by Barry Hannah
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
Once he had been to an inspirational seminar with one of his clients. The speaker was a man who had been through unbearable, unlucky, unavoidable horror. He told the crowd he intended never ever to have another bad day. He just wouldn’t. He was going to force every day to be a good day. Ross was heeding the man now. He was glad he’d remembered. He concentrated on Ivy, who was a good fisherman. She had sporting grace. They caught several bluegills and one large bass. There was never any question but that she’d clean them and put them in the freezer, since Ross was buying her supper.
“I suppose, though, Newt is casting around for other work?”
“It’s the band, the band, the band. He writes for it, he sings. He says everything he’s ever wanted to say is in the band.”
Ross had noted the late gloomy competency in American music, ever a listener in his Riviera. Electricity had opened the doors to every uncharming hobbyist in every wretched burg, even in Ohio. You could not find a dusthole without its guitar man, big eyes on the Big Time beyond the flyspecked window, drooling, intent on being wild, wild, wild. America, unable to leave its guitar alone, teenager with his dick: “Look here, I’ve got one too.” He saw Newt, late-coming thirty, in the tuning hordes, and it depressed him mightily. As witness the millions of drips in “computers” now. Yeah, toothless grizzled layabout in the Mildewville Café: “Yep, my boy used to cornhole bus exhausts, he’s now in computers.” Look down at a modern hotel lobby, three quarters of them were in “computers,” asking the desk clerk if the sun was shining. His daughter’s husband, a gruesome Mormon yuppie, was “in computers.” Then Ross’s ears harked to the Riviera speakers—something new, acoustic, a protolesbian with a message. Give people a chance, Ross corrected himself: you were a G-22, Intelligence, with the marines in the worst war ever, by choice, dim bulb in forehead. Whole squad smoked by mortars because of you, put them on the wrong beach. A gloomy competency would have been refreshing, ask their mothers. I could have stayed home and just been shitty, like the singer Donovan, hurting only music.
Back at home, she showered while Ross set up the CD player with its amazing resonant speaker boxes. What a sound they had here with Miles Davis. She heard it while the water ran. Ross was excited too. In his fresh shirt, blazer, trousers and wingtips, he emerged from his own shower, opened the mirror door of the medicine chest to check Newton’s drugs, and caught Ivy Pilgrim sitting naked on her bed, arms around her breasts, sadly abject and staring at the floor. Ross looked on, lengthening the accident. This is my daughter, my daughter, he thought, proud of her. The brave little thing.
There was a great misery she was not sharing with him. Doomed or blessed—he couldn’t know—he froze at the mirror until she looked over at him in the reflection and saw him in his own grief. Ross felt through the centuries for all chipper wives having to meet their in-laws. Holy damn, the strain. She was such a little lady, revealed. He smiled at her and she seemed to catch his gratitude instantly. Oops, slam the mirror. Nice there was nothing ugly here. I won’t have a bad day, I won’t. This was the best of it, and later he thanked the highway rushing in front of him for it.
• • •
The place was a converted warehouse rank with college vomit, beer in AstroTurf, a disinfectant thrown contemptuously over it. The spirit of everywhere: spend your money, thanks, fuck you. Chickenyard hippies, already stunned by beer, living for somebody right out of suburban nullity like them, “twisted” on his guitar stroking: “He don’t give a damn.” Couple of them so skinny they looked bent over by the weight of their cocks. Ivy had quit beaming. Since the mirror there had been an honest despair between them.
Newt and his truly miserable band came on, tuning forever as the talentless grim do. Ross was sorry he was so experienced, old. He could look at the face and bald pate of the drummer, comprehending instantly his dope years and pubic sorriness, pushed on till damned near forty, no better on drums than any medical doctor on a given Sunday afternoon with the guys. Then came Bimmer, a snob in overalls, fooling with his microphone like some goon on an airport PA system. Then a short bassman so ugly he had to go public. The sax man could play, but he was like some required afterthought in a dismal riot of geeks. Then there was a skinny man near seven feet tall who just danced, male go-go. What an appalling idea. Then Newt, not contented with the damage he’d done on backup guitar, began singing. He was drunk and fierce, of course. The point seemed to be anger that music was ever invented. It was one of the ugliest episodes Ross had ever witnessed. He smiled weakly at poor Ivy, who was not even tapping her foot. She looked injured.
