Ray Read online

  I paid for Sister to go to the University of South Alabama in Mobile. She thought she’d like Mobile. But there was no way she could cut college, not even a semester of it. She fell in love with two different boys and they both dropped out too. Now she’s a waitress in Atlanta, making a lot on tips and using marijuana by the wagonload. I received a scrawled letter and five one-hundred-dollar bills—her college fee—and a lurid photograph of her in skimpy waitress costume, receiving between her lips the huge member of a fat conventioneer, name badge on his coat, drink in his hand, eyes shut with pleasure and mouth open like a murdered boar. It was made up with the club’s name on the bottom. It was clear she was involved in a filthy, lucrative industry. In the letter she wrote:

  “Ray, I’m rich, but this ain’t me. There’s nobody to talk to and I’m turning into hate. Please come and marry me. This ain’t me.”

  I took the next plane out and got a taxi down to the club. I’d always liked Atlanta, and it was grievous to have to despise every building and every bus stop, every mansion and its trees, every club with jazz music and rock and roll pouring out.

  But I was Ray, ex—Navy pilot, who used to even have a pistol on me. Old valiant Ray from 1967 to 1969. Gas up, load up, get ready for the worst and give it worser back.

  Sister was in Heloise’s with two men around her. It wasn’t long before she was in the cab with me. The thing was she looked even younger, fresher, long legs in black hose. She cried and we did a lot of kissing. Because of the photograph, I was cooled down toward much gesture of lust for her, though. Besides, I had already met my next wife over in Jackson, Mississippi.

  “You ain’t going to marry me, are you?” Sister said. “I guess that picture was too much for you,” said she.

  “Yeah, it went over the line. I can take it in the abstract, but it’s not the same photographed. You don’t want any marriage thing or you wouldn’t have sent it to me.”

  “You’re right, Ray. I just want this.”

  We hugged in the cab and in the airport and in the plane back to Tuscaloosa.

  It was football season and my girlfriend’s son was a quarterback for Murrah High in Jackson. Early on, I knew I was in for another marriage, and this one full of love and a slight goddamned bit of wisdom. We went to all the games together all over the state of Mississippi, and her handsome jock son was the star everywhere. He was a very cool, light-voiced lad who kept fish, had read a few books, and took off his cleats when he came in the condominium on the parquet floors. The house was gorgeous, snug in shades of blue and melon, lots of okay furniture around. The ex-husband was a doctor—Christ!—who was very busy and very important. Westy, my girl, was from Iowa, the daughter of a dentist and a corn farmer who is one hell of a feisty wonderful gentleman. He gets me in a corner and tells these old-fashioned clean filthy jokes to me. His wife shrieks and he laughs. He laughs so much he weeps for sixteen minutes. Westy’s brother is an orthopedic surgeon in Omaha.

  There is no escape from doctors. They surround me as I surround myself.

  Westy has an uncommon adventurous warmth to her, a crazy hope in her blue eyes, and a body that will keep a lover occupied. I was gone for her about first sight.

  She was forty, had another son off at the University of Wisconsin, and a thirteen-year-old daughter who received her entire sustenance, by what I could tell, from her private telephone. There was also Tina, the live-in maid, an illegal immigrant from Chihuahua, who cooked Mexican holistically and, with other Mexican immigrants in the community, read the Holy Bible every night. They had converted to Assembly of God and had nothing for Catholicism and the priests. But the FBI knocked on the door one night when Westy and I were into a little wine and quiet, and the whole flock of Mexicans had to go underground with their Assembly of God friends.

  It was a great storm and a great shame. Tina was worth, with her cumin and bay leaf, any ten doctors you can name.

