High Lonesome

by Barry Hannah

  I told Modock if he stayed here he would die. He should live in my town and give the line beginning with him another whole chance.

  Blackie, way in the background, had somehow heard me. I heard the shriek.

  Nevertheless, in two weeks, he was at my door, behind him Blackie in a smoking Pontiac belonging to her mate up front who was too drunk to drive. Little Ebbnut was in the backseat with his kind smile. The car filthy with oil and dust over mud. You could barely read the tag when they turned and left. Pearl River County. Modock had said only, I’m here. Blackie called out the words that still rang, in her hag’s shriek, I see where you live! See where you live, Filipino!

  I asked Modock, there with his bag and hound Beaumont on my front porch, where his sweetheart was. She’d barely left his hip when I was in Carriba.

  Put her away from me.

  And came right here.

  Like you said. Get a new life.

  It was June and I rented the house next door, a lesser brown box in this old exurb, not ranchy at all. More chicken-houselike but squared into four rooms inside as if by a child with a ruler. My wife was soon muttering, no surpise, since she’s from mother stock who’s narrowed the world down to one gallstone. But neveryoumind, I took her off to Paris, gave her a Gold card, put us up in a fancy hotel that was Gestapo headquarters during the Occupation, and climbed her like an alp while she grabbed the curtains. She came back dripping with history and stayed actually mute and tender toward the world for a couple weeks. Thing that saves us is that the house is enormous and I don’t see her for days. She deeply resented having to cook the one night for Modock, and I would pay for it, I knew. Please, please, punish me with silence, I begged her with my eyes. She panted back to her great leisure room where she has three-hour phone conversations with her kin about how many people they have told off today, barks of victory spilling out now and then like canned soundtrack. Great God, and here I was already going from upper to flat middle class, in some fear. They gave me a class in journalism at the university. It was hard being smooth and unneedy when I applied, but I had a name and I’d once witnessed for a prof there who stayed out of jail.

  I was eating with my cronies at a downtown pizza and pasta bar when something hit me hard in the back of the head. Then I heard the pop of a shoe, a sneaker on the plank floor, and saw a body in a jumpsuit hastening away, with girl hair on top of it. This was Minkle. I’d never seen her before and here she’s popped me among friends in a town absolutely strange to her. She turned, about twenty feet away, not looking even faintly like Blackie or the rest of them, and waved as if we’d been bosom chums since rocks and water. I had no idea who she was, but she hollered over.

  I’m here now. Come on in the house. Don’t be a stranger.

  As if I could sense who she was and she knew I could. And she was right. I was baffled a little by the blow to the head, but she couldn’t be anybody else.

  Soon afterward, it was at Kroger’s, where I enjoy watching others’ wives, a hard rod came in my ribs at an aisleturn. This hurt. It was Minkle at the end of a mop who’d rammed me. She had a broad smile on.

  Uh-oh! Watch out now!

  I was in misery and didn’t smile at all. I don’t think I said anything, just covered my ribs with my hands where it hurt, seriously hurt. Then she was gone, with a giggle.

  There was a vast chemical spill in Carriba years ago, from a plant that packed up and left. Downtown, a man walked the streets wearing bright universal orange tape around his knees. He said it was to keep alligators away. A policeman I spoke to over the phone told me that the town was run top to bottom by a conspiracy of homosexuals. Henry Modock had wandered freely here. Several claimed he was the nicest man they’d ever met, almost. The town drug dealer worked from a roadhouse and was straight out the worst man I’d ever looked at, a grim, giant-stomached muskrat with no shirt and enormous fat red feet in sandals. He was holding the youngest of his infants while his wife raised an ungodly din back in the living quarters. The man may have been furtive but it could have done him no good. He wasn’t even a modern criminal. He belonged in the line of psychotic white trash straight from the days of Mike Fink. Feet dyed by the pirate river. I heard he was sly and stayed out of prison because “he done good turns now and then for the police.” Yet he was arrested within the week on big drug charges. Everybody knew what he did and where he was. You’d get directions to Benny Harp, the drug dealer. Sure, the town had its mansions and fine people. A former governor had built a Spanish mansion here. I spoke to two of these prosperous good boys. Both of their wives had gone mad within a week of each other. Another told me he deeply feared the ocean. It was an hour and a half away. Yet another shot his father-in-law out of a tree stand, thinking he was a “wolfbear.” Straight across the Mississippi River in Louisiana was a north-south rough rectangle seventy miles long besotted by petrochemicals for generations. It had the highest incidence of cancer in the nation.

