Airships

by Barry Hannah

  “Asshole of the mountains.” He was saying something like that. “Fortune’s ninny.”

  “Hi, General. My French isn’t too good. You speak English. Honor us.”

  He wouldn’t say anything.

  “You have a lot of courage, running out front with the tanks.” There were some snickers in the bush, but I cut them out quick. We had a real romantic here and I didn’t want him laughed at. He wasn’t hearing much, though. About that time two of their rockets flashed into the woods. They went off in the treetops and scattered.

  “It was worthy of Patton,” I said. “You had some bad luck. But we’re glad you made it alive.”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  “You want your hands free? Oliver, get his ropes off the tree.” The guy I beat up cut him off the tree.

  “You scared us very deeply. How many tanks do you have over there?”

  “Nonsense,” he said.

  “What do you have except for a few rockets?”

  “I had no credence in the phosphorus gun.”

  “Your men saw us use them when we landed.”

  “I had no credence.”

  “So you just came out to see.”

  “I say to them never to fear the machine when the cause is just. To throw oneself past the technology tricks of the monsters and into his soft soul.”

  “And there you will win, huh?”

  “Of course. It is our country.” He smiled at me. “It’s relative to your war in the nineteenth century. The South had slavery. The North must purge it so that it is a healthy region of our country.”

  “You were out in the tank as an example to your men?”

  “Yes!”

  All this hero needed was a plumed hat.

  “Sleep well,” I said, and told Oliver to get him a blanket and feed him, and feed the tiny gunner with him.

  When we got back to my dump, I walked away for a while, not wanting to talk with Tubby. I started crying. It started with these hard sobs coming up like rocks in my throat. I started looking out at forever, across the field. They shot up three more rockets from the woods below the hill. I waited for the things to land on us. They fell on the tops of trees, nothing near me, but there was some howling off to the right. Somebody had got some shrapnel.

  I’d killed so many gooks. I’d killed them with machine guns, mortars, howitzers, knives, wire, me and my boys. My boys loved me. They were lying all around me, laying this great cloud of trust on me. The picture of John Whitelaw about to hit that ball at Augusta was jammed in my head. There was such care in his eyes, and it was only a golf ball, a goddamned piece of nothing. But it was wonderful and peaceful. Nobody was being killed. Whitelaw had the right. He had the beloved American right to the pursuit of happiness. The tears were out of my jaws then. Here we shot each other up. All we had going was the pursuit of horror. It seemed to me my life had gone straight from teen-age giggling to horror. I had never had time to be but two things, a giggler and a killer.

  Christ, I was crying for myself. I had nothing for the other side, understand that. North Vietnam was a land full of lousy little Commie robots, as far as I knew. A place of the worst propaganda and hypocrisy. You should have read some of their agitprop around Gon, talking about freedom and throwing off the yoke, etc. The gooks went for Communism because they were so ignorant and had nothing to lose. The South Vietnamese, too. I couldn’t believe we had them as allies. They were such a pretty and uniformly indecent people. I once saw a little taxi boy, a kid is all, walk into a Medevac with one arm and a hand blown off by a mine he’d picked up. These housewives were walking behind him in the street, right in the middle of Gon. Know what they were doing? They were laughing. They thought it was the most hysterical misadventure they’d ever seen. These people were on our side. These were our friends and lovers. That happened early when I got there. I was a virgin when I got to Nam and stayed a virgin, through a horde of B-girls, the most base and luscious-lipped hustlers. Because I did not want to mingle with this race.

  In an ARVN hospital tent you see the hurt officers lined up in front of a private who’s holding in his guts with his hands. They’ll treat the officer with a bad pimple before they treat the dying private. We’re supposed to be shaking hands with these people. Why can’t we be fighting for some place like England? When you train yourself to blow gooks away, like I did, something happens, some kind of popping returning dream of murder-with-a-smile.

  I needed away. I was sick. In another three months I’d be zapping orphanages.

