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

“Let’s. .”

“Don’t look down,” said Horace.

“What? Why not?”

“Let’s don’t find out who it is. You don’t want to know, do you?”

I saw his point. Horace had a copy of Swann’s Way on the bed beside where he was sleeping and he was deep.

Kosciusko was a better town than we thought, if it afforded this tune at ten in the night. Maybe it was a man just released from jail, or maybe a woman just off a bus somewhere. Horace was right on, it was best not to know the source of this eerie, moaning thing. You couldn’t quite make out the words, but it had the blackstrap moan in it all right. The harmonica trailed in again, sweet and with a bit of terror in it. I grabbed the song. It was all mine. I heard something when the voice started and I could tell Horace had not caught it. Buddy, could you spare a future? This can’t be life . Then it just stopped and did not come back, like something swallowed up in a storm drain. I didn’t hear any steps going away. I looked over to shake my head, smiling, but Horace had already gone back to sleep.

I went out, closed the door, to see what more I could get from the balcony rail. Sometimes you see something that seems made for you, like a good fishing hole, and you won’t leave it although the hours prove there’s nothing there. The old man was still at his post, along with the gone tan carpet, the gone desk clerk, serried cubbyholes in a rack behind. But then, I could hardly believe it, feet in ladies’ sandals appeared, and a stretch of nice tan leg, black short-cut hair in bangs with a few strands of gray in it, and I could not question: a black long-sleeve slightly unseasonal sweater, bosoms small but prominent, and like great lamps in this stag-dark tedium. It was New York Slim, about ten years older than I had guessed her. I was back to New York Slim, instantly unfaithful to Natalie Wood, Natalie was nothing, this woman and I already having had two years of history in the head, you can’t deny old lovers. I couldn’t see all her face, but from the cut to the profile you knew she was at least summer chicken going into fall maybe. She talked to the old man, but he did not rise like an Old South gent should. Then she came up the stairs and saw me, kept going but slower, and the age in her face wasn’t too much — not quite in my mother’s era — with the muscles in her face making lines that matched those in her legs, drawing tight in strands as she took the last two steps. She did not look of this place at all. Then she smiled but at the same time shook her head, as if she knew something about me besides the fact I was nothing but a boy and felt that very much as I looked into her eyes — what color? — and sensed deep events decades long. Also, she was easy here, maybe she lived here, because without checking in she opened the door two away from ours and went in. I was so happy and tormented I looked at the last of her foot going in the closing door many times over, gathered to the rail like a great sinner at the bar.

I checked quickly, very quietly, to see if Horace was still asleep. Ever since the music out on the street I knew something was being made for me, only me, unshareable. It might have been her singing, though already I knew it wasn’t, no, but the singer could be an agent of telepathy as Harold believed in. Sure. The set of her was foreign here, I was certain of that. I had nothing to say. But Harold, now Harold would just go up to somebody and talk if he wanted to. With women he told me he just went right up and said I think we should be friends and probably sleep together, and it worked, he was right in with them. I went to her door and knocked, an enormous chill all over my body. It took a while. I thought I heard her say inside not yet . I knocked again. She opened the door barefooted with a bottle in her hand, a little clear one not for booze, and she was about to say something but I wasn’t who she thought.

“I feel I ought to know you,” I said. “You ring a bell.”

“You don’t know me. And I don’t want to know anybody else now, especially not anybody decent and young.” She took a pull on the bottle, and she seemed a little drunk.

“I’m not so decent as all that.”

“He thinks you are a Communist. He forgot to say you’re only a boy. Why’d you scare him?”

“That old man down there? I was just clearing my throat. Stretching.”

“He said you had symbolic gestures.”

“Oh. He’s a sick one, you know.”

“Yes he is. A very sick one.”

“Could we just talk? We’ve been working bricks and it gets lonesome. We’ve been at it now a week.”

She pulled from the bottle again and I could smell something familiar from it, not booze, something we’d had in the house. The label had microscopic print.

“Come in, oh Mister Communist Police. Arrest me if you must, but I will never break. I will never tell.”

“I’m no Communist. Don’t kid. Say, you’ve been living here.”

“I doubt it,” she said. Not only was she blurred in speech but the speech wasn’t quite American. I knew it.

“I go away, I come back. I go away, I come back,” she continued.

Besides some domestic things on the dresser, there was a bicycle raised on a jack to its axle. You could pedal and go nowhere. I pointed this out, asking if something was wrong with it. You never, also, saw a woman her age on a bike where I come from.

“I go nowhere on that one.” Beside the bike were tall black-laced boots, looking serious and military, but they seemed her size. She sat and slumped to one arm on the bed, pulling from the tiny bottle again.

“What’s that?”

“Happy medicine for nervous bad women.” I saw it was paregoric, the stuff prescribed on ice for nausea. I didn’t know about the opium in it then.

“Your voice.”

“Canadian. Quebec. World citizen. You all sound like the nickras down here. Who taught who to talk? This man I paid out of jail today down over Lexington, he hates the nickras too, but I ask him why does he talk like them then?”

“What was he in for?”

“Throwing things in the night. Fireworks.”

“Disturbing the peace?”

“More keeping. Believes. Depends on what you believe. But dumb to get caught. More of the white trash. Lumpen .”

On the dresser were several long steely pins. I went over and picked one up. They were too long for hairdos. It was extremely sharp on the end.

“Medical,” she said. “Look but don’t touch, if you please. Acupuncture, for relief. Go ahead. The man out of jail didn’t believe in them either.”

I wondered if she was practicing some kind of voodoo surgery. Those signs you see along the road in the country, on the outskirts of town. SISTER GRACE, PALMS. You sometimes feel your blood go darker, and I was feeling it here, more excited than disapproving. This world was fetched in fresh just for me, but I could never tell Horace. I was greedy for all her details. She was European, ageless, a brunette Marlene Dietrich with those long legs.

It was then I saw a Klan robe, a green rounded cross on the left breast, all white otherwise. It had a small ladies’ hood, cut to fashion for her, or so it seemed. The closet door was half open and she didn’t mind my seeing. It all was like stumbling into an alien person’s attic. My people hated the Klan, and I did too, I thought. But there is an undeniable romance, maybe adventure, to hating a whole race of people: it had its sway. Recently in Bay St. Louis, I had left a beautiful girlfriend to go to New Orleans. I did not get much of anywhere with her, but she’d talked affectionately with me. As I was leaving, she said, truly caring for me, I thought, “Oh George, do watch out for the nigguhs in New Orleans. They’re all loose and free over there and they’ll just do anything.” She had seemed lovely in her need to be protected from the dark hordes. I was taken very warmly by this problem, and went off like a knight of the streets, full of romantic charge, with something to prove. I’d been at the closet door overlong. The hanger next over held a great length of dog chain with bracelets at both ends. I supposed she wore this around her waist, like medieval women in the “Prince Valiant” comic strip.