High Lonesome

by Barry Hannah

  My grandmother had caught a seven-pound flounder from the sea wall years ago and she was still honored for it, my uncle retelling the tale about her whooping out, afraid but happy, the pole bent double. I wanted to have a story like that about me. The fish made Mama Hannah so happy, my older cousin said, that he saw her dancing to a band on television by herself when everybody else was asleep. Soon—I couldn’t bear to think about it—in a couple of days they would drive me over to Gulfport and put me on a bus for home, and in my sorrow there waited a dry red brick school within bitter tasting distance. But even that would be sweetened by a great fish and its story.

  It took place in no more than half a minute, I’d guess, but it had the lengthy rapture and terror of a whole tale. Something bit and then was jerking, small but solidly, then it was too big, and I began moving in the water and grabbing the butt of the rod again because what was on had taken it out of my hands. When I caught the rod up, I was moving toward the barnacled pole with the tide slopping on it, and that was the only noise around. I went in to my neck in a muddier scoop in the bottom, and then under my feet something moved. I knew it was a giant stingaree instantly. Hard skin on a squirming plate of flesh. I was sorely terrified but was pulled even past this and could do nothing, now up to my chin and the stiff little pole bent violently double. I was dragged through the mud and I knew the being when it surfaced would be bigger than me and with much more muscle. Then, like something underwater since Europe, seven or eight huge purpoises surfaced, blowing water in a loud group explosion out of their enormous heads, and I was just shot all over with light and nerves because they were only twenty feet from me and I connected them, the ray, and what was on my hook into a horrible combination beast that children who waded too far would be dragged out by and crushed and drowned.

  The thing pulled with heavier tugs like a truck going up its gears. The water suddenly rushed into my face and into my nose, I could see only brown with the bottom of the sun shining through it.

  I was gone, gone, and I thought of the cats watching onshore and I said good-bye cat friends, good-bye Cousin Woody, good-bye young life, I am only a little boy and I’m not letting go of this pole, it is not even mine, it’s my uncle’s. Good-bye school, good-bye Mother and Daddy, don’t weep for me, it is a thing in the water cave of my destiny. Yes, I thought all these things in detail while drowning and being pulled rushing through the water, but the sand came up under my feet and the line went slack, the end of the rod was broken off and hanging on the line. When I cranked in the line I saw the hook, a thick silver one, was straightened. The vacancy in the air where there was no fish was an awful thing like surgery in the pit of my stomach. I convinced myself that I had almost had him.

  When I stood in the water on solid sand, I began crying. I tried to stop but when I got close to Woody I burst out again. He wanted to know what happened but I did not tell him the truth. Instead I told him I had stepped on an enormous ray and its hook had sliced me.

  No.

  Yes. I went into briefer sobs.

  When we checked my legs there was a slice from an oyster shell, a fairly deep one I’d got while being pulled by the creature. I refused treatment and I was respected for my close call the rest of the day. I even worked in the lie more and said furthermore it didn’t much matter to me if I was taken off to the asylum for stingaree children, that was just the breaks. My cousin and the rest of them looked at me anew and with concern but I was acting funny and they must have been baffled.

  It wasn’t until I was back in the dreaded school room that I could even talk about the fish, and then my teacher doubted it, and she in goodwill with a smile told my father, congratulating me on my imagination. My father thought that was rich, but then I told him the same story, the creature so heavy like a truck, the school of porpoises, and he said That’s enough. You didn’t mention this when you came back.

  No, and neither did I mention the two cats when I walked back to shore with Woody and the broken rod. They had watched all the time, and I knew it, because the both of them stared at me with big solemn eyes, a lot of light in them, and it was with these beings of fur then that I entrusted my confidences, and they knew I would be back to catch the big one, the singular monster, on that line going tight into the cave in the water, something thrashing on the end, celebrated above by porpoises.

  I never knew what kind of fish it was, but I would return and return to it the rest of my life, and the cats would be waiting to witness me and share my honor.

