by Barry Hannah
She was needing Raymond less and this would go on, but she loved him. They could walk together like a pair of face cards. It did not frighten her that their love was sometimes dead. It would come back and surprise you. She was fierce for loyalty.
Now she parted the limbs of the wild magnolia and froze at the sight of two skeletons sitting in the soil watching her. She did not hear the six males whispering not far behind them. Ulrich, Jacob, Isaac, Sponce, Carl Bob Feeney, his nephew Egan. Choir of voyeurs? Hunters? Lake idiots? They could be tourists spying on this cottage haunted by its terrors and chaos. Rude bastards. Where was the woman nailed to the wall? Where did the graveyard witch sleep?
She gave a yelp for Raymond and shut her eyes. When she opened them, she saw every male coming forward through holly hedges and giant ferns to assure her with their kindest apologies. Hurt on their faces. Max Raymond now right behind her with the stupid mistletoe rifle. Everything absurd was borne by this ministry, like a strange rural basketball team that had lost its ball. The skeletons smelled too.
“I love you,” said small Jacob.
Mimi screamed again, but with less power.
“Lady, we ain’t—” Jacob was paralyzed by her scream and jumped backwards into some vines, struggling, feet tangled.
“We’re sorry we seen you naked.”
Not us, the adults thought together.
“We tried not to look.”
“I don’t care whether the children. . . . Who are you?”
She lowered herself before the two boys now standing together. She would not look at the skeletons. When Raymond saw them, he chambered a round. The skulls with their stunned hilarity. Arms resting on the soil. Now the wiring job obvious, coat hangers. Done with pliers. This was the empty swamp she had been singing to without knowing. All this lively rot. Mimi went back to the cottage and grabbed her robe off the porch rail.
“We don’t know,” said Egan. “These bones have nothing to do with any of us. The boys put them together with wire. I’m a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ.” She’d already heard from Raymond about the tattoo of the cross on the man’s cheek.
“Were you hunched down here listening to me or waiting for me to have a heart attack when I saw these dead bodies?”
“Please, lady. We meant good.”
“They did. They told me,” said Sponce. He was seeking the level of maturity, at least to that of Egan of the cross and gray ponytail. At least a trustable ass.
“We sharing these folks, but they ain’t ours. The sheriff can call up north and get us a reward,” said small Jacob.
“That’s not a good idea, little boy,” said Egan. He had been sweating mightily even before this conversation.
The boys now hunkered. She could barely perceive they were waddling toward her. Raymond shared lust for vision with the eldest, Ulrich. She saw they were fascinated by her black curls. Her Cuban Florida face. They wore her shirts, but she didn’t notice. Blanched coffee beans with faces on them, these boys. No Indian or black. Small earnest Ulstermen looking for a mother and her music.
She began singing, incredibly, facing away from them all but facing Max Raymond and his weapon, lowered. The song was about a baby, the mountain and the sea. She sang it quietly, but there were high notes that made the boys quiver. At the end Jacob reached over to touch her wrist. She held his hand. The three of them walked toward her kitchen. Isaac and Sponce knew they weren’t meant to follow.
She had become used to the smells out here. It was no longer only decay but richer life, she understood. Soldiers, slaves, Indians, lost women, all under her in the earth. Same as Cuba, with a crown of living creatures and fat vegetation on it.
She had once sung a song taken from the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho.
Summer grasses,
Where soldiers dreamed.
Now she sang that one to her new swamp acolytes, rapt twice over for being nearly in her face. She sat on the back steps after feeding them ham and Gouda on French bread with mayonnaise and a tall bottle of orange soda pop. Spanish words, Japanese thoughts, for these elves of Confederate trash. Sister singing away the last days of her youth.
Raymond had gone back inside and was sleeping. The preacher Egan had hung around for a reason unclear to her. He went back and forth to and through the border of tree arches, unseen at the foot of the swamp.
