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

She’d finished two Cokes and the blur was on again. At one point I thought she was breaking down and crying, but I cannot remember at what point. There was sweat on her forehead, and her lips moving, I could swear she’d become younger and younger as her cheeks stretched, then got older at the end, the paregoric driving a hotter, duller black to her eyes.

“I need a bath. Sometimes seven or eight a day,” she said dully. “Don’t forget to be my friend, boy. I think I’ve done something to your youth. You don’t look so decent now.” She waved for me to go.

This had taken a long while, and when I went by the room, Horace was in it, asking what in hell was going on, the day was done.

I told him a person down the way had some medicine for me and that we had chatted while I got better.

At breakfast the next day, Horace and I were still the only ones in the dining room, and feeling obliged for detaining the help, I claimed stomach distress that was not completely a lie. I was too excited and too heavy in her story, like a walking boy museum, hebephrenic and bitten at the scalp and loins. I was up the stairs before I realized I had passed the old man, who was back in the chair, with a black suit on. I knocked and she met me in the door on her way out. She drew me in and shut the door.

“He’s down there, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said, all nerves.

“Albert is very jealous. You have to watch it. It’s the worst thing about him. We’re going out to see my dog in the country. A man gave me a Weimaraner dog, a real lovey. When Albert gets bad he threatens to kill it.”

“No. He’s a monster.”

“In jealousy, yes.”

She was dressed in an innocent-looking country outfit, printed skirt and baby blue blouse. The little bow in her hair turned my heart around. Next she put on a raincoat I thought marked for French espionage. I was simply riveted to my stuttering place in awe.

“Visit me when you can, but be careful. Tonight he’s away.”

“Oh yes. I’m your friend. I’m hanging tough.”

That afternoon I worked twice as hard, owing it to Horace from yesterday. I was in the bricks so smoothly I might have been made for them. The sweat was pouring off me. I stood up and untied the kerchief to swab off. Horace was looking across the street.

“That old man, he’s watching you.”

He stood in front of the Baptist church across the road, hat in hand, and not looking at me as meanly as I had expected. He was standing just in front of the bricked marquee, with its message or sermon of the week: JESUS WEPT. COME AND GATHER. He was simply studying me mildly, almost kind in his face of red spots and rakeddown short gray hair. He was younger too, up and about on the pavements, the chair a whole other life dismissed with some strength. I mopped through to my eyes and peeked. His face buried in half a watermelon but peeking every now and then , I thought. My shirt was off and I felt small, a grimy peon.

“I believe he’s looking at your mighty build,” said Horace. “Must be the village queer. Let’s set him on fire.”

It is quite mature, I thought, to know everything and say nothing. I had not practiced this much in my life, and felt myself almost plump with rough wisdom, as the old man walked on.

I told Horace I was not wanting any supper that night, stomach knotted and butterflied. But I was her prized friend, heavy on the aftershave, the shave itself a ludicrous solemn wipe of the blade through foam. He went down to the John Birch diner with his Swann’s Way in hand, to give the shiftless owner more grief.

She was not right. Something had happened. There were five new bottles of paregoric on the dresser next to the long needles, the brush and the hand mirror. She stared at me with her mouth pinched and her eyes wary with fear and sadness. What is it? I wanted to know. You can tell me, in my last clean shirt, a blue one to match her blouse, telepathy.

“He took me to the field, the fence, and the dog was not there anymore. But he wanted me to look at the vacant field where it had been, I know it. The man in the house wasn’t our friend anymore, either, Albert told me, angry. He was a busybody, a turncoat, maybe a fellow traveler or a Jew.”

“You think he killed them both?”

“I don’t know. We go on a while and then there’s always some kind of rage or treachery.”

“Why don’t I take that Klan outfit and shove it up his ass for him?”

“No,” she said quickly, head swung up to glare and then dissolve, back into her bewildered tortured beauty.

“But you have no real home and an awful life. I could get money. My father is well-off. By the end of this week I’ll have two hundred.”

“Very, very sweet. Hand me my dream bottle.”

I did, and went and fetched her two Cokes, lightning across the face of the piggish, unknowing woman alone in the dining room.

“You’re Peter Pan,” she smiled. “I think you remind Albert of his son.”

“Your husband.”

“He wasn’t so much older when we met. He liked my legs, even my poverty.”

“So do I, Felice.” It was rich and almost too heavy on my tongue.

“All I can do is drag youth down to indecentness.”

“No. You care. You’re in a trap. There’s a whole other world. There’s movies, and music, and poems, and fishing in a private place with cypresses in the water. You with me. You can’t tell. Time—”

“Oh, please shut up. I told you I didn’t need to know anybody else. I’m just sailing along the current in the rain gutter, a piece of nothing, nobody can touch me without drowning.”

I thought that was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.

I was just on the edge of breaking into song with that great anthem of blind Christian affirmation of the fifties, “I Believe.” All jazz, Beatism, cattism had fallen away. By God, I was in Harold’s world, women with troubles, a spell of swooning charity on me.

“You’ve forgotten I’m your friend,” I told her.

“Well, that’s something. To know you’re not alone. A part of me must have that.”

I knew she was about to say a thing so sincere and poignant, from that bleak experienced face of hers, that it would be a sign for our parting, and she did.

“Even in hell the real part of me can carry that young face of you with me, friend George.”

I left the room all moist and on the verge of going ugly in the face with sorrow and joy.

I was wanting to be a broader man when next we met, so I picked up Horace’s Proust and began reading it that night while he went down to the bus station to see if the magazines had changed. The great champion of sensitivity and time, in his cork-lined room, allergic to noise, claimed my pal. This thicket of nerves I could not broach, however, most likely because I had my own, clawing over the pages in competition. But it was still of great use in the room, because it was French, I thought as I tossed it away.

Horace came in with a great smile. I was on the bed dreaming high and valiant stuff. He looked behind him down the hall.

“Well, somebody’s having a good time here. Did you know there was a woman down the way? And she must be all woman. They hadn’t shut the transom. She couldn’t get enough from some guy. Oh Bertie, Bertie, deeper, deeper!” I changed from the smile of my good dreams to a face that must have been stone fury.

“You couldn’t have heard that. That’s from a dirty comic book.”

“I tell you. And get this, what she was moaning when I left: Churn butter churn! Churn butter churn! Old Bertie whamming away.”

He couldn’t have made this up.

“Your kind go from blind ignorance straight to cynicism. You don’t feel, you don’t know.”