by Barry Hannah
Ross had written himself neutral. He rewrote what he had thrown to sea, it didn’t matter, there it was all back and the life of the saintly cowboy wrote itself. He wrote twenty pages one night, nonstop, and recollected that he could not remember what he had said. When he read the pages, however, they were perfect. The words had gone along by themselves. Ross seemed not to have mattered at all. His mind, his heart, his belly were not engaged. Entailed was a long episode of murder, rape, and the burning alive of a prized horse. A short herd of people were killed, the cowboy wounded in the throat. It was some of Ross’s best writing, but he had not particularly cared. Even hacks sometimes cared, he knew. This business was too alike to the computer goons he despised. Ross was bleak. He’d just gotten too damned good at his stuff. He was expendable. Nothing but the habitual circuitry was required.
Otherwise, it was a good year. Nabby did not say any more insane things. But she badly wanted a face-lift. Felt sure she was falling apart and would not show herself near sunlight. Back in her room the ointments overblew the air. She kept herself in goo and almost quit golf. They had had separate rooms since Newt went to the asylum. She felt ugly. Ross felt for her deeply. This emotion was a constant tender sorrow and that was what he had instead of the eruptions of love and homicidal urges. It was much better, this not too sad little flow. Their love life was much better, in truth. A sort of easy tidal cheer came over Ross, fifty-three. He was appreciating his years and the pleasant gravitation toward death. It had a sweet daze to it. He could look at his tomb and smile, white flag up in calm surrender.
Why not a face-lift, and why not love? Things were falling together even though he was a disattached man. He rushed to finish the book before the old cowboy died. Blink, there it was. The old man’s children read it to him and he liked it very much. They told Ross his eyes, like a robin’s eggs, brightened. He blessed the author. He had never thought his life made any sense. He had never meant to be famous or read about. He wished he could read. By far he was the most pleasant subject Ross had ever worked with.
Nabby, fresher at the neck though a little pinched at the eyes after her face-lift, wanted the children to visit over Thanksgiving and have a family portrait made. They’d not heard much from either of them lately. Newt was teaching night classes at a community college in Orlando. He had his own place.
But when Ann called he could hear his daughter was not right. Something had happened. The upshot was Newt had converted to Mormonism, very zealously, and had simply walked out of town and his job and his apartment, without a word to anyone. Nobody knew where he was. He had destroyed all his poetry two months before. He left everything he owned.
Ross could see his wife, blank in her new face, holding the phone as if it were a wounded animal. She cradled it and stroked it. Ross had never seen an act like that. Ann’s voice continued but her mother listened at the end, when Ross took the phone, as if death were speaking to her directly. Ann’s husband, Walker, came on and detailed the same version.
“What do Mormons, new Mormons, do?” asked Ross.
“There’s no place, like a Mecca, if that’s what you mean,” said Walker.
“I mean how should they act?”
“It’s inside, Ross. They affirm. They attend. They practice. They study. A great deal of study.”
“What did, damn it, Mormonism—or you—do to Newton?”
“He wasn’t raving. It’s not charismatic.”
“Would he be in some fucking airport selling flowers?”
Walker hung up. His reverent tongue was well known. All told, he was a Boy Scout with a hard-on for wealth; the boy so good he was out of order. He wouldn’t even drink a Coke. Caffeine, you know. When Ross lit a Kool, Walker looked at him with great pity. Ross hated him now, smug and square-jawed, wearing a crew cut. He saw him dripping with a mass of tentacles attached to him, dragging poor Newton into the creed, “elders” spiriting him away. The cult around Howard Hughes, letting him dwindle into a freak while they waited on his money. Clean-cut international voodoo. Blacks and Indians were the tribes of Satan, weren’t they? Ross always rooted against BYU when they played football on television. Sure. Hardworking, clean-limbed boys next door. Just one tiny thing or three: we swallow swords, eat snakes, and ride around on bicycles bothering people for two years. Nabby lay on her bed with her new face turned into the pillow. Ross petted her, but his anger drove him out to the pier again, where for a long time he searched the far shore for the image of his lost daughter-in-law, Ivy, naked and in grief, hugging her breasts.
