by Barry Hannah
I have felt of consequence to the universe only while drunk or at the moment of orgasm. These are lies too, I know, but good ones, an inkling. Maybe next for me is prayer, but with her I was praying only not to be too fast. She had drunk three wines at her apartment while going through the photos, I nothing for a long while now. Now she was lying naked on the bed, heavy breasts with dark exhuberant paps, her head propped on one arm, facing me under her pixie-cut hair with her high cheekbones, cheerful even though we were not lying on the B-52 pictures.
I was thinking of all that black wind outside the motel window, with her lying in the wind, only her. I saw nothing else in the room, just her and black rushing air around her. It was wonderful, this picture, but with an edge of terror too, an image come alive out of regular life. The wind was screaming and her husband’s big plane, the size of a football field, was screaming through and breaking up.
When I was with her I did not have her so much as melt twice inside. My word, I became a woman in her, is what it felt like. All the excitement, the hard passion from her place to here—I was sighing as if penetrated and then wrung out. Never in my life before, nothing like this. I would tell only you this, pal. I have nothing to boast about, nothing to leer at, I promise. No, there was hardly any pride. She was all the power, every minute of lost lechery in my life, a sucking dream in a black wind.
But when she left the room, she still smiled as if she were my friend, everything was lovely. I felt unsatisfying, my spine was vapor. She had admired my body, but I was the chew toy of a dog, pal, a sad man. I had wanted too much, I think, waited too long. I had dragged her back to the motel. This was wrong. So was her apartment wrong. There was no good place, there was no right place for us.
In the airplane home to Memphis I tried to raise myself, have my esteem back. For a few minutes I would recall her beauty and then boast inside, but this went away fast. Then I tried to attach a profound narrative to myself.
My uncle, a laughing athletic monument of a man, had mysteriously gone down in his B-26 while chasing Rommel in North Africa. For years my mother waited for news of her brother. In my infant memory I recalled her crying for him, didn’t I? His widow was a delta beauty who remarried an important man, maybe a college president. I would see the two of them pictured in the paper. She stayed fine looking for at least thirty years. I admit to strange family thoughts about her. At fifteen I imagined that one day she would call me up and have me over to show me the ropes, in honor of my uncle’s memory. All this was fitting for his nephew, perhaps even decreed in the Old Testament. They were twenty-three when my uncle disappeared. The woman of Grand Forks was twenty-four. She acted as if all this were inevitable. Witness our easy, instant friendship. Said I must see the bombers, must see how beautiful they were. We would have toiled in the photographs of the bombers. This was a profound narrative.
But it wouldn’t stick, although I tried. I wanted badly to be a part of weeping history but the ghosts in this thing would not line up. Every now and then I would catch myself in a gasp, even a sob. Something was overcoming me, a kind of weak shame.
Life went on with my woman back home, but not for long. She left teaching at the college for banking, which was the profession of her father, a grim man in a characterless brick town on a hill in east Texas. I went around town dopey. The words fill me, fill me came to my lips constantly without my will. This would have been frightening but I was not that alert. I saw her play flute with the Tupelo Symphony a last time when an old man—once a master, I guess—was featured at the piano in a Gershwin concert. Either my ears had gone totally out or the man was simply possessed and awful. He thrashed on the keys way too loud and without sense. The audience sat there as if everything were sweet and ordained, but couldn’t they hear that this old man in tails was awful? He might not even be the musician they invited. He might be someone deranged, an understudy who had killed the master and was now mocking him. Was I the only one appalled? I kept listening, then I suddenly saw him naked in a tall hat. A nude hatted monster, banging down with closed fists. Nobody around me reacted, of course. It was a sorry thing, and again, I would have been frightened, but I was dull as if doped.
