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

Ulrich had said that the lake was now Wooten’s college, but Wooten himself would never have expressed anything as pompous as that.

“The water looks so fresh and deep this morning!” Wooten would say, a curious sweet medicinal smell reaching you on his breath.

Sidney Farte did not care for his virtue, was made sullen by it, but did not dare attack “Cardinal Wooten” (as he called him under his breath) around the others. He was glad when the fellow passed on. Now Sidney could get back to the regular profanity of his observations. Sidney was having a bad time in his old age, but he rather adored his bad time. Also afflicted with serious deafness, he did not enjoy the reprieve from noise as other old people did, but hurled this way and that, certain that whispered conspiracies and revenges were afoot. The soreness in his chest predicted the weather, which Sidney inevitably pronounced rotten: tornadoes, more flooding and thunder, every kind of spiteful weather. A sunny day filled him with mild horror and suspicion. Sidney had endured lately a sorry, sorry thing, and all of them knew it. A male grandchild of his had won a scholarship to a mighty eastern university, Yale, and was the object of a four-year gloat by Sidney, who had no college. The young man upon graduation had come over to visit his grandfather for a week, at the end of which he pronounced Sidney “a poisonous, evil old man who ought to be ashamed of yourself.” This statement simply whacked Sidney flat to the ground. He was still trying to recover and was much more silent than in previous springs. Ulrich and Lewis both worried about him, used to his profanity as a sort of walking milieu against which they fished and breathed.

The other oldster of the core on the rail was late. This was Peter Wren, brother of the colonel who made Wake Island gallant against the Japanese and a chronic prevaricator whose lies were so gaudy and wrapped around they might have been a medieval tapestry of what almost or never happened. He had of course suborned the history of his brother and his constant perjuries held a real fear of the truth, lest the whole tissue of lies crumble when it came forward. It was getting where it seemed dangerous to risk even a simple declarative sentence about the weather or time of day, and Pete Wren was likely to misstate even that. “It’s really wanting to rain, you know. Must be near noon”—when the sky was full blue and the time was about ten, latest. People took him to be majorly misinformed, but it was not that: he lived in fear of rupture from the tangled web. So finally he came out with his expensive ultralight rig and crickets. Wren was a partisan of the bluegill, for which — it was heard — he held the state record, but he’d casually eaten the fish without registering it. He was breeding a special kind of mutant cricket in his wire keep that would take the record fish again. There were enormous bluegills in the lake, in fact, and even a liar could catch them. Wren had taken home a pound-and-a-quarter one late one evening, but he claimed it had interbred with a German trout and had disqualified itself.

“Morning, gents,” said Wren to the three at the rail. They waited for his maiden lie of the day. Something impossible about his sleep, perhaps.

“A car hit him and that queer just flew away,” he said.

“Say it again?” asked Lewis.

“Oh, I rented a video of Last Exit to Brooklyn last night. A queer ran out in the road, a car hit him, and that queer just flew straight up in the air away.”

“Could I see that?” asked Ulrich, intensely concerned with the flight of human beings.

“I might have lost the tape.”

“Already lost it, Wren?”

“It could be in there among my volumes of Shakespeare. I’ve got all ninety-five of his stories and plays. Given to me by my grandson, who just adores me.”

Though he meant nothing by it, Sidney Farte was insulted, recalling the anathema of his own grandson last spring. This began his day vilely, even lower.

“You diarrhea-mouth cocksucker,” he said.

“Here now, so early,” objected Lewis. A ninety-one-year-old man didn’t want to hear such filth announcing the day. That was the sort of thing they did in that vicious far-north horror, New York City. The saintly Wooten had established a certain spirit on the pier that was not recanted at his death. Sidney heard nothing beyond a direct blast in the ear, which Wren was determined to give him. He actually began feeling better now, recovering his purchase on the island of unconscious profanity that was his.

“Puts me in mind of Icarus,” said Ulrich.

“Like everything,” said Sidney. “Shit, I knew a rat once could fly. Throw that sumbitch cheese in the air. Shit in the air too.”

“You look thin today, Sidney. What’s your weight?” asked Ulrich, lighting another Kent.

He jumped into something running parallel in his brain: “Thing to do is wait out the pain. Most times it’ll pass of itself. Modern man has not let the body heal itself. The downfall was aspirin.”

“What in hell are you talking about?”

“Rock and roll kills a lot of men early. We know for a fact that the presence of rock and roll electrons in the air causes plane crashes. Some of that hip-hop stuff will take the wing right off your jumbo jet. Even makes cancer, too. They’re looking into it.”

“These people you say ‘looking into’ shit. Count ’em, it just about leaves only us on the pier that ain’t doing a survey.”

“It’s the age of high-priced nosiness all right,” said Lewis, whose bobber was going under as if a sucking thing were on. He let out an audible breath in sympathy. “Something’s on my shrimp, gentlemen.”

“I want to see this sea creature,” said Peter Wren, throat red with prevarication.

The huge bobber submerged and disappeared in the blackish green, down to legend they hoped, and the men hovered together into one set of eyes three hundred and twenty-three years old. The bobber came back up again, but Lewis raised the line and the shrimp was gone. Wren began rigging for bluegill, excited.

“A turtle or a gator’d bite shrimp,” said Sidney.

“I suspect sturgeon,” said Lewis. “They can breathe both salt and fresh. And they migrate long distances.”

“Your human being is made like the shark. If he quits moving and doing, he perishes,” said Ulrich.

“Now shark . I’ll eat any shark you catch raw,” said Wren. Though a liar, Wren was a man of some sartorial taste. He suddenly observed Ulrich with a jump. Ulrich wore a brown Eisenhower jacket over blue-striped polyester bell-bottom pants — something truly ghastly from the seventies, such as on a boulevarding pimp. Through a flashback of several connected untruths, Wren was visited by a haze of nausea, for everything wicked had happened to him in the seventies. He had lost his wife, his business; thieves had stolen his collection of guns. Music was provided by those skinny, filthy Lazaruses, the Rolling Stones. Carter had given away everything to the blacks and hippies; brought blue jeans to the White House. Every adult became a laughingstock and fool. Old Ulrich here was dressing right into the part. How Wren despised him now for his encyclopedic near-information. The world was in such a sorry state, it made a man lie sometimes to be sane. He tossed his line out grimly. Ulrich had ruined the fishing.

The lake, just alive, now seemed bright warm and dead, just a stretch of empty liquid at midmorning. A bad quality of light had suddenly come over. All of them felt it, like that mean gloom one feels after a pointless argument with one’s wife. Nobody spoke for thirty minutes, hearing the call of an unnamed flat accidie.

At last Lewis, back to his daybreaking thought about what he regretted having never done, his sin of omission, spoke. He asked the others what bothered them in this area. Lunchtime loomed — pleasant ritual of the hungry sun. More and more they talked about food, except for Sidney Farte, often too sick to eat.