Barry Hannah - Airships

Esther answered the phone when Quadberry called me seven months later. She gave me his message. He wanted to know my opinion on a decision he had to make. There was this Dr. Gordon, a surgeon at Emory Hospital in Atlanta, who said he could cure Quadberry’s back problem. Quadberry’s back was killing him. He was in torture even holding up the phone to say this. The surgeon said there was a seventy-five/twenty-five chance. Seventy-five that it would be successful, twenty-five that it would be fatal. Esther waited for my opinion. I told her to tell Quadberry to go over to Emory. He’d got through with luck in Vietnam, and now he should ride it out in this petty back operation.

Esther delivered the message and hung up.

“He said the surgeon’s just his age; he’s some genius from Johns Hopkins Hospital. He said this Gordon guy has published a lot of articles on spinal operations,” said Esther.

“Fine and good. All is happy. Come to bed.”

I felt her mouth and her voice on my ears, but I could hear only a sort of loud pulse from the girl. All I could do was move toward moisture and nipples and hair.

Quadberry lost his gamble at Emory Hospital in Atlanta. The brilliant surgeon his age lost him. Quadberry died. He died with his Arabian nose up in the air.

That is why I told this story and will never tell another.

Fistfight on the old cemetery. Both of them want Donna, square off, and Donna and I watch from the Lincoln convertible.

I’m neutral. I wear sharp clothes and everybody thinks I’m a fag, though it’s not true. The truth is, I’m not all that crazy about Donna, that’s all, and I tend to be sissy of voice. Never had a chance otherwise — raised by a dreadfully vocal old aunt after my parents were killed by vicious homosexuals in Panama City. Further, I am fat. I’ve got fat ankles going into my suede boots.

I ask her, “Say, what you think about that, Donna? Are you going to be whoever wins’s girl friend?”

“Why not? They’re both cute,” she says.

Her big lips are moist. She starts taking her sweater off. When it comes off, I see she’s got great humpers in her bra. There’s a nice brown valley of hair between them.

“I can’t lose,” she says.

Then she takes off her shoes and her skirt. There is extra hair on her thighs near her pantie rim. Out in the cemetery, the guys are knocking the spunk out of each other’s cheeks. Bare, Donna’s feet are red and not handsome around the toes. She has some serious bunions from her weird shoes, even at eighteen.

My age is twenty. I tried to go to college but couldn’t sit in the seats long enough to learn anything. Plus, I hated English composition, where you had to correct your phrases. They cast me out like so much wastepaper. The junior college system in California is tough. So I just went back home. I like to wear smart clothes and walk up and down Sunset Strip. That will show them.

By now, Donna is naked. The boys, Hank and Ken, are still battering each other out in the cemetery. I look away from the brutal fight and from Donna’s nakedness. If I were a father, I couldn’t conceive of this from my daughter.

“Warm me up, Vince. Do me. Or are you really a fag like they say?”

“Not that much,” I say.

I lost my virginity. It was like swimming in a warm, oily room — rather pleasant — but I couldn’t finish. I thought about the creases in my outfit.

“Come in me, you fag,” says she. “Don’t hurt my feelings. I want a fag to come in me.”

“Oh, you pornographic witch, I can’t,” says I.

She stands up, nude as an oyster. We look over at the fight in the cemetery. When she had clothes on, she wasn’t much to look at. But naked, she is a vision. She has an urgent body that makes you forget the crooked nose. Her hair is dyed pink, but her organ hair isn’t.

We watch Hank and Ken slugging each other. They are her age and both of them are on the swimming team.

Something is wrong. They are too serious. They keep pounding each other in the face past what a human could take.

Donna falls on her knees in the green tufted grass.

She faints. Her body is the color of an egg. She fainted supine, titties and hair upward.

The boys are hitting to kill. They are not fooling around. I go ahead in my smart bell-bottom cuffed trousers. By the time I reach them, they are both on the ground. Their scalps are cold.

They are both dead.

“This is awful. They’re dead ,” I tell Donna, whose eyes are closed.

“What?” says she.

“They killed each other,” says I.

“Touch me,” she says. “Make me know I’m here.”

I thrust my hand to her organ.

“What do we do?” says I.

She goes to the two bodies, and is absorbed in a tender unnatural act over the blue jeans of Hank and Ken. In former days, these boys had sung a pretty fine duet in their rock band.

“I can’t make anybody come! I’m no good!” she says.

“Don’t be silly,” I say. “They’re dead. Let’s get out of here.”

“I can’t just get out of here! They were my sweethearts!” she screams. “Do me right now, Vince! It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Well, I flung in and tried.

A half year later, I saw her in Hooper’s, the pizza parlor. I asked her how it was going. She was gone on heroin. The drug had made her prettier for a while. Her eyes were wise and wide, all black, but she knew nothing except desperation.

“Vince,” she said, “if you’d come lay your joint in me, I wouldn’t be lost anymore. You’re the only one of the old crowd. Screw me and I could get back to my old neighborhood.”

I took her into my overcoat, and when I joined her in the street in back of a huge garbage can, she kept asking: “Tell me where it is, the cemetery!”

At the moment, I was high on cocaine from a rich woman’s party.

But I drove her — that is, took a taxi — to the cemetery where her lovers were dead. She knelt at the stones for a while. Then I noted she was stripping off. Pretty soon she was naked again.

“Climb me, mount me, fight for me, fuck me!” she screamed.

I picked up a neighboring tombstone with a great effort. It was an old thing, perhaps going back to the nineteenth century. I crushed her head with it. Then I fled right out of there.

Some of us are made to live for a long time. Others for a short time. Donna wanted what she wanted.

I gave it to her.

It was a rout.

We hit them, but they were ready this time.

His great idea was to erupt in the middle of the loungers. Stuart was a profound laugher. His banjo-nigger was with him almost all the time, a man who could make a ballad instantly after an ambush. We had very funny songs about the wide-eyed loungers and pickets, the people of negligent spine leisuring around the depots and warehouses, straightening their cuffs and holding their guns as if they were fishing poles. Jeb loved to break out of cover in the clearing in front of these guards. He offered them first shot if they were ready, but they never were. It was us and the dirty gray, sabers out, and a bunch of fleeing boys in blue.

Except the last time, at Two Roads Junction in Pennsylvania.

These boys had repeaters and they were waiting for us. Maybe they had better scouts than the others. We’d surprised a couple of their pickets and shot them down. But I suppose there were others who got back. This was my fault. My talent was supposed to be circling behind the pickets and slaying every one of them. So I blame myself for the rout, though there are always uncertainties in an ambush. This time it was us that were routed.