Barry Hannah - High Lonesome

You didn’t hear? asked Shannon.

Hood had been in California during the earthquake last January. His apartment was all thrown around. For a while he tried to hang on in Los Angeles, but his nerves kept getting to him, so he moved back here to exercise his art on firm land. A generator came with his house, out a bit from town, and he was whistling about his luck after the ice storm, because most had no water and there were long lines of country and town folks down at the ice house, which had a natural spring under it. Hood was whistling in his shower, all loose in an orgy of steam, when an oak tree about the age of the Civil War fell down through the roof into the shower and broke his leg. He lay in his house for two days, phones out, until a neighbor’s dog came through the broken wall and the neighbor right after it. By then Hood was hoarse from screaming. His body, not just the leg, was poisoned green, black, and yellow.

In the fall, though, I saw him at the courts with another chum, and he seemed to be moving all right. Somebody had printed up T-shirts about the ice storm of ’94 and I was wearing one. Hood was not amused. We did play one night, but after just a few games he called it off. There was a real whine in his voice and a difference in his eyes. I had been serving very well, but my serve hadn’t frightened anybody since I was thirty. He didn’t say much, yet I heard another whine and this: “I can’t, I just can’t.” He got in his Jeep and pulled away, fretting. I’d liked Hood’s peculiarity. It was a shame to see him wussed.

I bought a video camera, my first, because I felt like life was getting away from me and wanted to shoot scenes of my wife naked or nearly so in compromising positions. I know this is the act of an aging creep who cannot understand his good luck, but I had ceased to care. I paid a great deal for this thing but what I could not buy was any desire to use it once it was in my hands. The first time I raised it I felt like an idiot and my wife ran away raving into the backyard. I just toiled there, whispering about my tender aims. Maybe I was in Hood’s world, a deeply wretched place.

I visited my mother a good deal that last year of her life. I did not know she was in the act of dying, wracked by the worst arthritis. But I worked close by her so we could chat occasionally. I was on the back glassed porch to keep the cigarette smoke away from her. I was working very well, almost under a miracle burst.

We had got very honest with each other. The old black lady who spent the nights with her had seen the white horse of death in the sky after a recent funeral. We talked about this, Mother and I, and she told me the old woman had introduced herself by saying “Ma’am, I ain’t not rogue.” This was finally understood as thief. She was a true old-timey woman although a bit younger than my mother, in her early eighties. Each day now I watched the diminishing of my mother. She was tiny, that woman who had controlled so much.

I thought of Hood, just to speak of something.

In another playwrighting workshop at the university he had become an out-and-out bitch who led insurrections against the teacher. He never spoke in class but wrote notes of delicious scorn. The teacher knew nothing, nothing. The lively girls who had been in Hood’s movies avoided him, but Hood was unaware of this. The distance in his eyes was shortened. His art vision was gone, replaced by much sighing and staring at the floor.

A great Nordic bitch, I finished.

“Please don’t use that word,” my mother said, “What could it possibly mean in relation to a young man?”

“Well, the tree might have done him in.”

“That’s not a man, then, son. He would be grateful he survived, happy in his health, not angry he was hurt. Believe: Your mother knows whereof she speaks.”

Still, the biggest oak anywhere right through the shower.

Then we talked about the Mississippi flood of 1927. She was there, in Leland, about to leave for college. She was in it, child. Broken levees, bodies, rain and ruin. My poor daddy, responsible to everybody on the plantation. You can’t tell me.

Where I work men spent several months putting in a criss-cross graded walk for the handicapped in wheelchairs. It had blue iron rails and resting benches, very stylish. The thing was superior to the ordinary walks by far.

One afternoon I noticed a man in a cape and a beret rolling down in a chair. Across the arms, too, he held a cane.

This was a lot of costume for early fall or I’d not have noticed. Under the beret was a long blond face, very surly. It was Hood. Before I knew this, I’d had in mind one of the great wounded artists of the fin de siècle. He was enrolled in yet another workshop.

But I have it on witness by his last vixen, a nurse, that, in truth, there is nothing wrong with him.

HE HAD NEVER LIKED THE YOUNG DANCING ASTAIRE, ALL GREEDY and certain. But now he was watching an old ghost thriller, and he liked Astaire old, pasted against the wall of mortality — dry, scared, maybe faintly alcoholic. This was a man. He pitied him. Everything good had pity in it, it seemed to Smith, now fifty and a man of some modest fashion himself. Even as a drunkard he had been a bit of a dandy. It was midnight when he turned off the set. He had begun thinking sadly about his friend Drum again, the man whose clothes were a crying shame. Drum two summers ago had exchanged his.22 for a pistol of a large bore, one that was efficient. In his bathtub in a trailer home on the outskirts of that large town in Alabama, he had put the barrel in his mouth. He had counted off the days on his calendar a full month ahead of the event of his suicide, and on the date of it he had written “Bye Bye Drum.” The note he left was not original. It was a vile poem off the bathroom wall, vintage World War II. He had destroyed his unpublished manuscripts and given away all his other art and had otherwise put his affairs in order, with directions he was to be cremated and there was to be no ceremony.

But two young friends had organized a ceremony for themselves. Many had loved and needed Drum. They had pleaded over the phone for Smith, of all people, to gather with them, but the town was such a valley of the shadow to Smith, with an air choked by rotten cherries and whiskey, he did not go. He felt cowardly and selfish, because it was ceremonies of pity that most moved him now, but he could not take his part. He asked his sons to appear at the ceremony for him. They wore suits and went to the funeral home and stood with a mournful group of people in wretched cheap dark clothes, and stood quietly for an hour before they discovered it was a rite for another person.

Smith did not like arithmetic or its portents, but he recalled Drum at his death was sixty-six, twice the age of Christ at Golgotha. With Drum this was relevant, and overbore the vile poem. Drum had been a successful carpenter several years previous.

But in Smith’s class ten years before the end, Drum was fifty-six and looked much like Charles Bronson. Big flat nose and thin eyes with a blue nickel gleam in them; three marriages behind him, and two sons by an opera singer far away in Germany. He held a degree in aeronautical engineering from UCLA. He could fix anything, and with stern joyful passion. He had written six unpublished novels. He served in the army in Panama in the years just after the world war, which he would have been a bit young for. Smith stole glances at Drum while he taught, or tried to, with his marriage and grip on things going to pieces. He tried to understand why this old man was in his class, whether he was a fool or a genius. There were indications both ways.

As in Smith’s progress toward the condition of a common drunkard.