by Barry Hannah
They were very stern at the gate, sincere cannons on their hips, thorough check of the interior, slow suspicious drawls rolled out of the lard they ate to get here. While they repeated the cautions three or four times—about stopping the car (don’t) and watching his wallet (“hard eye if I’s yoo”) and staying some lengths away from everybody, they acted as if Newt were a great creature on the hill (“Mister Ross he fonk nare boot cup, nard”).
Ross had not been searched thoroughly since the war, when at the hospital they feared briefly for his suicide, and in a strange way he felt flattered by these crackers taking the time around his own domain. Only when he was driving up to Newt’s house did he go cold, as splashed with alcohol. They’d missed the air rifle, which he had forgotten was there. Then he fell back, silly. It was an air rifle only. There would have been no trouble, only shy explanation about its presence and the snap compartment, where there should have been, if he were mature he supposed, a sawed-off pump for danger on the road. The times they were a-changing, all the merciless ghouls prowling for you out there, no problem. A shotgun would be easier to explain than a Daisy. Over here was the home of the peacemakers racked across the rear windshield, handy to the driver. Could always be a fawn or doe out of season to shoot, Roy Bob. Over here they considered anybody not in the training school fair gubernatorial timber.
So this was Newt’s new job, new home, new Newt. He’d not said how long he’d been here. A job like this, wouldn’t it take a while to qualify? But this was the Magnolia State. He’d probably beaten out somebody who’d killed only two people, his mother and father; little spot on his résumé.
Some boys were walking around freely, gawking at his car. This must be how a woman felt, men “undressing her with their eyes,” as that Ohio tub of guts might “inscribe.” Those kids would probably tear this car down in fifteen minutes. My God, they had skill-shops here to give them their degrees in it. Ross noticed that almost every boy, whether gaunt or swaybacked, chubby or delicate, had on expensive high-top sneakers. Crack and high-tops were probably the school mascots. But he saw more security men than boys outside. He’d glanced at the Rules for Visitors booklet: no sunglasses, no overcoats, no mingling with the student body. Do not give cigarettes or lighters if requested. Your auto was not supposed to have a smoked glass windshield or windows, but they had let him through because he was the father of “Mister Ross.”
At Newt’s WPA-constructed house, like the house of a ranger in a state park—boards and fieldstone—Ross hugged his son at the door, getting a timid but then longer hug back. His wife was still getting ready. They had just finished a late-morning breakfast. There had been trouble last night. Three boys cut the wire and escaped, APBs were issued, the dogs went out, and they were brought back before they even reached Raymond, where they were going to set fire to something.
Ross was thinking about the appearance of Newt’s pregnant wife. Why had he thought it necessary to describe her as “plain” in his letter, even if she was? It was something too deliberate, if you worried the matter. Revenge? Against Ivy, his first wife, his mother? Ross’s handsome world scorned? He hoped not.
She, Dianne, was very tall, taller than Newt by three inches and close to Ross’s height. She sat at the dining room table, very long and big-stomached, about seven months along. Her father had run this place before Newton. He was retiring and Newton, well, was right there, ready, willing, able—and with (she placed her hand over Newton’s at the salt and pepper shakers) the touch of the poet.
Ross did not want to ask his boy the wrong questions and run him away. He was gingerly courteous—to the point of shallowness, he realized, and hated this. It made him feel weak and bullied and this couldn’t go on long. But Newt was forthright.
“Not just the broken ribs over at the reservoir, Dad. I was saying my thing at Tishomingo, on the boat dock, and her” (he smiled over at Dianne, who looked fine although a bit gawky—old romantic history a-kindling) “boyfriend, this tattooed, ponytailed ‘ice’ addict, stabbed me with a knife right in the heart.”
“You’re not telling me—”
“Right in the heart. But Dianne knew, she was once a nurse and still will be when she gets her license back. She wouldn’t let me or anybody pull it out. The knife itself was like a stopper on the blood.”
“That’s true,” said Dianne. “He went all the way to the hospital with it still in him and you could see it pumping up and down with Newton’s heart. They helicoptered him to Memphis.”
