High Lonesome

by Barry Hannah

  But Minnie’s companion, who pays high for this act, is not casual. Things intended and designed pour out from him without stop, and it is the same Minnie, the goddess of this place and introduced to strange life by poverty, who fractures you in her quietness. She’s almost on her knees but I suppose actually in a crouch before his knees with his hands on each like a priest speaking his best sermon. But she is pitched close to the attitude of the outright kneel.

  Slut tramp whore rimsucker harlot Ford Escort blow job, he keeps going on as she listens calmly. Hag bitch scum. In the whisper, hardly a breath between.

  Yes sir, she says.

  Right as hell you swallow it all. Gutter lizard.

  Yes sir.

  Right now, come and die bitch, right now. Get off and die. I’ll keep on while you’re dead.

  Then he shows just a flick of his rock-hard eyes down at Minnie’s face. In that second you can see very sadly how much he wants to be her.

  Netherson. I never meant to meet Netherson, who once for a whole week had nothing to eat in Amarillo, Texas. He slept in a park in Amarillo and played checkers for food with people better than he and always lost. The cops would come by rousting him from the park and other hard beds under trees near water. He was too weak to do much but sleep but he couldn’t even finish a nap. The cops had his number, and he was black as a further kicker. He is something of a legend here, having missed many meals back then in his questing youth. He hit the road with absolutely nothing, which those who write about it never really do. He never had a dog companion. He was just himself and bone needy all over the West, Northeast, Midwest, and South, where he finally stopped when work opened. Netherson as a barman is a black zombie. He is moved by nothing, but he seems to be called by something, a voice is persistent in his forehead, you can almost see it in the wires of his temples. He is called away, he’s not standing here, not looking at you. Some believe he’s a god, especially the girls, he’s somebody long ago crucified now back to show you his hands, the ones pushing the drink to you, no expression in his face, nothing.

  I did not want to meet him. He scares me. But once I saw those dead eyes briefly come alive to some softness like a hamster’s or a small child’s. He scares me like something out of a sea bottom. Behind him the putty is flaking down at the bottom of the long bar mirror where the sunlight always hits with that one beam, just that one beam. A flashlight beam at the bottom of Netherson’s sea and this disturbs me. People look at Netherson and laugh that laugh of deserted insides, very flat, no reaction from him. It occurs to me all the laughter here is like that. Even the two waiting for me to come back and get my treatment when I bring the order.

  Minnie, almost to the full kneel like a woman in church, I think of her and Netherson getting naked together, for he is her man. That’s hard to realize. She’s his woman and you can’t believe he ever asked for anything. Although I am ashamed and even cruel sometimes, I need to be with some woman, testament to my existence. Be in a suit have some money sell something travel. Somebody would sort of miss me. Netherson stuck on himself in his zombiehood. If my cat would die I could have freedom and a personality maybe but I love the cat. She reminds me there is not much to it, only the noise, and sleeps three quarters of the day.

  The hands on the clock seem like snakes any minute to curl out and fall on your neck. But on my boots I can rise, I am solid, I can stand with Netherson, I have the soul of an implacable Negro. In certain moments, not many, I can reasonably imagine a tall naked woman standing there beside me with her hand on my butt, saying, Yes I am all his. Sometimes I think about my mother’s panties and where I came from, place to place to place. She was tall and strong and my father was in helicopter technology, a civilian hired by different arms of the service. I was not curious enough to ask much about him and now I realize he might have been interesting although something about my devoted apathy in my teens wouldn’t let me like him. He loved it that helicopters packed the most punch in modern war. He was short, but he stood tall on that fact, and he stood tall in lots of places, Florida, Oregon, Delaware.

  My mother would tremble at the window when he was overhead in a helicopter. She was a nervous woman, but tall and strong. Even nervous my mother was stronger than my father. He was freckled with round shoulders but he had fine fingers for his work and in Louisiana he received an award on the tarmac near those tall pines and red dirt. The pines had moss hanging down and I was back in a veil of it pretending I was dead while the helicopters in the air went by pop pop pop packing their punch. Much of what I see reminds me of death but death is interesting, not just sitting there. It is red, green, and blue of dirt, pines, and sky, and it is moving around, my mother being nervous there at the window. Death was like Stalin moving behind the scenes with a mustache killing every other person, Stalin the very man my father opposed, as I gather. Yet he died and they cut the brain out of his head to study.