At the stage, Ross saw the chicken-yard hippies and a couple of their gruesome painted hags, hateful deaf little twats who might have once made the long trip to Birmingham. They loved Newt and egged him on. This was true revolt. Ross wondered why the band had bothered to tune.
He had had dreadful insights too, too often nowadays, waking up in a faraway hotel with his work sitting there, waiting for him to limn another life. The whole race was numb and bad, walking on thin skin over a cesspool. Democracy and Christianity were all wrong: nobody much was worth a shit. And almost everybody was going to the doctor.
“Professional help” for Newt flashed across his mind, but he kicked it away, seeing another long line, hordes, at the mental health clinic, bright-eyed group addicts who couldn’t find better work waiting inside. Ross had known a few. One, a pudgy solipsist from Memphis, had no other point to his life except the fact he had quit cigarettes. A worthless loquacious busybody, he’d never had a day of honest labor in his life. What did he do? He “house sat” for people. But the fellow could talk about “life” all day.
Then things really got mean.
Newt, between sets, red-eyed, hoarse, angrily drunk, drew up a chair ten feet away from Ivy and his father, muttering something and bearing on them like some poleaxed diagnostician. Ross at last made out that Newt was disgusted by his blazer, his shoes, his “rehearsal to be above this place.”
“This place is the whole world, sad Ross-daddy. You won’t even open your eyes. There’s nowhere else to go but here! No gas, no wheels, no—” He almost vomited. Then he walked his chair over to them, still in it, heaving like a cripple. He was right in their faces, sweat all over him.
“Good-looking pair, you two. Did you get an old touch of her, Pops?” He reached around and placed his hand over Ivy’s right breast. “But I tell you. Might as well not try. You can’t make Ivy come, no sir. She ain’t gon come for you. Might as well be humping a rock, Rosser!”
Crazy, mean, unfinished, he laid his head on the table between them. The sweat coming out of his prickly head made Ross almost gag. Then he rose up. His eyes were black, mad. He couldn’t evict the words, seemed to be almost choking.
Ross handed over the endorsed check and stood to leave.
“What are you going to do for work, son?”
“S’all that bitch outside says. Job, job, job.”
“Well, bounced checks, bounced checks, bounced checks is not your sweetest path either.” He hated Newt. An image of Newt, literally booted out the window by an Auburn official, rose up and pleased him.
“Shut up, you old fuck,” said Newt. “Get home to Mama. And remember, remember . . .”
“What? Be decent, goddamnit.”
“Let the big dog eat. Always fill up with supreme.”
Ross looked with pity at Ivy. Given the tragedy, he could not even offer to drive her home.
Outside the turn at the Old Spanish Fort, Ross knew he would lie to Nabby. All was well in Auburn. Save Nabby, God, he asked. She was a fine golfer, in trim, but all those days in the sun had suddenly assaulted her. Almost overnight, she was wrinkled and the skin of her underchin had folds. The mirror scared her and made her very sad. Ross, for all his desk work and Kools, and without significant exercise, was a man near commercially handsome, though not vain. There was something wrong with the picture of a pretty fi
fty-two-year-old fellow in a Riviera, anyway. In the mirror, he often saw the jerk who’d got eleven young men mortared over there—a surviving untouched dandy. A quality in all of Ross apologized and begged people to look elsewhere.
Newt, by the way, had married somebody much like his mother. Small, bosomy, with slender legs agreeable in the calf. Probably he wouldn’t kill Ivy. Ross would make a good day of this one, be damned. It was only midnight. Nabby was up.
He caressed her, desperate and pitiful, wishing long sorrowful love into her. She cried out, delighted. As if, Ross thought, he were putting a whole new son in Nabby and she was making him now, with deep pleasure.
