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

He forgot how the drag worked. He forgot everything. Everything went into a hot rapid glared picture, and he was yanked into the sea, past his knees, up to his waist, then floundering, swimming, struggling up.

Then he began running knee-deep and following the fish.

Jesus — oh, thank you, please, please, yes — holy Christ, it was coming toward him now! He reeled in rapidly. He had gone yards and yards down the beach.

It came on in. He could pull it in. It was coming. It was bending the rod double. But it was coming. He had it. Just not be dumb and lose it.

It surfaced. A sand shark. About four feet long and fifteen pounds. But Roger had never seen anything so lovely and satisfying. He grabbed the line and hauled it toward him, and there it was, white bellied and gray topped, and now he had it on the sand and it was his , looking like a smiling tender rocket from the deep, a fish so young, so handsome, so perfect for its business, and so unlucky.

By this time a crowd had gathered, and Roger was on his knees in the sand, sweating profusely and with his chest full of such good air it was like a gas of silver in him.

The crowd began saying things.

“I’ll kill him with this flounder gig! Everybody stand back!” said one of the young men.

“Ooo! Ugg!” said a young somebody else.

George Epworth was on the beach by then.

“That was something. I watched you through the binoculars. That was something.” George Epworth knelt and watched the shark heaving away.

“Would you unhook him for me?” Roger Laird asked.

George Epworth reached down, cut the line, and pulled the hook out backward through the shank, leaving only a tiny hole.

A man who had been cutting up drift logs for a fire said, “I’ll do the honors. They’re good to eat, you know.”

The man was raising his axe and waiting for Roger to move away.

“Not mine, you don’t!” Roger screamed, and then he picked up the shark by the tail and threw it way out in the water. It turned over on its back and washed in as if dying for a few minutes, whereupon it flipped over and eased into the deep green.

When Roger Laird got back to Louisiana, he did not know what kind of story to tell. He only knew that his lungs were full of the exquisite silvery gas.

Reba Laird became better. They were bankrupt, had to sell the little castle with the dutch roof. She couldn’t buy any more dresses or jewelry. But she smiled at Roger Laird. No more staring at the wall.

He sold all his fishing gear at a terrible loss, and they moved to Dallas, address unknown.

Then Roger Laird made an old-fashioned two-by-four pair of stilts eight-feet high. It made him stand about twelve feet in the air. He would mount the stilts and walk into the big lake around which the rich people lived. The sailing boats would come around near him, big opulent three-riggers sleeping two families belowdecks, and Roger Laird would yell:

“Fuck you! Fuck you!”

I WAS SITTING RADAR. ACTUALLY DOING NOTHING.

We had been up to seventy-five thousand to give the afternoon some jazz. I guess we were still in Mexico, coming into Miramar eventually in the F-14. It doesn’t much matter after you’ve seen the curvature of the earth. For a while, nothing much matters at all. We’d had three sunsets already. I guess it’s what you’d call really living the day.

But then,

“John,” said I, “this plane’s on fire.”

“I know it,” he said.

John was sort of short and angry about it.

“You thought of last-minute things any?” said I.

“Yeah. I ran out of a couple of things already. But they were cold, like. They didn’t catch the moment. Bad writing,” said John.

“You had the advantage. You’ve been knowing,” said I.

“Yeah. I was going to get a leap on you. I was going to smoke you. Everything you said, it wasn’t going to be good enough. I was going to have a great one, and everything you said, it wasn’t going to be good enough,” said he.

“But it’s not like that,” said I. “Is it?”

He said, “Nah. I got nothing, really.”

* * *

The wings were turning red. I guess you’d call it red. It was a shade against dark blue that was mystical flamingo, very spaceylike, like living blood. Was the plane bleeding?

“You have a good time in Peru?” said I.

“Not really,” said John. “I got something to tell you. I haven’t had a ‘good time’ in a long time. There’s something between me and a good time since, I don’t know, since I was twenty-eight or like that. I’ve seen a lot, but you know I haven’t quite seen it. Like somebody’s seen it already. It wasn’t fresh. There were eyes that had used it up some.”

“Even high in Mérida?” said I.

“Even,” said John.

“Even Tibet, where you met your wife. By accident a beautiful American girl way up there?” said I.

“Even,” said John.

“Even Greenland?” said I.

John said, “Yes. Even Greenland. It’s fresh, but it’s not fresh. There are footsteps in the snow.”

“Maybe,” said I, “you think about in Mississippi when it snows, when you’re a kid. And you’re the first up and there’s been nobody in the snow, no footsteps.”

“Shut up,” said John.

“Look, are we getting into a fight here at the moment of death? We going to mix it up with the plane on fire?”

“Shut up! Shut up!” said John. Yelled John.

“What’s wrong?” said I.

He wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t budge at the controls. We might burn but we were going to hold level. We weren’t seeking the earth at all.

“What is it, John?” said I.

John said, “You son of a bitch, that was mine —that snow in Mississippi. Now it’s all shot to shit.”

The paper from his notepad was flying all over the cockpit, and I could see his hand flapping up and down with the pencil in it, angry.

“It was mine, mine , you rotten cocksucker! You see what I mean?”

The little pages hung up on the top, and you could see the big moon just past them.

“Eject! Save your ass!” said John.

But I said, “What about you, John?”

John said, “I’m staying. Just let me have that one, will you?”

“But you can’t,” said I.

But he did.

Celeste and I visit the burn on the blond sand under one of those black romantic worthless mountains five miles or so out from Miramar base.

I am a lieutenant commander in the reserve now. But to be frank, it shakes me a bit even to run a Skyhawk up to Malibu and back.

Celeste and I squat in the sand and say nothing as we look at the burn. They got all the metal away.

I don’t know what Celeste is saying or thinking, I am so absorbed myself and paralyzed.

I know I am looking at John’s damned triumph.

MY NAME IS NED MAXIMUS, BUT THEY CALL ME MAXIMUM NED.

Three years ago, when I was a drunk, a hitchhiker stabbed me in the eye with my own filet knife. I wear a patch on the right one now. It was a fake Indian named Billy Seven Fingers. He was having the shakes, and I was trying to get him to the bootleggers off the reservation in Neshoba County, Mississippi. He was white as me — whiter, really, because I have some Spanish.

He asked me for another cigarette, and I said no, that’s too many, and besides you’re a fake — you might be gouging the Feds with thirty-second-part maximum Indian blood, but you don’t fool me.

I had only got to the maximum part when he was on my face with the fish knife out of the pocket of the MG Midget.

There were three of us. Billy Seven Fingers was sitting on the lap of his enormous sick real Indian friend. They had been drinking Dr. Tichenors Antiseptic in Philadelphia, and I picked them up sick at five in the morning, working on my Johnnie Walker Black.