  It was a rebirth for old Ray. I hadn’t seen high school football since I played it at one hundred and fifteen pounds and one cold night in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, got knocked over a fence and onto a cinder track in the middle of the cheer-leaders by some hulking freak who later found his way to the Chicago Bears. That was my last punt return, and I went seriously into Fine Arts after that, where you could play with yourself and get applauded for it. Murrah High was full of blacks now, and you didn’t go in the rest-rooms at the stadiums, where they stayed by the hundreds for the entire game, talked mean, and got themselves numbed out on controlled substances. That is, those who weren’t in the band or on the team. The band had an amazing queer black boy named Dean Riverside out in front of them who did more boogie and stretch than the law allowed, the band into “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” and the synchronized Chargettes throwing their legs around the whole affair. They actually made you enamored of the asinine, by God. Such style and earnesty!

  One night, when I was in Saigon, a chicken colonel’s wife walked past my Yamaha motorbike on the street. My eyes got wide and my heart was molasses. She walked by me, clicking her heels, tanned legs so lean, a fine joyful sense of her sex uplifted at the juncture of her thighs. Her face was serene, her eyes were blue, and she was, as they say, music. I recall the Rolling Stones’ “Lady Jane” was pouring from the door of the nearest bar. But she was not mine. I could never have her, and my heart was broken. The image of her kept me pure for years. I resisted the whores in Saigon, mainly out of a horror of VD, and never cheated on my first wife, mainly because there was nothing I ever saw like the chicken colonel’s wife again. Until I met Westy.

  Westy does not talk much about the act of love. She just does it with all her heart. Her children are beautiful and polite, and she has never threatened suicide, which my first wife was good for at least once a month, maybe thinking her period entitled her to it. We’re all God’s creatures, but some of us can be especially ugly. I had from this union three beautiful children to present to Westy. She liked them, and the second night we were together, with my two youngest heavenly blessings running around, Westy said, “I want you and all of it.”

  “Hey, Doc, I hear you’re getting married,” says Mr. Hooch.

  “That’s right.”

  “You look happy and good, Doc. Me and Agnes wanted to invite you to have the wedding right here at the house. We’ll clean it up and the preacher will be free.”

  “Thanks. I got a lot of sentiment for the place, John, but this lady is really fancy and I’m afraid it’s going to have to be at the old Episcopal Church.”

  “Well, could we get invited?”

  “You didn’t get the engraved invitation yet?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t read much mail.”

  We went out to a heap of circulars, letters from the police, utility bills, pamphlets from the Cancer Fund, and unread newspapers in the front hall. I picked through it awhile, but I couldn’t find the envelope from Westy. Then there was a shriek from the top of the stairs. It was Sister.

  “I’ve got the cocksucking invitation up here I”

  Mr. Hooch looked very sad.

  “She ain’t right, Ray. She sings at night and smokes that marijuana all day and don’t eat much. Go see to her, if you would.”

  Her room was well set up. She had an expensive stereo system with Devon speakers, a microphone stand, a Martin guitar on the bed, which was brass and costly, a thick oyster-shell carpet on the floor, a tape deck, rugged white thick curtains on the window, and the walls were solid acoustic tile as well as the ceiling. It was a studio. It smelled like she’d lit ten joints about eight seconds ago. It had its own refrigerator. The door shut behind me as if in a vacuum unit.

  Sister was wearing only panties and a red halter. I’d never seen her look better. Actually, in good light, I’d never seen this much of her.

  She had the invitation from Westy in her hand and sat on the bed.

  “Ray, you told me once that you needed to make love twice a day or you got very tense and had headaches. But I n
eed it four times a day and I’m getting to be a better singer every day.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was still taking in her and the room.

  “There’s a man with a glorious voice I sing with named Marcel Smith. We do duets and we are making a lot of money around town and we might get an album contract with some people up at Muscle Shoals.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I said.

  “Just like your marriage,” Sister said.

  “I’ve got this woman. You’d like her,” I said.

  “I probably would. What do you want to do?”

  “Find it and live it,” I said.

  “Don’t you want me too?”

  “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” said I.

