Long, Last, Happy

by Barry Hannah

  He said it was the last of his uncle’s preacher money. Maybe he didn’t hear me say, “Indeed it is.” He couldn’t understand anything anyhow, you know that stretched careful way the very drunk have when they think nobody suspects but they are sober. My god, this boy lived in that outfit, always in a play doing sobriety over and over, the fool. So you know what a colossal gift he was to anybody needing an edge. You didn’t need much but to fake complete assurance it was business us usual.

  Soon enough he flat out told me he was burning things. The church fires up and down the river were all over the papers and television. I doubted he was fit to take off from his labors at the bottle, this kid could do two a day, but he kept talking, in that god-awful shrieking whisper he thought was most confidential. Sure it was, all the way to Louise’s ears and the ears of Tico and Rez on the back loading dock in this large whiskey palace, working the airport and the filthy alumni who can’t get rid of their lucre fast enough when they’re here buying memories, all of them in some form of Colonel Rebel, the mascot, who looks like he could put away more than his rightful serving. If you want to know, I might not look it, but I could be half these sporting fools in button-downs and penny loafers and executive jets.

  Not to get off my story, I listened to him about burning and it began to ring true. Because when he isn’t lying he takes a long time combing a part in his sweated-up hair, like he wants nothing to impede his veracity.

  Still, how could he manage to do all that climbing and heaving of his demolitions and accelerants and stay out of suspicion all by his drunk self? Then it snuck out that he didn’t. I spotted somebody in the parking lot preparing to enter the shop and quieted him. The man wanted a golf cart to buy or rent and I kept a fleet of Harley-Davidson carts just next to the entrance to College Hill Road where lies the golf course. I don’t have a trade that doesn’t prosper.

  But all through his histrionics I was in a state of delight because I do hate a church. I’ve been cast into darkness by many a preacher for the booze and the Used Auto. Isn’t it funny I get along fine with Dr. Quarles the Fourth at Pickwick in the condos and chicken-wing joint, although his massive church was also exploded. No dead, as with the big Roman Catholic cathedral. I say I was delighted, I was in fine fettle, anxious to get back to hear Bell’s whispery screaming and believing it.

  Our good buddies the firebugs had a wonderful supply of napalm from some loosely guarded armory, I’d say the National Guard at any of a dozen bases. They’re even more prone to accidental leakage than our fine army, which is a laugh when you say security. You can’t imagine the waste in our services. There’s not a lost and found office big enough. I should know it, I worked this lostness personally for five years. Before they caught on to me. A small nation could whip California with just the crap that rolls off a convoy or an army railroad caravan. I know an old boy took home a fully operating .50 cal and ammo for a souvenir when his time was up. Now that is class.

  But back to ready delight. I gave the man after the golf cart a good buy. If you keep a part of your trade fair then they’ll stand in line to be cheated next time. Et cetera with the drunk Bell boy.

  He had got all mysterious but had two half gallons in front of him on the counter. He was hinting at something but was too drunk to get the right hint in, so I got immoderate. What in hell are you trying to say, just say it, you overdressed sputtering fool! So thick drunk he didn’t even take this insult in, although he knew I wanted the secret from him. Thing is, he didn’t give it to me promptly, and swore this business was very tight and dangerous. So next day I had my car curbside across the street just to watch what unfolded out of his grand apartment on the square. Soon enough, Wilkes Bell came down the stairs followed by a gent of middle age but holding it well and with that unmistakable rigor in the back you get from serious military time. They can’t help it. They don’t even know how to slouch anymore. A suit on them looks like a costume from a foreign nation. I guess it’s us lowly sergeants that get familiar with our slouches. Yes he stepped along in something rich, Brit, bespoke. I learned that term from Mrs. Ferguson in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. You could hear his heels click across the street, a man in a clicking contest when all they were up to was eating at the Bottle Tree Bakery on West Van Buren, bagel, lox, cream cheese. Big deal. Or you would’ve supposed it was because heel-clicker was deeply studious, and drunk (yes, eight in the morning) Bell was trying to ape his manner like an earnest monk. I knew our older fellow was the other fireman. He had hard eyes and that sort of dismissal of everybody in front of him so as soon as they quit helping him they ceased to exist. A major hate engine in him set on fast idle when it wasn’t wholly engaged.

  Well I eased off to my much lesser acres without being seen, of course. If I play the better-looking half of my face right folks simply forget me, and I don’t mind, I work in the murk just fine. The other side makes people drop their dinner fork. I don’t mind, I just hate my parents for not having the drive to get me better treatment. They didn’t have the drive to learn their own language. I got my decent English from a middle-aged blonde woman with good legs who took pity on me and my temporary passion for books. I was so depressed I had no passion that lasted long. But she lasted long, Mrs. Ferguson. I wanted a style and she came near giving it to me. Another life. I’d been a harmless drudge at everything. Just lucky, I guess, best of both worlds even though my freedoms came late. I have finer points due to Mrs. Ferguson. You will see them, along with brotherhood, compassion, mercy. But I do hate church and loved the broken hearts all warming themselves by blackened rafters, warm stone, and melted glass.

