Barry Hannah - Airships

I burn to see her, but she lives in Yonkers. Dye my hair, appear at her window with a cello.

He paid the cab with his wet money.

“What’d you do, fall in the river?” said the guy.

But Quarles didn’t answer. Quarles was busy whispering:

My Beloved Daughter,

Thanks to you for being one of the few who never blamed me for your petty, cheerless and malign personality. But perhaps you were too busy being awful to ever think of the cause. I hear you take self-defense classes now. Don’t you understand nobody could take anything from you without leaving you richer? If I thought rape would change you, I’d hire a randy cad myself. I leave a few dollars to your husband. Bother him about them and suffer the curse of this old pair of eyes spying blind at the minnows in the Hudson.

Your Dad,

Crabfood

At the Y he found his suitcase and left for La Guardia on bicycle. Once out into the real mainway traffic, he heard the outraged automobiles blowing at him. Let no policeman interfere, he pleaded. This is New York’s last chance at me. He passed the toll at the bridge without even looking their way. There was a shout. Kill me, kill me, he shouted, answering. Then up into the wind of the Triborough Bridge. Shit, I’ve overpedaled; where’s La Guardia, anyway? he cursed himself. Then he remembered and turned around midbridge. He made it back and passed the tollkeepers, shouting imprecations.

His bike came in near thirty miles an hour over the last hump of the bridge, and there wasn’t much traffic now. He extinguished the lights.

Why didn’t I ever drink or smoke? he asked. I killed two men who did when I was intercepting hooch. I never had any bad habits. My body keeps on. I think I’m getting stronger. I’ve gotten a third wind. He turned back toward La Guardia.

This is such small tooling. I rode the first mass-produced motorcycle in America. Because of my lust habit, I can’t afford even a city Honda. Hundred sixty a month to trail Jill around in my phony wheelchair. Rental of the wheelchair fifty per. If I get back to Memphis I can afford something, if I’ve got to live.

My car was full of prime confiscated booze. It was summer in the Ozarks. I got her drunk and possessed her on the pine needles. She went hysterical and wouldn’t put her clothes back on without promise of marriage. After I married her, she seldom took them off again. Some nights she slept in overalls and a belted cold-weather coat. I stared at ceilings all over America and practiced self-abuse, thinking there was a government camera in the wall and hurling myself under the sacred bed of my snoring matrimony, afraid of God. Then that morning I crawled out over the towel of her latest shampoo, full of flint-colored hair. I gazed in my palms with terror, thinking the hair of the old stories was true.

Later in the day she cooked three hot meals, wildly neutral as to taste. She told me she thought a blessed event was coming to us. How? When? I wondered. I was dismayed by the holiness of my marriage. I got a glimpse of her ankle and climbed up on the roof, weeping. When I came down I didn’t care anymore. I wore the purple smoking jacket I’d bought for our honeymoon and stored away when she said it was snaky. When she said something, I said (I had limescented oil in my hair):

“So you don’t even have natural needs?” pouring myself a near beer. “All you care about is moving chairs and pictures, from room to room. Between me and a bucket of paint to freshen up the front porch, you’d choose the paint and we both know it. Me and God hate you.”

She fell in a spasm. She cried out how she could be a full wife.

“Let’s go all the way,” says I.

“Anything to please you and the Lord,” says she.

Soon afterward I had to blast a stiller who locked himself in a hooch shack, but he was underground and we didn’t know it when we set it afire. I heard the voice calling me. He knew me. It was just outside Mobile in my home grounds and they knew I was with the Volstead people. Calling me, Quarles? Quarles? I ran up to the door and there was Weeber Batson’s oldest son standing at the window with his clothes on fire and a double-barrel eight-gauge in his hands right on me, cocking it.

I had to blast him. I hit him right in the hair.

The guys kept calling him just a stiller, but I knew better and I was sick at heart. Oh, she really got interested in me when I was sick. That’s when she comes alive, going around with cold towels and that cold mud porridge she got off the recipe of her aunt who was even a colder warp than her, or more honest: the aunt never married. When I got well, we were in Arizona holding down the corn beer production on the Apache reservation. It suited me. I didn’t want to be near Mobile again. And on the reservation there was a drunk Indian I shot, about seventy years old. He claimed he’d been under old Geronimo, who died in aught-twelve or so. Nobody had a gun when the old guy run up all corned to the eyes, five of us agents sitting around a fire lying about strange vegetation and nooky we’d been among. For fifteen minutes we heard him yell he was going to kill us with this bow and arrow he had on him. We tried to kid it off him, but he kept stamping around and aiming it. I wasn’t scared, but the senior was, and he told me to get the heater out of the car. It was a Tommy gun. When I got back, the old Indian was stamping on their feet and spitting on them, making sounds like otta, otta ! over and over. He took their hats off them and threw them in the fire.

When he saw me come up with the gun, he smiled like a coon. For an old guy he had surprising white teeth even though all the rest of him was filthy. Then he took the arrow back and shot me square in the solar plexus with it, the crazy idiot. This filthy arrow was in me, it felt like right in my heart, and I looked over and all the agents were so juiced on corn beer they still thought it was a fun house when I needed help. So I shot about a quarter of the Tommy into him and he backed up ten yards and fell flat. I didn’t want to die alone. It sobered them up, quick, before I fainted. Luckily I had a big chest when I was young and the point was hanging in there a half inch from the fatals, said the doctor. The old Indian never bothered my sleep much. I think he wanted it bad.

Like me now, said Quarles on his bike. He saw the lights of La Guardia. I’m going to make it. Again, dammit.

I ride this bicycle in honor of the other one I got, he thought. The drive-in barbecue in Mobile when I chanced to go down again.

My wife had left to join Billy Graham’s World Crusade, in the choir. I never even knew she could sing before Graham came to Chicago. Graham came to town and she did a voice audition for the choir. They put her in the first rank of sopranos. Tokyo, Stockholm, The Hague, Glasgow, Dallas, and even New York. I saw her in my telescope at Shea Stadium, weighs about two hundred, but a mouth like a harpshaped cunt. Thank 01’ Massa I don’t have to run those rapids anymore, said Quarles Green. I used to play my little pieces on the cello to heat her up. She’d fall asleep and break her Christian wind.

If only I’d married a good pagan woman who never tired of the pleasures of the flesh, said Green in the wind of the entrance to La Guardia.

Don’t lie, he said louder. You would have done the same. You would have killed the same two. Perish clean at least.

I was in the new FBI of America. I had my card. Three of us were in the drive-in barbecue lot in Mobile. Somebody recognized me as the killer of Weeber Batson’s son. They started calling out at me when I was eating my ribs, which was a large part of why I took another Mobile assignment, the ribs at Boudreaux’s Pit. Some of the waiters used bicycles. I didn’t know they paid the Negro to come over and say these things to me.