Barry Hannah - Ray

“There’s something you should tell me. Something’s with you. Something’s lying heavy on you.”

“Basically, Westy, I would like, after we say goodnight to the children, that you sit on my face and let me lick your thing. Like on the honeymoon.”

“Oh, boy,” she says.

Westy is so happy. Her feet are moving this way and that way over the car pedals.

Sweet God, there is nothing like being married to the right woman.

WE have come up in a meadow, all five hundred horses. We are in the Maryland hills and three hundred yards in front of us are the Federals, about fifty of them in skirmish line. What they can’t see are the five Napoleon howitzers behind us.

Jeb Stuart is as weary as the rest of us, but he calls for sabers out. Our uniforms are rotting off us. It’s so hot and this gray cloth is so hot. There is a creek behind us. I dismount and we send the orderlies back to the creek. It is delightful to see them bring water back to the horses and me. The water is thunderously refreshing, though you can’t drink too much if we have to fight. I would prefer not to fight them, but I can see they’ve rolled in a cannon and mean business.

Thing is, all the blue boys are going to die. And we have to do something quickly or they’ll tell General McClellan where we are.

Stuart says to me, “Hold two hundred horses with you, Captain. Let us start the cannons and I will go forward.”

Then we kissed each other, as men who are about to die.

Our horses covered the howitzers.

They let off theirs. It hits in the trees. These are fresh boys. They don’t even really know how to shoot. Yet all of them must die.

I say, “General Stuart, I can kill them all from here. I suggest we don’t charge.”

He made the order to hold the sabers up.

“What do you mean?”

“Observe us, General.”

We had captured an ammunition wagon and it had the twenty-pound shells in it. You could hit a chicken in the middle of the head from this range.

“Do it rapidly, Captain.”

I make the order. The cavalry feints to its left. The Federals are confused. Pellham fires the howitzers.

Ooooof Oooof Oooooof Oooooof Oooooooof.

Then again. Five of them are left, and all wounded. One older man is standing up, living but bewildered, with all his friends dead around him.

“Hello, friend,” I say.

“Are you Jeb Stuart?”

“No. I am his captain,” I say.

“It was too quick for us, Captain,” the man says.

Then the banjo player came up and we drank their coffee and ate the steaks on the fires. We threw earth over the dead. Stuart went out in the forest and wept.

Then all of us slept. Too many dead.

Let us hie to Virginia, let us flee.

I fell asleep with the banjo music in my head and I dreamed of two whores sucking me.

I LIVE in so many centuries. Everybody is still alive.

WHAT I liked was the tea and bridge club. There were a lot of people around, beautiful young women and handsome men, young and old. It was a large living room in a mansion, and they threw the curtain back after the bridge was over. Husbands and wives were naked in different positions. It was like a dream. A soft-spoken woman asked us to go up on stage and remove our clothes. We were a little bit ashamed. But once Westy and I were into the act of love, we could not help it. There was a woman in real estate. She was wearing a violet gown, high-heeled silver sandals. She had a lecture stick. She did a lot of pointing with it at Westy and me. She said Westy and me were the newest thing.

When I had given my sperm to Westy, the audience stood up and applauded.

Good old Tuscaloosa.

THERE is Ray’s son Barry, a boy with a sweet brain and only fifteen.

There is Ray’s sister, Dorothy.

There are Ray’s parents, Elizabeth and Bill.

There are his nephews, Ken and Taylor, and his brother-in-law, John, another doctor and a good one.

How about we have us a nature walk? The trees, the mountains. Or let us dance at Lee’s Tomb, the cavernous saloon near the river and the docking port for trucks.

Sister was there, as were Charlie DeSoto and his girl, Eileen. They are married now. And they look very sad. There is something about marriage that brings on a certain sadness, as if burying the glad part.

Sister is prosperous now that she and Marcel Smith have an album out that is selling big. She has a marvelous suntan and she is wearing jewelry all over her. She looks very self-assured and gives me a self-assured kiss. The Locust Fork Band is playing. That’s Asa, Dwight, Bill. God bless you, niggers, for the music.

Besides the small friendly vagina and the blue eyes, Westy has sympathy. We shall be married forever.

Westy, my wife, my darling.

I hate to depend on another human being this much. But nobody is his own boy. Her breasts, her lovely feet, her cheerfulness, her care.

But I still want to fight. I still want to put it to somebody, duke a big guy out. Like the asshole who came in who had shot two of his children and broken the arm of his wife. He was an alcoholic red-neck and had a lot of Beechnut chewing tobacco on him. He really smelled lousy. Before I could ask him anything, he found a razor blade and came at me, his doctor! Lucky that Ray still has his quickness. The bastard missed me with the razor, and I kicked him in the gonads.

Certain people are this way. They kill everybody around, for one reason or another. He went to the pen, but I would like to see him tortured in a dungeon to get back the suffering he has caused.

The waving grass of the prairies, the moon settling over Minnesota over the lake. Me and my son Barry are having a good time. It is sunset and there are no loud noises. There are only us, and we’ve caught some bass and pickerel. My daughter Lee is paddling the canoe for us. Utter fucking peace.

Debbie, psychotherapist, is another person I’d like to see buried. She thinks you get the best out of people when you get them all in a room and ask them humiliating questions. She’s about six feet tall and drives her Fiat convertible around town, being queen of the world. She’s from Ohio, which is the worst state in the union.

Ohio is silly.

Ken, my nephew, once asked me as we were going to sleep after some snapper fishing in Destin, Florida: “Promise me something, Uncle Ray?”

“What?”

“That when I die I won’t be from Ohio.”

HERE is something about my class at the university. The pretty faces, the yearning to learn. Deborah, Sammy, Lenora, David, Edward Jurgielewcz, Ondocsin, Triola, Slubowski, Scordino, Edric Kirkman — they are all trying to learn.

The land is full of crashing jets, carbon monoxide, violent wives, and murderous men. There is a great deal of metal and hardness.

The subject of today is breast cancer. Why is there so much of it? Why the mastectomies, why the cancers of the uterus? Why in the hell is there so much cancer today, anyway?

Ray’s humble opinion is that it serves us fucking right.

OH, help me! I am losing myself in two centuries and two wars.

The SAM missile came up, the heat-seeker. It stood up in front of me like a dick at twenty thousand feet, and the squadron captain told me what the hell was going on. He was a nigger from Louisiana. I think that was the first time a nigger saved my life. Flight Captain Louis Diamond saved my life and I shot the SAM missile out of the air.