by Barry Hannah
The animals are in ecstasy even when they are eaten, Ulrich was telling Carl Bob Feeney. They stayed in Ulrich’s cottage or on the barge now, setting out short distances and tying up. All were sympathetic with the two except Sidney and Wren. Sidney felt the ex-priest had turned into a dog and belonged in Onward or jail. Wren’s position was that this fugitive situation would bring more law in, and you had one point in life, to get more law out. Egan, the nephew, was looking for his uncle still and keeping up his animals, himself verging toward feral because pursued by the vig.
So Ulrich and Carl Bob slept sometimes on the pews of the pontoon boat, sometimes in the unlighted basement of Ulrich’s house, sometimes in a single room in the rear of the doctor’s cabin. Harvard had threatened Sidney’s life if he revealed their whereabouts to anybody. Carl Bob Feeney might not have been the choicest seer at the lake, and Ulrich, now his secretary general, was just bogus guff mostly, but they were the only prophets they had now. Sidney threatened the doctor’s life back, but he was too busy running his old man’s store now and not doing that badly. He had a car, one of the new Chrysler PT Cruisers, a silver heartwarming car for anybody in love with the sixties Volvo coupe and forties grillwork.
One night when Egan was serving a prayer meeting at Rolling Fork, Ulrich helped Feeney break in his own house and steal his gun back, along with clothes including his old vestments, which he intended to put to new use. Feeney would not go to Onward if he could help it.
Ulrich would frequently stop talking and go quiet like a thief who had forgotten his mission. Carl Bob Feeney was a good listener because he was hearing himself now, in different words. They did not humanize animals, Ulrich and Carl Bob. They wanted to learn their language, and how indeed they had kept going despite depression, despair, even suicide. For instance, it is well known if a fire dog finds too many human corpses in the rubble, it will become inconsolable and stop looking. What of the amazing quality of forgiveness in animals? It broke your heart. Carl Bob often wept, but it did not weaken him. He had different kinds of weeping, some of it murderous, some of it clearly insane, a long purr-howl that frightened Ulrich.
“We are damned, but that is the way of the way. If you choose, you are damned somewhere else. We are deficient because we are tired of people. Bosnia, Ethiopia, Kosovo, the AIDS horror. We were not supposed to know so much despair at once. It has killed feeling for others. We are ready for the New Testament to be about dogs, monkeys, cheetahs. Ulrich, you must know we hate ourselves and accept it as right. The first thing you have to give up in belief is being admired and a friend to man. ‘Hail fellow well met’ is not a description down south, it is the vocation of most of the South. It has ruined it. We have lost something precious, Ulrich, and you must, must acknowledge this. We just don’t give a shit. Machines started it, but we finished the job. How is it possible a man could sit and read an average newspaper without attacking at least twenty people directly? Know that we are dangerous zealots now. Not just animal lovers.”
Ulrich had fallen asleep, but before he did, he was agreeing with what Feeney was saying. Then he awoke and they had a cup of fine dark coffee made on the hot plate of the steerage cabin. The coffee was too good here in the night. Ulrich brought some cigarettes out from a locker and they both lit up these Camels. He shouldn’t, but the night, the coffee, the ripple of the water and slap of bass.
“Most animals live a short while,” said Ulrich, “but I had a revelation. That we cannot know the intensity of their lives, which is hundreds of times more attuned than ours. They don’t talk because they don’t need speech. A dog, when it puts its head out a car window, smells almost everything in a county, a world we never even suspect and have no description for. That is why I am daft. I have flown and smelled the smells, Carl Bob. I have known life by my nose. That’s why the dog looks so ecstatic sniffing in the wind. They smell a thousand times more than we do. We could only know it as hallucinatory sense. Dogs are in space and time. We can only know one or the other, plodding, toddling. Not to mention hearing. And taste. Water is fifty times more delicious to them. We must not pity them, a cheap passive hobby. They live huge lives before they die. Watch how happy sleep is to them, and right next to waking. They live both at once. We are predators of not only meat but of essence, my friend. We want to be them because they have spoken to us without speaking and we can hardly bear their superiority.” Now Carl Bob had fallen asleep, the lit Camel in one hand, the coffee in the other. It was by the glow of their cigarettes that Egan found them and waded out the short way to the barge.
