Airships

by Barry Hannah

  He calls himself JIM, I mean loud and significantly, like that.

  Says he knows the game world. When we walked up on that big wild turkey just before we found Mrs. Neap’s house, I watched that sucker fire off three different arrows at it. The turkey stood there just like the rest of us, unbelieving. At this point I sicked soft-spoken Vince on the turkey. Vince is so patient and soft-spoken, he could talk a snake into leaving his poison behind and pulling up a chair for stud or Go Fish, whatever you wanted to play.

  Vince talked the turkey right into his arms.

  Then came the last arrow from JIM.

  It went through Vince’s hand and into the heart of the turkey.

  We didn’t need this. You can’t get medical help. There’s nothing left but home remedies.

  We started despising JIM right then and there.

  But Vince’s hand healed and is merely unusable instead of gangrenous.

  “My God, one of them jumped off,” says Mrs. Neap.

  I saw. It was an Oriental.

  He is wobbling on the gravel in front of the yard. I pull my knife. This close in to a town you have to perform the law.

  But one of the wardens in the air-rider cages shoots at him—then the next one, who has a shotgun, really blasts the gook.

  The guy lies down.

  I couldn’t tell whether he went to the dirt before or after the gun blast.

  Mrs. Neap kneels down with delicate attention to the dead man. With her cracked lens, she seems a benevolent patient scholar.

  Mrs. Neap says, “He’s a handsome little man. We don’t need to call the coroner about him. Look at the muscles. He was well fed. I wonder why he come running toward the house. I guess he wanted to end up here. He chose,” says Mrs. Neap.

  “I’ll get the bike and tell the coroner,” I say.

  “I said not get the coroner. This is my property. Look. His head is across my legal property line,” says Mrs. Neap.

  Say I, “Let’s push him back a few feet. Then he’s the city’s. There’s no reason for you to take the responsibility or cost of burying him.”

  The old lady is intent. She’d been through the minor Depression in the thirties. She’d seen some things, I guess.

  “Have you never?” says Mrs. Neap.

  Her spectacles are flaming with the rising sun.

  Say I, “Have I never what?” slipping my knife back into my hip scabbard.

  “Eaten it?”

  “It?”

  “Human being.”

  “Human being?”

  “Neither have I,” says Mrs. Neap. “But I’m so starving, and Orientals are so clean. I used to know Chinese in the Mississippi delta. They were squeaky clean and good-smelling. They didn’t eat much but vegetables. Help me drag him back,” she says.

  She didn’t need help.

  She has the man under the arms and drags him at top speed over the scrub weeds and onto her lawn. Every now and then she gives me a ferocious look. There is a huge broken-down barbecue pit behind the house. I can see that is her destination.

  I go up the front steps and wake up our “family.” Vince is already awake, his hand hanging red and limp. He has watched the whole process since the gook jumped off the train.

  JIM is not there. He is out invisible in the woods, taking dramatic inept shots at mountains.

  (To complete his history, when we move on, after the end of this, JIM kills a dog and is dressing him out when a landowner comes up on him and shoots him several times with a .22 automatic. JIM strangles the landowner and the two of them die in an epic of trespass.)

  My wife wakes up. Then Gardiner, the chemist who keeps us in booze, wakes up.

  Vince has grown even softer since the loss of his right hand. Larry (you don’t need to know any more about him) and his girl never wake up.

  “Mrs. Neap wants to cook the man,” I say.

  “What strength. She did a miracle,” says soft Vince.

  When we get to the rotisserie, Mrs. Neap has the man all cleaned. Her Doberman is eating and chasing the intestines around the backyard.

  My family goes into a huddle, pow-wowing over whether to eat the Doberman.

  We don’t know what she did with the man’s head.

  By this time she is cutting off steaks and has the fire going good.

  Two more tenants come out on the patio, rubbing their eyes, waked up by the smell of that meat broiling on the grill.

  Mrs. Neap is slathering on the tomato sauce and pepper.

  The rest of the tenants come down.

  Meat!

  They pick it off the grill and bite away.

