Long, Last, Happy Read online

  After they had eaten the smoked fish and salad and the oysters Rockefeller, everybody was sleepy except Roger—who pretended sleepiness and went to his room. It was a half hour he waited there, studying the Zebco outfit in the corner. Then you could hear nothing in the house, and he, despite himself, began making phony snoring noises.

  Barefooted, he scooted to the kitchen and found the plastic bowl of bait shrimp. He eased the door to, not even the sound of a vacuum sucking on rubber. Then he put on his sneakers and, holding the Zebco unit, he slipped out into the driveway.

  Roger was about halfway down the drive, aiming straight for the sea, when a loud voice from the little ugly redbrick house horrified him.

  “You!”

  It was Mr. Mintner, shouting from his window.

  The pale man was holding the windowsill, speaking with his nose practically against the screen.

  “Getting any?” shouted Mintner.

  There was a horrifying derisive laugh, like rolling tin, and then the window came down with a smash, Mintner receding into the dark of the room. It was two in the afternoon and the house was totally unlit.

  Roger was not certain that there had been a man at all. Perhaps it was just a voice giving body to something waxen and then vanishing.

  He had never been a coward. But he was unsettled when he reached the sea. He had some trouble tying on the hook. It was not even a sea hook. It was a thin golden bass hook that came with the Zebco kit. He put the bell weight on and looked out, yearning at the blue-gray hole where the creature had shown.

  There was not a bird in sight. There was no whirl and leaping of minnows. The water was as dead as a pond some bovine might be drinking from.

  Roger stayed near the water—waiting, getting ready.

  Then he cast—a nice long cast—easy with this much lead on the line, and the rig plumped down within a square yard of where he’d seen the fish.

  He tightened the line and waited.

  There was a tug but small and he knew it was a crab. He jerked the line back, cursing, and reeled in. The shrimp was gone. He looked in the plastic bowl and got the biggest shrimp there, peeled it, and ran it onto the hook, so that his bait looked like a succulent question mark almost to the geometry.

  This time he threw long but badly, way over to one side.

  It didn’t matter.

  He knew it didn’t matter. He was just hoping that that crabeating dog wouldn’t show up, and he hadn’t even tightened his line when it hit.

  It was big and it was on.

  He could not budge it, and he knew he’d snap the line if he tried.

  He forgot how the drag worked. He forgot everything. Everything went into a hot rapid glared picture, and he was yanked into the sea, past his knees, up to his waist, then floundering, swimming, struggling up.

  Then he began running knee-deep and following the fish.

  Jesus—oh, thank you, please, please, yes—holy Christ, it was coming toward him now! He reeled in rapidly. He had gone yards and yards down the beach.

  It came on in. He could pull it in. It was coming. It was bending the rod double. But it was coming. He had it. Just not be dumb and lose it.

  It surfaced. A sand shark. About four feet long and fifteen pounds. But Roger had never seen anything so lovely and satisfying. He grabbed the line and hauled it toward him, and there it was, white bellied and gray topped, and now he had it on the sand and it was his, looking like a smiling tender rocket from the deep, a fish so young, so handsome, so perfect for its business, and so unlucky.

  By this time a crowd had gathered, and Roger was on his knees in the sand, sweating profusely and with his chest full of such good air it was like a gas of silver in him.

  The crowd began saying things.

  “I’ll kill him with this flounder gig! Everybody stand back!” said one of the young men.

  “Ooo! Ugg!” said a young somebody else.

  George Epworth was on the beach by then.

  “That was something. I watched you through the binoculars. That was something.” George Epworth knelt and watched the shark heaving away.

  “Would you unhook him for me?” Roger Laird asked.

  George Epworth reached down, cut the line, and pulled the hook out backward through the shank, leaving only a tiny hole.

  A man who had been cutting up drift logs for a fire said, “I’ll do the honors. They’re good to eat, you know.”

  The man was raising his axe and waiting for Roger to move away.

