by Barry Hannah
“E-mail opened the floodgates. We weren’t meant to know this much about so many.”
I agreed.
“I have half a college education. I was quiet and dumb then. Scared.”
“I’d take that as a reasonable state for all of us.”
“I’m well nigh on drunk already, Anse Burden. You have kin here?”
“No. Maybe long ago.”
“All those people standing around outside. You saw them when you came in.”
“No. Just me, right here alone.”
“You’re a minister and smoke Camel filters? I’ll take one if I can.”
“I set a low example. My pride is invested in cigarettes, I’m sure. Nobody tells me what to do,” I admitted. “And I’m nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof coming in homes like this, Conrad.”
“That’s a good one. I never heard that.”
“It’s an old one, a play by our native son Tennessee Williams.”
“What if those nasty people around the house sent you in, Anse, to finish me off?”
“You’re on too much medicine, Conrad.”
“I know that.”
“Good grief, man, I was sent here by Christ because you’re in trouble. I’m a piece of wreckage, myself. Love. I believe I’m just now learning it.”
“Who called you, Pastor Burden? What a name. Pretty heavy on you, I guess some buddy or my wife called you.”
“You called me.”
“Did? Oh I do remember. Commonality, isn’t that a word? I have a busted Harley-Davidson out back. Those men broke it. I never heard a thing. I heard you were a motorcycle man, maybe we could ride someday. Then second, your career as a flyer in the navy. I thought you could bring higher power against those dangerous idiots after me. I’m no chicken, I swear, but the two of us. See here, I’m not drinking in a bar and cursing blacks and immigrants. I already have a Jesus in me but he is tiny.”
“I can’t be violent anymore. But how did you get this information, Conrad?”
“Not much in this town gets past the wife. She barely speaks but she has damn near canine hearing. My nerves need a long rest. Nembutal, Percocet, oxycodone when I can get it. Got a vicious ache in my spine, center of my back. My heart pounds like it wants out. So I wash these friends down with the Beam. Then Jesus gets bigger in me, I get a beautiful floating kind of courage, like when you come out of the shower after whipping somebody in a football game.
“You could help me if you had the words, just some new words about this war. The words that would make me free again.”
“You’re still some kind of athlete to even be awake. I went through the Desert Storm shoot-out loaded on Percodan and amphetamines. Afterward, I stayed stoned and would’ve been busted out except for squadron pals and higher brass. No way no kind of hero, I assure you.”
“Still, I can help you. In your own bosom you have nursed the pyromaniac.”
I went cold. “Your wife again? What could you mean? She knows the arsonists?”
“Maybe one, who’s made friends.”
Perry stared at the ceiling nearly knocked out but smug enough to smile.
“What are we trading for here, Conrad? Because I am an empty and officially nobody. No connections with the law or the churches.”
“If you’ll have another weak one with me, I’ll show you my suicide guns.”
“I’ll have another weak one. How many choices do you need for suicide?”
“The quality of my departure is still out for debate.”
“I’m not drinking with you if this threat keeps up, Conrad. You’d have already blown your head off in the backyard if you’d been serious. Give my church the guns. One of the members, the sculptor, Beck, has donated over two hundred of them, historical pieces. We’ll have an auction.”
“On the straight?”
“The straight. Your weakness would be our strength. The odds are you and your wife Betty are stronger than this minister.”
“Well, this is my church.”
I walked in and saw the pistols on blue velvet, the rebel flag, the big trout he caught in Arkansas with the flyweight crawfish stuck in its lips and the nylon leader leading back to his fly rod leaned in a corner. But it was an unhappy male chamber with food and drink stains on the sofa and rug. A smell as if a fire had swept through just months ago, but there was no fireplace, no embers. Then I saw the great burned spot on the rug, stomped out by a white sneaker that still remained. Not much toil against unkempt here.
“You know the arsonists? Tell me,” I asked him.
