by Barry Hannah
It was not her. It was me!
What have I done? I asked myself.
Then I heard heels on the stairs of my study. A pair was coming down, man and woman. They walked into the study and were silent for a while. Then I heard the sucking and the groans. For three or four minutes they must have kissed. Then:
“It’s not any good here.”
“I know. I feel it. Even sex wouldn’t be any good here.”
“You notice how all this good liquor tastes like iodine?”
They moaned and smacked a few more minutes. Then the man said, “Let’s get out of here.”
When they went away, I let myself out of the closet. Underwood was standing at my desk. He looked at me crawling out of the closet. I had nothing to say. Neither did he for a while.
Then he said, “I guess I better not come over anymore.”
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“The crazy . . . or off chick that lives upstairs that always comes down and leans on the piano about midnight every night? She’s good-looking, but she sets me off. I get the creeps.”
“Did she come down again? I guess it’s the piano. You ought to be flattered. Most of the time she sits up there in her chair reading.”
“Somebody said it was your sister. I don’t know. She looks like you. Got the same curly auburn hair. It’s like you with tits, if you think about it.”
“Well, of course it is my sister. For a while we had a reason for not telling that around. Trust me.”
“I trust you. But she makes my hair cold.”
“You loved all types back in the time of the beatniks. I always thought of you as a large-hearted person.”
“Something goes cold when she talks. I can’t get with the thing she’s after. For a while I thought she was far-out, some kind of philosopheress. But nothing hangs in in what she says.”
“She can have her moments. Don’t you think she has a certain charm?”
“No doubt on that, with her lungs dripping over her gown. But when she talks, well . . .” He closed his eyes in an unsatisfactory dreaming sort of trance.
“Can’t you see it? Can’t you see the charm?” I demanded.
“Whatever, it don’t sweeten me,” he said, setting down his glass.
He went out the study door.
There, leaning on the piano, in her perfect cobalt gown, was Patricia. She was waiting for Underwood. Near her, as I have intimated, I sometimes have no sense of my own petty mobility from one place to another. I appear, I hover, I turn. Her lush curls burned slowly round and round in the fire of the candle of the mantel. A blaze of silver came from her throatpiece, a lash of gemmy light bounced from her earrings.
Not a soul was in the room with her.
“Underwood’s left,” I said.
“Music gone?” she said, holding out her hand and clutching her fingers.
“It would be cooler upstairs with your little window unit. You could read. What were you reading tonight?”
“Heidi. Such a sugar,” she said.
“Oh, yes. Much sugar. The old uncle.”
“Mountain,” she said.
By this time only the priest was left. He was having an almost rabidly sympathetic conversation with my wife. The man was flushed out and well drunk, a ship’s captain crying his full speed ahead in the stern house of a boat rotting to pieces.
I looked over the long table of uneaten fish tasties. The heat had worked on them a couple more hours now and had brought them up to a really unacceptable sort of presence.
“Well. Ho ho. Look at all the stuff. All the cost,” I said.
“Just garbage God knows who, namely me, has to haul off and bury,” said my wife.
“Ah, no madam. I’ll see to all. Trust me. I’m made for it,” swore the priest.
With that he began circling the table, grabbing up the fish dainties and cramming them in his pockets, coat and pants, wadding them into his hat. He spun by me with a high tilt of adieu. But then he bumped into Patricia, who had come in, and spilled some of the muck in his hat on the front of her gown. She didn’t move. Then she looked downward into her bosom to the grease and fish flesh that smeared her gown.
“Fishies,” she said.
“What a blight I am! On this one, on this innocent belle! Strike me down!”
The priest wanted to touch her and clean her off, but could not. His hands trembled before the oil and flakes of fish on her stomach. He uttered a groan and ran from the house.
After he’d gone, the three of us stood there, offering no movement or special expression.
“You ought to go up and clean yourself,” Carolyn said to Patricia.
Patricia put her foot on the first stair and looked at me with an appeal. But then she went rapidly up and we could hear her air-conditioner going when she opened her door and then nothing when she closed it.
We straightened up awhile, but not very thoroughly. Then we got in bed.
“You’ve ruined my life,” said my wife. “This party showed it.”
“What’s wrong? What do you mean?”
“Stop it. What’s to pretend? Your twin goddamned sister. Your wonderful spiritual feeble-minded sister.”
“Not! Not! It’s just not our language she speaks! Don’t say that!”
“You taught her all the goddamned English she knows. Oh, when you explained, when she first came, that she was just silent, different! We went through all that. Then we’ve had her out of pity. . . .”
“She doesn’t need anybody’s pity! Shut your mouth!”
There was a long hot silence. Above us we heard rocking sounds.
My wife hissed: “She’s never even cleaned herself up.”
“I’ll see.”
“Oh, yes, you’ll see! Don’t bother to wake me when you come back.”
Carolyn had drunk a lot. I went to brush my teeth and when I came back out she was snoring.
I rose on the stairs.