  Carriba

  SOMETHING DROPPED, MAYBE A SHOE OUT THERE ON THE polished clay where they’ve made a path near my south window. There was no sidewalk so they walked a path through the old St. Augustine grass as white trash would do. The woman, Minkle, wants something more with me probably. She’d be out near my window provoking something, that might be what the sound was. I saw her nishy once when she was wet out of the shower but don’t think it wasn’t offered. She was laughing. I was right under her window. Her brother, the one who killed his father, was in the room beyond her petting the bobcat their horrible mother Blackie had brought up last week. Note the door between their rooms was open. They have a brother named Ebbnut. He stays back in Carriba with Blackie and has fattened within the last year, since the shooting of the father, into a great neckless artillery shell. I would guess Minkle wants my attention now because she is pregnant and the man has quit dating her, that lawyer with cultured looks who used to sit the bench for the university basketball team, in his Volvo.

  Or she might want to fight again. Right after that window episode I walked straight in her house past Modock with his bobcat, slammed the door, and beat her up while she was still in the towel. Not badly, but she knew it was due and just took it. Then I came out and sat down, asking Modock what he thought about that, son? He was only now eighteen, stroking that squirming swamp cat he pretended loved him.

  Modock wouldn’t raise his head.

  I say What of it? Get me a beer, you gloomy little saint.

  He went and got the beer, bobcat in his arms.

  Yes, a good deal was owed me and I liked to call it in from time to time. What began as charity becomes a battle. Life’s old tune. Before I could get a good toss of the beer over my lip, however, here comes Minkle in her jogging outfit from her room. Bap, bap, she’s into my face with her arms and the beer’s flying away one direction, my spectacles the other. I recall Modock rising, get this: so the beer wouldn’t get on his bobcat. Sure, into his vow of nonviolence, lifelong, after the patricide.

  Minkle got me a good sight more than I’d got her. I’m a gentleman, for godsake. Of which, as trash would say, she’s hardly no lady. I just took it, looking for my glasses more than even dodging. I let her beat herself out.

  You can’t hurt me, I said. Then I began laughing. But she was red and nearly weeping in the face.

  Hit me some more, wench. Do out this farce. You don’t even understand the word, do you?

  She began crying then: I’m sorry. I showed myself because I’m so sad, so sad. It wasn’t to mean nothing, she spluttered.

  You an old man, said Modock.

  Take a joke, she said.

  I’ll eat that pussy right off you, I grinned.

  Attaboy she smiled through the tears. We were all familiar again.

  Modock looked away. This boy might be a hero, even in the national papers, but by God he was dull. You get this American specimen nowadays that’s either shooting somebody or stone boring.

  You hear what I said, Modock? That’s how old man I am. Put that pussy on my head and wear her down the street like a hat. Hey. I nudged his shoe with mine. You got no honor? I be disrespecting you big sisser. All he could do was look pained and stroke that frowning bobcat, staring out the window as if there were some help out there.

  I believe you sisser got some new big bosoms trained out of her from the gym. Got them thigh muscles now. She be a roving clamp, son.

  I’d guess the two were separated in age by one of t
heir father’s longer penitentiary sentences. Minkle must be thirty-five. In this town, away from Carriba, she had risen in the world. Modock was going nowhere.

  He used to wear a python around his neck, down in Carriba. He had a girlfriend too, around his neck when the python wasn’t, when I first met him.

  Things were much tenderer and more awesome then, and I was a journalist sent down to cover the debris of misery after the killings. Now I am no longer a journalist and am relatively poor. It was the end of my career that way. I had never covered murders and had never worked a story in my home state. Murder is not interesting, friends. Murder is vomit. You may attach a story to it but you are already dishonest to the faces of the dead, in this case Modock’s father Henry and two policemen Henry had killed with his shotgun on the town square. I knew I had no place arranging this misery into entertainment, a little Hamlet for busy-bodies and ghouls. Nor could I add my other hyena’s worth to our already mocked and derided state, where I lived and worked and hoped. Doesn’t this sound noble of me? The fact is I have turned into a geezer and elected alderman of the town here. A booster, even. Around age forty-five there might be a pop and a hiss in your heart, and you are already on your way, a geezer. Nothing is good or like it used to be, not even nookie. A great gabby sadness swarms over you. You are an ancient mariner yanking on the arms of the young. See here, see here.

