Long, Last, Happy Read online

  “You are very sharp toward others,” Mother Rooney said.

  “Oh, I know, me,” Harry Monroe said. “A man who was so bad in music he was booted out of the Jackson symphony, and now almost failing med school.”

  “But you keep on being so cruel to me. You won’t open the door and let me see those boys. There are two boys out there, aren’t there?”

  “One of them isn’t a boy,” Monroe said.

  It was strange to him to hear the two on the porch, still savagely drunk, and to realize that he himself, who had put down more than any of them, was now sober as Mother Rooney was.

  He said, “The fellow with Silas is seventy years old. He was at the Dutch Bar and we thought we’d bring him over as a—a gift, a present to you. The old guy is ready to be your companion from now on out; he already has a crush on you, Mother. Listen!”

  She had begun to rise, hissing at him.

  “I know it’s horrible now. But I and Silas wanted to make amends to you, really. We are so sorry for what happened in this house. You know, it started with the little joking insults, and then it grew to where hurting you was a cult. You really occupied us. Especially those of us who were taking a lot of bad traffic in the shit of the outer world and were originally endowed with a great amount of rottenness in our personal selves. The next thing would’ve been murdering you. I always felt the police were ready to break in any minute.”

  “You prissy little scholar. I could’ve taken it,” Mother Rooney said. “You don’t know the hurt that’s come to me. It tells me I’m alive, hurting.”

  Monroe looked at her forlornly. “Do you think you can take that pin wound in your chest now?”

  “I don’t know.” Mother Rooney sank, remembering the pin. What to do? Monroe wondered. He drew away into the dining room and sat on the couch. “Puncture” was all he remembered. He was very busy with the Merck, after making the phone call. She heard the pages ruffling and Harry mumbling.

  “. . . do not bleed freely and the point of entry seals quickly, making the depths of the wound ideal for the propagation of infective agents. Tract should be laid open and excised and débridement carried out in the manner described under Contaminated Incised Wounds.”

  Mother Rooney also heard a loud mauling at the door.

  Silas and the old guy were making a ram attack on it. Monroe yelled unspeakably filthy words at them. His pages were still rippling. Then he threw the book out through the front bay window and there was a horrendous collapsing of glass. Then the ambulances came squalling up Titpea. By mistake, two of them came to the same house. Monroe ran on. There were steps and voices and the red lights outside.

  Mother Rooney bellowed, “Is it the police, Harriman? I always thought they’d come in and stop Hoover’s cruelty to me. I thought they should have been at the tennis courts at Hoover Second’s crash, declaring it illegal and unfair, and restoring him to me. But they never came. They’re worthless. Tell them that if they try to get in the door.”

  Harry Monroe studied the standing brooch on her chest. Do you pull it out? And because the brooch looked silly sticking in the old lady, he walked to her quickly and snapped it out, then flung it down the hall at the back of the house.

  He unlocked the door, and there was big Mr. Silas, asking, “What is occurring? I’ve got the lover here.” The old man was riding piggyback on Silas’s huge shoulders; he had combed his white hair back with his own drunkardly, lonely spit, using his fingers, and he was scared to death. The two men waddled in, looking at Mother Rooney.

  Monroe ran at Silas and slugged him in the eyes and Silas abandoned the old guy and fell into the dining room upon Monroe. A brawl could be heard by Mother Rooney. The table went over. Silas was reaching for Monroe, who kicked away and whimpered, and that was what the brawl amounted to.

  The old boy lay dazed in the lobby, fallen where he was shucked off Silas. He had landed hard and didn’t move. Then his body, with its ruined hairdo, started sliding on the slick boards, face up, down toward Mother Rooney. He moved on down and she saw he was really a red old drunk.

  The first ambulance crew thought he was the one and rolled him out expertly. The second crew noticed the woman bleeding. But she was standing now, and went out to the ambulance walking. One of the ambulance men had to go in and break off Silas from Monroe, and now Monroe was another case, and Mother Rooney sat beside him and petted him, all the way to the hospital.