“She followed me in a car, without her boyfriend.” Newt giggled. “She was strung out, violently sick herself, but drove all the way over, couple hundred miles.”
“The love got me through, don’t you see, Mr. Ross? I was already in love with him, like a flash. It pulled me through the heroin, the withdrawal. I sat out there in that waiting room, sick as a dog. But there is a God, there is one.”
“Or love. Or both, sure,” said Ross. “He stuck you for being a Mormon, Newt?”
Newt still smiled at his father. He looked much older, used, but his grown-out hair was long, like a saint’s or our Lord’s, thought Ross. Now the spectacles gentled him and he seemed wise and traveled, much like his new poems.
“Pa, don’t you know me? I was Mormon, I was Jew, I was Christ, I was Socrates, I was John the Baptist, I was Hart Crane, Keats, Rimbaud. I was everything tragic. I’m still outcast, but I’m almost sane.”
His son giggled and it was not nervous or the giggle of a madman. It was just an American giggle, a man’s giggle—“What the hell is going on?”—full-blooded and wary.
“You love these boys? I suppose they’re helping you back to . . . helping you as . . .”
“Hell no, I don’t love them. I hate these bastards. It might not be all their fault, but they’re detestable vermin and utter shits, for the main part. I love, well, five. The rest . . . What you find most often is they’ve been spoiled, not deprived. Like me. Nobody lasts long here. They try to love but it gets them in a few months. Dianne’s father lasted, but he’s the meanest, toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
Dianne assented, laughing again, about this paternal monster, just a solid fact. The laugh surely lit up that plain face nicely.
“Come eat with me in the big hall and I’ll show you something,” said Newt.
“Is this a bad question? What are you going to do? Stay here because you hate it?”
“No. I’ll do my best. But I’m in fair shape for a job up at Fayetteville. They’ve seen my new work and I guess they like post-insane poets at Arkansas. Actually, a lot of folks like you a lot when you straighten out a little. The world’s a lot better than I thought it was.”
Ross considered.
“Newt, do you believe in Christ?”
“Absolutely. Everything but the cross. That never had anything to do with my ‘antisocial’ activity. I’ll still holler for Jesus.”
“I love you, boy.”
“I know it. Last month I finally knew it. Didn’t take me forever, is all I can say.”
“Thanks for that.”
“There’s some repaying to do.”
“Already done. The new poems.”
Dianne wept a little for joy. This was greatly corny, but it was magnificent.
In the big hall, eating at the head table among the boys, Ross got a drop-jaws look at real “antisocial” manners. Guards were swarming everywhere, but the boys, some of them large and dangerous, nearly tore the place apart. They threw peas, meat, rolls, just to get primed. Two huge blacks jumped on each other jabbing away with plastic knives. A half grapefruit sailed right by the heads of Ross and Newt. It had been pegged with such velocity that it knocked down the great clock on the wall behind them. Whoever had done it, they never knew. He was eating mildly among them, slick, cool, anonymous, wildly innocent, successful. Right from that you could get the general tenor. Unbelievable. Newt and he were exiting when a stout boy about Newt’s height broke line and tackled him, then jumped up and kicked
him with his huge black military-looking high-tops. Newt scrambled up, but was well hurt before the guards cornered the boy, who’d never stopped cursing violently, screaming, the whole time. With their truncheons the guards beat the shit out of the kid and kept it up when he was handcuffed and down, maybe unconscious. None of the other boys seemed to think it was unusual. They neither cheered nor booed.
Newt wanted him to sleep over so they could go fishing early the next day. He knew a place that was white perch and bass heaven. Dianne insisted, so he did.
They did fairly well on the fish, again in a pond so dark green and gorgeous you could forget the training school and human horror everywhere.
“I guess, like I heard anyway, you went to bodies of water because, well, because what?” Ross asked.
“Because in the South, I figured, the men who change the world mostly go fishing?” He laughed at his father with the fly rod in his hands, so sincere. “They want out of this goddamned place.”
