Barry Hannah - Airships

“Pardon me. Is yo name Toid?”

“What?” I said.

“Erruh, yo name Mister Terrid?”

“He’s saying turd ,” said one of the agents.

“It certainly is,” I said to the boy on the bicycle. “I’m Mister Turd. How did you find me?” He was a pretty mulatto boy and looked very wise.

“I just find you, Mister Terrid,” said he. He pedaled back to the rear of the blockhouse where the cooking was.

I put the silencer attachment on my pistol. It was the first mass-produced silencer to come out. I told them we had to follow that boy home. He knew things about me.

It was easy. He left at one in the morning on his bicycle and struck out toward the west end, heart of niggertown. We trolled behind as if looking at the bay. His bike was lit up front and back and you could see him like a new dime on black cloth. We got into niggertown and stopped at a vacant lot where an old house had been pulled over. Somebody came out of the boards in man’s clothes but you could tell it was a girl. She hugged him while he was standing astraddle the bike. We went by like an idle lost car and I saw the girl was white. She was a plain white girl, no beauty about her. But she was passionate. She was all over him.

The next time we passed, I got out of the car.

“Hi. I’m Mister Turd. Remember?”

“Yes suh.”

“What’re you doing, boy, begging on your hands and knees for bad news? Don’t you know anything about Mobile’s miscegenation law?”

“Its what?”

“No black on white.”

“But you with the federals. You kill Weeber Batson’s boy.”

“You know everything. Is that why you’re sweet on him, ’cause he knows everything?” I said. But the girl never uttered a word.

One of the agents told me to get back in the car. I told them shut up, I wasn’t any hothead. The thing was, I was mortified, confused and jealous.

“Wouldn’t nobody else have you at your high school?” I said to her.

Standing astraddle his bike, the boy chopped me right in the jaw. I had the gun and he saw it and he still chopped me. I was seeing through a hot orange mist. At least I had the presence of mind not to kill him. I only shot him in the thigh. You could hear the rush of a whisper from the silencer. I was immediately repentant.

“Let’s get you to the hospital, son,” says I. He was still astride the bike.

“I ain’t going to no hospiter you takes me to,” he said. “Miss Edith, you come sit behind and pedal for my bad leg. I’ll do the other one with the good one.”

She sat on the rear fender and they went off in the damned most bizarre juxtaposition you ever saw. Similar to a circus tandem but not for fun. This was loyalty and romance, brothers. I know he was leaving blood up the road, though you couldn’t see it at night. The bike was wobbling all over the place, but they were going ahead.

And since then I have been a worm.

I left the South for ten years, then got my quarters in Memphis. That was some man, that boy. I wouldn’t touch Mobile again with a three-hundred-mile pole.

Quarles Green made La Guardia and waited a cold six hours for the plane to Memphis. He was a miracle of patience. He read nothing, hardly changed position, smoked nothing, watched no pay TV, wet his underwear imperceptibly.

Reynolds will be the only one in Memphis who might be alive that would remember me from the old days, he thought. Reynolds who’s had thirty names in his time, on three continents. I did my bit in the Second. Cornered the Nazi czar of Fort Worth and his fifteen rifles.

When the plane was in the air he asked for the headphones.

The stewardess passed him. She was a big leggy blond girl, a superlative quite at ease in the jumbo jet. She was desire trebled out. Quarles Green felt the last big pang. He wanted to take up habitation in her, such as a baby kangaroo.

A terrific fist bashed him directly on the heart.

He smiled at her with his head phones on, snapping his fingers.

“Catchy,” he said, pointing at the phones. “Groovy, for your generation.”

She winked and passed by. He sat there awhile and died. The stewardess wanted to know the tune the old whitehaired boy was grooving on. She lifted up her own pair in her dressing room. Nothing was coming over them. There was only a howling, like waves in a storm of particles.

When she was out of the room, she saw Dana and asked her.

“The whole system’s screwed up by lightning or something. None of the headphone FMs are any good,” said Dana.

The stewardess walked back to look at Quarles Green. He had a tight smug smile on him, his eyes closed, like every dead man who finally hears his tune.

I was walking around Gon one night, and this C-man — I saw him open the window, and there was a girl in back of him, so I thought it was all right — peeled down on me and shot the back heel off my boot. Nearest I came to getting mailed home when I was there. A jeep came by almost instantly with a thirty cal mounted, couple of allies in it. I pointed over to the window. They shot out about a box and a half on the apartment, just about burned out the dark slot up there. As if the dude was hanging around digging the weather after he shot at me. There were shrieks in the night, etc. But then a man opened the bottom door and started running in the street. This ARVN fellow knocked the shit out of his buddy’s head turning the gun to zap the running man. Then I saw something as the dude hit a light: he was fat. I never saw a fat Cong. So I screamed out in Vietnamese. He didn’t shoot. I took out my machine pistol and ran after the man, who was up the street by now, and I was hobbling without a heel on my left boot.

Some kind of warm nerve sparklers were getting all over me. I believe in magic, because, million-to-one odds, it was Ike “Tubby” Wooten, from Redwood, a town just north of Vicksburg. He was leaning on a rail, couldn’t run anymore. He was wearing the uniform of our Army with a patch on it I didn’t even know what was. Old Tubby would remember me. I was the joker at our school. I once pissed in a Dixie cup and eased three drops of it on the library radiator. But Tubby was so serious, reading some photo magazine. He peeped up and saw me do it, then looked down quickly. When the smell came over the place, he asked me, Why? What do you want? What profit is there in that? I guess I just giggled. Sometimes around midnight I’d wake up and think of his questions, and it disturbed me that there was no answer. I giggled my whole youth away. Then I joined the Army. So I thought it was fitting I’d play a Nelda on him now. A Nelda was invented by a corporal when they massacred a patrol up north on a mountain and he was the only one left. The NVA ran all around him and he had this empty rifle hanging on him. They spared him.

“I’m a virgin! Spare me!”

“You, holding the gun? Did you say you were a virgin?” said poor Tubby, trying to get air.

“I am a virgin,” I said, which was true, but hoping to get a laugh, anyway.

“And a Southern virgin. A captain. Please to God, don’t shoot me,” that fat boy said. “I was cheating on my wife for the first time. The penalty shouldn’t be death.”

“Why’d you run from the house, Tubby?”

“You know me.” Up the street they had searchlights moved up all over the apartment house. They shot about fifty rounds into the house. They were shooting tracers now. It must’ve lit up my face; then a spotlight went by us.

“Bobby Smith,” said Tubby. “My God, I thought you were God.”

“I’m not. But it seems holy. Here we are looking at each other.”

“Aw, Bobby, they were three beautiful girls. I’d never have done the thing with one, but there were three .” He was a man with a small pretty face laid around by three layers of jowl and chin. “I heard the machine gun and the guilt struck me. I had to get out. So I just ran.”