  1979-1985

  Captain Maximus

  Getting Ready

  HE WAS FORTY-EIGHT, A FISHERMAN, AND HE HAD NEVER CAUGHT A significant fish. He had spent a fortune, enough for two men and wives, and he had been everywhere after the big one, the lunker, the fish bigger than he was. His name was Roger Laird, better off than his brother, who went by the nickname “Poot.”

  Everywhere. Acapulco, Australia, Hawaii, the Keys. Others caught them yesterday and the weather was bad today and they were out of the right bait. Besides, the captain was sick and the first mate was some little jerk in a Def Leppard T-shirt who pulled in the big grouper that Roger hung because Roger was almost pulled overboard. Then the first mate brought some filets packed in ice to Roger’s motel door because Roger was ill with sunburn and still seasick.

  Roger had been paying money all day for everything and so when he went to bed, ill, he inserted a quarter for the Magic Fingers.

  Something went wrong.

  The bed tossed around worse than the boat in four feet of waves.

  There was vomit all over the room and when Roger woke up, hearing the knock on the door, he opened the ice chest and looked at the big grouper filets and before he could do anything about it, he threw up on the fish, too, reeling blindly and full of bile back to the bed, which was still on, bucking. His wife was still asleep—but when she heard the new retching sounds from Roger, him trying to lie down, she thought something amorous was up and would have gone for him except for the filthy smell he had.

  She crawled away.

  Mrs. Reba Laird was a fine woman from Georgia, with her body in trim. She had looked up the origin of the Laird name. In Scots, it means landholder. She knew there was an aristocratic past to her husband, for she herself had found out that her side of the family were thieves and murderers brought over by Oglethorpe to populate and suffer from the jungles of Georgia. She thought Roger was a wonderful lover when he wasn’t fishing.

  Roger eschewed freshwater fishing in Louisiana, where the Lairds lived now, except for the giant catfish in a river near the Texas border. He got a stout pole, a big hook, and let it down weighted with ocean lead and a large wounded shad. He had read all the fishing tips in Field & Stream and he knew those giants were down there because there were other men fishing right where he was with stiff rods and wounded live shad.

  The man to Roger’s right hooked into one and it was a tussle, tangling all the lines out—so Roger felt the mother down there, all right.

  When they got the fish out, by running a jeep in and hooking the line to the bumper, it was the weight of ninety pounds.

  The jeep backed over Roger’s brand-new fishing rod and snapped it into two pieces and ground his fishing reel into the deep muck. Roger saw the fish and watched them wrench it up, hanging from the back bar of the jeep. He was amazed and excited—but the fish was not his. Still, he photographed it with his Polaroid. But when Roger added up the day, it had cost him close to three hundred dollars for a Polaroid picture.

  The thing about it was that Roger was not dumb. He was handsome, slender, gray at the temples, with his forehair receding to reveal an intelligent cranium, nicely shaped like that of a tanned, professional fisherman.

  Roger watched the Southern TV shows about fishing—Bill Dance, others—and he had read the old Jason Lucas books, wherein Lucas claims he can catch fish under any conditions, even chopping holes in the ice in Wisconsin at a chill degree of minus fifty and taking his limit in walleye and muskie. Also, Roger had read Izaak Walton, but he had no use for England and all that olden sh
it.

  It was a big saltwater one he wanted, around the Gulf of Mexico where he lived. On the flats near Islamorado, Roger had hung a big bonefish. However, he was alone and it dragged the skiff into some branches where there were several heavy cottonmouth moccasins.

  He reached for the pistol in his kit. One of the snakes, with its mouth open, had fallen in the boat. Roger shot the stern floor out of the boat. As the boat sank, all his expensive gear in it, Roger Laird kept going down, reloading, firing at the trees, and when he went underwater he thought he saw the big bonefish under the water, which was later, as he recalled, a Florida gar. He could see underwater and could hold his breath underwater and was, withal, in good shape. But the .25 automatic shot underwater rather startled the ears, and the bullet went out in slow motion like a lead pellet thrown left-handed by a sissy. So Roger waded out of the water, still firing a few rounds to keep Nature away from him. Then got his wind back and dove in to recover his radio.

