by Barry Hannah
Just behind him, perhaps betrayed in partners, was Sidney Farté in a very large old-timer’s party suit and vest, white shoes. He troubled the floor with some spastic revision of anything right, perhaps clogging or just stomping. But he was happy and grinning and drunk. Looking on the back of his bad influence, and not a finer man in the county, old Man Mortimer. He the man!
John Roman ceased the dance and decided this was the worst possible outcome, to have danced himself to Mortimer. Nausea struck him. Danced to hell and didn’t even see. He wanted home to Bernice very badly. Old Sidney slid by, bumping in a kind of march, hands in the air, aimed toward a table where blond, blood-lipped whores laughed at him. This was enough.
“John Roman, the night is young! Come on now, man. You ain’t showing us nothing!” called Mortimer. “We in the Club! Get in the Club! Club of the Now!” He clamped his hand on Roman’s sleeve, and there was a too-mighty squeeze. Roman tore away. It was a nice coal-brown sports coat with a rep tie. Mortimer’s fingers themselves seemed coiled and toothed like serpents.
Roman did not realize he was bleeding from the wrist until he was in the car and cranking up. He leaned his head on the steering wheel. He felt sad, weak, small, eking away. His wife would die, he would be one leg in the grave. No more dancing. No song would speak to him. His wrist was wet and he raised it curiously. All his hand was drenched, sticky in its white dress shirt. He felt the pain and now saw the gash. What vicious tiny thing had snagged him? Then a car passed him in the lot with two lit skulls on the shelf of its rear windshield. Roman groaned.
I used to be a man. People did what I said. I advanced under fire. I had dignity. I walked toward crowds with my head up. Now I hold hands with nonsense. Gnats of spite around my head. I do not know where the fight is or where to give up.
Now he supposed he would have to kill Mortimer or start back going to church. With that ponytailed fool Byron Egan. Now that was a man who might have laid a couple out in his days. Lost his old uncle now. Like Roman had almost lost that nice old child Melanie Wooten for a friend. He started the car and drove home to hold the hand of his wife, Bernice.
Chet Baker was on the tape deck as Roman drove. Nothing. A painful irrelevance worse than silence especially in the love ballads. They seemed a fraud, they didn’t hurt enough, there wasn’t any shame in them, only that whimpering lapdog studio tribute to some ghost broad.
Vines climbed all over his housefront and there was a dim light within. Bernice would shoot the motherfucker, no doubt of that. And she’s still got a God, last I asked. I ain’t bothered her with him. She’s got the chemotherapy, she’s got the sleeps, she’s got the nausea and the marijuana pills, the THC. Now she’s a legal junky, but not even happy when she’s stoned. She’s got the baldness that’s humiliating her. That wonderful silvery hair gone. She didn’t want to look like no fortune-teller or woman wrestler.
All she wanted was her man and a house, waited half her life to get it. Set in the depopulated reaches of west-central Mississippi, Louisiana across the river. Swamps and flood on both sides, bayous. The great fertile lake that Roman had fished so good, so long. There was no starving here unless you meant money. People got by on enough. Too much electric have-to greed out there anyway. Roman thought he had gotten rid of the disease of want. His life was simple, near good fishing water. In their house he and Bernice shared the easy devotion that comes when you wait and wait. Little rhythms, unspoken speech of love. It seemed not to matter where a mad god was. They had earned this shelter beyond his wrath. Roman knew he was alive somewhere, this god. He had seen his work. And now he had seen Mortimer’s.
He held the handkerchief to his wet hand, his face cold. His shirt ruined too. Roman had seen such monsters in the service. Only question is whether Mortimer’s worth doing any kind of time for.
Chet Baker, what is it? It was always there, but we hear it only now and then.
Bernice was asleep.
One day you say I’m not moving, here is my country, I can’t help it, I’ve fallen into my place, no budging. I’ll die here with the ghosts of my old everybody. My Indians, my Africans, my uncles and aunts. Where half was grief, home was at least a hole to have it in.
