Ray Read online

  But I still want to fight. I still want to put it to somebody, duke a big guy out. Like the asshole who came in who had shot two of his children and broken the arm of his wife. He was an alcoholic red-neck and had a lot of Beechnut chewing tobacco on him. He really smelled lousy. Before I could ask him anything, he found a razor blade and came at me, his doctor! Lucky that Ray still has his quickness. The bastard missed me with the razor, and I kicked him in the gonads.

  Certain people are this way. They kill everybody around, for one reason or another. He went to the pen, but I would like to see him tortured in a dungeon to get back the suffering he has caused.

  The waving grass of the prairies, the moon settling over Minnesota over the lake. Me and my son Barry are having a good time. It is sunset and there are no loud noises. There are only us, and we’ve caught some bass and pickerel. My daughter Lee is paddling the canoe for us. Utter fucking peace.

  Debbie, psychotherapist, is another person I’d like to see buried. She thinks you get the best out of people when you get them all in a room and ask them humiliating questions. She’s about six feet tall and drives her Fiat convertible around town, being queen of the world. She’s from Ohio, which is the worst state in the union.

  Ohio is silly.

  Ken, my nephew, once asked me as we were going to sleep after some snapper fishing in Destin, Florida: “Promise me something, Uncle Ray?”

  “What?”

  “That when I die I won’t be from Ohio.”

  IX

  HERE is something about my class at the university. The pretty faces, the yearning to learn. Deborah, Sammy, Lenora, David, Edward Jurgielewcz, Ondocsin, Triola, Slubowski, Scordino, Edric Kirkman—they are all trying to learn.

  The land is full of crashing jets, carbon monoxide, violent wives, and murderous men. There is a great deal of metal and hardness.

  The subject of today is breast cancer. Why is there so much of it? Why the mastectomies, why the cancers of the uterus? Why in the hell is there so much cancer today, anyway?

  Ray’s humble opinion is that it serves us fucking right.

  X

  OH, help me! I am losing myself in two centuries and two wars.

  The SAM missile came up, the heat-seeker. It stood up in front of me like a dick at twenty thousand feet, and the squadron captain told me what the hell was going on. He was a nigger from Louisiana. I think that was the first time a nigger saved my life. Flight Captain Louis Diamond saved my life and I shot the SAM missile out of the air.

  Fuck you, heat-seeker! Take some cold steel!

  Then when Quisenberry was down on the beach and the gooks were running out to capture my friend from Mississippi, I slowed it down and turned the nose of that Phantom almost perpendicular to the ground. I used the cannons and missiles to clean them away. I saw their heads fly off and their chests.

  Tough shit, gooks! You ain’t going to get Quisenberry.

  He lives now, handsome and a credit to his race, a lawyer in Los Angeles.

  I am very proud of the things I did for my country. I fought for the trees, the women, who, when they quit talking, will let you, etc.

  Westy, Westy. It’s a miracle.

  When we get rid of the carbon monoxide, this will be a hell of a country again. Start with Ohio.

  DROP THE BIG ONE ON OHIO.

  XI

  WHOEVER created Ray gave him a big sex engine. I live near the Black Warrior River and have respect for things.

  XII

  I‘M falling in love with Sister again, who is not my wife. After my breakfast, which I hate to eat but is necessary for the tummy, after the multivitamin tab in case I miss something (one of those fuckers might just connect and root me up again), the house is uninteresting and I get out a Penthouse magazine. There Sister was, almost exactly. Not her, of course, but right on the button as to looks and smile, nipples, feet. I really find good-looking feet irresistible in a woman. I came near to losing a patient while I was looking at her feet. She wasn’t anything for looks besides her feet. Hubba hubba. I almost fell face-down in her thing while I was doing her appendectomy.

  Sister. Listen. I want you. My beloved wife does not seem awfully inspired in the bedroom lately. She’s more interested in the house, the yard, wood, and soil.

  “I knew you’d be back, Doctor Ray,” said Sister.