  Vince has taken the main part of the skeleton back to the garage, faithful to his deep emotion for good taste.

  When it is all over, Mrs. Neap appears in the living room, where we are all lying around. Her face is smeary with grease and tomato sauce. She is sponging off her hideous cheeks with a rag even as she speaks.

  She says, “I accepted you for a while, you romantic nomads. Oh, you came and sang and improved the conversation. Thanks to JIM for protecting my place and my dried-out garden, wherever he is. But you have to get out by this afternoon. Leave by three o’clock,” says she.

  “Why?” say I.

  “Because, for all your music and merriment, you make too many of us. I don’t think you’ll bring in anything,” she says.

  “But we will” says soft Vince. “We’ll pick big luscious weeds. We’ll drag honeysuckles back to the hearth.”

  She looks around at all of us severely.

  She says, “I hate to get this down to tacks, but I hear noises in the house since you’re here.” This old amazing woman was whispering. “You know what goes in America. You know all the announcements about food value. You, one of you, had old dangerous relations with Clarisse, the tenant next to my room. I heard. You may be romantic, but you are trash.”

  She places herself with her glasses so as to fix herself in the image of an unanswerable beacon.

  She says, “We all know the Survival News. Once I was a prude and resisted. But if we’re going to win through for America, I go along. Only oral relations are allowed. We must not waste the food from each other, the rich minerals, the raw protein. We are our own gardens,” Mrs. Neap says, trembling over her poetry.

  It costs her a lot to be so frank, I can see.

  “But you cooked a human being and ate him,” say I.

  “I couldn’t help it,” says she. “I remember the cattle steaks of the old days, the juicy pork, the dripping joints of lamb, the venison.”

  “The what?” say we.

  “Get out of here. I give you to four o’clock,” says she.

  So the four of us hit the road that afternoon.

  We head to the shady green by the compass in my head.

  I am the leader and my wife is on my arm.

  There are plenty of leaves.

  I think we are getting over into Georgia.

  My wife whispers in my ear: “Did you go up there with Clarisse?”

  I grab off a plump leaf from a yearling ash. In my time I’ve eaten poison ivy and oak too. The rash erupts around your scrotum, but it raises your head and gives you hope when the poison’s in your brain.

  I confess. “Yes.”

  She whispers on. “I wanted JIM. He tried. But he couldn’t find my place. He never could find my place.”

  “JIM?” say I. “He just can’t hit any target, now can he?”

  “I saw Clarisse eating her own eyelashes,” she whispers, from the weakness, I suppose.

  “It’s okay,” say I, wanting to comfort her with an arm over to her shoulder. But with that arm I am too busy taking up good leaves off a stout little palmetto. And ahead of us is a real find, rims of fungus standing off a grandfather oak.

  I’ve never let the family down. Something in my head tells me where the green places are. What a pleasure to me it is to see soft Vince, with his useless floppy red hand, looking happy as he sucks the delicious fungus off the
big oak.

  My wife throws herself into the feast. Near the oak are two terrapins. She munches the fungus and holds them up. They are huge turtles, probably mates. They’d been eating the fungus themselves.

  “Meat!” says the wife.

  “We won’t!” say I. “I won’t eat a hungry animal. I just want to hold and pet one.”

  The hunting arrow from JIM gets me right in the navel when I take the cuter of the turtles into my arms.

  The wife can’t cook.

  JIM’s feeling too awful to pitch in.

  So it’ll be up to soft Vince to do me up the best he can with his only one good hand.

  All the Old Harkening Faces at the Rail

  A few of the old liars were cranking it up around the pier when Oliver brought his one-man boat out. He was holding the boat in one hand and the motor in the other. Oliver probably went about fifty-seven or eight. He had stringy hair that used to be romantic-looking in the old days. But he still had his muscles, for a short guy.

  “What you got there?” said Smokey.

  “Are you blind, you muttering old dog? It’s a one-man boat,” said Oliver.

  Oliver didn’t want to be troubled.

  “I seen one of them in the Sears book, didn’t I? How much that put you back?”

  “I don’t recall ever studying your checkbook,” said Oliver.

