Long, Last, Happy

by Barry Hannah

  My friend and I played well. We sat down exhausted in that fine chill of Southern twilight that heaven might be. I looked to my right and somehow, in the flesh, the tall pale woman was sitting between us. You never see that kind of European paleness in women on a Southern tennis court. I was amazed at her musculature, like strands of soft wire. Then I saw the hat. She had been wearing a big unusual hat that must have given her seven feet in height. She was looking toward my friend. I had never seen her face. When she turned I looked away and in great fear I stared through the woods. I wanted her more than ever but I would not see her face. I heard her voice, though, just the once up close.

  I believe I’ve got something you want.

  I grabbed my bag and got in my car and was almost home before I remembered my friend had no ride home, a long way. But I couldn’t go back and I almost threw up.

  He called me, however.

  Man, the woman was fast on you. What the devil, did you see all of her, fool? I’m much the better-looking, but all she gave me was a pouting ride home.

  Who is she?

  Somebody’s relative. Can’t remember. Too busy stealing looks. That’s quite a drink of water, long and cool, old son. You never knew her?

  Never set eyes on her.

  You’re an uncommon fool. And sober.

  She has been around town now for a couple of years. I see parts of her here and there, but I walk or drive right away. I don’t intend to see her face because I know I’ve already seen it. When we touch one of us will die and be in the other’s dreams.

  I am not insane. My affairs are composed in vicious sobriety. I did not see my tennis partner either for several months. Then he called at the end of the summer.

  You don’t play anymore?

  A few times, other places.

  The tall one was back on the courts the other day. I swear, fool, she’s like something from the heart of winter in a foreign land. Same old story full of wolves where you’d stumble into a woman lying in the woods. I’m going to use a word. Alabaster.

  I swallowed. You mean living or dead?

  I’m not sure, mister.

  Wolves.

  I wonder, when she dies, likely by violence, will she be named like the lesser creatures in that story? Certain people believe all are given names when we die, not at birth.

  The creature goes to heaven very baffled.

  My God, what was all that about? it asks.

  God says: Well, you were a wolf.

  I see, says the wolf.

  I wonder will it be that simple for her, or for me.

  Drummer Down

  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 fiftysix 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.

  Smith wanted to be both lost and found, an impossibility. He was nearly begging to be insane. He saw this fellow of great persuasive ugliness, with his small airy voice and his sighs; the weariness about him, even with his blocky good build and the forearms of a carpenter. He was popular in class even these short weeks into the semester. Drummond was his last name. He pleased the girls around him. He was avuncular and selfless in his comments, with a beam of patient affection in his eyes. Somehow he scared Smith, Drum holding his smile, the flattened great bags under his eyes from rough living and failure. He spoke often of “love” and “quest.” He prefaced many things he said with “I am a Christian,” sadly, as if he were in some dreadful losers’ club.

  Paul Smith looked at the table in front of him and had a brief collapse.

  “I’m sorry.” He put his hands down flat. There seemed to be a whole bleak country in front of his eyes, the ten hills of his fingers on the desert floor of linoleum, speckled by gray lakes, all dry. “I’m sorry to be confusing. Things aren’t going well at home. Bear with me.”

  Drum befriended him. He seemed to be just all at once there, his hand on Smith’s shoulder and the grave twinkle in his eyes. The little smile of a prophet on his lips. Two of the very attractive girls from the class, right behind him, were looking concerned. Maybe they liked Smith. He didn’t know. He couldn’t get a read on much at all these days. Arrogance punctuated by bouts of heartbreaking sentiment had come on Smith since the publication of his last book, which was hailed by major critics and bought by a few hundred people.

  He didn’t want to be arrogant, but he was experiencing a gathering distaste for almost everybody. He would nowadays mumble and shout a few things in anguish that seemed loud and eternal, then call class. To others that might seem derelict, but many of his students grandly appreciated the quick hits and release, right in the manner of a punk lecture. Punk was all the rage that year, and in his class was a lame girl wearing a long sash with sleigh bells on it, so that when she wallowed along in the hall on big stomping crutches, a holy riot ensued. She wore enormous eyeglasses but was otherwise dressed and cut punk, wearing a hedge of waxed hair atop her tubular head. She was the punkest of them all, a movement unto herself. Smith noticed that Drum was very kind to her and cheered her various getups every class meeting. The girl was unceasingly profane too. This seemed to interest Drum even more. He grinned and applauded her, this funny Christian Drum.

