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

“Yes, Son! We know about that and your condition, bless your heart. Let’s—”

Wright’s father rose as if to go.

“Then. .”

“ Then? ” said Loomis. He put his short arms on the table. He wore a bulky child’s-size Izod shirt.

“ Then? Then? ” said the father. He sat back down.

“The best, I suppose, in a way, ha ha. At the end of the summer, when I was out of the hospital and all was said and done, Jet and I made a private trip to the Biloxi Yacht Club. We were interested in a boat. Or rather, as I usually did, I followed his interests. It was late in the afternoon and there had been a bumper crop of shrimp — so many they were falling off the boat. The sharks had followed the boats in and they’d called off swimming.

“A man on the dock was balling up hamburger meat full of razor blades, in chunks about the size of horse apples, and throwing them in the water. The water would churn and a fan of blood would rush out of the shark’s head. This brought the others to it. The water was white and thrashing. Heads and half bodies floated up and snapped back down. Then the alligator gars got into it and it was bleeding paradise. That was Jet’s phrase. Oh, he could do the smart phrase now and then, using a British term or some such.

“It was bleeding paradise , he said. After he finished saying this over and over again, he asked me what I thought. Thought about what? I said. And Jet got very sad and looked out over the water at the red sun. Then he pushed me in.”

“He pushed you in? In the water? ” said Milton, who was the only one at the table who could respond in words.

“Yes,” said Wright. There was a bit of hurt in his eyes, but they retained an even, soft gleam. “But there is the further beautiful thing.”

“He pushed you in the water, Son?”

“Yes. But last year I saw him on campus. I knew that he’d been born-again and I wanted to congratulate him. You know what he said to me as he rubbed that big Sugar Bowl ring on those great sun-browned fingers of his? He put his arm on my shoulder and said to me, ‘Wright, I’m sorry.’”

There was business to do, the game to see, or feel, so the four of them slowly left the bar, tapping, wobbling, huffing, and met Wright’s mother on the corner, then went up to the stadium to wait for Jet to kill them.

THE PIER SHOOK UNDER HIS FEET, WRAPPED IN SOCKS AND SANDALS. He wore huge gabardine shorts and was blue-white in the legs. Yeah, our time’s about over, and I was counting the things I hadn’t done last night, things I regretted, sins of omission; omitted to sin , I mean, ha! He was going on. Lewis, ninety-one, had watched some four-foot square of water for three years. He was still intrigued by what the lake gave up. Storms had been rough through the late winter and spring. This was an oxbow lake. The flooding from the great continental river washed splendid oddities into the channel, some of them carnivorous, some of them simply bottom suckers of astounding girth, armored with scales of copper. Lewis shook with both palsy and wonder when fish this rare were dragged up or just spotted rolling.

His fine sea-size rig was cast out with a six-inch red and white bobber; two fathoms under was a hooked shrimp from a frozen bag he’d brought down. Lewis had a theory that with hurricanes — they’d had two just lately a hundred-fifty miles south — sea life pushed up into the high reaches of the river, then flooded even into this lake and Farte Cove. He considered himself an ichthyologist of minor parts and kept a notebook with responses to fish life in it. There were no entries or dates when he did not catch or witness interesting water life. Like a great many days in a man’s life, those days he’d just as soon did not occur at all. He wanted a lot of the exotic and a minimum of the ordinary.

Lewis turned and was deeply unimpressed by old Ulrich staggering onto the pier. This man featured himself a scientist or at least an aerocrat, though Lewis thought him a fraud afloat on a sea of wide misunderstanding. Ulrich was in the process of “studying” blue herons, loons and accipiters in flight and for some nagging reason was interested in the precise weight of everybody he met. He thought it happily significant that the old had lighter, hollower, more aerodynamic bones, such as birds had. Having been witness to the first German jet aircraft in the war, a specter he had never recovered from, he “drew on” this reflection time and again, apropos of almost zero, thought Lewis. Unfortunately, he had also been blown a goodly distance by Hurricane Camille in 1969. Ulrich was old then , but claimed also to be wiser in special “hurricane minutes” and inflicted this credential here and there, at any time, during his seminar at the end of the pier. There was no gainsaying the man with his “brief flight” and “hurricane minutes.” The body was preparing the elderly for the “flight of the soul,” said Ulrich. Why, he expected to weigh about thirty-five pounds when he died, just a bit of mortal coil dragged away protesting like a hare under an eagle.

Another annoyance to Lewis — who actually loved Ulrich; almost all the old loved each other at the end of the pier — was that Ulrich, eighty-nine, showed no signs of bad health even though he lit up one Kent after another. This, Ulrich attributed — wouldn’t it be — to a “scientific diet” such as that literally eaten by birds. The diet of birds was indicated come the senior years. A final annoyance was that Ulrich cherished the word acquit , as in “let me acquit myself” or “he acquitted himself well.” Though Lewis ignored this as often as possible, he wondered why Ulrich should think a person was perpetually on trial when he opened his mouth, especially given the blather that flew out Ulrich’s own. Ulrich, too, was interested in piscatorial life, though fish were “base and heavy,” mere “forage in the pastures of the deep.” Ignore, look away, pleaded Lewis to himself.

Many eutrophic lakes, their food chains unbalanced by man or nature, simply died. But this old oxbow had come back in the nineties. Bass, sunfish, perch, bluegill, gar, buffalo, carp, and now small alligators popped the surface. Big shad fled and recovered in shoals. Rare wading birds attended the shores and shallows. Hunted duck and geese veterans rested and paddled with only the great moccasins and turtles to fear. The water was a late-spring black, with sloughs going to tannin. Three unrecovered human bodies were somewhere out there, victims of March lightning. In a bad storm, the huge lake could imitate an inland sea, all three-foot whitecaps and evil sail-wrappers. It would also flood quickly and drive mink and nutria to the back roads, where one could make ladies’ coats from the roadkill.

Next, Sidney Farte, of the old cove family who owned the boat and bait house, came out, barely, humbled by shingles and roaring ulcers, giving a sniff of propriety to the pier, which he did not own but had watched for fifty-seven years through the replacement and repiling in the seventies. The man who’d had the benches and the rail fixed for the elderly was a kind man — Wooten — now dead and discussed only by that one inexorable trait of his, his kindness in little things and big. Nobody knew what experience had produced this saint, and his perfection attracted none of them, so terrible would be the strain, especially considering the fact that Wooten had not been stupid, not at all. Some said that he had been president of a small Baptist college, but for some reason nobody had ever directly put the question to him. There was a holy air about the man, no denying, that brooked none of your ordinary street questioning. Wooten never quoted anybody or any source. He spoke only for himself, and not very often. Such a man — well, even if something enormous and ugly had happened in his past, it would seem rude to know it. Wooten was a tiny man, maybe five-four, with snow-white hair that turned boyishly fore and aft in the wind. He stepped very softly. Next you knew, he was beside you, looking at what you were looking at in respectful quiet.