by Barry Hannah
“What?”
Latouche’s pathetic unlined face was sopped with gin, dropping down like a beard of tears and slobber.
Coots dragged his handkerchief out and kneeled to attend Latouche, dabbing away, kinder than a nurse.
“My friend, my friend,” he sympathized in his great scratch, softened.
“It’s true. I killed them. They were just worn out, is all. Still lovely, both, still should have been in the fine bloom of a woman’s middle age, that arousing . . .”
“But one would suppose that one often destroys the loved one. I have destroyed. Have been destroyed,” Coots said, trying to aid.
“I don’t mean your . . . fictions, your creative writing! I mean destroyed!”
“Yes, but guilt, must . . .”
“I don’t know what brought me to shout it out. I don’t know why that pistol is loaded. Something made . . . You. It’s you, Coots. You demand terrible buried things, somehow. Calamities. Isn’t that it?”
“That’s not a condition of our friendship.”
Latouche calmed down and smiled. “We are friends, aren’t we? All our strangenesses and our differences. We are, yes?”
“Doubtless, friends. And for that I’ll get a fresh one for you. Take it easy. All is locked, here in the bunker.”
Latouche saw the big secured door and nodded, instantly more solid himself.
This drink Coots did thoroughly, a spring in his step, close again to that sun-browned boy with his string of bullheads, his Prince Albert tin filled with nightcrawlers.
When he came out, Latouche was gone and the door was thrown open. There had been a noise in his writing room, and now only Latouche’s things were left, his tape recorder, gun, and overcoat across the arm of the sofa. The front door was unlocked; it must have been thrown open very rapidly, speed quieting the noise.
Coots shut his eyes and knew. He’d forgotten, forgotten, forgotten, entirely the dog hides on the wall of his writing room: the Rottweiler’s black one, and the German shepherds’ speckled gray. Latouche must have stepped inside, looked, then fled, feeling hunted himself. On the spoor.
Horton’s Honda Express, the little city motorbike, was next to the front entranceway, helmet on the seat. Coots knew he should take this. He’d handled it perfectly many times. It would be required, he was positive.
He labored with the big two-by-twelve board on the stairs that served Horton as a ramp. His own long smart overcoat on, helmeted—Horton’s humor insisted on a dove aviary painted all over the helmet—and buckled in, he cranked the scooter and rushed precariously upward through exhaust clouds to the sidewalk, then out bumping off the curb, an old man from hell. Wouldn’t you know, his pesty neighbor, the junkie dentist Newcomb, antithesis of Latouche, hooked possibly on everything and ever determined to visit, was right in his way, and was knocked down by Coots and the whirling machine. Coots cursed with his last cigarette breath, despising this low absurdity. He thought he saw Latouche three blocks up as the street was otherwise empty. Something was scrambling ahead on all fours, head down, trailed by its suspenders, white shirttails out.
It was Latouche. Coots ran over his jacket in the street. Then there was a boot, an old Wellington boot, straight up, abandoned. Poor man! Coots could hardly breathe—the pity, the terror, the love, and the effort with that board. His adrenaline, if it was there, was wondering where to go. He could hardly get air down. Latouche was faster, or through asthmatic illusion Coots thought he was, and he turned back the accelerator all the way. The doctor was running up into the middle of the city. Soon he’d be lost in neon and street strollers, sloths, pimps, bus-stop criminals, sluts. Coots could see citizens spotting the sidewalks, increasingly, a quarter mile up.
At last his respiration and vision were easier. How fast could a dog run? He looked at the speedometer: thirty mph, and he still wasn’t gaining on him. What kind of dog was Latouche? Something Central American and predacious. Please not a greyhound, pushing forty! The motorbike could hit that speed too, but barely. How, then, could he catch Latouche?
