Airships

by Barry Hannah

  “Pardon me. Is yo name Toid?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Erruh, yo name Mister Terrid?”

  “He’s saying turd,” said one of the agents.

  “It certainly is,” I said to the boy on the bicycle. “I’m Mister Turd. How did you find me?” He was a pretty mulatto boy and looked very wise.

  “I just find you, Mister Terrid,” said he. He pedaled back to the rear of the blockhouse where the cooking was.

  I put the silencer attachment on my pistol. It was the first mass-produced silencer to come out. I told them we had to follow that boy home. He knew things about me.

  It was easy. He left at one in the morning on his bicycle and struck out toward the west end, heart of niggertown. We trolled behind as if looking at the bay. His bike was lit up front and back and you could see him like a new dime on black cloth. We got into niggertown and stopped at a vacant lot where an old house had been pulled over. Somebody came out of the boards in man’s clothes but you could tell it was a girl. She hugged him while he was standing astraddle the bike. We went by like an idle lost car and I saw the girl was white. She was a plain white girl, no beauty about her. But she was passionate. She was all over him.

  The next time we passed, I got out of the car.

  “Hi. I’m Mister Turd. Remember?”

  “Yes suh.”

  “What’re you doing, boy, begging on your hands and knees for bad news? Don’t you know anything about Mobile’s miscegenation law?”

  “Its what?”

  “No black on white.”

  “But you with the federals. You kill Weeber Batson’s boy.”

  “You know everything. Is that why you’re sweet on him, ’cause he knows everything?” I said. But the girl never uttered a word.

  One of the agents told me to get back in the car. I told them shut up, I wasn’t any hothead. The thing was, I was mortified, confused and jealous.

  “Wouldn’t nobody else have you at your high school?” I said to her.

  Standing astraddle his bike, the boy chopped me right in the jaw. I had the gun and he saw it and he still chopped me. I was seeing through a hot orange mist. At least I had the presence of mind not to kill him. I only shot him in the thigh. You could hear the rush of a whisper from the silencer. I was immediately repentant.

  “Let’s get you to the hospital, son,” says I. He was still astride the bike.

  “I ain’t going to no hospiter you takes me to,” he said. “Miss Edith, you come sit behind and pedal for my bad leg. I’ll do the other one with the good one.”

  She sat on the rear fender and they went off in the damned most bizarre juxtaposition you ever saw. Similar to a circus tandem but not for fun. This was loyalty and romance, brothers. I know he was leaving blood up the road, though you couldn’t see it at night. The bike was wobbling all over the place, but they were going ahead.

  And since then I have been a worm.

  I left the South for ten years, then got my quarters in Memphis. That was some man, that boy. I wouldn’t touch Mobile again with a three-hundred-mile pole.

  Quarles Green made La Guardia and waited a cold six hours for the plane to Memphis. He was a miracle of patience. He read nothing, hardly changed position, smoked nothing, watched no pay TV, wet his underwear imperceptibly.

  Reynolds will be the only one in Memphis who might be alive that would remember me from the old days, he thought. Reynolds who’s had thirty names in his time, on three continents. I did my bit in the Second. Cornered the Nazi czar of Fort Worth and his fifteen rifles.

  When the plane was in the air he asked for the headphones.

  The stewardess passed him. She was a big leggy blond girl, a superlative quite at ease in the jumbo jet. She was desire trebled out. Quarles Green felt the last big pang. He wanted to take up habitation in her, such as a baby kangaroo.

  A terrific fist bashed him directly on the heart.

  He smiled at her with his head phones on, snapping his fingers.

  “Catchy,” he said, pointing at the phones. “Groovy, for your generation.”

  She winked and passed by. He sat there awhile and died. The stewardess wanted to know the tune the old whitehaired boy was grooving on. She lifted up her own pair in her dressing room. Nothing was coming over them. There was only a howling, like waves in a storm of particles.

  When she was out of the room, she saw Dana and asked her.

  “The whole system’s screwed up by lightning or something. None of the headphone FMs are any good,” said Dana.

  The stewardess walked back to look at Quarles Green. He had a tight smug smile on him, his eyes closed, like every dead man who finally hears his tune.

  Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet

  I was walking around Gon one night, and this C-man—I saw him open the window, and there was a girl in back of him, so I thought it was all right—peeled down on me and shot the back heel off my boot. Nearest I came to getting mailed home when I was there. A jeep came by almost instantly with a thirty cal mounted, couple of allies in it. I pointed over to the window. They shot out about a box and a half on the apartment, just about burned out the dark slot up there. As if the dude was hanging around digging the weather after he shot at me. There were shrieks in the night, etc. But then a man opened the bottom door and started running in the street. This ARVN fellow knocked the shit out of his buddy’s head turning the gun to zap the running man. Then I saw something as the dude hit a light: he was fat. I never saw a fat Cong. So I screamed out in Vietnamese. He didn’t shoot. I took out my machine pistol and ran after the man, who was up the street by now, and I was hobbling without a heel on my left boot.

  Some kind of warm nerve sparklers were getting all over me. I believe in magic, because, million-to-one odds, it was Ike “Tubby” Wooten, from Redwood, a town just north of Vicksburg. He was leaning on a rail, couldn’t run anymore. He was wearing the uniform of our Army with a patch on it I didn’t even know what was. Old Tubby would remember me. I was the joker at our school. I once pissed in a Dixie cup and eased three drops of it on the library radiator. But Tubby was so serious, reading some photo magazine. He peeped up and saw me do it, then looked down quickly. When the smell came over the place, he asked me, Why? What do you want? What profit is there in that? I guess I just giggled. Sometimes around midnight I’d wake up and think of his questions, and it disturbed me that there was no answer. I giggled my whole youth away. Then I joined the Army. So I thought it was fitting I’d play a Nelda on him now. A Nelda was invented by a corporal when they massacred a patrol up north on a mountain and he was the only one left. The NVA ran all around him and he had this empty rifle hanging on him. They spared him.

  “I’m a virgin! Spare me!”

  “You, holding the gun? Did you say you were a virgin?” said poor Tubby, trying to get air.

  “I am a virgin,” I said, which was true, but hoping to get a laugh, anyway.

  “And a Southern virgin. A captain. Please to God, don’t shoot me,” that fat boy said. “I was cheating on my wife for the first time. The penalty shouldn’t be death.”

  “Why’d you run from the house, Tubby?”

  “You know me.” Up the street they had searchlights moved up all over the apartment house. They shot about fifty rounds into the house. They were shooting tracers now. It must’ve lit up my face; then a spotlight went by us.

  “Bobby Smith,” said Tubby. “My God, I thought you were God.”

  “I’m not. But it seems holy. Here we are looking at each other.”

  “Aw, Bobby, they were three beautiful girls. I’d never have done the thing with one, but there were three.” He was a man with a small pretty face laid around by three layers of jowl and chin. “I heard the machine gun and the guilt struck me. I had to get out. So I just ran.”

  “Why’re you in Nam, anyway?”

  “I joined. I wasn’t getting anything done but being in love with my wife. That wasn’t doing America any good.”

&nb
sp; “What’s that patch on you?”

  “Photography.” He lifted his hands to hold an imaginary camera. “I’m with the Big Red. I’ve done a few things out of helicopters.”

  “You want to see a ground unit? With me. Or does Big Red own you?”

  “I have no idea. There hasn’t been much to shoot. Some smoking villages. A fire in a bamboo forest. I’d like to see a face.”

  “You got any pictures of Vicksburg?”

  “Oh, well, a few I brought over.”

  The next day I found out he was doing idlework and Big Red didn’t care where he was, so I got him over in my unit. I worried about his weight, etc., and the fact he might be killed. But the boys liked a movie-cameraist being along and I wanted to see the pictures from Vicksburg. It was nice to have Tubby alongside. He was hometown, such as he was. Before we flew out north, he showed me what he had. There was a fine touch in his pictures. There was a cute little Negro on roller skates, and an old woman on a porch, a little boy sleeping in a speedboat with the river in the background. Then there was a blurred picture of his wife naked, just moving through the kitchen, nothing sexy. The last picture was the best. It was John Whitelaw about to crack a golf ball. Tubby had taken it at Augusta, at the Masters. I used to live about five houses away from the Whitelaws. John had his mouth open and his arms, the forearm muscles, were bulked up plain as wires.