  III

  AFTER a Ray kind of honeymoon in Florida, where I composed myself as a father and husband, children from seven to twenty running around my mind and knees, I get a jet, the DC-8, a lovely bird that flies a lot of people, and sit back and dream until La Guardia in New York, queen of the Eastern shore.

  At Columbia University there are fifteen doctors, three from the South I know, alcoholics themselves. I read them my paper. I get the applause and the check.

  (I have another paper on women, unfinished. Like Freud, I threw up my hands.)

  Columbia University got me a companion for dinner at the Russian Tea Room. She was Laurie Chalmers, a Jewess with large bosoms, very visible in a velvet dress. She was a tall, frank girl. After the meal we went back to the room they gave me at the Cornell Club, where Laurie Chalmers disrobed and lay on her back on the bed and described herself as constantly starved—for food and liquor and Southerners. Her family was in Charleston, South Carolina, and she said she missed the South despite her job, that was high-paying. She was an anesthetist.

  She was a gorgeous and restless lady, with an amazing amount of beard around her sex. While she talked to me, she chewed a corner of her pillow. Her feet were perfect and unlined and un-knobbed in any way. She ate me, just like another delicious thing on her menu. I felt rotten, cool, and unfaithful, yet I came with an enormous lashing of sperm, which made her writhe and lick. Then Laurie Chalmers fell sound asleep.

  Ray, listen, I said on the plane back. You don’t have the spiritual resources to cheat on your wife. You feel wretched and sinful and hung over, without having had any liquor. Adventures in sex are just not in your person anymore. You know too many people already. Your conscience is banging your head off and you can’t even eat your eggs.

  So I ordered a double vodka to hose down my conscience.

  The idea to keep at it came on, but I beat it back with thoughts of Westy.

  Westy fixing up our house in Tuscaloosa.

  Westy with her big blue eyes.

  But this lousy barnacle of unfaithfulness would not leave my mind. It is enough to be married to a good woman. It is plenty.

  Ray, the filthy call of random sex is a killer. It kills all you know of the benevolent order of your new life.

  Then the plane is in trouble. The bad things in my head have passed through the air and gone into the engines of the DC-8. Starboard engine is gone, finished, and the plane begins rolling. The stewardess loses everything. Her poise is all gone.

  So I go up in the cockpit. One of the pilots has fainted. They’re young boys, about twenty-eight.

  “Want me to take it?” says I. “There’s no big disaster,” I say. “Keep the nose up, asshole. Keep the nose up. Yes. Pull back all the way. What’s wrong with him?”

  “We’ve never had any trouble before.”

  I get the fainted pilot out of his seat, and while the other boy is leveling it, I try to get some action on the bad engine, meanwhile putting in my order for a second double vodka.

  We’re headed the wrong way, but that’s okay. We set it down in Birmingham. Suits me. I didn’t have to get another plane to Tuscaloosa. I called Westy and she came over to pick me up.

  “Ray, are you all right?” asks she.

  I asked her to pull over so I could get out and vomit.

  “Darling. Did you drink liquor in New York, darling?” she says.

  “Yes. I violated my rules,” I say. “Darling, let me have a piece of your Big Red gum.”

  “I missed you, Ray,” she says.

  Says I, “I missed you, Westy, in the worst way.”

  She is such a clean German. The car is clean. I invent cheerfulness from my heart, the biggest engine.

  “Ray, there’s something else wrong. Not just the liquor,” Westy says.

  “There’s nothing wrong,” I say.

  “There’s something you should tell me. Something’s with you. Something’s lying heavy on you.”

  “Basically, Westy, I would like, after we say goodnight to the children, that you sit on my face and let me lick your thing. Like on the honeymoon.”

  “Oh, boy,” she says.

  Westy is so happy. Her feet are moving this way and that way over the car pedals.

  Sweet God, there is nothing like being married to the right woman.

  IV

  WE have come up in a meadow, all five hundred horses. We are in the Maryland hills and three hundred yards in front of us are the Federals, about fifty of them in skirmish line. What they can’t see are the five Napoleon howitzers behind us.