Raymond suddenly knew it was time to return to the bad restaurant and then his ache for visions would be satisfied. The bad restaurant would stay when only zombies prevailed. It served food for the dead, tired fishermen and humble vacationers worsened the instant they sat down and had the bad water. Thousands like it at state lines, watering holes in the great western deserts, far-flung Idaho and Maine. Their owners say, “We just couldn’t help it, we were food people. We never said good food people.”
Raymond was in the pawnshop looking at a delightful saxophone and about to buy it when the feeling hit him. What he would see and be transformed by was right next door to his own cottage, not out in the fars, the wides, the bars or churches. He put the saxophone down and within seconds saw a shadow pass the shop. It was a man hobbling and slurring the few words he could manage, and Raymond was positive it was Mimi’s old ex, what was left of him after the suicide attempt in Vicksburg, rolling and pitching up Market and the pawns to find Raymond. He went out to the walk and saw nothing but a red car leaving, and he followed it in his own. Mimi was in Miami singing with another band for a couple of weeks. He was alone. He knew this was right. He had not eaten for two days, for no good reason. The moment was pressing.
A zombie had just waited on him in the pawnshop, a man who stood there remarking on the history of this saxophone. In apparently good health, in decent clothes and well groomed, polite, but quite obviously dead and led by someone beyond. You look at them and know they are spaces ahead into otherness. Not adolescent either, that natural Teutonic drifting or the sullenness without content. They might still be people, but unlikely.
Everything about the zombie is ravaged except his obsession, thought Raymond, following the red car. Dead to every other touch. They simply imitate when there is movement or sound. They imitate the conversations around them to seem human to one another. He had seen them in scores from the airports to the bandstands imitating one another, mimicking the next mimicker in no time, no space, no place, no history.
The bad restaurant even had bad-food loungers and loiterers, hard to shake when they got a good imitation of you going. The restaurant with its RESTAURANT sign. Its mimicking of the dining life, yet no edible food, bad water and a weak tea to go with that. Refill that beige for you, sir? Every dish served in contempt for what used to be human. Rations for an unannounced war.
Because as Mimi Suarez’s grandfather said, When you eat well, you are eating memory. But here for a few cents less, you could eat no life at all. You could eat as much history as just ended in the kitchen, cooked in spite at great speed by an inmate of dead dreams. A sort of hospital food with more dread in it.
Oh yes, mambo, salsa, shake that tree, bitch, let them coconuts of yours fall down. Max Raymond heard the man in the crowd watching Mimi in Miami right then. Each heavy command resounded in his head. He’d never experienced anything like this before.
The red car was indeed heading for the lake, through Redwood, the low fields and waters. Grim bluster of new black clouds in the west. This was storm country. Vicksburg, 1959, a tornado came through, tore out half the town, created new lakes, killed scores. He watched breaths circle a lawn, lifting the leaves of a collapsed muscadine arbor. The smell somewhere as if lightning had opened a melon, electrified sperm. He thought of the hot grease pitched on the honeysuckle by a zombie of the restaurant’s kitchen. In a meadow he caught a wave of dead-fish smell. Oh, the Onward cemetery. Called There Now. Har.
He was closer to rot and birth with every mile. This place was lodges, bulks of mobile homes, old trailer villages where fugitive creatures abided. Modern doctors did not vac
ation here anymore, nor modern anybody much, although the fishing was good. The town would ghost out in a bad fishing season, a hot spell, and the loneliness left behind could hurt you physically in the eyes. Long tubal aches to the grand home of migraine and hot rain at noon. The doctors took their families skiing in the West or to the Islands, where they mimicked life as best they could with the new big money. The wives haggard from hanging on to beauty.
Max Raymond realized all of a sudden he had very little doctor money left. It was nearly all saxophone money now. Or Coyote money. Not too bad. He would buy the house and make the landlord happy that its haunted memories would stay in good hands. His life, this place where something was. The red car? A boomerang on the curves now, all red.
