Long, Last, Happy Page 14

  “My God, for relief from this old charade, my mercantilia!”

  “There is a bad God,” groans the other, pounding a rail. “The story is riddled with holes.”

  The woman hears a clatter around the counter. One of the men, the owner, is moving. He reaches for a can of snuff. The other casts himself against a bare spar in the wall. The owner is weeping outright.

  He spits into the snuff in his hands. He thrusts his hands into his trousers, plunging his palms to his groin. The other man has found a length of leather and thrashes the wall, raking his free hand over a steel brush. He snaps the brush to his forehead. He spouts choked groans, gasping sorrows. The two of them upset goods, shatter the peace of the aisles. The man with the leather removes his shoes. He removes a shovel from its holder, punches it at his feet, howls and reattacks his feet angrily, crying for his mute heels.

  “My children are low-hearted fascists! Their eyebrows meet! The oldest boy’s in San Diego, but he’s a pig! We’re naught but dying animals. Eve and then Jesus and us, clerks!”

  The owner jams his teeth together, and they crack. He pushes his tongue out, evicting a rude air sound. The other knocks over a barrel of staves.

  “Lost! Oh, lost!” the owner spouts. “The redundant dusty clock of my tenure here!”

  “Ah, heart pie!” moans the other.

  The woman casts a glance back.

  A dog has been aroused and creeps out from its bin below the counter. The owner slays the dog with repeated blows of the shovel, lifting fur into the air in great gouts.

  She, Celeste, looks cautiously ahead. The road is still empty.

  The owner has found some steep plastic sandals and is wearing them—jerking, breaking wind, and opening old sores. He stomps at imagined miniature men on the floor. The sound—the snorts, cries, rebuffs, indignant grunts—is unsettling.

  The woman has a quality about her. That and the heat.

  I have been sober ever since.

  I have just told a lie.

  At forty, I am at a certain peace. I have plenty of money and the love of a beautiful red-haired girl from Colorado. What’s more, the closeness with my children has come back to a heavenly beauty, each child a hero better than yours.

  You may see me with the eye patch, though, in almost any city of the South, the Far West, or the Northwest. I am on the black and chrome Triumph, riding right into your face.

  Fans

  WRIGHT’S FATHER, A SPORTSWRITER AND A HACK AND A SHILL FOR THE university team, was sitting next to Milton, who was actually blind but nevertheless a rabid fan, and Loomis Orange, the dwarf who was one of the team’s managers. The bar was out of their brand of beer, and they were a little drunk, though they had come to that hard place together where there seemed nothing, absolutely nothing to say.

  The waitress was young. Normally, they would have commented on her and gone on to pursue the topic of women, the perils of booze, or the like. But not now. Of course it was the morning of the big game in Oxford, Mississippi.

  Someone opened the door of the bar, and you could see the bright wonderful football morning pouring in with the green trees, the Greek-front buildings, and the yelling frat boys. Wright’s father and Loomis Orange looked up and saw the morning. Loomis Orange smiled, as did Milton, hearing the shouts of the college men. The father did not smile. His son had come in the door, swaying and rolling, with one hand to his chest and his walking stick in the other.

  Wright’s father turned to Loomis and said, “Loomis, you are an ugly distorted little toad.”

  Loomis dropped his glass of beer.

  “What?” the dwarf said.

  “I said that you are ugly,” Wright said.

  “How could you have said that?” Milton broke in.

  Wright’s father said, “Aw, shut up, Milton. You’re just as ugly as he is.”

  “What’ve I ever did to you?” cried Milton.

  Wright’s father said, “Leave me alone! I’m a writer.”

  “You ain’t any kind of writer. You an alcoholic. And your wife is ugly. She’s so skinny she almost ain’t even there!” shouted the dwarf.

  People in the bar—seven or eight—looked over as the three men spread, preparing to fight. Wright hesitated at a far table, not comprehending.

  His father was standing up.

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” Wright said. He swayed over toward their table, hitting the floor with his stick, moving tables aside.

  The waitress shouted over, “I’m calling the cops!”

  Wright pleaded with her: “Don’t, don’t, don’t!”

  “Now, please, sit down everybody!” somebody said.

