Barry Hannah - Airships

When Minny got home, she scolded the children for destroying her pictures in the garage. This took the last of her energy. She was all done in, hauling the bags, finding the old places for the cans and hauling them to their spots. She went to the room where the air-conditioner worked, shut the doors and lay down.

She had an hour before everybody would be hungry and Daryl, the husband, would be in. In the bag leaning on her bed was four yards of orange cloth she would sew into a dress. Her youngest child opened the door and crawled into the bed beside her. This was her and their only girl. She was a small pulchritudinous thing, with strange heavy-lidded eyes. While Minny lay there, the child kicked her in the course of falling asleep.

I can’t sleep, said Minny to herself. Why isn’t Charlotte watching them? Why has Charlotte gone home? She’s paid to stay. They’re my responsibility. The teen-agers come by our street so fast in their cars and on motorcycles. They found out there are no police on our street and they use it as a blasting alley. One boy I met with before college liked to speed that way.

We raced everywhere. He was always early for everything, the basketball games, the prom. We never even held hands. One time when we went swimming together he looked down at my feet and tackled me. He put my big toe in his mouth. I told him to cut it out. He got big in his swimming trunks and was humiliated. He said: Listen, I got to teach you how to swim. It bothers me thinking a person like you might drown just for simple lack of swimming. So he taught me how to swim. He had a nice body and cut out through the water like a motor. No reason to go that fast, as usual, no point in getting there to the floating dock early except just to get there fifteen seconds before the others. He always kept a comb, even in his swimming trunks. Had hairy knees that disgusted me. Said I don’t want anything but would you at least look at what does want to. Pulled down his trunks. First one I really ever saw, miracle, although a little bit ugly. No wonder he was proud. All men ought to be proud. All I and the rest of us have is hair and a crease. What’s so emotional about titties? Mine are fine, but I never understood the excitement. Guy in a convention in New Orleans said he’d cut off his arm to savor my chest. The easiest place to have wit is in the presence of another’s need. Deaf and dumb guy selling ballpoint pens comes up with a card saying I am deaf and mute, raising two children, help me out. I pretended I was deaf and dumb too. He was giving signs like mad and I was giving signs back to him that weren’t real. I was looking in his face. Who let you have children in her? I thought. What’s deaf and dumb intercourse like? Then I became ashamed and bought all his pens with the grocery money. Daryl was drunk and therefore understood everything when I came home. We ate rice with ketchup on it. My hobby is Daryl now that my other interests have had no chance to grow. Maybe I was never an artist, but I could be an interior decorator. Lucky for me Daryl is good-looking. I couldn’t stand phonying-up to one with hair on his knees. They once tried to hire me as an interior decorator at the furniture place on Sixth Street. They offered me a salary of $5700 a year. Daryl got on the phone to the headman. “Who do you think you’re trying to hire, some Goddamned darkie? My wife has an art background and all sort of cleverness. You got to raise the ante or she doesn’t come at all. Let us know if you can get it up over nigger wages. I don’t want to be ashamed of what my girl is bringing home every month.” They didn’t up it and I lost the job. But I loved Daryl and his pride. I guess I have pride. I guess I’m lucky how much I love Daryl, who’s a silly ass by any judgment. Some hot nights I dream about the beaches in Pensacola. But Daryl is my hobby. You can tell how good it is by the temperature of a man’s come. Harold’s was lukewarm. . I suppose I shouldn’t think of it, being raised in the church. But with Daryl — once the kids are asleep — there’s nothing like that hot blowing out in you when you are coming yourself. I, good Lord, thank You for that. It keeps a body going through the trash in daylight. Good intercourse is a work of art.

Minny was asleep.

The boys had found a king snake in the garage. The oldest boy hit it over the head with the hammer. Then he wrapped it around the hammer handle. The youngest boy brought it into the house.

Daryl hitched a ride with his partner at the realty and drank a hot beer in the car to calm his nerves, but when he opened the door he sensed that everything was not all right. He knew that he was two bourbons away from peace, and in his desperation he opened the wrong door, not the cabinet under the sink but the basement door, and tumbled down the rotten stairs.

The youngest boy heard the air-conditioner running in his parents’ bedroom. He opened the door and saw Minny asleep beside the baby girl. He knew it was a sin for his mother to be asleep in the daytime, the baby-sitter gone.

He looked at her awhile. Then he hit her in the mouth with the hammer.

It woke her up. It also woke up the snake, who had been only stunned by the blow in the garage. The snake unwound itself from the hammer handle and fell on the bed. It rose and twisted since half its nerves were gone. It almost stood up. The boy was horrified and fled the room.

When this woman saw it, she thought she was still in a dream and she felt very guilty for her sleep.

Mother Rooney of Titpea Street, that little fifty yards of dead-end crimped macadam east off North State, crept home from the Jitney Jungle in the falling afternoon of October 1965. She had on her high-laced leather sneakers and her dress of blue teacup roses; she had a brooch the size of an Easter egg pinned on at her booby crease; she clutched a wrapped-up lemon fish filet, fresh from Biloxi, under her armpit.

Mother Rooney had been served at the Jitney by Mimsie Grogan, an ancient girl who had converted back in the thirties to Baptist. Mimsie would hiss at her about this silly disgusting ritual of Fridays as she wrapped the fish. Mother Rooney was Catholic. She was old, she had been being Mother Rooney so long. In the little first-story bathroom of her great weird house no spray she bought could defeat the odor of reptile corpses stewed in mud. Her boarder boys, all gone now for a month, would sometimes come in late and use her bathroom to vomit in, not being able to climb the stairs and use their own. And sometimes they were not able to use even hers well. There would be whiskey and beer gravy waiting for her on the linoleum. Just unspeakable. Yet the natural smell of her toilet would be overcoming the other vileness, she could not deny it. A couple of the young men smarties would openly confess, in the way of complaining about the unbearably reeking conditions among which they were forced to puke last night, that they were the ones. One of them even arranged his own horrid bountiful vomit into a face with a smile, such as a child might draw, and this she had to confront one morning at six o’clock as she came to the chilly tiles to relieve herself. Nobody confessed to that. But she caught on when she heard all the giggling up in the wings, at this hour in the morning. She wasn’t deaf, and she wasn’t so slow. The boys were sick and tired of her flushing the toilet and waking them all up every morning. Her toilet sounded like a volcano. Yes, Mr. Monroe had voiced that complaint before. He said it sounded as if this old house’s back was breaking at last, it couldn’t stand the tilt anymore. It woke them all up, it made them all goggle-eyed, everybody stayed stiff for two hours in their beds. Nobody wanted to be the one to make the move that finally broke it in two and sent them all collapsing down the hill into the Mississippi State Fairgrounds. What a way to wake up, Mr. Monroe complained. The situation here is uninhabitable. I don’t know a man upstairs who isn’t planning to move out of here as soon as he sees an equal rent in the paper.