He was nodding out on me on the crumby yellow sofa. “’Sman who can’t exist without being two men together. ’Sman of money, all these places, all these munitions. ’Nfaxt I thought it was you. You can get me Percodan and I would cheer you on. I’m highly in need. You can have all the pistols. Here’s a sack for them.”
He went to some rear shadows and wrestled out a croaker sack. You don’t see this burlap much anymore. I eased the guns into the mouth of it and was fascinated by these fine instruments, pearl-handled, a silvery .38 with recessed hammer, a gun of the noir forties.
I reached in my pocket and gave him four Percocets. Chuckled for this old bird’s knowing very well I was holding.
“What idiocy led you to think I’m the arsonist?”
“Exploded your own church for cover. Then a stranger to these parts, you arrive and the fires get widespread.”
“They were already doing that.”
He stood in front of me but his eyes were closed.
“Here I’ve been a fool thinking you wanted closer to Christ,” I said.
“You’re a little ungrateful. I gave the guns for Christ.” Conrad wobbled and I thought I’d have to catch him.
“Please call your physician. You’ve got way too much head medicine already. You’re asking for a coma of zero quality departure. Your wife mourning over a vegetable. You’ve got depression, Conrad. I don’t buy the insanity. It’s just your brain is carrying buckshot.”
“What about the people, all that mischief around my windows?” The man opened his eyes and smiled a hopeless smile, one of false discovery after long confusion.
“Since you’re not climbing the walls in terror, I think you know the answer. Take some steps toward getting well and maybe you’ll feel like helping people. They need you. I believe you once did help people. Now I’ve got another fellow down the road in much worse shape than you.”
When I said this he sat on the filthy sofa and went dead asleep. I was on the front porch making my way to my saddlebags with the sack full of pistols when I heard his wife speak very softly behind me through the screen.
“Thank you. You never know the form of the good one who comes.”
“Pray, Missus Perry, I’m the good one,” I asked her. I felt more like a busy malingerer.
I wonder if our Christ ever liked people. Plenty of evidence has him confused about them as well as his father, even as he loved them. He fled to the outlands when he couldn’t bear healing any more of them. The press of the crowds drove him to solitary meditations many times. Who was his friend, as we know friend? Or did the hungry and angry time of his ministry preclude friendship. He must have faced madness to know tragedy and glory up close and both at once. Did he know only pain from word go? Our dreary march of case histories. Nevertheless, I revamped myself on the optimistic noise of the Triumph, and got along the road, a merry old cowboy dressed in his corpse.
Talk, talk, talk. Much said and nothing settled. You’re not even certain of the subject anymore.
I knew an old gal and boy, married, who to anybody’s knowledge had never finished a sentence they started. They didn’t finish each other’s sentences. They didn’t even like each other. But perhaps the romance depended on the other never completing a thought.
Lastward, Deputy James
HE HIMSELF MIGHT BE ONE OF JUST ANOTHER CONFUSED BUT ADAmant sect. This idea had crossed his mind, since he was certain there was much to repay or regain from his past woes a
nd he knew who had burned the small church on the verge of Wall Doxey Park that Wednesday evening. None but himself.
His wardrobe, the woman reminded him, improved past the penitent rags he had once stolen from Goodwill warehouses. He also quit stealing books. Formerly it just seemed he should, since he was outcast already. Before the church, he’d not burned anything for long months, either.
The woman he found himself with would barely leave home except to spend $200 almost exactly each trip to Wal-Mart. She watched television movies or she cleaned or threw out older new things. She rarely cooked. He figured this love would not last long but she had her good side when she was not directing scathing attacks on him or slapping him as he lay sleeping in the bed he had bought, in the diminished hacienda he’d bought for them. After the eruptions she was quiet a long while, which the deputy discovered after months with her was her form of apology. Because she was never wrong and never spoke an apology. He was to understand her moods, that was his constant homework.
Mainly she attacked him for once being a Montana deputy who refused to reattach himself at good salary to the law. She wondered where his money came from, anyway.