The Allison boys still drove when they had gas, but they did not come near the house with their hot rod. They had washed it for free at several homes and car washes where there was a good machine. We may be next thing to dead children driving this old car, but we will run out our minutes in it. The car had come out of the water and was delivered by the sinkhole and they knew a true miracle because when Hare dragged it off to put on the last touches, it wasn’t but rust and slime yet and in five days he’d come back riding down the road in this. Even Dee was impressed by the car all painted and running, and she didn’t impress easily. Now, Isaac and Jacob believed, she had to give herself to Hare at the church not too long from now.
They dreamed Mrs. Suarez would hold them like puppies for a while and let them listen when her song started. She would sing and they would live high on these notes on her bosom before they were dead by Man Mortimer wanting the bones they had lost and the car they came in. They still had his pistol. Bam, bam, bam. But knowing Mrs. Suarez, they promised, we can’t kill, we can’t be mean no more.
The dogs were pleasant strays, all grateful, shivering. Made to be a friend of man. Happy for the hands that now led them and pulled the burrs, ticks and deer lice from their coats. The hands that gave them their heartworm medicine, their vaccinations. Their eyes were bright and their coats bushy and shined. They were a smiling lot, bidding for attention from Ulrich and Egan. They snuffled over Ulrich and took him down like a short rugby team, a scrum all over the laughing man. He required them for his soul, a new shape taking up its own just lately, and felt distinctly by Ulrich as a pain in his chest.
Fixed with Ulrich as his housemate, Egan was feeling better. Another five-hour surgery at University Hospital in Jackson was over. Ulrich drove him over and back daintily in the woody wagon, wanting to stop and chase down every stray on Highway 20 past Bovina, Edwards, Bolton and Clinton. Egan allowed only two severe cases, starving and spiny. The odor, road-carboned and grease-gamey, was not that bad. At home the dogs fell on a bucket of chicken and lapped water from bowls, then slept on old blankets of Feeney’s. One a spotted hound, one a corgi and shepherd mix they named Wayne. The other after a while they called Woody, for his profession.
Egan had shaved his head, which the surgeon liked. The black cross had re-formed whole, even blacker now that it was out of the gauze. With its Gothic menace. He wore the knife back to St. Peter, who cut off the centurion’s ear before Christ could stop him. Such bad faith, such minor work. He was not proud but he was scared.
Both of them missed Feeney very much. Ulrich was certain the old man was killed in the service of his animal ministry, but he did not tell this to Egan because he himself wished to die in this manner, it did not matter when. Just let him serve. Given this tenure, he was at peace. Without cigarettes, he was even something of a worker.
Egan had a good oblong head on him. Ulrich saw this as a sign of intelligence, although the biker hair never mattered to him, he who had just a pewter scrag on his own head, and large ears. Egan joined the part of the elders, and he spoke with them on the pier more as they cleared the burned hulk of the barge and began a new one. What else was there for Harvard?
One afternoon Egan told Ulrich, “It’s time we reached out to the orphans. Get up some of the friendlier dogs, say four, howabout? I’ll help. The kids’ll love petting them.”
“I don’t know. They’re not outgoing folks. But all right, Feeney’d been with us.”
“He’d be there.”
They drove themselves and the dogs, singing songs of faith, anthems of dead ravers and prophets, Luther, Longfellow.
TWELVE
Today
Maxwell Raymond
Eagle Lake, Mississippi
copyright at Vicksburg Public Library
My forebe
ars prayed give me Sherman, Grant or a
lesser general.
Ptoom and bummf, hit square.
This old mistress my rifle.
Nasty bite. I call her Mingo, the old bopster.
Bloooooom! Above the eyes the nice wide forehead.
My headshot, our whole lives.
Fill your head, Ulysses S. Grant, William T.
Sherman.
The visionary like the loaded gun.
If he waits long enough, something will happen.
Unless he rusts, unless his eyes collapse.
The dark diarist, his last words shouted, “I’m
dying, watch this!”
You knowest not what I do, Rag on the cross.
I always loved You Jesus and didn’t understand
much else.
These claims, What the Lord Wants Me to Do,
Greek, Greek to me.
I would like the straight Aramaic right from His
lips.
And why not?
This long wait with this much posture gives you
the blue soul.
I dab and idle, attendant God.
I insist my art and path be crooked, in fear there
will be a herd
Of the simple where I want to be.
