High Lonesome

by Barry Hannah

  Then I went to the nationals where I was attacked by a Latvian judge and driven into the familiar dark again, where a bum with perfect pitch heard me and mugged me of my instrument. But I lingered there in New York and drank out the tanks of this my first metropolis. I felt I was on the last planet of man, where the dregs of all stories were, and I became for years a mere roving hole of audiation, a great ear in my courtly brogans rubbed off to the white underneath.

  When I finally got my story out, the woman and the loaf, it had a terrible design to it, and the terrible part confused others. What terrible, how terrible, why terrible? Or was my story really kind, perhaps tragic too, the loaf floating out of her curtain, the man’s head in the curtain, he wore the curtain, wasn’t I remembering that finally? This was my first anecdote but I couldn’t blurt it out correctly. I didn’t have the light yet. The conjunction was not quite made, I had not driven the thing home. I was a sorry sight to my ruined acquaintances, shouting in my liquor, Show it, prove it, let’s have it out in the open! Drinking my cheap scotch, shouldering through mongrel New York. Or worse, meeting my own kind. It’s a hideous affront to see your own kind on the walks there. You want to run into them, through them, blaming them for the needless duplication. There they are with their own loyal monkeys around them, redundantios.

  Nevertheless I went on searching for my trumpet. I had met the man who stole it many, many times, but he never recognized me. He wore a hat like my father’s except much taller in the crown, perhaps ten inches of hat there giving him away and the further clue that he had never moved from the spot where first he fell on me, but without the trumpet in his hands now. My trumpet old and zinc flavored but mine and a partner to my vision through the naked tree. But this man begged so violently I couldn’t just stand there accusing him with my new New York voice. No, he would get the jump on you begging so you felt he’d tear your limbs and clothes off for a dime, and he saw no redundancy in people, he was such a consumer, so needy. He begged the same man as yesterday, who always gave something to him. He would beg the same man over and over, each day freshly minted, unbeggared. People gave him buttons, Tums, lint, keys, all over again. During his racket I was trying to get a word in but at not too close range. He had sucked in my horn and I felt did not remember this. Besides, he was pure. I mean he barely acknowledged the turds and string thrown at him. It was begging itself, the clean form, he aspired to. I tell you there was not the least suggestion he was mad. You saw a great patient sanity in his eyes under the hat, a sort of rage. Now and again he broke into song, always sweetly pitched, almost angelic like a castrato. I believe the whole street thought him superior, I’d swear it. They feared him when the cold days began and he became even louder, fearless, their obliviousness sorely tested. With more cold he loomed more awful, a fiend let down off a bronze horse rampant with pigeons and green mange. He kept up in his thin, not too nasty, clothes, a suit with vest over a tuna gym shirt. On his cheeks were handsome small tracks of acne. This touched me, his old teen-agehood shared with mine. With his persistence in the thin clothes under the tall optimistic hat as the chill of the mongrel city went inward to your marrow, then grew like a vine around your feet. I began to love the man.

  It started in pity as I saw him huddle, then hunker, some special wind from Maine smashing his pride. But he ascended to a racket of beseeching every now and then. Hardly anybody knew me, but I knew him. All the iron in me fled as love took over. Love is a buttered clarinet, that’s what it is. You’ve barely touched the instrument but begin your wretched toots on the alien thing.

  Sir, I said, Sir, don’t you have my horn? If so, just keep it, don’t think a thing about it. Or you could give it back. Either way your heart desires. I spoke aloud.

  The cold in him gave me my brief opportunity. He was not quick enough to drown me out begging. Holy God, the man collapsed when he heard me. On the spot he fell inwards. You saw what a delicate thing his need was. Reversed, begged at, he suffered spasms of revolution. Under the ambitious hat you saw the woe of an artist gripped in bankruptcy.

