by Barry Hannah
“Split. Get out of this CM.”
“But I still have wonderful love dreams of her.”
“You can have dreams of somebody else.”
“I envy you and Westy. You sit there very smug.”
“Get off of it. Westy’s a hell of a woman, but I’ve had three months with no nooky. People are like weather where she grew up. I’m terribly sorry your wife’s queer.”
I went by Hooch’s house. The yard is cleaned up. The backyard is raked and the grass is growing around it like a billiard table. They are clean and neat now that Sister is dead. He’s working on the tugboat and looks two decades from his real age. He and Agnes don’t sleep in the same room anymore. He lives in Sister’s acoustic-tile room, and he plays those records and he writes his poems that beat the hell out of mine.
And the old man is sixty-seven. He’s got himself an Olivetti automatic typewriter and plays Sister’s album over and over.
He picks up her brassieres and her pictures and her underwear.
He handed me one:
Grief is
Looking at the wooden Indian where your little ones should be.
I bought a new color teevee.
All the people you should be are on the screen.
Everybody is pretty.
XLIV
THERE will never be, stepson, another person that I have respected and loved as much as you.
Your stepfather will not fall down. Your step-dad Ray has created abuse and horrors in the house because of him and drink. I wasn’t born straight. God gave me a hundred-and-fifty IQ and perfect pitch on instruments. Sometimes I don’t hear. I am having a constant burn-out on communications. Nobody means any harm. Everybody is swell. Just can’t get through to anybody.
You, boy, will travel with beauty. Not just righteousness, which is easy, but beauty too. I saw you at Murrah move like a genius. You are a chieftain. You threw the ball, you scrambled, and the niggers dropped it.
Never be cruel, weird, or abusive.
I promise not to take a jet anymore.
I love your mother.
Amy, Bobby, too.
This boy is so full of loves the juice comes out his eyes.
Alt. 2000, 1000, 500, 120, flaps down, lights on? Yes. Port. Pork and beans.
Pick the football up, travel rearward on your legs, the way is clear, there is your receiver, arms up in the lights on the green field. The football leaves your arm like a quail. He’s got it. Runs into the last green zone.
XLV
ARE we here? Is everybody here? I have scored six points, the lights are up, but the stadium is empty. Want to do it again, Westy? Want to get married again? Want to be in the day instead of just walking through it and paying the bills? The deck has gone out from under my legs and we’re on the rocks and we’re on fire. Handsome craft, pure white, with sails up and now it’s not going anymore. She was blue-eyed, white. But now it’s raining fire. Everywhere you lift your eyes, a rain of cinders.
You get to the end, and you’re still swimming.
The people sing. My heart is all over my front yard. I am still reading Bill Shakespeare.
Bob Moony’s here. Mr. Hooch is here. There’s no other reason to be in Tuscaloosa.
Mike White is here. For God’s sake, where else is there? That’s why a lot of people are here.
All we have is together.
And sometimes I cure others.
Christ be with my friend Phil Beidler. He has a polyp on his vocal cords. I thought he might have C. Called Ned Graves in Jackson, Mississippi. Best one in the world with the knife on the throat. Phil was knocking down two packs of Marlboros a day. Like me, he loves his ciggies. Called Ned up. He was drunk, but wanted to fly over and get the C out of Phil. But good old Phil didn’t have it. Ned’s only twenty-eight, works in clear weather. No damned war memories. He just walks in with five knives, and can see cancer with his own eyes. Knifes them off. Only lost two patients in all his time. A nurse was the cause once. She overanesthetized the little boy. Ned went out in the parking lot, put the nurse in the front seat of his Mustang convertible, sat there saying nothing for fifteen minutes. She didn’t have a driver’s license and she was night-blind—big, thick glasses.
“You killed him,” said Ned.
“I wish you weren’t so emotional.”
“You killed the boy.” Ned drew on his cigarette. “Walk home.”
“I live in Pelahatchie. That’s twenty miles.”
“Walk home.”
So Ned is there, and I think of Ned. Sometimes it is better to think of your friends.
XLVI
IN desperation, I got a little dog named Elizabeth, spotted, three-quarters bird dog, abandoned by some person and running around the parking lot of the apartment where my stepson Tommy lives. You know how dogs are faithful. But she chewed everything. She chewed the shoes, the Oriental rugs, and the windowsills, plus leaving diarrhea all over the house. But her eyes were deep, hopeful, and oozy with affection. Thing is, her existence broke up Westy and me almost. Elizabeth ate a couple of pairs of Westy’s sexiest sandals.
Born to chew, apparently.
The feet of Westy are so beautiful.
I finally wanted to get rid of the dog.
The bare feet and the toes in the golden high heels will bring a man on when he’s entering his lady. You look at those and hear your woman moaning with pleasure and there’s something so deeply elegant to the erotic that you’ve got to look into Penthouse after you’ve finished making love to be sure it really happened.
So I took the little dog out and kissed her goodbye.
XLVII
I HAVE talked of pornography and medicine and love of art—which is Mr. Hooch’s poems.
Many friends around.
And I work here and crank up the bodies that are slow.