  So now Minkle. It was not clear for a while whether she’d moved in with Modock to save him or herself.

  She had a job at Wal-Mart and had begun wearing hosiery. She came up on that northern path they had made in the yard, almost under my window, to get in her car, a plain Ford given over by her prisoner ex-husband. She had a clean face and new shoes. Then she ran in the streets in the evenings, with a radio in her head, just like a coed. I saw her disappear down the hill, all shoe soles and butt, in her jogging Speedo. She was getting an overall suntan, perhaps at a gym, and in my indifference I watched the woman change from plain to outright fetching. In my patient geezer lechery I did admire her. She was a good big sister to Modock. The place was cleaner and there were flowers around. The hound got washed once a week and began to appear sleek and noble, with a nice leather collar and vaccination tag on him. I think even his posture improved. He would stare out at the street like a perfectly adapted suburban philosopher, rich in black and tan.

  I was out getting the paper in the drive early on a Saturday, didn’t see it, and bent down to a bush where it might be hidden. She was in the bush and whapped me upside the head with my own rolled newspaper.

  Lookin’ for somethin’, neighbor?

  You’re a rough one, aren’t you?

  Can’t you take it?

  I reached over and yanked down her Speedo bra, then slapped her mildly.

  Good morning, I said.

  She set herself right, not as shocked as she might be and a smile coming up.

  I brought you some rent. She had money in her hand. I looked at it and was puzzled, then all at once touched. It was green and black cash, somewhat wet in her palm, twenties I guess. You could feel the hours in it, the earning, like the money of a kid at a lemonade stand.

  When you get on your feet—, I started.

  We on our feet.

  Very well.

  I almost didn’t take it. Maybe I wanted to own them a bit longer.

  Modock’s not going to college, is he? I said to her.

  No. But I am. He’s swore nonviolence. Too many persons around give him trouble.

  What does he do after work over there?

  I have to open a big can of whupass on bro now and then, get him out of that stare, not eatin’.

  You beat up Modock?

  I get his attention. What he did, there’s not many like him in the world, you know. But he’s got to unbrood himself and move on.

  There was a man in town who had killed his mother. Her death was a drunken accident in a car he drove through police roadblocks with his mother, eighty, as a passenger. She was thrown from the car. After his arrest they watched him for suicide. Only a mattress in a windowless room at the hospital. We all expected him to go to prison. It was the worst thing one could do, this matricide, and prison would not touch the guilt, we imagined. I suppose we expected him to crumble and seek hell. But mourning has its limits. I would guess there might come a day when you do not murder yourself with grief, you have become a part of it. You are the definition of grief, and yo
u keep moving, a monster beyond atonement, a shadow of guilt on the wall to your neighbors. His sister wrote the judge a moving letter. The man did no prison time. He is simply doing time there in the grocery store. People, including me, do not know how to look at him even when we say hello. He is the permanent bottom line of horror, maybe even another breed.

  I wondered should this man and Modock meet. Should they form a rare club.

  But Modock worked and came home. He was looking thin and sorry. They told me he was neither good nor bad at work. His boss said this odd thing: Modock doesn’t want to know or remember things. Every day it’s like he just first came on the job. He didn’t mind being shouted at. He never laughed at a joke.