It was from his army savings and his father’s photographic inheritance, a prudent man young as he was when death popped him. His pension from Montana and an uncle’s inheritance, Old Ralph who loved him and pitied him in Toronto. But she would not leave him alone about the rest of his secret money for he was the sole source of her income now she had risen from near welfare and could throw out more old new things. She cleaned the house with the meticulous fury of a German analist, and she did enjoy dirty jokes. She was pleasant in the face, then grew pretty with expensive cosmetics. Her figure was in trim although she quarreled with her hips. She was angry about age, too. Her wrath and resentment were perfect like the work of flood or fire. No man or woman was spared.
He wondered idly sometimes why he did not kill her, but then in rare times she was good company and claimed to love him above all things in the world. She won him over, but he always knew what she was up to, which was to set him up for a sort of vicious theater where one character, himself, a bum with prospects, stands speechless while a harridan who owes everything to him attacks him up and down for not improving himself so that she could owe him even more. This debt was intolerable to her, she would never forgive him, especially now that she didn’t have to appear in the workforce at all.
He would leave slapping her to somebody else even though a comprehensive bitchslapping would help her. Her lone mission was to go out into town and berate others.
Now the taste for burning had left him he was practically a saint. Outside of the church, what he had burned was just a hobby, for god’s sake. He improved places by fire. He held himself in some esteem for not reattaching his talents to the law, the last career on his mind, and for doing almost nothing ardently except the secret trips. Like a great artist. His vocation was looking clean cut, now weeks away with a crop of recluse’s bush all around his head and chin, and staying awake for upward of eighteen hours. Even so, he owned an exceptional facility for falling asleep dead center of one of the woman’s attacks. This act calmed her and she was in awe of him.
Their house was a weathered one, old Spanish elegance as the realtors would have it, rented and tested by college men before they took it, the landlord negligent since many of the boys spirited themselves away to other quarters where mommy or granny lay waiting to spoil them and their creditors paid hard to find them. Our hero paid for a new roof and paint, white with slate trim, and a fence planted with Carolina jasmine soon thick and green, and her dogs could dig around the roots of the pecan and hickory trees safe from the highway out front. The dogs were a mix of corgi and shepherd, and he adored these oddly made creatures too. Our man, Franklin James, also paved the driveway where sat his carpentered hut with wheels, towed by a 600cc Ducati motorcycle from the seventies but in perfect repair. The hut’s roof was peaked, it had a shatterproof window on either side, a smart thing as huts go. Tan and lean, he could be handsome with his beard lost. He had lived in federal and state campgrounds for nearly four years. He’d lived almost without cost, for an adventure hostile to most. He had had a bad night, only one bad experience with a small pack of motorcyclists anointed wild by themselves and carrying their own priests and witches.
He carried a nickel-plated hammerless .38 but the weapon had acquired the status of a mere hammer about the cabin, a wide enough rectangle with a small electric heater so that he slept comfortably in innocence, doom, and fatalism all three.
James was Canadian French. In the early sixties his father was killed by suspicious gunfire called random because another had died, this at a campus riot against the entry of a black man to the university. His father was a photojournalist. The shooter was never found and barely sought. The state then was in apartheid hotly and there was little sympathy for outside agitators, as his father was labeled, a meddler with no credentials in this place of fire and blood. James himself was a lieutenant in the French Legion, riding a .50-caliber machine gun in a sand jeep during Desert Storm, but this was not important.
Important was that even though the Klan had been broken by the FBI and lawsuits, they and their fellow travelers might still live and worship or preach in certain wooden churches. Such people tended to stay undriven from their soil, holy to their feet regardless of their less genial reception or the rough success of integration decades-old now in the Magnolia State. The best band in these parts was a mixed pigment group, sons of the famous Dickinson, Kimbrough, and Burnside blues/rock geniuses. But old murderers and burners muttered against them, even as they were hauled to jail lately for crimes forty years old.