  But know we are speaking of two years while I remained innocent as a lamb, as to fireworks at least. Yes, I lay in wait like your alligator or your mule, who had a long mean memory that’ll all of a sudden flash out and catch you guessing with your underwear down and a hoof print dead center of your forehead. A gator twenty years until the time is perfect to eat a flamingo. This creature, tell me not, knows it has longevity. Even if what you have is a slug with little arms and one long slosh of a tail with vise-grip jaws. I lie in turds to accomplish the right moment. Even the promise of what I’d do to these specific turds, the bond jumpers, is enough, if I have that side of my face to them. Oh I’m licensed to carry a .357 Magnum revolver, but it’s never used. I believe the jumper knows I’ve yet to use it and hastens to the backseat of the car not wanting to be first under the gun. The only fights I’ve ever had were with two women. I guess they thought I’d be a gentleman. Some shocked fool standing on tradition. They slugged me. But hit bad once, almost everbody sits down and asks the quickest route to jail. And I did swat them good.

  I’m working on a children’s story as well as my entry to that corrupt gallery in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. If I detect certain biases I plan to be not only assertive but persuasive. I don’t care if third’s the highest I ever placed. Many a listener told me I was the clear winner. Explosion bears repeating. I love being a bad loser. I got a hard-on for unsportsmanlike. I get to mock both fire-setting Bell and partner and the angry, miserable sheep inside what used to be the doors of their houses of worship. But why, why, why? you ask. A grown man with my skills, how can I stoop to this like the others wreaking havoc.

  Poetry, I think, is the answer. To live that zigzagged deathlessness of the poem, as taught me by Mrs. Ferguson. It’s how you know you’re young, you’re a gamer, and bantam rooster, your face in a curl of loogie-launching at the law. And that is paradise, to confuse the police with half their eyelids down over yellow eyes. Flies on their head, lazy waddlers who’d rather do nothing except compare their muscles, shoot at the range, and beat the heat with beers and chattering wives in their cheap-ass project houses where they all, except the chiefs, commiserate about their punk salaries and hard service.

  I had my time in glory with these people, or their military equivalent in Georgia. The charge: blowing up useless surplus shit on the firing precincts, harming red dirt. Experimentation. I’m not kidd
ing. I was too old for a juvenile delinquent and what’s more a master sergeant. The brass knew my projects had been going on weeks before they decided they needed a whipping boy to take the higher brass’s eyes off another big scandal of their own, and that would be a wife-swapping club fueled by the liquor of Uncle Sam. Yellow-gilled loafers. I was at least employing my skills in the future guerilla actions of Their Man’s Army. Blowing up a few gasoline and ancient artillery barrels, launching a short arc missile, things to save some of our boys’ lives woeful down the line. So a bus ticket to ride I got at age thirty-two and a reaquaintance with my father in his putrid lounge chair. A letter arrived and I didn’t have to tell him about the dishonorable proceedings because the old woodpecker got to the mail and opened the letter addressed to yours truly. I picked him up by the shoulders and came close to killing him, but it was the worst day of my life because he never stopped laughing and the old lady called me a rottener name every time I swatted my honored patriarch.

  So I was sent into all parts of trade by necessity until I had constructed my own realm, which I did here in the swanky back end of my liquor store. Oh, I had fun with the bonds and the jumpers and the drunks charging way over their head, taking care of the blurred math for them. It is always a hoot to see a lush get an attitude about charging booze, as if he’s earned a pricey berth and can’t be bothered with small change. Still, he’s overcharged and doesn’t even scratch his head, because he’s weak and guilty and feels he owes the world. Or he sees the pitted side of my face and my unnegligible bulk in arms and legs and understands it is not good to call this man a liar.

  On the other hand I have been bemused by this burning. I know Bell doesn’t have the drive. He’s been to the drying-out clinics about four times, then promptly appeared at my counter like a boomerang that came the world around, stopping in exotic clinics long enough to make off with their terry-cloth robes, a thick oozy warm for his travails through the shakes. The man has worn these robes with, say, “Palo Alto Chemical Dependency” or “Dr. Fang’s Heat Cure” on their front pockets to the store, and shower sandals like such as you and I have never even seen to buy. I’ve given him dribs and drabs of the money, less his tab, which could launch a small satellite into space.

  I understand he’s now in constant quarrel with this uncle, but I fear little from a lay preacher running from the IRS.