Westy has gotten so absorbed by inflation and her stepchildren that she does not raise her happy irises to me anymore. She cleans the clothes and makes suppers and if she is not a lesbian, then what is she?
I am drinking five bottles of wine a day just to stay cool. Looking forward to the football at Alabama. I’m not going crazy and am not violent. I could play better tennis if my habit on nicotine would give up. I roam in the past for my best mind.
XLVIII
I HAD a little hashish and some Jack Daniel’s, so I went out to Tuscaloosa airport, broke in the hangar, and took up the Pfeiffer Wire Learjet. Wanted to go everywhere. Refueled in Atlanta. Then I was all out of chemicals and had to do it on guts to get near Toronto, over the border. No chance. I was out of fuel, lights were off. So I crashed it in a small lake by the woods. First time Ray ever had a crash. Had his son’s new guitar so as to strum along and almost burned it up too.
I walked away from there and the Lear blew up and took away about an acre of pines. I could not believe I lost that much good equipment. But wait a minute. The explosion lifted my son’s guitar out of the cockpit, and I saw the bright strings loft over the pines and I ran and caught it.
So I hitchhiked back to New York, where I had a friend. I got a sailboat to outside of Philly. Then I rode a train back to here.
I was black as an Indian when I arrived at the door of my tranquil house. I’d lost weight. I was back to a hundred and forty, as in high school. My lovely, caring brother Robert was in the house, They all had huge eyes, worrying if I was dead.
“Who are you?”
“Your relative,” I said.
XLIX
WESTY gave me a roll yesterday. A good one. Toes and all.
Also the phone came in from Mr. Hooch. He’s beating the shit out of Shakespeare with his new ones.
L
YOUR hat’s rotting off. It’s hot. You’re not sure about your horse. Or the cause. All you know is that you are here—through the clover, through the low-hanging branch, through the grapeshot.
All of it missed you.
Your saber is up, and there goes your head, Christian.
LI
> I SEE no pressing reason to get out of bed. The lights are off and it is raining and the covers are the cave I dreamed of when I was a child. I am pretending to be sick—a faker like some of my patients. I dream of monsters that cannot get me. Ha ha. The covers touch me like mother hands. The memories of war talk in the house when I was growing up jabber around, and I close my eyes and bury my face in the pillow like little Ray of three. Bill and Elizabeth told me what an unexpected event I was, and that’s how I feel to this day. Even I don’t expect me. If I could happen, anything could.
Sister is knocking on the door, with a cry as dismal as when I first saw her in her funny gown on the railroad tracks.
Charlie DeSoto is knocking there too. He says he’s got a new bow and arrow. My God, that interests me about as much as a traffic jam.
“You want to shoot some gar?” he says.
Westy was out of town. There was nothing else crazy to do. So we went. We went out Highway 82 to the swamps of the Sipsey River. And there the huge, rolling, scaly, comb-toothed, vicious-snouted gar were not waiting. We were over our shoes in mud, and it was drizzling dirty rain, getting chilly, and the water was as still as oil.
There was one woodpecker going at it in the high branches of a dead tree. It was the only sign of life, and we’d been there two hours.
Charlie looked up at the woodpecker. Then he loaded the bow.
“Aw, Charlie,” I said.
“If I don’t kill something, I’m going to kill my wife,” he said.
Says I, “Go ahead. You ain’t going to hit it, anyway.”
But he did. The arrow rose from the bow as dead-sure as a heat-seeker and skewered the lovely redheaded thing, went on up into the air with the bird still on it.
LII
TO live and delight in healing, flying, fucking. Here are the men and women.
LIII
HE waded, then swam. Then he came back the same way, sand and tears in his eyes. I say, “You must’ve been shooting that bow for a while.”
“I been having hate in me since my wife turned lesbian or narcissistic or whatever,” Charlie says. “But look, I’ve killed this beautiful bird. Ray, you’ve got to do something for me.”
He looked like the creature of mud with a feather in his hand.
I have sympathy because a lot of the people I have loved and given to have never especially loved or given to me, and Westy is colding off like the planet, except I can’t believe it in either case.
Nothing really to say except in some reaction like on the television.
Now I am looking at the bird with the arrow through it.
And all it does is make me very sleepy.
LIV
RAY meets Westy at the fancy yellow restaurant. She’s looking pretty tired and old now. In the deep sparkling blue of her eyes I see a certain dangerous blank. Is Ray to blame? The rings and the other jewelry twinkle on her. I am looking at the other side of the hill now, at the sunken eyes, at the grim desperation of the earlobes. On her forehead Westy wears the wide frown of surrender.
“I am an old woman,” says some voice.
“No no no no no no no,” says mine.
“Ray, you care more about the sorriest scum than you do me.”
“No, I don’t,” I say.
“Among your friends there is not one decent straight solid person. They are entirely the mange, as far as I am concerned.”
I say, “What about Charlie DeSoto? He wears a suit.”
She just looked at me hopelessly.
“There is something about you, Ray, that wants to set yourself deliberately in peril and in trash. One of these days you won’t come back alive. You are drinking again. You’ve had three vodka tonics.”
