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

“My Gawd, that’s awful,” said the old geezer by the rail. “Is that the truth? I wouldn’t’ve told that. That’s terrible.”

Sidney Farte was really upset.

“This ain’t the place!” he said. “Tell your kind of story somewhere else.”

The old man who’d told his story was calm and fixed to his place. He’d told the truth. The crowd on the pier was outraged and discomfited. He wasn’t one of them. But he stood his place. He had a distressed pride. You could see he had never recovered from the thing he’d told about.

I told Wyatt to bring the old man back to the cabin. He was out here away from his wife the same as me and Wyatt. Just an older guy with a big hurting bosom. He wore a suit and the only way you’d know he was on vacation was he’d removed his tie. He didn’t know where the bait house was. He didn’t know what to do on vacation at all. But he got drunk with us and I can tell you he and I went out the next morning with our poles, Wyatt driving the motorboat, fishing for white perch in the cove near the town. And we were kindred.

We were both crucified by the truth.

MY HEAD’S BURNING OFF AND I GOT A HEART ABOUT TO BUST OUT OF my ribs. All I can do is move from chair to chair with my cigarette. I wear shades. I can’t read a magazine. Some days I take my binoculars and look out in the air. They laid me off. I can’t find work. My wife’s got a job and she takes flying lessons. When she comes over the house in her airplane, I’m afraid she’ll screw up and crash.

I got to get back to work and get dulled out again. I got to be a man again. You can’t walk around the house drinking coffee and beer all day, thinking about her taking her brassiere off. We been married and divorced twice. Sometimes I wish I had a sport. I bought a croquet set on credit at Penney’s. First day I got so tired of it I knocked the balls off in the weeds and they’re out there rotting, mildew all over them, I bet, but I don’t want to see.

Some afternoons she’ll come right over the roof of the house and turn the plane upside down. Or maybe it’s her teacher. I don’t know how far she’s got along. I’m afraid to ask, on the every third night or so she comes in the house. I want to rip her arm off. I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out. Some nights she lets me lick her ears and knees. I can’t talk about it. It’s driving me into a sorry person. Maybe Hobe Lewis would let me pump gas and sell bait at his service station. My mind’s around to where I’d do nigger work now.

I’d do Jew work, Swiss, Spanish. Anything.

She never took anything. She just left. She can be a lot of things — she got a college degree. She always had her own bank account. She wanted a better house than this house, but she was patient. She’d eat any food with a sweet smile. She moved through the house with a happy pace, like it meant something.

I think women are closer to God than we are. They walk right out there like they know what they’re doing. She moved around the house, reading a book. I never saw her sitting down much, unless she’s drinking. She can drink you under the table. Then she’ll get up on the spot of eight and fix you an omelet with sardines and peppers. She taught me to like this, a little hot ketchup on the edge of the plate.

When she walks through the house, she has a roll from side to side. I’ve looked at her face too many times when she falls asleep. The omelet tastes like her. I go crazy.

There’re things to be done in this world, she said. This love affair went on too long. It’s going to make us both worthless, she said. Our love is not such a love as to swell the heart. So she said. She was never unfaithful to me that I know. And if I knew it, I wouldn’t care because I know she’s sworn to me.

I am her always and she is my always and that’s the whole trouble.

For two years I tried to make her pregnant. It didn’t work. The doctor said she was too nervous to hold a baby, first time she ever had an examination. She was a nurse at the hospital and brought home all the papers that she forged whenever I needed a report. For example, when I first got on as a fly in elevated construction. A fly can crawl and balance where nobody else can. I was always working at the thing I feared the most. I tell you true. But it was high pay out there at the beam joints. Here’s the laugh. I was light and nimble, but the sun always made me sick up there under its nose. I got a permanent suntan. Some people think I’m Arab. I was good.

When I was in the navy, I finished two years at Bakersfield Junior College in California. Which is to say, I can read and feel fine things and count. Those women who cash your check don’t cause any distress to me, all their steel, accents and computers. I’ll tell you what I liked that we studied at Bakersfield. It was old James Joyce and his book The Canterbury Tales . You wouldn’t have thought anybody would write “A fart that well nigh blinded Absalom” in ancient days. All those people hopping and humping at night, framming around, just like last year at Ollie’s party that she and I left when they got into threesomes and Polaroids. Because we loved each other too much. She said it was something you’d be sorry about the next morning.

Her name is Jane.

Once I cheated on her. I was drunk in Pittsburgh. They bragged on me for being a fly in the South. This girl and I were left together in a fancy apartment of the Oakland section. The girl did everything. I was homesick during the whole time for Jane. When you get down to it, there isn’t much to do. It’s just arms and legs. It’s not worth a damn.

The first thing Jane did was go out on that houseboat trip with that movie star who was using this town we were in in South Carolina to make his comeback film. I can’t tell his name, but he’s short and his face is old and piglike now instead of the way it was in the days he was piling up the money. He used to be a star and now he was trying to return as a main partner in a movie about hatred and back-stabbing in Dixie. Everybody on board made crude passes at her. I wasn’t invited. She’d been chosen as an extra for the movie. The guy who chose her made animalistic comments to her. This was during our first divorce. She jumped off the boat and swam home. But that’s how good-looking she is. There was a cameraman on the houseboat who saw her swimming and filmed her. It was in the movie. I sat there and watched her when they showed it local.

The next thing she did was take up with an architect who had a mustache. He was designing her dream house for free and she was putting money in the bank waiting on it. She claimed he never touched her. He just wore his mustache and a gold medallion around his neck and ate yogurt and drew houses all day. She worked for him as a secretary and landscape consultant. Jane was always good about trees, bushes, flowers and so on. She’s led many a Spare That Tree campaign almost on her own. She’ll write a letter to the editor in a minute.

Only two buildings I ever worked on pleased her. She said the rest looked like death standing up.

The architect made her wear his ring on her finger. I saw her wearing it on the street in Biloxi, Mississippi, one afternoon, coming out of a store. There she was with a new hairdo and a narrow halter and by God I was glad I saw. I was in a bus on the way to the Palms House hotel we were putting up after the hurricane. I almost puked out my kidneys with the grief.

Maybe I need to go to church, I said to myself. I can’t stand this alone. I wished I was Jesus. Somebody who never drank or wanted nooky. Or knew Jane.

She and the architect were having some fancy drinks together at a beach lounge when his ex-wife from New Hampshire showed up naked with a single-shot gun that was used in the Franco-Prussian War — it was a quaint piece hanging on the wall in their house when he was at Dartmouth — and screaming. The whole bar cleared out, including Jane. The ex-wife tried to get the architect with the bayonet. She took off the whole wall mural behind him and he was rolling around under tables. Then she tried to cock the gun. The policeman who’d come in got scared and left. The architect got out and threw himself into the arms of Jane, who was out on the patio thinking she was safe. He wanted to die holding his love. Jane didn’t want to die in any fashion. Here comes the nude woman, screaming with the cocked gun.