by Barry Hannah
He found himself speaking aloud in French to his dead mother Celestine. In your hands how does the finish of this vendetta feel? He asked her. He recognized that all the earthly goods he’s heaped on Goodie, Teresa more now, woman of tears, were meant for his mother. He’d just bought her a new car, Saab SUV sculpted like a space shuttle. These days, like millions of the talentless, she’d developed pretentions to art photography. This black wagon would hold her leather and canvas cases. You were nearly a saint, Mother, and I deserted you, he spoke. Now “Hey Joe” by that Mozart of the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix, grabbed and dragged him to Iraq, lolling beside the 105 as he watched men burn in their T-34s on the red horizon. Allons enfants to this good hell.
Unsolved, said the state. Unsolved means all senses hover, loom, linger, harken. Nobody, however, knows a thing for sure. But I do.
So his Teresa sleeps as his nightmare it moves across the meadow, hooves in wet clover, toward the charred ruins of the little church. Canarsis’s piano still stands, only half consumed, only half dead. The man, a sixty-four-year-old tattooed deacon and lay preacher. Destiny run toward him. James had the .38 and the wheeled propane and napalm flamethrower in the car.
Now in the cold January twilight he looked the man full in the face and told him to walk. The man had a round white ordinary face, more youthful than James expected. He held a pistol but James told him to throw it away and the man complied.
“Let’s walk to the pier where they found Jimmy Canarsis and saved him. You may have heard about his success on the concert circuit. He began at the Castellow Ford Center. Then Memphis, Philadelphia, New York.”
“Yeh. Why are you speaking these words?” asked the man, whose name was Dee Gale.
“Because Canarsis is so beautifully different from such sorry jackasses as us. Wouldn’t you like to have lived in complete innocence and made as much of your gift as he has, nearly burned to death?”
“You the man who burned the church?”
“Well, I did not finish. You seem to want something remaining in it, too. You came back to the charcoal. What would that be? Your pilgrimage?”
“It had a good true spirit to it, that giant boy on a piano that seemed like a kid’s toy measured to him. He brought God down from heaven with his music.”
“You killed my father, holy man. What was your favorite hymn? A man like you.”
They walked around the dam in silence. No creature stirred, all cabins were empty, the house ranger dulled like a sloth as he watched the evening news, settling in to his Pepsi and Orville Redenbacher’s sublime pour-over cheddar popcorn. The perfection of winter muteness, happily dead in the mind, his contented good woman close to hand. James imagined them in an alternate universe. The gun was in his right hip pocket, forgotten, the flamethrower easy on its wheels. They walked to the end of the pier in dogged duty. A beaver fell from a dead cypress with a loud percussive entrance to the water.
“‘Just as I Am’ would be the one. We all are worms with guilty secrets. He forgives all even though we are without one plea.”
“You don’t have one plea right now?”
“You notice I’m not screaming for help, like I could. I stand absolved.”
“I stand as your delayed executioner.”
“But I’ve got a feeling you’ve killed before. You stand guilty and unforgiven.”
“Can you do something for me then? Can you make up a hymn about why it was necessary to kill my father?”
“He was one those outside agitators helping bring on niggers adulterating our way of life. I only say this about the shooting. If the state thought I was guilty of anything but delaying these niggers I’d of been brought up on charges a long time ago. After what happened you didn’t find no French meddlers and liars in these parts.”
The flames were already reaching him then, and they kept reaching him as the napalm stuck. James was amazed the man could stand so long without taking to the water. He used a boat paddle to push the surviving stump of Gale into the lake. But the end of the pier was still on fire and he left in moderate haste to his car.
I watched him afterward. He was a kind of friend, always at Smitty’s talking over the good country vegetables, fried okra, collards, world-class cornbread. He had fantastic eyes, jarred awake like a man whose head had just been severed. He was the saddest man I’ve ever known.
I can’t know what you’ve heard of these parts, but there is law. More of the sheriffs voted, not appointed, into office, are college educated in criminology. Whatever that vague science is worth.
