Barry Hannah - Ray

ARE we here? Is everybody here? I have scored six points, the lights are up, but the stadium is empty. Want to do it again, Westy? Want to get married again? Want to be in the day instead of just walking through it and paying the bills? The deck has gone out from under my legs and we’re on the rocks and we’re on fire. Handsome craft, pure white, with sails up and now it’s not going anymore. She was blue-eyed, white. But now it’s raining fire. Everywhere you lift your eyes, a rain of cinders.

You get to the end, and you’re still swimming.

The people sing. My heart is all over my front yard. I am still reading Bill Shakespeare.

Bob Moony’s here. Mr. Hooch is here. There’s no other reason to be in Tuscaloosa.

Mike White is here. For God’s sake, where else is there? That’s why a lot of people are here.

All we have is together.

And sometimes I cure others.

Christ be with my friend Phil Beidler. He has a polyp on his vocal cords. I thought he might have C. Called Ned Graves in Jackson, Mississippi. Best one in the world with the knife on the throat. Phil was knocking down two packs of Marlboros a day. Like me, he loves his ciggies. Called Ned up. He was drunk, but wanted to fly over and get the C out of Phil. But good old Phil didn’t have it. Ned’s only twenty-eight, works in clear weather. No damned war memories. He just walks in with five knives, and can see cancer with his own eyes. Knifes them off. Only lost two patients in all his time. A nurse was the cause once. She overanesthetized the little boy. Ned went out in the parking lot, put the nurse in the front seat of his Mustang convertible, sat there saying nothing for fifteen minutes. She didn’t have a driver’s license and she was night-blind — big, thick glasses.

“You killed him,” said Ned.

“I wish you weren’t so emotional.”

“You killed the boy.” Ned drew on his cigarette. “Walk home.”

“I live in Pelahatchie. That’s twenty miles.”

“Walk home.”

So Ned is there, and I think of Ned. Sometimes it is better to think of your friends.

IN desperation, I got a little dog named Elizabeth, spotted, three-quarters bird dog, abandoned by some person and running around the parking lot of the apartment where my stepson Tommy lives. You know how dogs are faithful. But she chewed everything. She chewed the shoes, the Oriental rugs, and the windowsills, plus leaving diarrhea all over the house. But her eyes were deep, hopeful, and oozy with affection. Thing is, her existence broke up Westy and me almost. Elizabeth ate a couple of pairs of Westy’s sexiest sandals.

Born to chew, apparently.

The feet of Westy are so beautiful.

I finally wanted to get rid of the dog.

The bare feet and the toes in the golden high heels will bring a man on when he’s entering his lady. You look at those and hear your woman moaning with pleasure and there’s something so deeply elegant to the erotic that you’ve got to look into Penthouse after you’ve finished making love to be sure it really happened.

So I took the little dog out and kissed her goodbye.

I HAVE talked of pornography and medicine and love of art — which is Mr. Hooch’s poems.

Many friends around.

And I work here and crank up the bodies that are slow.

Westy has gotten so absorbed by inflation and her stepchildren that she does not raise her happy irises to me anymore. She cleans the clothes and makes suppers and if she is not a lesbian, then what is she?

I am drinking five bottles of wine a day just to stay cool. Looking forward to the football at Alabama. I’m not going crazy and am not violent. I could play better tennis if my habit on nicotine would give up. I roam in the past for my best mind.

I HAD a little hashish and some Jack Daniel’s, so I went out to Tuscaloosa airport, broke in the hangar, and took up the Pfeiffer Wire Learjet. Wanted to go everywhere. Refueled in Atlanta. Then I was all out of chemicals and had to do it on guts to get near Toronto, over the border. No chance. I was out of fuel, lights were off. So I crashed it in a small lake by the woods. First time Ray ever had a crash. Had his son’s new guitar so as to strum along and almost burned it up too.

I walked away from there and the Lear blew up and took away about an acre of pines. I could not believe I lost that much good equipment. But wait a minute. The explosion lifted my son’s guitar out of the cockpit, and I saw the bright strings loft over the pines and I ran and caught it.

So I hitchhiked back to New York, where I had a friend. I got a sailboat to outside of Philly. Then I rode a train back to here.

I was black as an Indian when I arrived at the door of my tranquil house. I’d lost weight. I was back to a hundred and forty, as in high school. My lovely, caring brother Robert was in the house, They all had huge eyes, worrying if I was dead.

“Who are you?”

“Your relative,” I said.

WESTY gave me a roll yesterday. A good one. Toes and all.

Also the phone came in from Mr. Hooch. He’s beating the shit out of Shakespeare with his new ones.

YOUR hat’s rotting off. It’s hot. You’re not sure about your horse. Or the cause. All you know is that you are here — through the clover, through the low-hanging branch, through the grapeshot.

All of it missed you.

Your saber is up, and there goes your head, Christian.

I SEE no pressing reason to get out of bed. The lights are off and it is raining and the covers are the cave I dreamed of when I was a child. I am pretending to be sick — a faker like some of my patients. I dream of monsters that cannot get me. Ha ha. The covers touch me like mother hands. The memories of war talk in the house when I was growing up jabber around, and I close my eyes and bury my face in the pillow like little Ray of three. Bill and Elizabeth told me what an unexpected event I was, and that’s how I feel to this day. Even I don’t expect me. If I could happen, anything could.

Sister is knocking on the door, with a cry as dismal as when I first saw her in her funny gown on the railroad tracks.

Charlie DeSoto is knocking there too. He says he’s got a new bow and arrow. My God, that interests me about as much as a traffic jam.

“You want to shoot some gar?” he says.

Westy was out of town. There was nothing else crazy to do. So we went. We went out Highway 82 to the swamps of the Sipsey River. And there the huge, rolling, scaly, comb-toothed, vicious-snouted gar were not waiting. We were over our shoes in mud, and it was drizzling dirty rain, getting chilly, and the water was as still as oil.

There was one woodpecker going at it in the high branches of a dead tree. It was the only sign of life, and we’d been there two hours.

Charlie looked up at the woodpecker. Then he loaded the bow.

“Aw, Charlie,” I said.

“If I don’t kill something, I’m going to kill my wife,” he said.

Says I, “Go ahead. You ain’t going to hit it, anyway.”

But he did. The arrow rose from the bow as dead-sure as a heat-seeker and skewered the lovely redheaded thing, went on up into the air with the bird still on it.

TO live and delight in healing, flying, fucking. Here are the men and women.

HE waded, then swam. Then he came back the same way, sand and tears in his eyes. I say, “You must’ve been shooting that bow for a while.”