  The horn, devoured so long ago, the idea of the horn pitched him into such a rage about every delinquency of the planet he could not finish yelling them out. He could not possibly announce all that was owed him. He broke down in a sickness of decomposition. I was a heinous agent from the Outer and his beany eyes magnified me. He shrank in his thin suit. He was a dog rolled over in awe, spreading his legs to explain his inconsequence. His protests died choking.

  Say, there’s not that much to it, man. We could let it go. It’s just I’ve waited so long, the months of growing this beard on my face, I said.

  He jumped towards me and put his hands around my throat. But then he shrank back in his suit odor. The odor was not that bad, either that or I had become married to it in my long wait for the horn.

  The philosopher had it right, the monkey scratches its fleas with the key that opens its cage. I was liberated to speak by the whiskey but more by the bum, while he dove back in his cage at the horror of being asked for anything back. The whirlpool of need stopped cold by a simple request.

  He ran off somewhere and then was here again. I had the old horn back in my hands, just a shade greener with corrosion, and I was free to see my youth again. From then on he would hardly look at me until one day he and the hat were immobilized by sleet. I think he was dead or very ill, squatted there in a stare. Maybe he was me in my old age. I didn’t want to age anymore up north. I took a bus driven nearly walking speed back to my own rented lands.

  In the warmth I got a temper on me, in my old town much the same except they sold more whitened lawn turd and the billboards had taken over the air crying Money! It was hard to go back to my room because the woman still lived over there darker, and her hair streaked with gray, very long and neglected. The rumor was that alone, she hardly left her chair. I was not prepared to see her in the very same chair, in the exact old place, the vista through the tree obscured by the leaves of spring. I had a temper now, though, I was advanced. I could be, finally, sullen. My life’s work was ahead of me. Now was not the time for sullenness. The leaves should not have made me so angry. I was having my sullen stage inappropriate to my season. My region was covered in leaves, steaming leaves and giant insects and cats screeching as they mated, infamy proceeding regardless of the churches and their desperate parking flats swept clean to the point of cruelty. Beating back nature was the obsession of men in these suburbs, and failing that, arranging it like a combed orphan. But you could wake up here with new vines in your room like criminals.

  In my absence my parents had gotten a dark orange boxer bitch. They had more affection for the animal than me, but that didn’t upset me. I wanted alone in my work whenever I found it. The dog went around the house hiding meal bones in cushions and nooks. This delighted the folks. Look at her, such a steward! Why can’t you be such a steward? This was their favorite parable from Scripture, the Good Steward. But I got home so poor I was wearing my pa’s shirts rolled up at the sleeves.

  For a while I was excused as a patient in need of food and exercise. I seemed weaker than I was. I brought an old typewriter from the back porch to my room. Here I practiced letterheads for my work, toiling through several choices. A position I could hurl all my resources at, but I had none much, only fear and indignation until I settled on church trumpet. Within the day I was combing my hair differently and carried my letterheads from room to room, trailed by the orange boxer who wanted me for a friend.

  My folks went all out as if this was the last gift to me and bought me a new horn. I would take myself to huge wealthy churches with their mobs of penitents. The woman, sitting in her chair, while the brown toasted loaf floated to her, out of the curtain it seemed, until I recalled the husband’s near-bald head above in it—I used this mystery in my horn and had new tones. Many horns, hundreds, were in the Scriptures, I reasoned. They would see I was necessary. I would be history walking in, an old friend.

  But just now with t
he folks out, I went out to the tree where it was wet from rain and cut the leaves back for the notch, such a hallowed ordinary thing to be doing in these suburbs. I wore Pa’s big rubber boots. We had a long trimmer for the job and I never looked away until I exhausted my steward’s duty. But when I appeared again in my room I was naked except for the boots and the new trumpet at my belly, feeling this was how the Hebrew trumpeters of old were, they must have been. In my work. My hair was fresh from the rain and recombed in my new way. In my horn would be the beggar of New York too. And the orange dog with her belligerent adoration.

