Long, Last, Happy Read online

  “He goes a long time without spells. He’s set off by mental . . . imagery, I think. Especially dogs. Or their enemies. Cats, awful. And sometimes blacks, unfortunately, although Dr. Latouche doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.”

  “He’s going to quit this after a while, then?”

  “If things go right. But the spells are getting longer. We’ve got to keep him locked in here. I’m sorry.”

  “Not at all. I’ve no other business. So he gave you money, he paid you . . .”

  “Mr. Coots, you’d imagine, but Dr. Latouche doesn’t even have that much money. He’s given it all away. He should have a better apartment, servants, but he’s got none of it. Thousands are alive because of Dr. Latouche.”

  “And he looks a young seventy.”

  “Doesn’t he? I think it’s all love and happy work, Mr. Coots.”

  “William. You think so? And nobody knows any more than I do about the disease?”

  “Looked everywhere. Only one doc in New York had ever heard of it. It’s never been treated in South America. We can only be grateful his is milder, so far. If you believe this, Dr. Latouche wants to begin a fund to go in and cure those few pitiful Indians. Not for himself, not in his lifetime.”

  “Yet an Indian . . . died. For him.”

  “That’s the worst way to put it. And it was my choice.”

  Coots lit a Player’s. He needed a strong hit. Fifty years of cigarettes now, with no drastic trouble. He was enjoying the smoke no less than the first good inhale in St. Louis. In that pool hall, he remembered now, a strange old man from nowhere had put his hand on his shoulder and said to him, “My lad, you will write masterpieces.” One of those magic episodes that had punctuated his life. Now Latouche was grievously scuttling and digging at the floor with his long elegant surgeon’s fingers.

  “I don’t know why you’re here, sir. But you are the thing, I hope. Obviously you know medicine and magic. I’ve read all your books. What can we do?”

  “The Indians did nothing. I believe they revered and, I know, feared the grofftites.”

  “Your guess would be better than any doctor’s, I’d bet.”

  “I could try something.” Coots was into the grim clinical zone he often elected for himself. It was obvious he could have been a fine MD, given any ambition to heal. The other, too. He grabbed at the pertinent file in his head. The delight of the fit was wearing out. He had lost his spite somewhere.

  “You might try slapping him a hard one. Be a bigger dog. Canines respond to bald aggression. They’re pack animals.”

  “I doubt I could—”

  “Do it. Don’t hold back. Otherwise, you could drench yourself with bitch urine. But he might just hump you and bite your back.”

  Barnes did reach down, turning the doctor’s cheeks up, and slap him powerfully, then shut his eyes in pity.

  It worked.

  Soon enough, Latouche was biped, straightening his tweedy suit back to its original loose rumple, pulling down his vest and replacing his watch chain across the front in the old style. His medical fraternity pin hung there, a small vanity. He was national president in the fifties, the decade of Coots’s first grand fame and obscenity trial. The French, who like their authors sick, fell on his book in droves. Coots stayed shyly and happily away, grogged in morpheus. It had taken him years and the help of friends, but the thing was out and he was going to make some money. Manslaughterer, junkie, thief, queer, layabout—the outer and under had won through. He was regent guru of the beatniks, like it or not.

  “Little phase there. I seem to have left you. My cheek smarts. Did I fall?” Latouche wanted to know.

  “A little,” said Riley Barnes quickly.

  “Old men get tired. Don’t they, Coots? Are you sometimes just tired?”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “I think it’s martini time. Can almost taste it already, terribly cold, with big white onions. Would you, Riley? What’s your pleasure, Coots?”

  “The same. Sounds perfect.”

  “All right, then. Don’t want to try the stick?”

  “No. Let’s sit in the booth and talk, guns maybe. Hard decisions about the forty-four/forty-five.”

  Coots noticed Latouche did not have that detestable turkeyness under the throat that the old often do. Even in his thinness Coots had one gaining on him. A thing that the aging imp Capote attempted to cure by fellatio, he’d heard. They sat.

  “Good. I have one. An eighteenth-century heavy handgun. Short piece, cap and ball, of course. Never shot.”

  “Bring it on down to the range next Tuesday. We’ll rig it.”

  The martinis came, with Barnes, who had a light beer, imported. A health man. How long was his dick? The drinks were sublime, just the ticket. Coots opened up even more. He was narrowing on the question of his own spite.