  They sat down. Wright’s father looked with hatred at Loomis. Milton was trembling. Wright made his way slowly over to them. The small bar crowd settled back to their drinks and conversation on the weather, the game, traffic, etc. Many of the people talked about J. Edward Toole, whom all of them called simply Jet. The name went with him. He was in the Ole Miss defensive secondary, a handsome figure who was everywhere on the field, the star of the team.

  Wright found a seat at the table. He could half see and he looked calmly at all of them. His voice was extremely soft, almost ladylike, very Southern. Wright was born-again, just like Jet, who led the team in prayer before every game.

  “Let’s talk about Jet. I know him well,” Wright began.

  His father shifted, embarrassed. “We know that, Son.”

  “I grew up with that boy,” he went on.

  “Wright, we know . . .”

  “We shared the normal boyhood things together. We were little strangers on this earth together. We gamboled in the young pastures. We took our first forbidden pleasures together”—he winked—“our first cigarette, our first beer.” Wright paused, shyly. “I shared my poetry with him.”

  “God,” said Wright’s father.

  “We met when he and the other boys chased me down the beach with air rifles, shooting me repeatedly on my bare back, legs, and ears until they had run me to earth. He was always large and swift. He used to pinch me in the hall and pull out my T-shirt so that it looked as if I had breasts. He used to flatulate at his desk and point at me. In point of the fair sex, there was always a gag from this merry lad. He took my poems and revised them into pornographic verse, complete with sketches, mind you, and sent them to my sweetheart—”

  “Son,” pleaded Wright’s father.

  “Oh, I even tried the field with him myself, though thin of leg. He was a champion already, only a sophomore at Bay High. I will say that he, ha ha, taught me very well how to fumble on return of punts and kickoffs. For such was I used—as swift fodder for the others.”

  Loomis and Milton were entranced. Wright’s father was breathing very heavy and looking at the floor.

  “Wright.” This time he was almost demanding.

  “Those smashes of his! I certainly, ha ha, coughed up the ball and often limped into the showers. One afternoon while no one was looking, he clipped me from behind, right on the concrete floor.”

  Wright was smiling meekly as his voice trailed off. And when he went on, it was quieter but very even.

  “We won all the games. I say we, though I stood on the sidelines or played in the band—French horn. I remember his beautiful mother watching from the stands, but what I mainly remember was Jet, with all his tackles and interceptions. He was All-State his junior year, then went on to duplicate that his senior, ultimately receiving, as you know, a full scholarship to the university here, where fate—or most likely God—brought my family and me to this fair city, my father finding employment and I a convenient although irregular education.”

  Wright’s father’s hands were over his face.

  “It’s back to the night of our senior graduation from Bay High, that night you are familiar with—”

  “Yes, Goddamn it, we are familiar!” said his father.

  “Wait. I want to hear the story again,” said Loomis Orange.

  “Yeah. Ag
ain,” said Milton.

  “That night, knowing I had my new Vespa motor scooter as a present from my father and mother, Jet and some of the boys waited at the end of the drive out from the auditorium. Still wearing my robe, my mortarboard under my arm, I cranked up that lovely red Vespa for all it could rip. I was in a hurry to change and join Jet and the others out at the lake party. They were in the bushes on either side of the road with a rope lying hidden between them. Well, they ‘clotheslined’ me. The rest is history.”

  “Yes, Son! We know about that and your condition, bless your heart. Let’s—”

  Wright’s father rose as if to go.

  “Then . . .”

  “Then?” said Loomis. He put his short arms on the table. He wore a bulky child’s-size Izod shirt.

  “Then? Then?” said the father. He sat back down.

  “The best, I suppose, in a way, ha ha. At the end of the summer, when I was out of the hospital and all was said and done, Jet and I made a private trip to the Biloxi Yacht Club. We were interested in a boat. Or rather, as I usually did, I followed his interests. It was late in the afternoon and there had been a bumper crop of shrimp—so many they were falling off the boat. The sharks had followed the boats in and they’d called off swimming.

  “A man on the dock was balling up hamburger meat full of razor blades, in chunks about the size of horse apples, and throwing them in the water. The water would churn and a fan of blood would rush out of the shark’s head. This brought the others to it. The water was white and thrashing. Heads and half bodies floated up and snapped back down. Then the alligator gars got into it and it was bleeding paradise. That was Jet’s phrase. Oh, he could do the smart phrase now and then, using a British term or some such.