But no man showed at his door, no man raised a hand against him. Three men he knew, I was one of them, voiced the wish very sincerely that he would vanish from these parts, as he had from Montana. But no sheriff told him this. When James had swallowed it all he was dead for a while. He was in the tomb although the stone had been rolled aside for his free walk around the water or to the Arctic. This state with only a million whites is one backyard, and it is solid mouth to ear. Faster than you could trace it on the Internet, certainly faster than the sheriff’s office women could find it on those grandmother computers, the worst is known, the gossip is dead-on to the comma. The lynching of blacks by vigilantes is gone forever, hope to God. We have a new aristocracy and they are black men. Morgan Freeman, B. B. King, Muddy Waters, the ghost of Robert Johnson making his deal with the Devil at a crossroads on Highway 61. But we are a state that still loves the vigilante. The climate is ripe for vengeance.
Franklin James became friends with a black emeritus professor out of Rust College in Holly Springs. Amos Pettigrew. They shared some subject, it was unclear what it was for a while. Pettigrew seemed to hold sway over whether James stayed, fled with or without Goodie, destroyed himself, or lived abundantly, propelled like a bird from the opened tomb into wild freedom. Pettigrew was a calm force for both James and Goodie. She did not know she might be deserted for a while or for good. I saw Pettigrew’s old Buick in their drive many times. James told the man his whole story. Goodie was much afraid. The terror was all over her. She began a series of very expensive shopping trips. James, the killer, said nothing about this mania. He just stared at the bags. She acted as if the purchase of some choice item might be her soul and she could catch it and hold it in a shopping bag. Some of the bags she never touched, although they were full of goods, jewelry, God’s own amount of purses.
Dr. Pettigrew had degrees from Dartmouth and Yale. He had worn himself thin striving against the darkness in young blacks. He had left his heart in the college. Now he was a hoarse and skinny man, going to frail. He knew every living fact about the struggle for civil rights in this area, every night attack, bombing, miscarriage of justice, even every fistfight. I don’t know what afternoon exactly he told James he had burned up the wrong man. The right man was dead of natural causes. He had killed a man who emulated the dead one, dressed like him, had the same tattoos, the same voice, and was even fiercer and louder about his lay preaching and deaconry church to church with the biblical evidence for white supremacy. Two churches had obtained restraining orders against him, a first within anybody’s memory.
When I noticed the yellow motorcycle was gone for several days, I crept up to their bedroom window, yes, like a common Peeping Tom and at my sadder age. I had to peep and eavesdrop. What I saw I call pornography, or some order of necrophilia. She was lying on the bed in a black nightgown revealing an amazingly fit nudity beneath. She did not move for an hour, as if commanded to lie still by a man out of sight. But James was long gone. I could not believe that frozen specter was all about grief. That’s why I said pornography, some militant sexual exercise. I was guilty I saw her. My hands felt heavy when I crept back to the highway. They were bloodier and bloodier.
Out-Tell the Teller
Rangoon Green
Trophy Holder, Third Place in the National Storytellers Tell-Off
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 2011
YOU MAY HAVE HEARD OF MY BEHAVIOR AT MURFREESBORO LAST YEAR when they
announced the winner, runner-up, and next, third, that would be me. Of course I made a noise. The winner, a long-haired creature with a lute who read barefoot, slept with one of the judges, and I know it truly because I saw her disappear into his trailer at ten thirty the previous night. Second was the old bushy man who lived in Murfreesboro. He circulated a fancy brochure about his wins not only here but out west and up north. His wife made cheese sticks, the pepperish kind, and got a tin of them to each judge. If that ain’t cheating take me out to the pasture and shoot me. I’m still not over it. I don’t get over robbery quick. If ever.
After the second propane fire here in Oxford the marshalls came to my door at the liquor store near the airport, right next to Supreme Used Auto, which I also own as well as the bail bondsman office straight across the street. Yes, women do sleep in the cars of Used Auto, but that doesn’t make it an operation, a brothel. Men do come to them in the cars, but that is trespassing. If they have the keys to the autos, my right knows not what my left is doing. I cannot control sleepy women, poor gals down on their luck without the price of a motel, you can’t say a thing. How could I organize sleepy women off the highway, as a lawyer said for me once?
On the mean-o-meter, if there was such a contraption, all right, I might score high. But much of that is rooted in the acne on my face and shoulders. When I finally got to a skin doctor, he told me about recent discoveries about vitamin A that would have cleared me up, but it was far too late. I don’t look that bad except for the big pit on the left cheek, and there we have some serious ugliness. As a boy I hid my face behind the barn while others pissed and jacked off on each other. I have been called Frankenstein, Wolfman, the Flying Pitface. But what brought the marshall was the history of serious fireworks I had in the army, stations and bases in Texas, California, Michigan, and Georgia. Yes, true facts reveal I barely missed a court martial and did receive a dishonorable discharge from the bastards but that was twenty-five years ago, for making two oil drums rise a hundred feet with a propellant in my keeping. Just old boy fun but not to the sullen-ass army.
