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

The big Indian made the car seem like a toy. Then we got out in the pines, and the last thing of any note I saw with my right eye was a Dalmatian dog run out near the road, and this was wonderful in rural Mississippi — practically a miracle — it was truth and beauty like John Keats has in that poem. And I wanted a dog to redeem my life, as drunks and terrible women do.

But they wouldn’t help me chase it. They were too sick.

So I went on, pretty dreadfully let down. It was the best thing offering lately.

I was among dwarves over in Alabama at the school, where almost everybody dies early. There is a poison in Tuscaloosa that draws souls toward the low middle. Hardly anybody has honest work. Queers full of backbiting and rumors set the tone. Nobody has ever missed a meal. Everybody has about exactly enough courage to jaywalk or cheat a wife or a friend with a quote from Nietzsche on his lips.

Thus it seemed when I was a drunk, raving with bad attitudes. I drank and smiled and tried to love, wanting some hero for a buddy: somebody who would attack the heart of the night with me. I had worn out all the parlor charity of my wife. She was doing the standard frigid lockout at home, enjoying my trouble and her cold rectitude. The drunkard lifts sobriety into a great public virtue in the smug and snakelike heart. It may be his major service. Thus it seemed when I was a drunk, raving with bad attitudes.

So there I was, on my knees in the pebble dust on the shoulder of the road, trying to get the pistol out of the trunk of my car.

An eye is a beautiful thing! I shouted.

An eye is a beautiful thing!

I was howling and stumbling.

You frauding ugly shit! I howled.

But they were out of the convertible and away. My fingers were full of blood, but it didn’t hurt that much. When I finally found the gun, I fired it everywhere and went out with a white heat of loud horror.

I remember wanting a drink terribly in the emergency room. I had the shakes. And then I was in another room and didn’t. My veins were warm with dope, the bandage on. But another thing — there was my own personal natural dope running in me. My head was very high and warm. I was exhilarated, in fact. I saw with penetrating clarity with my lone left eye.

It has been so ever since. Except the dead one has come alive and I can see the heart of the night with it. It throws a grim net sometimes, but I am lifted up.

Nowadays this is how it goes with me: ride, fly, penetrate, loiter.

I left Tuscaloosa — the hell with Tuscaloosa — on a Triumph motorcycle black and chrome. My hair was long, leather on my loins, bandanna of the forehead in place, standard dope-drifter gear, except for the bow and arrows strapped on the sissy bar.

No guns.

Guns are for cowards.

But the man who comes near my good eye will walk away a spewing porcupine.

The women of this town could beg and beg, but I would never make whoopee with any of them again.

Thus it seemed when I was a drunk.

I was thirty-eight and somewhat Spanish. I could make a stand in this chicken house no longer.

Now I talk white, Negro, some Elizabethan, some Apache. My dark eye pierces and writhes and brings up odd talk in me sometimes. Under the patch, it burns deep for language. I will write sometimes and my bones hurt. I believe heavily in destiny at such moments.

I went in a bar in Dallas before the great ride over the desert that I intended. I had not drunk for a week. I took some water and collected the past. I thought of my books, my children, and the fact that almost everybody sells used cars or dies early. I used to get so angry about this issue that I would drag policemen out of their cars. I fired an arrow through the window of my last wife’s, hurting nothing but the cozy locked glass and disturbing the sleep of grown children.

It was then I took the leap into the wasteland, happy as Brer Rabbit in the briars. That long long, bloated epicene tract “The Waste Land” by Eliot — the slideshow of some snug librarian on the rag — was nothing, unworthy, in the notes that every sissy throws away. I would not talk to students about it. You throw it down like a pickled egg with nine Buds and move on to giving it to the preacher’s wife on a hill while she spits on a photograph of her husband.

I began on the Buds, but I thought I was doing better. The standard shrill hag at the end of the bar had asked me why I did not have a ring in my ear, and I said nothing at all. Hey, pirate! she was shrieking when I left, ready to fire out of Dallas. But I went back toward Louisiana, my home state, Dallas had sickened me so much.

Dallas, city of the fur helicopters. Dallas — computers, plastics, urban cowboys with schemes and wolf shooting in their hearts. The standard artist for Dallas should be Mickey Gilley, a studied fraud who might well be singing deeply about ripped fiberglass. His cousin is Jerry Lee Lewis, still very much from Louisiana. The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.

I went back to the little town in the pines near Alexandria where I grew up. I didn’t even visit my father, just sat on my motorcycle and stared at the little yellow store. At that time I had still not forgiven him for converting to Baptist after Mother’s death.

I had no real home at all then, and I looked in the dust at my boots, and I considered the beauty of my black and chrome Triumph 650 Twin, ’73 model, straight pipes to horrify old hearts, electricity by Lucas. I stepped over to the porch, unsteady, to get more beer, and there she was with her white luggage, Celeste, the one who would be a movie star, a staggering screen vision that every sighted male who saw the cinema would wet the sheets for.

I walked by her, and she looked away, because I guess I looked pretty rough. I went on in the store — and now I can tell you, this is what I saw when my dead eye went wild. I have never been the same since.

The day is so still, it is almost an object. The rain will not come. The clouds are white, burned high away.

On the porch of the yellow store, in her fresh stockings despite the heat, her toes eloquent in the white straps of her shoes, the elegant young lady waits. The men, two of them, look out to her occasionally. In the store, near a large reservoir, hang hooks, line, Cheetos, prophylactics, cream nougats. The roof of the store is tin. Around the woman the men, three decades older, see hot love and believe they can hear it speak from her ankles.

They cannot talk. Their tongues are thick. Flies mount their shoulders and cheeks, but they don’t go near her, her bare shoulders wonderful above her sundress. She wears earrings, ivory dangles, and when she moves, looking up the road, they swing and kiss her shoulders almost, and the heat ripples about but it does not seem to touch her, and she is not of this place, and there is no earthly reason.

The men in the store are stunned. They have forgotten how to move, what to say. Her beauty. The two white leather suitcases on either side of her.

“My wife is a withered rag,” one man suddenly blurts to the other.

“Life here is a belligerent sow, not a prayer,” responds the other.

The woman has not heard all they say to each other. But she’s heard enough. She knows a high point is near, a declaration.

“This store fills me with dread. I have bleeding needs,” says the owner.

“I suck a dry dug daily,” says the other. “There’s grease from nothing, just torpor, in my fingernails.”

“My God, for relief from this old charade, my mercantilia!”

“There is a bad God,” groans the other, pounding a rail. “The story is riddled with holes.”

The woman hears a clatter around the counter. One of the men, the owner, is moving. He reaches for a can of snuff. The other casts himself against a bare spar in the wall. The owner is weeping outright.