by Barry Hannah
“Whether you dead or alive don’t matter to us but it’s up to you.”
The other three were opening the door to his hut when he told them, Stop. He had the pistol out of his back pocket. He felt the world and nature were begging him to kill them and, despite himself, he began to cry great tears of sorrow. All of his long grief broke out in his eyes. He could barely see the men under the station halo when they obeyed and spread out in a straight packed rank as if to die as one or rush him. He was cool when the tears stopped, very close to murder. He knew he would be exonerated if the law ever found him. All his service and medals backed him. They knew he would shoot and stayed as quiet as altar boys except for agreeing with him when he robbed them, Yes sir, Yes sir. In four bags was $104 thousand in baled hundreds. They put it all and also their crack cocaine and methedrine in his hut, the latter in big plastic freezer bags. They knew he was the law but could not imagine how he’d imagined this bust. They handed every bike key over to him and then stripped naked. He broke every spark plug he could see with his hammer, had a second thought and told them each to open the lid of their gas tanks and drop a lighted match into it. They were slow about this until he shot a round through the nearest gas tank.
When he’d got to Jackson, Tennessee, making only fifty miles per hour max, he had long since ceased being wily. He kept south into Mississippi, the very place he’d vowed never to go.
It was only when he rested in a motel in Holly Springs that he became aware of how lucky he was the black men were so befogged on their own product and he began weeping again, this time loudly, moans and rending sobs. Except for the Pakistani couple who lived in the office, no other people were in these rooms. This was a shame. He wanted others to hear him, hug him, and stay as company to his grief until it subsided.
The license tags on the motorcycles of the black motorcyclists read Mississippi. Once his weeping spell was over he was pleased by the idea they might find him again. He knew methedrine and carefully measured some grains into his morning coffee for the next several days. He kept a modest high putting eastward to Tishomingo and Iuka, where he bought two boxes of .38 hollow points simply because he was high. At the same Wal-Mart he bought new propane tanks. He felt free and less threatening than in ages, happy that somebody might kill him. He was not goofy, perhaps had never been, not once. James could not reckon what he was now but his dead father rose and stood inside him. He walked the earth of Tishomingo, but that chief’s magic was just a part of the spirit in his arms, legs, eyes, and preternatural ears so that he walked and glided on a narrow river impervious to harm and quite happy to be a burner and a killer when he met those who begged for him to guide their fates. He’d come near this feeling in the war but it had not filled him as in this time and place.
Immediately he went to work, which came easily. A tall lank man with acne scars, native of Oxford, swore to others in a café how his motherfucking yacht was tiresome to him now and he stood to gain more from the insurance on it. Another swore he’d had to drive up from Meridian in his wife’s Cadillac Esplanade, a nigger car, but his was in the shop. Still another with even more vodka in him was a wealthy minister built like a football linebacker. He had a televised Sunday morning sermon in his huge protestant cathedral surrounded by his wealthy congregation in Germantown, the affluent suburb of Memphis dense with white flight. This man too had a yacht on the Tennessee River. However, what called to Franklin James was this man’s erotic success with a divorcée who lived just off Highway 30 between New Albany and Oxford. Her real name was Teresa but she was called Goodie. He asked the men at the table to guess why. Grins went around. The minister had a wife and several other women, whom he described in detail for the delectation of the others. The church, he declared, was actually a castle and city unto itself as in feudal times. Here was much money to be made, many wives and single women in graduate school, medicine, the arts. These were often confused and lonely souls, you could not imagine the loneliness and compliance of these lovely, soft, and wet creatures, demanding he take them in all ways granted the healthy, wild prophet of God that he was. They may laugh, but he did believe and was beloved like King David of the Psalms, and what memory did we have of Solomon except for his wisdom and love songs? Men of many wives, concubines, the wives of other men. The other men grew quiet beneath this sincerity, a sermon itself, unexpected among drunks in a rib house built on stilts in a womb of granite hill near Pickwick Dam.