  They had been in town several months before Modock missed a day of work. I noted his leftward auto at the curb around eleven and went over. The house was dark and Modock sat on a far chair in boxer underwear with a bar of light across his eyes. The eyes seemed out on stalks away from the grave and emaciated face. They seemed cracked with light inside. Modock had become a haint of his former self. He scared me. I got him a glass of water and felt heat coming off his body from his fingers. He said he had been throwing up a little. The old television was not on, only the hum of the refrigerator was heard, aggressive, a raw and odd tune here.

  Black girls, he said. Two black girls at work found out what I did with my daddy. They said I had taken the hell from him and now the hell was in me. I was hell and I was in hell and there was forever a mark on me, which I already knew.

  Now you’ve just talked yourself into a case of the flu, boy.

  I don’t have the flu.

  Your pa was begging you to shoot him. Like he was on fire and couldn’t stand it.

  I was doing all right until somebody said it, them girls.

  He wanted company in hell but don’t give it to him, nor to your mother.

  I’m not having a new life.

  Sink then. Call your mama and get another lease on the old shit.

  Blackie in fact had been calling me for a while, always something, but unbearable when she was drunk. The police would not give back “my husband’s” camper or his clothes or Modock’s gun, either. She’d go down and raise hell at the station. But now she wanted to sell her life story for a great deal of money. I would write it. I’m afraid not, I told her. She then told me I’d better watch out for Modock. No, I won’t, I said.

  In a week I saw the car over there, rammed up to the porch. Ebbnut was around, assisting something with a burred tail, moving it into the house. This was the bobcat, still muddy from the swamps near Carriba. Modock wasn’t moving out as I’d thought. They’d brought more of Carriba to him. Poor Ebbnut was even more swollen. Some say depression among the poor shows up instantly as fat. The boy was not only neckless but nigh to growing another face across. Blackie, of course, was lean in her alcoholism. Already she had married another wretch, a man who stayed behind the wheel. Modock had had three other stepdads while Henry was in prison. This one didn’t even cause a ripple. He seemed merely frozen in the act of valet. Imagine the bite of such love as he could wrest at evening from each day’s journey.

  I suddenly thought of my own case. I had wanted a great woman but then I was not a great man, always in this swoon of brooding. Even my aldermanship was a stretch. I did not care that much.

  Frozen at the wheel of this my old Mercury of a body, driven up on foreign shores, weary of the music from my ancient radio, beyond me barely intelligible voices in odd rooms, an eye out for the leap of the unexpected. It was ever thus. I was never firmly native to anywhere. Yet ravenous for the unexpected. Half amazed that others even bother to carry on.

  I at last danced with Minkle. I saw her alone at that discotheque two art queers began with one’s grandfather money. It was an instant failure and I felt sorry for the fellows. They thought a revival would be all the rage. But not here. Only Minkle and a few others came. She was dancing with one of the owners under great speakers full of Donna Summer and the Bee Gees. There was a billiard table lit in the corner and big dying ferns of all nations set around. Big pulse, a raised platform for styling where sad queers offered themselves up to the lonely passion of the Pet Shop Boys. One grabbed a silver fireman’s pole and expressed himself around it, dying as if rammed by heaven.

  I walked over and popped her a stout one against the head. Drunk and in blue jeans, I was not recognized at first. But then she held her head and smiled. At last I was Bob Bubb, famous old son of her orbit. I was down in the bottoms with the boys, lanterns and dogs on the hunt for a screaming bobcat, or painter as they called them down Carriba way.

  Oh oh you’re so extreme I want to take you home with me.

  I went flailing around the beat, another sad old married like most of the queers in this town.

  We danced something out, god knows what, but I was earnest, earnest, wanting out and up so badly. All this weight we get in time. It isn’t that childhood was any better, it’s that it was so much lighter.

  I whispered to her I wanted to be crucified upside down like Saint Peter over her naked form. Of course she didn’t hear me. Or maybe she did. When the tune stopped she tore up my hair with her hands and cracked me across the back of the head with an elbow. My hair was ruined and flared-out like Stan Laurel’s, I saw in the mirror. My fly was unbuttoned and Minkle corrected this. She had on a tie-dyed T-shirt. I had felt sorry for her, out there with that gay fellow. Give her a break and let her dance with an alderman and former journalist. I was a worthy, many respected me. She was rising.