This smug Marshall Root, whose Montana ass shall be lined up for gutting after I have a word with my sidekicks Tico and Rez. The one Latino as it sounds, and the other named for his hesitancy to ever leave his bass boat and trotlines on Sardis Reservoir boat launches ten miles north at Coontown and sixteen miles west on Clear Creek, passing over the famous glory hole for bass, Tobby Tubby Creek. English for a long unsayable Chickasaw name centuries old. You can take centuries old and cram it. I don’t care a thing about naught but today. You get into your golden history and you just walk around with this paralysis of mud on your boots, ask me. Another marshall, Bitters, lording it over me, put a word on me such as I made him write down. Smell this diction: hypermnesia. I got red knowing he reviled me and my unswept liquor parlor. My woman in the back where we live ever lazy except in the science of nooky.
It’s plenty of room amounting to a five-bedroom home, two full baths, halls, kitchen, oversize pantry, wide screen porch where no mosquito or gnat penetrates. You ask about my woman, Louise. Well there she sits. Good figure, foxy in the face, some kind of coiled searching curls in her hair, shiftless as a hound dog in the song that eternal shaker from Tupelo, Elvis Presley, sang. She says she’s even kin to the man, and there is one rule when you hear this claim. The claimer is not worth a shit, but they want the throne. I do not beat women. My father’s violence toward my mother cured me forever of that notion. But Louise is hesitant to move even while looking crosseyed at a fly that got in the front screen door after some long-jawed whiskey customer has let it in. I say the fly on the end of her nose can be setting up his fly stand and tuning his fiddle and she’ll stay transfixed before she moves to another cube of air that might be flyless. After all my pains making the place ladylike for her, making it double the catalog lacey look so it would not be viewed as just a hell of a butt to a liquor store. Two HD televisions, purple drapes with cord pulls, satin sheets. And an even better set up on Lake Pickwick on the Tennessee River, which is flat-out a condo. We sit with the mighty there. Judges, expensive Memphis lawyers, a whiskey preacher out of a crystal cathedral, televised on Sunday. Well, I mean one, Dr. Quarles the Fourth, who could put away a bottle of Stolichnaya Saturday night and you’d watch that cathedral service Sunday morning, he’d be coming on strong fresh as a rose. Louise will loiter, but that figure of hers gets into action and you forgive and forget a host of sins. She can’t warm a pot of peas and who cares.
Did I tell the truth to Marshall Root, was I afraid, so fraidy that I caved into Marshall Bitters? About the propane missile that wound up in the city hall bathroom? Oh no, not on your ass. Fear don’t hunt here especially when it’s anybody at the counter in tie and coat. I wonder if the man knew I was marking him for death or at least serious maiming when he held me there with his badge out, blah blah blah. Of course I was guilty, but guilty only of a little fun. We don’t have a lot of raw fun hereabouts. And it was copycat, as far as that goes, except I started with fire in the army a good long time before these church fires began a dozen years ago. Let me put it this way. The army wanted me to work with fire and demolitions, then they did not, snuck to my back and called me down as some lame kind of example, an attack of conscience suddenly, oh no, what have we created in this master sergeant?!
And named Goon Green, formally Rangoon, because my mother liked rain and thought monsoons were a romantic weather period in the far-off gaudy East. Ignorant sow. Never said she wasn’t a good woman. Just that she was an ignorant sow and I cannot imagine another kind of mother. A smart, kind mother I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I did at last come close to killing my father when he was beating on her. That earned me the road and a duffel sack. The old man thought it would make me all sad but it was the happiest day of my life. That night I blew up his pickup outside the eatery where he flirted with a woman with big titties.
One side of my face is good looking and I was holding that half toward the marshall, saying, “I’m not only innocent, you will see a lawyer if you come back. The damage to my reputation as a businessman will come to many, many thousands, I mean you even being around.”