  Jeb Stuart is as weary as the rest of us, but he calls for sabers out. Our uniforms are rotting off us. It’s so hot and this gray cloth is so hot. There is a creek behind us. I dismount and we send the orderlies back to the creek. It is delightful to see them bring water back to the horses and me. The water is thunderously refreshing, though you can’t drink too much if we have to fight. I would prefer not to fight them, but I can see they’ve rolled in a cannon and mean business.

  Thing is, all the blue boys are going to die. And we have to do something quickly or they’ll tell General McClellan where we are.

  Stuart says to me, “Hold two hundred horses with you, Captain. Let us start the cannons and I will go forward.”

  Then we kissed each other, as men who are about to die.

  Our horses covered the howitzers.

  They let off theirs. It hits in the trees. These are fresh boys. They don’t even really know how to shoot. Yet all of them must die.

  I say, “General Stuart, I can kill them all from here. I suggest we don’t charge.”

  He made the order to hold the sabers up.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Observe us, General.”

  We had captured an ammunition wagon and it had the twenty-pound shells in it. You could hit a chicken in the middle of the head from this range.

  “Do it rapidly, Captain.”

  I make the order. The cavalry feints to its left. The Federals are confused. Pellham fires the howitzers.

  Ooooof Oooof Oooooof Oooooof Oooooooof.

  Then again. Five of them are left, and all wounded. One older man is standing up, living but bewildered, with all his friends dead around him.

  “Hello, friend,” I say.

  “Are you Jeb Stuart?”

  “No. I am his captain,” I say.

  “It was too quick for us, Captain,” the man says.

  Then the banjo player came up and we drank their coffee and ate the steaks on the fires. We threw earth over the dead. Stuart went out in the forest and wept.

  Then all of us slept. Too many dead.

  Let us hie to Virginia, let us flee.

  I fell asleep with the banjo music in my head and I dreamed of two whores sucking me.

  V

  I LIVE in so many centuries. Everybody is still alive.

  VI

  WHAT I liked was the tea and bridge club. There were a lot of people around, beautiful young women and handsome men, young and old. It was a large living room in a mansion, and they threw the curtain back after the bridge was over. Husbands and wives were naked in different positions. It was like a dream. A soft-spoken woman asked us to go up on stage and remove our clothes. We were a little bit as
hamed. But once Westy and I were into the act of love, we could not help it. There was a woman in real estate. She was wearing a violet gown, high-heeled silver sandals. She had a lecture stick. She did a lot of pointing with it at Westy and me. She said Westy and me were the newest thing.

  When I had given my sperm to Westy, the audience stood up and applauded.

  Good old Tuscaloosa.

  VII

  THERE is Ray’s son Barry, a boy with a sweet brain and only fifteen.

  There is Ray’s sister, Dorothy.

  There are Ray’s parents, Elizabeth and Bill.

  There are his nephews, Ken and Taylor, and his brother-in-law, John, another doctor and a good one.

  VIII

  How about we have us a nature walk? The trees, the mountains. Or let us dance at Lee’s Tomb, the cavernous saloon near the river and the docking port for trucks.

  Sister was there, as were Charlie DeSoto and his girl, Eileen. They are married now. And they look very sad. There is something about marriage that brings on a certain sadness, as if burying the glad part.

  Sister is prosperous now that she and Marcel Smith have an album out that is selling big. She has a marvelous suntan and she is wearing jewelry all over her. She looks very self-assured and gives me a self-assured kiss. The Locust Fork Band is playing. That’s Asa, Dwight, Bill. God bless you, niggers, for the music.

  Besides the small friendly vagina and the blue eyes, Westy has sympathy. We shall be married forever.

  Westy, my wife, my darling.

  I hate to depend on another human being this much. But nobody is his own boy. Her breasts, her lovely feet, her cheerfulness, her care.