  I had a dream about Stalin in my room looking for his brain. My mother was in the dream, still nervous, she seemed to know where it was. My dead father was sailing around the room showing everybody his lung cancer but laughing at Stalin even though he hardly ever laughed when he was alive. I want to be dead like Netherson, nothing in my eyes, maybe be nothing but black muscle with eyes in it. Minnie would come to me. No more on her knees making extra money listening and agreeing. No more enduring this shame and this slackness and the total indifference of Netherson.

  Death, let’s get it on, I say.

  Not so fast though.

  Here we go again at my table. Look who’s back, the lone wartberry, guy says.

  While I’m holding the trays up, the man who looks like me except groomed has not said a word yet, but he has roll crumbs on his mouth and the white sauce of the salad remains in a line across his upper lip. He does not eat well, so impatient he is, while the other goes on.

  We are sworn to bring the message home to you, Wartly. We do wish we could see your dreams. Most waiters are waiting until a better thing turns up. But you, Wartly, seem already promoted beyond your talents. This man speaking is courtly, of the world. Even his rich tie looks born for him, his shoes are loving animals gathered to his feet. When I brought him more tea, the meal had not tired him at all. He says, Our old pale old Wartly. Why are you alive? Could it be that anyone would find you necessary? We’ve figured you as a walking breathing missing person but nobody searching for you.

  Yes who? The other man, even more like me suddenly, finally spoke. His look lingered on me. I could hardly believe he had spoken. He is moving up in my eyes and shoulders with his expression. He is taking possession, after long patience, in exasperation, is how it feels. I move away from myself into even further nothing, not toward death, not toward Netherson, and I float out the window, past Minnie Hinton still on her knees before her paying customer, always right, the hissing man, him set there in a pout, and I float out into the alley into the hot meat exhaust fan and pavement oil with my arms around the Dumpster, is how it feels.

  I could be Fagmost, on the other hand. He is that drunkard always sick under the stands after every ball game, puking up his guts but smiling. He screams at the team for three solid hours and then you will see him dancing alone in the lowbrow clubs around town. You see him on his hands and knees but making kick motions like a dancer shot down. Then one night two policemen piled into the crowd and dragged Fagmost off, him all wet in his lumpy flower shirt and dirty beard. He never claimed to be nice like everybody around here aspires to. I am nice, I am all right. What a nothing to be said, no? Why, he turned on the television just to get another herd of foreigners to scream at. He fed stray cats is the best thing I know about him. I could be him, but I doubt I have the staying power to be a good drunkard. You see Fagmost trying to eat a hearty meal, the way his lips quiver and he scrapes around at it, this man can move you with his lack of memory and gut persistence. He is smiling, mostly, and you see him back under the stands of the football stadium, puking without a thought of the well-dressed wo
men around him and all the while wearing his smile. My Lord if I, say, had a good four-year war behind me and was a hopeless lush carried down the street by a flock of children on Memorial Day, that would be something like Fagmost, that would be Fagmostian, I wouldn’t have to stand for any of this over at that table. Nobody wants to take the time to insult Fagmost, he is so out there.

  But I just want to eat candy and drink three sodas with it then fall asleep with a sweat on me watching some women prisoners in slips on the television, wanting to be their guard. I would even wear a slip too just for fun because all women know how to talk. I would like to have a poison ivy rash and have them scratch it for me, all in their slips and their little folkways to cure what ails you.

