Barry Hannah - High Lonesome

I turned toward Florida, seeking Tyndall air base beyond Panama City. I would have a chat with the pals there who didn’t know me yet, perhaps even her ex-husband down on a mission, then on to Tallahassee where I would explain to the woman I was not a fool. No, I was in control, in vast control. But first I took a turn into Magnolia Springs on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, where an old student of mine lived.

We talked a while. His parents were in the back, visiting, but he did not want me to meet them. Then he asked me to go, please. So I took my bottles and left in a huff. It seemed to me the world was certainly turning rude here lately, a lamentable sign of the times, those times you read about. Oh I was high into my righteousness, and just out near some swamp and palmettos I went way off into it and attempted to set fire to my car, which would not fly and was really hot on my feet. I threw matches into it, a ’73 MG convertible. Then somebody stopped my arm. He put out the little rug fire I’d started. He was the son of a strange nearby family who fed me for three days. I could not decide whether they were white or colored.

They didn’t pay much attention to me and did not speak much, but I thought I caught a foreign brogue, not creole, when they did. They ate rice and collards. This brought my health back in little angry fragments. One morning I was suddenly very sober, just very frail. They didn’t mind how much I ate because they had their eye on my car over there out of sight. Then my old student came back and told me he was taking me home. I never gave them the car but I gave them the keys and was ashamed to return a week later. My student took a look around my cottage, then took a U-turn back the long trip. I still did not understand I had been gently but seriously kicked out of his county, 350 miles far.

My old girlfriend married the Texan. In the fall I got a call from my nephew who had heard from a musician that she was killed in a robbery of her bank in Jacksonville, Florida. Killed by crack people. She was no doubt in her smart executive suit, all bright and cheerful. New leaf, new man. She was not good with people, she once told me. Maybe a bit of a snob. I understand the new breed of crack killer is much concerned with respect. Something in her eyes, maybe. Maybe nothing at all, she was white and too lovely. She was there. I thought of her father, the dour banker on that hill in the east Texas town, her tiny thin mother. One of their daughters was a lesbian psychiatrist and the other was now dead from banking. He hustled peas in the Depression and now he was in modern life, on the hill there with the wind blowing the last of his hair.

Nevertheless, it is said we are predators, eyes forward, and we go on towards the hunt, as if nobody had eaten it all before us. As if just around the corner is the really fine feed, the really true woman, the world that will call us son. Somebody is missing to our left but we only sniff deeper, it must be there, there.

I was doing this in the aisle of a small local grocery when I turned a row and was shocked chilly, down to the bones of my hands, nearly crippled from a swat of cold nerves into my thighs and scalp. It was a very tall man all naked, in a large hat. He had a long gray country face I was certain I knew, a man confined somehwere too long.

The crown of the hat was above the top shelf of cans. He was turning my way to look but I did not want him to look at me. Then I noticed he was in a bleached pink set of long underwear, not naked, but the possibility was so close it was jolting. He opened his mouth. I ran away with my hands and groceries in my ears, with his lips twisting up there over me.

I went out in the street with the groceries still in my hands. Nobody called me back. I was well home before I was aware I had them, still locked in my fingers. I had no excuse for running out with them, for running away, nothing manly anyway. My act could not be explained. I was ill and ashamed, and jerking with breaths.

Next day I got a letter from the woman — now twenty-five — in Tallahassee. My hands still shook a little and my breathing came hard. I was without sleep because I didn’t want to dream.

She wrote that things were not going very well. She lived with her mother, but Satan, her father, lived close by. Not going well. Too close, this man. As if he could move away but not very far. It felt like forever. It hurt to discuss certain things.

She asked me to forgive her . She had visited me with her winter pounds shed and with a dark suntan so as to hurt me, in her vanity. To make my mouth water. But yet I was her friend and this could no longer go unconfessed. She had wanted to change and ruin me for a while, with her beauty. It was an unfortunate trait. Her father had accused her of it all her life, but only now she was truly adult could she admit she enjoyed inflicting pain this way, always had. Her mother, a beauty, was fast losing her looks and was always in a state, afraid to go out with anybody new. She and her mother spent the days simply keeping a watch on each other. They had begun going to church together. Even there, they knew the great Satan was in one of the cars in the parking lot, watching them.

You must never write about me, she wrote. You think I am special but I am not. I am to be forgotten, do you understand. We have had a bad house, wherever I am is a bad room .

A week later I won an award from the governor. My old parents were there glowing in the mansion. I was in a suit, now a goodly time healthy, but in my short acceptance speech I was conscious of sneering ironic people somewhere in the crowd. When I looked at the rear rank of those standing I did see three hats way above the rest and flashes of beige skin. I may have broken all forms for modesty, unwilled actually, but from a diminished heart, and held my work in an esteem equal to that of a scratching worm drowned in ink and flung against a tombstone. Through all this too I confess I was coming on to the governor’s wife — helplessly, God — and finished in a burst of meekness coupled with hideous inappropriate lust. I could hear the laughter and was led away.

I was looking at the plaque and stroking myself a couple days later as the phone rang. A voice I could not remember began. At once I could feel the black wind of North Dakota between us on the lines. She was a friend of the Florida girl. I had not seen her since I chatted with them at that bar near the Minnesota line. She was clear for a while but then started sobbing and stalling. Her friend. Our friend. You were kind to her, she said. Always she mentioned your kindness. What?

In Tallahassee the father had run her over in her own living room and killed her. The car came in through the bay window and crushed her as she sat on the couch in her bikini swimsuit. Her mother, also in a swimsuit, was broken up badly but would survive. Abruptly after the collision, the father, still in the driver’s seat, put a pistol to his ear and destroyed himself. The women were having lunch after sunning. He must have known all their moves. You are a good person, the woman said — a scrap of memory through the black air of days and days ago — and I had to tell a good person. Somebody who knew her.

I am not a good person, I told her. This is too awful.

Do you believe in God?

Foxhole Christian. When all else is lost.

Nothing else was said and she hung up.

I was suddenly something fresh to her, a way I did not know. Then she was destroyed by a monster I had never believed in, who was true. My pity was so confused I could not accept I was even worthy of having it, for weeks. Or worthy of her, or my former girlfriend.

It is true now that, years later and desperately married (to the daughter of a World War II pilot named Angel), whenever a flute plays I have the woman sweet in my ears and think of our laughter. Wherever I see a headline beauty I brag quietly: Come on, I had a better, with a sad smile, I’d imagine, that fine appreciation of ourselves when we have bittersweetness right on time.