Barry Hannah - Long, Last, Happy - New and Collected Stories

There is a groove in all roads that leads this motorcycle to needy souls at home, as if the old Triumph can’t go anywhere else. Both my nephew and I are hopeless, helpless, maybe turning into souls as I speak but it feels like only fumes.

I’ll die if I lose her. She keeps our dogs down in Edwards, Ms. There’s barely enough of me left to be jealous of the sound handsome men who look on her when she walks the dogs in the nearby Civil War Park and Cemetery around Vicksburg. The war dead would snap awake too when they felt her and her several hounds’ feet above them. But she is faithful, she told me so. My mission baffles and frightens her, that’s all. Yes, laughing friends deride, oh smoke is in my eyes. I’ve got faith in my bones, she said, why make a pageant out of it? You’re always trying to make a comeback, putting your doomed march on, the biggest kid in the Children’s Crusade. I swear you want to die in some god-awful place, the nastier the better. I don’t, I want to die in your arms, Brazile, I said. Wherever and whenever.

My pathway is a foggy circle back to her. I pray to the motorcycle. Please do keep me in a fog. I’m weary of light shed on myself, the sick and whining always at your door. Help. Love. Service. Find, but time always whispers lost lost lost . And fool , fool astride this smoking rocket called Quo vadis?

I arrived at the first house where a man on disability is breaking the seal on his first bottle of the day. He dismisses his wife to the rear quarters, but not unkindly. They seem to have an agreement that she is a speechless ghost.

Christ is difficult enough. Do we have to meet his father, too? The man sits next to an end table where the bottle and ice and Sprite in cans rest. With his iron gray hair parted and combed straight back you can guess he was an authority somewhere, old school. Black business oxfords on his feet, lanky, more master than slave by far, maybe an old god himself. Things speak to him, he said over the phone, but as with homicidal maniacs the voices are of himself as god, no outer god speaks to him. God the father whose shrieks of laughter behind that tome of law and mass homicides they call the Old Testament this reader can’t doubt. Old Dad somewhere busting his ribs with glee over the misreadings of rabbis, monks, and the television preachers from the Academy for Significant Hair. Smiling charismatics trying to improve on Jesus because he’s just too mad and wild. Fishermen and failures were his chums, most of them confused even when they saw him walking on water. Why did he choose men who could never understand him? Father why hast thou forsaken me? is not the utterance of a man certain of his painless ascent into heaven. It’s the same cry I and billions make when wracked by undeserved pain.

I look at him in his Barcalounger in a clean white shirt. Indicates he is involved in a solemn vocation that did not brook meddlers. He looks like the deceased actor William Holden. He is watching Animal Planet on a big-screen TV.

“You want me to turn it off?” He lowered the volume with his remote.

“No. I love animals.”

“Three years ago one of those stingrays killed that Australian man.”

“Awful. But he was lucky. Happy in his work.”

“You’re here for Jesus, who died for these shits. Stay as long as you’ll drink with me.”

“I can’t. Well, a very light one I’ll nurse a good spell.”

“Hello to mellow.” He handed over a weak bourbon. My chair was new and overstuffed. I felt I was its first guest.

“Well it’s bon voyage to this old ship. I wish there was a fresh ocean we hadn’t ruined. I’m in the throes of nervous collapse, can’t bear to work with people anymore. I give them work and even love for thirty years but people piss on it. They drove to a shrink with a tackle box full of wonder drugs. Hell, I’m on four of ’em. Excellent if you want to shuffle around like the living dead and eat the ass out of your kitchen. I never had a big stomach before, I was trim. I was a fine old troubleshooter for Winchester worn out by people. People wasn’t the acceptable answer, but Dr. Meatloss signed the script for my long vacation. I was supervisor, got awards. You think I can afford this? I was handsome and some called me an intellectual. Now I couldn’t stand even you, one unlucky pastor, if I wasn’t well into the Beam.”

He wore rimless glasses. I looked at his stomach pouch slyly. I asked him what drugs he took. A depth charge for depressive manias, I wondered he could be awake with the Beam on top.

“Tell me what people are like, Mr. Perry.”

“Conrad. Conrad Perry. Rodents, but every one of ’em has studied the course Ratocracy. They’re angry they’re mediocre and believe you’re to blame. Feel my pain. Lookit my cancerous ass.”

“You’re describing the school, the church, the state, the nation.”

“E-mail opened the floodgates. We weren’t meant to know this much about so many.”

I agreed.

“I have half a college education. I was quiet and dumb then. Scared.”

“I’d take that as a reasonable state for all of us.”

“I’m well nigh on drunk already, Anse Burden. You have kin here?”

“No. Maybe long ago.”

“All those people standing around outside. You saw them when you came in.”

“No. Just me, right here alone.”

“You’re a minister and smoke Camel filters? I’ll take one if I can.”

“I set a low example. My pride is invested in cigarettes, I’m sure. Nobody tells me what to do,” I admitted. “And I’m nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof coming in homes like this, Conrad.”

“That’s a good one. I never heard that.”

“It’s an old one, a play by our native son Tennessee Williams.”

“What if those nasty people around the house sent you in, Anse, to finish me off?”

“You’re on too much medicine, Conrad.”

“I know that.”

“Good grief, man, I was sent here by Christ because you’re in trouble. I’m a piece of wreckage, myself. Love. I believe I’m just now learning it.”

“Who called you, Pastor Burden? What a name. Pretty heavy on you, I guess some buddy or my wife called you.”

“You called me.”

“Did? Oh I do remember. Commonality, isn’t that a word? I have a busted Harley-Davidson out back. Those men broke it. I never heard a thing. I heard you were a motorcycle man, maybe we could ride someday. Then second, your career as a flyer in the navy. I thought you could bring higher power against those dangerous idiots after me. I’m no chicken, I swear, but the two of us. See here, I’m not drinking in a bar and cursing blacks and immigrants. I already have a Jesus in me but he is tiny.”

“I can’t be violent anymore. But how did you get this information, Conrad?”

“Not much in this town gets past the wife. She barely speaks but she has damn near canine hearing. My nerves need a long rest. Nembutal, Percocet, oxycodone when I can get it. Got a vicious ache in my spine, center of my back. My heart pounds like it wants out. So I wash these friends down with the Beam. Then Jesus gets bigger in me, I get a beautiful floating kind of courage, like when you come out of the shower after whipping somebody in a football game.

“You could help me if you had the words, just some new words about this war. The words that would make me free again.”

“You’re still some kind of athlete to even be awake. I went through the Desert Storm shoot-out loaded on Percodan and amphetamines. Afterward, I stayed stoned and would’ve been busted out except for squadron pals and higher brass. No way no kind of hero, I assure you.”

“Still, I can help you . In your own bosom you have nursed the pyromaniac.”