by Barry Hannah
“Aw.”
“Or just read a book.”
“Yes sir. Could you please get off your knees?”
“But I love thee, Lord Bernardo.”
“Personnel are gathered at the window.”
“Get the book, Bernard. Look up the difference between deputy and rubbernecking fool.”
The sheriff got dreamy. “I seen this movie the other night, deputy old son.”
“You don’t talk like that, Sheriff.”
“No. But a priest in it knew karate against zombies. He said, ‘I’m kicking ass for the Lord.’ Is that what you’re doing, or is that what I’m doing?”
“You’re embarrassing me, sir.”
“Now get out there and troll amongst those sullen crackers along the roads. They’re used to talking to their own dicks and staring offwards, looking for cars. I implore you, Bernard. Don’t just be hitting on strange cars.”
Those gathered at the window felt much more for the young deputy than they did for the sheriff. The murmurs had been going. The histrionics, the Norton, the fact he might be gay, the lack of hate, the little zeal he showed for his gun.
Hare and Sponce were not doing well. Sat on either end of the porch in ragged lounge chairs and reclined, with the radio tuned out and in on the tape box and orange Gatorade in a cold thermos next to each, brought and refilled by Dee when she was home. After three days she had had to go back to work, but she had no dates and this was sweet to them both. They did not eat. They were drawn, pale, whimpering, like things called by Legba. They expected the virus to pass each day listening to a radio song about rum and the sea. The health in the song was miserable to them.
They were some better, then not. They marveled at the disease. It had its own dreams. Big violent birds and prehistoric sauria. A man with an enormous head who searched for a hat and killed many. Hats or people. Johnny Cash in Vietnam. Neither was alive at the date of Cash’s appearance for the soldiers. They fell asleep at any time and went into somebody else’s story, somebody who also seemed lost and sick. They awoke to another singing about dope, seawater and dizzy sophomores. A one-note faked happiness, rhyming names to malaria. Inside, the television flamed with others talking, dying. Nobody watched. They were too weak to turn a button off and weary of listening to the bubbles of their own selves. They hung as in caves for lost days, aged hermits at twenty, twenty-one. To the bathroom if anywhere. Wet feet on tile.
Isaac and Jacob came out of a culvert they could almost stand in and walked into the yard. The grass was thick and good in large parts of the yard. Zoysia. Sponce saw them and imagined the culvert ran back miles into the woods. The boys wore clean tank tops, coral and blue. Sponce thought they had been in the culvert for hours, maybe days. He wondered vaguely why Isaac’s shoulder was bandaged. If it was the monster from his dream they had been fighting.
One of them went up to the radio and tuned out the fuzz.
“Where you been?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“We been sick, Isaac. You don’t wanna know.”
“Where’s Mama?”
“At work. She about to quit. Some old lady is asking her sexual advice. They think Mama smashed up some animal glasses or like. They think our mother did that.”
“How can she quit?” Isaac said.
“She’s got Daddy and them men supportin’ her.”
“She needs taking care of anyway,” Hare put in. “Her health is important.”
“Her job’s the part of her isn’t nobody else’s,” said Jacob. “She can’t quit.”
“You want more money for her staying on?” asked Hare.
“I never thought the least about money.”
“She heard what you been up to. Hare lied and told her all y’all had was dummy zombies. Where are they?” Sponce demanded.
“Sitting in their own peace.”
“You a wart.”
“None of that’s the point,” Hare said. “The point is you were somewheres like two stray dogs. Off. Else I dreamt it.”
“You get well and fix up that car, Hare. Or we might go to the sheriff and stand back and wait for the reward. That was a car like songs are written about, and we goin’ to have it in red and a gold hood. Or else I’m gonna tell Mama alls you want is your weenie in her.”
“Mama doesn’t need that anymore,” Sponce snapped. “You shut off your pie hole, wart.”
