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

A Yarp is weak and quick like Indians in the legs, thin, but in the upper body powerful, so this thing throw through the woods and running water and pea gravel top-weighted. It can reach up with its arms and yank you down, but it aint hardly nothing underneath but coot legs and wading feet. My grandpa knewn a family of Yarps, peaceable, but nere eye has set on a whole family sinct his time which was eighty year ago when the Ozarks was founded. A Yarp really belong in Europe or Asia is what my grandpa say, he dont like it here in Arkansas, but some fell off accidental in the boats going out and there we are, they come a Yarping with Vikes and Pilgrims, they dont know no breed. Like the Indian they would be not so scarey if they was strong and upright. They is twict the fear to me weak and slimy, hanging down toward the ground like a slug snail, presiding on you specially when they are in groups nearby you, glooming at you, wanting something you cant give but they have to stay after it. That feebletude and they putting hands on you, that belongs more in your nightmares than a strong evil man, it gets your back clammier, your head colder, your heart miserabler.

I coasted on down not talking at all like Im talking now, lights flickering at the snow that were like gray scales, I finally got it, like fish scales, aflapping on the glass. I wouldnt look but he started shaking with cold I guess, commenced knocking on the tin floorboard of my Ford, gruesomish. There hadnt been lights left or right the whole trip, nare cabin nor goodly shack even if there were a light to commit, you hadnt sawn it.

Hurry, lad, the store, said him. I was cold to bones too. When what you know, the engine caught on for maybe cooling down gainst the snow. This thing get a hundred mile on a gallon of water when its good. Will there be music, he asted again. Saying from my choked throat was grievous.

Even if the radio broke they have a televisioner that pull in a music channel all snowy. Out here for the mountains we cant barely get waves, but there is people moving, dancing in the speckled screen we dont know the source, but there be a tiny music at it. The people is sad-looking themselves back and fro specially when the music goes out entire, you just having loud snow and forms pitching and pulling at each other. But I didnt say this to the man I knewn certain were a Yarp, chatting and shifting with cold. I wont it were light enough to see his feet and legs so thin out the right side low of my eyeball.

If there isnt music, lad, we must ride on.

Oh no we dont said I to me.

He knewn already that at the VT school we gathered with Deacon Charles, some nine of us young hillbillies at the head of the willow creek back of the parked schoolbus, the Indian chief Don Nini with us too listening and saying and ahearkening at lunch, seemed it was wouldnt you know subject of females and some studying the old stories and some about the at large way of the world. Some of them had Satan with a fiddle, why Im assaying off again here, the music. He was known to come to a dance out of nowhere and negotiate his fiddle to warp womens and girls. But Deacon who is reasonable in the head and forty-five and run the small engine course said that was made up by jealous male hillbillies whose wives and sweethearts was taken off by a musical stranger. Any slicker could do her, even out of a flat Arkansas town. You might as well say that Satan had a good car or money, which would work better. Deacon knewn the flat delta as well as us in the hills and of course was in the arm service when we was fighting I believe India. He said there werent even half the real tales never that they claim, like youd think a standard Ozark person was going round hardly nothing but a blabbering tale, tales piling up in ever holler and cove. No, and a lots were did pure for government men and university people who wouldnt leave them alone and specially during the Deep Ression. In the Deep Ression times folks often told a tale get the government interested in you as interesting, as workable or feedable or sometimes even free money which they awarded you for not coming off the mountain and mixing in nare cities, which already had too many folks. Some had went to California and messed it up terrible. The governor of California had began a new state and he didnt want nare hillbillies on it. In California they have science that grow eggs on a tree, and them hillbillies so sloppy and shuffling, they dont know how to harvest them down and walk cracking them with their stupid Arkansas feet. Deacon Charles would hold up his banana at lunch and say Whats this? A banana. Well, more than that, friends, youre looking at California, where I shipped out to the East. You say I went west to get East, how? Well, friends, there is a line in the ocean all stormy where everything gets backwards, that’s how. They worship whats little, like a stick. Back to the tales, he said when you then dropped the ones said by parents to scare theyr young into formity, you hadnt hardly no real tales left. No, your witches and your haints, there wasn’t many of them and the tales told about them got them wrong, my hillbilly geese, all gaggle and tongue. Your active supernaturals aint ever going to get that apparent , for one thing. He live on the rim of things and dont want to be discovered. I seen exactly one Yarp and I been searching all my life.

Finally the store, but it looked dim in that rain of snow, just a quarter the light that usually come out of there from Mr Simpson and old Gene James, tall and gray-bald with a bowtie like some girl stood him up sixty years ago. The thing, the Yarp, hopped out and went on in while I gassed up and watered the truck. Ice and snow was already thick and made my truck ghosted. Oh it were freezing and I trembled scared both, not wanting in the store but too cold not to.

The Yarp was over next to the wood stove where they was sitting just staring at the Risk board, no pieces on it. Something was wrong and I were glad theyr was somebody else to share the Yarp with, even nineteen like I am.

He had said something made them stop and frown, Mr Simpson out of a old blanket over him and the smart goat next to the leg of the Yarp. That goat could make change for a dollar, signalled with his right foot.

Theyr not believing I am Missus Skatts man, Roonswent, said the Yarp.

Mr Simpson had a face long like a mule’s, with magnifying glasses he wore making his eyes huge and swimming at you. He said, That old woman crooked and near eighty and dyes her hair red? She on them inclines like a crab been skint. Aint no young man like you be courting her. Why youd be too young for her son .

Before this night is over I will be with her. I have seen her many many times. I have been with her many many times.

Gene James spoke, God made the vaginer of even a plain woman so sweet that even after knucular war and it was the only thing left, the race would be continued. But she cross the line.

How could you get up there? said Mr Simpson.

You cant hardly get up there on a hard summer day, said Gene James. Hed of been the right age if nare man would court her, which, it made you sick to think about. Its froze in on top of being naught but gullies, said James, like that was the law, that was it.

Why I’ll walk right up there from here, said the Yarp.

Some dimwits was released on the county about when I was ten from a bus wreck down a iced incline, them that wasnt killed outright. They come from the hatch in Little Rock to spy the Ozarks. Folks liked some of them and took them in and some of them bred, we all knewn. Gene James looked at him and then me like he might be one, this Yarp, just now showing up from torment. You couldn’t tell them from normal. But I was busy looking at that mans legs and feets. The feets were long and wide all right, in Ill be hung, dirty white or gray scuffed brogans like an normous baby shoe. You never seen that brand nigh nowhere round here. I liked being clost to my home, three mile on.