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

“Commendable. So this is the ‘secret’?”

“Yes.”

“But, my God, boy, he’s a horror. How can you have him out here in public playing at billiards?”

“He goes a long time without spells. He’s set off by mental. . imagery, I think. Especially dogs. Or their enemies. Cats, awful. And sometimes blacks, unfortunately, although Dr. Latouche doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.”

“He’s going to quit this after a while, then?”

“If things go right. But the spells are getting longer. We’ve got to keep him locked in here. I’m sorry.”

“Not at all. I’ve no other business. So he gave you money, he paid you. .”

“Mr. Coots, you’d imagine, but Dr. Latouche doesn’t even have that much money. He’s given it all away. He should have a better apartment, servants, but he’s got none of it. Thousands are alive because of Dr. Latouche.”

“And he looks a young seventy.”

“Doesn’t he? I think it’s all love and happy work, Mr. Coots.”

“William . You think so? And nobody knows any more than I do about the disease?”

“Looked everywhere. Only one doc in New York had ever heard of it. It’s never been treated in South America. We can only be grateful his is milder, so far. If you believe this, Dr. Latouche wants to begin a fund to go in and cure those few pitiful Indians. Not for himself, not in his lifetime.”

“Yet an Indian. . died. For him.”

“That’s the worst way to put it. And it was my choice.”

Coots lit a Player’s. He needed a strong hit. Fifty years of cigarettes now, with no drastic trouble. He was enjoying the smoke no less than the first good inhale in St. Louis. In that pool hall, he remembered now, a strange old man from nowhere had put his hand on his shoulder and said to him, “My lad, you will write masterpieces.” One of those magic episodes that had punctuated his life. Now Latouche was grievously scuttling and digging at the floor with his long elegant surgeon’s fingers.

“I don’t know why you’re here, sir. But you are the thing, I hope. Obviously you know medicine and magic. I’ve read all your books. What can we do?”

“The Indians did nothing. I believe they revered and, I know, feared the grofftites.”

“Your guess would be better than any doctor’s, I’d bet.”

“I could try something.” Coots was into the grim clinical zone he often elected for himself. It was obvious he could have been a fine MD, given any ambition to heal. The other, too. He grabbed at the pertinent file in his head. The delight of the fit was wearing out. He had lost his spite somewhere.

“You might try slapping him a hard one. Be a bigger dog. Canines respond to bald aggression. They’re pack animals.”

“I doubt I could—”

“Do it. Don’t hold back. Otherwise, you could drench yourself with bitch urine. But he might just hump you and bite your back.”

Barnes did reach down, turning the doctor’s cheeks up, and slap him powerfully, then shut his eyes in pity.

It worked.

Soon enough, Latouche was biped, straightening his tweedy suit back to its original loose rumple, pulling down his vest and replacing his watch chain across the front in the old style. His medical fraternity pin hung there, a small vanity. He was national president in the fifties, the decade of Coots’s first grand fame and obscenity trial. The French, who like their authors sick, fell on his book in droves. Coots stayed shyly and happily away, grogged in morpheus. It had taken him years and the help of friends, but the thing was out and he was going to make some money. Manslaughterer, junkie, thief, queer, layabout — the outer and under had won through. He was regent guru of the beatniks, like it or not.

“Little phase there. I seem to have left you. My cheek smarts. Did I fall?” Latouche wanted to know.

“A little,” said Riley Barnes quickly.

“Old men get tired. Don’t they, Coots? Are you sometimes just tired?”

“Yes indeed.”

“I think it’s martini time. Can almost taste it already, terribly cold, with big white onions. Would you, Riley? What’s your pleasure, Coots?”

“The same. Sounds perfect.”

“All right, then. Don’t want to try the stick?”

“No. Let’s sit in the booth and talk, guns maybe. Hard decisions about the forty-four/forty-five.”

Coots noticed Latouche did not have that detestable turkeyness under the throat that the old often do. Even in his thinness Coots had one gaining on him. A thing that the aging imp Capote attempted to cure by fellatio, he’d heard. They sat.

“Good. I have one. An eighteenth-century heavy handgun. Short piece, cap and ball, of course. Never shot.”

“Bring it on down to the range next Tuesday. We’ll rig it.”

The martinis came, with Barnes, who had a light beer, imported. A health man. How long was his dick? The drinks were sublime, just the ticket. Coots opened up even more. He was narrowing on the question of his own spite.

“I have the Billy the Kid gun,” he said.

“You don’t. There is no Billy the Kid gun.”

“But there is. I’ll show it to you. You must come down to my fort. Say Tuesday instead of the range.”

Barnes spoke up, delighted. “He’s known for not inviting many, Dr. Latouche. You should feel honored. This could be a legendary evening for us.”

Coots looked at the boy, who had become too chummy.

“How about just an old-timers’ chat, the two of us?” said Coots. “This is no rebuke, Barnes.”

“Sorry. Not at all. I go to the gym, anyway, when he goes shooting. I could be nearby, however.”

“Then it’s fixed. I’m feeling better all the time,” said Latouche. “Let me ask you something. Why did Billy the Kid kill so many?”

“¿Quien es?” chuckled Coots. These were the Kid’s last words before being gunned down by Pat Garrett. “I’m not sure. It was a sort of war, the Lincoln County thing. It wasn’t twenty-one, not nearly that. But I’d imagine it got in his blood, very early, when he was attacked by a bully with a knife. Rather like a drug addiction. I’ve studied killers. Now let me ask you: When you shoot, who are you shooting, mentally? What kind of enemies does a man like you have?”

The old doctor was surprised. “Well. . quite zero. It’s all mental, a sport.”

“Come now. You’re too good at it. Some emotion belongs, surely.”

“I’ve no enemies I know of.”

“Life has treated you nicely. No malpractice suit, say, totally unjust. The lawyers. You’ve known women . Some yapping gash that bilked you. Tell me too, that somewhere in the world of money there wasn’t. . And you were in the war, no?”

Coots hardly ever beseeched this much. Even when directly interviewed, for money, he’d not shown this zeal.

“Downrange there you must see some Nazi, some Commie, hippie, queer, black mugger, proponent of socialized medicine, or, really, man a—” Coots almost said cat , as a joke. He looked at Riley Barnes, intense and worshipful, vastly enjoying, and lucky. “Mengele, a Stalin, a Klansman.”

“Not at all. I’m afraid you’re making me sound like a man of no passion. What do you shoot, Coots?”

“Everything. Old age.”

This created high giggles in the other two. Poor men, was he that interesting to them? A scholar, a dreamer, and rather a drudge is what Coots thought he was. He yearned for the character of William Bonney.

“I suppose people who don’t hate don’t write,” said the doctor. “With surgery, I was rarely conscious of a person. Another thing entirely. Never have I felt the necessity, either, to interpret the universe. It was mainly just one piece of work, then another.”