  Older and darker, she was in the chair, which had been turned a little, more toward me, so that half her face might be watching me from its one eye. I in my maturity. She looked the age of a matron doing the rumba in a film I had long ago endured. They whispered she was now either a drunkard or had been lamed by a stroke. I was late, so late. So like me to turn up just in time for despair. You know the type. Several ambulances had come and gone at her place, the word was. But I begged, again the beggar, Let that which remains reveal itself, Let there be a spark of health still in her. Let my music enter her to assuage our loneliness. All she had to do was give me some sign. She had been in my dreams waking and sleeping for so long. My youth sobbed at her window. Help me, where were you? How could you live through that afternoon and have nothing more for me? You are famous in your rousing obscurity for many wretches and their duplicates in New York. For you I have borne the tale without quite having the message. Here, with my combed hair, look! I shouted through my open window. Grown, my voice no longer had that ugly wayward whine. I felt I was succeeding. This house was cast loose in this rain like a wild brick boat and I was in the wheelhouse. We were nosing into the swells. Ahoy. I with my profession. She in her enigma my woman. I was finally deep in the world, like the beggar and the others I envied.

  I didn’t go on forever. I couldn’t be sure she’d ever looked even as I began playing my trumpet. In the manner of Gideon at sea, those hours until my lips went to blubber. And Jonah spat up onshore, returned in his ministry to our difficult homeland.

  Although she never said so, I believe Mother had taken a job since I was in the house. Sometimes she was away weeks, so in essence the house was mine. When she returned it was in every case that she caught me in the act going about various manipulations at the window. Consider her punctuality, the unmitigated shame of this, for after all I was grown. It was as if she stayed under the house and came up only when she heard noises. I was not yet going to the churches, going about my internship there. She was promptly in the room from nowhere suddenly, myself a wincing wreck. There’s never really time to develop one’s ambitions. They just throw you out there and you grab on to something handy like an amateur, in terror. Hardly time to hide your cheap scotch and prepare a face. Pa, for instance, had chosen wrongly, rushed to life insurance when he wanted to be a cowboy, then panicked by my advent, my whirling hole of needs. Forced into his lies: I love you, love you, boy. It was grievous, but he still managed in his sentimental way to be gone huge lengths of time like a star of the rodeo. I see my pa sitting in his parked car for hours looking at true horsemen in a lot somewhere, bewitched and sad.

  In my case nothing prepared me for my success. Outside my window two blue jays ebbed and flowed and made their hoarse quacks only for me, I pretended.

  The first minister was no fool, he agreed immediately, and to a handsome figure that left me filthy with cash relative to the none I’d had yesterday. I played from a projection booth in the balcony through the hole where religious films were projected, big epics of the waddling masses under the Hebrew kings and their antagonists. The man believed devoutly in old Hollywood, especially Debra Paget in her golden halter. He didn’t count much on the abstract. He was thoroughly for the age of vision come again after two millennia’s trifling with print and its craven black and white. Next to the rolling wheels aloft, I blew during the films and even afterwards, antiphonal to the choir in the loft below, at last let make their own noise until everybody filed out and I was left alone with the hot machine. You could not see much from the projection slot except the minister in his pulpit to the right of the screen all thrilled and bent forward like a longbow and seized by his approving spasms. The people went out into the street, chatting gulls driven off an argosy. He succeeded in bringing in more of the young. I was partly responsible. I had the impression of motion through the universe, very happy there in my elevated box. Ahoy. I once owned a happy cat named Ralph who would rush out to meet people, calling to them. This was how I felt, like Ralph with his salutations, for the first time in my life.

  Other Sundays I pressed forth, there is no rest in the professions once engaged, down to the ocean where a priest thought I was essential. I was in the ramparts instead of an organ they could not afford. It was a poor church although very pretty. A submerged cartoon in blue, white, green, and orange. Already I had broken my earlier rule to stick with the rich Christians. Maybe I was becoming a little Christian myself. It’s hard to tell. The priest felt very puny beneath all the colors and really, he was, with his grim whispers. He was trying for more balls, as he put it, in himself and service. I was instructed to play freeform at any inspired moment even while he talked or whenever I felt there was a lapse in worship. I was so good at this a very old man thought I was a violin. Then it was nice to go down wading in the sea and believe in God, to pretend I had girlfriends and deep acquaintances, like poor Pa with his cows and salty pals.