  “Bobby, are you all right?” said Tubby, waddling out to the tree I was hanging on.

  “I shouldn’t ever’ve seen that picture of John Whitelaw. I shouldn’t’ve.”

  “Do you really think we’ll be famous?” Tubby got an enchanted look on him, sort of a dumb angel look in that small pretty face amid the fat rolls. It was about midnight. There was a fine Southern moon lighting up the field. You could see every piece of straw out there. Tubby, by my ass, had the high daze on him. He’d stepped out here in the boonies and put down his foot in Ozville.

  “This’ll get me Major, anyhow. Sure. Fame. Both of us,” I said.

  Tubby said: “I tried to get nice touches in with the light coming over his face. These pictures could turn out awfully interesting. I was thinking about the cover of Time or Newsweek.”

  “It’ll change your whole life, Tubby,” I said.

  Tubby was just about to die for love of fate. He was shivering.

  I started enjoying the field again. This time the straws were waving. It was covered with rushing little triangles, these sort of toiling dots. Our side opened up. All the boys came up to join within a minute and it was a sheet of lightning rolling back and forth along the outside of the woods. I could see it all while I was walking back to the radio. I mean humping low. Tubby must’ve been walking straight up. He took something big right in the square of his back. It rolled him up twenty feet in front of me. He was dead and smoking when I made it to him.

  “C’mon, I’ve got to get the pictures,” he said.

  I think he was already dead.

  I got my phosphorus shotgun. Couldn’t think of anything but the radio and getting it over how we were being hit, so we could get dragons—helicopters with fifty cals—in quick. The dragons are nice. They’ve got searchlights, and you put two of them over a field like we were looking at, they’d clean it out in half an hour. So I made it to the radio and the boys had already called the dragons in, everything was fine. Only we had to hold them for an hour and a half until the dragons got there. I humped up front. Every now and then you’d see somebody use one of the experimental guns. The bad thing was that it lit up the gunner too much at night, too much shine out of the muzzle. I took note of that to tell them when we got back. But the gun really smacked the gook assault. It was good for about seventy-five yards and hit with a huge circle burn about the way they said it would. The gooks’ first force was knocked off. You could see men who were still burning running back through the straw, hear them screaming.

  I don’t remember too well. I was just loitering near the radio, a few fires out in the field, everything mainly quiet. Copters on the way. I decided to go take a look at Li Dap. I thought it was our boys around him, though I didn’t know why. They were wearing green and standing up plain as day. There was Oliver, smoking a joint. His rifle was on the ground. The NVA were all around him and he hadn’t even noticed. There were so many of them—twenty or so—they were clanking rifles against each other. One of them was going up behind Oliver with a bayonet, just about on him. If I’d had a carbine like usual, I could’ve taken the bayoneteer off and at least five of the others. Oliver and Li Dap might’ve ducked and survived.

  But I couldn’t pick and choose. I hardly even thought. The barrel of the shotgun was up and I pulled on the trigger, aiming at the bayoneteer.

  I burned them all up.

  Nobody even made a squeak.

  There was a flare and they were gone.

&nbs
p; Some of my boys rushed over with guns. All they were good for was stomping out the little fires on the edges.

  When we got back, I handed over Tubby’s pictures. The old man was beside himself over my killing a general, a captured general. He couldn’t understand what kind of laxity I’d allowed to let twenty gooks come up on us like that. They thought I might have a court-martial, and I was under arrest for a week. The story got out to UPI and they were saying things like “atrocity,” with my name spelled all over the column.

  But it was dropped and I was pulled out and went home a lieutenant.

  That’s all right. I’ve got four hundred and two boys out there—the ones that got back—who love me and know the truth, who love me because they know the truth.

  It’s Tubby’s lost fame I dream about.