  Or I could be Jimmy with Mr. Beckett in the alley. Jimmy wears a football helmet and Mr. Beckett follows him with a cane. They are inseparable. Jimmy pigeon-toed and hunchbacked. He gimps along slowly looking at the pavement, while Mr. Beckett follows. Then he will strike Jimmy over the helmet with the cane, blap, and there you are their never-ending street playhouse. Jimmy goes into a howling fit to remark on his discomfiture and sends Mr. Beckett down to hell several times. Then Mr. Beckett extends his hand, apologizes. They make up and move on to drink coffee in the town café across the street under a marlin on the walls. They are feebleminded but they have structure and design such as discussed in that class at the UI took. Wouldn’t you imagine Mr. Beckett is a god, and Jimmy, looking for cans to cash in, his faithful servant? While I serve and yet never serve anything.

  While the two are finishing up their meal I don’t have to look over there. I can feel that one’s eyes on my back. The clock is hard to watch too the way it is rushing forward and the hands trying to get out like snakes. It is hot on my back and the one at the table is running after me down a gray alley with the air heavy in hot meat exhaust every damned pizza ever consumed like preflatulence of the eating mobs. I’m out of breath just turning around and my bare legs over my boots look like thin milky sticks to run on, they can’t carry on much farther, I should have done more exercise like God intends for real men only I’m in love with my weakness, women in slips could stand and lie all around me licking my disease, they go for weak men you know, oh yes they love nothing better than a bad poet who needs all kinds of help and understanding even to finish out a new poem about self-abuse. The man handles me somehow, yes his fingers go around my neck become snakes off the clock, next the way he steps into me with his knees behind my knees, paralyzing me to make me buckle like somebody collapsed in love. He is like smoke and he wears me like a suit or maybe just underwear.

  My mother, the strong one, taller than both my father and me, she was always at the window nervous, looking out at the flatness of the airfields where my father worked. She said she wondered why we needed to go to the moon, we already lived on it, we had lived on many moons, one moon-scape to the next. They are making my mind flat, she said, and she never complained much. My tits are going flat, my breast does not swell, no heart in it I can see out there honestly try as I might, then try to love again in another place, wherever God has furnished another pool table for their little games. You can’t just peer out to the flats forever. I can’t love again, I can’t. You will have to make do with some younger gypsy with huge breasts. Even in her depression my mother was strong, you see. But she pitied me and all the ones over the world who were never quite dead but little else. That is the trouble with everything, she said, new people are not quite loved like I can’t quite love you or your father. On the streets in the airports in the churches in the stores they are not quite loved. You can see it in almost everybody’s eyes. They are paying for somebody to love them, they are trying to make up somebody who loves them, but everybody’s soul is stretched out flat, we just are things to sit something on like airfields. There are too many places too many pictures. Nobody can get to them except crazy people like my own father your granddaddy. He was crazy but he taught me to love and be loved.

  My father, I just remembered. He was working on a strange gas with a space name to power a weapon that in a single helicopter you had the gunforce to level a block in Manhattan at midnight in a storm. He worked always deep into the night even at home and he loved those Winston cigarettes. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer his doctor suggested he sue the government because that space gas had a direct bearing and he the doctor would testify so. But see this, my father was a patriot as well as a small genius and he could not in good heart as he put it, and with cancerous lungs as he could have, sue his own government even if it would provide millions and Harvard for me and a palace in the mountains for my mother although my mother always said she just wanted one small Ozark to live on at last, she was from Arkansas and that’s all she dreamed of, just the one little mountain. So he just blamed the Winstons alone and nobody knew of the other until his partner later died too with tumors like fists in his head and lungs and liver.

  The very next day after my father was diagnosed, I mean the next day after that ceremony on the tarmac, helicopters saluting him from overhead in a squadron, I watched where he got the award. In Louisiana. The moss hung from the limbs of the pines and the sun up like bright hell, the sky just stupid and blue, a skinny squirrel running behind the grandstand over the tarmac like some rat making a protest, all that pavement and bop bop bop ping metal sound overhead. Before he began crying and getting smaller, he said, Yes, there are too many. God bless war otherwise the pestilential hordes reaching up to level us. There you’d really have your flat plains. You can never trust an armed corporal, boys and girls, something’s different there no matter what you read. Trust this, history will always create a monster to harvest the millions. We should worship the helicopter, boy, god of our times, Hitler Stalin Mao, Hussein, all of them corporals. There is not even such a thing as a personal soul in many countries. The souls were dead already waiting for Marx, all he was was the final announcement. I am dying for you, I have had hell so you may carry on. Love me, every breathing motherfucker around me. I give you my lungs and heart to eat thereof. I taste like a sword.

