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

But know we are speaking of two years while I remained innocent as a lamb, as to fireworks at least. Yes, I lay in wait like your alligator or your mule, who had a long mean memory that’ll all of a sudden flash out and catch you guessing with your underwear down and a hoof print dead center of your forehead. A gator twenty years until the time is perfect to eat a flamingo. This creature, tell me not, knows it has longevity. Even if what you have is a slug with little arms and one long slosh of a tail with vise-grip jaws. I lie in turds to accomplish the right moment. Even the promise of what I’d do to these specific turds, the bond jumpers, is enough, if I have that side of my face to them. Oh I’m licensed to carry a.357 Magnum revolver, but it’s never used. I believe the jumper knows I’ve yet to use it and hastens to the backseat of the car not wanting to be first under the gun. The only fights I’ve ever had were with two women. I guess they thought I’d be a gentleman. Some shocked fool standing on tradition. They slugged me. But hit bad once, almost everbody sits down and asks the quickest route to jail. And I did swat them good.

I’m working on a children’s story as well as my entry to that corrupt gallery in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. If I detect certain biases I plan to be not only assertive but persuasive. I don’t care if third’s the highest I ever placed. Many a listener told me I was the clear winner. Explosion bears repeating. I love being a bad loser. I got a hard-on for unsportsmanlike. I get to mock both fire-setting Bell and partner and the angry, miserable sheep inside what used to be the doors of their houses of worship. But why, why, why? you ask. A grown man with my skills, how can I stoop to this like the others wreaking havoc.

Poetry, I think, is the answer. To live that zigzagged deathlessness of the poem, as taught me by Mrs. Ferguson. It’s how you know you’re young, you’re a gamer, and bantam rooster, your face in a curl of loogie-launching at the law. And that is paradise, to confuse the police with half their eyelids down over yellow eyes. Flies on their head, lazy waddlers who’d rather do nothing except compare their muscles, shoot at the range, and beat the heat with beers and chattering wives in their cheap-ass project houses where they all, except the chiefs, commiserate about their punk salaries and hard service.

I had my time in glory with these people, or their military equivalent in Georgia. The charge: blowing up useless surplus shit on the firing precincts, harming red dirt. Experimentation. I’m not kidding. I was too old for a juvenile delinquent and what’s more a master sergeant. The brass knew my projects had been going on weeks before they decided they needed a whipping boy to take the higher brass’s eyes off another big scandal of their own, and that would be a wife-swapping club fueled by the liquor of Uncle Sam. Yellow-gilled loafers. I was at least employing my skills in the future guerilla actions of Their Man’s Army. Blowing up a few gasoline and ancient artillery barrels, launching a short arc missile, things to save some of our boys’ lives woeful down the line. So a bus ticket to ride I got at age thirty-two and a reaquaintance with my father in his putrid lounge chair. A letter arrived and I didn’t have to tell him about the dishonorable proceedings because the old woodpecker got to the mail and opened the letter addressed to yours truly. I picked him up by the shoulders and came close to killing him, but it was the worst day of my life because he never stopped laughing and the old lady called me a rottener name every time I swatted my honored patriarch.

So I was sent into all parts of trade by necessity until I had constructed my own realm, which I did here in the swanky back end of my liquor store. Oh, I had fun with the bonds and the jumpers and the drunks charging way over their head, taking care of the blurred math for them. It is always a hoot to see a lush get an attitude about charging booze, as if he’s earned a pricey berth and can’t be bothered with small change. Still, he’s overcharged and doesn’t even scratch his head, because he’s weak and guilty and feels he owes the world. Or he sees the pitted side of my face and my unnegligible bulk in arms and legs and understands it is not good to call this man a liar.

On the other hand I have been bemused by this burning. I know Bell doesn’t have the drive. He’s been to the drying-out clinics about four times, then promptly appeared at my counter like a boomerang that came the world around, stopping in exotic clinics long enough to make off with their terry-cloth robes, a thick oozy warm for his travails through the shakes. The man has worn these robes with, say, “Palo Alto Chemical Dependency” or “Dr. Fang’s Heat Cure” on their front pockets to the store, and shower sandals like such as you and I have never even seen to buy. I’ve given him dribs and drabs of the money, less his tab, which could launch a small satellite into space.

I understand he’s now in constant quarrel with this uncle, but I fear little from a lay preacher running from the IRS.

Now comes a hard pass for me to set down but I feel it necessary you even know the, well saltier parts of this man who was robbed down to third place in Murfreesboro and for the last two years failed to place. See here, you now have gay hillbillies and phony hillbillies who’ve studied in the drama department in Knoxville or Louisville. Yes, Asheville, too. It’s not fair that these ringers win. But I was a good loser to these privileged little weasels anyway, and as an artist I withdrew to my studies on my long-awaited children’s book. Me and the wife have no children. But I’ve made a story for the little ones a goal all my life, and I know what moves, what bores them. It’s a bookish town and I join right in. I was once with a friend, a writer, and we visited the great historian Shelby Foote in his Memphis mansion. I’d brought a gift crate of good whiskey to him, which he deeply appreciated. He showed us his working study, his foolscap and the nibs on his pens, which he ordered from the only place in the world that carried them anymore, a town in New Jersey. So I obtained for myself the staffs and nibs, ink and mini blow-dryer that completed the kit of the Civil War master and go about my slow but careful work. The antiquarian process slows the head until the absolutely correct word comes to it, so it is slow going and brain beating. I stay in my study and dress in a business suit, with tie, for hours, hours. This child’s tale is not all for kids, but one of hurt and early hardship, which the boy works through with wiles and slyness. I can give away that much. My wife is charmed I’m in there looking good and working so hard. If it’s good enough I might even publish it myself instead of having some far-off New York printer steal his cut.

But here is the hard pass, much harder to tell than Who’s Laughing Now? , the child’s book. Now five or six years ago we had several odd fogs come over the town. You couldn’t find my liquor store, the airport shut down, it was unsafe even to drive until about ten in the morning. I’m writing. If I come out of my “den of the scribe” in my suit and catch a woman customer waiting, I could be irresistible to her. Some of the wimmens, they like rough faces and boldness. Ahead of myself here. These fogs kept up but one morning I heard a plane buzzing out of it with fog thick as soup and wondered how this pilot ever got clearance when the tower itself was shut.

Then who comes in all sprawling and emaciated, whirling his rich thick mane of hair around but Wilkes Bell, drunker than I’ve ever seen him. Instantly he’s asking for the money in the freezer bag in my kitchen where no man goes. It’s just a thing with me. I tell him it’s out gaining interest in Harley-Davidson stock, which was true about the thirty K he had remaining, and that you just don’t move that money around, it’s got to stay to grow just like a seed. From the little scripture I know I cited Christ in favor of interest when he said the master had reprimanded the man who hid his money in fear of the master and congratulated the man who put his money out to make money. Some of the money was in H.D. stock and climbing. Then he told me the plane that just left was his uncle Ray flying to the bedside of a dying pilot he’d known in that old Iraq war of ninety-one. The man has no money and it’s all my fault! he cries out. I’m quiet. Not quite a man of stone. Then quit drinking and I’ll see what I can do, I tell him. At which he goes berserk and ends this flailing drama by begging for a bottle of Wild Turkey. His thirst is approaching the danger point, he says. People could get hurt. Sure, by your throwing up on them and/or falling off your balcony, I say, handing over the bottle. He left with two.