  We were where she sang. The lights on the stage were going full blast. Why the young idiots of today like multiple lights running around and two hundred decibels of guitars and organ, I can’t tell. They want to make war out of peacetime. You can’t even play Ping-Pong without some young asshole lighting up a pinball machine next to you that sounds like a serious invasion.

  Sister quit the set right in the middle and we went to the Hooches and up to her room. She put her feet up for a while and then got naked. Her eyes looked tired a bit. Her toes were chafed by the high sandals she wore. But she was a violent delight. For about an hour we went into the beautiful nowhere together. When she came, she screamed like a man getting stabbed. Lucky that the room was fixed for sound.

  “It’s not enough,” she said after she was relaxed some. “I want it all the way up my ass. Every inch of you, Ray.”

  She went and got the Vaseline.

  None of this should happen, but it does.

  “What have we proved?” I ask Sister.

  “That it can be done,” she said. “I love you, Doctor Ray.”

  “Sister, I have serious doubts and a filthy conscience.”

  “Not near filthy enough for me.”

  There was a knock on the door. Sister began scrambling around for her clothes, as did I. It was Maynard Castro, the preacher. He was a studied man of good will, as far as I knew. There are some good Baptists, and Maynard was one of them. He bade me hello. Then he sat on the bed next to Sister. Maynard had a trimmed beard and gold-framed spectacles.

  “I came by to say how much I liked your album. My wife adores it too. We play it constantly. I was going to ask a special favor. You are so admired by the young people in town, I wonder if you’d sing for us at the church during the Youth Impact next month.”

  Sister lit a cigarette.

  “You’d give them peace,” said Maynard. “You have given me peace.”

  “Which song? I thought they were all pretty nervous.”

  “ ‘High on the Range.’ There is an eerie joy in that tune.”

  “There ain’t any hope in that song. That’s about high misery because she’s loved too many people. She’s about done in, ‘cause she spread it too thin.”

  “I see it as Christlike. It is full of sharing.”

  “All right, I’ll do it.”

  “I appreciate it, Sister.”

  When Maynard left, Sister laid out on her back and began weeping.

  “I’ve done it, Ray. I’ve loved too many people, and now it hurts to love.”

  Said I, “I’ve got the same disease, sweetest.”

  “I need to make love too much.”

  “Ditto,” said I.

  “And pretty soon, I want it again.”

  “There’s not much that’s truer,” I said.

  On the way out, I heard Mr. Hooch whistling on the back porch. He must’ve just come home from work. Agnes was sitting by him in resigned melancholy. Mr. Hooch was swinging his bare feet, sitting on the porch railing, swarthy from his work on the tugboat. Agnes was back on her Pall Malls. I borrowed one from her.

  I couldn’t tell there was anything wrong with his leg. After the skimpy backyard, you looked into the foliage of the ravine, the car with the wooden Indian at the steering wheel now rotting off the fierce colors of its face. The smaller Hooches, who aren’t so small anymore, aren’t afraid of that thing anymore either. The grave of Oscar is plentitudinous with heavy white blossoms. It is like a memorial back here, nature doing the main work, going at it in random dereliction with spouts of large beauty here and there.

  There has not been time to say that little Constance Hooch had he
r legs backed over by a school bus and lost one of them. She is out in the yard near the ravine, walking peacefully on her artificial leg. She’s a ravishing little thing of eleven. The other twin, Ethel, stays close by, very considerate. They are running down some of the early lightning bugs with a Mason jar. The older twins are out front fixing up a broken motorcycle. You can almost smell the wreck coming on when they get it going.

  Mr. Hooch says, “Guess what I told the foreman stevedore today when we were docking. He’s been long on my list of shits in the world. He’s always nagging about tiny things. He’s a big man with the makeup of a warhorse and the mind of a shrieking little woman. I told him little certificates come out his mouth and he ain’t got the wings of a bee.”

  “That’s fine,” say I. “That’s the way to tell them,” say I.