  Modock’s distress, sitting there on the couch with the python draped around his neck, his gruesome high school sweetie pressing him to marry her, get a car and a job and some money, threw me into action. Come on, die with us, real close to us, the sweetie and Modock’s dreaded mother Blackie might as well be screaming: It’s lonesome, come on pretty thing and die with us, snuggle up there. Modock is pretty. Put a good sweater on the boy and he’s instantly in a movie about the right side of the tracks. I saw him as a freshman here at the university, look of a teenage saint on him—those pained green eyes—first in his family at a college ever. I told him to get out of the place and live near me five hours upstate, in this little gem of a burg. He shocked me by accepting.

  Now they’re both here, he and Minkle, in that modest brown wooden rental next to me in this white subdivision, mainly red brick and ranchy, of the Eisenhower years. Wide streets and combed curbs with the dogs sleeping away blissfully in their rabbit dreams. Briefly he improved. He had work at the Whirlpool plant and the manager, a pal of mine, gave him a Subaru cockeyed on its frame from an old wreck, so Modock goes forever leftward down the road whichever way he goes. He had his old hound, Beaumont, and I brought him over some books and pictures. His grades were not bad down in Carriba High although he detested the place. Everybody had airs. I noticed even the weather-woman on television seemed to threaten him with airs.

  Son, I said, Can’t you see the bod on her, those nice smacking lips?

  Nobody dressed like that talks about rain, he said.

  But the slope, the promise of that hip on her.

  You wear you pants around you head.

  He was the son of a prisoner released three times to kill again, always pleading self-defense. Always innocent somehow, this man. An altercation on a back porch—somehow the gun discharged, hell of a thing. He wrote songs in prison. His lawyer, a former gubernatorial candidate, showed them to me. Untamed broken heart, Manslaughter One/Miss My Daughter and Tiny Sons. Henry, forever getting a bad deal, just wanted to sing. If he could just quit killing people and get some private lessons. I saw a photograph of him and Modock smiling together, arms across shoulders, a guitar hanging off Henry’s neck. It was a good one, not cheap. Henry’s hair looked suddenly arisen in oil and hope. Henry and Blackie divorced and remarried several times. She told me she had “been” with Henry the night before his last rampage.

  Henry seems to have been one of a very rare breed in whom marijuana, which he used frequently, induced a murderous psychosis. Two young well-built patrolmen had lately been “bothering” him. Or not. Henry had a case of policemen bothering him just about forever. The two cops “shook him down” in front of his friends in a restaurant on the square. He was free of dope. But in a few minutes he walked out to his white camper, perhaps toked-up (although the state toxicology lab pronounced his body free of drugs, Blackie said he was never free of drugs) and set upon the policemen with a twelve-gauge loaded with buckshot. He killed both of them, although there were two bullet holes in the window of the camper, which I examined. Then he went home, where, as the beloved Robert Frost said, they have to take you in. But he went home brandishing the shotgun and wanting to kill everybody. A younger cousin stood in his way and Henry leveled on him. The cousin, a hunched skinny man with homemade tattoos crawling all over his arms (in prison, they use old-timey carbon paper and a needle to do this upon themselves; there’s plenty of time), said this to Henry:

  Well, Henry, go ahead and do what you have to do.

  What you have to do. Imagine. I loved the steel of this, my friends.

  I talked to a black policemen about the incident and Henry.

  Well, Henry’s in heaven now, he said.

  In heaven, after killing five men?

  He’s in heaven.