  Nevertheless, she had gone to the chairwoman about Smith’s asthmatic style. She loved his hungover explosions, but complained that he cut them too short and she was not getting her money’s worth. Smith was incredulous. It was his first experience with a vocal minority
, the angry disabled woman. Angel B. was very serious about her writing—very bad—and viewed it as her only salvation. He was not imparting the secrets of the art to her. She must know everything, no holding back. All this with a punk’s greediness and nearly solid blue language, the bells shaking. Smith noted that he made no complaint about the bells. Smith planned to kill her and insist on one of her prettier banalities for her headstone, so that she could be mocked for centuries. But this man Drum loved her even as the talentless bitch she was. How could he be here offering to help Smith?

  “What can we do, Paul?” Drum was whispering and uncleish. The two girls nodded their wishes to help too. Smith looked them over. He was already half in love with the taller one, pretty with lean shanks, who looked like she was right then slipping into a bathtub with Nietzsche, that lovely caution about her. The other was pre-Raphaelite, a mass of curly hair around a pale face very oval, the hair coiled up on her cheeks and separating for the full lips.

  “We could drink,” said Smith, dying for a taste. He was imagining a long telescope of whiskey and soda through which to view these newcomers to his pain. He liked people waving like liquid images, hands reaching toward him.

  At home the end was near. His wife, just out of the tub, would cover her breasts with her arms as she went to her drawers in their bedroom. Smith watched, alarmed and in grief. No old times anymore. She meant, These are for something else, somewhere else down the road. He had hoped to hang on to ambivalence just a little bit longer. He wanted her more than ever. He said unforgettable, brutal things to her. His mouth seemed to have its own rude life. Here he was, no closer to her than a ghoul gazing through a knothole to her toilet, the hole rimmed with slobber, in their own big smart house.

  They all went to the Romeo Bar on the university strip. Smith saw Drum drive up with the girls in a bleached mustard Toyota with a bee drawn on it at the factory. Smith thought it was an art statement, but it was not. Drum was poor.

  He wore unironed clothes, things deeply cheap, dead and lumpy even off the rack at bargain barns, and the color of harmful chemicals, underneath them sneakers with Velcro snaps instead of shoestrings. The clothes of folks from a broken mobile home, as a pal of Smith’s had described them. Drum at fifty-six lived upstairs in a small frame house of asbestos siding. In the lower story lived his mother, whom he called the Cobra. The brand of his smokes was Filter Cigarettes. His beer was white cans labeled Beer.

  Nothing surprised Drum, and the girls were rapt as Smith poured forth. He was a bothered half-man, worn out by the loss of heart and music of the soul.

  Drum agreed about the times, entirely. “There should be only a radio in every home, issuing bulletins on the war. The war of good against evil. That’s all the news we need,” he said, directing the bar air like a maestro. “But all they give us is facts, numbers, times. Enough of this and nobody cares about the war anymore. Why, all television addresses is the busybody in everybody!

  “We’re born to kill each other. First thing in the morning we take something to numb us, then parachute into the sordid zones of reality. Layers of dead skin on us, layers!” he finished.

  Everything surprised the girls. They seemed to adore being confidantes in Drum’s presence. They were anxious to become writers and have sorrows of their own. The grave male details of Smith’s distress the girls thought exquisite. That through a knothole looking at her toilet thing was beautiful, said the pre-Raphaelite Minny.

  Later, they all stayed over at Smith’s green hovel by the railroad tracks he’d rented as his writing place, a heartbreaking first move toward divorce. Minny took ether and began talking about her enormous clitoris, a thing that kept her in nerves and panic every waking hour. Pepper passed out before she could recall any true sorrow. Drum went back in the kitchen with some of Smith’s stories. He had on half-glasses bought at a drugstore, and Smith saw him foggily as a god: Charles Bronson as a kitchen god. Smith retired with Minny.

  Then in the morning his wife knocked on the door. Smith answered in a leather overcoat, nude underneath. He was stunned by drink and ether, and his wife’s presence simply put a sharpness on his wrecked eyesight. Behind him in a bedsheet sat Minny in front of a drum set. She was sitting there smiling at Smith’s palomino-haired wife. It was her first scandal, she told them later.

  His wife said something about divorce papers, and Smith slapped her. She rammed the door shut.

  “Oh, how Old World!” Minny cried. She dropped the sheet and rose naked and curly like something from a fountain. Already Smith was tired of her. He loved Pepper, the lean beauty who could not get her sorrow out, asleep in the rear room.