Next morning he left them cheerfully, driving out, but then, as he neared the gate, he circled back—out on his own hook, cautious in the car with smoked windows. He had seen what he wanted, set it up, had found his nest. There was a place in the parking lot for officials and staff that the Riviera nestled into, uniform in the ranks of autos and pickups, as you might see in a big grocery lot. Behind his smoked window he was unseen. Sixty feet away was the entrance to a shop or snack bar. Anyway, a lot of the boys were gathered there, allowed to smoke.
Ross unsnapped the compartment and withdrew the Daisy. My, it had been months, years. Thin, tall, lumpy, sneering, bent, happy, morose, black, white, Indian. It didn’t matter. He rolled the window down just a tad, backing up so the barrel wasn’t outside the window.
He began popping the boys singly, aiming for the back of their necks and, if lucky, an ear. That was about the best pain he could inflict. A boy leapt up, howling, holding his wound. He got another right on the tit. Did he roar, drop his cigarette, stomp and threaten the others? Yes. He popped another in the back of the head, a hipster with tattooed arms mimicking sodomy. Many of them were questioning, protesting, searching the trees in the sky and other inmates.
Ross rolled up the window and watched them through the one-way glass.
That’s it, lads. Start asking some big questions like me, you little nits. You haven’t even started yet.
1993-1996
High Lonesome
Get Some Young
SINCE HE HAD RETURNED FROM KOREA HE AND HIS WIFE LIVED IN MUtual disregard, which turned three times a month into animal passion then diminished on the sharp incline to hatred, at last collecting in time into silent equal fatigue. His face was ordinarily rimmed with a short white beard and his lips frozen like those of a perch, such a face as you see in shut-ins and winos. But he did not drink much anymore, he simply often forgot his face as he did that of his wife in the blue house behind his store. He felt clever in his beard and believed that his true expressions were hidden.
Years ago when he was a leader of the Scouts he had cut way down on his drink. It seemed he could not lead the Scouts without going through their outings almost full drunk. He would get too angry at particular boys. Then in a hollow while they ran ahead planting pine trees one afternoon he was thrust by his upper bosom into heavy painful sobs. He could not stand them anymore and he quit the Scouts and the bonded whiskey at the same time. Now and then he would snatch a dram and return to such ecstasy as was painful and barbed with sorrow when it left.
This man Tuck last year stood behind the counter heedless of his forty-first birthday when two lazy white girls came in and raised their T-shirts then ran away. He worried they had mocked him in his own store and only in a smaller way was he certain he was still desirable and they could not help it, minxes. But at last he was more aggrieved over this than usual and he felt stuffed as with hot meat breaking forth unsewed at the seams. Yes girls, but through his life he had been stricken by young men too and became ruinously angry at them for teasing him with their existence. It was not clear whether he wished to ingest them or exterminate them or yet again, wear their bodies as a younger self, all former prospects delivered to him again. They would come in his life and then suddenly leave, would they, would they now? Particular Scouts, three of them, had seemed to know their own charms very well and worked him like a gasping servant in their behalf. Or so it had felt, mad wrath at the last, the whiskey put behind him.
The five boys played in the Mendenhall pool room for a few hours, very seriously, like international sportsmen in a castle over a bog, then they went out on the sidewalks mimicking the denizens of this gritty burg who stood and ambled about like escaped cattle terrified of sudden movements from any quarter. The boys were from the large city some miles north. When they failed at buying beer even with the big hairy Walthall acting like Peter Gunn they didn’t much care anyway because they had the peach wine set by growing more alcoholic per second. Still, they smoked and a couple of them swore long histrionic oaths in order to shake up a meek druggist. Then they got in the blue Chevrolet Bel Air and drove toward their camp on the beach of the Strong River. They had big hearts and somehow even more confidence because there were guns in the car. They hoped some big-nosed crimp-eyed seed would follow them but none did. Before the bridge road took them to the water they stopped at the store for their legitimate country food. They had been here many times but they were all some bigger now. They did not know the name of the man in there and did not want to know it.