Finally I could not stand this feeling anymore and went on a bender, after a year without a drink. I dragged the woman away from her commencement duties and took her to a reservoir in the northeastern corner of the state near Tombigbee. I imagined the woodsy rocks and bluffs with a cold stream down the middle. We never found this, a place I thought very necessary, very much an emergency. The cool wet rocks and mountain laurel with fish to catch. I conceived of our eating fish and living off the land, a rebaptism of ourselves. My fishing rods lay helter-skelter in the back of the car. But there was no proper place, then the moment was gone and I was just a fool. We stayed in a motel with thin pseudowood walls owned by Pakistanis, the poor woman exhausted, her last loyalty expired. I couldn’t sleep well, and when I did I dreamed a number of the tall naked dead in extravagant hats, standing about like cattle.
Within the month, the woman got an abortion as I waited in the car. It was early on. I think I cared more than she did. She had never had children and didn’t want any. Then, out in Texas while she worked in her father’s bank beginning her new future, she met a blond man of new interest. I wrote to her but she didn’t write back. I smelled something wrong and went on another bender, using every room in my house, a huge rented country estate—modest to be sure—to have pretentious toddies in. I was intent on finding the safe and happy mix. No sick loonies this time, surely not.
In the midst of this the girl in North Dakota called and said her divorce from Nicholas was accomplished. She was headed back South and would drop by on her way to Florida. This was good, I was happy. There may be something serious here. I smiled in my mansion under the oaks, my dogs racing around the yard beneath the giant magnolia. Christ, I was baronial, you couldn’t stop me, man of many parts, hear, old son?
When she came in the house I was in a Confederate cavalry hat. I have no clear idea why, except I had become also a pilot. I could not refuse the conviction I was a fighter pilot. The hat gave me a certain authority, I felt. The passion of my race ran high in me. I talked in this vein while she sat and watched. She had lost weight and was all sun browned and lithe. I spoke directly into her black eyes, unconstrained, possessed. She seemed charmed and amazed. My powers wanted out of me. I could not hold them back.
I had a long drink in the kitchen, staring out at my rented orchard. The future looked bright now with missy in the house. Yes, there would be great carrying on. When I returned she was gone.
My nephew walked through.
Who was that? That was the best-looking woman I’ve seen in my life. Now she’s just up and gone. Didn’t even get her name.
Old son, you fool. Don’t you understand she’ll be back? She has no choice, I told him.
I got a letter from her in Florida. Who are you? she began.
It couldn’t have occurred to me then, and didn’t for another year, that I must have been, in my cavalry hat, a lunatic older version of the very man she had left behind in the air force. Even days after she left I could not quit being a pilot. I woke up in the mode.
Then the other collapse of that summer. A butchy wife and her namby husband, lawyers, bought the rented estate right out from under me. I had to pile my belongings into a two-story hovel next to a plowed field, an instant reversal from baron to sharecropper. My nephew had to drag me out of a bar where I was attempting to buy a coed with a roll of hundreds. My ex-woman was driving around town with her new smiling blond Texas boyfriend. She had changed the locks of her doors. I lost my driver’s license. I went broke. I could not eat, I went to the doc for depression. I was a wraith. Once, after some business in San Diego, as a passenger from the Memphis airport to home I was arrested for drunken riding. I have a clear memory of the dream I had those few hours in jail. The naked dead, all in hats and a foot taller than I, were in the jail cell. They said nothing.
But they were mute with decision, letting their height speak.
The woman from Tallahassee wrote about her affairs. Living near her father who was Satan. Becoming adjusted to freedom. She was easy and friendly as if nothing had happened. However, I thought I detected a patronizing tone. She took me for a common fool, I decided. I drove to the home of my ex-woman. When she came out in the yard I promised her that in the future evil would come upon her. Or perhaps we could get married, I added.
At the end of a bender I have, like thousands of others, been stricken with righteousness. I wanted to have discussions with the naked dead but I could not dream them back. At the gate of an air force base near Columbus, Mississippi, I was thrown out by APs after certain demonstrations. I claimed to have friends on the base, imperative that they see me. I drove following a contrail in the sky to New Orleans, got out of my car dropping money, and was mugged before I could let out I was in the secret ground air force they had better stand wide for. The mugging did not make much of an impression on me. Unlike other drunks, I remember almost everything. Only the humiliation is left out, until later it leaps and is unbearable.
