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

“But I suppose you’ve been paid back. The blood of a very wrong Indian. Hmm?”

“Yes. And that wasn’t my first transfusion. I’ve had two others — one for each of my marriages — each done legally. Good Swiss blood, very.”

“What do you mean, for?”

“For Maggie and Verna both. I was slowing down and I did it for us. To keep up, to prance, to dance. They were both a good deal younger and I couldn’t give them an old coot dead on his lounge chair at the end of the day.”

“And they worked?”

“My word, yes! You couldn’t keep me down. It was amazing, scary, truly. I romanced them, read in erotic books” (Latouche blushed), “rowed down the river with them in the bow. I pleased them constantly, not just with flowers and gifts. In fact—”

“Just a second. I’ll have the martinis out. Save this.”

Coots prepared the martinis with more care than usual, dropping in Latouche’s big white onions, specially bought that afternoon. He waited longer, too, to diffuse the agitation the nonagenarian had got himself into. Coots — Saul on the road to Tarsus — suddenly had an overwhelming light on him; nothing like this had happened to him before. He liked Latouche, thoroughly. True friendship was attacking him. He was very afraid the fellow would get too wound up and stumble into the names, the “imagery,” and say cat or dog — wolf? snake? Negro? quail? He was close to saying everything, and in danger. He waited almost impolitely long. When he went out with the tray he stared at the gun. Let’s get that thing away, Coots decided. Which is what he did, turning it in his other hand admiringly, his martini hand freezing.

“Fine heft. A real buried treasure. The recoil must be a consideration. Jim ’Awkins and Long John Silver, eh?”

“What?”

“Treasure Island . Stevenson. What did you do as a boy in Kansas?”

“Oh, sure now. Even I read that one once, I think.”

“I dreamed of almost nothing but pirates, myself.”

“I dreamed of, can you believe it, Kansas itself. Simply re-pictured what was around me. The wheatfields, the blizzards, the combines, the awful summer sun. For dreams in my sleep, I never had any. I never dream.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. A man would die, flat out.”

“But it’s true. Freud would’ve had no use for me.”

“Well, surgery did. But what a fact.”

“The transfusions, though—” began Latouche.

“My friend, this is startling too. Yours worked. Mine didn’t. I tried to kick morphine with one. No go.”

Latouche couldn’t know that he had Coots entirely. Coots had a young healthy crush on him, wanting nothing.

“I’m very sorry.” Latouche drank deep. Coots was saddened by the unusual sloppiness, gin down the doctor’s chin, untended. “But my transfusions, let me tell you, I think, I know — poor Maggie, poor Verna — I was too much. How they loved me! What a heavenly benefit, their love. I could not leave them alone, Coots. Finally, I — now I say, the bed, the bed, the bed, the bed. The dances, the bicycling, the jogging, the too long mountain hikes in rain — they loved it for me . Then always the bed, the couch, the shower, even the garage, every which way, all hours! Then I’d be up with their breakfast, waking them. I’d have written up an oncological technique while they slept! Too much, too much! They died.”

“What?”

Latouche’s pathetic unlined face was sopped with gin, dropping down like a beard of tears and slobber.

Coots dragged his handkerchief out and kneeled to attend Latouche, dabbing away, kinder than a nurse.

“My friend, my friend,” he sympathized in his great scratch, softened.

“It’s true. I killed them. They were just worn out, is all. Still lovely, both, still should have been in the fine bloom of a woman’s middle age, that arousing. .”

“But one would suppose that one often destroys the loved one. I have destroyed. Have been destroyed,” Coots said, trying to aid.

“I don’t mean your. . fictions, your creative writing! I mean destroyed! ”

“Yes, but guilt, must. .”

“I don’t know what brought me to shout it out. I don’t know why that pistol is loaded. Something made. . You . It’s you, Coots. You demand terrible buried things, somehow. Calamities. Isn’t that it?”

“That’s not a condition of our friendship.”

Latouche calmed down and smiled. “We are friends, aren’t we? All our strangenesses and our differences. We are, yes?”

“Doubtless, friends. And for that I’ll get a fresh one for you. Take it easy. All is locked, here in the bunker.”

Latouche saw the big secured door and nodded, instantly more solid himself.

This drink Coots did thoroughly, a spring in his step, close again to that sun-browned boy with his string of bullheads, his Prince Albert tin filled with nightcrawlers.

When he came out, Latouche was gone and the door was thrown open. There had been a noise in his writing room, and now only Latouche’s things were left, his tape recorder, gun, and overcoat across the arm of the sofa. The front door was unlocked; it must have been thrown open very rapidly, speed quieting the noise.

Coots shut his eyes and knew. He’d forgotten, forgotten, forgotten, entirely the dog hides on the wall of his writing room: the Rottweiler’s black one, and the German shepherds’ speckled gray. Latouche must have stepped inside, looked, then fled, feeling hunted himself. On the spoor.

Horton’s Honda Express, the little city motorbike, was next to the front entranceway, helmet on the seat. Coots knew he should take this. He’d handled it perfectly many times. It would be required, he was positive.

He labored with the big two-by-twelve board on the stairs that served Horton as a ramp. His own long smart overcoat on, helmeted — Horton’s humor insisted on a dove aviary painted all over the helmet — and buckled in, he cranked the scooter and rushed precariously upward through exhaust clouds to the sidewalk, then out bumping off the curb, an old man from hell. Wouldn’t you know, his pesty neighbor, the junkie dentist Newcomb, antithesis of Latouche, hooked possibly on everything and ever determined to visit, was right in his way, and was knocked down by Coots and the whirling machine. Coots cursed with his last cigarette breath, despising this low absurdity. He thought he saw Latouche three blocks up as the street was otherwise empty. Something was scrambling ahead on all fours, head down, trailed by its suspenders, white shirttails out.

It was Latouche. Coots ran over his jacket in the street. Then there was a boot, an old Wellington boot, straight up, abandoned. Poor man! Coots could hardly breathe — the pity, the terror, the love, and the effort with that board. His adrenaline, if it was there, was wondering where to go. He could hardly get air down. Latouche was faster, or through asthmatic illusion Coots thought he was, and he turned back the accelerator all the way. The doctor was running up into the middle of the city. Soon he’d be lost in neon and street strollers, sloths, pimps, bus-stop criminals, sluts. Coots could see citizens spotting the sidewalks, increasingly, a quarter mile up.

At last his respiration and vision were easier. How fast could a dog run? He looked at the speedometer: thirty mph, and he still wasn’t gaining on him. What kind of dog was Latouche? Something Central American and predacious. Please not a greyhound, pushing forty! The motorbike could hit that speed too, but barely. How, then, could he catch Latouche?

He didn’t know it but he passed Riley Barnes, early out of the gym, coming toward him in the Hudson. Barnes flinched and soon U-turned. Coots’s frail head in the bird helmet was unmistakable. By the time he came even, Coots was narrowing his eyes, an elderly cavalry scout in spectacles. Latouche had run into the crowd. He was gone. There was only reckoning with his speed now and trying to stay up even. If Latouche took a turn, it was hopeless. The motorbike wobbled into higher speed, but the traffic would have him soon. Coots felt pure hate for humankind, especially New Yorkers, too cowardly to stay in their rooms; they must be out with their autos, part of the clot, rubbernecking at each other — like dogs. Dogs! Packs of them sniffing, licking balls, consorting in dumb zeal, not a clue, not an inward reflection. The mayor and the police should be shot, for not shooting them. And then this streetlight. He was in a paroxysm of fury.