The cool in Patricia’s room had surpassed what is comfortable. It was almost frigid, and the unit was still heaving more cold into the room. She sat in the rocking chair reading her book. The soiled gown was still on her. She raised her hand as I passed her to turn down the air-conditioning, and I held her hand, coming back to stare over her shoulder.
There was a picture of Heidi and her goat upside down.
“Let’s get you in your little tub,” I said.
I stripped the gown from her. Then I picked her up and put her in the tub, turning on the water very slow as I lathered her all over.
I gave her a shampoo. Pulling an arm up, I saw what was needed, ran the razor gently over her pits, then saw to the slight stubble on her legs. This is when she always sang. A high but almost inaudible melody of the weirdest and most dreamlike temptation, it would never come from another person in this world.
I began sobbing and she detected it.
“I love you with everything that lives me,” she said. “You love me the identical?”
“Everything. Yes.”
“Mickey,” she said. She clutched one breast and with the other hand she raised the red curls and lips of her virgin sex. “Are you like me?”
I looked away and was getting a towel.
“Yes. I’m exactly like you. We’re twins. We’re just alike,” I said.
“That’s why we can love each other everything,” she said.
“Exactly. Just the same.”
“Show me you.”
“We can’t. I can’t because of the rules.”
“Oh, yeah, darling, the rules!”
She’d always shown a peculiar happiness about the rules.
When I got her in bed, I wound up downstairs, no memory of having traveled anywhere.
I was breathless. My heart was big. Sometimes like this I thought it would just burst and spray its nerves into the dark that would not care, into the friends that would not care.
In bed again I found Carolyn was not asleep at all. She was sitting up.
�
��Did you finish with her?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t tell me what went on. I don’t want to know. I love you too much to do anything about it. But look what you’ve dragged me into.”
“I know.”
“You can’t sleep with me tonight. Get out of here.”
“I know,” I said.
I got the flashlight and got in the closet again, pulling the door to. I went through all the newspaper notices and the college term papers and picked up the love letters. They were on lined paper, grammar-school paper. It was the summer after I’d taught her to write.
Mickey I love you. There isn’t anything but love of you for me. I see the way you walk and your shoes are nice. I desire to thank you with my tongue and my legs too. The tongue and legs are good places. But the most is under my chest where it beats.
Sincerely yours,
Patricia
I held all the others, her letters, as the handwriting improved, and saw the last ones with their graceful script, even prettier than I could write on a good day. My essence yearned and rose from the closet and my roots tore from me, standing up like a tangled tree in dark heaven. My mother gave Patricia to me before she threw herself into what she called her patriotic suicide—that is, she used Kentucky whiskey and tobacco and overate fried foods in a long faithful ritual before she joined my old man in the soil near Lexington.
I thought heavily and decided I’d go back down South.
I was tired of Washington, D.C.
I was tired of my vocation.
I was tired of me.
Somewhere near the sea we’d go. Carolyn and Patricia both loved the sea. I’d find a town that would appreciate me for my little gifts and we’d move there. Have new friends, more privacy. I might turn back into a Democrat.
Changes like that never bothered my heart.
Eating Wife and Friends
We were very fond of Mrs. Neap’s place—even though it was near the railroad. It was a rambling inn of the old days, with its five bathrooms and balcony over the dining room. We had been harboring there for a couple of weeks and thought we were getting on well enough. But then she comes downstairs one morning holding a swab, and she tells me, looking at the rest of them asleep on the couches and rug: “This is enough. Get out by this afternoon.”
“Last night you said we were your adorable vagabonds.”
“In the light of day you look more like trash. I had too much of that potato liquor you brought,” says Mrs. Neap.
I say, “Give us another chance. It might be your hangover talking. Let’s have another conference, say two o’clock. Invite down all the tenants. We’ll talk it out.”
She says, “It’s my decision. I own the place. Property is ninetenths the law,” forearm muscles standing out as she kneads the cleaning rag, one of the lenses of her spectacles cracked.
I say, “But we’re the tenth that gives existence quality, the quantum of hope and dream, of laughter, of music. Further, please, Miz Neap, we’ll clean, keep this place in shape, paint it up.”
“Where paint? What paint? It’s ten dollars a quart if you can even find it. You can’t find more than four quarts in all South and North Carolina.”
“We make our own liquor. We can find a way to make paint too. Gardiner there is close to being a bona-fide chemist.”
She says, “None of you is any good. You never brought any food into the house. Oh, that sack of onions that fell off a truck and a few blackbirds.”
I say, “How can you forget the turkey we brought when we came?”
“Sure,” says she, “that’s what you got in with, the turkey. But what since, besides potato liquor? Then you ate all the magnolias,” says she.
“One foolish evening. Your other tenants ate some too,” say I.
“You broke the handle on the faucet.”
“Nobody ever proved it was one of us.”
“There was no fleas before you came, no cockroaches.”
“Unproven. Besides, seeing as how there’s no more turkey . . .”