  The Coast Guard came and got him.

  Roger’s father, Bill Laird, was a tender traveler of eighty years in his new Olds 98. Old Mr. Laird found remarkable animals all over the land. Behind a service station in Bastrop, Louisiana, he saw a dog playing with a robin. The two of them were friends, canine and bird. They had been friends a long time. Grievously, one day the dog became too rough and killed the bird. The men at the service station were sort of in mourning. They stared at the nacreous eyes of the bird on the counter. The dog was under the counter, looking up sorrowfully at the corpse.

  Nothing of this should have occurred.

  Roger thought of his father, who had always loved animal life and was quite a scholar on the habits of anything on land that roved on four legs.

  Well, where was Roger now?

  Roger was at Mexico Beach, thirty miles south of Panama City. He was out of money and had brought only a Zebco 33 with a stiff fiberglass rod. He had no money for bait, and he was just helping pay for some of the groceries for George and Anna Lois and their son and daughter-in-law, who had a baby. The house was old and wooden, with a screen porch running around two sides; a splendid beach house owned by Slade West, a veteran of Normandy, who had once kept a pet lion there. The lion started chasing cars when the Florida boom hit, and he had to give it to a zoo.

  At the moment, Roger was alone in the house. He was looking out over the ocean at some crows. The crows hung around, although it was not their place. They fetched and quacked in the air and were rolled by sea breezes off the mark.

  Somebody’s dog from down the way came in and rolled privately in the sea oats. What a lark, all to himself, he was having! Feet in the air and twisting his back in the sand and the roots! But the heavy dangerous trucks going by were just feet from the dog. The dog was playing it very close.

  Yesterday, Roger had caught a crab on his line that reminded him of himself. The crab was aging well and, dumb as hell, was holding on till the very, very last, where Roger might drag him in out of the water if he wanted him. The crab was in the surf, clamped on the shrimp and hook, trying to prove something. While the crab was looking at Roger and deciding on the moment, the dog dashed into the water and tore the crab to pieces with its jaws.

  Roger had never seen anything like this. Not only was Roger stunned, he had now caught a dog! So he ran down the beach lickety-split with a loose line—so the hook wouldn’t hurt the dog’s lips. Roger offered abject apologies, pulling the last ten from his wallet to pay the vet bill.

  Next door to the house where Roger was staying was an ugly little brick house fenced in as if somebody would want to take something from it. The owner and occupant was a Mr. Mintner, possibly a vampire. Roger had never seen Mr. Mintner come out into the sun and all the plant signs around the house were dead and dry. Parked outside was a Harley-Davidson golf cart, and at 11 p.m. three nights ago Roger had seen Mr. Mintner crank up the golf cart and come back from the Minute Market with several bloody-looking steaks and beef bouillon cubes and some radishes. Roger saw all this in the dim outside light of Mr. Mintner’s. He saw Mr. Mintner in a black golf outfit and black boots, and his arms were pale almost to luminescence. There was a story that his heart had been broken by a woman years ago and that he had never recovered.

  Roger had a fascinated aversion to this Mintner and believed that he should be hauled away and made to eat with accountants.

  Roger, with no financial resources at the time, cleaned up the house and read some of the National Geographic and Discover magazines around the place. He had brought along his fisherman’s log, in which there was not one entry, only some notes on the last pages where it said NOTES.

  He looked out at the green softly rolling ocean again. There were a lot of things out there in “the big pond,” as McClane’s New Standard Fishing Encyclopedia called the Gulf. There were things like marlin and sailfish and cobia(ling) and bluefish. As for the little ocean catfish, Roger had caught his weight twenty times over of them.

  They were trash and insignificant.

  Today George and his son Steve were out casting in the surf and catching some small whiting. Roger waded into the water, feeling the warm wash over his sneakers, and then stood straddle legged, arms behind his back, rather like a taller Napoleon surveying an opposing infantry horde from an unexpected country of idiots.

  Two-thirds of the world was water, wasn’t it?