Fifteen miles behind him, Vicksburg, city of the bluffs. Gilbraltar of the West at one time. Now into these casinos dime-store Legbas bid the weak and bored come in. See the man with the wonderful saxophone! Illuminations of the bridge over Louisiana at night. Capitulant city! Shops crying deeds and titles for cash. Children out at the orphans’ camp because their parents were for sale without buyers. Drugs, car wrecks.
Lightning loved the swamp. The willows thrashed now where all the souls of dead bad poets roamed day and night. In their big sprawling cottage, what good storms Mimi and he watched together. Popping those souls that cannot die but must return to open-microphone poetry slams against an adjacent junior college. Catering by the bad restaurant. Pop, a soul in bliss for just seconds thinks it has actually died and is moving away somewhere beyond this green echo chamber. No such luck, only the cynical lightning.
Raymond had one model for a poet-warrior such as himself and his Mossberg. Or just forget the rifle. Be a man, use your new long-barrel .38, stuffed in the trousers. You go by even the orphans’ camp, there’s the mass popping of firearm training now. Nobody can touch them. It’s a legitimate sport. Then the thud of the bigger stuff. The lunatic couple ride horses now. The .38, you’ve got to be good. No real stopping power, no scatter-shooting. His model was a man he visited in the veterans’ hospital, a nationally honored poet, mad and with his shoes on contrariwise. The poet’s son in middle age said he had suffered all this while for being a man. He now wanted a woman operation. And as a woman he desired other women. His father the old poet could not understand.
Why was madness ever thought to be a transcendent state? What idiot waited how long around the raving to decide this? It was the nastiest and saddest condition Raymond had seen. The man had suffered Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Saipan. He wrote long electric poems, or tried, like an ecstatic writing in sand with a pickax, or something like that, a reviewer said. But then real madness drove him to real madness. Worse, perhaps the son wanted to change into the mother so he could at last have her. And on and on. How can life take this turn? Raymond himself still felt depressed by his short visit. His pity, his terror, his absolute disgust. But the poems. Were they worth the cost?
He caught up to the red car pulling out of the gravel lot of the little church, continuing around the lake toward the restaurant. Raymond drove up to the window with its stained glass raised to prevent explosion during the storm. Egan was leaning out, watching the sky. Then he looked at Raymond in his car window. Egan had a bloody face and he pointed. Raymond got out the .38 and drove back to the road, but not before he heard a quartet of trombones behind Egan in the church, playing sweetly and importantly some sacred number, oblivious to both the storm and Egan. He seemed to have gotten his cuts leaning out the window.
Raymond was chilled, but he drove on. Some kill for Christ, he reflected, and cannot be Christian but are Christ’s allies. They can never have close communion, only quiet thanks. They do not have visions. They have war.
He touched the pistol, then thought further about Christian soldiers. They live in a dream amid the valley bottoms of tall white pines, live and river oaks, palm trees, palmettos, wild magnolia. They live in a dream between paradise and purgatory. They sleep on hard thin mattresses. They sit down to dinner in the bad restaurant, today with its blue plate special of frozen prefloured meat, gummy white bread and gravy made from cut-rate mushroom soup in giant industrial drums. There should be pictures of ambiguous fiends through history on the wall, all dead by the efforts of the Christian soldiers. Every meal as they wait for the battle, somebody looks at dinner and says, “I’ve had worse.”
Raymond thought. Separation from Christ through murder for him.
But in his mind he saw again the church in the dell and heard the sweet trombone chorus chording through the window. “Nearer My God to Thee” was the tune.
On the barge that afternoon, Melanie and Dee and several men, including Sidney, began a tradition of meditation on the lake. The pontoon boat was both museum and church afloat, by far the most elegant hand-built craft on these waters, which opened as they went through the lock into a new reservoir.
The first meditation was to be led by Melanie, with comment from others as the rest of church. Essentially, they were floating Unitarians. Facetto was aboard for the first time, his and Melanie’s love in plain sight. Dr. Harvard was having a very hard time. Melanie was unconscious of this. They anchored in a cove. She stood at the wheel on the captain’s box.
