d love to. And I love everything you brought. Thank your wife, Nabby, for me.”
Marriage was a good cause, thought Ross. On a given day chances were one of you might be human. Was D. H. Lawrence a rude bastard, even into his thirties?
He saw the kids gather and Newt go out as the giant weird quarterback. The day was marked for gloom but he was going to have something good out of it. He did not want to watch his son play football. But thanks, Lord, for providing him with the dread image: Newt had once embarrassed him playing football with young kids.
He was home from graduate school—Greensboro—at Christmas. He was invited over to an old classmate’s house in Daphne. Ross came later to have a toddy with the boy’s father. It was another big modest beach house with a screened porch all the way across the back. They took their hot rums out to the old wooden lounges and watched Newt and his friend quarterback a touch game with his friend’s nephews and nieces, ages five to twelve. Ross was pleased his boy cared about sports at all. It was a stirring late December day, cool and perfect for neighborhood touch, under the Spanish moss and between the hedges. But then Ross saw his contemporary staring harder out there and when Ross noticed, things were not nice. Newt was hogging the play and playing too rough, much too rough. He smashed the girl granddaughter of this man into the hedge. She didn’t cry, but she hung out of the game, rubbing her arms. Then Newt fired a pass into the stomach of a boy child that blew him down into the oyster-shell driveway. The kid was cut up but returned. Newt’s friend implored him and the children were talking about him, but he remained odd, yes, and driven. Ross was looking at something he deeply despised seeing. He did not want to think about the other examples. They called the game. The children came up on the porch hurt and amazed, but gamely saying nothing around Ross. They were tough, good children, no whiners. In the car home, he said to Newt, “Son, you were a mite fierce out there. Just kids, kids.” Newt waited a while and came back, too gravely: “You want me to smile all day like a waitress?”
This fierceness, off the point, that was it.
So they drove around and Ivy, who did not change from her short skirt and flowered blouse to go fishing, directed him through town to pick up Newt’s bounced checks—this tavern, that grocery, the phone company. Ross didn’t mind. He’d expected financial distress and had brought some money. With some irony of kinship he’d bro
ught up a fairly big check from Louisiana State University Press to sign over to Newt. This concern had published Newt’s books. Ross had just picked up a nice bit of change from a piece of his they were anthologizing. Christ, though, the kid might make something out of it. But not a kid. He was thirty. Newt’s sister Ann was twenty-eight, married in Orlando, straight and clean as a javelin, thanks. Ivy Pilgrim (her real name) wanted to know all about Ann and Nabby. Then they did go fishing.
Auburn had some lovely shaded holes for fishing in the country. Erase the school, and it was a sweet dream of nature. Ross, a Tuscaloosa man, could never quite eliminate his prejudice that Auburn U should have really never occurred, especially now that it had fired his boy. There had been some cancerous accident among the livestock and chicken droppings years ago, and, well, football arose and paid the buildings to stay there and spread. These farm boys, still confused, had five different animal mascots, trying to get the whole barnyard zoo in. Ivy was amused by these old jokes, bless her, though he really didn’t mean them. She was in architecture, hanging tough. How could Newt have attracted her? he thought, instantly remorseful.
She thought Newt would return to his poems soon. Improbably, she understood his books and wanted him to move on to—pray for rain!—some gladness, bless him. The poetry had won her over, but as a way of life it sucked wind.
“Newt is proud of you and he wants to be glad,” she said.
