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

Then he spoke with his back to me. “Do you know who blew up the storyteller’s stage in Murfreesboro, Tennessee?” he asked. I gave a long pause, I governed it. “No, but I wish I did. That place needed refreshing, a real makeover.”

“I went up and saw you tell your tale,” says Bell.

“Well, you went but were promptly thrown out for drunk before the competition started.”

“It made the Memphis paper, which I’m sure was its aim. This drunk is more aware than you know. It wasn’t till after your tale telling that I was fully wise to your coming on as a homey old pea picker. It didn’t work. Whoever blew that pitiful stage up might pray for certain of his acquaintances staying quiet. For a half column of newsprint. It wasn’t very mature or original.”

He’d had one or two nips from the bottle, but this is the most forceful I’d ever heard him. The change took me aback. I went mute, then placed my hand on an original billy club I’d made from a child’s bat. This action surprised me, because I never intended to harm Bell. His business was too good and just too interesting to give up. I believe I was scared.

“And you and your broomstick-up-ass buddy are mature, of course.”

“We are constant, you hunk of burning white trash.”

He walked on out, a changed man, a man with sudden convictions. The fog lay out so thick he disappeared into his dented Saab SUV with only the sound of the door to give him away, ten in a July morning. This fog, I say, I’ve never seen the likes of it. Curling around getting thicker like in a stew pot. But none of this is the embarassing part, which came almost immediately. After Wilkes Bell’s car left, some other car rolls into the lot and a form walks to me slowly. At one or two times in a man’s life he fears everything in his world. Such was this figure closing to me out of the insane weather; I swear I saw hell walking and shook. But it was only a woman. I’d worked myself up to a lather.

Here’s my secret: I lick the sweat off women.

And I do sing as I lick, it’s an involuntary thing with me, a lullaby or children’s graveyard whistling. I believe it proceeds from the id part of Freud’s teaching. I saw droplets of sweat or fog or both on this delicious young lady’s back. I was still in my formal composing suit, which in afterthought might have reminded her of Wilkes, and I was around the corner and in a deep suck thitherto , a word I’d been working out lately in the child’s book. My arms around to that sweet depression above her rump as the back convexes itself, my tongue busily tasting, my senses way heated and wetness spreading down. Well, she did take offense, but she was too stunned to take immediate action. I’ve had two who returned the licking, beside themselves, and then turn sick. I tell you that if my woman Louise was up front, which almost never happens, I’d be doing the same thing.

She shook me off with surprising strength, but then I remembered she was a dancer and aerobics instructor. I offered my handkerchief and quickly said, “You’re so wet, beautiful, and sad!”

From fury she changed to a broken creature who was simply lost as to how to act.

“You ought not to do that. Maybe you think I’m somebody else.”

“You came in once before. I can tell you’re normal. Some women suffer from unceasing sweats. I know you because you came in once and Wilkes Bell talks about you in words sublime. I’m a writer and a yarn spinner myself.”

“You don’t call that horrible licking attack anything but crime.”

“I’m sorry but something that sweet can’t be a crime.”

Well, she drilled me with hatred in her eyes and then she did almost collapse.

Women’s throats in the summertime, that perfume and randy ooze the fairer sex has that we don’t. So I’ve out and said it, and it’s nothing I can help and lucky nobody’s turned me in to the law. Five of them positively enjoyed it, and never knew they would until I was across the counter fast as a werewolf and as thirsty for salt as a sponge. Oh I lick them.

This woman was Charlotte Barrios, girlfriend to Bell. She’d never been here before.

“I’m sick with worry about him. Something’s come over him where he thinks the end is near. He’s nothing but woe and morbid surrender. He is changed to an upright corpse and just stumbles along.”

“Miss, that’s the normal style. He was just here saying those kind of things and hurling around like an actor from a great tragedy. For god’s sake, he’s a drunk, Charlotte.”

“Who are you ? You with that huge bow tie. Bob Cratchit? You can’t just. . lick a woman without. . consequences.”

“It’s not my choice, Charlotte. It’s an old compulsion. I’ve had treatment.”

“Well you need more. You’re lucky. . What is wrong with him? Where had he gone?” She was all to pieces again and I knew I was safe.

“I’ve a feeling he will keep to a small radius unless somebody else is driving. Wilkes is one for diablerie ,” I said, taking charge in my composing suit, my best shoes and shirt. I matched that ass Bitters for obscure names.

She just stared at me.

“I was so worried I drove over to the delta to see if his folks could help. It’s no secret he’s been a mess for years.”

They’re all hopeless trips. He speaks of them. He speaks of you. I know.”

“Fuck you. You can’t know.”

The cursing surprised me, but then I looked at the full buffed bod under that warm-up suit of hot pink, and it didn’t. How did Bell ever hang on to this?

I get a good neck sweat of my own eye-drilling her right back and by use of the eye on the good side alone I see her as a long picture of bare beige woman. Christ, if I’d had a golden youth to pour all over her. My eyesight was your abstract impressionism, probably. Maybe he painted her nude? The idea almost brought on another dire need to werewolf her.

“No, I never was his model,” she answers, then sits in the counter chair, moving and crossing her legs for most of an hour. “We met when I saw him in a drenched suit with a brown paper sack of liquor six years ago in the Grove near the art department, maybe early October. Skinny where if he ate a full meal he’d look like a snake that swallowed a biscuit whole. That old cliché. I pitied him and told him he’d get in trouble. No liquor allowed on campus. What got me was his courtesy even messed up as he was. His big gray eyes so concerned for my well-being. You knew he was from blue bloods. His voice was beautiful. He said he had a weakness for painting, painting those fires, in fact painting was all he had, my man, and that day we met he was too drunk to remember where the Fine Arts Building where he’d spent four years was. I’ve seen him lose his car for an hour and a half after we tried to attend a Tulane football game.

“He told me his father despised him, was rather proud of it, then told me he was capable of great harm, his father was lucky. His courage struck me. Never did he complain of his own misery, which was constant. When I guided him to his own show that first afternoon, I saw he was a good draughtsman but had not broken out to another dimension. Maybe he was on the edge of it. As in dance when you do a skilled presentation of the movements, but not the true movements. He felt deeply and gave directly to the poor. Was wonderful with black children.

“Said he knew what I was thinking about his work, how it was not there yet but that life, not study, would give it to him and there was a black burning maw in the earth that ate the spirit of people and spat it back in the image of frozen brick and glass. In short, churches. He also said we did badly at peace and needed catastrophe closer by to stir us to life. These United States had made too many artifices between life, dirt, and blood, and every day we should do a good turn to a poorer person and give this person our flesh, dirt, and blood. In our world people were waiting earnestly for a happy deep-blue square of death.”