Barry Hannah: Ray

RAY is thirty-three and he was born of decent religious parents, I say.

Ray, I didn’t ever think it would get to this. The woman I love and that I used to meet in the old condemned theater and we would wander around looking at the posters and worshiping the past, I just called her Sister like her parents, the Hooches, did. Her mother lives in that house with that man. Her grandmother was a Presbyterian missionary killed by the gooks.

Ray, you are a doctor and you are in a hospital in Mobile, except now you are a patient but you’re still me. Say what? You say you want to know who I am?

I have a boat on the water. I have magnificent children. I have a wife who turns her beauty on and off like a light switch.

But I can think myself out of this. My mind can do it. It did it before, can do it again, as when I was pilot of the jet when I was taking the obnoxious rich people in their Lear from Montreal to New York to Charlotte to Pensacola to New Orleans to Mexico City to the Yucatán to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, because they had an old friend there.

You can do it, mind and heart. You can give it the throttle and pick up your tail and ease it on. You can do it, Ray.

For instance, look at this male nurse. He weighs three hundred pounds. He’s got flab in his eyes, but he used to weigh four hundred. Now he’s divorced his second wife and has no remorse and is moving to Key West for a higher-paying job. He has no care for other people because his own elephantine system keeps him employed. You would fire him, Ray. Except you can’t fire anyone now.

Nether. That’s a good one. Hang on to a word like nether.

Her nether hoot. No, I don’t, nether. This is the netherlands and it will nether get worse. That is the awfulest netherest laughter.

I just threw up my netherest soul. There’s nothing left, nether. My eyes are full of yellow bricks. There are dry tiny horses running in my veins.

That was three weeks ago, Ray. Now I am clean. My head is full of light. I am a practicing doctor again and it is necessary I go over to the Hooches.

My heart, my desire. Sister!

The stacked tires, the station wagon half-captured by kudzu and ivy, the fishing boat on wheels, the tops of an ash and a pine rising from the falling ravine behind the backyard, and in front, the house, a peeling eyesore, the complaint of the neighborhood. The Hooches!

The Hooch children are afraid. The car seems to have plunged up from the ravine. The smaller Hooches are fearful.

The roof of the garage has fallen in and around it clay pots are scattered through the lustrous ragged fronds.

The Hooch family is large and poor.

I have seen the moon make an opaque ghost of the backyard, and I have seen the Hooch animals roam out into it, smelling the life of themselves. They enter the border of visibility and pass through it into the uncanny.

Time and time again it comes back. Where the Hooches buried Oscar in the backyard near the fallen garage. Where the broken flowerpots were pulled away to make a place for Oscar. Where a single white wild blossom occurred under the forever stunted fig tree, making no sense at all, certainly not to dead Oscar.

The others of the street are not of their homes as much as the Hooches. The loud and untidy failures of the Hooches pour from the exits. Their broken car is on the curb in front, pasted over with police citations. Around the base of a ragged bush near the front door is wrapped an old rotten brassiere. In the small front yard parts of toys and soaked food lie. A rope hangs from a second-story window. The drainpipe has been beaten out of place by the children.

The Hooch family has a familiar, I am saying, a certain familiar joyful lust and ignorance. They are mine. They’re Ray’s.

I say they are mine.

“Hi, Doctor Ray. You got that morphine for me?” says Mr. Hooch.

“Sure.”

“I do like that fog.”

Mr. Hooch climbs up on his crutch.

“I guess I’m a fairly worthless bastard, aren’t I?” he asks.

“You are. You’ve perfected it,” I say.

The old man is tickled.

“Are you horny, Doctor Ray? You want me to call Sister?”

“No, thanks.”

“There’s nothing to drink. I’ve drunk everything there is to drink.” Mr. Hooch throws out a cough, very nearly pukes. Revives. “Didn’t you say you used to be a drunkard, Doctor Ray?”

“I did,” I say. “Almost got kicked out of the trade for it.”

I can see it makes the old man feel better to hear it. “Ray,” he says. “Ray, boy, that old morphine is sudden, hey? I’m fogging away.”

“Your leg already better?”

“Already. Listen to this, Doctor Ray. I know life all round, up and down. I have become my dreams. I have entered the rear of Mother Nature and come out her mouth, and I am the sin that is not ugly.”

“That’s fine,” I say.

“It hurts my leg to talk like that,” the old man says.

From the back of the house, looking over the fishing boat and past it to the wide, brittle leaves at the crown of the unhealthy magnolia, there comes Mrs. Hooch with her Pall Malls, a blotched woman in a bravely colored wrap, her legs lean and veiny. She arrives out of breath. She sits in the flaking chair.

“What are you looking at, Doc?” she says.

“Everything in your backyard looks hungry,” says I. “There’s a bird that looks like he doesn’t know what to do.”

“It’s all we got.”

Looking out at the unhappy foliage.

“Ever since I wasn’t a virgin no more, things have slid down,” she says.

“There must have been love or something,” I say.

“Sure, but it was all downward.”

I say, “Are you hopeless?”

“Close,” she says.

“Well,” I say, “I brought another bottle of Valium.”

“The preacher was here,” she says. “He couldn’t do anything. I told him every time you came you left us happier.”

“God bless the pharmacy,” I say.

Outside, there are two small heads wobbling in the fishing boat. The Hooch twins, the young set. They have older twins too, and three children between these pairs.

“You want to talk today, Doc?” Mrs. Hooch wants to know.

I say, “I get tired of people. All of them driving around in their cars, eating, having to be. All of them insisting on existing.”

“But you help people,” Mr. Hooch says.

“I’m one of them,” I say.

“If you’re sad, do you want to see Sister?” Mrs. Hooch says. “I think she’s still in bed.”

“Maybe I will,” I say.

Sister is always in love with somebody, sometimes me. There is a capricious wisdom she has about attaching herself to anybody for very long, although her loyalties are fast. She plays the guitar well and has a nice voice that she keeps to herself. Life has been such for her that she has no attitude at all. She expects no sympathy. Two of her teenage lovers died in an accident at the railroad tracks. That’s when I met Sister. I rode down to the tracks, and she was standing there in a long sleeping gown, two weeks after the accident.

“What’s wrong, girl?”

“I growed up.”

“You want to go home? I’m a doctor. The preacher called me. They’re worried about you.”

“Ain’t nobody should worry. I’ll be here.”

“I can give you a pill.”

But she said to leave her be.

So I drove back to the fancy rich thing of my home in my Corvette. In back of my house is the swamp, where all the creatures are either singing or angry or sexed up. My three well-fed and luxuriously moving furred Persian cats roam around with their big eyes. The back door was open and in front of one of their feed dishes there sits a mother raccoon. She’s got two little raccoons with her, who are having a really good time. One of the cats tried for them, but I kicked it back through the kitchen. “Listen,” I said, “I am the emperor here. I reign.”