Newt had left some books in the house a while back. Ross wanted to see what made his son. He picked up the thing by Kundera with the unburdening thesis that life is an experiment only run once. We get no second run, unlike experience of every other regard. Everything mistaken and foul is forever there and that is you, the mouse cannot start the maze again; once, even missing the bull’s-eye by miles, is all you got. It is unique and hugely unfair. No wonder the look you see on most people—wary, deflected, puzzled—“What the hell is happening?” Guy at a restaurant, gets out of his car and creeps in as on the surface of the moon. Ross liked this and stopped reading. There would be no Newt ever again, and whatever he’d left out, fathering the boy, it was just botched forever, having had the single run. Forgiven, too, like a lab assistant first day on the job. And then Ann, not a waver, twice as content as Ross was, almost alarmingly happy. She was the one run too. He could call Ann this instant and experience such mutual love it almost made him choke. There was the greedy Mormon, her husband, but so what? You didn’t pick her bedmate out of a catalog.
The old hack suing E. Dan Ross backed off, unable to face the prospect of any further revelations on himself the trial might bring. He called up Ross himself, moaning. He was a wreck, but a man of honor too, a First Amendment champion after all. Ross, who’d never even hired a lawyer, felt sorry for what the erupting truth had brought to both of them. He feared for his future credit with clients. But the hack was invited on television, in view of his new explosion of hackery, a photo album valentine to every celebrity he’d let a fart off near. He became a wealthy man, able to buy a chauffeur who took him far and wide, smelling up the privacy of others.
For months they did not hear from Newt, only two cards from Ivy thanking them for boat, motor, luggage and Newt. This sounded good. Around Christmas they got a letter from Newt. He was in the state asylum in Tuscaloosa, drying out and “regaining health and reason.” The marriage was all over. He was smashed with contrition. There’d been too many things he’d done to Ivy, unforgivable, though she’d wanted to hang in right till the last. What last nastiness he had done was, after her badgering, he’d written her a poem of such devastating spite there was no recovery. It was a “sinful, horrible thing.” Now he still loved her. She’d been a jewel. He was a pig, but at least looking up and out now. He pleaded with them not to visit him. Later, out, when he was better. He still had health insurance from the school and needed nothing.
. . . And Dad, the boat and motor was wonderful. Bimmer stole it, though. He proved to be no real friend at all. I ran after him down the highway outside the city limits with a tire tool in my hand. They say I was raving, my true friends, and they brought me up here. True. I was raving. No more “they said.” Please forgive me. I’m already much better.
Love, Newton
Nabby and he held hands for an hour. Nabby began praying aloud for Newt and then blamed the “foreigners at Auburn and all that dreadful radioactivity from the science department.” Ross was incredulous. Nabby was going nuts in sympathy. Have a good day, Ross, have a good day. He walked out to the pier, into his writing room, and trembled. For no reason he cursed the Bay of Mobile, even the happy crabs out there. What could a man take?
Then, next week, another blow lowered him. Chase’s wife called and told him Chase was dead. He’d taken a pistol over to Long Beach, threatened his ex-wife, and was killed in a shoot-out with the police. God have mercy. Chase was a policeman himself.
Ross recalled the street, the long steep hill down to Paseo del Mar from Chase’s house, with thick adobe walls around it. Ross had needed the walls. He was badly messed up and stayed that way a month, having fired himself from the war, G-22, all that, after he misdirected the Seals to a hot beach and got them mortared. Chase met him in a bar and they stayed soaked for five weeks. Chase was a one-liner maniac. All of life had a filthy pun or stinger. Ross thought it was all for him and appreciated it. But when he got better and wouldn’t drink anymore, Chase kept it up. Ross needn’t have been there at all, really, he found out. Chase became angry when Ross quit laughing. Not only were the jokes not funny anymore, Ross knew he was witnessing a dire malady. Chase kept hitting the beer and telling Ross repeatedly about his ex-wife, whom he loved still even though married to Bernice, a quiet thin Englishwoman, almost not there at all but very strong for Chase, it seemed to Everett D. Ross, before he was E. Dan Ross. Ross heard of vague trouble with the woman in Long Beach and the law. But Chase was selfless and mainly responsible for Ross’s recovery, giving him all he needed and more. Chase had also adopted a poor street kid, a friend of his daughter’s. He was like that. He would opt for stress and then holler in fits about it. When Ross told him he was leaving, taking his rearranged name with him back to Mobile where his wife waited, hoping for his well-being, Chase went into a rage and attacked him for ingratitude, malingering, and—what was it?—“betrayal.” Not of the Seals. Of Chase. It was never clear and Chase apologized, back into the rapid-fire one-liners. Chase was very strange, but Ross had not thought he was deranged. The shoot-out sounded like, certainly, suicide, near the mother of his children. Too, too much. A man Ross’s age, calling happily to the ships at sea around LA Harbor over his ham set. Raving puns and punchers.