  John was ten years older than me, but I knew about him. John Whitelaw was our only celebrity since the Civil War. In the picture he wore spectacles. It struck me as something deep, brave, mighty and, well, modern; he had to have the eyeglasses on him to see the mighty thing he was about to do. Maybe I sympathized too much, since I have to wear glasses too, but I thought this picture was worthy of a statue. Tubby had taken it in a striking gray-and-white grain. John seemed to be hitting under a heroic deficiency. You could see the sweat droplets on his neck. His eyes were in an agony. But the thing that got me was that John Whitelaw cared so much about what he was doing. It made me love America to know he was in it, and I hadn’t loved anything for nigh three years then. Tubby was talking about all this “our country” eagle and stars mooky and had seen all the war movies coming over on the boat. I never saw a higher case of fresh and crazy in my life.

  But the picture of John at Augusta, it moved me. It was a man at work and play at the same time, doing his damnedest. And Whitelaw was a beautiful man. They pass that term “beautiful” around like pennies nowadays, but I saw him in the flesh once. It was fall in Baton Rouge, around the campus of LSU. He was getting out of a car with a gypsyish girl on his hand. I was ten, I guess, and he was twenty. We were down for a ball game, Mississippi vs. Louisiana, a classic that makes you goo-goo eyed when you’re a full-grown man if your heart’s in Dixie, etc. At ten, it’s Ozville. So in the middle of it, this feeling, I saw Whitelaw and his woman. My dad stopped the car.

  “Wasn’t that Johnny Whitelaw?” he asked my grandfather.

  “You mean that little peacock who left football for golf? He ought to be quarterbacking Ole Miss right now. It wouldn’t be no contest,” said my grandfather.

  I got my whole idea of what a woman should look like that day . . . and what a man should be. The way John Whitelaw looked, it sort of rebuked yourself ever hoping to call yourself a man. The girl he was with woke up my clammy little dreams about, not even sex, but the perfect thing—it was something like her. As for Whitelaw, his face was curled around by that wild hair the color of beer; his chest was deep, just about to bust out of that collar and bow tie.

  “That girl he had, she had a drink in her hand. You could hardly see her for her hair,” said my grandfather.

  “Johnny got him something Cajun,” said my father.

  Then my grandfather turned around, looking at me like I was a crab who could say a couple of words. “You look like your mother, but you got gray eyes. What’s wrong? You have to take a leak?”

  Nothing was wrong with me. I’d just seen John Whitelaw and his girl, that was all.

  Tubby had jumped a half-dozen times at Fort Bragg, but he had that heavy box harnessed on him now and I knew he was going down fast and better know how to hit. I explained to him. I went off the plane four behind him, cupping a joint. I didn’t want Tubby seeing me smoking grass, but it’s just about the only way to get down. If the Cong saw the plane, you’d fall into a barbecue. They’ve killed a whole unit before, using shotguns and flame bullets, just like your ducks floating in. You hear a lot of noise going in with a whole unit in the air like this. We start shooting about a hundred feet from ground. If you ever hear one bullet pass you, you get sick thinking there might be a lot of them. All you can do is point your gun down and shoot it all out. You can’t reload. You never hit anything. There’s a sharpshooter, Mclntire, who killed a C shooting from his chute, but that’s unlikely. They’ve got you like a gallery of rabbits if they’re down there.

  I saw Tubby sinking fast over the wrong part of the field. I had two chutes out, so I cut one off and dropped over toward him, pulling on the left lines so hard I almost didn’t have a chute at all for a while. I got level with him and he looked over, pointing down. He was doing his arm up and down. Could have been farmers or just curious rubbernecks down in the field, but there were about ten of them grouped up together, holding things. They weren’t shooting, though. I was carrying an experimental gun, me and about ten of my boys. It was a big, light thing; really, it was just a launcher. There were five shells in it, bigger than shotgun shells. If you shot one of them, it was supposed to explode on impact and burn out everything in a twenty-five-yard radius. It was a mean little mother of phosphorus, is what it was. I saw the boys shooting them down into the other side of the field. This stuff would take down a whole tree and you’d chute into a quiet smoking bare area.