“Here’s a story,” said Jacob the skinnier, taller. “These people is our ticket unless that car gets done. It might be some old rich man in Missouri missin’ his wife and child all this time. He’d be laying on his deathbed cryin’, and all this money and it never been no happiness since they were stolen. He misses the car too. Then you see us on television and him light up. And we would be friends, we wouldn’t need no daddy or dating men ever again. He wouldn’t let none of us six need nothing again, aside from the reward. We’d have a new house on a brand-new lake. If not a ocean.”
Hare turned even sicker. If that were possible, heaving a new tomb in a dry rock face from his bowels.
But he spoke in a whisper afterward.
“I’m going through some purification here. I got to have it. Them old stories hit at me. I’m all reamed out of everything nasty. I’m not listening to any more nasty stories. That ain’t right. We all better get us a better story. When I’m well, it’s going to be a good story.”
The next morning Hare awoke on the recliner on the porch in his pajamas. July was well on. The house was too big for its window air-conditioning units. Some corners sweltered, eighty-eight at night. He snapped his mouth to cut off a snore and slept. He had on no shirt. His lean muscles were packed closely.
Dee saw him when she went off to Onward in her whites. Her knees went a little weak. When will I get any better about men, she asked herself. She walked in a trance most of the day. Cautious, polite, gone milky and holy in the head, abstracted into kindness.
SIX
MORTIMER PICKED UP THE MAGAZINE. HE COULD NOT quite believe it existed, the gift of an old girlfriend who had found it on the Internet. New Deal, the organ for reformed country people who now hated nature. People who had lost farms. Settlers between town and country who wanted even less. The homes pictured were like mausoleums beside highways, no grass and not a stick of a tree in sight. Paved lawns. Good-looking women and whole families in chairs on brick and concrete lawns. Homes in bare sand neither in the desert nor near the ocean. Not a sunset in the magazine. No visible seasons. The only length of prose was an article about Hitler’s bunker in the last days of Berlin, not for the history but for the architecture.
Some dwellings were high-fashioned storm cellars. To hold off grass, leaves and the elements. Nearing airlessness even in the photograph.
Mortimer was loaded with himself. He had dreamed his history, and in this heavy automobile, in heavy calm, he was a creature of great velocity. He had forgotten to tell her what to wear, and this annoyed him. He went in the casino with her full of self-worth and clarity. It had been awhile and he was mysterious. She was intrigued. Then they walked across the lot and entered the hotel, a huge monster waiting for them.
He wondered why he was not three countries away, but not long. Edie and Large Lloyd were waiting in the penthouse suite. They drank drinks. The wallpaper was flocked with red kudzu and catfish forms swimming in it, gold traces. Somehow not trashy.
She told him in the elevator what a suck-up the sheriff was, coming around Almost There. He liked hearing that.
“Are you attracted to him?”
“I believe it’s the other way around.”
She thought she could hear the din of gamblers, glasses rattling, shouts expressed from a gilded maw somewhere. Impossible at this distance. The very air perhaps.
Large Lloyd and Edie waited in the room, wore sunglasses.
“Let me make an introduction.”
A show about sharks and rays was on a large television. Dee had not watched television since nature began to play
such a part. The sharks weren’t bad, although Mortimer seemed frightened of them and presumed she would be. He looked without wanting to and could not even manage to get pensive before looking away.
On the big vanity dresser, his collection of knives stood in their case. Huge machetes to slivery stilettos, even razor knives. Velvet backing two inches thick, scarlet. Gold and silver instruments of despair against people in the golden excess of the room. They all simply stared at the collection.
“Here it is. I’ve shown you the houses over in Belhaven and Jackson, those English cottages and lawns. You didn’t want that. I’m going to play you some more nothing for two hours, and you can’t turn it off or I will come back and you won’t like it. It is a rehearsal of a man named Raymond on a saxophone, from a band called Caliente something. His wife, the Coyote, sings, and she’s good. But you see what you think about him. Then you decide between me and Frank Booth, who won’t be looking very good soon.”
Lloyd the Huge spoke. “My actual name is Lloyd. You will remember this night and my name. Large Lloyd.”
“And my name is Edie,” said the woman in the elegant dress, the ballroom heels. “I go deep.”