James harked to this minister four booths away. It seemed these men formed a club that met four times a year with the seasons. Each was a singular financial wizard, were men of the lusty world, and here was their chaplain, second-team All American out of Tulane in the late eighties. He could turn pro or turn demigod, so he went to seminary at Sewanee.
James was newly bathed, soap in a cold creek, but no longer had his thick bush of a beard, so his face was both sunburned and white. He might be a bargeman or professor. He wore round tortoise prescription spectacles that changed with light. He was happy, again mildly high from methedrine granules in his iced tea. Beside his plate of rib bones lay a Gideon Bible open to his pen, the matchless Pilot Precise rolling ball. Between the lines of Acts of the Apostles he wrote down much of what this minister said.
He was not unusual here. Most likely, since it was Saturday night, a deacon on vacation preparing his lesson for Sunday school, that was all. The minister who talked and bragged could drink an entire bottle of Stolichnaya vodka with no ill effects the next day. In fact he would preach on television tomorrow, a suntanned and berobed hunk of love with just a few white strands in his black hair. James was already in church with this man at the podium on the dais before him. He was a seeker of heat and light, attentive in the pews. The good pastor was not even drunk, just savvy and loquacious, as he described the geography, portfolio, and erotics of his circuit. He did not neglect his visits to the hospitals and to the shut-ins, the ancient lunatics of the rest homes so happy to will wild portions of their nest eggs to him. He told how his congregation loved him as a sportsman casting wide for bass and sauger, loved his prosperity, his fine auto.
But you might hurt and burn, thought James happily. This bliss I ride. On the edge of things there and then reduced to ash. He had just painted his cabin slate gray. After the fires he headed to Oxford. He threw away all the powder and crack in hides and kudzu all the way from Corinth to New Albany.
The minister had called his church the Neo-Fortress Village, out of California theosophy. The others were not too drunk to take him seriously. Franklin James also took him seriously. He watched him that Sunday on his motel TV.
The die was cast. He cared nothing for his body even though it was trim and well muscled from sprints through the meadows of everywhere.
After his heated affair with Goodie, after his marriage to her, once the preacher’s but available no more, he took trips to Jackson where he could stand the history of his father’s killing. There was the building with the newspaper whose clarion was well nigh the voice of Goebbels in the early sixties. Obfuscators of the weak search for the assassin. Then he was at the door of the First Baptist Church, a very big one on North State where the pastor remained a silent, good German with big hair, chicken guts, who never made a stand, never a whisper, about the Klan, the killer, their Old Customs, as racists would have it. These of the Southern Baptist Church bore the most sins as good Germans in apartheid sweetly. This is where the redundant sheep of fundamentalism took a stand on nothing, except for wanting the Jews to hurry up Armageddon in the Holy Lands.
Now he had burned a small church in the wildwood and despised the fact his guilt made him kinder toward small houses of worship.
He walked the grounds of the state capitol but did not go inside. He had no doubt that half its body were grandchildren of the blood that brought down his father. James knew that the advent of television and blacks owning their own guns had done as much for defeating the Klan and status quo as all the sermons and marches of Dr. King, because I t
old him so. He spat on the capitol grounds as much as salivation allowed him to. His hatred grew back to its perfect fury when he thought of his mother, a priest-bound sick woman who never achieved fury, only the flattened presenility of mourning, this vivacious French lady of culture, quickest to laugh a laugh in any room, the laugh that brought tears of thanks from James, then and now in his memory. She became a dead woman he could not bear to visit. All natural love was cut and down. He was too weary of his fury now, like bricks on his head until he ran down his man, who was very much alive and, a loud churchman, a tattooed deacon of the boondocks.
Why had he begun his mission so late then? Why had he circled it so long? Why the petty necessity of marriage to Goodie and in the near future the sophisticated immolation of the great cathedral in Memphis, venue of Goodie’s former lover, that pastor he had overheard in the Pickwick rib house? In which the organist died of molten pipes in avalanche.
He only half knew himself. And he could not have known the organist slept with the pastor and was thinking of suicide already.