  The Army confiscated the roll and all his pictures. I wrote the Pentagon a letter asking for a print and waited two years here in Vicksburg without even a statement they received the note. I see his wife, who’s remarried and is fat herself now, at the discount drugstore every now and then. She has the look of a kind of hopeless cheer. I got a print from the Pentagon when the war was over and it didn’t matter. Li Dap looked wonderful—strained, abused and wild, his hair flying over his eyes while he’s making a statement full of conviction.

  It made me start thinking of faces again.

  Since I’ve been home I’ve crawled in bed with almost anything that would have me. I’ve slept with high-school teachers, Negroes and, the other night, my own aunt. It made her smile. All those years of keeping her body in trim came to something, the big naughty surprise that the other women look for in religion, God showing up and killing their neighbors, sparing them. But she knows a lot about things and I think I’ll be in love with her.

  We were at the John Whitelaw vs. Whitney Maxwell play-off together. It was a piece of wonder. I felt thankful to the wind or God or whoever who brought that fine contest near enough by. When they hit the ball, the sound traveled like a rifle snap out over the bluffs. When it was impossible to hit the ball, that is exactly when they hit it.

  My aunt grabbed hold of my fingers when the tension was almost up to a roar. The last two holes. Ah, John lost. I looked over the despondency of the home crowd.

  Fools! Fools!. I thought. Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it. Nobody was killed. We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful.

  Our Secret Home

  I threw a party, wore a very sharp suit. My wife had out all sorts of hors d’oeuvres, some ordered from long off—little briny peppery seafoods you wouldn’t have thought of as something to eat. We waited for the guests. Some of the food went bad. Hardly anybody came. It was the night of the lunar eclipse, I think. Underwood, the pianist, showed up and maybe twelve other people. Three I never invited were there. We’d planned on sixty-five.

  I guess this was the signal we weren’t liked anymore in town.

  Well, this had happened before.

  Several we invited were lushes who normally wouldn’t pass up cocktails at the home of Hitler. Also, there were two nymphomaniacs you could trust to come over in their highfashion halters so as to disappear around one in the morning with some new innocent lecher. We furthermore invited a few good dull souls who got on an occasional list because they were good and furnished a balance to the doubtful others. There was a passionate drudge in landscaping horticulture, for example.

  But none of them came.

  It was a hot evening and my air-conditioner broke down an hour before the party started.

  An overall wretched event was in the stars.

  Underwood came only for the piano. I own a huge in-tune Yamaha he cannot separate himself from. Late in the evening I like to join him on my electric bass.

  Underwood never held much for electric instruments. He’s forty-two, a traveler from the old beatnik and Charlie Parker tribe. I believe he thinks electric instruments are cowardly and unmanly. He does not like the basic idea of men joining talents with a wall socket. In the old days it was just hands, head and lungs, he says. The boys in the fifties were better all-around men, and the women were proud of being after-set quim.

  Underwood liked to play with this particular drummer, about his age. But that night the drummer didn’t show up, either. This, to my mind, was the most significant absentee at our party. That drummer had always come before. I thought he was addicted to playing with Underwood. So when Underwood had loosened up on a few numbers and the twelve of us had clapped and he came over for a drink, I asked him, “Why isn’t Fred Poor here?”

  “I don’t know. Fred’s got a big family now,” said Underwood.

  “He’s always come before. Last month. What’s wrong with tonight? Something is wrong with tonight,” I said.

  “The food’s good. I can remember twenty friends in the old days around Detroit who’d be grooving up on this table. You’d thank em for taking your food. That’s how solid they were,” said Underwood, drinking vodka straight off the ice and smelling at one of the fish hors d’oeuvres.

  I saw my wife go into the bathroom. I eased back with a greeting to the sweated-up young priest who had the reputation of a terrific sex counselor. He was out there with the great lyrical lie that made everybody feel good. Is that why he showed up and the others not? His message was that modern man had invented psychology, mental illness, the whole arrogant malaise, to replace the soul. Sex he called God’s rule to keep us simple and merry, as we were meant to be, lest we forget we are creatures and figure ourselves totally mental. One night I asked him what of Christ and Mary and the cult of celibacy. “Reason is, Mr. Lee, believe or disbelieve and let be,” he answered. “I’m only a goddamned priest. I don’t have to be smart or be a star in forensics.”