  I don’t know. I don’t like a group waiting on me when I jump out of a plane. I almost zapped them, but they weren’t throwing anything up. Me and Tubby hit the ground about the same time. They were farmers. I talked to them. They said there were three Cong with them until we were about a hundred feet over. The Cong knew we had the phosphorus shotgun and showed ass, loping out to the woods fifty yards to the north when me and Tubby were coming in.

  Tubby took some film of the farmers. All of them had thin chin beards and soft hands because their wives did most of the work. They essentially just lay around and were hung with philosophy, and actually were pretty happy. Nothing had happened around here till we jumped in. These were fresh people. I told them to get everybody out of the huts because we were going to have a thing in the field. It was a crisis point. A huge army of NVA was coming down and they just couldn’t avoid us if they wanted to have any run of the valley five miles south. We were there to harass the front point of the army, whatever it was like.

  “We’re here to check their advance,” Tubby told the farmers.

  Then we all collected in the woods, five hundred and fifty souls, scared out of mind. What we had going was we knew the NVA general bringing them down was not too bright. He went to the Sorbonne and we had this report from his professor: “Li Dap speaks French very well and had studied Napoleon before he got to me. He knows Robert Lee and the strategy of Jeb Stuart, whose daring circles around an immense army captured his mind. Li Dap wants to be Jeb Stuart. I cannot imagine him in command of more than five hundred troops.”

  And what we knew stood up. Li Dap had tried to circle left with twenty thousand and got the hell kicked out of him by idle Navy guns sitting outside Gon. He just wasn’t very bright. He had half his army climbing around these bluffs, no artillery or air force with them, and it was New Year’s Eve for our side.

  “So we’re here just to kill the edge of their army?” said Tubby.

  “That’s what I’m here for, why I’m elected. We kill more C’s than anybody else in the Army.”

  “But what if they take a big run at you, all of them?” said Tubby.

  “There’ll be lots of cooking.”

  We went out in t
he edge of the woods and I glassed the field. It was almost night. I saw two tanks come out of the other side and our pickets running back. Pock, pock, pock from the tanks. Then you saw this white glare on one tank where somebody on our team had laid on with one of the phosphorus shotguns. It got white and throbbing, like a little star, and the gun wilted off of it. The other tank ran off a gully into a hell of a cow pond. You wouldn’t have known it was that deep. It went underwater over the gun, and they let off the cannon when they went under, raising the water in a spray. It was the silliest-looking thing. Some of them got out and a sergeant yelled for me to come up. It was about a quarter mile out there. Tubby got his camera, and we went out with about fifteen troops.

  At the edge of the pond, looking into flashlights, two tankmen sat, one tiny, the other about my size. They were wet, and the big guy was mad. Lot of the troops were chortling, etc. It was awfully damned funny, if you didn’t happen to be one of the C-men in the tank.

  “Of all the fuck-ups. This is truly saddening.” The big guy was saying something like that. I took a flashlight and looked him over. Then I didn’t believe it. I told Tubby to get a shot of the big cursing one. Then they brought them on back. I told the boys to tie up the big one and carry him in.

  I sat on the ground, talking to Tubby.

  “It’s so quiet. You’d think they’d be shelling us,” he said.

  “We’re spread out too good. They don’t have much ammo now. They really galloped down here. That’s the way Li Dap does it. Their side’s got big trouble now. And, Tubby, me and you are famous.”

  “Me, what?”

  “You took his picture. You can get some more, more arty angles on him tomorrow.”

  “Him?”

  “It’s Li Dap himself. He was in the tank in the pond.”

  “No. Their general?”

  “You want me to go prove it?”

  We walked over. They had him tied around a tree. His hands were above his head and he was sitting down. I smelled some hash in the air. The guy who was blowing it was a boy from Detroit I really liked, and I hated to come down on him, but I really beat him up. He never got a lick in. I kicked his rump when he was crawling away and some friends picked him up. You can’t have lighting up that shit at night on the ground. Li Dap was watching the fight, still cursing.