  “I have the Billy the Kid gun,” he said.

  “You don’t. There is no Billy the Kid gun.”

  “But there is. I’ll show it to you. You must come down to my fort. Say Tuesday instead of the range.”

  Barnes spoke up, delighted. “He’s known for not inviting many, Dr. Latouche. You should feel honored. This could be a legendary evening for us.”

  Coots looked at the boy, who had become too chummy.

  “How about just an old-timers’ chat, the two of us?” said Coots. “This is no rebuke, Barnes.”

  “Sorry. Not at all. I go to the gym, anyway, when he goes shooting. I could be nearby, however.”

  “Then it’s fixed. I’m feeling better all the time,” said Latouche. “Let me ask you something. Why did Billy the Kid kill so many?”

  “¿Quien es?” chuckled Coots. These were the Kid’s last words before being gunned down by Pat Garrett. “I’m not sure. It was a sort of war, the Lincoln County thing. It wasn’t twenty-one, not nearly that. But I’d imagine it got in his blood, very early, when he was attacked by a bully with a knife. Rather like a drug addiction. I’ve studied killers. Now let me ask you: When you shoot, who are you shooting, mentally? What kind of enemies does a man like you have?”

  The old doctor was surprised. “Well . . . quite zero. It’s all mental, a sport.”

  “Come now. You’re too good at it. Some emotion belongs, surely.”

  “I’ve no enemies I know of.”

  “Life has treated you nicely. No malpractice suit, say, totally unjust. The lawyers. You’ve known women. Some yapping gash that bilked you. Tell me too, that somewhere in the world of money there wasn’t . . . And you were in the war, no?”

  Coots hardly ever beseeched this much. Even when directly interviewed, for money, he’d not shown this zeal.

  “Downrange there you must see some Nazi, some Commie, hippie, queer, black mugger, proponent of socialized medicine, or, really, man a—” Coots almost said cat, as a joke. He looked at Riley Barnes, intense and worshipful, vastly enjoying, and lucky. “Mengele, a Stalin, a Klansman.”

  “Not at all. I’m afraid you’re making me sound like a man of no passion. What do you shoot, Coots?”

  “Everything. Old age.”

  This created high giggles in the other two. Poor men, was he that interesting to them? A scholar, a dreamer, and rather a drudge is what Coots thought he was. He yearned for the character of William Bonney.

  “I suppose people who don’t hate don’t write,” said the doctor. “With surgery, I was rarely conscious of a person. Another thing entirely. Never have I felt the necessity, either, to interpret the universe. It was mainly just one piece of work, then another.”

  “Then who would you rather have been, Latouche? Please think.”

  “Umm. Well, actually . . . Methuselah. I’m not ready to go. I’ve known hardly a day I’ve not truly enjoyed. Even the war, I was always up bright and early. Even, do not mistake me, the morning of my wives’ funerals. You’ve made me honest. Is that your function?”

  “But, my man, you have . . .” Coots reflected and checked on Riley Barnes, who was writing something down
on a billfold tablet. “You have grofft. The only man in North America.”

  Barnes flashed up, eyes sorrowful. He might want to strike Coots. When he masturbated, looking in the mirror, did he insert his finger in his anus to intensify it? Could he entice women into rim jobs? Many muscle men—vide your obsessive weightlifters in the big house—were “anally retentive,” thanks, Sigmund. And sex was a way of keeping, owning lovers, having them to play with in the bank vault later. As opposed to the looser lostness of the mere pussy, which invited death and servility. Barnes’s big stevedore’s hand was on Latouche’s wrist.

  “Yes, I have it. But luckily, it seems, just a mild touch. I’ve not been on all fours yet. No barking. Riley watches me honestly.”

  As with a thirty-year quart-a-day man he’d once met at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans: “I have no drinking problem, Coots.” Skin flaking off from the burst veiny patches of his face, yellow as a crayon, and his tongue black.

  “Then Tuesday night at seven, Latouche.”

  “Delighted. I’ll have Riley bring me around in my vintage Hudson. Now there’s an item you might like. Spotless. Forest green. Purrs like a”—Barnes harder on his wrist—“sewing machine.”