I turned toward Florida, seeking Tyndall air base beyond Panama City. I would have a chat with the pals there who didn’t know me yet, perhaps even her ex-husband down on a mission, then on to Tallahassee where I would explain to the woman I was not a fool. No, I was in control, in vast control. But first I took a turn into Magnolia Springs on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, where an old student of mine lived.
We talked a while. His parents were in the back, visiting, but he did not want me to meet them. Then he asked me to go, please. So I took my bottles and left in a huff. It seemed to me the world was certainly turning rude here lately, a lamentable sign of the times, those times you read about. Oh I was high into my righteousness, and just out near some swamp and palmettos I went way off into it and attempted to set fire to my car, which would not fly and was really hot on my feet. I threw matches into it, a ’73 MG convertible. Then somebody stopped my arm. He put out the little rug fire I’d started. He was the son of a strange nearby family who fed me for three days. I could not decide whether they were white or colored.
They didn’t pay much attention to me and did not speak much, but I thought I caught a foreign brogue, not creole, when they did. They ate rice and collards. This brought my health back in little angry fragments. One morning I was suddenly very sober, just very frail. They didn’t mind how much I ate because they had their eye on my car over there out of sight. Then my old student came back and told me he was taking me home. I never gave them the car but I gave them the keys and was ashamed to return a week later. My student took a look around my cottage, then took a U-turn back the long trip. I still did not understand I had been gently but seriously kicked out of his county, 350 miles far.
My old girlfriend married the Texan. In the fall I got a call from my nephew who had heard from a musician that she was killed in a robbery of her bank in Jacksonville, Florida. Killed by crack people. She was no doubt in her smart executive suit, all bright and cheerful. New leaf, new man. She was not good with people, she once told me. Maybe a bit of a snob. I understand the new breed of crack killer is much concerned with respect. Something in her eyes, maybe. Maybe nothing at all, she was white and too lovely. She was there. I thought of her father, the dour banker on that hill in the east Texas town, her tiny thin mother. One of their daughters was a lesbian psychiatrist and the other was now dead from banking. He hustled peas in the Depression and now he was in modern life, on the hill there with the wind blowing the last of his hair.
Nevertheless, it is said we are predators, eyes forward, and we go on towards the hunt, as if nobody had eaten it all before us. As if just around the corner is the really fine feed, the really true woman, the world that will call us son. Somebody is missing to our left but we only sniff deeper, it must be there, there.
I was doing this in the aisle of a small local grocery when I turned a row and was shocked chilly, down to the bones of my hands, nearly crippled from a swat of cold nerves into my thighs and scalp. It was a very tall man all naked, in a large hat. He had a long gray country face I was certain I knew, a man confined somewhere too long.
The crown of the hat was above the top shelf of cans. He was turning my way to look but I did not want him to look at me. Then I noticed he was in a bleached pink set of long underwear, not naked, but the possibility was so close it was jolting. He opened his mouth. I ran away with my hands and groceries in my ears, with his lips twisting up there over me.
I went out in the street with the groceries still in my hands. Nobody called me back. I was well home before I was aware I had them, still locked in my fingers. I had no excuse for running out with them, for running away, nothing manly anyway. My act could not be explained. I was ill and ashamed, and jerking with breaths.
Next day I got a letter from the woman—now twenty-five—in Tallahassee. My hands still shook a little and my breathing came hard. I was without sleep because I didn’t want to dream.
She wrote that things were not going very well. She lived with her mother, but Satan, her father, lived close by. Not going well. Too close, this man. As if he could move away but not very far. It felt like forever. It hurt to discuss certain things.