Not only the bondsman office, out of which I run bounties, too, sits across the street, but the big pawnshop is mine. Louise helps a little, shuffle, shuffle, moan, moan. I never heard anybody moan serving a customer like this woman. Goes against her looks, you understand. I free her to be a laboring feminist but her spirit is all fettered, an old-fashioned gal. Oh but liberated to hell when you show her a vacuum cleaner. “It ain’t elegant,” she says.
I can look a man in the eye and make him squeal. I can look a man fleeing from bond collapse and cry with his arms around my ankles. I began the pawnshop several years ago when I noticed the crack riffraff hanging around the corners of our fair little city. The Tunica casinos, where fat Wisconsin women play like they’re in Las Vegas, are an hour and a half away, but broke riffraff spreads out in a great radius topped by Memphis and bottomed by us. Let me say others saw them as riffraff, and these suspicious persons were picked up and prosecuted on the old vagrant charge when they couldn’t show fourteen cents in their pockets. But they also came with ridiculous merchandise on them if they could get to me before the cops got to them. I saw money in the trees while others saw just a nasty forest. This money tree might also include two gambling lawyers from the army in town. Well, they’ve got mini tape recorders, police scanners, fancy or antique pistols I need not know the getting of, as well as supreme boats with large engines. At least six in this town have lost everything to the casinos. They come to me for money. I can look their wife square in the face while I cut their husband’s throat, as a figure of speech, of course.
Before that Marshall Bitters got off the bastard went so far as to use the word maffick on me, and I asked him what? three times, the last with the curse he deserved. It means to celebrate. The marshall knew enough of my history to step off. Come around speaking maffick at me.
He left confused. I was not confused at all.
I had my fingers in at least four pies, and here I’m not counting the boyhood fun Tico, Rez, and I had constructing that V-1 missile from the propane tank. The shell on these mothers is not strong enough to penetrate the ceiling and roof of even a flimsy church like the Free Will at the end of Van Buren East. You have to know liftoff angle and be certain your power is large enough to begin right off. This you do not obtain with merely a propane tank just lying there. Well, I did even better and got a SCUD that penetrated two roofs. City hall was an accident, but I will accept the admiration for it. I wish two lawyers had been working late and found this flaming tube in their lap. You ask why. Because it could be done. I did not think the marshalls would be at my door so fast, but I knew they didn’t have anything definite. Just tidying up a few loose ends. This loose end I told I would fold him five ways and stick him where the sun don’t shine. I look at people and they stay looked at. I’ve never laid hand on a bond jumper. They jump right back in the car with me, shivering. See, the bad side of my face, pitted cheeks and nose, does work for me. I’ve taken such as I was given, no whining, and manufactured a man nobody messes with, no brag. That side of my face also worked for me when I got the fingers in the pies.
Wilkes Bell is a common drunkard except he wears Armani and other Italian suits, aristocratic shoes of a deep grained shine so you know it. And subtle thick-weave ties. Has thick light hair, you know, tossed this way and that and curled back from his forehead. Rich delta daddy in chemical fertilizers and rice. And while he was at the university thirteen or so years ago he was an art student and even now had paint on his skin when he was in the store sweating through his suit. You could smell the liquor coming out of those pores. My nose is trained for your lush. Half of those sleepy women who bed down in the cars of Used Auto are lushes, of course, and some of their boyfriends. One day Wilkes Bell staggers into the liquor store and whispers, that is mildly screams, a secret he had about his person in a big Ziploc bag. Lord help me if it wasn’t forty or fifty thousand dollars of his uncle Anse Burden’s money. He wasn’t certain himself, since he’d scrambled around in it for a few night’s drunks. His uncle had left it with him for safekeeping, what a made fool this uncle was, and he was thinking to catch up on his tab here, $6500 with interest, and let the money hide with me in my freezer. When he described his uncle as a down-at-the-heels lay minister I feared nothing. So the damned fool leaves it with me and starts staggering around replenishing his thirsty liquor cabinet with the blurred math he always had, meaning a 20 percent markup on every bottle for me, and I do this stupid playacting as I delicately lift the money bag and take it to the kitchen. Funny part is, the boy had such an attitude about himself he thought I was being used by him, I mean this unbreakable attitude. Hair tossed back and forth like some genius conductor and sweat popping out on his forehead like fury. Well, when they walk right into the vault with money for you, you take it. He asked this sum minus his tab be refrigerated against the IRS or other long noses and I said you have it, I’m like an eagle on it.