  Now she had a job at the university television station. She helped produce programs for welfare mothers that educated them for the mainstream, a government project with a heartwarming acronym attached run by a shady parasite who kept a car phone in his bass boat. The sparse crowd of collegiates out on the floor reminded me she was taking several classes.

  You’ve done well, Minkle, with your talents here, I said.

  You mean barely high school?

  I mean the Carriba situation. A place develops its own luck, you know. A family from Carriba lived near me when I was growing up. Terrible things were always happening to them. Car wrecks, cancer, fires. Boat explosions. Saying all this made me sober, I swear. There was something true about it that cut through nine drinks and brought on a brightly lit melancholy.

  You know it wasn’t but the one thing, she said.

  The one thing?

  That Modock was worth coming here for a fresh start. Well I went on and interpreted that I might be worth it too. You gave us that.

  Modock doesn’t seem—

  Modock is dying, man. He’s either going to make it or he’s not. I believe he almost has to die and get better. Or not. I know it.

  He could talk to a doctor, I guess. Tell it to a group, I said.

  No. One of those days one of them would say to him: I know how you feel. Then I’d go up there and tear into them and want our money back. It’s in the blood, man. My mother Blackie beat up several doctors.

  When I left the disco, walking, I was drunk again and melancholy both. I wandered to the front window of an auto parts dealer chum of mine, as if he’d be open. He was marrying the ex-wife of a rich doctor. I wanted to explain to him how important friendship was in this cold universe. I wanted to explain to him that what television and bad American movies had done was to make us doubt that others even existed except as a shadow play. That virtual reality and cyberspace would complete the job. That you could not be sure that you were at your own father’s funeral. Or think the woman squirming under you was only good if it would make a good movie. Or doubt that there had been any football on a live field because there was no replay. As some GI in his first firefight in Vietnam was supposed to have hollered out: Where’s the soundtrack!? That the poisonous excuse for all bad on television was that: But it’s true. I was hammering on the glass doors, wanting my chum to be in and talk this over. When I turned around, in front of the grocery store in his apron with meat stains on
it, there under the fluorescent lights having a cigarette, was the man who’d killed his mother.

  I rushed home and woke up my wife. I pulled the gown back down to her waist and gave her a massage, in terrible grief. We have to love each other, I said. Even if we don’t want to, we have to. Cling to a buoy even though half of it’s shot away.

  I love you too, she said. Leave me be, midnight poet.

  But I was back in the disco the next night as if to complete something unfinished. That ’70s music. During Vietnam I was in Korea in the army around the 38th parallel. In bell-bottoms, beads, and bandanna wrap, a buddy and I used to give the finger to the Koreans across the valley who rolled out artillery from their caves every morning. That was some bad dope. We had been listening to the bulletproof Hendrix.

  For the longest while even fewer people were coming in. Some of them were even more pathetic than the other evening. I sensed they were trying to be queer but hadn’t the moves. I loved it, racing through vodka martinis and huge onions.

  I waited and waited and waited, staring at the baroque mirror at a man who was dwindling into something else. I would bark out involuntarily sometimes, as if with Tourette’s syndrome, saying No! No! Perhaps I had taken on some of Modock’s grief, was now a barking dummy for the killer son. I hadn’t meant to, but I kept erupting, as if somebody was there accusing me. Finally the whap on the back of the head came, but not so hard, even some tenderness in it. I turned and it was Minkle, but she was accompanied by the long-haired lawyer, young and blond, pretty vacant in the face.

  She put her hands around my neck and dragged me to her. Next I knew my head was turned and she was pouring a kiss down my mouth, a tongue in there. It was ten years since I’d had a kiss like this. My wife used to be good at it in her throes. But hell, I knew what Minkle was up to. She was kissing a man of importance to mark the fact that she had classy friends.