Harvard introduced her. “Today’s meditation will be read by Melanie Wooten, a changed woman who now shares an altered worldview.” Harvard did not know about the tongue in the car window, so he did not understand Melanie. But she had a new sadness that Harvard liked, because her careering with this confident young lawman was not right.
Dee Allison and her little girl stood wearing church dresses, but they tended to recede from the group in uneasy shyness. The little girl was fine, but Dee had never been among dressed boat crowds and felt diminished by the blazers and Melanie’s smart suit.
“‘There was the snow, and her watch ticking. So many snowflakes, so many seconds. As time passed they seemed to mingle in their minds, heaping up into a vast shape that might be a burial mound, or the cliff of an iceberg whose summit is out of sight. Into its shadow dreams crowded, full of conception and stirrings of cold, as if ice floes were moving down a lightless channel of water. They were going further into darkness, allowing no suggestion that their order should be broken, or that one day however many years distant, the darkness would give place to light.
“‘Yet their passage was not saddening. Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them. Crying out against their implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep.’
“That was a selection from A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin,” said Melanie softly.
“Nice,” said Carl Bob Feeney, less insane than last week.
“I disagree,” said Sidney. He rose from a director’s chair near a side pew. “And I need a drink.” Sidney had taken to mixing Stolichnaya vodka with orange juice for his health. He had affected this weeks ago.
“Disagree?”
“Number one, it ain’t about me, or nothin’. It’s about snow and some time shit.” He looked down at Emma, the child.
“Any other thoughts?” asked Harvard.
“Well I’d like to know who she thinks she is,” said Wren.
“You mean the girl in that passage?” asked Melanie.
“No. You. ‘Unsatisfied dreams crying out against their implacability’ or such. Who the hell you think we are, schoolkids you’re trying to impress? You’re implying you go around the house saying implacability often? Ever? Or hoping many of us dumbos wouldn’t get it? Why, I understand the word quite well. And I find you and the author posing asses. Christ, I thought we’d get some Robert Frost or something. This is worse than Faulkner.”
Melanie was stunned.
Another man, Ulrich, wanted to speak. “You need to change again from wherever you’ve changed. You would have us think anybody gives a damn what white people think anymore. They are the killers of seals, baby seals, by clubbing.
They shoot polar bears just because they’re there. What do these creatures think about our thoughtful moaning?”
“That’s not fair,” said Facetto. “It was a meditation to invite thought. It wasn’t her own writing.”
“She didn’t read it because she hated it,” said Wren.
“Maybe she read it because she ain’t getting enough dick,” said Sidney. You would not know he was drunk until he went suddenly about it at the drop of a dime.
Many turned. But nobody called down Sidney. He seemed satisfied. Statement, vodka, orange juice, his tweed vested suit, everything.
Melanie tried, but she could not help weeping the rest of the day. The sheriff left her early.
Sidney led a disordered party far into the night. Whores were still coming aboard at nine P.M. Large orphans mingled with them, and Minny and Sandra, now fifteen, had on backless cocktail dresses. John Roman and his wife, Bernice, who had not been out in weeks, were aboard celebrating the end of chemotherapy and the beginning of remission. The launch rocked. Chet Baker was heard in the middle of it all, though he was not a noisy man. The pier lit up with fireworks or gunplay. You couldn’t be sure. Harvard’s hair became disarrayed. He waded in the cove and cursed and howled, holding a bottle of Jack Daniels aloft, baying at the moon. All this practically in Melanie’s backyard that Sunday night.
“The best thing about dogs and kids,” Ulrich cried out near the end, feverishly intoxicated, “is they ain’t going anywhere. They’re already there!”
He dandled Emma the cherub on his knee, breathing tortuously, from the emphysema, in long tugs and seekings of his lungs. This angel was not frightened of Ulrich. She thought he was a train. Then one of the fifteen-year-olds took the baby girl in her own arms, saying, “Oh, this one’s coming home with me!” At one time Melanie pressed her nose against her own windowpane, watching down the hill in miserable incredulity.