They were both startled by the voice from a man standing above them on the planks of the stern, just ahead of the engines. “I’m so tired, Uncle Carl Bob, chasing you. How could you doubt I loved you? How can you wear me out this way? Who is your friend?”
“I’m Ulrich. Son, he can’t go with you. We heard about your sermon. You said you had to find him and help him. But you’ve found him and you mean to follow him, don’t you?”
“I’m worn out with the dogs and cats. Come on home, please. I can’t do it by myself. Nobody can. I love them too much. I can’t get nothin’ else done. I can’t stand for one to get hurt or left out, great or small, I’m goin’ round huggin’ ’em and pettin’ ’em and cooin’ over ’em. I’m a silly ass. I’m in trouble with God. I’m in trouble for some old bodies. I’m preachin’ bad. And let me tell you, somebody broke in the house.”
“That was us, son,” said Ulrich. “We needed some things. And we needed protection. I agreed with your uncle.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I knew who that was. This person left something square in the middle of the front room. They didn’t take anything.”
“Left something?”
“A football.”
“Why?”
“It was sitting on top of the Edwards newspaper about some game a few weeks back where somebody in the men’s room got his face nigh cut off.”
“I saw the old bodies, the old bones myself,” said Carl Bob.
“You’ve got to stop that. Somebody’ll hear and haul you off. You couldn’t have seen the bodies. They were in a car underwater till a sinkhole took the water out.”
“I don’t mean underwater. I mean behind the doctor’s house. I looked out the window at night and there were two skeletons and some little boys sitting beside them like in church.”
“That’s right. He told me,” added Ulrich. “Three nights ago when the girl was singing on the back porch. Some animals come up too. Two deers, a bear, a ghost of a orangutan.”
“No orangutans,” said Carl Bob.
It suddenly occurred to Egan that his uncle looked like Basil Rathbone and Ulrich looked like an elderly Mortimer Snerd. Then the name Mortimer passed through him.
Roman was riding his motorbike with Melanie Wooten clasped behind him. These were grave times, but they were not sure how grave. Roman’s wife waited for more tests. Basal cell lymphoma. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which wasn’t too bad. But she had begun bleeding, masses had shown. She was up and about but weak, and they had her in the chemo now. Roman did not know what to do with disease. Except for his wounds, his wife and he had been healthy and they were not old and they had done nothing much dissipating or poisonous. He smoked a little. She could eat a great deal without gaining, and she liked two stiff drinks of Maker’s Mark now and again. Melanie had helped as she could, but Bernice Roman did not take to help, although she was pleasant enough. The woman acted distinctly outraged by her luck, as if still misdiagnosed.
This was not as much fun as Melanie expected, but it was trouble of a sort that she still wanted. She had never had a black friend, and she thought it ridiculous that she could die without having this man as one. He liked her and reminded Melanie of early playmates in Texas. But she wondered if there were any left around the lake who might shoot them. She was so tired of race. She was warier since the destruction of the glass animals. The world with that person out in it, wild and needy and ugly.
A m
an stood in the road, just a man alone. He was staring at her and Roman, but a flat field suddenly interested him and she couldn’t see a car. They came to a little bridge over a creek after passing the man, and the motorbike wobbled on twelve-by-twelves. You didn’t want to catch a tire between them. But then they shook as a car came up behind them. She turned and watched as a Lexus SUV neared them. The windows were smoked. Roman drove to the right to let it pass, but the Lexus stopped when they were abreast the front passenger door. Roman drove around it across the road to his left to force a decision, but it passed them. Roman stopped. Holding the motorbike between his spread sandaled feet. Melanie tapped him on the shoulder to show the Lexus had stopped with them.
