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

Aw hell, Monroe thought. The bottle of wine was a third drunk, and the Merck Manual was an old one he’d got out of the pharmacology trash basket.

“You were always ugly to me. Is Jerry Silas out there? I want to see him. I have a crush on him,” she said.

She’s with it. She’s not in shock, Monroe thought.

“I’m not going to let them in,” he said.

Two men were outside the door, falling on the porch and yelling to him.

“You don’t like Silas, Mother. We all knew he was. . he lifted weights. Didn’t just lift them. The weights possessed him. He sent off for special underwear and for red oil to rub on his body. He bought a camera that he could activate from across the room while he lay on his bed, flexing. He’ll kill himself when his stomach muscles start sagging.”

Oh, but they didn’t sag, Mother Rooney thought, when I walked in on him and he was naked and stiff, but twinkling in his eyes so joyously that it was clear he couldn’t hurt a woman in all his health, either. He would have been tender, friendly, out-of-doors with you. Oh, he maketh me to lie down in green pastures, but where was he and where was his pasture? And, yes, he restoreth my soul, but all I got was used up. And, yes, his rod and staff, they comfort me — and they would have, but where was he, and where was the comfort I was entitled to? My cup runneth over with hurt-juice.

“Mr. Silas wanted me to be thirty again,” Mother Rooney said.

Monroe leaned on the stairwell with his head in his hands. He yelled out to the porch for them to shut up. He opened the Merck Manual and began turning pages.

“You cannot like him. You cannot like any of us. We were the ugliest people as a group. Didn’t you see how marked out for losing we all were? Hammack, Worley, Delph. I sometimes wondered how all we shits got ganged up in this — this beautiful house. But especially you can’t like Silas. Silas breathes out a smell of broiler shanties and rotten pine, and he is always sweating. He’s lost his job at the music store, but he flourishes on, trying in different ways to prove that he is not from Fig Newton, Mississippi, that a certain type of mass-produceable chicken wasn’t named after his father.”

“You are very sharp toward others,” Mother Rooney said.

“Oh, I know, me,” Harry Monroe said. “A man who was so bad in music he was booted out of the Jackson symphony, and now almost failing med school.”

“But you keep on being so cruel to me. You won’t open the door and let me see those boys. There are two boys out there, aren’t there?”

“One of them isn’t a boy,” Monroe said.

It was strange to him to hear the two on the porch, still savagely drunk, and to realize that he himself, who had put down more than any of them, was now sober as Mother Rooney was.

He said, “The fellow with Silas is seventy years old. He was at the Dutch Bar and we thought we’d bring him over as a — a gift, a present to you. The old guy is ready to be your companion from now on out; he already has a crush on you, Mother. Listen!”

She had begun to rise, hissing at him.

“I know it’s horrible now. But I and Silas wanted to make amends to you, really. We are so sorry for what happened in this house. You know, it started with the little joking insults, and then it grew to where hurting you was a cult. You really occupied us. Especially those of us who were taking a lot of bad traffic in the shit of the outer world and were originally endowed with a great amount of rottenness in our personal selves. The next thing would’ve been murdering you. I always felt the police were ready to break in any minute.”

“You prissy little scholar. I could’ve taken it,” Mother Rooney said. “You don’t know the hurt that’s come to me. It tells me I’m alive, hurting.”

Monroe looked at her forlornly. “Do you think you can take that pin wound in your chest now?”

“I don’t know.” Mother Rooney sank, remembering the pin. What to do? Monroe wondered. He drew away into the dining room and sat on the couch. “Puncture” was all he remembered. He was very busy with the Merck , after making the phone call. She heard the pages ruffling and Harry mumbling.

“. . do not bleed freely and the point of entry seals quickly, making the depths of the wound ideal for the propagation of infective agents. Tract should be laid open and excised and débridement carried out in the manner described under Contaminated Incised Wounds.”

Mother Rooney also heard a loud mauling at the door.

Silas and the old guy were making a ram attack on it. Monroe yelled unspeakably filthy words at them. His pages were still rippling. Then he threw the book out through the front bay window and there was a horrendous collapsing of glass. Then the ambulances came squalling up Titpea. By mistake, two of them came to the same house. Monroe ran on. There were steps and voices and the red lights outside.

Mother Rooney bellowed, “Is it the police, Harriman? I always thought they’d come in and stop Hoover’s cruelty to me. I thought they should have been at the tennis courts at Hoover Second’s crash, declaring it illegal and unfair, and restoring him to me. But they never came. They’re worthless. Tell them that if they try to get in the door.”

Harry Monroe studied the standing brooch on her chest. Do you pull it out? And because the brooch looked silly sticking in the old lady, he walked to her quickly and snapped it out, then flung it down the hall at the back of the house.

He unlocked the door, and there was big Mr. Silas, asking, “What is occurring? I’ve got the lover here.” The old man was riding piggyback on Silas’s huge shoulders; he had combed his white hair back with his own drunkardly, lonely spit, using his fingers, and he was scared to death. The two men waddled in, looking at Mother Rooney.

Monroe ran at Silas and slugged him in the eyes and Silas abandoned the old guy and fell into the dining room upon Monroe. A brawl could be heard by Mother Rooney. The table went over. Silas was reaching for Monroe, who kicked away and whimpered, and that was what the brawl amounted to.

The old boy lay dazed in the lobby, fallen where he was shucked off Silas. He had landed hard and didn’t move. Then his body, with its ruined hairdo, started sliding on the slick boards, face up, down toward Mother Rooney. He moved on down and she saw he was really a red old drunk.

The first ambulance crew thought he was the one and rolled him out expertly. The second crew noticed the woman bleeding. But she was standing now, and went out to the ambulance walking. One of the ambulance men had to go in and break off Silas from Monroe, and now Monroe was another case, and Mother Rooney sat beside him and petted him, all the way to the hospital.

HE WAS FORTY-EIGHT, A FISHERMAN, AND HE HAD NEVER CAUGHT A significant fish. He had spent a fortune, enough for two men and wives, and he had been everywhere after the big one, the lunker, the fish bigger than he was. His name was Roger Laird, better off than his brother, who went by the nickname “Poot.”

Everywhere. Acapulco, Australia, Hawaii, the Keys. Others caught them yesterday and the weather was bad today and they were out of the right bait. Besides, the captain was sick and the first mate was some little jerk in a Def Leppard T-shirt who pulled in the big grouper that Roger hung because Roger was almost pulled overboard. Then the first mate brought some filets packed in ice to Roger’s motel door because Roger was ill with sunburn and still seasick.

Roger had been paying money all day for everything and so when he went to bed, ill, he inserted a quarter for the Magic Fingers.