  “This man’s feisty this afternoon, ain’t he?” said a relative newcomer named Ulrich. He was sitting on the rail next to the steps where Oliver wanted to get his boat down them and to the water. For a moment this Ulrich didn’t move out of Oliver’s way. “You buy it on credit?”

  Oliver never answered. He stared at Ulrich until the old man moved, then went down the steps with his little boat to the water and eased the thing in. It was fiberglass of a factory hue that is no real color. Then Oliver went back up the steps where he’d left the motor. It was brand new. He pondered for a moment. Then he pulled the back of the boat up and screwed on the boat clamps of the motor. It was nifty. You had something ready to go in five minutes.

  All the old liars were peering over the edge at his operation.

  “Don’t you need fuel and a battery?” said Smokey, lifting up his sunglasses. One of his eyes was taped over from cataract surgery.

  “A man that buys on credit is whipped from the start,” said Ulrich.

  When Oliver looked up the pier on all the old harkening faces at the rail, he felt young in an ancient way. He had talked with this crew many an evening into the night. There was a month there when he thought he was one of them, with his hernia and his sciatica, his lies, and his workman’s compensation, out here with his cheap roachy lake house on the reservoir that formed out of the big Yazoo. Here Oliver was with his hopeful poverty, his low-rent resort, his wife who never had a bad habit in her life having died of an unfair kidney condition. All it’s unfair, he’d often thought. But he never took it to heart until Warneeta passed over to the other side.

  There was a gallery of pecking old faces scrutinizing him from the rail. Some of them were widowers too, and some were leaking away toward the great surrender very fast. Their common denominator was that none of them was honest.

  They perhaps had become liars by way of joining the evening pier crowd. One old man spoke of the last manly war, America against Spain. Another gummed away about his thirty pints and fifteen women one night in Mexico. Oliver had lied too. He had told them that he loved his wife and that he had a number of prosperous children.

  Well, he had respected his wife, and when the respect wore off, he had twenty years of habit with her. One thing was he was never unfaithful.

  And he had one son who was the drum major of the band for Lamar Tech in Beaumont, and who had graduated last year utterly astonished that his beautiful hair and outgoing teeth wouldn’t get him employment.

  But now I’m in love, thought Oliver. God help me, it’s unfair to Warneeta in the cold ground, but I’m in love. I’m so warm in love I don’t even care what these old birds got to say.

  “Have you ever drove one of them power boats before, son?” This was asked by Sergeant Fish, who had had some education and was a caring sort of fellow with emphysema.

  Oliver walked through them and back across the planks of the pier to his car that was parked in the lot at the end. He opened the trunk of his car and lifted out the battery and the gas can. He managed to hold the marine oil under his armpit. He said something into the car, and then all the men at the end of the pier saw the woman get out of Oliver’s Dodge and walk to him and pull the marine oil can from under his arm to relieve the load. She was about thirty-five, lean, and looked like one of those kind of women over at the Rolling Fork Country Club who might play tennis, drink Cokes and sit around spraddle-legged with their nooks humped out aimless.

  Jaws were dropped on the end of the pier.

  Smokey couldn’t see that far and was agitated by the groans around him.

  Sergeant Fish said: “My Gawd. It’s Pearl Harbor, summer of forty-one!”

  When she and Oliver got near enough the liars, they saw her face and it was cute—pinkish big mouth, a jot pinched, but cute, though maybe a little scarred by acne.

  Oliver rigged up the gas line and mixed the oil into the tank. He attached the battery cables. The woman sat two steps above him while he did this alone in the back of the boat. There was one seat in the boat, about a yard wide. Oliver floated off a good bit while he was readying the boat. The woman had a scarf on her hair. She sat there and watched him float off thirty feet away as he was getting everything set. Then he pulled the crank on the motor. It took right up and Oliver was thrown back because the motor was in gear. The boat went out very fast about two hundred yards in the water. Then he got control and circled around and puttered back in.

  The woman got in the boat. She sat in Oliver’s lap. He turned the handle, and they scooted away so fast they were almost out of sight by the time one of the liars got his tongue going.

