Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories

Get Some Young

SINCE HE HAD RETURNED FROM KOREA HE AND HIS WIFE LIVED IN MUtual disregard, which turned three times a month into animal passion then diminished on the sharp incline to hatred, at last collecting in time into silent equal fatigue. His face was ordinarily rimmed with a short white beard and his lips frozen like those of a perch, such a face as you see in shut-ins and winos. But he did not drink much anymore, he simply often forgot his face as he did that of his wife in the blue house behind his store. He felt clever in his beard and believed that his true expressions were hidden.

Years ago when he was a leader of the Scouts he had cut way down on his drink. It seemed he could not lead the Scouts without going through their outings almost full drunk. He would get too angry at particular boys. Then in a hollow while they ran ahead planting pine trees one afternoon he was thrust by his upper bosom into heavy painful sobs. He could not stand them anymore and he quit the Scouts and the bonded whiskey at the same time. Now and then he would snatch a dram and return to such ecstasy as was painful and barbed with sorrow when it left.

This man Tuck last year stood behind the counter heedless of his forty-first birthday when two lazy white girls came in and raised their T-shirts then ran away. He worried they had mocked him in his own store and only in a smaller way was he certain he was still desirable and they could not help it, minxes. But at last he was more aggrieved over this than usual and he felt stuffed as with hot meat breaking forth unsewed at the seams. Yes girls, but through his life he had been stricken by young men too and became ruinously angry at them for teasing him with their existence. It was not clear whether he wished to ingest them or exterminate them or yet again, wear their bodies as a younger self, all former prospects delivered to him again. They would come in his life and then suddenly leave, would they, would they now? Particular Scouts, three of them, had seemed to know their own charms very well and worked him like a gasping servant in their behalf. Or so it had felt, mad wrath at the last, the whiskey put behind him.

The five boys played in the Mendenhall pool room for a few hours, very seriously, like international sportsmen in a castle over a bog, then they went out on the sidewalks mimicking the denizens of this gritty burg who stood and ambled about like escaped cattle terrified of sudden movements from any quarter. The boys were from the large city some miles north. When they failed at buying beer even with the big hairy Walthall acting like Peter Gunn they didn’t much care anyway because they had the peach wine set by growing more alcoholic per second. Still, they smoked and a couple of them swore long histrionic oaths in order to shake up a meek druggist. Then they got in the blue Chevrolet Bel Air and drove toward their camp on the beach of the Strong River. They had big hearts and somehow even more confidence because there were guns in the car. They hoped some big-nosed crimp-eyed seed would follow them but none did. Before the bridge road took them to the water they stopped at the store for their legitimate country food. They had been here many times but they were all some bigger now. They did not know the name of the man in there and did not want to know it.

Bean, Arden Pal, Lester Silk, Walthall, and Swanly were famous to one another. None of them had any particular money or any special girl. Swanly, the last in the store, was almost too good-looking, like a Dutch angel, and the others felt they were handsome too in his company as the owner of a pet of great beauty might feel, smug in his association. But Swanly was not vain and moved easily about, graceful as a tennis player from the era of Woodrow Wilson, though he had never played the game.

From behind the cash register on his barstool Tuck from his hidden whitened fuzzy face watched Swanly without pause. On his fourth turn up the aisle Swanly noticed this again and knew certainly there was something wrong.

Mister, you think I’d steal from you?

What are you talking about?

You taking a picture of me?

I was noticing you’ve grown some from last summer.

You’d better give me some cigarettes now so we can stamp that out.

The other boys giggled.

I’m just a friendly man in a friendly store, said Tuck.

The smothered joy of hearing this kept the rest of them shaking the whole remaining twenty minutes they roamed the aisles. They got Viennas, sardines, Pall Malls, Winstons, Roi-Tans, raisins; tamales in the can, chili and beans, peanut butter, hoop and rat cheese, bologna, salami, white bread, mustard, mayonnaise, Nehi, root beer, Orange Crush; carrots, potatoes, celery, sirloin, Beech-Nut, a trotline, chicken livers, chocolate and vanilla MoonPies, four pairs of hunting socks, batteries, kitchen matches. On the porch Swanly gave Walthall the cigarettes because he did not smoke.

Swanly was a prescient boy. He hated that their youth might end. He saw the foul gloom of job and woman ahead, all the toting and fetching, all the counting of diminished joys like sheep with plague; the arrival of beard hair, headaches, the numerous hospital trips, the taxes owed and the further debts, the mean and ungrateful children, the washed and waxen dead grown thin and like bad fish heaved into the outer dark. He had felt his own beauty drawn from him in the first eruption of sperm, an accident in the bed of an aunt by marriage whose smell of gardenia remained wild and deep in the pillow. Swanly went about angry and frightened and much saddened him.