  “It was bleeding paradise, he said. After he finished saying this over and over again, he asked me what I thought. Thought about what? I said. And Jet got very sad and looked out over the water at the red sun. Then he pushed me in.”

  “He pushed you in? In the water?” said Milton, who was the only one at the table who could respond in words.

  “Yes,” said Wright. There was a bit of hurt in his eyes, but they retained an even, soft gleam. “But there is the further beautiful thing.”

  “He pushed you in the water, Son?”

  “Yes. But last year I saw him on campus. I knew that he’d been born-again and I wanted to congratulate him. You know what he said to me as he rubbed that big Sugar Bowl ring on those great sun-browned fingers of his? He put his arm on my shoulder and said to me, ‘Wright, I’m sorry.’”

  There was business to do, the game to see, or feel, so the four of them slowly left the bar, tapping, wobbling, huffing, and met Wright’s mother on the corner, then went up to the stadium to wait for Jet to kill them.

  1986-1993

  Bats Out of Hell

  High-Water Railers

  THE PIER SHOOK UNDER HIS FEET, WRAPPED IN SOCKS AND SANDALS. He wore huge gabardine shorts and was blue-white in the legs. Yeah, our time’s about over, and I was counting the things I hadn’t done last night, things I regretted, sins of omission; omitted to sin, I mean, ha! He was going on. Lewis, ninety-one, had watched some four-foot square of water for three years. He was still intrigued by what the lake gave up. Storms had been rough through the late winter and spring. This was an oxbow lake. The flooding from the great continental river washed splendid oddities into the channel, some of them carnivorous, some of them simply bottom suckers of astounding girth, armored with scales of copper. Lewis shook with both palsy and wonder when fish this rare were dragged up or just spotted rolling.

  His fine sea-size rig was cast out with a six-inch red and white bobber; two fathoms under was a hooked shrimp from a frozen bag he’d brought down. Lewis had a theory that with hurricanes—they’d had two just lately a hundred-fifty miles south—sea life pushed up into the high reaches of the river, then flooded even into this lake and Farte Cove. He considered himself an ichthyologist of minor parts and kept a notebook with responses to fish life in it. There were no entries or dates when he did not catch or witness interesting water life. Like a great many days in a man’s life, those days he’d just as soon did not occur at all. He wanted a lot of the exotic and a minimum of the ordinary.

  Lewis turned and was deeply unimpressed by old Ulrich staggering onto the pier. This man featured himself a scientist or at least an aerocrat, though Lewis thought him a fraud afloat on a sea of wide misunderstanding. Ulrich was in the process of “studying” blue herons, loons and accipiters in flight and for some nagging reason was interested in the precise weight of everybody he met. He thought it happily significant that the old had lighter, hollower, more aerodynamic bones, such as birds had. Having been witness to the first German jet aircraft in the war, a specter he had never recovered from, he “drew on” this reflection time and again, apropos of almost zero, thought Lewis. Unfortunately, he had also been blown a goodly distance by Hurricane Camille in 1969. Ulrich was old then, but claimed also to be wiser in special “hurricane minutes” and inflicted this credential here and there, at any time, during his seminar at the end of the pier. There was no gainsaying the man with his “brief flight” and “hurricane minutes.” The body was preparing the elderly for the “flight of the soul,” said Ulrich. Why, he expected to weigh about thirty-five pounds when he died, just a bit of mortal coil dragged away protesting like a hare under an eagle.

  Another annoyance to Lewis—who actually loved Ulrich; almost all the old loved each other at the end of the pier—was that Ulrich, eighty-nine, showed no signs of bad health even though he lit up one Kent after another. This, Ulrich attributed—wouldn’t it be—to a “scientific diet” such as that literally eaten by birds. The diet of birds was indicated come the senior years. A final annoyance was that Ulrich cherished the word acquit, as in “let me acquit myself” or “he acquitted himself well.” Though Lewis ignored this as often as possible, he wondered why Ulrich should think a person was perpetually on trial when he opened his mouth, especially given the blather that flew out Ulrich’s own. Ulrich, too, was interested in piscatorial life, though fish were “base and heavy,” mere “forage in the pastures of the deep.” Ignore, look away, pleaded Lewis to himself.

