by Barry Hannah
During the week, she’d get in his car evenings and give me a pout as she nestled in his Volvo. I’d hang at the window there. She meant some kind of low irony I didn’t understand. I wasn’t angry or jealous. I just despised the obvious deal being struck here. The urgency of her rise, the flat coy look on the ex-jock now Volvo lawyer.
It is the sadness of Modock’s old hound I want to address here. In the next few days, displaced by the bobcat, he lay next to the steps in full mourning. Hounds are mournful anyway, but he was in clear further distress. He even came over to visit and get some affection, as he’d never done before. In his eyes were both the mourning of the world and the unexpected torture of Modock’s neglect.
Inside, the bobcat was all cleaned up. Modock made much over it. Pretending it was getting all homey. Any fool could see its eyes looking out for every crack of egress. Modock was back at work and may have been a little ruddier. The few visits I made made me angrier.
Your mama can’t be here so she wants you stroking that cat, which is her, which is Carriba, I told him. What about Beaumont?
He didn’t answer.
Beaumont’s not wild or mean enough, is he? He ain’t got that spitting beauty to him, what? You suffering all over that cat, stroking away, running round after its poopoo. This makes quite a story. Only you can’t see it.
I’m not a story. I’m people, he said.
Well, months, and we went on. Minkle ran home glistening, a bit more stylish every week. She picked up fast, only she was copying things a bit young for her, like two bows in the hair, blue jeans with the knees out. Once I felt for her so much, watching her that way, I started crying a little. And I had never stopped the involuntary barks, the looking around as if there were somebody there on my case.
She got pregnant, the guy stopped coming by, and she showed me her nookie at the window. She cheered up some after the fight. But the hound Beaumont now was emaciated and weak with grief. Modock was a killer but he was not cruel, that I knew of. I took over the hound. Can you believe it? The hound brought the wife and me closer together. She made over it, gave Beaumont special scraps, and he got some hope in his eyes. It had been ages since she’d nursed anything. My word what you find just stumbling around. Both the hound and I were getting some, with wild and tender goodwill.
At the school was a little man who had followed the civil rights struggle and written several books about it, a white man. He had a name and esteem, but in the hall I attacked him for being a civil rights junkie with his eye on the main chance, a part of the modern university industry where all the grants and prizes were. I accused him of living off the grief of better men. That he was a tick. At the end of this, with several students around, I began barking, No! No!
They let me go.
Amazing but that very afternoon I came across a stanza from Charles Simic that buried right into me, although I never read poetry. Simic had been on campus, a friend urged the book on me, a page blew open at my window.
I tell you, I was afraid. A man screamed
And continued walking as if nothing had happened.
Everyone whose eyes I sought avoided mine.
Was I beginning to resemble him a little?
I had no answer to any of these questions.
Neither did the crucified on the next corner.
Even so I was not doing well. I reread the stanza, even more afraid, and regarded the stack of letters on my desk. I should have been flattered, these magazines begging me to come back to their world. Assignments in grave astounding places all over the world. I had almost nothing left in savings. Yet I felt unable to move.
I went over to Modock’s angrier than ever and didn’t hear the protest inside before I yanked out the screen door and the bobcat was through my legs. Modock might be weak but he was fast, up the hill of the house across the street, a big hill, right after the creature. But beyond the house, I knew, was a valley of deep kudzu, old tall stricken trees, and this went on for a half mile. I could hear Modock’s screams, and then his weeping, like a tot who’s lost everything, over the hill. It was an hour before he came back, and he was ripped bloody by thorns, and green at the knees where he’d been crawling.
So he got sicker again. I was the villain. He became crazed, sitting by the phone all hours after work. He expected somebody to call. About the bobcat. Some person who’s a fair person, he told me. Minkle and I stared on, horrified.
This can’t go on, I said. I’d never seen Minkle, the jogging optimist, in real despair. But now she was square in it, all pregnant and stunned.
So it could not go on, could not.
I made a couple of calls that night, in my own study, after reading the Simic again. My people with your people, the business. At suppertime the next evening I told Modock and Minkle to be present and ready. Midnight.
