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

I went cold. “Your wife again? What could you mean? She knows the arsonists?”

“Maybe one, who’s made friends.”

Perry stared at the ceiling nearly knocked out but smug enough to smile.

“What are we trading for here, Conrad? Because I am an empty and officially nobody. No connections with the law or the churches.”

“If you’ll have another weak one with me, I’ll show you my suicide guns.”

“I’ll have another weak one. How many choices do you need for suicide?”

“The quality of my departure is still out for debate.”

“I’m not drinking with you if this threat keeps up, Conrad. You’d have already blown your head off in the backyard if you’d been serious. Give my church the guns. One of the members, the sculptor, Beck, has donated over two hundred of them, historical pieces. We’ll have an auction.”

“On the straight?”

“The straight. Your weakness would be our strength. The odds are you and your wife Betty are stronger than this minister.”

“Well, this is my church.”

I walked in and saw the pistols on blue velvet, the rebel flag, the big trout he caught in Arkansas with the flyweight crawfish stuck in its lips and the nylon leader leading back to his fly rod leaned in a corner. But it was an unhappy male chamber with food and drink stains on the sofa and rug. A smell as if a fire had swept through just months ago, but there was no fireplace, no embers. Then I saw the great burned spot on the rug, stomped out by a white sneaker that still remained. Not much toil against unkempt here.

“You know the arsonists? Tell me,” I asked him.

He was nodding out on me on the crumby yellow sofa. “’Sman who can’t exist without being two men together. ’Sman of money, all these places, all these munitions. ’Nfaxt I thought it was you. You can get me Percodan and I would cheer you on. I’m highly in need. You can have all the pistols. Here’s a sack for them.”

He went to some rear shadows and wrestled out a croaker sack. You don’t see this burlap much anymore. I eased the guns into the mouth of it and was fascinated by these fine instruments, pearl-handled, a silvery.38 with recessed hammer, a gun of the noir forties.

I reached in my pocket and gave him four Percocets. Chuckled for this old bird’s knowing very well I was holding.

“What idiocy led you to think I’m the arsonist?”

“Exploded your own church for cover. Then a stranger to these parts, you arrive and the fires get widespread.”

“They were already doing that.”

He stood in front of me but his eyes were closed.

“Here I’ve been a fool thinking you wanted closer to Christ,” I said.

“You’re a little ungrateful. I gave the guns for Christ.” Conrad wobbled and I thought I’d have to catch him.

“Please call your physician. You’ve got way too much head medicine already. You’re asking for a coma of zero quality departure. Your wife mourning over a vegetable. You’ve got depression, Conrad. I don’t buy the insanity. It’s just your brain is carrying buckshot.”

“What about the people, all that mischief around my windows?” The man opened his eyes and smiled a hopeless smile, one of false discovery after long confusion.

“Since you’re not climbing the walls in terror, I think you know the answer. Take some steps toward getting well and maybe you’ll feel like helping people. They need you. I believe you once did help people. Now I’ve got another fellow down the road in much worse shape than you.”

When I said this he sat on the filthy sofa and went dead asleep. I was on the front porch making my way to my saddlebags with the sack full of pistols when I heard his wife speak very softly behind me through the screen.

“Thank you. You never know the form of the good one who comes.”

“Pray, Missus Perry, I’m the good one,” I asked her. I felt more like a busy malingerer.

I wonder if our Christ ever liked people. Plenty of evidence has him confused about them as well as his father, even as he loved them. He fled to the outlands when he couldn’t bear healing any more of them. The press of the crowds drove him to solitary meditations many times. Who was his friend, as we know friend ? Or did the hungry and angry time of his ministry preclude friendship. He must have faced madness to know tragedy and glory up close and both at once. Did he know only pain from word go? Our dreary march of case histories. Nevertheless, I revamped myself on the optimistic noise of the Triumph, and got along the road, a merry old cowboy dressed in his corpse.

Talk, talk, talk. Much said and nothing settled. You’re not even certain of the subject anymore.

I knew an old gal and boy, married, who to anybody’s knowledge had never finished a sentence they started. They didn’t finish each other’s sentences. They didn’t even like each other. But perhaps the romance depended on the other never completing a thought.

HE HIMSELF MIGHT BE ONE OF JUST ANOTHER CONFUSED BUT ADAmant sect. This idea had crossed his mind, since he was certain there was much to repay or regain from his past woes and he knew who had burned the small church on the verge of Wall Doxey Park that Wednesday evening. None but himself.

His wardrobe, the woman reminded him, improved past the penitent rags he had once stolen from Goodwill warehouses. He also quit stealing books. Formerly it just seemed he should, since he was outcast already. Before the church, he’d not burned anything for long months, either.

The woman he found himself with would barely leave home except to spend $200 almost exactly each trip to Wal-Mart. She watched television movies or she cleaned or threw out older new things. She rarely cooked. He figured this love would not last long but she had her good side when she was not directing scathing attacks on him or slapping him as he lay sleeping in the bed he had bought, in the diminished hacienda he’d bought for them. After the eruptions she was quiet a long while, which the deputy discovered after months with her was her form of apology. Because she was never wrong and never spoke an apology. He was to understand her moods, that was his constant homework.

Mainly she attacked him for once being a Montana deputy who refused to reattach himself at good salary to the law. She wondered where his money came from, anyway.

It was from his army savings and his father’s photographic inheritance, a prudent man young as he was when death popped him. His pension from Montana and an uncle’s inheritance, Old Ralph who loved him and pitied him in Toronto. But she would not leave him alone about the rest of his secret money for he was the sole source of her income now she had risen from near welfare and could throw out more old new things. She cleaned the house with the meticulous fury of a German analist, and she did enjoy dirty jokes. She was pleasant in the face, then grew pretty with expensive cosmetics. Her figure was in trim although she quarreled with her hips. She was angry about age, too. Her wrath and resentment were perfect like the work of flood or fire. No man or woman was spared.

He wondered idly sometimes why he did not kill her, but then in rare times she was good company and claimed to love him above all things in the world. She won him over, but he always knew what she was up to, which was to set him up for a sort of vicious theater where one character, himself, a bum with prospects, stands speechless while a harridan who owes everything to him attacks him up and down for not improving himself so that she could owe him even more. This debt was intolerable to her, she would never forgive him, especially now that she didn’t have to appear in the workforce at all.