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

Assuredly his books raised the image of those he wrote about. Ross had developed the talent long ago of composing significance into any life. He had done gangsters, missionaries, musicians, politicians, philanthropists, athletes, even other old writers. He could put an aura on a beggar. Then with the air rifle, he would shoot complete innocents to see them dwindle. He would swear off for months but then he would come back to it.

It had happened often that Ross was more interesting than his subjects. He was certainly not as vain. Writing his own autobiography would not have occurred to him. But there was a vain and vulgar motive in everybody he depicted: look at me , basically. The ones who insisted on prefaces disclaiming this howling fact made him especially contemptuous. It was not hilarious anymore, this “many friends have beseeched me to put down in writing,” etc. Blab, blook, blep. It was astounding to Ross to find not one of his biographees conscious of this dusty ritual in their own case. Their lives were exempt from the usual flagrant exhibitions of the others. His last chore on a porcine Ohio hack writer — the suer, as Ross called him — a sentimental old fraud who’d authored one decent book a century ago when he was alive, then rode like a barnacle the esteem of the famous who suffered him the rest of his life, dropping names like frantic anchors in a storm of hackism and banality. Ross had to pretend blithe unconsciousness to the fact that the man “was ready for his story to be told,” and had sent friends to Ross to “entice you to sit down with shy, modest X.” Ross also had to watch the man get drunk about seventy times and blubber about his “deep personal losses,” his “time-stolen buddies.” The depth of his friendship with them increased in proportion to their wealth and fame. Ross kept a bland face while the obvious brayed like a jackass in the room. The amazing fact was that the man had lived his entire life out of the vocabulary and sensibility of his one decent book. There seemed to be no other words for existence since 1968, no epithets for reality outside the ones he’d bandaged on it twenty years ago. He’d written his own bible. Most of all he adored himself as a boy, and wept often now about his weeping then. Ross gutted through, and one night, as it always did, the hook fell out to him gleaming — the point of the biography: history as a changeless drunken hulk, endlessly redundant; God himself as a grinding hack. The sainthood of no surprises. The Dead Sea. This truth he sedulously ignored, of course — or thought he had — and whipped out a tome of mild hagiography. This was his fifteenth book and sold better than the others, perhaps because it celebrated the failure of promise and made the universal good old boys and girls very comfortable. The hack was a Beam-soaked country song.

The fact that Ross himself was a sort of scheduled hack did not alarm him. There weren’t many hacks of his kind, and that pleased him. He dared the world to give him a life he could not make significant on paper and earn some money with. So didn’t this indicate the dull surprise that nobody was significant? Or was it the great Christian view — every man a king? Ross had no idea, and no intention of following up on the truth. Years ago he had found that truth and the whole matter of the examined life were overrated, highly. There were preposterous differences in values among the lives he had thrown himself into. Even in sensual pleasure, there was wide variance. He himself thought there was no food served anywhere worth more than ten dollars. No woman on earth was worth more than fifty, if you meant bed per night. Others thought differently, obviously. The young diva who put pebbles in her butt and clutched them with her sphincter (she insisted he include this) — well, it was simply something. It made borderline depraved people feel better when they read it. Also, when would the discussion about love ever quit? He could be deeply in love with most of the women in every fashion magazine he’d ever flipped through. The women would have to talk themselves out of his love, stumble or pick their noses. Usually he did not love Nabby, his wife, but given an hour and a fresh situation he could talk himself into adoring her.

What he loved was his son.

What was love but lack of judgment?

So if God judged, he was not love, eh?

This sort of stuff was the curse of the thinking class. You went away to college and came back with such as that to nag your sleep till you dropped.

Best to shut up and live.

Best to shoot anonymous innocent citizens with an air rifle and shut up about it. The delicious thing was that the stricken howled and bore the indignity as best they could, never to have an answer. He saw them questing through the decades for the source of that moment. He saw them dying with the mystery of it. Through the years the stricken had looked up at the top of buildings, sideways to the alleys, and directly at passersby. Once he had looked directly at a policeman, beebeed, rubbing his head and saying something. Twice people had looked deeply at Ross and his car — another year, another Riviera — but Ross was feigning, of course, sincere drivership. What a rush, joy nearly pouring from his eyes!

In Newt’s neighborhood his car was blocked briefly by some children playing touch football on the broken pavement. They came around and admired his car and the two-seater boat towed behind as he pulled in between dusty motorcycles in front of a dark green cottage, his son’s. Already he wanted away from it, on some calm pond with the singing electric motor easing the two of them into cool lily-padded coves, a curtain of cattails behind their manly conversation. They had not fished together in ages. Newt used to adore this beyond all things. Ross had prepared his cynicism, but he had prepared his love even more. The roving happy intelligence on the face of little Newt, age eleven, shot with beauty from a dying Southern sun as he lifted the great orange and blue shellcracker out of the green with his bowed cane pole — there was your boy, a poet already. He’d said he had a new friend, this fish, and not a stupid meal. He’d stroked it, then released it. You didn’t see that much in the bloody Southern young, respect for a mere damned fish. He’d known barbers to mount one that size, chew and spit over it for decades.

They seemed to have matched Ross’s care in his presents with (planned?) carelessness about his arrival. This sort of thing had happened many times to Ross in the homes of celebrities, even in the midst of his projects with them. Somebody would let him in without even false hospitality: “Ah, here is the pest with his notes again,” they might as well have said, surprised he was at the front door instead of the back, where the fellow with their goddamn mountain water delivered.

The girl indicated somebody sitting there in overalls who was not Newt, a big oaf named Bim, he thought she said. Yes, there always had to be some worthless slug dear to them all for God knew what reasons hanging about murdering time. Bim wore shower shoes. He did not get up or extend a hand. Ross badly wanted his cynicism not to rise again, and made small talk. The man had a stud in his nose. He dressed like this because the school was a cow college, Ross guessed. It was hip to enforce this, not deny it, as with Ivy League wear, etc.

“So where do you hail from, Bim?”

“Earth,” said the man.

Drive that motherfucking stud through the rest of your nose, coolster, thought Ross. Ross looked straight at Bim with such bleak amazed hatred that the man rose and left the house as if driven by pain. Ross stood six feet high and still had his muscles, though he sometimes forgot. There wasn’t much nonsense in him, and those who liked him loved this. The others didn’t. He might seem capable of patient chilly murder.