  “That’s no good, Paul. You shouldn’t hit.” Drum had awoken and come out. His big fingers were around a fresh cold beer. “Oh, I hit my second wife. She thrived on it. Some women like hitting, they work for it. But it’s a bad thing. A man of your sensitivity, with that sad little child in you, you won’t survive, is what I’m saying.”

  “I love the sad child!” said Minny.

  “But it makes an end to things at least. You need to end things, Paul. Purgatory is much rougher than hell. Well I know. You’ve got to wish them well, and be off. Wish them well in love, hope they have good orgasms.”

  “My God!” Smith could not imagine this charity.

  Sometime later in the week Smith asked Drum how he’d lost three wives.

  “Because I was a failure, man!” Drum seemed delighted. “I wrote and wrote and couldn’t get published. I quit all my jobs. I’d had it with facts, the aeronautics industry. Working plans to fly in a coal mine, baby! The heart, Paul, the heart, that’s where it is.”

  On the last of his GI bill the man was taking ceramics, photography, sculpture, and Smith’s writing class.

  “I pride myself on being a dilettante! I am looking for accidental successes. Heart accidents. I want to slip down and fall into something wonderful!”

  As for Drum’s physical heart, there was a bad thing running in his family. His father and two older brothers had gone out early with coronaries, and he himself took nitroglycerin tablets to ward off angina.

  Even Smith’s punk band excited Drum. Anything declamatory of the heart moved him. He was very often their only audience. He applauded and commended, through their vileness. They switched instruments, versatile in absence of talent. It didn’t matter.

  “Everything must be explored! Nothing left untouched!” Drum shouted, slugging down his cheap beer, smoking his generics.

  They played their own “Yeast Infection Blues” and a filthy cover of George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” The regular guitarist was a vicious harelip pursued all over town for bad checks. The singer was a round man with dense eyeglasses and a squint who sold term papers to fraternity boys. They called him the Reverend. The bass man was a boy who never wore shoes, hardly bathed, and in appearance approached the late Confederate veterans around Appomattox—gaunt, hang-necked, and smutty. Drum absorbed them all. They were his children, junior alcoholics to Smith. Sometimes he’d dance with Minny or Pepper. They shook the little green house and the police came. Perfect.

  Smith poured Southern Comfort in a Pepsi can in order to make it through his lectures, which seemed a crucifixion. The crippled girl Angel B. seemed satisfied, liberated more thoroughly and writing even worse. As for his own heart, Smith wanted to get rid of it. He missed his wife terribly. The thing pounded as if it were an enormous fish in him. He was barred from his old home. The band was angry over his lack of endurance on the drums. One night Drum brought him over some chicken soup, vitamin B, and gluconate. He was worried.

  “Look at you. Look at this room,” he said.

  Smith’s SS overcoat was spattered with white paint. He had painted everything instead of cleaning. He had painted even Minny’s dog. It was under the table licking itself. He had nailed bedsheets to the floor. The novel he was writing was strewn out in copies all over the musical instruments. He and the band were singing his novel. The children fr
om his first marriage were not allowed to visit him anymore. He had been fired at the college. Bare inside his overcoat, with a Maltese cross made by Drum hanging from a chain around his neck, he had grown so thin that his wedding band had fallen off somewhere. He was now almost pure spirit, as Minny called him.

  “We need your big heart, Paul. The forces of good need you. Technique and facts and indifference are out there winning. Money is winning, mere form and the tightasses are winning. Commerce is making the town uglier and uglier. We Christians need you. You’re giving over to low anger and spite, drinking away your talent. An old bad thing coiled in the dust, that’s not you.”

  Smith poured the remainder of a jar of cherries into a mug half filled with Southern Comfort. The overcoming taste would remind Smith forever of his last days in this town.

  Drum had made the mug. On it was an ugly face with a cigarette in its lip. It was one of the forms of “Sarge,” an old army drunk Drum had known in Panama. The man had been only in his thirties, like Smith, but already grotesque. He would line up for review every morning, everything wrong with his uniform, but with a tiny smile and ruined goggle-eyes, maimed in every inch by the night before. He’d been busted from sergeant four times.

  Later Smith fought with the band and threw them out. Minny ran out of Valium. Now living was almost impossible without constant fornication. People with police records began showing up in the house. Some played musical instruments or sang, then stole the equipment. One night while he was plying Minny, who poured out high spiritual sighs, he had to have a drink. On his way to the kitchen, he caught a thief in the house. The man sprinted out the back window as Smith pulled his father’s antique shotgun off the wall. Then out came Minny, screaming for him please to not shoot anybody.