  Now comes a hard pass for me to set down but I feel it necessary you even know the, well saltier parts of this man who was robbed down to third place in Murfreesboro and for the last two years failed to place. See here, you now have gay hillbillies and phony hillbillies who’ve studied in the drama department in Knoxville or Louisville. Yes, Asheville, too. It’s not fair that these ringers win. But I was a good loser to these privileged little weasels anyway, and as an artist I withdrew to my studies on my long-awaited children’s book. Me and the wife have no children. But I’ve made a story for the little ones a goal all my life, and I know what moves, what bores them. It’s a bookish town and I join right in. I was once with a friend, a writer, and we visited the great historian Shelby Foote in his Memphis mansion. I’d brought a gift crate of good whiskey to him, which he deeply appreciated. He showed us his working study, his foolscap and the nibs on his pens, which he ordered from the only place in the world that carried them anymore, a town in New Jersey. So I obtained for myself the staffs and nibs, ink and mini blow-dryer that completed the kit of the Civil War master and go about my slow but careful work. The antiquarian process slows the head until the absolutely correct word comes to it, so it is slow going and brain beating. I stay in my study and dress in a business suit, with tie, for hours, hours. This child’s tale is not all for kids, but one of hurt and early hardship, which the boy works through with wiles and slyness. I can give away that much. My wife is charmed I’m in there looking good and working so hard. If it’s good enough I might even publish it myself instead of having some far-off New York printer steal his cut.

  But here is the hard pass, much harder to tell than Who’s Laughing Now?, the child’s book. Now five or six years ago we had several odd fogs come over the town. You couldn’t find my liquor store, the airport shut down, it was unsafe even to drive until about ten in the morning. I’m writing. If I come out of my “den of the scribe” in my suit and catch a woman customer waiting, I could be irresistible to her. Some of the wimmens, they like rough faces and boldness. Ahead of myself here. These fogs kept up but one morning I heard a plane buzzing out of it with fog thick as soup and wondered how this pilot ever got clearance when the tower itself was shut.

  Then who comes in all sprawling and emaciated, whirling his rich thick mane of hair around but Wilkes Bell, drunker than I’ve ever seen him. Instantly he’s asking for the money in the freezer bag in my kitchen where no man goes. It’s just a thing with me. I tell him it’s out gaining interest in Harley-Davidson stock, which was true about the thirty K he had remaining, and that you just don’t move that money around, it’s got to stay to grow just like a seed. From the little scripture I know I cited Christ in favor of interest when he said the master had reprimanded the man who hid his money in fear of the master and congratulated the man who put his money out to make money. Some of the money was in H.D. stock and climbing. Then he told me the plane that just left was his uncle Ray flying to the bedside of a dying pilot he’d known in that old Iraq war of ninety-one. The man has no money and it’s all my fault! he cries out. I’m quiet. Not quite a man of stone. Then quit drinking and I’ll see what I can do, I tell him. At which he goes berserk and ends this flailing drama by begging for a bottle of Wild Turkey. His thirst is approaching the danger point, he says. People could get hurt. Sure, by your throwing up on them and/or falling off your balcony, I say, handing over the bottle. He left with two.

  Then he spoke with his back to me. “Do you know who blew up the storyteller’s stage in Murfreesboro, Tennessee?” he asked. I gave a long pause, I governed it. “No, but I wish I did. That place needed refreshing, a real makeover.”

  “I went up and saw you tell your tale,” says Bell.

  “Well, you went but were promptly thrown out for drunk before the competition started.”

  “It made the Memphis paper, which I’m sure was its aim. This drunk is more aware than you know. It wasn’t till after your tale telling that I was fully wise to your coming on as a homey old pea picker. It didn’t work. Whoever blew that pitiful stage up might pray for certain of his acquaintances staying quiet. For a half column of newsprint. It wasn’t very mature or original.”

  He’d had one or two nips from the bottle, but this is the most forceful I’d ever heard him. The change took me aback. I went mute, then placed my hand on an original billy club I’d made from a child’s bat. This action surprised me, because I never intended to harm Bell. His business was too good and just too interesting to give up. I believe I was scared.

  “And you and your broomstick-up-ass buddy are mature, of course.”

  “We are constant, you hunk of burning white trash.”

  He walked on out, a changed man, a man with sudden convictions. The fog lay out so thick he disappeared into his dented Saab SUV with only the sound of the door to give him away, ten in a July morning. This fog, I say, I’ve never seen the likes of it. Curling around getting thicker like in a stew pot. But none of this is the embarassing part, which came almost immediately. After Wilkes Bell’s car left, some other car rolls into the lot and a form walks to me slowly. At one or two times in a man’s life he fears everything in his world. Such was this figure closing to me out of the insane weather; I swear I saw hell walking and shook. But it was only a woman. I’d worked myself up to a lather.

  Here’s my secret: I lick the sweat off women.

  And I do sing as I lick, it’s an involuntary thing with me, a lullaby or children’s graveyard whistling. I believe it proceeds from the id part of Freud’s teaching. I saw droplets of sweat or fog or both on this delicious young lady’s back. I was still in my formal c
omposing suit, which in afterthought might have reminded her of Wilkes, and I was around the corner and in a deep suck thitherto, a word I’d been working out lately in the child’s book. My arms around to that sweet depression above her rump as the back convexes itself, my tongue busily tasting, my senses way heated and wetness spreading down. Well, she did take offense, but she was too stunned to take immediate action. I’ve had two who returned the licking, beside themselves, and then turn sick. I tell you that if my woman Louise was up front, which almost never happens, I’d be doing the same thing.