  There were king mackerel out there, too, and big snapper. But Roger had no funds to hire a boat, and all his wonderful gear was back in Louisiana in his garage, every line coiled perfectly, every hook on every lure honed to surgical sharpness, every reel oiled and soundless. As for what Roger had here at Mexico Beach, it was the cheap Zebco with a light-medium–weight rod, the whole thing coming out of a plastic package from T.G.&Y. at a price of twenty-four dollars—such a rig as you would buy a nephew on his eleventh birthday.

  Roger’s friend George Epworth was having a good time with his son Steve. They were up to their hips in water, casting away with shrimp on the hook. They caught a ground mullet, which Roger inspected. This kind of mullet is not the leaping vegetarian that is caught with a net only. Roger looked on with pursed lips. Then there were some croakers, who gave them a little tussle. It was fine kid sport, with the surf breaking right around the armpits of the fellows. Steve’s wife, Becky, had made a tent over their baby, and Anna Lois, newly a grandmother, was watching the baby and reading from one of Slade West’s encyclopedias of sea life. George was a biochemist back at Millsaps College in Jackson. Anna Lois worked for the state crime lab, and their ocean time was precious. They liked everything out here and knew a good bit about sea chemistry. Roger envied them somewhat. But he had only a fever for the big one, the one to write home about, the one to stuff, varnish, and mount, whereas none of these fish were approaching a pound, though they were beautiful.

  Roger was wondering what in the deuce was so wrong with him and his luck now.

  Not just the fish.

  Not just the fact that his Reba had gone a bit nuts when menopause came on her.

  Not just the fact that she bought a new dress every day, and from high-priced boutiques, and that she stayed in the bathroom for an hour, making up—but that she emerged in earrings and hose and high heels only to sit on the couch and stare at the wall across from her. Not at a mirror, not at a picture, not at the television, not smoking anymore, not drinking, not reading—which she had loved—just sitting there with a little grieving smile on her face. She wasn’t grouchy. She just sat, staring with the startling big gray eyes that had charmed Roger to raving for her back in college days. They’d just had their twenty-fifth anniversary, Roger and Reba.

  Further, his luck with money recently. Why, he’d had near a hundred-fifty thousand in the bank, and they were thinking about living on interest for the first time ever when bang, the offshore-drilling speculation in which they had the stock exploded and the money was gone.

  It made Roger so tired he had not the energy to track down the reasons.

&nbs
p; As for Nature, Roger was tiring, too. He had a weary alliance with Nature—the roses, the wisteria, and the cardinals and the orioles and the raccoons round the deck on the rear of his dutch-roofed little castle. But he was not charmed much now when he went out there and looked.

  Were his senses shutting down? He who had never had to use even reading glasses and about whom everyone said he looked a decade younger than he was? At least?

  Roger Laird was about to turn and go back to his room, shut the curtains, write in his fishing log something that might give him an idea as to what was wrong with him, when something happened out beyond the breakers.

  He saw it roll, and he saw a fin of some kind stand up.

  Then it rolled again!

  A rising shower of small fish leapt up and the gulls hurried over, seconded by the crows, quacking but not knowing how to work the sea as the gulls did.

  The big fin came up again!

  Roger’s eyes narrowed and the point of his vision met on the swirl of water as if on the wrong end of a pair of Zeisses. Given the swirl, the fish was seven to nine feet long at the smallest.

  Roger looked slyly around to see if any of his friends, the Epworths, had noticed it. But they were otherwise occupied and had not.

  Roger looked again, bending as if to find a nice conch shell like a lady tourist, and the thing rolled again!

  The birds were snapping the moiling little minnows, the crows missing and having to move out heavy on the flap because of their sogged feathers.

  Then there was no activity.

  Roger walked back with the Epworths, helping to carry the bucket of fish they intended to roast over charcoal for lunch. The baby was put to bed. Steve and his wife lay on the divan watching the soap opera General Hospital. The local weather and fishing report came on. The man with big spectacles said the weather was fine but the fishing was no good, apologizing to the world for the ocean this week.