Nobody opened the door. The sun glare off it was hot. You could see the car as the house of whatever your mind held. The people inside were not visible, so you guessed many and not one. The elevation and headroom were preposterous even for a large rich fool. Still it sat blind, dumb, glaring. The whole world was the gravel and this vehicle. Roman got off the bike and kickstanded it. The two of them walked up to the window, a bright maw next to opening but not. There was some activity behind the smoke. It was a human tongue circling the glass, licking and sucking it. They could see nothing except the mouth working dimly. But the glass went down inches, and Man Mortimer looked over the top of the window at them. Devoid of expression, yanked-in tongue, flat, overall. The rearview reflected the ones in the back who did not know they were revealed. It was old Sidney without his shirt, very mottled and speckled, silvered concave chest. Marcine and Bertha, the car-lot girl, were working on him.
Then the glass rose and stopped the view. The Lexus went off at urgent speed.
“That’s a lot of car,” said John Roman, “to be fucking with you. I’m sorry I said that, but—”
They knew well who the backseat lovebird was, but it took minutes to get their three or four images of Mortimer together. These still did not make one man, because they had little but a forehead and a mouth. Old Sidney perched right in the love nest, at ease in the rearview mirror. He could enjoy his money and new friendship, a major change from his old man. The shamelessness of it shook Melanie, the ugliness. But she who with Facetto . . . it was not good to pursue this concept. The SUV all black and swollen, it hurried as if recently parted from a gathering of its fellows in a wealthier country.
It was getting hard to have innocent fun. All seemed driven toward a calculated nightmare. The football game, Pepper, poor Bernice with her cancer, the tongue in a fretting black ghoul of a car.
They never rode the motorbike together again. She missed the touch of Roman’s fat shoulders. She had never felt the war wounds beneath his shirt, as she suspected she might.
The pleasant day erased by that thing on the window of the Lexus.
It occurred to her how many motions people made to simply present themselves to a window, a mirror, a sea of nobodies. These groomings, pulling straight the pants, licking a finger for the hair out of place. She had heard these all were movements of those before execution. Why else so circumspect? Your first impression on the gallows.
John Roman thought. He fished with a spinning rod. He had delayed the pleasure of artificial bait–casting deliberately until he retired. Times were wretched in many ways. Bernice and cancer, tongue on window, old men on the run from relatives for loving animals too much and learning to talk with the beasts, a grown white man shrieking with a sound that should not be heard when he stumbled close to snakes in the willows. But you could get as good a spinning reel and rod as the pros for cheap at Big Mart, against which there was no competition. The local fishing-supply stores didn’t even attempt it but went rather for a fishing class that imagined itself temporarily detained by Mississippi until it could get to the glossy lakes and streams in magazine photographs at the doctor’s office.
Roman fished long and guiltily because Bernice did not want him home fretting about her condition. She’d lost some weight and looked even more Indian now. Perhaps the last trace of the Natchez tribe. He was another sort of Indian partly, Chickasaw, lost in the South.
Melanie was on his mind, how she was doing. He hadn’t fished close to her house for a while. She was a friend in a panic to live, and he didn’t want to be her instructor. Life itself was not much of an instructor but more like the fits of a runaway child. It would shock you with depravity and staggering kindness within the same hour. If you could get used to that, you might learn, but life itself didn’t especially want to follow up on anything.
It was his own time alone with his memories. The wash through the head, a wash of half-stories, peace and war. No screaming or banging or outer noise, just this steady action, floats of rooms and lamps, rolling of women like happy seabirds riding the first of the storm waves. No radio, no beer, but you sat there on a bucket and collected them all.
Nobody had the right to touch the stories, the pictures, the silence. That was your due. Nobody could enter. No government was here. No phone calls, no mail, no knocks on the door. You saw old men on benches and you pitied them for all bereft, but you were wrong. They had the time of their life. The deaf ones even more so. Inside and away. They were inside a pure dream.
Roman resembled his grandfather on his mother’s side, a man struck blind by a train in his sixties. The old man sat in the chair grinning. Roman couldn’t recall a whine or complaint from him. As if he had crashed up safe somewhere, the water of an ocean bathing his feet. You would go to him for a memory and he spoke it.
Melanie was a fine lady but didn’t have enough stories in her, ones of her own. She borrowed from him. This was not so much too late as just impossible. If you couldn’t sit without stirring into somebody else’s life at age seventy-two, you had either bad stories or too few of them. When you had too few stories, you went mad. When you had only one, they took you away to the asylum until you got more.
