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

“Where in the hell are you going, Mr. Coots?” Riley Barnes was next to him at the junction, yelling to him from the high car. “Stop, please.”

Coots did.

“He went into the grofft. I swear, Barnes, a horrible inadvertency at my place. He saw some ‘imagery’ on my wall in another room. He’s up there, blocks, incredibly fast.”

“Get in the car, quick. He can’t be out here!” Barnes was in tears already.

“The car’s no good. If he turns, you’ve no chance. This Honda’s the thing. Let me go.”

“I’m going too. He’s mine.”

“Fool. Then get on the back if you can.”

“You can handle this?” Great poundage in the rear with Barnes. They sank down.

“I can handle it. Shut up and look.”

They were off, riding as if on a wire, given Barnes’s body. Every yard was risky and grim. The motorbike wanted to waddle off into the gutter or straight out into the oncoming lanes. Coots’s arms were noodles from the effort.

“Don’t move! Just look, damn you!” His voice whipped back around the helmeted cheeks.

He looked too, tried to. Hunter of the hunter, pointer of the pointer. It had been ages since he’d labored physically at anything, but Nature had not slighted him in adrenaline. He was handling the cargo nicely after another half mile. But Nature — in Latouche’s case, God? — had not slighted the doctor either. Age ninety, ninety! His fitness was uncanny. Coots thought he saw a clot of citizens part, shouting, at something on the ground another three blocks up. Maybe they were gaining a little. Latouche could not be given much more by his heart and lungs. His bootless feet must be awful by now. If only some decent man would just stop him. But where was a decent citizen of New York to be found? It would take a tourist, some Johnson from Kansas.

“Help! Help him!” shouted Barnes, sensing the same.

All Latouche did was gather disgusted glares from both sidewalks.

The thing they feared worst occurred. Plainly, just two blocks up now, a corner crowd parted, faces snapped down, then to the left, some of them pointing down a side street. Latouche had turned. If he began weaving the streets, he was doomed unless he fainted. Coots’s grand new friend would be snatched from him by the most horrible chance and he would be forever had by another “black thing” as vile as his wife’s death. This plague of one, this Kansan prince of North America, was nearing his end and Coots did not even feel potent enough to be his nurse.

Latouche may have been the only man of pure virtue Coots had ever known. You could not really fornicate somebody to death. That was all just Latouche’s elevated code, wasn’t it? An anachronism. Guilty for his own vigor, guilty for his own superb gifts. Could be slight atherosclerosis closing on the old gent, who’d buried awesomely too many contemporaries. Left lonely in his luck.

He must have turned yet again. These streets were near empty, and they saw nothing. It would be merely a matter, Coots feared, of patrolling for his corpse, if they were even that fortunate. They’d have to go to the police and do the official. In the precincts they might know Latouche and get on it with more effort.

The motorbike putted — bleakly — as Coots halted it. The weight of Barnes, at rest, nearly threw them over into the road. But he stood them up with his mighty legs spread. He had not expected to stop.

“Go on! Go on!” cried Barnes in a futile voice as Coots removed the helmet. His hair stood out in wisps. The city had never seemed so unnecessary and odious to him. You could forget there was an old-time Greenwich Village, once worth inhabiting, breathing. And a zoo, the museums, Columbia, the fruitful subway where he’d rolled drunks for dope money. You could “raincoat” a stiff, tying the thing over his head with the sleeves, and have the money without violence; it was quite safe, even for the skinny Coots.

He must meditate the point here, a new one. Where did grofftites want to go? Where would they rest? Where was the quarry? There had to be something, he figured. While Barnes was calling the police, Coots tried to voodoo it out, but there was no file in his head about this he could turn to. Bad luck. “Spot of bother”—a refrain of the nasty British colonial — rang silly back and forth in his mind. He had no further sources. Barnes was probably worthless, in his grand-sonly adoration. Knock down the maze, what could be the rat’s desire? Somebody should have injected rats with grofft gland, offered a number of rat gratifications at the end.

The two of them, Coots and the almost whimpering Barnes — as if taking on symptoms in sympathy — stood foolishly beside the Honda peeping around, statues of the bereaved. Coots had had it with impotence, too old and losing too much by it in the past.

“He was talking about his wives, how he’d murdered them, worn them out with love. He sounded hyper, self-flagellating, caused by a quick suck of gin, maybe.”

Barnes stood taller and clamped on Coots’s wrist, too hard. You fucking monster. Then Barnes kneeled in street clothes with white bucks on his feet, drew a pen from his coat, and began drawing some route on his right shoe.

“What are you doing?”

“He’s talked about his wives before. He could barely stand going to the cemetery with flowers for them. And their birthdays ruined him for days. He was chin-up, but I could tell.”

“What cemetery?”

“Forest Hills, and the dog is there too. I know how to get in at night.”

“That’s ages from here. He couldn’t make it.”

“He could try. It’s all we have. I’ve got a crow’s flight route here on my shoe. We’ve got to go. Look along the way for him.”

Damn the horror between here and there, thought Coots. It’s the only mission.

The men wobbled along for a while seeing nothing, then hit an expressway where motorbikes were disallowed and Coots put the engine up red-line, clawing for near forty-five, deathly slow against the eighteen-wheelers. They looked along the highway for the doctor’s flattened corpse. He could bake flat like a dog before New York got irritated by the smell. Thank the stars, they were soon off it, buffeted by winds of every rolling thing back there.

The landscape became tree-lined, with residential hedges on both sides where dogs could conceivably sleep in the street for a while, as in Kansas. Coots thought of every possible hazard to Latouche on a run even near here. They were too monstrous to confront. He aimed the scooter numbly, dread age tuckering him again in this long helpless mourning. He wondered if Barnes could feel the cap and ball.44/.45 in his overcoat pocket. He’d forgotten it himself and could not recall why he’d pocketed it. Then it came to him — it was exactly the caliber he’d used to nail the dogs, the favored size of the Old West and until lately the modern army. So what? Except that plugging the dogs was the last large physical thing he had done.

There was a narrow screened gate in a northern wall before a gravel path. Barnes simply destroyed the gate before moving instantly a long ways ahead. Happy to be off the Honda, Coots crept like a rag on wasp’s legs. It would be best to let Barnes see that there was nothing at the graves, then return to him. On the other hand, deeper into the burial grounds — vast — he noticed cross paths and cul-de-sacs. He might get lost out here, celebrating this fool’s errand by his own tragedy. This place at night was a sullen metropolis, its high monuments like a blind skyscape. The roll of it had its own charm, but not now.

He called ahead to Barnes. There was no answer. Coots was at the bottom of a very dark, long hill. He should stop, but he couldn’t.

“Not yet, friends. Three or four more books I’ve got in me, I think,” he announced to the brothering tombstones around him. No limit to the elevated vanity of some of them. Who the hell did they think they were, these fat-cat dead? No doubt with hordes of progeny scumming the Northeast. Old tennisers and polo players who should have died at birth, but giving the granite finger to the lowly and the modest who neighbored them. No worse fate than to fall and just be discovered out here.