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

In an ARVN hospital tent you see the hurt officers lined up in front of a private who’s holding in his guts with his hands. They’ll treat the officer with a bad pimple before they treat the dying private. We’re supposed to be shaking hands with these people. Why can’t we be fighting for some place like England? When you train yourself to blow gooks away, like I did, something happens, some kind of popping returning dream of murder-with-a-smile.

I needed away. I was sick. In another three months I’d be zapping orphanages.

“Bobby, are you all right?” said Tubby, waddling out to the tree I was hanging on.

“I shouldn’t ever’ve seen that picture of John Whitelaw. I shouldn’t’ve.”

“Do you really think we’ll be famous?” Tubby got an enchanted look on him, sort of a dumb angel look in that small pretty face amid the fat rolls. It was about midnight. There was a fine Southern moon lighting up the field. You could see every piece of straw out there. Tubby, by my ass, had the high daze on him. He’d stepped out here in the boonies and put down his foot in Ozville.

“This’ll get me major, anyhow. Sure. Fame. Both of us,” I said.

Tubby said: “I tried to get nice touches in with the light coming over his face. These pictures could turn out awfully interesting. I was thinking about the cover of Time or Newsweek.”

“It’ll change your whole life, Tubby,” I said.

Tubby was just about to die for love of fate. He was shivering.

I started enjoying the field again. This time the straws were waving. It was covered with rushing little triangles, these sort of toiling dots. Our side opened up. All the boys came up to join within a minute and it was a sheet of lightning rolling back and forth along the outside of the woods. I could see it all while I was walking back to the radio. I mean humping low. Tubby must’ve been walking straight up. He took something big right in the square of his back. It rolled him up twenty feet in front of me. He was dead and smoking when I made it to him.

“C’mon, I’ve got to get the pictures,” he said.

I think he was already dead.

I got my phosphorus shotgun. Couldn’t think of anything but the radio and getting it over how we were being hit, so we could get dragons — helicopters with fifty cals — in quick. The dragons are nice. They’ve got searchlights, and you put two of them over a field like we were looking at, they’d clean it out in half an hour. So I made it to the radio and the boys had already called the dragons in, everything was fine. Only we had to hold them for an hour and a half until the dragons got there. I humped up front. Every now and then you’d see somebody use one of the experimental guns. The bad thing was that it lit up the gunner too much at night, too much shine out of the muzzle. I took note of that to tell them when we got back. But the gun really smacked the gook assault. It was good for about seventy-five yards and hit with a huge circle burn about the way they said it would. The gooks’ first force was knocked off. You could see men who were still burning running back through the straw, hear them screaming.

I don’t remember too well. I was just loitering near the radio, a few fires out in the field, everything mainly quiet. Copters on the way. I decided to go take a look at Li Dap. I thought it was our boys around him, though I didn’t know why. They were wearing green and standing up plain as day. There was Oliver, smoking a joint. His rifle was on the ground. The NVA were all around him and he hadn’t even noticed. There were so many of them — twenty or so — they were clanking rifles against each other. One of them was going up behind Oliver with a bayonet, just about on him. If I’d had a carbine like usual, I could’ve taken the bayoneteer off and at least five of the others. Oliver and Li Dap might’ve ducked and survived.

But I couldn’t pick and choose. I hardly even thought. The barrel of the shotgun was up and I pulled on the trigger, aiming at the bayoneteer.

I burned them all up.

Nobody even made a squeak.

There was a flare and they were gone.

Some of my boys rushed over with guns. All they were good for was stomping out the little fires on the edges.

When we got back, I handed over Tubby’s pictures. The old man was beside himself over my killing a general, a captured general. He couldn’t understand what kind of laxity I’d allowed to let twenty gooks come up on us like that. They thought I might have a court-martial, and I was under arrest for a week. The story got out to UPI and they were saying things like “atrocity,” with my name spelled all over the column.

But it was dropped and I was pulled out and went home a lieutenant.

That’s all right. I’ve got four hundred and two boys out there — the ones that got back — who love me and know the truth, who love me because they know the truth.

It’s Tubby’s lost fame I dream about.

The army confiscated the roll and all his pictures. I wrote the Pentagon a letter asking for a print and waited two years here in Vicksburg without even a statement they received the note. I see his wife, who’s remarried and is fat herself now, at the discount drugstore every now and then. She has the look of a kind of hopeless cheer. I got a print from the Pentagon when the war was over and it didn’t matter. Li Dap looked wonderful — strained, abused and wild, his hair flying over his eyes while he’s making a statement full of conviction.

It made me start thinking of faces again.

Since I’ve been home I’ve crawled in bed with almost anything that would have me. I’ve slept with high school teachers, Negroes and, the other night, my own aunt. It made her smile. All those years of keeping her body in trim came to something, the big naughty surprise that the other women look for in religion, God showing up and killing their neighbors, sparing them. But she knows a lot about things and I think I’ll be in love with her.

We were at the John Whitelaw vs. Whitney Maxwell play off together. It was a piece of wonder. I felt thankful to the wind or God or whoever brought that fine contest near enough by. When they hit the ball, the sound traveled like a rifle snap out over the bluffs. When it was impossible to hit the ball, that is exactly when they hit it.

My aunt grabbed hold of my fingers when the tension was almost up to a roar. The last two holes. Ah, John lost. I looked over the despondency of the home crowd.

Fools! Fools! I thought. Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it. Nobody was killed. We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful.

IT MAKES ME SICK WHEN WE KILL THEM OR RIDE HORSES OVER THEM. My gun is blazing just like the rest of them, but I hate it.

One day I rode up on a fellow in blue and we were both out of ammunition. He was trying to draw his saber and I was so outraged I slapped him right off his horse. The horseman behind me cheered. He said I’d broken the man’s neck. I was horrified. Oh, life, life — you kill what you love. I have seen such handsome faces with their mouths open, their necks open to the Pennsylvania sun. I love stealing for forage and food, but I hate this murdering business that goes along with it.

Some nights I amble in near the fire to take a cup with the boys, but they chase me away. I don’t scold, but in my mind there are the words: All right, have your way in this twinkling mortal world.

Our Jeb Stuart is never tired. You could wake him with a message any time of night and he’s awake on the instant. He’s such a bull. They called him “Beauty” at West Point. We’re fighting and killing all his old classmates and even his father-in-law, General Philip St. George Cooke. Jeb wrote about this man once when he failed to join the Confederacy: “He will regret it but once, and that will be continuously.”