When Dee had listened to the dreadful saxophone, the endlessness of its despair and whining, then gaseous punctuations, she turned off the tape deck but kept watching the television for the sharks and rays. She was certain then that Man Mortimer was a disease and had assumed she knew this too for a while. He did make things happen, but the flow of these things had been redundant until now. He was only a man, even with this interesting disease. The others came in immediately.
Dee was not that averse. She had finished many men and loved to reduce them. The woman, when she began with her endearments, was not nightmarish or painful. Dee, who had never had a woman before, was thrilled by naughtiness more wanton and liquid than any since the first naked night of adolescence. An actual departure, as distinct as first leaving the Garden of Eden and perhaps the heavy air of earth altogether.
Lloyd, a mathematician and animal lover, was not accomplished, and they brought him to sighing infanthood quickly. But Man Mortimer was watching, fully clothed, and near the end of something. He rushed in and cut Dee’s thigh.
Edie shouted out, “Oh God, no!”
Lloyd remonstrated but held Dee. Until then she had been winning and asserting her pleasure on others. She felt the long cut on her thigh. It stung and then throbbed. Mortimer left the room. Perhaps never to return to her in friendly form again.
The three remaining were embarrassed and sad. The woman had expected just to slap her a little and Lloyd to insist on familiar desecrations passing for ecstasy in pornographic circles. They brought her a wet towel and then played poker with her while swallowing pills. She swallowed them too. She knew she had been sliced long and deep by a razor of some kind. Her own blood, in this prison, was a relief to see, curiously. Because that had to end it, she could still win.
She believed she had wrecked them all and they were burning now. She had reduced Mortimer to spite and outright crime. She could look him in the face, but she doubted he could look back at her. She guessed she knew him fairly well. But she drank too much and took narcotics with Edie and Lloyd, the towel bunched around her thigh. They tried to play cards but were numbed in giggles. Dee did not understand what trouble she was in until she called Edie a name and Edie hit her very hard in the mouth. Then Lloyd twisted Dee’s arm out of its socket. They were gone and she was in the elevator riding up and down when she woke up. A fifty-dollar bill was pinned to the front of her dress.
She stumbled into her kitchen in early morning, brought all this distance by a sympathetic Vietnamese cabdriver whose family fished out of Biloxi. There were a few hundred thousand of his citizens on the Gulf. They even had gangs now, he explained.
She did not know what she wore or what her hair was like. She was after ice water, then many aspirin in a large bottle. She missed her mouth with the glass. She spilled the aspirin bottle and it clattered on the tile. Her lap was full of melting aspirin when Hare walked in to see her under the hanging light at the table where nobody ate. The little boys sometimes cleaned fish on it or ate cold cereal and used the toaster on it. Enriched white bread, molasses, jam. Some of this food was on her forearms.
“You sick? Hurt?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“You can’t hardly talk.”
“You can’t know.”
“You’re woozy. And faraway. I’ll take care of you.”
Her lips were swollen, saliva in the corner, her nose chapped. A dried rivulet of blood out of one nostril.
“You’re not in love with him, are you?”
She looked at him as if he had just sung in Latin.
“I’ll fix things, Dee. Not to brag. I’ve used this home to grow up in. Now I’ll take care of you.”
It floated, it worked, it launched against a bottle of cheap champagne swatted on the bow planks by Melanie. It was August, and they all wore boat shoes. Ulrich dressed, as usual, as if he had shoplifted in a hurry from a clothes barn in the seventies. Military jacket, purple jean bell-bottoms. Harvard had a cravat, a gold chain from Melanie. For being captain and largely the builder and finisher. Engineer’s cap like Admiral Halsey’s. Because it was somewhere between a railroad saloon and a boat. Twin Mercuries carried them briskly. The pontoons made an oversize wake. You could fish and swim from it. There were lockers with this gear. Sidney, after mocking them like Noah’s neighbors during the laying in of planks, the rail and pews from a razed country church, the stained glass on either side of the cabin, the teak wheel, was aboard as if it had been his idea and he’d never doubted it. He loved hawking into the water the phlegm that rose easily like a permanent natural resource. They were eating burgers cooked on a grill right on the afterdeck and close to the happy engines. John Roman was aboard but not his handsome silver-haired wife, who was sick with something bad, they feared. Life jackets were everywhere. You sat on them, you used them as pillows on the pews. The big cabin was much like a chapel simply portaged over out of the church.