Bean, Arden Pal, Lester Silk, Walthall, and Swanly were famous to one another. None of them had any particular money or any special girl. Swanly, the last in the store, was almost too good-looking, like a Dutch angel, and the others felt they were handsome too in his company as the owner of a pet of great beauty might feel, smug in his association. But Swanly was not vain and moved easily about, graceful as a tennis player from the era of Woodrow Wilson, though he had never played the game.
From behind the cash register on his barstool Tuck from his hidden whitened fuzzy face watched Swanly without pause. On his fourth turn up the aisle Swanly noticed this again and knew certainly there was something wrong.
Mister, you think I’d steal from you?
What are you talking about?
You taking a picture of me?
I was noticing you’ve grown some from last summer.
You’d better give me some cigarettes now so we can stamp that out.
The other boys giggled.
I’m just a friendly man in a friendly store, said Tuck.
The smothered joy of hearing this kept the rest of them shaking the whole remaining twenty minutes they roamed the aisles. They got Viennas, sardines, Pall Malls, Winstons, Roi-Tans, raisins; tamales in the can, chili and beans, peanut butter, hoop and rat cheese, bologna, salami, white bread, mustard, mayonnaise, Nehi, root beer, Orange Crush; carrots, potatoes, celery, sirloin, Beech-Nut, a trotline, chicken livers, chocolate and vanilla MoonPies, four pairs of hunting socks, batteries, kitchen matches. On the porch Swanly gave Walthall the cigarettes because he did not smoke.
Swanly was a prescient boy. He hated that their youth might end. He saw the foul gloom of job and woman ahead, all the toting and fetching, all the counting of diminished joys like sheep with plague; the arrival of beard hair, headaches, the numerous hospital trips, the taxes owed and the further debts, the mean and ungrateful children, the washed and waxen dead grown thin and like bad fish heaved into the outer dark. He had felt his own beauty drawn from him in the first eruption of sperm, an accident in the bed of an aunt by marriage whose smell of gardenia remained wild and deep in the pillow. Swanly went about angry and frightened and much saddened him.
Walthall lived on some acreage out from the city on a farm going quarter speed with peach and pecan trees and a few head of cattle. Already he had made his own peach brandy. Already he had played viola with high seriousness. Already he had been deep with a “woman” in Nashville and he wrote poems about her in th
e manner of E. A. Poe at his least in bonging rhymes. In every poem he expired in some way and he wanted the “woman” to watch this. Already he could have a small beard if he wanted, and he did, and he wanted a beret too. He had found while visiting relatives around the community of Rodney a bound flock of letters in an abandoned house, highly erotic missiles cast forth by a swooning inmate of Whitfield, the state asylum, to whatever zestfully obliging woman once lived there. These he would read to the others once they were outside town limits and then put solemnly away in a satchel where he also kept his poetry. A year ago Walthall was in a college play, a small atmospheric part but requiring much dramatic amplitude even on the streets thereafter. Walthall bought an ancient Jaguar sedan for nothing, and when it ran, smelling like Britain on the skids or the glove of a soiled duke, Walthall sat in it aggressive in his leisure as he drove about subdivisions at night looking in windows for naked people. Walthall was large but not athletic and his best piece of acting was collapsing altogether as if struck by a deer rifle from somewhere. For Walthall reckoned he had many enemies, many more than even knew of his existence.
Swanly was at some odds with Walthall’s style. He would not be instructed in ways of the adult world, he did not like talking sex. Swanly was cowlicked and blithe in his boy ways and he meant to stay that way. He was hesitant even to learn new words. Of all the boys, Swanly most feared and loathed Negroes. He had watched the Negro young precocious in their cursing and dancing and he abhorred this. The only role he saw fit in maturity was that of a blond German cavalry captain. Among Walthall’s recondite possessions, he coveted only the German gear from both world wars. Swanly would practice with a monocle and cigarette and swagger stick. It was not that he opposed those of alien races so much but that he aspired to the ideal of the Nordic horseman with silver spurs whom he had never seen. The voices of Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis pleased him greatly. On the other hand he was careful never to eat certain foods he viewed as negroid, such as Raisinets at the movies. There was a special earnest purity about him.