Help my eyes and ears,
Or just show up, why don’t You?
Raymond was speechifying to Mimi as never before. He was nearly coherent and it frightened her. They heard a mass of gunfire across the lake from the orphans’ camp one evening.
“Now I can feel the madness of grief in the kitchen where Penny talked to the limb. When they lost the boy, I believe they became just people at last and couldn’t bear it.”
“Became people?” asked Mimi. “What were they before?”
Raymond said aloud, looking past Mimi, “Movers, actors, I’d suppose. Sellers, takers, keepers. Some come apart when they discover themselves. As somebody said, Acts mark the land, words are only its smoke, or something.
“I despise, but am in awe of, this couple, Mimi. They simply ran out of words, don’t you understand? They dealt with things you touch and hold and appraise. Bodies. Bodies and acts is what they knew.
“With drugs or without them, bodies and acts. At my deposition nobody wanted to talk drugs, but two lawyers wanted Halcyon and Xanax, I tell you. I told them, sorry, I’m a saxophonist.
“Sure, Gene and Penny were sad. And they were absent the usual compulsion to be good in sadness. Goodness is respected and often mistaken for a cure. Not only words, though, they seem to have lost even their taste buds toward the end. They went naked or wore clothes to no effect on each other. They collected money. They collected fish. They had destroyed wetlands and aviaries. Now they began nailing it all on the wall.”
“Why is it that you adore the pain and suffering of your family and others? Tell me.” Mimi stared hard at him without warmth. Now he was silent. At last. “You are in love with ruin. You get a contact high from it. You play your horn like you are sick of the notes sometimes. Why is that?”
When Mimi left, he had, he did have, a vision of his old poet mentor, speaking out of a fog at the vets’ hospital. Speaking as he had done in the late seventies.
“Oh I found my feminine side long ago, Max. It’s Edna, an old navy dyke.”
The poet did not smile.
Ulrich and Egan returned home with their petting zoo intact. They met Malcolm, who carried a rifle negligently at his left leg, telling them he was the victim of Max Raymond and he loved Mimi Suarez. The proximity alone seemed to please him. All this he told Ulrich and Egan while they looked at a few bullet holes in the woody wagon. Gene and Penny were on horseback. An accident. They were sorry.
Harvard, who worked to salvage what good timber might be left of the launch, was annoyed when Ulrich and Egan’s dogs came to the pier. He was querulous in his suffering over Melanie. He pouted in her presence and scowled. This might be her last year of radiance. Harvard hoped it was. She was unbearable to him.
America is dreadful for the emeritus, or so Harvard thought. Once a god, a surgeon of few mistakes, now an eccentric out to pasture. His neighbors connected him to more charming days when doctors made house calls and bespoke themselves in soft benisons. Some might hit him for a drug now and then.
He began searching the aisles of the launch, through cinder and ashes, and finding bullet slugs. He knelt and studied them. Mushroomed .22 Magnums, .30/.30 and buckshot. Harvard raked through the coals and could hear the slugs rattling.
He cleared the embers, the broken stained glass, the half-pews, the quarter-wheel. He had once lived across the street from a man with thick glasses. He owned no car. The neighbors called him the Walking Man. He walked everywhere, morning and evening, and nobody knew his mission. He did not sing, laugh, play. He had no work except perhaps at the library. In his thick glasses, he seemed to be taken up with the traffic. Going and returning was a demanding event. You would stop to offer him a ride and he would brusquely refuse. He did not answer his phone. He once drank, but he stopped. He smoked, but he quit. He may have been a failed scholar, a torn philosopher. The thick glasses controlled him. Earnest and officious, even fervent, in his walk, without humor. Never smelled a rose. It was a free country. Harvard wondered why the neighborhood boys hated him so.
Sheriff Facetto and Bernard were in the bait store one evening in khakis and T-shirts and canvas shoes, a johnboat in the gravel out front. The weather was mild and the winter crappie season was in and they had in mind filling a freezer box with fillets for a county beer-and-fish picnic the middle of February. Big slabs lurked thick as necklaces in the brushy sinks near the spillway.