He didn’t know it but he passed Riley Barnes, early out of the gym, coming toward him in the Hudson. Barnes flinched and soon U-turned. Coots’s frail head in the bird helmet was unmistakable. By the time he came even, Coots was narrowing his eyes, an elderly cavalry scout in spectacles. Latouche had run into the crowd. He was gone. There was only reckoning with his speed now and trying to stay up even. If Latouche took a turn, it was hopeless. The motorbike wobbled into higher speed, but the traffic would have him soon. Coots felt pure hate for humankind, especially New Yorkers, too cowardly to stay in their rooms; they must be out with their autos, part of the clot, rubbernecking at each other—like dogs. Dogs! Packs of them sniffing, licking balls, consorting in dumb zeal, not a clue, not an inward reflection. The mayor and the police should be shot, for not shooting them. And then this streetlight. He was in a paroxysm of fury.
“Where in the hell are you going, Mr. Coots?” Riley Barnes was next to him at the junction, yelling to him from the high car. “Stop, please.”
Coots did.
“He went into the grofft. I swear, Barnes, a horrible inadvertency at my place. He saw some ‘imagery’ on my wall in another room. He’s up there, blocks, incredibly fast.”
“Get in the car, quick. He can’t be out here!” Barnes was in tears already.
“The car’s no good. If he turns, you’ve no chance. This Honda’s the thing. Let me go.”
“I’m going too. He’s mine.”
“Fool. Then get on the back if you can.”
“You can handle this?” Great poundage in the rear with Barnes. They sank down.
“I can handle it. Shut up and look.”
They were off, riding as if on a wire, given Barnes’s body. Every yard was risky and grim. The motorbike wanted to waddle off into the gutter or straight out into the oncoming lanes. Coots’s arms were noodles from the effort.
“Don’t move! Just look, damn you!” His voice whipped back around the helmeted cheeks.
He looked too, tried to. Hunter of the hunter, pointer of the pointer. It had been ages since he’d labored physically at anything, but Nature had not slighted him in adrenaline. He was handling the cargo nicely after another half mile. But Nature—in Latouche’s case, God?—had not slighted the doctor either. Age ninety, ninety! His fitness was uncanny. Coots thought he saw a clot of citizens part, shouting, at something on the ground another three blocks up. Maybe they were gaining a little. Latouche could not be given much more by his heart and lungs. His bootless feet must be awful by now. If only some decent man would just stop him. But where was a decent citizen of New York to be found? It would take a tourist, some Johnson from Kansas.
“Help! Help him!” shouted Barnes, sensing the same.
All Latouche did was gather disgusted glares from both sidewalks.
The thing they feared worst occurred. Plainly, just two blocks up now, a corner crowd parted, faces snapped down, then to the left, some of them pointing down a side street. Latouche had turned. If he began weaving the streets, he was doomed unless he fainted. Coots’s grand new friend would be snatched from him by the most horrible chance and he would be forever had by another “black thing” as vile as his wife’s death. This plague of one, this Kansan prince of North America, was nearing his end and Coots did not even feel potent enough to be his nurse.
Latouche may have been the only man of pure virtue Coots had ever known. You could not really fornicate somebody to death. That was all just Latouche’s elevated code, wasn’t it? An anachronism. Guilty for his own vigor, guilty for his own superb gifts. Could be slight atherosclerosis closing on the old gent, who’d buried awesomely too many contemporaries. Left lonely in his luck.
He must have turned yet again. These streets were near empty, and they saw nothing. It would be merely a matter, Coots feared, of patrolling for his corpse, if they were even that fortunate. They’d have to go to the police and do the official. In the precinct
s they might know Latouche and get on it with more effort.
The motorbike putted—bleakly—as Coots halted it. The weight of Barnes, at rest, nearly threw them over into the road. But he stood them up with his mighty legs spread. He had not expected to stop.
“Go on! Go on!” cried Barnes in a futile voice as Coots removed the helmet. His hair stood out in wisps. The city had never seemed so unnecessary and odious to him. You could forget there was an old-time Greenwich Village, once worth inhabiting, breathing. And a zoo, the museums, Columbia, the fruitful subway where he’d rolled drunks for dope money. You could “raincoat” a stiff, tying the thing over his head with the sleeves, and have the money without violence; it was quite safe, even for the skinny Coots.