  “Not mine, you don’t!” Roger screamed, and then he picked up the shark by the tail and threw it way out in the water. It turned over on its back and washed in as if dying for a few minutes, whereupon it flipped over and eased into the deep green.

  When Roger Laird got back to Louisiana, he did not know what kind of story to tell. He only knew that his lungs were full of the exquisite silvery gas.

  Reba Laird became better. They were bankrupt, had to sell the little castle with the dutch roof. She couldn’t buy any more dresses or jewelry. But she smiled at Roger Laird. No more staring at the wall.

  He sold all his fishing gear at a terrible loss, and they moved to Dallas, address unknown.

  Then Roger Laird made an old-fashioned two-by-four pair of stilts eight-feet high. It made him stand about twelve feet in the air. He would mount the stilts and walk into the big lake around which the rich people lived. The sailing boats would come around near him, big opulent three-riggers sleeping two families belowdecks, and Roger Laird would yell:

  “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

  Even Greenland

  I WAS SITTING RADAR. ACTUALLY DOING NOTHING.

  We had been up to seventy-five thousand to give the afternoon some jazz. I guess we were still in Mexico, coming into Miramar eventually in the F-14. It doesn’t much matter after you’ve seen the curvature of the earth. For a while, nothing much matters at all. We’d had three sunsets already. I guess it’s what you’d call really living the day.

  But then,

  “John,” said I, “this plane’s on fire.”

  “I know it,” he said.

  John was sort of short and angry about it.

  “You thought of last-minute things any?” said I.

  “Yeah. I ran out of a couple of things already. But they were cold, like. They didn’t catch the moment. Bad writing,” said John.

  “You had the advantage. You’ve been knowing,” said I.

  “Yeah. I was going to get a leap on you. I was going to smoke you. Everything you said, it wasn’t going to be good enough. I was going to have a great one, and everything you said, it wasn’t going to be good enough,” said he.

  “But it’s not like that,” said I. “Is it?”

  He said, “Nah. I got nothing, really.”

  * * *

  The wings were turning red. I guess you’d call it red. It was a shade against dark blue that was mystical flamingo, very spaceylike, like living blood. Was the plane bleeding?

  “You have a good time in Peru?” said I.

  “Not really,” said John. “I got something to tell you. I haven’t had a ‘good time’ in a long time. There’s something between me and a good time since, I don’t know, since I was twenty-eight or like that. I’ve seen a lot, but you know I haven’t quite seen it. Like somebody’s seen it already. It wasn’t fresh. There were eyes that had used it up some.”

  “Even high in Mérida?” said I.

  “Even,” said John.

  “Even Tibet, where you met your wife. By accident a beautiful American girl way up there?” said I.

  “Even,” said John.

  “Even Greenland?” said I.

  John said, “Yes. Even Greenland. It’s fresh, but it’s not fresh. There are footsteps in the snow.”

  “Maybe,” said I, “you think about in Mississippi when it snows, when you’re a kid. And you’re the first up and there’s been nobody in the snow, no footsteps.”

  “Shut up,” said John.

  �
�Look, are we getting into a fight here at the moment of death? We going to mix it up with the plane on fire?”

  “Shut up! Shut up!” said John. Yelled John.

  “What’s wrong?” said I.

  He wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t budge at the controls. We might burn but we were going to hold level. We weren’t seeking the earth at all.

  “What is it, John?” said I.

  John said, “You son of a bitch, that was mine—that snow in Mississippi. Now it’s all shot to shit.”

  The paper from his notepad was flying all over the cockpit, and I could see his hand flapping up and down with the pencil in it, angry.

  “It was mine, mine, you rotten cocksucker! You see what I mean?”

  The little pages hung up on the top, and you could see the big moon just past them.

  “Eject! Save your ass!” said John.

  But I said, “What about you, John?”

  John said, “I’m staying. Just let me have that one, will you?”

  “But you can’t,” said I.

  But he did.

  Celeste and I visit the burn on the blond sand under one of those black romantic worthless mountains five miles or so out from Miramar base.

