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

He met Drum’s woman, a handsome lady of Greek descent. Drum was wild for her. She stayed over the night in their larger bedroom at the other end of the trailer. When she left, Smith told Drum he was very happy for him.

“I worried you’d turned queer,” Smith kidded him.

“You ought to hear her moan, boy. I’m bringing happiness to that one.”

Now Smith saddened, and his teeth cut into his tight under-lip. Drum all those years without a woman, the uncle to everybody, in the background, cheering them on; urging them on to the great accidents of art and love. Drum the Drummer. Keeping the panic out, keeping the big heart in. He had convinced Smith he was worth something. He had convinced others that Smith was rare. Many days in California Smith had nothing else to take him through the blank stupid days.

“I’m living on borrowed time, man. Nothing is unimportant. Every minute is a jewel. Every stroke of pussy, every nail in the board.”

He had lived that way every minute Smith had known him. That seemed very clear now. He looked at his friend and a shock passed through him. Drum was old, with wisps of gray hair combed back. He was pale, his eyes wet. The strong arms gestured and the mouth moved, but Smith heard nothing. Then the voice, like a whisper almost, came back. What was he saying? The vision had overcome everything.

It occurred to Smith later that success did not interest Drum. When Smith told him of some publishing luck and gave him a book, the man just nodded. You could see the boredom, almost distaste, freeze his eyes. He was not jealous. It simply didn’t matter.

Near the end he had broken off relations with the Greek woman. His oldest son had come back from Germany to live with him, but he could not live with anybody. He asked him to leave the trailer.

And then the poem when they found him:

Here I sit all brokenhearted .

Paid a nickel to shit ,

And only farted .

A common piece of trash off a bathroom wall, a punkish anonymity.

How could he? Why not even a try at high personal salute? The way he had believed in work, the big heart, the war.

Smith was angry a long time that Drum had left nothing else.

The waiting on borrowed time, the misery of his heart yearning like a bomb, the bad starving blood going through his veins. Smith could understand the suicide. Who was good for endless lingering, a permanent bad seat and bad magazine at the doctor’s office? And with heaven looming right over there, right next to you salvation and peace, what Christian could hold out any longer?

Yes, but the poem.

So common, so punk, so lost in democracy, like an old condom.

The wretched clothes, beneath and beyond style, the style of everybody waiting intolerable lengths of time in an emergency room. Clothes the head of Sarge belonged on, the smile of ruin on his lips. Here, sir. All accounted for.

THEY WERE COMING TOWARD ME — THIS WAS 1949—ON THEIR HORSES with their guns, dressed in leather and wool and canvas and with different sporting hats, my father and his brothers, led by my uncle on these his hunting lands, several hundred acres called Tanglewood still dense in hardwoods but also opened by many meadows, as a young boy would imagine from cavalry movies. The meadows were thick with fall cornstalks, and the quail and doves were plenty. So were the squirrels in the woods where I had been let off to hunt at a stand with a thermos of chocolate and my 28-gauge double. At nine years old I felt very worthy for a change, even though I was a bad hunter.

But something had gone wrong. My father had put me down in a place they were hunting toward. Their guns were coming my way. Between me and them I knew there were several coveys of quail to ground, frozen in front of the dogs, two setters and a pointer, who were now all stiffening into the point. My uncle came up first. This was my namesake, Peter Howard, married but childless at forty-five. I was not much concerned. I’d seen, on another hunt, the black men who stalked for my uncle flatten to the ground during the shooting, it was no big thing. In fact I was excited to be receiving fire, real gunfire, behind my tree. We had played this against Germans and Japanese back home in my neighborhood. But now I would be a veteran. Nobody could touch me at war.

My uncle came up alone on his horse while the others were still hacking through the overhang behind him. He was quite a picture. On a big red horse, he wore a yellow plaid corduroy vest with watch chain across, over a blue broadcloth shirt. On his bald head was a smoky brown fedora. He propped up an engraved 16-gauge double in his left hand and bridled with his right, caressing the horse with his thighs, over polo boots a high-gloss tan. An unlit pipe was fixed between his teeth. There was no doubting the man had a sort of savage grace, though I noticed later in the decade remaining to his life that he could also look, with his ears out, a bit common, like a Russian in the gate of the last Cold War mob; thick in the shoulders and stocky with a belligerence like Krushchev’s. Maybe peasant nobility is what they were, my people. Uncle Peter Howard watched the dogs with a pleasant smile now, with the sun on his face at midmorning. I had a long vision of him. He seemed, there on the horse, patient and generous with his time and his lands, waiting to flush the quail for his brothers. I saw him as a permanent idea, always handy to reverie: the man who could do things.

In the face he looked much like — I found out later — the criminal writer Jean Genet, merry and Byzantine in the darks of his eyes. Shorter and stockier than the others and bald, like none of them, he loved to gamble. When he was dead I discovered that he also was a killer and not a valiant one. Of the brothers he was the most successful and the darkest. The distinct rings under my eyes in middle age came directly from him, and God knows too my religious acquaintance with whiskey.

The others, together, came up on their horses, ready at the gun. They were a handsome clan. I was happy to see them approach this way, champion enemy cavalry, gun barrels toward me, a vantage not many children in their protected childhoods would be privileged to have. I knew I was watching something rare, seen as God saw it, and I was warm in my ears, almost flushed. My uncle Peter tossed a stick over into a stalk pile and the quail came out with that fearsome helicopter bluttering always bigger than you are prepared for. The guns tore the air. You could see sound waves and feathers in a space of dense blue-gray smoke. I’d got behind my big tree. The shot ripped through all the leaves around. This I adored.

Then I stepped out into the clearing, walked toward the horses, and said hello.

My uncle Peter saw me first, and he blanched in reaction to my presence in the shooting zone. He nearly fell from his horse, like a man visited by a spirit-ghoul. He waddled over on his glossy boots and knelt in front of me, holding my shoulders.

“Boy? Boy? Where’d you come from? You were there? ”

“Pete, son?” called my father, climbing down mystified. “Why didn’t you call out? You could’ve, we could’ve. . ”

My uncle hugged me to him urgently, but I couldn’t see the great concern. The tree I was behind was wide and thick; I was a hunter, not a fool. But my uncle was badly shaken, and he began taking it out on my father. Maybe he was trembling, I guess now, from having almost shot yet another person.

“Couldn’t you keep up with where your own boy was?”

“I couldn’t know we’d hunt this far. I’ve seen you lost yourself out here.”

An older cousin of mine had had his calf partially blown away in a hunting accident years ago, out squirrel hunting with his brother. Even the hint of danger would bring their wives to their throats. Also, I personally had had a rough time near death, though I hadn’t counted up. My brother had nearly cut my head off with a sling blade when I walked up behind as a toddler, but a scar on the chin was all I had. A car had run me down as I crossed the street in first grade. Teaching me to swim the old way, my pa had watched me drown, almost, in the ocean off a pier he’d thrown me.