He must meditate the point here, a new one. Where did grofftites want to go? Where would they rest? Where was the quarry? There had to be something, he figured. While Barnes was calling the police, Coots tried to voodoo it out, but there was no file in his head about this he could turn to. Bad luck. “Spot of bother”—a refrain of the nasty British colonial—rang silly back and forth in his mind. He had no further sources. Barnes was probably worthless, in his grand-sonly adoration. Knock down the maze, what could be the rat’s desire? Somebody should have injected rats with grofft gland, offered a number of rat gratifications at the end.
The two of them, Coots and the almost whimpering Barnes—as if taking on symptoms in sympathy—stood foolishly beside the Honda peeping around, statues of the bereaved. Coots had had it with impotence, too old and losing too much by it in the past.
“He was talking about his wives, how he’d murdered them, worn them out with love. He sounded hyper, self-flagellating, caused by a quick suck of gin, maybe.”
Barnes stood taller and clamped on Coots’s wrist, too hard. You fucking monster. Then Barnes kneeled in street clothes with white bucks on his feet, drew a pen from his coat, and began drawing some route on his right shoe.
“What are you doing?”
“He’s talked about his wives before. He could barely stand going to the cemetery with flowers for them. And their birthdays ruined him for days. He was chin-up, but I could tell.”
“What cemetery?”
“Forest Hills, and the dog is there too. I know how to get in at night.”
“That’s ages from here. He couldn’t make it.”
“He could try. It’s all we have. I’ve got a crow’s flight route here on my shoe. We’ve got to go. Look along the way for him.”
Damn the horror between here and there, thought Coots. It’s the only mission.
The men wobbled along for a while seeing nothing, then hit an expressway where motorbikes were disallowed and Coots put the engine up red-line, clawing for near forty-five, deathly slow against the eighteen-wheelers. They looked along the highway for the doctor’s flattened corpse. He could bake flat like a dog before New York got irritated by the smell. Thank the stars, they were soon off it, buffeted by winds of every rolling thing back there.
The landscape became tree-lined, with residential hedges on both sides where dogs could conceivably sleep in the street for a while, as in Kansas. Coots thought of every possible hazard to Latouche on a run even near here. They were too monstrous to confront. He aimed the scooter numbly, dread age tuckering him again in this long helpless mourning. He wondered if Barnes could feel the cap and ball .44/.45 in his overcoat pocket. He’d forgotten it himself and could not recall why he’d pocketed it. Then it came to him—it was exactly the caliber he’d used to nail the dogs, the favored size of the Old West and until lately the modern army. So what? Except that plugging the dogs was the last large physical thing he had done.
There was a narrow screened gate in a northern wall before a gravel path. Barnes simply destroyed the gate before moving instantly a long ways ahead. Happy to be off the Honda, Coots crept like a rag on wasp’s legs. It would be best to let Barnes see that there was nothing at the graves, then return to him. On the other hand, deeper into the burial grounds—vast—he noticed cross paths and cul-de-sacs. He might get lost out here, celebrating this fool’s errand by his own tragedy. This place at night was a sullen metropolis, its high monuments like a blind skyscape. The roll of it had its own charm, but not now.
He called ahead to Barnes. There was no answer. Coots was at the bottom of a very dark, long hill. He should stop, but he couldn’t.
“Not yet, friends. Three or four more books I’ve got in me, I think,” he announced to the brothering tombstones around him. No limit to the elevated vanity of some of them. Who the hell did they think they were, these fat-cat dead? No doubt with hordes of progeny scumming the Northeast. Old tennisers and polo players who should have died at birth, but giving the granite finger to the lowly and the modest who neighbored them. No worse fate than to fall and just be discovered out here.
Something let go a howl, canine and terrifying. It was too high for Barnes or Latouche. Too beyond, too nauseating. He stumbled down the hill toward it, however, loving the pistol when he felt it again. Ghoul, I am ready. Eat me, try. Then he heard what was plainly Barnes, near a big tree by the moon, weeping. Oh no. Oh what.
Apparently Barnes had done the howling. He sat at a plot of three stones.
Latouche had got deeply into one of the graves. His head was in it and both arms. He lay there—bloody, barefoot and dead. The name on the stone of the scratched grave was VERNA LOUISE LATOUCHE.
Coots kneeled, arm on the shoulder of the muddy Barnes, who was beating the ground with his hands, sobbing. He turned his face, changed into one hole of grief.