  “It was Pearl Harbor, summer of forty-one, until you saw her complexion,” said Sergeant Fish.

  “I’ll bet they was some women in Hawawyer back then,” said the tall proud man with freckles. He waved his cane.

  “Rainbow days,” lied Fish. “The women were so pretty they slept right in the bed with me and the wife. She forgave me everything. It was just like stroking puppies, all of them the color of a goldfish.”

  “Can that boat hold the two of ’em?” said Smokey.

  “As long as it keeps goin’ it can,” said Ulrich, who featured himself a scientist.

  “Oliver got him a babe,” said another liar.

  “I guess we’re all old enough to see fools run their course,” said old Dan. Dan was a liar who bored even the pier crowd. He lied about having met great men and what they said. He claimed he had met Winston Churchill. He claimed he was on friendly terms with George Wallace.

  “You’d give your right one to have a chance with Oliver’s woman, indifferent of face as she is,” said Sergeant Fish.

  “When the motor ever gives out, the whole thing will sink,” said Ulrich.

  They watched awhile. Then they all went home and slept.

  Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed

  It makes me sick when we kill them or ride horses over them. My gun is blazing just like the rest of them, but I hate it.

  One day I rode up on a fellow in blue and we were both out of ammunition. He was trying to draw his saber and I was so outraged I slapped him right off his horse. The horseman behind me cheered. He said I’d broken the man’s neck. I was horrified. Oh, life, life—you kill what you love. I have seen such handsome faces with their mouths open, their necks open to the Pennsylvania sun. I love stealing for forage and food, but I hate this murdering business that goes along with it.

  Some nights I amble in near the fire to take a cup with the boys, but they chase me away. I don’t scold, but in my mind there are the words: All right, have your way in this twinkling mortal world.
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br />   Our Jeb Stuart is never tired. You could wake him with a message any time of night and he’s awake on the instant. He’s such a bull. They called him “Beauty” at West Point. We’re fighting and killing all his old classmates and even his father-in-law, General Philip St. George Cooke. Jeb wrote about this man once when he failed to join the Confederacy: “He will regret it but once, and that will be continuously.”

  Gee, he can use the word, Jeb can. I was with him through the ostrich feathers in his hat and the early harassments, when we had nothing but shotguns and pretty horses. He was always a fool at running around his enemy. I was with him when we rode down a lane around a confused Yank picket, risking the Miniés. But he’s a good family man too, they say.

  I was with him when he first went around McClellan and scouted Porter’s wing. That’s when I fell in love with burning and looting. We threw ourselves on railroad cars and wagons, we collected carbines, uniforms and cow steaks that we roasted on sticks over the embers of the rails. Jeb passed right by when I was chewing my beef and dipping water out of the great tank. He had his banjo man and his dancing nigger with him. Jeb has terrific body odor along with his mud-spattered boots, but it rather draws than repels, like the musk of a woman.

  When we were celebrating in Richmond, even I was escorted by a woman out into the shadows and this is why I say this. She surrendered to me, her hoop skirt was around her eyebrows, her white nakedness lying under me if I wanted it, and I suppose I did, because I went laboring at her, head full of smoke and unreason. I left her with her dress over her face like a tent and have no clear notion of what her face was like, though my acquaintance Ruppert Longstreet told me in daylight she was a troll.

  That was when young Pelham set fire to the Yank boat in the James with his one Napoleon cannon. We whipped a warship from the shore. Pelham was a genius about artillery. I loved that too.

  It’s killing close up that bothers me. Once a blue-suited man on the ground was holding his hands out after his horse fell over. This was at Manassas. He seemed to be unclear about whether this was an actual event; he seemed to be asking for directions back to his place in a stunned friendly way. My horse, Pardon Me, was rearing way high and I couldn’t put the muzzle of my shotgun at him. Then Jeb rode in, plumes shivering. He slashed the man deep in the shoulder with his saber. The man knelt down, closing his eyes as if to pray. Jeb rode next to me. What a body odor he had. On his horse, he said: