Barry Hannah - Airships

I’ve never let the family down. Something in my head tells me where the green places are. What a pleasure to me it is to see soft Vince, with his useless floppy red hand, looking happy as he sucks the delicious fungus off the big oak.

My wife throws herself into the feast. Near the oak are two terrapins. She munches the fungus and holds them up. They are huge turtles, probably mates. They’d been eating the fungus themselves.

“Meat!” says the wife.

“We won’t!” say I. “I won’t eat a hungry animal. I just want to hold and pet one.”

The hunting arrow from JIM gets me right in the navel when I take the cuter of the turtles into my arms.

The wife can’t cook.

JIM’s feeling too awful to pitch in.

So it’ll be up to soft Vince to do me up the best he can with his only one good hand.

A few of the old liars were cranking it up around the pier when Oliver brought his one-man boat out. He was holding the boat in one hand and the motor in the other. Oliver probably went about fifty-seven or eight. He had stringy hair that used to be romantic-looking in the old days. But he still had his muscles, for a short guy.

“What you got there?” said Smokey.

“Are you blind, you muttering old dog? It’s a one-man boat,” said Oliver.

Oliver didn’t want to be troubled.

“I seen one of them in the Sears book, didn’t I? How much that put you back?”

“I don’t recall ever studying your checkbook,” said Oliver.

“This man’s feisty this afternoon, ain’t he?” said a relative newcomer named Ulrich. He was sitting on the rail next to the steps where Oliver wanted to get his boat down them and to the water. For a moment this Ulrich didn’t move out of Oliver’s way. “You buy it on credit?”

Oliver never answered. He stared at Ulrich until the old man moved, then went down the steps with his little boat to the water and eased the thing in. It was fiberglass of a factory hue that is no real color. Then Oliver went back up the steps where he’d left the motor. It was brand new. He pondered for a moment. Then he pulled the back of the boat up and screwed on the boat clamps of the motor. It was nifty. You had something ready to go in five minutes.

All the old liars were peering over the edge at his operation.

“Don’t you need fuel and a battery?” said Smokey, lifting up his sunglasses. One of his eyes was taped over from cataract surgery.

“A man that buys on credit is whipped from the start,” said Ulrich.

When Oliver looked up the pier on all the old harkening faces at the rail, he felt young in an ancient way. He had talked with this crew many an evening into the night. There was a month there when he thought he was one of them, with his hernia and his sciatica, his lies, and his workman’s compensation, out here with his cheap roachy lake house on the reservoir that formed out of the big Yazoo. Here Oliver was with his hopeful poverty, his low-rent resort, his wife who never had a bad habit in her life having died of an unfair kidney condition. All it’s unfair, he’d often thought. But he never took it to heart until Warneeta passed over to the other side.

There was a gallery of pecking old faces scrutinizing him from the rail. Some of them were widowers too, and some were leaking away toward the great surrender very fast. Their common denominator was that none of them was honest.

They perhaps had become liars by way of joining the evening pier crowd. One old man spoke of the last manly war, America against Spain. Another gummed away about his thirty pints and fifteen women one night in Mexico. Oliver had lied too. He had told them that he loved his wife and that he had a number of prosperous children.

Well, he had respected his wife, and when the respect wore off, he had twenty years of habit with her. One thing was he was never unfaithful.

And he had one son who was the drum major of the band for Lamar Tech in Beaumont, and who had graduated last year utterly astonished that his beautiful hair and outgoing teeth wouldn’t get him employment.

But now I’m in love, thought Oliver. God help me, it’s unfair to Warneeta in the cold ground, but I’m in love. I’m so warm in love I don’t even care what these old birds got to say.

“Have you ever drove one of them power boats before, son?” This was asked by Sergeant Fish, who had had some education and was a caring sort of fellow with emphysema.

Oliver walked through them and back across the planks of the pier to his car that was parked in the lot at the end. He opened the trunk of his car and lifted out the battery and the gas can. He managed to hold the marine oil under his armpit. He said something into the car, and then all the men at the end of the pier saw the woman get out of Oliver’s Dodge and walk to him and pull the marine oil can from under his arm to relieve the load. She was about thirty-five, lean, and looked like one of those kind of women over at the Rolling Fork Country Club who might play tennis, drink Cokes and sit around spraddle-legged with their nooks humped out aimless.

Jaws were dropped on the end of the pier.

Smokey couldn’t see that far and was agitated by the groans around him.

Sergeant Fish said: “My Gawd. It’s Pearl Harbor, summer of forty-one!”

When she and Oliver got near enough the liars, they saw her face and it was cute — pinkish big mouth, a jot pinched, but cute, though maybe a little scarred by acne.

Oliver rigged up the gas line and mixed the oil into the tank. He attached the battery cables. The woman sat two steps above him while he did this alone in the back of the boat. There was one seat in the boat, about a yard wide. Oliver floated off a good bit while he was readying the boat. The woman had a scarf on her hair. She sat there and watched him float off thirty feet away as he was getting everything set. Then he pulled the crank on the motor. It took right up and Oliver was thrown back because the motor was in gear. The boat went out very fast about two hundred yards in the water. Then he got control and circled around and puttered back in.

The woman got in the boat. She sat in Oliver’s lap. He turned the handle, and they scooted away so fast they were almost out of sight by the time one of the liars got his tongue going.

“It was Pearl Harbor, summer of forty-one, until you saw her complexion,” said Sergeant Fish.

“I’ll bet they was some women in Hawawyer back then,” said the tall proud man with freckles. He waved his cane.

“Rainbow days,” lied Fish. “The women were so pretty they slept right in the bed with me and the wife. She forgave me everything. It was just like stroking puppies, all of them the color of a goldfish.”

“Can that boat hold the two of ’em?” said Smokey.

“As long as it keeps goin’ it can,” said Ulrich, who featured himself a scientist.

“Oliver got him a babe,” said another liar.

“I guess we’re all old enough to see fools run their course,” said old Dan. Dan was a liar who bored even the pier crowd. He lied about having met great men and what they said. He claimed he had met Winston Churchill. He claimed he was on friendly terms with George Wallace.

“You’d give your right one to have a chance with Oliver’s woman, indifferent of face as she is,” said Sergeant Fish.

“When the motor ever gives out, the whole thing will sink,” said Ulrich.

They watched awhile. Then they all went home and slept.

It makes me sick when we kill them or ride horses over them. My gun is blazing just like the rest of them, but I hate it.