  Back at the house I lent Pa money and stared with my new power through the notch of the tree outside my window.

  But one day the curtain was closed.

  Great God, they always dig the tunnel right where you love, don’t they? Somehow they have known the route all along, then they are right next to you, plundering jackals, bothered spies eating toward your heart in their envy, fiends with cutting nails and their dread offices. Just at your high tide too, everything smiling, your old parents in your hands like glass animals; the orange bitch humping herself, so glad for your arrival.

  He was a relative of hers, a detective, he said, wearing an even bigger hat than the beggar and as in Pa’s dreams, his boots and long gun. You could see Pa crumpling in envy.

  With my parents gathered at our eating table, he continued.

  In essence, you killed her, he says. With her stroke, she could not take her eyes away from you. Neither stop your nasty suggestive horn playing every tune she most abhorred.

  The whole point of her later life in fact was to escape wherever horns were. She only wanted a little liquor and great silence, poor thing.

  I did not, could not, I said.

  Mother witnessed against me.

  Next Pa crept from his station of hunched envy. Might I have a look at your peacemaker there under the coat? he wondered.

  Stand back, little missus, warned the man. After much unbuckling came out his exquisite almost interminable gun, practically a hand rifle. Unduly long and quarrelsome in its chromium. Then it was back in his coat, snapped into harness, a cruel aid to his searches and legal destruction. Pa was stunned as by a miracle snatched away in full bloom.

  The man wore provocative and immense boots too. Sort of a dancing cream leather boot poured on the end of his heavy legs.

  After the end you still kept on, the man scolded me. She must have been gone in the chair two days, three, while you went on mocking her.

  How could you know?

  You were at it even as they discovered the body. This looked to be such a decent lovely neighborhood. However.

  He stared at me all over again, refreshed by pure loathing.

  In my line of work you seem to find at least one monster in every block. A sorry rule, but one without which I wouldn’t be necessary at all. There isn’t hardly any kind of human ugliness can live by itself forever. It can’t keep, it’s got to leap out on parade. Then they call me.

  How wonderful, said my pa, the borrower.

  Who sent
you? I asked. I deny everything. It was her fault, when I was young. She ate floating bread. You weren’t there.

  Here is the evidence by witness: you switched from an old horn, a bent one, to a new one even shriller and more bombastic. Is this the case? He put away his notes.

  It is, said my mother. He resumed.

  You can’t obscure this in mysticism. Your “floating bread.” When you were young. You were hardly a juvenile when you finished her.

  Bread, long brown bread floated toward her face from out of the curtains, I swore.

  Wonderful and sad, my pa spoke again. I should have known, so instantly feral and willing to attack the first wounded among us.

  There will probably be a fine, which I might get reduced, since you two in your ignorant disgrace, have, I feel this deeply, been the salt of the earth, ignorant of this man’s troubles.

  We are ignorant, said Pa. You can’t know.

  The man recited a tale of another’s crime so vile and lethal they were relieved in the comparison. Such tears of innocence gathered in Mother’s eyes I could have smashed her. Now I seemed merely a squalid pile they could talk around.

  There it is, that’s how they find your route and burrow right into your works. The ruin of your ambitions, your virtues, love’s persistent dream. The orange boxer bitch turns its butt to you, slinks off with your kin, the shocked traitors. Next the imposition of a monstrous fine all of them agree is most lenient. I would be ruined for years along with my father. He was so happy, Mother and he without hope, at last, after the niggling prospects, the ray sent back from the future now and then. Finally a tragic humiliation from which there was no recovery.