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

Within the month, the woman got an abortion as I waited in the car. It was early on. I think I cared more than she did. She had never had children and didn’t want any. Then, out in Texas while she worked in her father’s bank beginning her new future, she met a blond man of new interest. I wrote to her but she didn’t write back. I smelled something wrong and went on another bender, using every room in my house, a huge rented country estate — modest to be sure — to have pretentious toddies in. I was intent on finding the safe and happy mix. No sick loonies this time, surely not.

In the midst of this the girl in North Dakota called and said her divorce from Nicholas was accomplished. She was headed back South and would drop by on her way to Florida. This was good, I was happy. There may be something serious here. I smiled in my mansion under the oaks, my dogs racing around the yard beneath the giant magnolia. Christ, I was baronial, you couldn’t stop me, man of many parts, hear, old son?

When she came in the house I was in a Confederate cavalry hat. I have no clear idea why, except I had become also a pilot. I could not refuse the conviction I was a fighter pilot. The hat gave me a certain authority, I felt. The passion of my race ran high in me. I talked in this vein while she sat and watched. She had lost weight and was all sun browned and lithe. I spoke directly into her black eyes, unconstrained, possessed. She seemed charmed and amazed. My powers wanted out of me. I could not hold them back.

I had a long drink in the kitchen, staring out at my rented orchard. The future looked bright now with missy in the house. Yes, there would be great carrying on. When I returned she was gone.

My nephew walked through.

Who was that? That was the best-looking woman I’ve seen in my life. Now she’s just up and gone. Didn’t even get her name.

Old son, you fool. Don’t you understand she’ll be back? She has no choice, I told him.

I got a letter from her in Florida. Who are you? she began.

It couldn’t have occurred to me then, and didn’t for another year, that I must have been, in my cavalry hat, a lunatic older version of the very man she had left behind in the air force. Even days after she left I could not quit being a pilot. I woke up in the mode.

Then the other collapse of that summer. A butchy wife and her namby husband, lawyers, bought the rented estate right out from under me. I had to pile my belongings into a two-story hovel next to a plowed field, an instant reversal from baron to sharecropper. My nephew had to drag me out of a bar where I was attempting to buy a coed with a roll of hundreds. My ex-woman was driving around town with her new smiling blond Texas boyfriend. She had changed the locks of her doors. I lost my driver’s license. I went broke. I could not eat, I went to the doc for depression. I was a wraith. Once, after some business in San Diego, as a passenger from the Memphis airport to home I was arrested for drunken riding. I have a clear memory of the dream I had those few hours in jail. The naked dead, all in hats and a foot taller than I, were in the jail cell. They said nothing. But they were mute with decision, letting their height speak.

The woman from Tallahassee wrote about her affairs. Living near her father who was Satan. Becoming adjusted to freedom. She was easy and friendly as if nothing had happened. However, I thought I detected a patronizing tone. She took me for a common fool, I decided. I drove to the home of my ex-woman. When she came out in the yard I promised her that in the future evil would come upon her. Or perhaps we could get married, I added.

At the end of a bender I have, like thousands of others, been stricken with righteousness. I wanted to have discussions with the naked dead but I could not dream them back. At the gate of an air force base near Columbus, Mississippi, I was thrown out by APs after certain demonstrations. I claimed to have friends on the base, imperative that they see me. I drove following a contrail in the sky to New Orleans, got out of my car dropping money, and was mugged before I could let out I was in the secret ground air force they had better stand wide for. The mugging did not make much of an impression on me. Unlike other drunks, I remember almost everything. Only the humiliation is left out, until later it leaps and is unbearable.

I turned toward Florida, seeking Tyndall air base beyond Panama City. I would have a chat with the pals there who didn’t know me yet, perhaps even her ex-husband down on a mission, then on to Tallahassee where I would explain to the woman I was not a fool. No, I was in control, in vast control. But first I took a turn into Magnolia Springs on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, where an old student of mine lived.

We talked a while. His parents were in the back, visiting, but he did not want me to meet them. Then he asked me to go, please. So I took my bottles and left in a huff. It seemed to me the world was certainly turning rude here lately, a lamentable sign of the times, those times you read about. Oh I was high into my righteousness, and just out near some swamp and palmettos I went way off into it and attempted to set fire to my car, which would not fly and was really hot on my feet. I threw matches into it, a ’73 MG convertible. Then somebody stopped my arm. He put out the little rug fire I’d started. He was the son of a strange nearby family who fed me for three days. I could not decide whether they were white or colored.

They didn’t pay much attention to me and did not speak much, but I thought I caught a foreign brogue, not creole, when they did. They ate rice and collards. This brought my health back in little angry fragments. One morning I was suddenly very sober, just very frail. They didn’t mind how much I ate because they had their eye on my car over there out of sight. Then my old student came back and told me he was taking me home. I never gave them the car but I gave them the keys and was ashamed to return a week later. My student took a look around my cottage, then took a U-turn back the long trip. I still did not understand I had been gently but seriously kicked out of his county, 350 miles far.

My old girlfriend married the Texan. In the fall I got a call from my nephew who had heard from a musician that she was killed in a robbery of her bank in Jacksonville, Florida. Killed by crack people. She was no doubt in her smart executive suit, all bright and cheerful. New leaf, new man. She was not good with people, she once told me. Maybe a bit of a snob. I understand the new breed of crack killer is much concerned with respect. Something in her eyes, maybe. Maybe nothing at all, she was white and too lovely. She was there. I thought of her father, the dour banker on that hill in the east Texas town, her tiny thin mother. One of their daughters was a lesbian psychiatrist and the other was now dead from banking. He hustled peas in the Depression and now he was in modern life, on the hill there with the wind blowing the last of his hair.

Nevertheless, it is said we are predators, eyes forward, and we go on towards the hunt, as if nobody had eaten it all before us. As if just around the corner is the really fine feed, the really true woman, the world that will call us son. Somebody is missing to our left but we only sniff deeper, it must be there, there.

I was doing this in the aisle of a small local grocery when I turned a row and was shocked chilly, down to the bones of my hands, nearly crippled from a swat of cold nerves into my thighs and scalp. It was a very tall man all naked, in a large hat. He had a long gray country face I was certain I knew, a man confined somewhere too long.

The crown of the hat was above the top shelf of cans. He was turning my way to look but I did not want him to look at me. Then I noticed he was in a bleached pink set of long underwear, not naked, but the possibility was so close it was jolting. He opened his mouth. I ran away with my hands and groceries in my ears, with his lips twisting up there over me.