I am still unclear whether after the first fires he appeared reincarnated as Captain Max Petraeus who began his long campaign of church arsons up and down the Mississippi Valley. He seemed too chastened for this after the woman died. He sent anonymous money to help the concert career of Jimmy Canarsis. But James’s vendetta against the old tattooed man was settled also, and you’d imagine also his love of flames, for a good long while.
* * *
The riot and anarchy on the Ole Miss campus in 1962 has often been called the last civil war, and I was square in the thick of it as a captain of the state National Guard. All that fire and shooting, three dead by gunshot and the shooter never found, against the entrance of James Meredith, a black man. What you had was both students and the Klan, with their fellow travelers. I had boys in my own command who wanted to join the rioters. It was rot, the last of an old cancer on us.
The Nobel laureate William Faulkner died in the hot July preceding the September riots. It was good he didn’t have to watch. He was a racial moderate, read nigger lover in these parts then, and left much of his estate to the United Negro College Fund. I mention him only to place this story on the map and call to memory, now I’m an old man, that not all of us were rot. I did understand much of Faulkner’s greatest books. Personally I disliked him as a snob who with no effort at all could have been kinder to the neighbors in the village we were then. He was passing strange and spiteful to many. You had to reckon with some conceit as birthright, which made him contemptuous of the very humble folk he was celebrated for taking to his heart on the written page. You will often see pure words in a great wash of self-atonement, no people necessary to them. Like your pastors of the pulpit James despised. If masturbation had an echo, he said.
Well James found me and made me honest, without threat. It was way high time I unburdened. I sit in front of a glass of peach schnapps on my lake south of town. Prime woodlands, thick elder pines, spruces. I was privy too long to the grievous matter. Now my hands are red, not a prayer of a peaceful death, but some wonderful living behind me with the wife and daughters so fine. I served in Korea, came home almost cursed with life after being with many gut-shot fellows with snow falling on ice, temp minus 30. It was nighttime, but I knew James’s man and had never divulged the true rot of him, although I brought him up on charges of cowardice. I believe I witnessed the event itself, him in a tree and raising the M1 Garand.
But there were all kinds of gasses in the air, all kinds of flares, gunshots, overturned cars burning. This done by handsome young frat boys. The man was dishonorably discharged from the army, but that was a slap on the wrist.
The town of Water Valley in Yalobusha County sixteen miles below us hired him, nevertheless, on its patrol force. One soggy night, say 1977, me and the old gang were coming back from an Ole Miss/State game that we’d won when a gust of wind like out of the Bible blew the state kicker’s try for an extra point backward from the goalposts. I mean dead missed a sitter. I was both drunk and speeding and this patrolman in Water Valley put his face in the window, sniffing around six old boys all soused and hollering. Guess who he was. He had his ticket book open and his gun hand on the butt. Oh he had some live ones. But he took a long look, went white in the face. Walked quick back to his black-and-white chariot all whipped around and ass-important with way high antennas, and just eased off ahead of us, like now, Captain, go ahead and arrest me please. All our gang, me and two of them who’d serve in the spoils of the Republican administration in three years, got soberer but I was white in the face, too, until I told them who that cop was, and they almost broke the car laughing, hooting. A charmed day all around.
But that’s when I learned the fellow had gone off into lay preaching and multiple deaconage around small county churches. I got white in the face as he was, all those pictures racing back from fifteen years ago, and the picture, the sickest. He did lay preaching along the white supremacy line, they said, not unusual for the race killers getting dug up nowadays by a reporter from the Jackson paper, the Clarion Ledger, and a special prosecutor out of the state attorney general’s office after forty-five years and more. I don’t believe I joined in the howling with the others in my van.
