Long, Last, Happy

by Barry Hannah

  She shook me off with surprising strength, but then I remembered she was a dancer and aerobics instructor. I offered my handkerchief and quickly said, “You’re so wet, beautiful, and sad!”

  From fury she changed to a broken creature who was simply lost as to how to act.

  “You ought not to do that. Maybe you think I’m somebody else.”

  “You came in once before. I can tell you’re normal. Some women suffer from unceasing sweats. I know you because you came in once and Wilkes Bell talks about you in words sublime. I’m a writer and a yarn spinner myself.”

  “You don’t call that horrible licking attack anything but crime.”

  “I’m sorry but something that sweet can’t be a crime.”

  Well, she drilled me with hatred in her eyes and then she did almost collapse.

  Women’s throats in the summertime, that perfume and randy ooze the fairer sex has that we don’t. So I’ve out and said it, and it’s nothing I can help and lucky nobody’s turned me in to the law. Five of them positively enjoyed it, and never knew they would until I was across the counter fast as a werewolf and as thirsty for salt as a sponge. Oh I lick them.

  This woman was Charlotte Barrios, girlfriend to Bell. She’d never been here before.

  “I’m sick with worry about him. Something’s come over him where he thinks the end is near. He’s nothing but woe and morbid surrender. He is changed to an upright corpse and just stumbles along.”

  “Miss, that’s the normal style. He was just here saying those kind of things and hurling around like an actor from a great tragedy. For god’s sake, he’s a drunk, Charlotte.”

  “Who are you? You with that huge bow tie. Bob Cratchit? You can’t just . . . lick a woman without . . . consequences.”

  “It’s not my choice, Charlotte. It’s an old compulsion. I’ve had treatment.”

  “Well you need more. You’re lucky. . . . What is wrong with him? Where had he gone?” She was all to pieces again and I knew I was safe.

  “I’ve a feeling he will keep to a small radius unless somebody else is driving. Wilkes is one for diablerie,” I said, taking charge in my composing suit, my best shoes and shirt. I matched that ass Bitters for obscure names.

  She just stared at me.

  “I was so worried I drove over to the delta to see if his folks could help. It’s no secret he’s been a mess for years.”

  They’re all hopeless trips. He speaks of them. He speaks of you. I know.”

  “Fuck you. You can’t know.”

  The cursing surprised me, but then I looked at the full buffed bod under that warm-up suit of hot pink, and it didn’t. How did Bell ever hang on to this?

  I get a good neck sweat of my own eye-drilling her right back and by use of the eye on the good side alone I see her as a long picture of bare beige woman. Christ, if I’d had a golden youth to pour all over her. My eyesight was your abstract impressionism, probably. Maybe he painted her nude? The idea almost brought on another dire need to werewolf her.

  “No, I never was his model,” she answers, then sits in the counter chair, moving and crossing her legs for most of an hour. “We met when I saw him in a drenched suit with a brown paper sack of liquor six years ago in the Grove near the art department, maybe early October. Skinny where if he ate a full meal he’d look like a snake that swallowed a biscuit whole. That old cliché. I pitied him and told him he’d get in trouble. No liquor allowed on campus. What got me was his courtesy even messed up as he was. His big gray eyes so concerned for my well-being. You knew he was from blue bloods. His voice was beautiful. He said he had a weakness for painting, painting those fires, in fact painting was all he had, my man, and that day we met he was too drunk to remember where the Fine Arts Building where he’d spent four years was. I’ve seen him lose his car for an hour and a half after we tried to attend a Tulane football game.

  “He told me his father despised him, was rather proud of it, then told me he was capable of great harm, his father was lucky. His courage struck me. Never did he complain of his own misery, which was constant. When I guided him to his own show that first afternoon, I saw he was a good draughtsman but had not broken out to another dimension. Maybe he was on the edge of it. As in dance when you do a skilled presentation of the movements, but not the true movements. He felt deeply and gave directly to the poor. Was wonderful with black children.

