Barry Hannah - High Lonesome

“Not a prayer. You’re had. You worked for it hard to be had, and you’re not stepping out now! You’re married, Royce! You’re so absolutist. You think heaven’s supposed to feel like heaven. If you quit this, I know this: you’ll get old and tired instantly, with all your little principles intact. Just old and tired.”

Now she was wet in her eyes.

But my raccoon, my arbor, my self! “A house should be a boat on this planet, riding nature. She wants a high-profile mausoleum, a monolith with a lawn like a pool table around it.” This felt original to me, and I was in rare beer eloquence, with my face good and bruised by that fiend on the court. I felt good and brave.

Mary simply left, on her little legs, and I had the shop alone.

So now our love life is getting worse, although the raccoon came right up for the muscadines when they were out two years later. It didn’t care if the poles were green metal. I fixed a couch under the vines that Jane seemed to like, but easing her toward long talks — we had nothing left to say — and pleasures under the moon will be a job. Sometimes on the television we’ll see a number of people, peasants, driven off into a chasm in the desert by charioteers with great-looking helmets in pursuit, and she’ll get a little warm. Sometimes there’s a sort of new kindness about her. I saw her feeding the raccoon with a can of premium King Oscar sardines once, out there by herself with it. I don’t think she knew I could see through the vines from the house.

She got bored and the granny decorator, with his delicious whip of a tongue, wanted her to work with him, since she was educated to his home touches. I imagine he’s seen with her at very good restaurants where they eat in St. Louis. She eats with him a lot more than with me, and that’s fine, really, since we can’t talk very much. One week there was a sort of scandal, rather pathetic, when the old granny was lying in his own bed playing with himself in easy view of several straight young workmen busy at his house. Jane took his side. I was surprised how this desperation endeared him to me too, sad fellow. Because I’m on his team. The coach has sent me in whether I wanted to play the last losing quarter or not. I look at my lean face in the mirror and see less a younger man than a thing in progress to a remarkable death’s head.

Thanks deeply for listening as I wind down this scratchy log. I’ve gone back to the Presbyterian church of my youth a few times, alone and secretly. White church music is still awful and middle-aged everybody still appalls me, especially the sudden careful holiness they’re given over to, having bought a ticket to a proverb convention — I judge.

Yet the very few graceful, profound, and bewildering words of Our Saviour do get through to me more and more, so different from this loser’s, lost like a two-headed snake in jabber at itself, condemned to my own story like somebody already in an Italian hell. I am slow, I am windy. I have so little vision, engaged in this discourtesy of length and interminable excuse, but seeing bits of light here and there ahead. The Indian tennis players aren’t winning much anymore, but I hope they’re still around.

Tell me. Did Our Saviour die because he was right, or is it that he simply was right and then he died? Tell me, let’s chat. I’ll be mostly in the shop.

TIGER BANDINI WAS A SHORT SORT OF PROWLING FELLOW WITH plump red lips and black ashy cheeks. He came from sports people but even to other hard-bitten fans he was over the line. He knew intimately about all the quick and larger hitters in American football. Above all he liked the linebackers and other violent crushers. He worshiped the violent crush. His eyes would close as if in a dream when he talked about Lawrence Taylor, for instance. He would begin screaming and white liquid would form at the corners of his lips. Giants fans in the bars who had begun in agreement with him would edge away and huddle together to avoid him. But Bandini was in a zone of screaming delight and was not conscious of this. One day after a Giants game on the television he went into a tirade of celebration and lost consciousness. They let him lie there on the floor, and in a few minutes he was back up on the bar, his eyes gone to slits and a vicious grin wrapped around another whiskey. He was whispering, “Taylor. Taylor.” He had been there since morning and when he left he got in his car and killed another man in a bad head-on accident.

He was forbidden a driver’s license in perpetuity by the judge. His family had struggled in measures grievous to them to keep Bandini out of prison and Bandini advised himself that he could no longer exist in his own town in upper New York state under the burden of shame and guilt.

Before his college experience was interrupted by the accident Bandini had met a pair of Southern boys who were crazed for the work of William Faulkner, and even more crazed as their homesickness grew. They could quote long passages from Faulkner that sounded to Bandini like a black preacher schooled on an enormous dictionary. Bandini sided with blacks, especially now that he was in disgrace and felt shunned. The Southern boys, like Faulkner, had elaborate reasons for doing almost anything. Bandini was impressed by this. He felt he was in the world of pain and ruin now after the wreck, but he saw there were elaborate reasons for it, and he relished this, as he drank only beer now at the end of the bar, only sometimes shouting. Ruin talked to him.

For instance, their college was not a very good college and was even falling apart physically. The buildings were erected by inferior contractors supported by the New York Mafia. Around the campus, interior and exterior walls fell down in chalky gravel that the students walked over daily. Sections of ceiling were apt to drop out, especially after a big snow or rain. Bandini liked to expatiate on the complexities of this in a patient beered-up review of the history of the New York Mafia. The Southern boys agreed nothing worthy was as plain as it seemed. The only worthy subjects were coiled up and crossed like nylon fishing line. Like them, Bandini began to speak much of destiny and twists of fate. This comforted him. Much was inevitable and bound to the blind dice-thrower fate. Fishing line left overnight would coil of its own.

So he thought it was in the dice and natural that he wind up way down south in a rental home in the precincts of the great author Faulkner himself. The town was storied and cozy, filled with shady lanes under great oaks. Around even his poor house in the student section was a bank of weeping willows.

One night, uncommonly drunk on Jägermeister, Bandini fell into them. It was midmorning when he awoke in a dream of green wigwam. A skinny cat came in there with him. Bandini took off all his stinking clothes, picked up the cat, and began weeping. This seemed a sad and wonderful place in here. He cursed the pavement and steel outside and did not come out of the trees until evening, when the cat began mewing loudly. The animal continued mewing in the house but he had got too drunk all over again on a pint of sloe gin thrown out of a car into the willows and did not understand what it wanted since he hardly ever ate himself. He looked at the creature and passed out on his nasty fluorescent sofa.

In the night he woke up the cat was still calling out and he recognized what it wanted because now he was hungry too. He put the cat in his overcoat pocket and walked a mile and a half to Kroger’s intending to provide a feast for the both of them and pushing the cat down by the shoulders. It scratched and hurt Bandini’s hand gravely but he staggered on. His cheeks were blown and red, and were like somebody had thrown a full ashtray on them.