Somebody said something like all that is required for evil to prosper is the silence of good men. I count myself one of those. Too many of us stayed good Germans, a term I first heard in Eighth Army, Chosin Reservoir, 1950, staying quiet when a heinous thing is about like Hitler. The rest only knew him for a coward in the Guard, just now in the worst face-to-face you could pull on him. On race matters I remained quiet. You can’t overestimate the difficulty of my Guard command, largely filled by boys sympathetic to the rioters but serving John Kennedy much against their instincts. We heard this was a police action at Ole Miss, but there were eventually thirty thousand troops in town, tents everywhere, a way station for the movement of troops to south Florida during the Cuban missile crisis. Wild boys or insurgents from the Klan of neighboring states were dropping railroad cross ties into the windshield of Army Reserve troop carriers from the overpass on Jackson Avenue. Still, I sent the order down that if any live ammo was discovered off their belt clips there’d be hell to pay. We were pure bayonets regardless of provocation, just like the federal marshalls who were trapped inside the Lyceum with Meredith courtesy of a bulldozer driven against its door by the apostles of the lunatic General Edwin Walker, who led the assault himself with a goddamned cavalry sword. It was a miracle no more than three were killed, among them James’s father, a man I never put eyes on.
Our governor was Ross Barnett, a purebred mule-faced jackass rabble-rouser, about states’ rights and sovereignty, but when I was a young captain I did not think he was such a bad sort. He was our jackass, was the issue. Nevertheless I dressed my command and told them their asses belonged to the federal government and me, rough as it was. You had to keep an eye on them. You never knew what mean little bastard would break ranks and try to make a name for himself.
I told this to James at Smitty’s café just south of the courthouse and looked into his kind Canadian face, a face that had mesmerized me into this revelation over a good breakfast, eggs, country ham, redeye gravy, grits, the best big light biscuits. He ate the same as me, listened courteously without interruption. Then I saw the new look to him and knew that if the point of this story was that I killed his father, he would kill me on the spot with still the courteous look. It had been a long time since I had killed a gook or two. Not very long for him. Iraqis, the church organist.
The man was courtly. He out-captained me. We were just talking acquaintances, then, I don’t know how he did it. Suddenly when I got to his man in the tree that night nearly half a century ago, of all things I thought of the Lord. I mean Our Heavenly Father. I leave the Lord alone since Korea and hope He’ll do the same for me. You have to hand it to Him, He’s done a damned pro job of evaporating these last centuries. I can’t tell you the bodies, the pain. What wa
s that about? Well, we turned South Korea Christian, and now our labor gets shipped off to them, Zenith TV and all. But it’s not worth one gut-shot private, one lance corporal from Wyoming with a sucking chest wound. What Lord? What wondrous ways His works to perform?
The secret spoke itself like a tired bad ghost walking out of my throat.
Then for a while I didn’t see him, only heard about the acts. I had peace for half an afternoon. But then my hands were bloody. My calm had a frown on it. Yes I’m going funny. This peach schnapps ain’t doing it for me.
He made love with Goodie with a writhing ardor she’d not experienced, perhaps, ever.
“For the love of God, thank you,” she whispered. She put on her kimono and white slip-on keds. Her body was remarkable. Without exercise except for five minutes of work and standing an hour around machines that would have perfected her in a Baptist hospital gym. Or remarkable because he stared at her as through a magnified pipe, and straight past her to their familiar replicants in a museum of devolution until the final sullen corpus, his man, stood at age twenty with the Ml Garand in his hand, a clip of live ammo snuck into its chamber, all the auto fires and tear gas and flares in the air, students shouting curses from as deep in them as the very heart of rot in Old Dixie. Punk Guardsman, punk city cop, his conversion to the Lord Jesus Christ and belting out hymns, earning thereby the right to walk among free men, even preach to them, the low son of a bitch. But he must have felt a bona fide hell at his shoulders these years, or something right around the next door he opened, especially after the firebombing of the little church where he had stood recently. Was the man his man, or was the man himself? What a stupid meditation.
He left two days later for the archives in the attorney general’s office in Jackson, three hours southward. The sunroof of the Mazda Miata was open. On the CD box was Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy. This sound like the reunion of a battalion in steel walls. Intense moments in Iraq, his sick mother. He needed more hate. Soon he was not rightly human. He could imagine himself howling on the street corner of a burning city. His eyes were wide. Purpose, what purpose did he serve against the lassitude of grief that filled his mother and himself all those years? Their avoidance of the topic and word Mississippi.