I ordered a fourth. Some old hideous baby in me wanted to see Westy pissed.
“You lousy ignorant bitch,” says Ray.
Westy got up and left, leaving me to bum a ride back to the office.
At the office there were a number of people in line. I went over to the back window and looked out over the creek, then down to it and the slick granite rocks through which it rushed. Who was it said we were invented by water as a means of its getting itself from one place to the other?
LV
I AM looking at the swelling hordes. I know too many goddamned people, too many wretched Americans at this point. Between the hours of healing, I dream of dropping the ace on much home real estate in hopes that many citizens will get trapped inside in the wide handshake of phosphorus.
Nothing wrong with me. For example, somebody’s wife comes to see me. She says, Doctor, what’s wrong? She says, I seem to have given all I can to make everybody comfortable, yet they despise me. All of my food and laundry elicits nothing but contempt in their eyes.
Back over in Mississippi my friend Wyatt Newman and I invented this girl that you took to the drive-in. She was rather large and leggy with huge breasts. During the movie she would start, after putting one hand to her brow, humping and moving her sex back and forth in motions of her inner time. She would sigh and pant. The fool who had dated her, skinny and never had any, would move over to touch her tits and give himself ease as well as affection to this large woman who was about to have to come over the whole idea of herself. But when he touches her, she knocks him away.
“Animal!” she screams.
Women are fucking awful. Sister was the one exception.
LVI
RAY is crawling this afternoon. Many things have broken down in our nice house. The only glory I see is the glory I saw as a jet fighter. I went through the clouds and brought up the nose of the Phantom, lifting at twenty-one hundred land miles per hour. It was either them or me, by God. I loved those clean choices. And I loved my jet. I loved all those aerodynamics, the rising and diving.
Something’s wrong.
Westy and I are not close in the old way. My dreams are big discouraging monsters, hellish. Had one that was a walking building, which was my high school. It was my old high school chasing me down the block.
I tell you, if not for his old records and his Shakespeare, Ray would be a casualty of the American confusion.
Like yesterday. Eileen, DeSoto’s wife, wanted to talk with me at the office. She was pale and she had developed a dramatic deepness in her voice. It was huskier, more Northern. I think she comes from Selma, Alabama. I am not an expert on lesbianism, mind you.
“I want to describe what it is like, Ray,” she said.
I said, “First let me say that I am not an expert on lesbianism.”
“That’s okay,” she says, “I was shocked myself. I had fever and che shakes. It was like a big dream where you can’t help walking toward the place although it’s scary. There were a lot of voices and mouths. Then I became one of the mouths. I became one of the soft naked girls, and an ecstasy ran through every part of my mind. And I was there at the place and it was familiar, like coming back to something you had as a child.”
“Why’d you come see me?”
“Because you’re a friend of Charlie’s and he’s very hurt. Besides, you are a doctor, aren’t you?”
“Let me fuck you,” I say. “It will be good for you. Doctor’s orders,” I say. “Come on,” I say, “you crazy lesbian bitch—ohh, uhh, uhnn, touch it!”
LVII
AND yet without a healthy sense of confusion, Ray might grow smug. It’s true, isn’t it? I might join the gruesome tribe of the smug. I think it’s better with me all messed up.
I looked at the Nembutals this morning and thought for about three minutes about going over to the other side. Westy is snoring per usual. I love to hear her snore. I love to hear her come too. The whisper: “Aw, you made me come!” Puts it out there like a pratfall, footing lost. If I could only get her to wear the high heels when she’s nude, as in Penthouse. Going over to the other side, I’m not sure I could fuck, shoes or no. So I ditched the whole idea.
LVIII
TWO thugs were looking for me when I got off work today.
; Here’s something.
“We got reason to believe you let our uncle die when he coulder been saved.”
That old case several months ago. I was guilty.
“One of them nurses that was close to our family told us,” said one guy.
“We going to make you a flat doctor,” said the other one.
They were bikers and wore leather and studs and wrist guards. Two black-and-silver Harleys behind them. I felt very sleepy.
I said, “Yes. I let the old mean son of a bitch die.” I was too tired to lie. I said, “Come on, boys. One of you will get hurt bad, but there are two of you.” I was staring them down. They were huge, grimy creatures. The huger one was wearing a tattoo on his arm—skull and crossed swords.
Death is everywhere. Why do these killers on motorbikes think they have the corner on it?
“Come on,” I said. “I’m full of death,” I said. “Come and get it.”
“Huh?” said the grimier thug. He was one of those hairy men who go out of their way to be ugly. His hair was to his shoulders and he had a bald spot on the top of his head.
“Yes!” I shrieked. “I come from the Navy and I know how to kill in a fight! One of you is going to get it. I don’t right now have the energy but to kill one.”
“Kill?”
“Come on!” I hollered. “Give it to me I” I took off my jacket.
They were not moving. Then they both moved fast and they slugged me around, mainly half-jabs to the belly. I never got a lick in and I fainted.
I guess this was justice in a way. I was sore when I came to, but to be truthful, I felt good. I was bleeding a little, but I felt fresh as sweet sixteen.