  “Said he knew what I was thinking about his work, how it was not there yet but that life, not study, would give it to him and there was a black burning maw in the earth that ate the spirit of people and spat it back in the image of frozen brick and glass. In short, churches. He also said we did badly at peace and needed catastrophe closer by to stir us to life. These United States had made too many artifices between life, dirt, and blood, and every day we should do a good turn to a poorer person and give this person our flesh, dirt, and blood. In our world people were waiting earnestly for a happy deep-blue square of death.”

  “Whoa?” I say.

  “He was not a reincarnationist. He was assured of misincarnation, where millions had just missed being born to their correct art and spent their days in sorrow wondering what was wrong. When what was wrong was that they were forced into occupations and beliefs they did not match, unhappily squirming toward their correct skill, even their correct bodily shape and health, and most of all, the fact that they were at one neither with their skills or their loves.”

  “He had time to think all this up? Or did he have a teacher? I never heard it, and we chewed the fat for hours over one bottle of single malt, Charlotte—”

  “Wilkes said he was born into yet another category, perhaps the worst. That is getting born almost into your right form, almost a painter or almost a happy, loyal son. He squirmed every second, he stared and glared, he lay in cotton fields drunk under the stars in two-thousand-dollar suits. Suits to put a good face on his misbirth. To help his fellows and especially the black children see that you could bear bad luck in style.”

  “Please, this is quite enough talking. Have some water, lady. Frankly, old Wilkes, for all the hours we talked, was not that original a man. He was all over the place drunk but at the bottom of it, dull normal dressed up and forever wanting that next drink—”

  “No!” Now she was angry. I was baffled why. “He drinks because he was a friend of the poet-philosopher William Blake, but he’s better than Blake, I think. The Misgenitor is the villainous force in this world, he says.”

  “I see more sweat on you neck. Could I—”

  “God, no! I can’t believe he spent time with you. You hold the money of his uncle in bondage, you with the tongue, and that queer, what? old-timey poet’s suit, if that’s not misborn, you horrible old fuck.”

  “Woman, you should—”

  “You shut up! You don’t deserve to be in the same room, the same town, on his road. Now he’s just out there lost in the damned fog. Someday his painting will become as natural as rainwater to him. He tries, he hurts himself so badly for it. A mystic in the middle of yahoos.”

  Her voice was rising and I heard Louise rising in the back. I was in a state. If she had come out front I’d have swatted her. Privacy reigned here.

  “Lady,” I said, “whoever told you you were that interesting? Come in my store. I am not a goddamned ear you work on till it’s callused all over.”

  But then God, there’s always a woman. Those death-row-marrying kind. She’d been up for nights and couldn’t do anything but talk like one of those heads guillotined and fallen in a basket. That weird fog creeping outside.

  The price you pay for some harmless licking.

  Some months later Green was back from another storytellers convention in Tennessee and had not even placed. He did not speak to his common-law wife Louise for a week. He took to drink himself for the first time in his life. You could then hear him cursing in impotent rages through the curtains and back in his domicile connected to the liquor store. He would peep through the curtains or push only
his face out through them if he heard a familiar voice at the counter run by his men Tico and Rez, who spoke very little anywhere, any day. The disattached face was red and puffed like the ass of a baboon, fearsome, fearsome and foreign even to customers who thought they knew him. When he heard Wilkes Bell baying for vodka he was way back in his “study” with the book but he was out of the curtains instantly and rushing around the counter in his jockey briefs, tall and gangling, specked by liver spots and sagging teats, sparse white chest hair. Bell was shocked into a long fart and a near blackout. Green dragged him back through the curtains as four other customers watched with a quick sickness. Green drew up a beach chair and pushed the floppy Bell into it.

  Then he hauled him and the chair over to his desk to read the Wikipedia.

  The No. 76 was an incendiary grenade based on white phosphorus and used during World War II.

  The design was the suggestion of the British phosphorus manufacturing firm of Albright and Wilson at a time when the UK faced possible invasion by the Germans. . . . It would be used by organized resistance units as part of a last-ditch attempt.

  It was a glass bottle filled with white phosphorus, benzene, a piece of rubber, and water. Over time the rubber dissolved to create a sticky fluid that would self-ignite when the bottle broke. The grenade could either be thrown by hand or fired from the Northover Projector, a simple mortar; a stronger container was needed for the latter and the two types were color coded. As any breakage of the glass would be dangerous, storage under water was recommended. Like the sticky bomb it did not engender much confidence in its users.

