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

Something let go a howl, canine and terrifying. It was too high for Barnes or Latouche. Too beyond, too nauseating. He stumbled down the hill toward it, however, loving the pistol when he felt it again. Ghoul, I am ready. Eat me, try. Then he heard what was plainly Barnes, near a big tree by the moon, weeping. Oh no. Oh what.

Apparently Barnes had done the howling. He sat at a plot of three stones.

Latouche had got deeply into one of the graves. His head was in it and both arms. He lay there — bloody, barefoot and dead. The name on the stone of the scratched grave was VERNA LOUISE LATOUCHE.

Coots kneeled, arm on the shoulder of the muddy Barnes, who was beating the ground with his hands, sobbing. He turned his face, changed into one hole of grief.

“Imposs — he was already coldish,” said Riley Barnes.

“I think, lad, you’ll find he’s broken his fingers and his jaws. Poor Latouche.”

“He was the finest man I’ve ever known.”

“What was his given name?”

“Harold. Harry. I’m just a termite.” Barnes was able to quit weeping, slowly. “What are you doing with that gun?”

“I. . suppose I was going to try and woo him out of it with a piece of familiarity. It’s his. He was an uncommon pistoleer.”

“That was nice, Coots.”

Barnes stood, filthy at the knees and palms. Then he kneeled again and pulled Latouche out of the hole; he was at the depth you’d see when an infantryman was caught out by bombs. Coots looked up at the rushing beardy clouds. He preferred not to see Latouche’s face. That would be profane. Barnes, brushing the dirt from the doctor’s face, seemed to agree. He would not look at him full-on. They also agreed that officials should be told — the ambulance, hurling lights, Coots could already imagine. This was enough.

There was, of course, the unspoken idea between them that Latouche should not be found like this. The gossip, the ugliness, the possibility of blemish on his life. Neither said anything for a good while until Coots, finally, spoke up.

“Really it’s a better death than most. He didn’t have to wait for it. More valiant, don’t you think? We’ve got one problem. They won’t believe it.”

“It doesn’t matter. All of him was unbelievable, when you study it.”

“You go call. Can you do the Honda?”

“No problem.”

“I’d like to stay and watch. A few more minutes with him.”

“You’re a good man, Mr. Coots. I really never knew that, by your stuff.”

“I have my vagrant loyalties.”

As he waited, seating himself finally in an ecstasy of relief — so tired, so worse than weary, his right hand in an agony from twisting on the motorbike — he found a Player’s cigarette in his coat and lit it. Nature did nothing more, but the city became louder. Horns, screeches, a ball game, airplanes — it was all obscene.

“Oh yes I saw ‘a death,’ Harry. So Harry—” He stopped.

Coots’s eyes became misted and blind. This was all right, this was fitting.

“But what a gap, Harry. What an awful gap you leave. And I only a watcher.”

WE, IN A RAGGED BOLD LINE ACROSS THEIR EYES, COME ON. SHREDS of the flag leap back from the pole held by Billy, then Ira. We, you’d suspect, my posteritites, are not getting on too well. They have shot hell out of us. More properly we are merely the Bats by now. Our cause is leaking, the fragments of it left around those great burned holes, as if their general put his cigar into the document a few times. Thank you mercilessly, Great Perfecter. But we’re still out there. We gain by inches, then lose by yards. But back by inches over the night, huff, flap, narg. I am on a first-name basis with five who have had their very trigger fingers blown away— c’est rien , mere bagatelle . They mutter, these Cajuns. Something about us their cannon doesn’t like, to put it mildly. By now you must know that half our guns are no good, either.

Estes — as I spy around — gets on without buttocks, just hewn off one sorry cowardly night. Morton lacks hair, too close to the cannon before he decided on retreat. I have become the scribe — not voluntarily, but because all limbs are gone except my writing arm. Benedict, Ruth and the Captain say I am not unsightly, in my tent with the one armhole out of it, not counting the one for my head. I’m a draped man of some charm, says our benign crone of a nurse, Emmaline. Nobody comes forward to our rear like loyal Emmaline, the only woman to see this much this close. She comes up to the foul hospital, carrying a depth of pity. How, we wonder, does she carry on? “I’ve seen everything, boys! These milky old eyes have seen it all!” The only real atheist around, she carries love and helplessness forward in a bucket in either hand. We wonder, surely, whether this is the last woman we’ll ever see. Maybe they use her to make us fight for home, but which way would that work? Better to think she’s part of no plan at all. The best things in life, or whatever you call this , happen like that, even I in my old youth have learned. This marks the very thing, most momentous, I am writing about. It’s over for me but I can’t leave. No. I’d rather just stick here at my niggled work, undismayed by an occasional overshot bomb. I just lean over, disgusted, and think there’s not much left of me to hit. Shrapnel blows through my tent-dress every now and then.

The best thing is that on retreat our boys run the rats and shocked wrens and baby rabbits back to me. Out of my tent shoots my arm. Yummy. The creatures had figured me for a goner. The smoke from the enemy’s prime ribs, T-bones and basted turkeys floats over here at night sometimes, cruelly, damn the wind. In my long glass I can hardly find a human figure over there among the thick and bristling cannon, and when I do find a face, the smirk on it is killing. That is enough. I whisk back to the rear, wheel rapidly under my dress. Wind blows my tent up and I must resemble some fop’s umbrella, rolling in the wheelbarrow. Some of us in that last long entrenchment, I noted, are so narrow against the wind they suffer the advantage of disappearing as targets. One man cuts and eats his own bunions. Corporal Nigg was still in his place, frozen upright, long dead but continuing as the sentry. Who can fire him? Who has time for clerical work? Nigg is present, accounted for, damn you, a soldier’s soldier. So Private Ruth brings my journey in the wheelbarrow to its conclusion back at the tent, puffing. Calamity has provided me with perquisites. Some resent me, as they go off to lose an eye or ear and return to chat, lucky this time.

The charge, our old bread and butter, has withered into the final horror of the field, democracy. It is a good thing we are still grassroot-mean, or there would be no impetus left. Referendums for and against the next charge take a long time, collecting ballots down the line, out in the swamp. Every sniper has an opinion, every mule-lackey, every musician. The vote is always in favor, for we are the Bats Out of Hell Division, even if we are down to less than regiment size. These boys can still stir you. When I know something big’s afoot, I shriek for Ruth, who rolls me up to jump-off with the shock troops. Nobody is disheartened by my appearance. There are men far, far worse off than I, men unblessed with the ability to write and read; men whose salivation has been taken from them by breathing in one ball of fire too many. Oh Jesus, I’d go rolling out there with them if I could. It’s Ruth that holds me back. Otherwise I’d be in the fore, quill high, greeting their cannon — hub to hub they are — a row almost endless of snobs’ nostrils, soon to come alive with smoke and flame: grape, canister, ball, bomb, balls and chain. They greet us even with flying glass. I’ll never forget the lovely day they took nearly my all. In a way I want to revisit it; a sentimental journey, however, this war has no time for. Ruth won’t budge. He has his orders. I, the scribe, have become as important as our general, who is, of no debate, criminally insane just like the rest of them.