  “The Hudson and Billy the Kid’s gun,” said Barnes in wonder. “A great American evening.”

  A couple days later Coots flew to Kansas with his amanuensis, Horton. They planned to live there soon, and had already bought a small clapboard house with a picket fence and a porch in the university town. Coots hoped he might teach a class there, though there was some lack of enthusiasm from the older faculty, to whom he was a profane dope fiend and pederast who wrote gibberish. His secretary friend was attempting to broker him into a place. Coots could use the money. It was a sorry scandal that they would exclude him. In several apparent ways he was a conservative. He loved the plains of the Midwest and was fascinated by the Old West and its worthy guns. He knew Native American culture (Custer’s stuffed horse, Comanche, was in the university museum); had the notes for two large books wherein he would explore the West in space-time narratives and by way of his “cut-up” method—not montage, he insisted, but more: common threads of magic in random clippings from various sources, sometimes announced into his tape recorder and retranscribed. He’d not yet got all from cannabis that he intended, either. Coots was a hard worker, putting to shame the energies of the senior faculty, with their emeritus rose beds and sailing vacations.

  It was hard for Horton not to get angry about the matter, though Coots accepted the landscape and l’état gladly as they were away from wearying, impolite and expensive New York. The main point was he was old, damn it, and had been everywhere. He’d never had a thing against roots and a calm place, there was no crime in that. And there would be wide and free places to shoot. He could have a cat or two, his favorite creatures. He was so much like them it was nearly like having children. “The furred serpent,” Egyptians called them.

  He did not tell Horton about Latouche.

  Lawrence, Kansas, occupied them. Coots breathed in his “square” neighborhood: perfect, superb. The air might give him a few more years, a few more books. The scratchy, potent West. The “Johnsons”—trustworthy, minding their own business, nonjudgmental, quick to ally with a fellow in trouble, salt of the earth, loving of land, their house was yours, etc.—Coots had the forgotten shock of being waved at by citizens who didn’t know him from Adam. Howdy. Partners in the given day. Suitably, it came a “gusher” while they were there. The rain smelled sweet, rich. Thinking of the golden wheat lapping it up, breadbasket of the world, amber fields of, sun-browned boy with a string of bullheads, home-dried cut cane pole with black cotton line, drilled piece of corncob for a bobber, Prince Albert tin with nightcrawlers in wet leaves for bait.

  Horton liked seeing the old fellow this happy.

  They were out in Latouche-land too. Latouche was originally from Ellsworth.

  It was the land of generals—Eisenhower, Bradley. And Frank James rode through Lawrence itself with the guerrilla slaughterers and Quantrill. Then Coots and T. S. Eliot over in St. Louis, not far from Twain. Ah, dreamed Coots on his porch, his thin hair blowing, to have fucked Huck when the country was young, about to strangle itself in the Big One, sun-swollen teenage corpses in the cornfield. Sherman sodomizes the South. John Brown began here first, Kansas, bloody Kansas, my Kansas. What did Latouche think of it? Had Latouche ever thought much at all?

  The doctor was at his door and they walked out to see the Hudson purring at the curb. Barnes, in gym suit, was at the wheel saluting him. The Hudson was a gem all right. A space fiction of 1950, drop-shaped, chubby, svelte too. Barnes yelled something about being careful, he’d see Latouche at midnight. Coots noticed his massive legs. That boy could really hurt you if he wanted. Without him, the car gone, Latouche seemed smaller, with snowier hair, cautious and unbalanced. Coots helped him down the stairs to “the bunker,” leaning on the sharp door—like a vault door. Coots gasped, weak himself. Safe inside, Latouche took the sofa and looked about, out of his overcoat. They were alone. Horton was away for the night.

  “I’ve brought this mini–tape recorder, if you don’t mind. It’s for Riley’s sake,” said Latouche.

  Coots minded. His words were worth a great deal lately. The BBC thing, and NPR. He was to play a junkie priest in a movie soon too. Might as well ham it up toward the end.

  Something had clicked one strange tired morning a month ago—he’d been very, very tired, from no direct cause. Coots was going to die soon, the fatigue told him quietly. Some ancient soft voice like that of the unknown man in the pool hall, but this was not an “episode.” This was the dead and dry tone of the inevitable. He didn’t know when he’d die, but something announced the beginning of the last lap. The public flies were on him, even worse.