  But I can’t figure why he was allowed even on the streets of here, I said.

  This earth were not his home.

  You forgive him?

  There ain’t no other choice.

  Henry Modock was fifty-three when he died. He had got himself against the wall of the rented barracks compound where they all lived—he sometimes, when in good with Blackie. He continued to rave and to brandish. His son was somehow now in the camper. Henry pointed the gun. Modock rammed him against the wall of the barracks. Henry howled in agony, his last. The boy carried a nine-shot .22 revolver behind his leg. Henry, even in his parlous state, leveled the shotgun one more time. Modock shot him nine times, to death. One guesses it was in essence suicide, this act, but Henry went for the nastier patricide. Consistent with the riot of self-pity forever in the heart of most killers of his stripe. Legacy of the son with bloody hands. Taking you with me, boy. I love you that much. Squeeze on up here for a hug, it’s lonesome and deep here.

  Why’d you make me shoot you, Daddy? You knew we loved you, said Modock.

  This statement went out over the national wire along with the other ghastly events of that afternoon in Carriba. The big slick men’s magazine in New York called me. By the time I arrived the bodies were five months old.

  Around the room sat Ebbnut, Blackie, Modock and python and high school sweetie, and one of Blackie’s sister alcoholics, Pearl from down the road. The women were well into the beer. On the counter of the sink was four pounds of bleeding hamburger defrosting in pink webs over the brown-veined porcelain. Blackie thought I looked Filipino and this idea was hilarious to her and her mate, shrieking away. But the boys moved me. Ebbnut reminded me exactly of an old high school chum who had gone far on the trombone with merry diligence and very small talent. Modock, lean and hungry, startled and sad at the same time if you could tell by his green eyes, was flat-out pretty. He seemed not made for this earth either. He hardly spoke. I withered, already impertinent, an obscenity.

  My whole professional life reared up in my mind. I was a hag and a parasite. I was to be grave and eloquent over their story, these people I would not have spat at unless three people had been murdered. They were to get nothing. I was to get fame and good bucks, provided I was interesting. A great sick came on me. Already I was looking at leaner but better years.

  Minkle was not in the house. I believe she was currently over in Hattiesburg failing at something menial. Her ex-husband was in prison. Her grandfather, Blackie’s Pa, had been in prison. I had already seen him while tracing the new whereabouts of the Modocks. He was a little man out cutting a huge lawn around a tiny box of a house. You know: we’ve had our troubles, he said. He was worried about Blackie’s drinking problem. Blackie was currently worried about the $15,000 insurance on “my husband’s” life. She was also screaming at the police, wh
o would not return the clothes of “my husband.” For some reason she wanted back the clothes he had on when he was shot. When something was owed Blackie, I noted she struck the formal tone “my husband.”

  I saw them five times and at no time did anybody commiserate with the families of the dead policemen. They listened to a police-band radio for home entertainment, even still. I noticed police-band radios were the hottest item at every pawnshop in town. A running battle with the police was a fact as manifest as wallpaper. I’d noticed the same about some bikers in Pensacola I wrote about. Take away the harassment and dogged persecution of the police and the folks had little cause to exist. I suspected Blackie was a looker at one time but she was fast turning dry, blotched, and yellow, with dark teeth through which she issued this astounding promise: When I get my husband’s insurance money I’m gettin’ me a good gun. We need us a good gun.

  I nearly dropped my pencil. Modock was silent, as usual, with his sweetie pressing up to him, whispering about money, job, and car. Modock had a deep curious thing going with his ma, as most of us do, but these were Mississippi criminal Irish and among them Mama Love often kills, one way or the other. I began glaring at Blackie as the likely source of it all, or much of it. She caught on to this, got drunker, and I left with her spitting a much meaner and more poisonous laughter, as if I’d just kicked over her rock and she was lying all twisted and naked beyond my heels. Among the dispossessed you find an insane loyalty in family members that does not exclude murder of their own. Go ahead, Henry, and do what you have to do.