Barry Hannah - High Lonesome

Oh oh you’re so extreme I want to take you home with me.

I went flailing around the beat, another sad old married like most of the queers in this town.

We danced something out, god knows what, but I was earnest, earnest, wanting out and up so badly. All this weight we get in time. It isn’t that childhood was any better, it’s that it was so much lighter.

I whispered to her I wanted to be crucified upside down like Saint Peter over her naked form. Of course she didn’t hear me. Or maybe she did. When the tune stopped she tore up my hair with her hands and cracked me across the back of the head with an elbow. My hair was ruined and flared-out like Stan Laurel’s, I saw in the mirror. My fly was unbuttoned and Minkle corrected this. She had on a tie-dyed T-shirt. I had felt sorry for her, out there with that gay fellow. Give her a break and let her dance with an alderman and former journalist. I was a worthy, many respected me. She was rising.

Now she had a job at the university television station. She helped produce programs for welfare mothers that educated them for the mainstream, a government project with a heartwarming acronym attached run by a shady parasite who kept a car phone in his bass boat. The sparse crowd of collegiates out on the floor reminded me she was taking several classes.

You’ve done well, Minkle, with your talents here, I said.

You mean barely high school?

I mean the Carriba situation. A place develops its own luck, you know. A family from Carriba lived near me when I was growing up. Terrible things were always happening to them. Car wrecks, cancer, fires. Boat explosions. Saying all this made me sober, I swear. There was something true about it that cut through nine drinks and brought on a brightly lit melancholy.

You know it wasn’t but the one thing, she said.

The one thing?

That Modock was worth coming here for a fresh start. Well I went on and interpreted that I might be worth it too. You gave us that.

Modock doesn’t seem—

Modock is dying, man. He’s either going to make it or he’s not. I believe he almost has to die and get better. Or not. I know it.

He could talk to a doctor, I guess. Tell it to a group, I said.

No. One of those days one of them would say to him: I know how you feel. Then I’d go up there and tear into them and want our money back. It’s in the blood, man. My mother Blackie beat up several doctors.

When I left the disco, walking, I was drunk again and melancholy both. I wandered to the front window of an auto parts dealer chum of mine, as if he’d be open. He was marrying the ex-wife of a rich doctor. I wanted to explain to him how important friendship was in this cold universe. I wanted to explain to him that what television and bad American movies had done was to make us doubt that others even existed except as a shadow play. That virtual reality and cyberspace would complete the job. That you could not be sure that you were at your own father’s funeral. Or think the woman squirming under you was only good if it would make a good movie. Or doubt that there had been any football on a live field because there was no replay. As some GI in his first firefight in Vietnam was supposed to have hollered out: Where’s the soundtrack!? That the poisonous excuse for all bad on television was that: But it’s true . I was hammering on the glass doors, wanting my chum to be in and talk this over. When I turned around, in front of the grocery store in his apron with meat stains on it, there under the fluorescent lights having a cigarette, was the man who’d killed his mother.

I rushed home and woke up my wife. I pulled the gown back down to her waist and gave her a massage, in terrible grief. We have to love each other, I said. Even if we don’t want to, we have to. Cling to a buoy even though half of it’s shot away.

I love you too, she said. Leave me be, midnight poet.

But I was back in the disco the next night as if to complete something unfinished. That ’70s music. During Vietnam I was in Korea in the army around the 38th parallel. In bell-bottoms, beads, and bandanna wrap, a buddy and I used to give the finger to the Koreans across the valley who rolled out artillery from their caves every morning. That was some bad dope. We had been listening to the bulletproof Hendrix.

For the longest while even fewer people were coming in. Some of them were even more pathetic than the other evening. I sensed they were trying to be queer but hadn’t the moves. I loved it, racing through vodka martinis and huge onions.

I waited and waited and waited, staring at the baroque mirror at a man who was dwindling into something else. I would bark out involuntarily sometimes, as if with Tourette’s syndrome, saying No! No! Perhaps I had taken on some of Modock’s grief, was now a barking dummy for the killer son. I hadn’t meant to, but I kept erupting, as if somebody was there accusing me. Finally the whap on the back of the head came, but not so hard, even some tenderness in it. I turned and it was Minkle, but she was accompanied by the long-haired lawyer, young and blond, pretty vacant in the face.

She put her hands around my neck and dragged me to her. Next I knew my head was turned and she was pouring a kiss down my mouth, a tongue in there. It was ten years since I’d had a kiss like this. My wife used to be good at it in her throes. But hell, I knew what Minkle was up to. She was kissing a man of importance to mark the fact that she had classy friends.

During the week, she’d get in his car evenings and give me a pout as she nestled in his Volvo. I’d hang at the window there. She meant some kind of low irony I didn’t understand. I wasn’t angry or jealous. I just despised the obvious deal being struck here. The urgency of her rise, the flat coy look on the ex-jock now Volvo lawyer.

It is the sadness of Modock’s old hound I want to address here. In the next few days, displaced by the bobcat, he lay next to the steps in full mourning. Hounds are mournful anyway, but he was in clear further distress. He even came over to visit and get some affection, as he’d never done before. In his eyes were both the mourning of the world and the unexpected torture of Modock’s neglect.

Inside, the bobcat was all cleaned up. Modock made much over it. Pretending it was getting all homey. Any fool could see its eyes looking out for every crack of egress. Modock was back at work and may have been a little ruddier. The few visits I made made me angrier.

Your mama can’t be here so she wants you stroking that cat, which is her, which is Carriba, I told him. What about Beaumont?

He didn’t answer.

Beaumont’s not wild or mean enough, is he? He ain’t got that spitting beauty to him, what? You suffering all over that cat, stroking away, running round after its poopoo. This makes quite a story. Only you can’t see it.

I’m not a story. I’m people, he said.

Well, months, and we went on. Minkle ran home glistening, a bit more stylish every week. She picked up fast, only she was copying things a bit young for her, like two bows in the hair, blue jeans with the knees out. Once I felt for her so much, watching her that way, I started crying a little. And I had never stopped the involuntary barks, the looking around as if there were somebody there on my case.

She got pregnant, the guy stopped coming by, and she showed me her nookie at the window. She cheered up some after the fight. But the hound Beaumont now was emaciated and weak with grief. Modock was a killer but he was not cruel, that I knew of. I took over the hound. Can you believe it? The hound brought the wife and me closer together. She made over it, gave Beaumont special scraps, and he got some hope in his eyes. It had been ages since she’d nursed anything. My word what you find just stumbling around. Both the hound and I were getting some, with wild and tender goodwill.