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

“Yes, they had a very ornate coffin.”

“Lilian was the Unknown Stewardess. I’m not getting up.”

“I said you still have your saxophone.”

“No, I don’t. I tried to play it on the ship after the last time I hurt my back. No go. I can’t bend my neck or spine to play it. The pain kills me.”

“Well, don’t get up, then. Why am I asking you to get up? I’m just a deaf drummer, too vain to buy a hearing aid. Can’t stand to write the ad copy I do. Wasn’t I a good drummer?”

“Superb.”

“But we can’t be in this condition forever. The police are going to come and make you get up if we do it much longer.”

The police didn’t come. It was Quadberry’s mother who came. She looked me in the face and grabbed my shoulders before she saw Ard on the floor. When she saw him she yanked him off the floor, hugging him passionately. She was shaking with sobs. Quadberry was gathered to her as if he were a rope she was trying to wrap around herself. Her mouth was all over him. Quadberry’s mother was a good-looking woman of fifty. I simply held her purse. He cried out that his back was hurting. At last she let him go.

“So now we walk,” I said.

“Dad’s in the car trying to quit crying,” said his mother.

“This is nice,” Quadberry said. “I thought everything and everybody was dead around here.” He put his arms around his mother. “Let’s all go off and kill some time together.” His mother’s hair was on his lips. “You?” he asked me.

“Murder the devil out of it,” I said.

I pretended to follow their car back to their house in Clinton. But when we were going through Jackson, I took the North 55 exit and disappeared from them, exhibiting a great amount of taste, I thought. I would get in their way in this reunion. I had an unimprovable apartment on Old Canton Road in a huge plaster house, Spanish style, with a terrace and ferns and yucca plants, and a green door where I went in. When I woke up I didn’t have to make my coffee or fry my egg. The girl who slept in my bed did that. She was Lilian’s little sister, Esther Field. Esther was pretty in a minor way and I was proud how I had tamed her to clean and cook around the place. The Field family would appreciate how I lived with her. I showed her the broom and the skillet, and she loved them. She also learned to speak very slowly when she had to say something.

Esther answered the phone when Quadberry called me seven months later. She gave me his message. He wanted to know my opinion on a decision he had to make. There was this Dr. Gordon, a surgeon at Emory Hospital in Atlanta, who said he could cure Quadberry’s back problem. Quadberry’s back was killing him. He was in torture even holding up the phone to say this. The surgeon said there was a seventy-five/twenty-five chance. Seventy-five that it would be successful, twenty-five that it would be fatal. Esther waited for my opinion. I told her to tell Quadberry to go over to Emory. He’d got through with luck in Vietnam, and now he should ride it out in this petty back operation.

Esther delivered the message and hung up.

“He said the surgeon’s just his age; he’s some genius from Johns Hopkins Hospital. He said this Gordon guy has published a lot of articles on spinal operations,” said Esther.

“Fine and good. All is happy. Come to bed.”

I felt her mouth and her voice on my ears, but I could hear only a sort of loud pulse from the girl. All I could do was move toward moisture and nipples and hair.

Quadberry lost his gamble at Emory Hospital in Atlanta. The brilliant surgeon his age lost him. Quadberry died. He died with his Arabian nose up in the air.

That is why I told this story and will never tell another.

FISTFIGHT ON THE OLD CEMETERY. BOTH OF THEM WANT DONNA, square off, and Donna and I watch from the Lincoln convertible.

I’m neutral. I wear sharp clothes and everybody thinks I’m a fag, though it’s not true. The truth is, I’m not all that crazy about Donna, that’s all, and I tend to be sissy of voice. Never had a chance otherwise — raised by a dreadfully vocal old aunt after my parents were killed by vicious homosexuals in Panama City. Further, I am fat. I’ve got fat ankles going into my suede boots.

I ask her, “Say, what you think about that, Donna? Are you going to be whoever wins’s girlfriend?”

“Why not? They’re both cute,” she says.

Her big lips are moist. She starts taking her sweater off. When it comes off, I see she’s got great humpers in her bra. There’s a nice brown valley of hair between them.

“I can’t lose,” she says.

Then she takes off her shoes and her skirt. There is extra hair on her thighs near her pantie rim. Out in the cemetery, the guys are knocking the spunk out of each other’s cheeks. Bare, Donna’s feet are red and not handsome around the toes. She has some serious bunions from her weird shoes, even at eighteen.

My age is twenty. I tried to go to college but couldn’t sit in the seats long enough to learn anything. Plus, I hated English composition, where you had to correct your phrases. They cast me out like so much wastepaper. The junior college system in California is tough. So I just went back home. I like to wear smart clothes and walk up and down Sunset Strip. That will show them.

By now, Donna is naked. The boys, Hank and Ken, are still battering each other out in the cemetery. I look away from the brutal fight and from Donna’s nakedness. If I were a father, I couldn’t conceive of this from my daughter.

“Warm me up, Vince. Do me. Or are you really a fag like they say?”

“Not that much,” I say.

I lost my virginity. It was like swimming in a warm, oily room — rather pleasant — but I couldn’t finish. I thought about the creases in my outfit.

“Come in me, you fag,” says she. “Don’t hurt my feelings. I want a fag to come in me.”

“Oh, you pornographic witch, I can’t,” says I.

She stands up, nude as an oyster. We look over at the fight in the cemetery. When she had clothes on, she wasn’t much to look at. But naked, she is a vision. She has an urgent body that makes you forget the crooked nose. Her hair is dyed pink, but her organ hair isn’t.

We watch Hank and Ken slugging each other. They are her age and both of them are on the swimming team.

Something is wrong. They are too serious. They keep pounding each other in the face past what a human could take.

Donna falls on her knees in the green tufted grass.

She faints. Her body is the color of an egg. She fainted supine, titties and hair upward.

The boys are hitting to kill. They are not fooling around. I go ahead in my smart bell-bottom cuffed trousers. By the time I reach them, they are both on the ground. Their scalps are cold.

They are both dead.

“This is awful. They’re dead ,” I tell Donna, whose eyes are closed.

“What?” says she.

“They killed each other,” says I.

“Touch me,” she says. “Make me know I’m here.”

I thrust my hand to her organ.

“What do we do?” says I.

She goes to the two bodies, and is absorbed in a tender unnatural act over the blue jeans of Hank and Ken. In former days, these boys had sung a pretty fine duet in their rock band.

“I can’t make anybody come! I’m no good!” she says.

“Don’t be silly,” I say. “They’re dead. Let’s get out of here.”

“I can’t just get out of here! They were my sweethearts!” she screams. “Do me right now, Vince! It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Well, I flung in and tried.

A half year later, I saw her in Hooper’s, the pizza parlor. I asked her how it was going. She was gone on heroin. The drug had made her prettier for a while. Her eyes were wise and wide, all black, but she knew nothing except desperation.