His name was Ferdinand but he was called Ferd. A few minutes before midnight he took off his apron very positively. I saw hardly a hint of doubt or even concern in his eyes. He had cut some flowers that were waiting in the refrigeration bin where they sold them. He tamped a few Clorets into his mouth, and I could tell his hair had been recently combed. Ferd wasn’t a handsome man, but he had a good smile. The thing that shocked me was that he thought I had been friendlier to him these couple years than I was aware of. He counted on me as a pal, just by my minimal greetings. I felt very unworthy but this didn’t last long. Too many days now, I had been a barking worm, grimness wrapped around my head like my old bandanna of Korea. It was time to move and do.
We were admitted in the front door by Minkle. I looked over at Modock in the chair, so skinny and petrified with fear.
This is Ferd, the guy who killed his mother, I announced him.
Ferd held the flowers, and I swear, became handsome in his delight.
Sure, I’ll marry you. Seen you ’bout, he said.
Now look. I want the three of you to mix and talk. I’ll be off months doing stuff I’ve got to. Get in there, and by fuck, get along.
Either way you want it, I’m there, said Ferd. Have the baby or not I’ll love it like it’s my own, said Ferd. I’ve many times thought I could be a powerful father.
Well, said Minkle, looking at me. This don’t seem like it’s in … very good taste.
Taste? Taste, I swore at her.
Even so, the look she was giving Ferd, ignoring me, was not a bad one.
Snerd and Niggero
MRS. NIGGERO WAS IN THERE WITH MR. SNERD ON THE COUCH. She had her dress folded back on her thighs with her gift out to Snerd, who was .minutely rolling the hem onward so as to roll it even more to her globes’ bottoms. Then his rolling goes even more up her so her dress was as a rolled flag around her neck and one cup of her brassiere was hanging off her left globe. Mr. Snerd liked her earlobes even better than that, though, now after these long years. He has his fingers up to them and nicks them and fondles them as Mrs. Niggero consumed him up to his navel to her chin, even mashing her freckles there, and sobs around his fundament. Mrs. Niggero didn’t want this at first because she was married to another man, Cornelius.
But she had been doing this eighteen years with Snerd whom she can’t not love in another way. So Snerd played with her ears and croons to her while she sobs preparing him for the inevitable though now somehow sad primary entrance. She squeezed her eyes blind and he with resignation pushed in amidperson, a little deaf with grief and wild comfort. Then she smiled the more now. Snerd saw her smile, too, as she delays the primary act, withdraws herself in beauty, and plunges down amid his person, soon with her eyes happily on him above her stuffed mouth where she moves in jazz with the clutches of her throat, because she cannot help her loves and now she must slow the fever down, not bring off Snerd’s pathos and ultimatum too quickly. Because her joy is growing only as fast as a spring garden while Snerd is the tropical bamboo.
This thing has been described ever since Snerd beheld her face, in a chilly bank, over her legs bare, tan, and cool like those eggs from certain hens, w
hile on her feet were flat petite Roman sandals, midheeled, the straps of them over the curve of her instep on the feet above the toes, which pitched Snerd’s eyes upwards to her childish belted waist and high bosom, under cloth of a wildflower print, apricot. Snerd was in pain for her immediately, sweating on his checks written sloppily to him by bohemians and the old. He never afterwards collected himself, but was a man alive hardly anywhere else but near her: he had no will, but dragged his heart and blue loins through ruined hours away from the reach of her.
She was married but he stood in her lawn and watched her eat with her husband Cornelius in a yellow room, then walked into her flowers and amongst her high azalea bushes, near the windowsill, below which he ground himself on a whitened plank, calling in a whisper.
Now Mrs. Niggero—Nancy—sighed and Snerd retired from her lips, then went like a slave at them again. She met him with a luxury of stroke in her cunny and pulled him in way out of his depth so Snerd was almost anxious as with his waist jerked down a well, but safe, his balls would not go further, and the two of them settled into the planes of full criminal love, pulling each the other’s organ from its aim and both losing; something like a pilgrim running back and forth through the doorway of a shrine, welcomed then ejected.
