Barry Hannah - High Lonesome

Bandini had forgot his wallet, and he was far, far from his resources, a cold desert away it seemed. So in the lonesome store with scant personnel he put his free hand down into the aquarium and shoplifted two great lobsters and set them in the other pocket. Now he was truly fastened in by the hands on both sides and he went out the front electric door with a rictus of his big red mouth and some kind of song it might have seemed to the policeman, bored in a car. He got far out in the lot before he could truly whimper. The night manager came out and the policeman swung toward Bandini in his vehicle but Bandini saw this and scampered like a goat-fiend over the hill behind a branch bank and into the thorns, dead wortvine, and minor gullies where only the most wretched of animals went, and down closer to another road he stumbled on yet another bottle with half its liquor, so he secured the lobsters and drank, then he stayed to the backyards and overcame the trifling fences of the middle-aged and wifeworn, where had they shined a light on him they would have seen a man near vomitous with joy.

Tiger Bandini had got new lungs and legs off the boon of drink and he was again that twisting shifty dodger who had almost made the team nine years ago in the town close to the Canadian line. He came out of an alley into the town square free of the police, crafty and game, rid of the pain in his hands, which failed against the found whiskey. He tossed the bottle into a grate and saw in the cold moon before him the courthouse statue of the lone Confederate looking curiously southward. He became infatuated right off and with great conviction he emancipated the cat and lobsters, then began climbing the ten feet of pedestal and statue. He did not see the cat remain in the gutter only a short time before it ran at both lobsters huddled and alien there.

Bandini had a free wide heart for the vanquished. He scaled toward the man, all fours engaged, in an act of hunching and embracing. The policeman had driven up to witness this remarkable love, as Bandini almost reached the boots of the defeated. The policeman heard the man cry out like a thing impaled and then it was too ugly for him to watch anymore. The odor of rank sea and a low hissing brought the officer to kneel with his light. Above him, Bandini was going nowhere.

In jail Bandini was given the drunk tank where Cruthers, a lean black man, squatted. Cruthers was a police informer and chauffeur for a town writer who specialized in the burden of history.

Cruthers had twelve or fourteen DUIs. He claimed to be a sergeant in the Vietnam conflict who carried about an M-60, his sweet big baby, and mowed down hundreds. He slept in a tree and went native, a lizard of death from above, abandoned to independent slaughter by an army who did not love it enough and did not have the hair.

Cruthers would drive the writer to far parts, even New York, where the writer would introduce him to his cronies as the burden of history. Late at night with enough whiskey the writer and Cruthers would listen to Sinatra and Presley on a small cassette player and began weeping over the Vietnam dead and the Confederate dead, and, appropriate to the writer’s novel, the Korean dead. When Sinatra sang, it was the dead of World War II.

The lobsters and cat and scaling of the soldier were precious to the writer and Bandini was in solid at the writer’s campus bungalow. He read up on Bruce Catton and could account for the Northern agony, better and better, when the topic moved over to Those Who Fell once Elvis sang his medley of “Dixie” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” with the highly sincere Las Vegas band behind him.

Bandini insisted Cruthers move in with him and share his lot and the few hundred a month he got from his parents to stay out of New York. In fact he rather kidnapped Cruthers from the writer. But this was all right, since the writer was growing tired of Cruthers a little. Lately he had begun running the car out of gas and leaving it in mean places where crack fiends prowled and respected nothing. Also there was the problem of Cruthers always being in jail to be bailed out. Some money had disappeared too.

Bandini filled up the old shabby yellow house with history books. He was studying to be a student in the future, but this could wait. Through the writer he was let in to practice sessions of the football team, and he watched from the sidelines for hours, memorizing the players, especially the swift monstrous crushers. The coaches did not know what to make of the screaming little man with the New York accent who seemed to know and hate the weaknesses of individual players even more than they did. He used the word pussy a great deal. Soon he was asked to quiet down or leave. But he seemed to think of himself as a man with true work and vicious responsibility. Bandini knew that college players were semipro recruits only tenuously connected to the university. Half of them were not on familiar terms with the phrase alma mater . Bandini loved this. He wanted to think of the boys as pure cruising crushing meat, a kind of express ham. He was partial as always to the blacks, who he thought of as bursting out of their little nasty nowheres into the howling arenas of the world in the manner of Spartacus. This was their only shot and Bandini worshiped this wild simplicity.

The first time I saw Bandini in public trouble was after a game our team had lost in November when it was first turning chilly. Twilight was coming on and we filed out under the end zone stands. In the end zone we had a sort of rowdy club made up of professors and artists. It was fun seeing the touchdowns and murderous defensive plays from just a few feet away. Bandini sat with us and always brought Cruthers to the games with him. Without cease he would yell insults at the players, naming them, when he saw an error. He became hoarse doing this but never relented even when the game was far gone and the loyal were trickling out.

Under the stands a large professor who was also drunk had not cared for Bandini’s style and was beating Bandini on his head, really pounding him, as the man’s wife and Cruthers looked on. But Bandini would rise and rise again, crying out hoarsely. The wife seemed angrier than the man beating Bandini, actually. She had been personally insulted but the large professor was going about clobbering Bandini in a dutiful way, just socking him as if stamping the price on groceries. Cruthers was holding the man’s coat and smiling. Bandini would not fall and stay, and when he rose once, I heard his hoarse voice still going, hoarse in a whisper through his big bloody lips. He was still yelling about the game, the errors. He was barely acknowledging the professor, and I believe there was even a little smile on Bandini’s lips, a tolerant thing, as if this were a small social misunderstanding.

Months later, toward the end of my own serious drinking life, I was in a bar in an alley off the center of town. This bar prided itself on its roughneck and biker atmosphere in a town devoted to campus fashion in nearly everything. A crowd made way on the dance floor in front of the rock-abilly band. I thought at first it was Bandini dancing by himself. But he was doing his moves and staggering from having been hit. A man in a leatheroid long cowboy coat had struck him for defending Cruthers, who had been dancing with a white girl. Cruthers was still standing beside the girl with his arm around her shoulders sweated up from the dance. I noticed he was beholding it all with an expression of implacable scorn.

I really felt for Bandini, who went over to a booth by himself and sat there a long time, with an awful bruise rising on the side of his face. He was saying something over and over to the table but you couldn’t hear it for the band. I asked him if he was all right.

He lifted up his head and said: “I’m always all right.”