The army had been a long mistake, but he could let that go. Somebody must be there as the platoon’s old animal and it was him. Sergeant major, watching West Point, Virginia Military and Citadel killed over and over. He regretted he was not a singing jazz-trumpet man like Chet Baker, but somebody had to be there regretting too. The army would rise up and grab you because it was vacant. You went to it young when even an army barracks was something fresh. The place filled you, or the unplace of it. Then you got wise enough to live. Others came close to you wanting to live also.
Roman hooked into something large and squirming. All his evenings contracted into this sweet emergency. Muscles underwater struggling against your arms, the line alive down to your belly and the butt of the new rod, Shakespeare the brand, answering. It had to be a cat, very big. As clear a gift as anything in the world. If he were a preacher, he would say that fish was God’s mercy. You never got closer to it than above the water for a long, long time. Here, bringing it home like a lost friend.
When he was young he cursed fish as he pulled them in. He no longer did. That was evil, stupid, greedy. Should lose your thumbs for it. For your mean and larcenous spirit. Now he loved this fishing peace above all things. He had not once been let down, even when nothing came home for him. The stories inside had been better over green water.
At the mouth of another cove near the bad restaurant, the one that he called Gristle and Sons with Cold Beer, he saw a pale-faced but arm- and shoulder-burned cracker bounced up and wallowing on a Jet Ski, a horrible and noi-some bully of a water motorcycle built in spite for the northern snowmobile, on which other punks roared and beheaded themselves on fence wire. The boy was doing about fifty over Roman’s quiet water. The wash from the machine was immense into the shallows, whipping water weeds and terrifying minnows and young bass toward Roman. The big catfish rolled in behind this local storm. Roman cursed the ski and saluted this bully. Old whiskered heavyweight at last snatched from its appetites. At last we meet. It was too big to be succulent, and he was glad to let it go after petting it.
When he turned to the lake again and threw his
nightcrawlers and light sinker toward a stranded bough on a black strip of deep, he hoped he would not see another living soul, and he didn’t. Heard only the distant nagging whine of the ski.
The cracker Sponce was on the far side of the lake, seeking other audiences. A mad Protestant in a cathedral too green and black and silent for him, bent on fouling these spaces with the great I am.
EIGHT
THE COYOTE WAS IN HER COTTAGE BACKYARD SINGING to the edges of the swamp. She was naked in her solitude with nature. She sometimes saw deer and raccoon coming up to hear. And a thickage of squirrels, red and fox and gray. She saw mistletoe high on a dead post-oak limb and wanted it for her hair. She hated guns, but Raymond shot the mistletoe down for her with his newly confessed Mossberg. Now she had it in the hair above her ear.
The Coyote was much like John Roman. The young should have been seeking her instruction, but it was Raymond after her, and sometimes hard, wanting evermore an answer to her easy talents, her simple life. Still doing homework for his soul in his forties. His nervous dissertation.
He was a late-blooming prodigy on the saxophone. She could not read music much but she knew. Grant him that, even though he bought the band and managed it toward himself almost unintentionally. He had somehow gotten good through pure want. Triumph of his burnt doctor’s will. It was a puzzle why he played certain needy and vicious ways, or would even want to, like a tomcat dragging away from a long fight down an alley. Imprecations, hisses, mewlings, threats. Why develop this style when there were so many others?
They put something called a jellyball in horses’ stables to give them something to do. Or they put chickens, goats or radios in their stalls to be their friends, or a Jack Russell terrier. Otherwise they would get bored and kick themselves lame. Hurt others, bite. Maybe she was Raymond’s jellyball. And he needed another too, his talking saxophone. But who would not? Standing alone drives most mad in a single week. Look at Castro’s and Stalin’s prisoners. Mimi was on the right, happily and with great health. Her talent was committed on the day the Iron Curtain fell. She felt new lightness in her voice, the old gray seriousness with its laws left her. Her dispossessed grandparents were mocked in Havana for once having money and an ink factory. She could spit twenty feet across the room into the eye of a communist.