The very next day he heard that a classmate of his, the class joker, had shot himself dead in a bathtub in San Francisco. Wanted to make no mess. Something about money and his father’s turning his back on him. Ross could not work. He stayed in his pier room rolling up paper from his new biography—of an old sort of holy cowboy in San Antonio. Talked to animals, birds, such as that. Four wives, twelve children. The balls of paper lay in a string like popcorn on the meager tide, going around the ocean to California where the dead friends were. Ross thought of the men not only as dead but as dead fathers. Children: smaller them, offspring of grown pranksters, gag addicts. Ross thought of his air rifle. His classmate, last Ross had seen of him, right before he went over to Vietnam, was in the National Guard. He did something hazy for athletic teams around Chicago, where Ross last saw him. It didn’t take much time. His real life work was theft and happy cynicism about others. Bridge could level anybody with mordant wit. He’d kept Ross and others howling through their passionate high school years. Once, on a lake beach in late April, a class party where some of the girls were in their bathing suits sunning themselves, first time out this spring, Bridge had passed a couple of lookers and stopped, appreciative, right in front of them: “Very, very nice. Up to morgue white, those tans.” The boys howled, the girls frowned, mortified. Given everything by his psychiatrist parents, Bridge still stole, regularly. Ross heard he’d been kicked out of the university for stealing a football player’s watch from a locker. Bridge was an equipment man. He deeply relished equipment, and ran at the edge of athletic teams, the aristocracy in Southern schools. In Chicago, he’d taken Ross up to his attic. Here was a pretty scary thing: Bridge had stolen from his unit a Browning .30-caliber machine gun and live ammo and enough gear to dress a store dummy, stolen somewhere else; he had set the dummy behind the machine gun among a number of sandbags (the labor!) so that the machine gun aimed right at the arriving visitor. Ross jumped back when the light was turned on. Bridge, Bridge. Used to wear three pairs of socks to make his legs look bigger. Used Man Tan so he was brown in midwinter. Children, money and booze. Maybe great unre
payable debt at the end.
Ross knew he was of the age to begin losing friends to death. But more profound was the fact that he was not the first to go. Fools, some thirty of them from his big high school in Mobile, had gone over to Asia and none of them was seriously scratched or demented on return. It was a merry and lusty school, mental health or illness practically unheard of. What was his month of breakdown? Nothing. What was he doing, balling up the hard work and watching it float off? Nothing.
His son in a nut ward, Nabby collapsing, he took down a straight large glass of tequila and peered strongly across the bay to where Ivy Pilgrim had grown up. Did she have to be all disappeared from Newt, forever? A smart young woman, very sexy, plenty tough, endowed, couldn’t cure him. He missed her. Ross, frankly, was glad Newton didn’t want him at the asylum. But he sat down and wrote him a long letter, encouraging his strengths. The tequila gave him some peace. He took another half glass. His friend, Andy the pelican, walked into the room and Ross began talking to him, wanting to know his adventures before he opened a can of tuna for him.
He confessed his grief and confusion to the pelican. The absurd creature, flying bag, talked back to him: “Tell me. It’s rough all over, pard. Lost my whole family in Hurricane Fred.” One thing about the sea, thought Ross, sneering toward it, it doesn’t care. Almost beautiful in that act. Maybe we should all try it.
Next thing they heard, Newt was visiting his sister in Orlando. She and her husband lent their condo at New Smyrna Beach to him. He was sunning and “refining his health” at pool and ocean-side. He was working on poems and didn’t know how he felt about them. Walker, Ann’s husband, came by frequently and chatted. He liked Walker a lot. He wasn’t going to impose on them forever. The world was “over there” and he knew it. Ross and Nabby’s music was helping, thanks. Especially Bach. Had they ever listened to the Tabernacle Choir? Glorious. Newt said that he wanted “excruciatingly to walk in the Way.” Grats extreme too for the money. He was just beginning his life and would be reimbursing everybody soon. “Truly, though, people, I like being poor and I am going to get used to it.”