  Some of the white ducks come up in the yard from the ravine. The twins pick them up and pet them hard.

  This here’s the day Dr. Cullen in the History department has asked me to address the American Civilization class, because we talked the other night about Franklin and Jefferson, who were inventors and public helpers, and I have a little knowledge of them.

  So now, class, I say:

  “Americans have never been consistent. They represent gentleness and rage together. Franklin was the inventor of the stove, bifocals, and so on. Yet he abused his neglected family. Jefferson, with his great theories, could not actually release the slaves even though he regularly fornicated with one of them. One lesson we as Americans must learn is to get used to the contrarieties in our hearts and learn to live with them.” Etc.

  I am infected with every disease I ever tried to cure. I am a vicious nightmare of illnesses. God cursed me with a memory that holds everything in my brain. There is no forgetting with me. Every name, every foot, every disease, every piece of jewelry hanging from an ear. Nothing is hazy.

  Westy is back. She is developing her entrance into the real-estate profession. She has a dream of being her own person, making her own money. I’ve never seen her prettier. Yet she’s tired. The Westy of the encouraging eyes is tired. At forty-two, she looks as if she’s throwing in the towel. Me, I’ve been visiting Lee’s Tomb a lot and taking in too much sound and bourbon. I get up choking. Some mornings I don’t even know I get up.

  Sabers up! Get your horses in line! They have as many as we do and it will be a stiff one. Hit them, hit them! Give them such a sting as they will never forget. Ready? Avant! Avant, avant, avant! Kill them!

  Horses gleaming with sweat everywhere, Miniés flying by you in the wind.

  Sometimes there is no answer from your wife, even when you’re sweet as pie. Sometimes there is no answer from the world. The trees are furry with green, the beach is rolling, the old houses stand straight and thick in the shade of the oaks. And Sister and I are in love.

  I read the paper as I was waiting in the emergency room. Sister is dead, and they have Maynard Castro as probable cause. Three times through her precious brain. Maynard just could not take the beauty. Not a sign of sexual molestation. No sign of nothing except an outright shooting in the nightclub where she sings.

  He couldn’t even wait for her to sing at the Youth Impact.

  Lewd stories came out about him, as told by his wife and others. Repressed sexuality that finally pitched him over into total craziness.

  Sit on that, Ray. Your left arm is gone.

  XIII

  THE gulls are coming in to the dock and fighting over the can of sardines I left out for them. I couldn’t finish it. I should eat. Sweetest Sister is gone and Westy is gone, and it is hard to swallow a cracker. Out in the gulf you see the edge of your world, many boats, and people falling off, silhouetted by the sun. Arms up, screams, goodbye. The moon is coming in red. Small-craft warnings are out. Over the crumpled horizon the moon seems to roll away the clouds and be a great ruby marble.

  Barry and I are here. We aim to catch some fish.

  Lee and Barry are also back here in Tuscaloosa with me. Hold old Ray close, everybody, for he is estranged from the clear home that he once knew.

  I almost forgot. My dogs are here too. We’re all in here now and we are having fun pitching pennies in a minnow bucket. We are about to eat the delicious ribs from Archibald’s—happy nigger that smokes them the best—and my daughter Lee and I have had a good time at the university pool. She comes down the slide hollering with glee. She’s a water lady of nine years. We go off the diving board together in a backflip. Through the water and swimming forward.

  This is me at the trial.

  “Doctor, did you ever hear Doctor Castro threaten the woman?”

  “No.”

  “Did you yourself ever have sexual relations with the deceased?”

  “No.”

  “You are under oath.”

  “The answer is no.”

  “Semen was found in her vagina.”

  “Not mine.”

  “But Doctor Castro has alleged that he saw . . .”

  “I’m not on trial here.”

  Maynard stood up, crying, and confessed. You couldn’t understand too much of what he said through the weeping. But there it was. He rushed over to me and hugged me. I came up with a quick stroke from the old Navy practice and sent him sprawling back to his lawyer.