  Mark 77 bomb.

  The MK-77 is the primary incendiary weapon currently in use by the United States military. Instead of the gasoline and benzene fuel used in napalm, MK-77s use kerosene-based fuel, which has a lower concentration of benzene. The Pentagon has claimed that the MK-77 has less impact on the environment than napalm. The mixture reportedly also claims an oxidizing agent, making it more difficult to put out once ignited.

  Use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  MK-77s were used by the U.S. Marine Corps during the first Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Approximately five hundred were dropped, reportedly on Iraqi-constructed oil-filled trenches. They were also used at Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

  Green held Bell by the back of the neck, forcing this matter on him. Bell was shaken but he had the vodka open nevertheless and nipped, then raised his head enough to drink from the saving bottle.

  “Read, son. You read this and maybe your saint uncle’ll see his forty K even though you drank it up long ago. I saved you by the investment.”

  “Why am I reading? What investment?”

  “Even in these lame prime-rate times, you’re a lucky-assed loser. And you know damned well what you’re reading. I’m warning you.”

  “Please. Get your hand off so I can get drunk enough to read, Goon. Items of fire. Items of fire. Napalm, phosphorous. Where’s the joy here? Your face. You’re drinking?! God, do I look as bad as you? Red ass of an ape?”

  “I’m not used to it. But you shut up and read.”

  “I will read.”

  He read about Greek fire, naptha, and thermite, thermate-TH3. Then he read about the fat bombs project, WWII, proposed against the Japanese whereby these winged creatures attached to incendiaries would fly into wooden homes and castles. Wilkes Bell wore horn-rimmed spectacles, pulling at his sweated yellow collar against his pink tie, his throat well wet and slightly yellow itself. Pondering soft hawk’s face near emaciated. He felt Green at his shoulder not as a sodomist. He drank a long one from the Stolichnaya and wondered what the proper reaction would be to remove this long naked threat from his back. He chanced a look sideways and never completed the word no before Green was fastened on his neck and licking with such force it felt subdermal.

  Bell reared up shaking away Green’s mouth but the witless man still licked the air.

  “God, man! Is this the end of the world? It was only women up to now. Anse got the last one to drop charges, insane bastard!”

  Goon stood bereaved but mean in the face while his woman could be heard bellowing in a separate grief about a kitchen grease fire. Green ignored her as he tucked a loose gonad back into his briefs. Loud sad world and stinking, hog flesh and smoke. Both men standing thigh high in its wreckage. Mutual scholars and addicts of fire. Just over the north hill a jet screamed down to concrete. Out in the store the premium brands were pushed forward for these wealthy alumni and their sparkling second wives.

  “I ain’t myself,” Goon apologized. “Where am I, what’s that burning smell?” Neither man turned to watch or hear the woman, her bare feet and legs scattering beneath the pan she held. Both deaf by liquor, Bell in an appalled trance.

  “I believe your house is nearly on fire,” said Bell.

  “Mizz Ann always manages. Good woman but got large in the ass on me.”

  “Goon, you got weird prominent titties. Be kind. You have much to worry about.”

  “These pages you read. That’s your scripture, ain’t it? Say you never get caught, s’how you work. Now I’m up on you. Got you in my sights. You tell Mr. Max Petraeus watch my smoke on the next pyrotechniques!”

  “I’m telling you, you might already be dead for that propane rocket in the primitive church.”

  “Dead how? Do you believe I fear any man in this town? Look out that window and you see maybe a fifth of my empire, fool.”

  “I see a car lot, a bait shop, beauty shop, bail bonds office, a fleet of golf carts. Why are there iron bars on the bond building? I thought you were so tough and pro you could talk the shotgun off a maniac.”

  “I can in fact. But I want to give back to the community. The office is a home for battered women at night. I found the one in the back through my work there.”

  “I believe that as much as I believe those three whores prowling the used Cadillac section are flying nuns.”

  Another executive jet, purple and gold, squeaked and stormed with blowback, made its keening cry as it turned toward the radio shack. It was game day, LSU richlings poured in, the noise of two tigers aiming squarely at the liquor store, where on the airport side Tico and Rez, with Bell’s painterly wit, had made a great billboard, with and deep, “FIRST STOP LAST STOP” bordered by the fierce helmets of the Southeastern Conference, whose boasted brutality and speed had long ago raised a sport to religion.