The house begins the shiver it does when a train is entering the curve. The train is always, beyond other concerns, an amazement. Mrs. Neap and I walk out to the warped porch to watch. The train is coming in, all right, rolling its fifteen miles an hour, and you can see the people, hundreds and hundreds, standing and sitting on the wooden platforms the company built over the cars, those pipes and chicken wire boxing in about ninety “air-riders” per car top.
Even an air-riding ticket is exorbitant, but that fifteen-mile-an-hour breeze must be nice.
The train passes three times a week. This one must’ve been carrying about five thousand in all if you were to count the between-car riders and the maintenance-ladder riders.
Resettlers.
When the bad times really came, they brought families back together, and mainly everybody started coming South. Everybody would travel back to the most prosperous member of his family, taking his own light fortune along to pool it. It healed a lot of divorces and feuds. The best thing you could have was a relative with land. You showed up at his place offering your prodigal soul and those of your family as guards of the land, pulling out your soft hands to garden up the soil and watch over it.
There are no idle murders to speak of anymore. Almost all of them are deliberate and have to do with food, water, seeds or such as a ticket on the train. For example, if I tried to jump that train Mrs. Neap and I are looking at, a man in street clothes (you’d never know which one but usually a fellow mixing with the air-riders) would shoot me in the head. The worst to come of that would be some mother would see her child see the cloud of blood flying out of my face, and she’d have to cover its mouth before it could yell because you don’t want a child making noise in a public area. Be seen and not heard applies to them, and better not even to be seen very much.
The little ones are considered emblems of felony.
When bad times first settled into reality, the radio announcers told us what conversationalists and musicians Americans were proving to be and that our natural fine wit was going to be retreasured. People began working on their communication. Tales were told. Every other guy had a harmonica, a tonette or at least was honking on two blades of grass. But that was before they started eating grass in New York and then buying up the rest of the nation’s.
On the National Radio two years ago, we heard the Surgeon General report on the studies done on survivors of lost expeditions, polar and mountaintop sorties. The thing of it was that you could stay alive a phenomenal length of time on almost nothing if you did almost nothing, counting talking and singing. Which sent communication and melody back into the crapper.
The Surgeon General said you had to be sure whatever food you were after surpassed in calories the effort getting it would burn up. Don’t run after a clump of celery, for example. Chewing celery takes more calories than eating it gives you. But cockroaches, moths and butterflies will come to you and can be caught and ingested with a bonus of calories and protein. Wash the cockroaches if possible, the Surgeon General said.
We were chewing on our rutabagas and radishes when this came out and we considered it all laughable, radical over-science for the ghettos above the Mason-Dixon.
That was in the days of cheese.
Then all the blacks started returning to the South, walking. Five thousand of them came through Maryland, eating three or four swamps around Chesapeake Bay, stripping every leaf, boiling and salting all the greenery in huge iron cauldrons they pulled along on carts.
Those blacks hit Virginia and ate a senator’s cotton plantation. People started shooting at them, and some of the nigs had guns themselves.
It was a bloodbath.
There were rumors that the blacks cooked their own dead and that you could see that’s where their strength was coming from.
When the walking poor of Chicago went through the fields of southern Illinois, over to Kansas, down through Missouri, this sort of thing was avoided. All of Amer
ica knew about the Virginia horror, and steps were apparently taken among leaders to prevent its recurrence. The radio announcers urged all the walkers to spread out, don’t go in large groups. The vegetation of America would feed everybody if all the Resettlers would spread out.
This was good advice, unless you spread out on somebody’s acres.
The South was filling up with railroad people from the big defunct hives in the North. Theoretically, everybody could have his own hundred-foot-square place. But too many came back to the South. There were five million Resettlers in Atlanta, they say. Atlanta is very sorry that it prospered as a railhead. The mayor, a Puerto Rican with his Chinese wife, abdicated, leaving everything to the wardens and the stateside CIA.
Everybody is quiet. No more music or talking or needless exertion.
Crowds everywhere are immense and docile.
We hear it on the radio.
“They all look at this place covetously, those air-riders,” says Mrs. Neap. “Poor souls.”
You also had the right to kill anybody who jumped off the train into your yard. An old coroner might come by on his bicycle and stare at the body for a while, letting off a few platitudes about the old days. Like as not, a town officer, usually a nig or Vietnamese, appears and digs a hole three feet deep and prods the body over into it. This is slow going because the man will eat every worm, every grub, every spider and juicy root he upturns with his spade.
Even Mrs. Neap’s run-down house probably looks as if it has gunners at it. But it had no protection at all before we got here. I carry a knife.
The direly thin guy six and a half feet tall who melted into the dawn fog with his bow and arrow before anybody got up and returned at evening with almost all his arrows lost and not a goddamn ounce of meat to show—to be fair, four blackbirds and a rabbit smaller than the hunting arrow-wanted you to think he was Slinking Invisible itself on the borders of our landhold, when the truth was he was miles away missing ten-foot shots on trifling birds and sticking his homemade arrows into high limbs where he couldn’t retrieve them.