  He headed out for more bourbon, and I trucked on after my wife.

  I whispered in the bathroom keyhole and she let me in. She was rebuckling her sandal with a foot on the commode.

  “Why didn’t anybody come tonight? What do you think’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “I only know about why five aren’t here. Talked to Jill.” She paused. One of Carolyn’s habits is making you pose a question.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “The people Jill knew about said there was something about our life they didn’t like. It made them feel edgy and depressed.”

  “What?”

  “Jill wouldn’t ever say. She left right after she told me.”

  When I went out, there weren’t as many as before. Underwood was playing the piano and the priest was leaning on the table talking to one of the uninvited, a fat off-duty cop from about four houses up the row I’d wave to in the mornings when he was going out in his patrol car. Sitting down fanning herself was a slight old friend of my wife’s who had never showed up at our other parties. She was some sort of monument to alert age in the neighborhood—about eighty, open mind, colorful anecdotes, crepy skin, a dress over-formal and thick stockings.

  “Hi, Mrs. Craft,” I said.

  “Isn’t this a dreadful party? Poor Carolyn, all this food and drink. Which one’s her husband?” the old lady said.

  I realized maybe she’d never got a good look at me, or had poor eyes.

  “I really don’t know which one’s her husband. What would you say was wrong with them, the Lees? Why have people stayed away from their party?” I said.

  “I saw it happen to another couple once,” she said. “Everyone suddenly quit them.”

  “Whose fault was it?”

  “Oh, definitely theirs. Or rather his. She was congenial, similar to Carolyn. And everybody wanted a party. Oh, those gay sultry evenings!” She gave a delicate cough. “We invented gin and tonic, you know.”

  “What was wrong with the husband?” I asked.

  “He suddenly changed. He went bad. A handsome devil too. But we couldn’t stand him after the change.”

  “What sort of change?” I offered her the hearts of palm and the herring, which, I smelled, was ge
tting gamy in the heat. She ate for a while. Then she looked ill.

  “A change . . . I’ve got to leave. This heat is destroying me.”

  She rose and went out the kitchen, opening the door herself and leaving for good.

  Then I went back to the bathroom mirror. The same hopeful man with the sardonic grin was there, the same religious eyes and sensual mouth, sweetened up by the sharp suit and soft violet collar. I could see no diminution of my previous good graces. This was Washington and my vocation was interesting and perhaps even important. I generally tolerated everybody—no worms sought vent from my heart that I knew of. My wife and other women had said I had an unsettling charm.

  I got out the electric bass and played along with Underwood. But I noticed a baleful look from him, something he’d never revealed before. So I quit and turned off the amplifier. I took a hard drink of Scotch in a cup and opened a closet in my study, got in, shut the door, and sat down on all my old school papers and newspaper notices in the cardboard boxes in the corner.

  Here was me and the pitch dark, the odor of old paper and some of my outdoor clothes.

  How have I offended? I asked. How do I cause depression and edginess? How have I perhaps changed for the bad, as old Mrs. Craft hinted?

  By my cigarette lighter I read a few of the newspaper notices on me and my work. I looked at my tough moral face, the spectacles that put me at a sort of intellectual remove, the sensual mouth to balance it, abetted by the curls of my auburn hair. In fact, no man I knew looked nearly anything like me. My wife told me that when we first met at Vanderbilt my looks pure and simple were what attracted her to me. Yet I was not vain. She was a brown-haired comely girl, in looks like many other brown-haired comely girls, and I loved her for her strong cheerful averageness. Salt of the earth. A few minor talents. Sturdy womb for our two children.