Mrs. Niggero in an agony of pleasure gave birth to root and Snerd commenced his spurts with a prayer. She, all gone, pleaded quietly for his final drops. Robert Snerd, married blithely in indifference himself, was already jealous of her minutes away from him with Cornelius.
They were ashamed shortly afterwards, gathering the old clothes on for the miserable attritions demanded by the clock, in a flat horror of the zombies such as count, hasten small distances, and get mean-eyed over the matter of a nickel in the bank where Snerd first saw her. Each time they were a little incredulous such raw worship had overcome them, for eighteen years. With a terrible clasp of the other, they fled apart. Mrs. Niggero wept and had a limp. Snerd was grim in the years of his week until he saw her again but nonetheless forcing his shadow to the outer window of the bookstore he owned. He looked in on his staff, smart girls nearly devout in their errands; here and there a customer, a browser, wanting someone else’s life; the books themselves, the thousands of titles grown alien and faintly nauseating to him. He had rather warm his mind vainly in thought about his valiant hot seed still within the treacherous loins of Nancy Niggero, now in her married home. Her husband would now at seven P.M. be sitting across the room from her, looking at her although pretending interest in the television book. Mr. Niggero, hardly more than a curved backbone with a damp shirt hung on it. She would be forced into the worst role, managing her contempt by the second. An eruption might mean the end of the world.
But Snerd was in error. Nancy loved this silent drooping man deeply and burned like a penitent, always intent to sense his needs, which were few, in happy submission. Niggero watched her slyly too, and with an urge to haul goods to her feet and roll in them like a dog, then next day wag off to his work as city attorney, provided a desk and an old-fashioned clerk’s eyeshade he imagined touched him with romance in accuracy; and the briefs of fretting gnatlike spite. He for twenty-seven years had been driven pale and near emaciated by them, but his eyes still glowed with a beautiful near-insane gray like a wolfs with his nose raised for a feast six counties away and hearing—eyes and ears at attention to the far-off. He was not a dog, neither just the curved spine under a sweated shirt, a mere hanger for expensive broadcloth shirts and paisley neckties seen in Gentleman’s Quarterly, There was about him still an extremely nervous happiness of search and a small glee that he was not nearly close to its end yet. On the edge of his tongue was the appeal “Please stomp my grapes!” now for several years. Stomp my grapes. He did not know why, quite, nor was the appeal constantly there, and he knew every minute of the day it was inappropriate and scandalous.
Cornelius Niggero, because of his name partly, had never done a thing inappropriate yet and felt always shy under the odd banner of this title. He was almost bowled over by the weight of his name, enough. Even more so than by the vicious tedium of his work for the city. These days there seemed a parental or student suit at least once a week in the school system. But he loved Nancy too much to announce out loud about stomp my grapes please. He was impatient until she had everything she wished, which, as with himself, was not very much at all. She had the large clean house, splendid clothes, and ready means of travel to anywhere she wanted.
Nancy Niggero, however, a clean and even reverent person, was frugal and a creature of not much whim. Even though in Niggero’s eyes an authentic aristocrat, she was plain and definite in her speech and not partial to the vaguely depressed chatter of that class at all, even with a nice woman’s college in the East and European travel behind her. She was very north Mississippian. Of all beings she seemed to him the one most certain why she was born and went about her days as if fetched by a quiet honorable master, a call from both firmament and fundament. She astonished him and was his saint. He could never comprehend why she had married him, because he knew he was dulling and only pulled forth per diem by a fog of uncertain promise, only solid when he thought of seeing her once again and already grateful, his tongue hardly restrained from lupine rapture. Even now looking at her he could see her again tomorrow night in a different softer blouse perhaps. He could see her mailing her poems at the post office and nearly wept for her lack of success in that work, although she reviewed every rejection with a sly grin of defeat. In every other thing in life she was accepted. This was a fine mystery to her. Niggero would have cut half his finger off if she could have only one triumph. He defended her with an inner rage. It seemed highly relevant here, what he had read in some book of inspiration months ago: “When a finger points at the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger.” He remembered this as Chinese. Nancy seemed suddenly even more lovely as Chinese herself to him—radiant, calm, and stoical.