So. The colleges wouldn’t have him anymore. There goes that option. He had a great future behind him, did Newt.
“Destroyed his poems.” Right out of early Technicolor. Have mercy on us. What kind of new Newton did we have now? Fig Newton, Fucked Newton. He tried hard again not to detest his boy. He tried to picture him helpless. Mormons probably specialized in weak depressed poets. Promise him multiple wives, a new bicycle. But more accurately Ross detested Newton for the sane cheer of his letters. What a con man, cashing Ross’s ardent checks. Venal politician. Ross could hit him in the face.
From Ann he had heard that Ivy was at home with her father, who was sick and might die. They’d cut a leg off him just lately. Ross wanted to take the form of Andy the pelican and fly over there to her.
This did not feel like his home right now. He did not like Nabby collapsing again, especially with her expensive new face. He reviewed his grudges against her. Five years ago, at the death of his father—an ancient man beloved by everyone except Nabby, who thought he was an awful chauvinist who loved to be adored too much: true—she had not shed a tear until later in the car when she told Ross some woman had alluded slyly to her sun wrinkles. She began cursing and crying for herself, his father barely in the ground. Ross almost drove the Riviera off the road. He said not a word all the way home from Florida. Nabby, jealous of the dead man who’d upstaged her own dear plight; the funeral a mere formality while huge issues like sun wrinkles were being battled.
Feeling stranded, he’d driven over to Bayou La Batre four days later. He didn’t call ahead. The Pilgrims lived just off Route 90 in a little town called Grand Bay. A healthy piece of change from the old cowboy’s book had just arrived. He was anxious to spend money on something worthwhile. How impoverished were the Pilgrims? the mother had been a surprise. He’d not told nabby about it, for the first time in his life with her.
Their home was neat. On the front were new cypress boards, unpainted. The house was large and the yard was almost grassless, car ruts to one side, where he parked behind a jeep with an Auburn sticker on the rear window. Over here you got a sense of poor Catholics, almost a third world, some of them Cajun and Slavic and Creole. He’d always loved this country. Most of your good food came from these people; your music, your bonhomie, your sparkling black-eyed nymphs. Upland, the Protestants had no culture. If anything, they were a restraint on all culture, especially as it touched on joy. He thought of Newton, now even odder than they were, beyond them, in a culture of how much crap can you swallow, unblinking, and remain upright. Close by was the great shipyard at Pascagoula, where Ivy’s father had worked. You threw a crab net in the water and thought of submarines the length of football fields close under you, moving out with fearsome nukes aboard. Almost a staggering anomaly, these things launched out of the mumbling-dumb state of Mississippi.
Ivy and one of her brothers, also a painter at Ingalls, met him at the door. They were very gracious, though mournful. It didn’t look like their father was going to make it. An hour from now they would go back to the hospital in Mobile. Surprising himself, Ross asked if he might go with them, drive them. They thought this was curious, but would welcome a ride in his Riviera, which the brother thought was the “sporting end.” He had a coastal brogue. Ivy had got rid of hers. Maybe it would not go with a career in architecture. Ivy looked radiant in sorrow. When he mentioned Newt, the brother left for the back of the house, where it smelled like Zatarain’s spic
es and coffee.
“I’ve heard a few things, none of them very happy. I’m afraid I don’t love him anymore, if you wanted to know that,” she said.
The finality hurt Ross, but he’d expected it. He did not love the boy much either.
“He was in the shipyards ‘witnessing.’ My brothers saw him. Some security guys took him out of the yard. He had a bicycle. He told my brother he was going to places around large bodies of water.”
“Did he have ‘literature’?”
“The Book of Mormon? No, he didn’t. You’d know that Newt would be his own kind of Mormon or anything. He’d stretch it.”
Ross recalled his hideous singing.
“Did you ever think of Newt’s age?” she asked him.
Ross went into a terrible cigarette cough and near-retching, reddening his face. Father of Newt, he felt very ugly in front of her; a perpetrator.
“His age. Thirty-one. Jesus Christ was crucified at age thirty-three. A Mormon is a missionary, all the males, for two years.” Ivy revealed this much in the manner of a weary scientist. The evidence was in: cancel the future.
“You figured that out, Ivy. Do you . . . How . . . Would you like him dead?”
“Oh no, Dan!” She was shy of using his first name, but this brought her closer to him. “A friend of mine from Jackson, big party girl, said she saw him at the Barnett Reservoir north of the city. He was ‘witnessing’ outside a rock-and-roll club and some drunk broke his ribs. The ambulance came but he wouldn’t get in.”
“He rode a bike to Jackson, Mississippi?”
“I suppose so. Don’t they have to?”
At the hospital he was useless, pointless, and ashamed of his good clothes, a pompous bandage on his distress. He smoked too much. He looked for a Book of Mormon in the waiting room. One of the nurses told him no flatly and looked at him with humor when he asked if there were one around. An alien to their faith, he was being persecuted anyway. The world was broken and mean.
The only good thing about the trip was the sincere good-bye hug from Ivy in her yard. She was on him quickly with arms tight around his neck, not chipper anymore, and she cried for her father, him and Newt, too, all at once. The strength of it told him he would probably never see her again. So long, daughter. I will not have a bad day, will not. He crashed into early night.
In Mobile, on Broadway beneath one of the grandfather live oaks “bearded with Spanish moss”—as a hack would write—Ross beheld a preacher, a raver, with a boom box hollering gospel music beside him on the sidewalk. He was witnessing through the din, screaming. Heavy metal would be met on its own terms. Three of the curious peered on. It was a long red light. Ross unsnapped the chamber, lower left, where his air rifle was hidden. He badly needed to shoot. But for that reason, he did not. He saw it was in there oiled, heavy with ammo, semper fidelis, a part of his dreams.
The next option was to buy a tramp and hump her silly. Make a lifelong friend of her. Nice to have a dive to dip into, young Tootsie lighting up in her whore gaud. Calamity Jane. Long time, no see, my beacon. Miserable bar folks withering around their high-minded big-time copulation. Relieve himself of wads, send her to South Alabama U, suckology. Nabby bouncing dimes off her face back home, considering a mirror on the ceiling and her own water tower of ointment.
He cruised home, shaking his head. He was having another bad day, and the clock was up on legs, running.
The next day he set out for Jackson, got as far as Hattiesburg, saw a bicycle shop, hundreds of bikes out front, sparkling spokes and fenders under the especially hired muttering-dumb Mississippi sun, and grew nauseated by chaos. Too many. He’d never find Newt, going on one mission from one large body to the next. He feared his own wrath if he found him. Two more years of life for him, if you listened to Ivy, who might know him better than Ross. Newt’s conversion still struck him as elaborately pretended, another riot of fierceness. In Salt Lake City, he would have turned Methodist. What was he “witnessing”—what was his hairy face saying? He wouldn’t sustain. He was a damned lyric poet, good hell, having a crucifixion a day, maybe even broken ribs, but chicken when the nails and the hill hove into view.
They did not know where he was for nearly a year. Minor grief awoke Ross every morning. Nabby almost shut down conversation. Some days he woke up among his usual things, felt he had nothing but money and stuff, was crammed, pukey with possessions—its, those, thingness, haveness. One night in April he tore up a transistor radio. Nothing but swill came out of it, and he always expected to hear something horrible about Newton. He dropped his head and wanted to burn his home. The men he’d got mortared called to him in nightmares, as they had not ever before. The tequila, nothing, would help. The murdered men begged him to write their “stories, our stories.” Their heads came out on long sprouts from a single enormous hacked and blasted trunk. He got to where he feared the bed and slept on the couch under a large picture of him and Nabby and the kids, ages ago. Everybody was grinning properly, but Ross looked for precocious lunacy in the eyes of young Newt, or some religious cast, some grim trance. He fell asleep searching for it.
What was religion, why was he loath to approach it on its own terms? You adopted it, is what you did, and you met with others you supposed felt as you did, and you took a god together, somebody you could complain to and have commiserate. Not an unnatural thing one bit, though inimical to the other half of your nature, which denied as regularly as your pulse out of the evidence of everyday life. For instance the fact that God was away, ancient and vague at his best. Also there was the question of the bully. Ross had never been a bully. Better that he had been, perhaps. He had never struck a man in a bar or country club. Ross’s mother was a religious woman, aided in her widowhood by church friends and priest, who actually seemed to care. He had never bullied her. Rather the reverse. She’d used the scriptures to push him around, guiltify him. There was no appeal to a woman with two millennia of religion behind her. Ross suddenly thought of the children Newt played football with, or at, hurting them, oppressing them. A thin guy, he was the bully, as with his little wives. A lifelong bully? Bullying the happiness out of life. Bullying his parents—a year and a half without a word.
When Ross was in his twenties, he went to Nabby’s family reunion up in Indiana. Most of her relatives were fine, scratchy hill people, amused by the twentieth century, amused by their new gadgets like weed eaters, dishwashers and color televisions. They were rough, princely Southern Americans. Ross thought of Crockett and Bowie, Travis, the men at the Alamo. But then the pastor of the clan came on board, late. It was Nabby’s uncle, against tobacco, coffee, makeup, short dresses, “jungle music” and swearing. Stillness fell over the clan. The heart went out of the party. That son of a bitch was striding around, quoting the prophets, and men put away their smokes, women gathered inward, somebody poured out the coffee, and he was having a great time, having paralyzed everybody before he fell on his chicken. So here was Newt? indiana preacher’s genes busting out, raiding the gladness of others.
They received a letter, finally, from Newton, who was not too far from them, eight hours away in Mississippi. He was superintendent of a boys’ “training school” and taught English. The school had a storm-wire fence around it, barbed wire on top, armed guards, and dogs for both dope and pursuit at the ready. Tough cases went there. Sometimes they escaped out to the county and beyond to create hell. Parents had given up, courts had thrown in the towel and placed them here, the last resort. Occasionally there were killings, knifings, breakages; and constant sodomy. A good many of the boys were simply in “training” to be lifelong convicts, of course. Much of their conversation was earnest comparison of penal situations in exotic places, their benefits and liabilities. Many boys were planning their careers from one joint to another as they aged, actually setting up retirement plans in the better prisons they considered beds of roses. A good half of them never wanted outside again. The clientele was interracial, international and a bane to the county, which was al
ways crying out for more protection and harsher penitence. Newt wrote that he had to whip boys and knock them down sometimes, but that “a calm voice turneth away anger,” and he was diligently practicing his calmness. He was married yet again. His wife was pregnant. She was plain and tall, a Mennonite and recovering heroin addict, healthy and doing very well. This love was honest and not dreamy. Newt apologized for much and sent over twelve poems.
They were extraordinary, going places glad and hellish he’d never approached before.
Ross cried tears of gratitude. His hands shook as he reread the poems: such true hard-won love, such precise vision, such sane accuracy—a sanity so calm it was beyond what most men called sanity. He raised his face and looked over Dauphin Island to the west, taken. Nabby trembled the entire day, delirious and already planning Christmas three months ahead. Newt was bringing his wife over to meet them and visit a week, if they would have him. He invited Ross to visit him at the school as soon as he could get over. His voice on the phone when Ross called seemed a miracle of quiet strength. He made long, patient sentences such as Ross had never heard from him before. Ross would leave that night.
His brand-new navy blue Riviera sat in the shell drive. It was a sweet corsair, meant for a great mission: nothing better than the health and love of the prodigal son. Bring out the horns and tambourines. Poor Ann. There was no competition. All she was now was nice, poor Ann. He wanted to pick up his wealth in one gesture and dump it on Newton.
Outside Raymond, Mississippi, he pushed the hot nose of his chariot into a warm midmorning full of nits, mosquitoes, gnats and flying beetles. His windshield was a mess. Ross was going silly. He felt for the bugs and their colonies. Almost Schweitzer was he, hair snowier, fond, fond of all that crept and flogged.