  In their secret hearts, such perversities as Maynard know there are things they can never have, things they have wanted with all their hearts. So they kill them. Most preachers are this way. Their messages seem benevolent, but they are more evil than the rest of us walking pavement.

  When I fly again, it will be against the preachers.

  XIV

  AFTER the trial, this man comes up to me. I’m so full of trouble I don’t even recognize him. Holy God, it’s one of those students I taught in that American Civ class. He wants me to read his poem.

  Certain Feelings

  I have certain feelings about this room

  I have certain feelings about doom

  I have certain feelings about trees and gnats

  I have certain feelings about this and that

  I have certain feelings about firearms

  I have certain feelings about the girls and the guests

  I have certain feelings about firearms

  I have certain burglar alarms

  I have certain strains of Mozart in my soul

  Certain helplessness I cannot control

  Though I guess when all is said and done

  I have certain feelings

  They always say Southerners can write. So I slugged this skinny lad. I laid him down the steps. They took this on the local TV, and I watched it with Westy. I was in my white suit and I duked away this harmless poet. He tumbled down a lot of steps and his family is saying they’ll sue.

  No matter. I’m in Westy again. The thing seemed to have turned her on. Not the violence, but the lonely trouble. Cornelia Wallace called me up about publishing her novel. Fame on the TV got me back to Westy.

  She covers me with kisses. Tears running down. Ray heaving, wife receiving. Hear me, poets. I have certain feelings.

  XV

  IN the moon that comes over Dauphin Island, over the bay, we see the gray-blue chariots of the gods move across its face. The wind is running from the south. The night is clear. The blinking lights of the airport tower are throwing out against the color.

  The hurricane is over and many people are dissatisfied that it killed no one. Bob the hurricane came in and just sort of raised the water, blew a few phony cupolas off the houses.

  Ray meets one of the detestable children of the modern day. I delivered her baby and now she’s delivered her modern self onto the world. She was at the 7-Eleven when I was buying crab bait.

  “Are you, I’d guess, a Taurus, Doctor Ray?”

  “Yes. Nice to see you.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Fishing with my father and my son.”

  “Oh, how macho. Just like a Taurus.”

  “Yes, isn’t i
t?”

  “I’m divorced now.”

  “Oh.”

  XVI

  WESTY and I are hugging. The thrill goes all around the world. I seem to have made her pregnant. Westy is worried about having a retarded idiot at her age, and we have too many children already. But I want it, moron, imbecile, whatever’s in the cards.

  Come forth! Take flight! Son or daughter of Ray and Westy!

  When the day is done, I have seen ten patients and the sun is setting out over the trees. Westy sits on the bed crying, face in her hands. She doesn’t know what to do about the baby. She is scared of it. Another thing to fly and die.

  Dr. Ray breaks into tears himself. He washes them away with cold water, but they flood again. The baby in Westy’s womb looms up like the huge fetus at the end of 2001. Our baby, our baby.

  Two more days and it turns out she wasn’t pregnant, after all. My brain was in squalor and torment. But now it’s like another friend I lost in Nam.

  “Edward, what you got?”

  “I’ve got something, something on me!”

  Then I saw it, the SAM missile go into his exhaust. It was a big white flower spraying in the night. There was Edward, lieutenant commander from St. Paul, Minnesota, a nigger who saved my life twice, falling to pieces. There he goes.

  I should have delivered him. I should have been awaker.

  Mr. Hooch was at the funeral, of course. Sister was lying all fixed up in the coffin. I couldn’t go by to see the body or smell the bank of flowers. Mr. Hooch is a strong man. His wife trembles and smokes. The Hooches have lived in CM (Constant Misery), and now their first claim to fame is dead.

  I was shivering. Westy was holding me with her slim arms.

  “You really loved her, didn’t you?” says Westy.

  “Yeah. Westy, I’m sorry, but I did.”

  “She was lovely. But don’t you think I’m lovelier?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is everything just sex and music?”