She asked me to forgive her. She had visited me with her winter pounds shed and with a dark suntan so as to hurt me, in her vanity. To make my mouth water. But yet I was her friend and this could no longer go unconfessed. She had wanted to change and ruin me for a while, with her beauty. It was an unfortunate trait. Her father had accused her of it all her life, but only now she was truly adult could she admit she enjoyed inflicting pain this way, always had. Her mother, a beauty, was fast losing her looks and was always in a state, afraid to go out with anybody new. She and her mother spent the days simply keeping a watch on each other. They had begun going to church together. Even there, they knew the great Satan was in one of the cars in the parking lot, watching them.
You must never write about me, she wrote. You think I am special but I am not. I am to be forgotten, do you understand. We have had a bad house, wherever I am is a bad room.
A week later I won an award from the governor. My old parents were there glowing in the mansion. I was in a suit, now a goodly time healthy, but in my short acceptance speech I was conscious of sneering ironic people somewhere in the crowd. When I looked at the rear rank of those standing I did see three hats way above the rest and flashes of beige skin. I may have broken all forms for modesty, unwilled actually, but from a diminished heart, and held my work in an esteem equal to that of a scratching worm drowned in ink and flung against a tombstone. Through all this too I confess I was coming on to the governor’s wife—helplessly, God—and finished in a burst of meekness coupled with hideous inappropriate lust. I could hear the laughter and was led away.
I was looking at the plaque and stroking myself a couple days later as the phone rang. A voice I could not remember began. At once I could feel the black wind of North Dakota between us on the lines. She was a friend of the Florida girl. I had not seen her since I chatted with them at that bar near the Minnesota line. She was clear for a while but then started sobbing and stalling. Her friend. Our friend. You were kind to her, she said. Always she mentioned your kindness. What?
In Tallahassee the father had run her over in her own living room and killed her. The car came in through the bay window and crushed her as she sat on the couch in her bikini swimsuit. Her mother, also in a swimsuit, was broken up badly but would survive. Abruptly after the collision, the father, still in the driver’s seat, put a pistol to his ear and destroyed himself. The women were having lunch after sunning. He must have known all their moves. You are a good person, the woman said—a scrap of memory through the black air of days and days ago—and I had to tell a good person. Somebody who knew her.
I am not a good person, I told her. This is too awful.
Do you believe in God?
Fox
hole Christian. When all else is lost.
Nothing else was said and she hung up.
I was suddenly something fresh to her, a way I did not know. Then she was destroyed by a monster I had never believed in, who was true. My pity was so confused I could not accept I was even worthy of having it, for weeks. Or worthy of her, or my former girlfriend.
It is true now that, years later and desperately married (to the daughter of a World War II pilot named Angel), whenever a flute plays I have the woman sweet in my ears and think of our laughter. Wherever I see a headline beauty I brag quietly: come on, I had better, with a sad smile, I’d imagine, that fine appreciation of ourselves when we have bittersweetness right on time.
I have not had that many women, is the truth, and this, pal, I know seems crammed with serial romance and grief, but I’m not quite through, and you will understand me at last as more that poor man on the east Texas hill with the wind in his last hairs, too thick in modern life, too thick in dream, too sad for years now. Maybe the girl in North Dakota mistook my sadness for kindness; defeat for gentleness. I look at an old photograph of myself at eight when I was just a boy and his dog under a cowboy hat. I was looking at the world across the cornfield, all ready to touch it all under the shade of my tall Hoot Gibson. Now I understand I have been witness to the worst fifty years in the history of the world. A tragedy that might make Caligula weep in commiseration. And I have had, you know, a relatively pampered life, although you see me puffing away on my smoke like a leathered vet, a tough cookie.
I used to be a considerable tennis player. So in my health I took it up again and got the game back quickly. I just had a tough time giving a damn about the score. Once I was playing with a friend and noticed a very tall pale woman through the fence on another court. She had her back to me. I saw she struck the ball with authority and grace. I wanted her within seconds of seeing her. I needed her. I had never had a tall woman, blonde, and I was already in my mind rocking with her in great abandon like a dying cannibal. The nourishment would be endless, so generous.