  The kitchen fire was on the walls, Green yet clothed in only jockeys and Cole Haan brogans. He turned with low interest to the kitchen, walking like an unconvinced zombie to it even as Louise screamed louder. He slammed a door behind him. Bell managed a swat of vodka huge enough to straighten him out most genially. Next he knew the door opened on white smoke, dense but no flame. But both of Goon Green’s shoes were on fire. Not so that Green noticed. Backwater Mercury blasted down by antiaircraft rounds.

  “Look down,” said Bell.

  “Why? Well just fuck it.” He stomped himself left and right. Success at last. “Now what danger to my person were we talking about.”

  “Petraeus. A man who does what he says.”

  “I would put it another way. Say this: With what I know I can bury the both of you. You drunks can’t wait to tell a secret. Mr. Petraeus ought to kill you for starters.”

  “He really doesn’t care that much. But he won’t stand for mockery. This is twice now. The armory at Millington, maybe Hattiesburg, too.”

  “Didn’t I ever tell you the fact our government military is just plain stupid. Sure, you’ve got your experts. They move shit around and make noise. But they lose things and steal things right and left. You’ve got majors simpler than a cow, and a cow’s not good at anything but hiding her calf.”

  “So you stole from then blew the sides out of two armories.”

  “Impossible. I’ve got witnesses I was nowhere near, whenever they went off.”

  “But you made me read the pages. The point was? Was any jackass who can move a mouse can build a bomb. And
you’re in the big league now. But I asked you before. Where’s the joy? What makes you put a foot on the floor when you wake from the bed?”

  “Like you with booze? The next drink?”

  “Like me with booze, with art, with Max. My woman. My dear uncle. Really good raisin bran at midnight after a bender.”

  “What a list. Somebody might mistake you for busy.”

  “They’re not going to mistake you for breathing if you don’t stop. Now give me Uncle Ray’s money.”

  “No can do, not now. Your unc gets nothing if any harm comes to me. And both of you get bad, bad assfucking big houses.”

  Bell stood sodden with alcoholic sweat that made his suit feel heavy and absurd, a deep-diving outfit with globe head, lead pants. At once he felt the ghost of violent corn-holing in all this gear, weighted perfectly for bitches of the pen. He was out in his Porsche speeding up to leave the precincts.

  At this moment a belch of fire raised most of an unpowered plane over the radio shack so you could see it over the smooth-lawned north hill whose south descended to a line of hangars for the new jet port. The explosion was terrific but seemed to be without human consequence. Bell was so used to exploding churches behind him and deaf from vodka he remarked it not at all.

  No screams played out. The accident seemed to raise no further interest than a random column of swamp gas. Bell was far into his own land and recited as one hypnotized several facts from the pages he’d just seen in Green’s house.

  “Napalm . . . invented by Harvard president James Conant and colleagues at MIT Dupont, and Standard Oil . . . mixing napthenic and palmitic acids with gasoline produced a Vaseline-like yellow paste . . . burned slowly, stuck to materials . . . could not be put out. Water only splattered this jellied gasoline . . . hit the side of an edifice, run down it, find every opening until it consumed itself.”*

  Green, like any nondrinker after nearly a full bottle, had sprawled out cold in his “study” recliner, smelling of burned leather, his brogans, still smoking, pages spread over his lap and strewn all over the room. The unreconciled gonad had crept out the slit of his jockeys again. The liquor bottle clutched by its neck as in a lewder Norman Rockwell village hearth-warmer. His woman then stood over him. The hang of Green’s hammer was no less a thrill and she knew secrets he guessed she didn’t, despite the mumblings to Tico and Rez. She was frightened seeing him drunk the first time and by the close explosion over the hill he had slept through. She was a woman slightly more handsome than rough-edged, spoke proper English, knew how to dress and show her long legs in slitted skirts that made Goon and other men hot around the forehead and lap. What she looked upon, in his shorts and burned shoes, was not a feast of love unless she followed his lead and poured down the whole bottle.