Walthall lived on some acreage out from the city on a farm going quarter speed with peach and pecan trees and a few head of cattle. Already he had made his own peach brandy. Already he had played viola with high seriousness. Already he had been deep with a “woman” in Nashville and he wrote poems about her in the manner of E. A. Poe at his least in bonging rhymes. In every poem he expired in some way and he wanted the “woman” to watch this. Already he could have a small beard if he wanted, and he did, and he wanted a beret too. He had found while visiting relatives around the community of Rodney a bound flock of letters in an abandoned house, highly erotic missiles cast forth by a swooning inmate of Whitfield, the state asylum, to whatever zestfully obliging woman once lived there. These he would read to the others once they were outside town limits and then put solemnly away in a satchel where he also kept his poetry. A year ago Walthall was in a college play, a small atmospheric part but requiring much dramatic amplitude even on the streets thereafter. Walthall bought an ancient Jaguar sedan for nothing, and when it ran, smelling like Britain on the skids or the glove of a soiled duke, Walthall sat in it aggressive in his leisure as he drove about subdivisions at night looking in windows for naked people. Walthall was large but not athletic and his best piece of acting was collapsing altogether as if struck by a deer rifle from somewhere. For Walthall reckoned he had many enemies, many more than even knew of his existence.

Swanly was at some odds with Walthall’s style. He would not be instructed in ways of the adult world, he did not like talking sex. Swanly was cowlicked and blithe in his boy ways and he meant to stay that way. He was hesitant even to learn new words. Of all the boys, Swanly most feared and loathed Negroes. He had watched the Negro young precocious in their cursing and dancing and he abhorred this. The only role he saw fit in maturity was that of a blond German cavalry captain. Among Walthall’s recondite possessions, he coveted only the German gear from both world wars. Swanly would practice with a monocle and cigarette and swagger stick. It was not that he opposed those of alien races so much but that he aspired to the ideal of the Nordic horseman with silver spurs whom he had never seen. The voices of Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis pleased him greatly. On the other hand he was careful never to eat certain foods he viewed as negroid, such as Raisinets at the movies. There was a special earnest purity about him.

The boys had been to Florida two years ago in the 1954 Bel Air owned by the brother of Arden Pal. They were stopped in Perry by a kind patrolman who thought they looked like runaway youth. But his phone call to Pal’s home put it right. They went rightly on their way to the sea but for a while everybody but Swanly was depressed they were taken for children. It took them many cigarettes and filthy songs to get their confidence back. Uh found your high school ring in muh baby’s twat, sang Walthall with the radio. You are muh cuntshine, muh only cuntshine, they sang to another tune. From shore to shore AM teenage castrati sang about this angel or that, chapels and heaven. It was a most spiritual time. But Swanly stared fixedly out the window at the encroaching palms, disputing the sunset with his beauty, his blond hair a crown over his forehead. He felt bred out of a golden mare with a saber in his hand, hair shocked back in stride with the wind. Other days he felt ugly, out of an ass, and the loud and vulgar world too soon pinched his face.

The little river rushed between the milky bluffs like cola. Pal dug into a clay bank for a sleeping grotto, his tarp over it. He placed three pictures of draped bohemian women from the magazine Esquire on the hard clay walls and under them he placed his flute case, pistol, and Mossberg carbine with telescope mounted there beside two candles in holes, depicting high adventure and desire, the grave necessities of men.

The short one called Lester Silk was newly arrived to the group. He was the veteran army brat of several far-flung bases. Now his retired father was going to seed through smoke and ceaseless hoisting on his own petard of Falstaff beers. Silk knew much of weapons and spoke often of those of the strange sex, men and women, who had preyed the perimeters of his youth. These stories were vile and wonderful to the others yet all the while they felt that Silk carried death in him in some old way. He was not nice. Others recalled him as only the short boy, big nose and fixed leer — nothing else. His beard was well on and he seemed ten years beyond the rest.