Sidney wore eyeblinding Rod Laver shoes, the old original leather ones his father had got ahold of by lot last month. Pepper worked with people who looted stores that neither had sales nor declared bankruptcy but whose owner simply up and walked away from their stock after a failed fire.
The huge lake today was a suspension of silver. At creek mouths and around treetops you saw fishermen like ants on sticks, this side of a moody horizon. Another barge came out from the orphans’ camp dock, loaded with an extra adult, Man Mortimer. He wore a blazer, double-breasted, with khaki linen breeches and high-gloss rubber-soled moccasins. The two teenage girls, Minny and Sandra, were near him and all aboard were happy, especially the insane couple.
They could not tell their mood from Harvard’s boat, but it seemed roisterous even from a half mile away. Sidney wondered if they would collide. A short-barreled .410 shotgun and a flare pistol were on board and he knew where they were. Inevitably the two pontoons plowed toward each other, as two cars on a desert highway must mate.
A storm could be making. The old ones hoped so. The roof had not been tested, but it looked as sweet and snug as all of Harvard’s work. The pleasure barge had taken a year and a month to build. None of them knew how to build anything but Harvard, and Ulrich, putatively. But all but Sidney had labored with care.
They were roofed, windowed, unsinkable. They stormed forward, a chapel on the top of adventure. They were going uncharted places up the river and into the new catfish reservoir flooding down from Yazoo City.
At Yazoo Point something raced out from the creek. It was Sponce Allison on Ulrich’s old Jet Ski. The rooster tails high. Driven in anger at troubling speed toward them, they thought. Closer, you saw a pale boy clutched aghast to its arms, as if the vehicle had stolen him. The boy didn’t seem to know how to slow down the ski. Sidney went for the flare pistol, interested in its stopping power. Sponce barely missed the ba
rge, then came back in a circle beaten seriously by their wake and flying high, wobbling. The smackdown knocked the boy away, and the Jet Ski slowed to the boat’s spirited crawl as the boy looked over at the passengers in both fear and spite.
He saw Sidney gawking at him and straightaway collided with the pontoon.
Sidney had been seasick since the first movement away from the pier, but in an angry active way of his own. Now possessed by three nauseas, he was tamping down a cylinder of puke by main will until it backed into the last of his gorge. A major muscle group undeveloped in other men sprang forth so hard his head recoiled. Nigh ten feet out, some specks may have found Sponce’s foot. The boy went wild with incredulity. He had set against this man void of any purpose and without a final destination. He shrieked over and over.
Ulrich noted that this was his old Jet Ski bobbing, wasn’t it?
Sponce floated on the dead thing and it would not start again.
The old man peered at him. Wren, with skin you could nearly see through. Lewis and Moore, the sexual gymnasts in chemotherapy, were dressed for fun, and she should not, as the girls would say, be wearing a bikini with green stilt cabana heels. The boat stopped.
“No. You ain’t towing me, and I ain’t getting on neither,” said Sponce.
So they left him, and ahead the oncoming orphans’ barge puttered down to bump into them. They were no longer feral, these children, but disciplined by a uniform glee like that of their counselors, the insane couple. The Ten Hoors, Penny still a svelte looker, Gene in better shape and seeming savvy with his freckles and mustache, were distinctly in charge and adult. But they were in beatitude still. The whole group shone, and were much cleaner, and knew what they were doing on the boat. They were having love and the outdoors was what. These things were good. The four engines of the two crafts stopped entirely and they shuddered up against each other. Melanie, Lewis and the Ten Hoors tied up the boats with the wharf lines.