  I am a lieutenant commander in the reserve now. But to be frank, it shakes me a bit even to run a Skyhawk up to Malibu and back.

  Celeste and I squat in the sand and say nothing as we look at the burn. They got all the metal away.

  I don’t know what Celeste is saying or thinking, I am so absorbed myself and paralyzed.

  I know I am looking at John’s damned triumph.

  Ride, Fly,

  Penetrate, Loiter

  MY NAME IS NED MAXIMUS, BUT THEY CALL ME MAXIMUM NED.

  Three years ago, when I was a drunk, a hitchhiker stabbed me in the eye with my own filet knife. I wear a patch on the right one now. It was a fake Indian named Billy Seven Fingers. He was having the shakes, and I was trying to get him to the bootleggers off the reservation in Neshoba County, Mississippi. He was white as me—whiter, really, because I have some Spanish.

  He asked me for another cigarette, and I said no, that’s too many, and besides you’re a fake—you might be gouging the Feds with thirty-second-part maximum Indian blood, but you don’t fool me.

  I had only got to the maximum part when he was on my face with the fish knife out of the pocket of the MG Midget.

  There were three of us. Billy Seven Fingers was sitting on the lap of his enormous sick real Indian friend. They had been drinking Dr. Tichenors Antiseptic in Philadelphia, and I picked them up sick at five in the morning, working on my Johnnie Walker Black.

  The big Indian made the car seem like a toy. Then we got out in the pines, and the last thing of any note I saw with my right eye was a Dalmatian dog run out near the road, and this was wonderful in rural Mississippi—practically a miracle—it was truth and beauty like John Keats has in that poem. And I wanted a dog to redeem my life, as drunks and terrible women do.

  But they wouldn’t help me chase it. They were too sick.

  So I went on, pretty dreadfully let down. It was the best thing offering lately.

  I was among dwarves over in Alabama at the school, where almost everybody dies early. There is a poison in Tuscaloosa that draws souls toward the low middle. Hardly anybody has honest work. Queers full of backbiting and rumors set the tone. Nobody has ever missed a meal. Everybody has about exactly enough courage to jaywalk or cheat a wife or a friend with a quote from Nietzsche on his lips.

  Thus it seemed when I was a drunk, raving with bad attitudes. I drank and smiled and tried to love, wanting some hero for a buddy: somebody who would attack the heart of the night with me. I had worn out all the parlor charity of my wife. She was doing the standard frigid lockout at home, enjoying my trouble and her cold rectitude. The drunkard lifts sobriety into a great public virtue in the smug and snakelike heart. It may be his major service. Thus it seemed when I was a drunk, raving with bad attitudes.

  So there I was, on my knees in the pebble dust on the shoulder of the road, trying to get the pistol out of the trunk of my car.

  An eye is a beautiful thing! I shouted.

  An eye is a beautiful thing!

  I was howling and stumbling.

  You frauding ugly shit! I howled.

  But they were out of the convertible and away. My fingers were full of blood, but it didn’t hurt that much. When I finally found the gun, I fired it everywhere and went out with a white heat of loud horror.

  I remember wanting a drink terribly in the emergency room. I had the shakes. And then I was in another room and didn’t. My veins were warm with dope, the bandage on. But another thing—there was my own personal natural dope running in me. My head was very high and warm. I was exhilarated, in fact. I saw with penetrating clarity with my lone left eye.

  It has been so ever since. Except the dead one has come alive and I can see the heart of the night with it. It throws a grim net sometimes, but I am lifted up.

  Nowadays this is how it goes with me: ride, fly, penetrate, loiter.

  I left Tuscaloosa—the hell with Tuscaloosa—on a Triumph motorcycle black and chrome. My hair was long, leather on my loins, bandanna of the forehead in place, standard dope-drifter gear, except for the bow and arrows strapped on the sissy bar.

  No guns.

  Guns are for cowards.

  But the man who comes near my good eye will walk away a spewing porcupine.