  “I thought you’d bring your forty-four/forty-five,” he said coolly. Coots could wither, with his scratchy voice and small eyes.

  “But I did, in the other pocket.” Latouche drew the handsome brute out, size of a good man’s organ, laying it on the coffee table next to the minirecorder, a Toshiba. He punched it on. Coots’s anger left when he spied the weapon. Lovely little highwayman’s surprise, lovely.

  “I’ve loaded the thing. Can’t quite figure why,” said Latouche.

  “The mean streets. It’s a bad area.”

  “No.” Latouche stared at Coots as if lost. He seemed really to have no idea why the thing was loaded. Septagonal barrel?

  “Barnes knows you have a loaded gun?”

  “No. He’s a deep pacifist, for gun control. New York law, of course.”

  “I think he killed an Indian for you.” Coots smiled at the little reels turning inside the machine.

  “He told you?”

  “I gather things. Pretty nasty, and unethical, medically speaking, you know.”

  “Oh, I do. It’s all a bad mysterious thing. And my fault. I found out that Riley has a dangerous loyalty to me. Almost an innocence. If only I could take it back. I’m very shallow with people, I’m afraid.”

  “But I suppose you’ve been paid back. The blood of a very wrong Indian. Hmm?”

  “Yes. And that wasn’t my first transfusion. I’ve had two others—one for each of my marriages—each done legally. Good Swiss blood, very.”

  “What do you mean, for?”

  “For Maggie and Verna both. I was slowing down and I did it for us. To keep up, to prance, to dance. They were both a good deal younger and I couldn’t give them an old coot dead on his lounge chair at the end of the day.”

  “And they worked?”

  “My word, yes! You couldn’t keep me down. It was amazing, scary, truly. I romanced them, read in erotic books” (Latouche blushed), “rowed down the river with them in the bow. I pleased them constantly, not just with flowers and gifts. In fact—”

  “Just a second. I’ll have the martinis out. Save this.”

  Coots prepared the martinis with more care than usual, dropping in Latouche
’s big white onions, specially bought that afternoon. He waited longer, too, to diffuse the agitation the nonagenarian had got himself into. Coots—Saul on the road to Tarsus—suddenly had an overwhelming light on him; nothing like this had happened to him before. He liked Latouche, thoroughly. True friendship was attacking him. He was very afraid the fellow would get too wound up and stumble into the names, the “imagery,” and say cat or dog—wolf? snake? Negro? quail? He was close to saying everything, and in danger. He waited almost impolitely long. When he went out with the tray he stared at the gun. Let’s get that thing away, Coots decided. Which is what he did, turning it in his other hand admiringly, his martini hand freezing.

  “Fine heft. A real buried treasure. The recoil must be a consideration. Jim ’Awkins and Long John Silver, eh?”

  “What?”

  “Treasure Island. Stevenson. What did you do as a boy in Kansas?”

  “Oh, sure now. Even I read that one once, I think.”

  “I dreamed of almost nothing but pirates, myself.”

  “I dreamed of, can you believe it, Kansas itself. Simply re-pictured what was around me. The wheatfields, the blizzards, the combines, the awful summer sun. For dreams in my sleep, I never had any. I never dream.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. A man would die, flat out.”

  “But it’s true. Freud would’ve had no use for me.”

  “Well, surgery did. But what a fact.”

  “The transfusions, though—” began Latouche.

  “My friend, this is startling too. Yours worked. Mine didn’t. I tried to kick morphine with one. No go.”

  Latouche couldn’t know that he had Coots entirely. Coots had a young healthy crush on him, wanting nothing.

  “I’m very sorry.” Latouche drank deep. Coots was saddened by the unusual sloppiness, gin down the doctor’s chin, untended. “But my transfusions, let me tell you, I think, I know—poor Maggie, poor Verna—I was too much. How they loved me! What a heavenly benefit, their love. I could not leave them alone, Coots. Finally, I—now I say, the bed, the bed, the bed, the bed. The dances, the bicycling, the jogging, the too long mountain hikes in rain—they loved it for me. Then always the bed, the couch, the shower, even the garage, every which way, all hours! Then I’d be up with their breakfast, waking them. I’d have written up an oncological technique while they slept! Too much, too much! They died.”