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

On the mean-o-meter, if there was such a contraption, all right, I might score high. But much of that is rooted in the acne on my face and shoulders. When I finally got to a skin doctor, he told me about recent discoveries about vitamin A that would have cleared me up, but it was far too late. I don’t look that bad except for the big pit on the left cheek, and there we have some serious ugliness. As a boy I hid my face behind the barn while others pissed and jacked off on each other. I have been called Frankenstein, Wolfman, the Flying Pitface. But what brought the marshall was the history of serious fireworks I had in the army, stations and bases in Texas, California, Michigan, and Georgia. Yes, true facts reveal I barely missed a court martial and did receive a dishonorable discharge from the bastards but that was twenty-five years ago, for making two oil drums rise a hundred feet with a propellant in my keeping. Just old boy fun but not to the sullen-ass army.

This smug Marshall Root, whose Montana ass shall be lined up for gutting after I have a word with my sidekicks Tico and Rez. The one Latino as it sounds, and the other named for his hesitancy to ever leave his bass boat and trotlines on Sardis Reservoir boat launches ten miles north at Coontown and sixteen miles west on Clear Creek, passing over the famous glory hole for bass, Tobby Tubby Creek. English for a long unsayable Chickasaw name centuries old. You can take centuries old and cram it. I don’t care a thing about naught but today. You get into your golden history and you just walk around with this paralysis of mud on your boots, ask me. Another marshall, Bitters, lording it over me, put a word on me such as I made him write down. Smell this diction: hypermnesia. I got red knowing he reviled me and my unswept liquor parlor. My woman in the back where we live ever lazy except in the science of nooky.

It’s plenty of room amounting to a five-bedroom home, two full baths, halls, kitchen, oversize pantry, wide screen porch where no mosquito or gnat penetrates. You ask about my woman, Louise. Well there she sits. Good figure, foxy in the face, some kind of coiled searching curls in her hair, shiftless as a hound dog in the song that eternal shaker from Tupelo, Elvis Presley, sang. She says she’s even kin to the man, and there is one rule when you hear this claim. The claimer is not worth a shit, but they want the throne. I do not beat women. My father’s violence toward my mother cured me forever of that notion. But Louise is hesitant to move even while looking crosseyed at a fly that got in the front screen door after some long-jawed whiskey customer has let it in. I say the fly on the end of her nose can be setting up his fly stand and tuning his fiddle and she’ll stay transfixed before she moves to another cube of air that might be flyless. After all my pains making the place ladylike for her, making it double the catalog lacey look so it would not be viewed as just a hell of a butt to a liquor store. Two HD televisions, purple drapes with cord pulls, satin sheets. And an even better set up on Lake Pickwick on the Tennessee River, which is flat-out a condo. We sit with the mighty there. Judges, expensive Memphis lawyers, a whiskey preacher out of a crystal cathedral, televised on Sunday. Well, I mean one, Dr. Quarles the Fourth, who could put away a bottle of Stolichnaya Saturday night and you’d watch that cathedral service Sunday morning, he’d be coming on strong fresh as a rose. Louise will loiter, but that figure of hers gets into action and you forgive and forget a host of sins. She can’t warm a pot of peas and who cares.

Did I tell the truth to Marshall Root, was I afraid, so fraidy that I caved into Marshall Bitters? About the propane missile that wound up in the city hall bathroom? Oh no, not on your ass. Fear don’t hunt here especially when it’s anybody at the counter in tie and coat. I wonder if the man knew I was marking him for death or at least serious maiming when he held me there with his badge out, blah blah blah . Of course I was guilty, but guilty only of a little fun. We don’t have a lot of raw fun hereabouts. And it was copycat, as far as that goes, except I started with fire in the army a good long time before these church fires began a dozen years ago. Let me put it this way. The army wanted me to work with fire and demolitions, then they did not, snuck to my back and called me down as some lame kind of example, an attack of conscience suddenly, oh no, what have we created in this master sergeant?!

And named Goon Green, formally Rangoon, because my mother liked rain and thought monsoons were a romantic weather period in the far-off gaudy East. Ignorant sow. Never said she wasn’t a good woman. Just that she was an ignorant sow and I cannot imagine another kind of mother. A smart, kind mother I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I did at last come close to killing my father when he was beating on her. That earned me the road and a duffel sack. The old man thought it would make me all sad but it was the happiest day of my life. That night I blew up his pickup outside the eatery where he flirted with a woman with big titties.

One side of my face is good looking and I was holding that half toward the marshall, saying, “I’m not only innocent, you will see a lawyer if you come back. The damage to my reputation as a businessman will come to many, many thousands, I mean you even being around.”

Not only the bondsman office, out of which I run bounties, too, sits across the street, but the big pawnshop is mine. Louise helps a little, shuffle, shuffle, moan, moan. I never heard anybody moan serving a customer like this woman. Goes against her looks, you understand. I free her to be a laboring feminist but her spirit is all fettered, an old-fashioned gal. Oh but liberated to hell when you show her a vacuum cleaner. “It ain’t elegant,” she says.

I can look a man in the eye and make him squeal. I can look a man fleeing from bond collapse and cry with his arms around my ankles. I began the pawnshop several years ago when I noticed the crack riffraff hanging around the corners of our fair little city. The Tunica casinos, where fat Wisconsin women play like they’re in Las Vegas, are an hour and a half away, but broke riffraff spreads out in a great radius topped by Memphis and bottomed by us. Let me say others saw them as riffraff, and these suspicious persons were picked up and prosecuted on the old vagrant charge when they couldn’t show fourteen cents in their pockets. But they also came with ridiculous merchandise on them if they could get to me before the cops got to them. I saw money in the trees while others saw just a nasty forest. This money tree might also include two gambling lawyers from the army in town. Well, they’ve got mini tape recorders, police scanners, fancy or antique pistols I need not know the getting of, as well as supreme boats with large engines. At least six in this town have lost everything to the casinos. They come to me for money. I can look their wife square in the face while I cut their husband’s throat, as a figure of speech, of course.

Before that Marshall Bitters got off the bastard went so far as to use the word maffick on me, and I asked him what? three times, the last with the curse he deserved. It means to celebrate . The marshall knew enough of my history to step off. Come around speaking maffick at me. He left confused. I was not confused at all.

I had my fingers in at least four pies, and here I’m not counting the boyhood fun Tico, Rez, and I had constructing that V-1 missile from the propane tank. The shell on these mothers is not strong enough to penetrate the ceiling and roof of even a flimsy church like the Free Will at the end of Van Buren East. You have to know liftoff angle and be certain your power is large enough to begin right off. This you do not obtain with merely a propane tank just lying there. Well, I did even better and got a SCUD that penetrated two roofs. City hall was an accident, but I will accept the admiration for it. I wish two lawyers had been working late and found this flaming tube in their lap. You ask why. Because it could be done. I did not think the marshalls would be at my door so fast, but I knew they didn’t have anything definite. Just tidying up a few loose ends. This loose end I told I would fold him five ways and stick him where the sun don’t shine. I look at people and they stay looked at. I’ve never laid hand on a bond jumper. They jump right back in the car with me, shivering. See, the bad side of my face, pitted cheeks and nose, does work for me. I’ve taken such as I was given, no whining, and manufactured a man nobody messes with, no brag. That side of my face also worked for me when I got the fingers in the pies.