In her nightgown in low light, her wet hair bound back by a scarf, she was a wrenching vision. Niggero could almost scream to her, “Stomp my grapes!” Please, asked her without sound, as she passed against the moony glass of the front door and he could hear the rush of her slippers, see her legs move her gown. It would fairly put him to sleep in admiration. When she made an uncivil stomach sound, he blamed it on the dog. She was such a wife that Niggero felt selfish and had an impulse to share her with something large and hungry, which he did in a manner when they ate with the mayor and his wife and he watched the both of them with their helpless eyes on her.
Even in winter Niggero sweated too much. He was more noxious to himself than anyone else. A grim fever was on him. It was necessary he put himself in slow motion ever since the advent of midlife in order to prevent the moisture from running into his socks. His shirt wet and rank, he had to change each day at noon. There was a space with a mirror in his closet at city hall in which he saw his beaded face, same as in the air force years ago, blurred since, quite a bit, though not lean as it should be: Italian bloodhound, Semitic without distinction, nose made for the dense odors of southern Europe and blown up by them. But the blazing wolf’s eyes in the center—if his eyes could see his eyes—two beacons on a saddle. He often broke wind with a great searching hook of sound, poisoning his closet just beyond the mayor’s secretary at her desk, and emerged red with scandal and blindness. His lungs seemed too narrow and gunked in a residue of half a year of menus. Through the window in back he saw the rubble of the rear yard one late afternoon. He was drawn to it suddenly, the glass and brick fragments and shrubweed, so he opened the window and crawled out into it. Here was his true neighborhood.
It was exile he deserved in his undeserving existence, and he squatted in it, arguing with the deer fleas and chummy ticks already on his hands. Since thirty he had been aware of being nearly dead and was shocked when anybody, even the city in legal trouble, needed him. Then he scrambled up and walked around the front of the ancient and chalky red brick city hall. The grand doorway ennobled him. He fel
t halfway a man about town, certified; at least a unit of the edifice, a brick with a nose. Some bustling town music, such as that in an old movie from the late forties, seemed to announce itself around him. Niggero went leaping back to his job. A hired extra, lost in the republic.
Robert Snerd watched him without contempt, just then. Moved in fact to charity, feeling old and the butt of something himself, he looked down at the clean pavement at another blind decade, gray with infinitesimal holes like invoked another memory of Nigero once when he saw him alone watching his enormous shepherd run down the hill of a ditch near the baseball stadium. Niggero looked very foreign and diminished by the healthy players out tiny on the practice field. Snerd was lost by a sudden respect for the fellow, so made for treachery, like an idol of betrayal, there scrambling down for his dog, stubborn in a culvert.
When Mrs.Niggero died an acutely quadraplegical musculer almost overnight, three years later, Robert Snerd thought for a while that the formality of his public inexpression of grief had damaged his true sorrow . He had never wept, only stared. He could not wink out even a drop, even missing Nancy and seeing her whole, in sandals only, her bold chest and public darkness strutted out for him as a display of promised bounty. This was a posture she had never struck in a real life. Here she was whispering something with a sly smile on her, and holding a sheaf of her unpublished poems behind a thigh as if to promise even rares pleasures if he could help her get them published, a thing with his considerable connections to small elegant presses, he had never been able to accomplish in real life. In fact her only public poem was the one Cornelius had chosen for her gravestone in quotation marks. To Snerd, this was unfortunate. It was a poem crisp but woozy at the same time, so sentimental it almost washed out her eminence in flesh and belied her highly arousing natural voice, a music of the most moving classical resignation. But then as the weeks passed, he knew he was doing no act for the town and propriety but was an utter stone bastard. He simply was not feeling that much. He had let everything of her but the merely photographic go, entirely. This thing terrified him. All those thousands of books around him thirty years and what they had made him was a monster insensate as a concrete city lion.