Mortimer in the back did not recognize the sheriff and his deputy through the storeroom window. But these men were not leaving until they learned the color of jig and depth for the slab crappie. The locals were leaning around freezer chests close to a potbellied stove with a good fire. Two of them were having a sport on the sheriff and thought he ought to find out himself about the jig color and technique. It wasn’t something you just handed over to a foreigner, it took years, many bad mornings, many frozen spines. Mortimer could see the skinny younger one, Bernard, getting angrier over this matter.
Mortimer recognized the sheriff and deputy the same moment he saw the thing on the top rack. Two full-size footballs secured in tandem by foot-long black strips of canvas webbing with Velcro at the ends. It was a life preserver, worn around the neck. Pepper’s old footballs. Sidney was having a go at invention. The weekend after the costume dance, when he had gotten with three large women for special tastes right out of Mortimer’s service, the experience of which, he told Mortimer and Lloyd, was like “rolling around in a warm room,” he had worn Mortimer’s silk bandit’s mask all weekend behind his store counter. The effect on a fishing Sunday was disquieting to his hungover clients, drinking beer rapidly before they could decide whether to stay.
Now Mortimer was staring dead-on at Facetto, through the glass and quite unknown to him. He could have rammed a bolo through the two-way storeroom mirror into the man’s very face without his ever knowing what nightmare had struck him.
Years ago a man had driven into the bait shop at night, hungry and with the inventory of an entire bankrupt sporting-goods store in a four-ton truck. It was hot summer, tree frogs and gnats having away at the air, aggravating the man’s thirst. He was broke, bankrupt and alcoholic, and he knew not where he was. He figured perhaps Kansas. Nobody else was in the store. He appealed to Pepper’s charity, spoke to him curiously, as if he might be the governor of the state, who was at that time a graceless yahoo whipping up racial purity among even lesser yahoos in confrontation with the Brothers Kennedy, who wanted one black man in the university at that time. He spoke as if Pepper were in charge of large fates and was known far and wide for his special attunement to the troubles of the little man in this often heartbreaking and deceptive land. He indicated waves of wheat and torrents of oranges out through the
door. “I will do anything for a drink and a sandwich,” he told Pepper. “I have a truck full of sports equipment and not a dime. For a bottle I could give you a whole lot of sports equipment. Playground, floor play. There might even be fishing stuff in there, I’m sure there is. Isn’t there a good bottle, two bottles, and a hamburger?” He looked over at the greased meat and soggy bread under the heat-lamp row across the way. A man on the television was pouring down a frosty mug of beer so sweet it seemed to create new muscles of pleasure in his throat.
“First,” said Pepper, unmoved but interested, “I want you to get out a football. Go get it out of the truck there. Something might be waiting on you. Take your time and get a good football, your best.”
“My best football. I got one kind, the best. A Hutch. You got it.” When he came in with it, a bottle of Maker’s Mark sat beside a greasy burger on a napkin with a bottle of mustard next to it. Pepper seemed to have moved no place nor fretted. The man held out the big football.
“Now I want you to suck it. Suck this football. Get a lot of it in there.”
“Aw, man. Why, do you love football? That your game?”
“I hate it. Suck it, now. On in there, moan around on it.”
The man did, caterwauling and gagging. “Is that all right? God damn. You reckon it’s really pig hide?”
“Go on, get your drink now. We can be trading for a while now. There’s a place for you. Some old crazy man’s tree house, he left it. But the tree house is professional. The tree’d blow down ’fore the house would. He left meat around on the floor like. You goin’ to want to clean some with the critters comin’ after the smell at night.”
The man stayed for six weeks, fed from the store, seined minnows and caught grasshoppers and crayfish for Pepper, and stayed mainly drunk, high in the boughs singing with a transistor radio. There was a wire up to it for reading or coffee. Then he left, and the truck was all Pepper’s. He had sold off most of the gear to fairly delighted people who had hobbies. That is, outside fishing, hunting, weather discussion and church. But he kept the boxes of footballs in the storeroom. When he saw the boy children come along with their fathers to learn the way of the world, he would look at them with no expression and refuse them a football for their own. It was believed he kept the balls as a memorial to the ungodly humiliation he had wrestled from that bankrupt creature those many years ago.
