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

Some had called him a genius since the fifties. Now he was a man of adequate means and invited everywhere for very little reason except the sight of him, alive and gray and imperturbable, a miracle of crotchety survival, beyond space and time. By late afternoon, through with his “studies”—diseases, drugs, hieroglyphics (he had no facility with languages and was deaf to music) — he’d be tired, and walk off the funk in the company of his secretary on interesting streets, wanting to “see a death” near him. His cane, really a sheath for a long stiletto, tapped along merrily. New York was getting too expensive, but he had always loved the hate and Byzantine corruption not only as metaphor but directly inhaling them so as to store them as power. He had been among natives and occult literatures and believed in magic as flatly as in chemistry. He had experienced rare days when he could do no wrong. He would sail an envelope, eyes blind, and it would smack right into the wastebasket. He would drop his razor and the thing would tumble perfectly to his toe, clipping a nail that needed it. On his tape recorder certain meaningful phrases would rise in volume for no technical reason, and they would be important to his life and work. He could fast for a week and be stronger. On the streets he was almost sure that if the enemy were persuasive enough, he could cause “a death” and pass by as an innocent bystander. The evidence of this had come clear years ago when an absurdly rude landlady had looked at him and fallen dead right on the stair landing outside his door, the hexed “gash.” At night, eating with friends and admirers, some of them world-famous actors and musicians, he was polite and attentive. He would not lie, and he refused to be cajoled into being “strange” by some fresh fool who had misunderstood him entirely. Most of the world was perfectly obvious to him. He would not romanticize the “alien.” In his own case, he’d never romanticized being a junkie. Contemporaries in drug and drink had dropped around him like flies — into morgue or loony bin — but a certain dim ingeniousness and regularity had dragged him through, so that his gray eminence punched out like a face on Mount Rushmore. For several thousands worldwide, Coots was one of the true fathers of the century. And greatly tested by calamity. His wife, then their son shooting up like Pop (amphetamines), but lasting only till thirty, liver all gone. Coots was not stone. He fell in love with forlorn helplessness, even now, and would cry like a woman when penetrated by some dreams. Dr. Latouche was in his dreams — not love, not envy, but what? Coots was driven, as not in decades.

When he found the billiards club, an establishment for the Arrived, he snorted. The Britishness. These atavistic beasts he’d had fun with in his violent satires, but even those books were old. He reckoned he looked MP enough to get in and was very pleased when the deskman, young, collegiate, recognized him and waved to the back rooms where all the fun was, offering him the place. It was dark green and woody, pungent with hearthsmoke, with jolly music from somewhere like England happening. Low voices drifted from separate parlors. Coots had no opinion of billiards at all, but the place made him a little homesick for St. Louis in the thirties: innocent American pool tables, the first taste of tobacco, the swoon. He was a boy then, just graduated from the neighborhood pond, with sun-browned cheeks, a string of bullheads, and a cane pole with black cotton line. Learning to be idle and mock, forever. The heft of the cue stick always made it seem like a good thing to knock with. Even Harvard never dragged that feeling from him. The pool hall had a real wood fire you could spit in and watch.

The first players to his right were neither one Latouche. Coots could tell by their faces that they were dumbed by privilege and bucks, and he hissed straight at them, feeling the hidden stiletto in his cane. How a sweep of it across the throat would tumble them, gasping Why? Why? Queer angels would then move down on them with a coup de grace of quick sodomy. Coots’s grandfather was a rich inventor and Coots had never been without a constant monthly sum, but the frigid regard of certain wealthy raised a fire from balls to crown in him. And where was Latouche? In another parlor, vainly ignoring active grofft by placing himself in public at billiards. Coots had only, with delight, heard of grofft in his Central American travels, where he’d made himself fit enough to penetrate the wilds in search of a storied hallucinogen. The drug was a retching bust, but the grofft tales were very interesting. Latouche must have been there to contract grofft. Coots had never heard of a white man with it.

A man near ninety could not have pushed into the deeps down there. Coots remembered the horrible misunderstandings with natives, the dangerous approach through a white-water creek, the malarial bottoms, where mosquitoes were the air. He had written solemnly about his explorations, but in the back of his mind he’d since wondered if he was thoroughly had by the tribesmen. Some foliage had moved, a barking human face emerged briefly, and the thing had run off lowly like a pointer, having smelled or seen that Coots was not the right thing. Grofft! shouted the natives, terrified. He didn’t understand what was going on, but he was alarmed too, near killed by a fer-de-lance before he snapped out of it. In the University of Mexico medical library he had looked up the pathology. But the entry on grofft read as if it didn’t belong, as if it had been written in dread by a haunted mystic of the seventeenth century. The cause: probably the bite of a grofftite — the breath or saliva. Etiology? Symptoms: lupine facial features and doglike barking and whining; quadruped posture; hebephrenia; extremely nervous devotion to a search, general agitation, constant disappointment; lethargy, then renewal. Treatment: Nobody of any medical skill had ever run down a grofftite. History: The skeletons of grofftites had been seen (and avoided) in places near and far from settlements; no uniformity in demise except bones of the fingers, forehead, and sometimes neck were often (twelve cases reported) fractured, the teeth broken; head in three cases planted to jaw depth in dirt, as if thrown violently from a high elevation. And this : Grofftites have lived up to fifty years after being stricken. It was claimed infants were taken off by grofftites but these might be mere Indian tales or manipulative responses to the urban interlocutors. N.B .: Indians have demanded money to imitate a grofftite.

Coots, peering hard at old Latouche in the last parlor now, suspected it might be a powerful drug that induced grofftism. He was in the country of powerful brews, and he could not shake the idea that it was a vaguely religious, maybe even saintly condition, drunk deliberately down by the devout, enough d ’s to go direct to disease, the divine. The sight of noble old Latouche, cuing the ball and doing something smooth with it, was making Coots silly.

Thinking back through the years, he had known very, very few people of pure virtue, if that was Latouche’s case. In his suit Coots felt rude and small. Latouche — another endearing trait — wore wonderful clothes, but he was a bit sloppy and misfit in them. They loved his rumpled way, his scuffed shoes, the speck of sauce on his tie. What an agreeable granddad of a guy.

The doctor was playing a young man with a built-up physique. The young man wore a blazer. Ribbed socks — Coots noticed — with spangling black loafers. He acted familiar with old Latouche. Coots wondered if Latouche was the ward of this muscular stooge.

“Good evening, our genius,” said Latouche, surprised. “You’re a billiards man too?”