His father was Anglo-French, a Parisien by way of Toronto. A good-natured lively man who wrote and shot stirring photos heralded in many news magazines in both Canada and the States. He was strong. He worked long distances from home and always came back with happy presents from these regions. Franklin James had lost him when he was fifteen.
Now he was fifty-three, an ex-sheriff’s deputy from Missoula, sworn to fire anyway and also to a refinement to the precise gunman in golden years who now gained respect from his fellow churchmen and love from his teenaged grandchildren, which idea drove James near insane with rage. He would kill or find the grave of his father’s murderer. He tried to live out this disease, tried to burn it out of himself, but it was fickle with mere time and would rise like a flaming snake in even sublime nature, the staggering gorges and pools of America’s parks of prime natural glory. He hoped the killer played a fine fiddle and even rode on a scooter in a Shriner’s fez in a parade for the Christmas blind.
His woman, in her rages, never knew how he could snap her in two if she were the murderer’s niece, so her rages amused him, too. He did love her as she swore to love him. She knew nothing of his mission. He slipped ever easily into the brogue of love, that long hill-country moan that required slow action around the tongue and almost no lip opening to a song against coherence. Without her around he despised it, listening to men gossip at the barber’s, the cafés in Holly Springs and Oxford. General Grant was headquartered in Holly Springs, where the antebellum mansions still stood, although in a flat of lackness frozen in brine, much like those in Natchez, a back-lot set for zombies in a costume feed. The general had sent the drunker general, Smith, to burn Oxford three times, in reprisal for Forrest’s raids on his supply lines toward Vicksburg. Now Oxford had the university and life, restaurants, nightclubs, gorgeous women on its walks hurrying to nothing, cellphoning nothing, but gladly come spring wearing nearly nothing. Five hundred lawyers and a state-of-the-art county office building and jail, along with the storied Faulknerian courthouse, the pale redbrick Art Deco city hall, and it seemed five though only two state flags flew high and wide here, one quarter of each the stars and bars of Dixie. James saw nothing but the Confederate flag and spat on the pavement until he had no spit. He cared little about the history of anywhere, but the irony of hi
s lost father’s body among all this formal law brought on a near faint of resentment. Like blood and vomit with a flag on it.
With his new accent he led conversations among suspicious men. He did hear things but the men lied and invented so much it was a jam box of hell to get anything of substance from them. Two men claimed to know his father during his short tragic stay. Not a prayer. He heard men from the church he’d burned and surprised himself by this sympathy with them, poor country sorts looking for a new hall of fellowship. A poor giant boy savant played sacred tunes on its piano day and night all week and was burned terribly because he would not leave his instrument until the flames were on him. The injury to the boy savant was an injustice that depraved him and made him soberer in his hatred. He made daily trips to eavesdrop on the boy’s condition after he left the burn ward in a Memphis hospital and came for further therapy to Oxford’s Baptist one. He had meant nothing like that, nothing near it, and he hated that he had polluted his mission. He could not tell the boy or his parents his sorrow and guilt. He could tell nobody. At night he writhed as if sleeping in a coffin on a king-size bed he’d wanted, and this was mistaken by his wife Goodie Drake as amorous hunger, and she supplied him as he gave to her afraid to hurt her feelings. Neither of them was listless in bed.
Teresa was her proper name. She bought the bed a headboard of Byzantine pattern befitting this name, and elevated it to nearly four feet on risers, then put many comforters and a phalanx of fat pillows over these. He slept in the effeminate pomp of a bed and breakfast resort. When there was too loud a fight, excruciating for a half hour while he stood silent, he slept out in the cabin, which she called his “pouting house.” Be a man, she commanded him over and over. He couldn’t tell her the kind of man he was. She didn’t know he had received and returned much fire in Iraq with French troops. She didn’t know what happened to make him an ex-deputy and a runaway from Missoula, Montana. He was tall and windblown like the actor Sam Shepard, she said, and she’d proclaim her love for him without once apologizing for her rages, a condition that came on like epilepsy. Another man would have left months ago.