  The women of this town could beg and beg, but I would never make whoopee with any of them again.

  Thus it seemed when I was a drunk.

  I was thirty-eight and somewhat Spanish. I could make a stand in this chicken house no longer.

  Now I talk white, Negro, some Elizabethan, some Apache. My dark eye pierces and writhes and brings up odd talk in me sometimes. Under the patch, it burns deep for language. I will write sometimes and my bones hurt. I believe heavily in destiny at such moments.

  I went in a bar in Dallas before the great ride over the desert that I intended. I had not drunk for a week. I took some water and collected the past. I thought of my books, my children, and the fact that almost everybody sells used cars or dies early. I used to get so angry about this issue that I would drag policemen out of their cars. I fired an arrow through the window of my last wife’s, hurting nothing but the cozy locked glass and disturbing the sleep of grown children.

  It was then I took the leap into the wasteland, happy as Brer Rabbit in the briars. That long long, bloated epicene tract “The Waste Land” by Eliot—the slideshow of some snug librarian on the rag—was nothing, unworthy, in the notes that every sissy throws away. I would not talk to students about it. You throw it down like a pickled egg with nine Buds and move on to giving it to the preacher’s wife on a hill while she spits on a photograph of her husband.

  I began on the Buds, but I thought I was doing better. The standard shrill hag at the end of the bar had asked me why I did not have a ring in my ear, and I said nothing at all. Hey, pirate! she was shrieking when I left, ready to fire out of Dallas. But I went back toward Louisiana, my home state, Dallas had sickened me so much.

  Dallas, city of the fur helicopters. Dallas—computers, plastics, urban cowboys with schemes and wolf shooting in their hearts. The standard artist for Dallas should be Mickey Gilley, a studied fraud who might well be singing deeply about ripped fiberglass. His cousin is Jerry Lee Lewis, still very much from Louisiana. The Deep South might be wretched, but it can howl.

  I went back to the little town in the pines near Alexandria where I grew up. I didn’t even visit my father, just sat on my motorcycle and stared at the little yellow store. At that time I had still not forgiven him for converting to Baptist after Mother’s death.

  I had no real home at all then, and I looked in the dust at my boots, and I considered the beauty of my black and chrome Triumph 650 Twin, ’73 model, straight pipes to horrify old hearts, electricity by Lucas. I stepped over to the porch, unsteady, to
get more beer, and there she was with her white luggage, Celeste, the one who would be a movie star, a staggering screen vision that every sighted male who saw the cinema would wet the sheets for.

  I walked by her, and she looked away, because I guess I looked pretty rough. I went on in the store—and now I can tell you, this is what I saw when my dead eye went wild. I have never been the same since.

  The day is so still, it is almost an object. The rain will not come. The clouds are white, burned high away.

  On the porch of the yellow store, in her fresh stockings despite the heat, her toes eloquent in the white straps of her shoes, the elegant young lady waits. The men, two of them, look out to her occasionally. In the store, near a large reservoir, hang hooks, line, Cheetos, prophylactics, cream nougats. The roof of the store is tin. Around the woman the men, three decades older, see hot love and believe they can hear it speak from her ankles.

  They cannot talk. Their tongues are thick. Flies mount their shoulders and cheeks, but they don’t go near her, her bare shoulders wonderful above her sundress. She wears earrings, ivory dangles, and when she moves, looking up the road, they swing and kiss her shoulders almost, and the heat ripples about but it does not seem to touch her, and she is not of this place, and there is no earthly reason.

  The men in the store are stunned. They have forgotten how to move, what to say. Her beauty. The two white leather suitcases on either side of her.

  “My wife is a withered rag,” one man suddenly blurts to the other.

  “Life here is a belligerent sow, not a prayer,” responds the other.

  The woman has not heard all they say to each other. But she’s heard enough. She knows a high point is near, a declaration.

  “This store fills me with dread. I have bleeding needs,” says the owner.

  “I suck a dry dug daily,” says the other. “There’s grease from nothing, just torpor, in my fingernails.”