  Many eutrophic lakes, their food chains unbalanced by man or nature, simply died. But this old oxbow had come back in the nineties. Bass, sunfish, perch, bluegill, gar, buffalo, carp, and now small alligators popped the surface. Big shad fled and recovered in shoals. Rare wading birds attended the shores and shallows. Hunted duck and geese veterans rested and paddled with only the great moccasins and turtles to fear. The water was a late-spring black, with sloughs going to tannin. Three unrecovered human bodies were somewhere out there, victims of March lightning. In a bad storm, the huge lake could imitate an inland sea, all three-foot whitecaps and evil sail-wrappers. It would also flood quickly and drive mink and nutria to the back roads, where one could make ladies’ coats from the roadkill.

  Next, Sidney Farte, of the old cove family who owned the boat and bait house, came out, barely, humbled by shingles and roaring ulcers, giving a sniff of propriety to the pier, which he did not own but had watched for fifty-seven years through the replacement and repiling in the seventies. The man who’d had the benches and the rail fixed for the elderly was a kind man—Wooten—now dead and discussed only by that one inexorable trait of his, his kindness in little things and big. Nobody knew what experience had produced this saint, and his perfection attracted none of them, so terrible would be the strain, especially considering the fact that Wooten had not been stupid, not at all. Some said that he had been president of a small Baptist college, but for some reason nobody had ever directly put the question to him. There was a holy air about the man, no denying, that brooked none of your ordinary street questioning. Wooten never quoted anybody or any source. He spoke only for himself, and not very often. Such a man—well, even if something enormous and ugly had happened in his past, it would seem rude to know it. Wooten was a tiny man
, maybe five-four, with snow-white hair that turned boyishly fore and aft in the wind. He stepped very softly. Next you knew, he was beside you, looking at what you were looking at in respectful quiet.

  Ulrich had said that the lake was now Wooten’s college, but Wooten himself would never have expressed anything as pompous as that.

  “The water looks so fresh and deep this morning!” Wooten would say, a curious sweet medicinal smell reaching you on his breath.

  Sidney Farte did not care for his virtue, was made sullen by it, but did not dare attack “Cardinal Wooten” (as he called him under his breath) around the others. He was glad when the fellow passed on. Now Sidney could get back to the regular profanity of his observations. Sidney was having a bad time in his old age, but he rather adored his bad time. Also afflicted with serious deafness, he did not enjoy the reprieve from noise as other old people did, but hurled this way and that, certain that whispered conspiracies and revenges were afoot. The soreness in his chest predicted the weather, which Sidney inevitably pronounced rotten: tornadoes, more flooding and thunder, every kind of spiteful weather. A sunny day filled him with mild horror and suspicion. Sidney had endured lately a sorry, sorry thing, and all of them knew it. A male grandchild of his had won a scholarship to a mighty eastern university, Yale, and was the object of a four-year gloat by Sidney, who had no college. The young man upon graduation had come over to visit his grandfather for a week, at the end of which he pronounced Sidney “a poisonous, evil old man who ought to be ashamed of yourself.” This statement simply whacked Sidney flat to the ground. He was still trying to recover and was much more silent than in previous springs. Ulrich and Lewis both worried about him, used to his profanity as a sort of walking milieu against which they fished and breathed.

  The other oldster of the core on the rail was late. This was Peter Wren, brother of the colonel who made Wake Island gallant against the Japanese and a chronic prevaricator whose lies were so gaudy and wrapped around they might have been a medieval tapestry of what almost or never happened. He had of course suborned the history of his brother and his constant perjuries held a real fear of the truth, lest the whole tissue of lies crumble when it came forward. It was getting where it seemed dangerous to risk even a simple declarative sentence about the weather or time of day, and Pete Wren was likely to misstate even that. “It’s really wanting to rain, you know. Must be near noon”—when the sky was full blue and the time was about ten, latest. People took him to be majorly misinformed, but it was not that: he lived in fear of rupture from the tangled web. So finally he came out with his expensive ultralight rig and crickets. Wren was a partisan of the bluegill, for which—it was heard—he held the state record, but he’d casually eaten the fish without registering it. He was breeding a special kind of mutant cricket in his wire keep that would take the record fish again. There were enormous bluegills in the lake, in fact, and even a liar could catch them. Wren had taken home a pound-and-a-quarter one late one evening, but he claimed it had interbred with a German trout and had disqualified itself.