  When I turn to take the bill over, the man who looks just like me is standing right in my face. His meal is all in his breath.

  Isn’t it time we met? he asks. Please take off that apron.

  Repulsed

  WHEN THE DETECTIVE COMES HE IS NEVER WHAT YOU WOULD think at all. The questions aren’t fair as you’d presume. But his gun and cigarettes are very long. They become enormous batons eventually. And my gracious the boots. They are like elegant scrollworked skis and the points on them could flatten a roach in a corner. As he remonstrates you feel that more honestly he would kick you in both eyes with them and slide in your blood.

  For many years I was quiet. I did not talk, I had nothing to say long—millennia, it seemed—after the event of my puberty. I did not quite all shut up, not enough, because when my words went out they were worthless, mere agreement with the village wisdoms so that I could occupy my rented space without trouble. It’s the confidence that he is renting space, no more, that marks the foreigner, whereas the loud citizens call out as if rooted to favorable ground in a fort with hooting windows. I prayed to be firm, I prayed to be even sullen in my adolescence. But I was too much the blown leaf cracked dry under their boots, not even ignored. At the end I begged strong drink and large women to relieve me, just as I had while an urchin begged the walnut orchard to let go and smite me with those heavy nuts in their pods. Help me, touch me. I wished for women on bicycles to race to me with their hair like ragged wings, flying. I begged for that but could barely find my voice.

  But once, playing my forlorn old trumpet, can’t it be forgiven that I saw her through the bare limbs of the tree next to my house in its March agony, into where the woman was, not on a bicycle come to snatch me up, but an older woman? Only in night dreams could I abide her. She was eating an enormous piece of bread, I thought, the whole loaf of French bread. It was so large it looked to be a separate thing delivered to her out
of her drapes. A buttered French bread afloat there at her lips.

  Long, long afterwards, long beyond that moment I held at my belly my old trumpet tasting of wet zinc, long after the woman seated almost clothed there through the bare notch of the early March limbs, past the years I drank enough to talk, then got gnawed by every wrong kind of woman there was, gnawed and thrashed by their awful stories (because I made them tell all to learn what being rightly human was about, even the woman who kept marrying others while we were courting I made tell everything before she got off her bicycle); on past this I only half realized what I had seen. Can’t I be pardoned, because what ecstasy holds a candle to the sudden intelligence one is granted years, whole cycles of war and famine, after viewing a rare event in ignorance? The collision of mind and flesh, all your veins pumped with light. Your own sweet innocence brings tears to your eyes, which see again revised, nostalgia on you like a barrel of walnuts. Time has been a kind uncle saving your inheritance until the moment was right. He has been patient, his hands out to you over the years. The woman’s husband was a rented soul too, in our neighborhood of pale clerks in their red brick dormings. He too was dull. He came to this town where nobody would ever ask him, How could you deserve this wife of yours? Drudge as you are, teacher of religious education, you must have rich hidden gifts, eh? This town with a surplus of flanking churches where the unctuous and the grim were sanctified. No ruffians took him off to the alley and told him, Your face is getting on our nerves, see, gray fool. While I played my trumpet at all their studied venerable blank heads, unable to speak.

  After that afternoon their marriage somehow ground to a halt, a halt of a halting anyway, and a muted scandal hung around them when he went away. I would have known everything, had I known. She was Mediterranean, a little anyway, although her voice was the same as everyone’s. Some Sicilian, maybe, frowning out of her. Or she could be a tropical Jewess. I thought I had driven them apart with my trumpet and was vain. In three separate sleeps I dreamed of her and I was ruined for the regular girls. I couldn’t speak to them anyway. At every pass I was vanquished except in a state contest where they gave me a yellow ribbon for superior.