“Imposs—he was already coldish,” said Riley Barnes.
“I think, lad, you’ll find he’s broken his fingers and his jaws. Poor Latouche.”
“He was the finest man I’ve ever known.”
“What was his given name?”
“Harold. Harry. I’m just a termite.” Barnes was able to quit weeping, slowly. “What are you doing with that gun?”
“I . . . suppose I was going to try and woo him out of it with a piece of familiarity. It’s his. He was an uncommon pistoleer.”
“That was nice, Coots.”
Barnes stood, filthy at the knees and palms. Then he kneeled again and pulled Latouche out of the hole; he was at the depth you’d see when an infantryman was caught out by bombs. Coots looked up at the rushing beardy clouds. He preferred not to see Latouche’s face. That would be profane. Barnes, brushing the dirt from the doctor’s face, seemed to agree. He would not look at him full-on. They also agreed that officials should be told—the ambulance, hurling lights, Coots could already imagine. This was enough.
There was, of course, the unspoken idea between them that Latouche should not be found like this. The gossip, the ugliness, the possibility of blemish on his life. Neither said anything for a good while until Coots, finally, spoke up.
“Really it’s a better death than most. He didn’t have to wait for it. More valiant, don’t you think? We’ve got one problem. They won’t believe it.”
“It doesn’t matter. All of him was unbelievable, when you study it.”
“You go call. Can you do the Honda?”
“No problem.”
“I’d like to stay and watch. A few more minutes with him.”
“You’re a good man, Mr. Coots. I really never knew that, by your stuff.”
“I have my vagrant loyalties.”
As he waited, seating himself finally in an ecstasy of relief—so tired, so worse than weary, his right hand in an agony from twisting on the motorbike—he found a Player’s cigarette in his coat and lit it. Nature did nothing more, but the city became louder. Horns, screeches, a ball game, airplanes—it was all obscene.
“Oh yes I saw ‘a death,’ Harry. So Harry—” He stopped.
Coots’s eyes became misted and blind. This was all right, this was fitting.
“But what a gap, Harry. What an awful gap you leave. And I only a watcher.”
Bats Out of Hell Division
>
WE, IN A RAGGED BOLD LINE ACROSS THEIR EYES, COME ON. SHREDS of the flag leap back from the pole held by Billy, then Ira. We, you’d suspect, my posteritites, are not getting on too well. They have shot hell out of us. More properly we are merely the Bats by now. Our cause is leaking, the fragments of it left around those great burned holes, as if their general put his cigar into the document a few times. Thank you mercilessly, Great Perfecter. But we’re still out there. We gain by inches, then lose by yards. But back by inches over the night, huff, flap, narg. I am on a first-name basis with five who have had their very trigger fingers blown away—c’est rien, mere bagatelle. They mutter, these Cajuns. Something about us their cannon doesn’t like, to put it mildly. By now you must know that half our guns are no good, either.
Estes—as I spy around—gets on without buttocks, just hewn off one sorry cowardly night. Morton lacks hair, too close to the cannon before he decided on retreat. I have become the scribe—not voluntarily, but because all limbs are gone except my writing arm. Benedict, Ruth and the Captain say I am not unsightly, in my tent with the one armhole out of it, not counting the one for my head. I’m a draped man of some charm, says our benign crone of a nurse, Emmaline. Nobody comes forward to our rear like loyal Emmaline, the only woman to see this much this close. She comes up to the foul hospital, carrying a depth of pity. How, we wonder, does she carry on? “I’ve seen everything, boys! These milky old eyes have seen it all!” The only real atheist around, she carries love and helplessness forward in a bucket in either hand. We wonder, surely, whether this is the last woman we’ll ever see. Maybe they use her to make us fight for home, but which way would that work? Better to think she’s part of no plan at all. The best things in life, or whatever you call this, happen like that, even I in my old youth have learned. This marks the very thing, most momentous, I am writing about. It’s over for me but I can’t leave. No. I’d rather just stick here at my niggled work, undismayed by an occasional overshot bomb. I just lean over, disgusted, and think there’s not much left of me to hit. Shrapnel blows through my tent-dress every now and then.