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

“I guess what I missed most was having a significant pet,” said Lewis. “I was always talked out of them. Would be nice to have an old dog hearkening toward the end with me.”

“I guess I missed the Big Money,” said Ulrich. “That could have been sweet. Imagine the studies one could pursue. Perfecting one-man propulsion. I could have been the Howard Hughes of individual flight.”

“I wish I’d had a heart,” blurted Sidney Farte. “I didn’t even cry at my wife’s funeral. Knew I should, but I just couldn’t. My children looked long and expectant at me. Hell, I was like that as a little boy. Look on the worst things without a blink, eyes so dry they hurt. Something left out of me at birth. Begun lying ’cause there wasn’t nothing in true life that moved me.”

The confession was so astounding to the rest, who had known Farte for a decade and a half, that reply was occluded. His health must be sincerely bad. They all felt a surrender. Now noon, it became darkly clouded; something dangerous and honest seemed to be in the air. Peter Wren had a fish on, but was just ignoring it, reckoning on Sidney Farte. But it was Wren’s turn.

“That I could have sex with a child,” he said.

“My ugly God,” said Lewis.

“I mean a youngish girl, say fourteen. That she would adore me. I would be everything to her.”

Was he now adjusting himself to a public? they wondered. Or was he inwardly a vile old criminal, collecting photographs and near to wearing a garter belt? Fourteen was suddenly too legitimate, hardly a story at all. In their youth, fourteen was open season. There were many mothers at age fifteen, already going to fat. Four memories raked through the deep ashes of their desire.

“Shit, I had that,” said Sidney.

“Was she tight? Did she cavort for you?” asked Wren.

“Yes and yes. Couldn’t get enough. I tell you—”

“Shhh!” said Lewis.

Behind them, someone had lightly shaken the pier. In her tennis shoes, she had crept up unheard. The small vibration of the boards was all the warning Lewis had of her. She was right behind Sidney, attentive. It was Melanie, Wooten’s widow, the only woman ever to insist on coming among the men at the end of the pier. Farte despised having her near. The others could not quite decide. Something was always suspended when she came around. A sort of startled gentility set in, unbearable to Farte, like sudden envelopment by a church.

“We were talking horses, Mrs. Wooten,” said Lewis.

She’d brought them a snack of homemade sugar cookies. You could smell vanilla on her. She was an industrious person who had begun blowing glass animals after the death of her husband. That she came out there was somewhat aggressive, they felt, and she had begun talking a lot more since Wooten passed, finding a hobby and her tongue at about the same time.

“No, you weren’t talking horses. Don’t mind me, don’t you dare. I like man talk.”

“Cloudy noon,” Ulrich offered.

“Aren’t you going to pull your fish in?” the old lady asked Wren.

When he got the fish reeled in, they saw it was a Gaspergou, a frog-eyed crossbreed of bass and bream nobody had seen in ages. Everybody but the sulking Farte was fascinated.

“That’s your unlikely combination, a mutant, absolutely,” said Ulrich, “the predator and the predatee, crossbred. The eater and the eaten.” As Wren unhooked it and laid it out on the planks, Ulrich continued, in an excess of philosophy: “An anomaly of the food chain, hardly ever witnessed. We’ve got the aquatic equivalent of a fox and a chicken here, on your food chain. Reminds you of man himself. All our funereal devices are a denial of the food chain — our coffins, our pyres, our mausoleums, our pyramids. Pitifully declaring ourselves exempt from the food chain. Our arrogance. But we aren’t, we’re right in it. Nits, mites and worms will have us. Never you doubt it.”

They munched the sugar cookies and Ulrich was confident he had produced a deep silence with his gravity.

“I’m not that innocent, lads,” said Melanie Wooten. “I’ve cavorted. I was a looker, my skin they said seemed not to have any pores at all. Wootie was lucky. The man stayed grateful, all his life.”

“Is that what made him so kind?” asked Lewis.

He acknowledged, looking at her firmly for the first time, that she was no liar. Her skin was still fine for a woman in her seventies. There was a blonde glow to her. Her lips were full and bowed — quite beautiful, like a lady in films. The way she broke into life here toward the end he found admirable too. Many women of his generation remained huddled mice. You could not even imagine them straight in their coffins.

“I hope so,” said Melanie. “His gratitude. Without, I hope, sounding proud.”

“Not at all,” said Lewis. “Gratitude is what marks the higher being, doesn’t it?”

“But the thing came over him toward the end, which I’ve never much discussed. It came on just like diabetes. My love had nothing to do with it. In his seventies he turned gay. Isn’t that something? All those male students — he had a different infatuation every week. Poor Wootie. They fired him from the college. He couldn’t control himself.”

“What?” asked Sidney Farte, rather meanly. She knew the problem.

“He turned homosexual. Homosexual ,” she emphasized, as if in a lecture to a pupil.

“Is it true?” asked Lewis.

They were not looking anywhere in particular, the others, when they noticed Lewis was weeping. He shook a little, and his long white face was drawn up in hurt.

“What is it?” Ulrich and Wren begged. “What’s wrong?”

“I want a dog . I want a dog . I get so lonely, nothing anybody can do about it,” Lewis cried out like a child.

“Well now, a dog can be had . Let’s be about getting you a dog,” said Ulrich.

“Certainly,” Melanie said, taking Lewis’s hand. “Did I upset you?”

“Just a dog,” Lewis sniffled.

“By all that pukes, get the man a dog,” said Sidney.

“That’s a dream you hardly have to defer,” said Wren. “That can be most painlessly had.”

They went back up the pier together, Melanie indicating the way to her station wagon. All in, they set out over to Vicksburg to find Lewis a dog.

THE OLD MAN OFF FORTY YEARS OF MORPHINE WAS FASCINATED BY guns. He was also a foe of dogs everywhere. They were too servile, too slavering, too helplessly pack-bent when not treacherous. The cat was the thing. Coots cut at the evening with his cane and wanted to “see a death” in the big city. He had been crazy for death these many years, writing about it and studying it in thick manuscripts. Many, hordes, died in his fictions. He dressed in a suit, often a three-piece, and looked to be a serious banker, with a Windsor knot in his tie. The scratch of the lower Midwest was in his voice. He was looking for a billiards parlor in Manhattan. In these blocks he had heard one rumored.

He knew of an afflicted man playing billiards — Latouche, ninety, a barely retired surgeon. The grofft was getting him. It was a rare Central American disease, making one hunt like a dog, bark and whine, the face becoming wolfish. The old man, Coots, despised the even older Latouche. There was just something, something — what? — about the man, perhaps his comfort, an obtuseness. And, sealing it, he owned a proud Hungarian sheepdog. The thing had gruesomely licked Coots at an underground firing range where he and Latouche shot their exotic weapons. It was their only similarity, this love of handguns. The old men would ardently blast away for hours, exchanging Italian, German, South African and Chinese pieces, barrels all heated up so that they would have made a pop of steam if tossed in water. Hunting and ordering correct calibers was a main part of their lives. Latouche was more the weapons technician, while Coots revered the history of each piece, or even more precisely, what kind of hole in what men in what time, entrance and exit; what probable suffering.