Bean’s father, a salesman, had fallen asleep on a highway cut through a bayou and driven off into the water. The police called from Louisiana that night. All of the boys were at the funeral. Right after it Bean took his shotgun out hunting meadowlarks. The daughter of his maid was at the house with her mother helping with the funeral buffet. She was Bean’s age. She told Bean it didn’t seem nice him going hunting directly after his father’s funeral. He told her she was only a darkie and to shut up, he made all the rules now. Her feelings were hurt and her mother hugged her, crying, as they watched young Bean go off over the hill to the pine meadows with his chubby black mutt Spike. Bean was very thin now. He had a bad complexion. He ran not on any team but only around town and the gravel roads through the woods. Almost every hour out of school he ran, looking ahead in forlorn agony and saying nothing to anybody. He was the Runner, the boy with a grim frown. When he ran he had wicked ideas on girls. They were always slaves and hostages. His word could free them or cause them to go against all things sacred. Or he would leave them. Don’t leave, don’t leave. I’ll do anything. But I must go. After the death of his father he began going to the police station when he was through with his run. He begged to go along on a call. He hoped somebody would be shot. He wished he lived in a larger city where there was more crime. When he got a wife he would protect her and then she would owe him a great deal. Against all that was sacred he would prevail on her, he might be forced to tie her up in red underwear and attach a yoke to her. Bean was vigilant about his home and his guns were loaded. He regarded trespass as a dire offense and studied the tire marks and footprints neighbor and stranger made on the verge of his lawn. Bean’s dog was as hair-triggered as he was, ruffing and flinching around the house like a creature beset by trespass at all stations. Both of them protected Bean’s mother to distraction. She hauled him to and fro to doctors for his skin and in the waiting room thin Bean would rise to oppose whoever might cross his mother. Of all the boys, Bean most loved Swanly.

Three boys, Bean among them, waded out into a gravel pool now, a pool that moved heavy in its circumference but was still and deep in its center like a woman in the very act of conception. The water moved past them into a deep pit of sand under the bridge and then under the bluffs on either side, terra-cotta besieged by black roots. An ageless hermit bothersome to no one lived in some kind of tin house on the bank down the way a half mile and they intended to worry him. It was their fourth trip to the Strong and something was urgent now as they had to make plans. They were not at peace and were hungry for an act before the age of school job money and wife. The bittersweet Swanly named it school job money whore, and felt ahead of him the awful tenure in which a man shuffles up and down the lanes of a great morgue. Swanly’s father was a failure except for Swanly himself who was beautiful past the genes of either parent. He worshiped Swanly, idolized him, and heeded him, all he said. He watched the smooth lad live life in his walk, talk, and long silent tours in the bathtub. He believed in Swanly as he did not himself or in his wife. It was Swanly’s impression there was no real such thing as maturity, no, people simply began acting like grown-ups, the world a farce of playing house. Swanly of all the others most wanted an act, standing there to his waist in the black water.

The storekeeper Tuck knew for twenty years about the clothesline strung from the shed at the rear of the yard of the house behind the store. The T-bar stood at the near end with high clover at its base. Yet that night two weeks ago. His throat still hurt and had a red welt across it. He ran through his lawn and necked himself on the wire. Blind in the dark in a fury. What was it? All right. He had given himself up to age but although he did not like her he thought his wife would hold out against it. After all she was ten years younger. But he saw she was growing old in the shoulders and under the eyes, all of a sudden. That might cause pity, but like the awful old she had begun clutching things, having her things, this time a box of Red Hots she wouldn’t share, clutching it to her titties, this owning things more and more, small things and big, when he saw that he took a run across the yard, hard on baked mud, apoplectic, and the wire brought him down, a cutlass out of the dark. Now he was both angry and puny, riven and welted and all kind of ointment sticky at his shirt collar. It was intolerable especially now he’d seen the youth, oh wrath of loss, fair gone sprite. His very voice was bruised, the wound deep to the thorax.

Swanly, out in the river in old red shorts, was not a spoiled child. His father intended to spoil him but Swanly would not accept special privileges. He did not prevail by his looks or by his pocket money, a lot at hand always compared with the money of his partners, and he was not soft in any way so far that they knew. He could work, had worked, and he gave himself chores. He went to church occasionally, sitting down and eyed blissfully by many girls, many much older than Swanly. Even to his sluttish pill-addicted mother he was kind, even when she had some pharmaceutical cousin over on the occasion of his father being on the road. He even let himself be used as an adornment of her, with his mild temper and sad charm. She would say he would at any moment be kidnapped by Hollywood. And always he would disappear conveniently to her and the cousin as if he had never been there at all except as the ghost in the picture she kept.

Walthall with his German Mauser was naked in the pool. He had more hair than the others and on his chin the outline of a goatee. On his head was a dusty black beret and his eyes were set downriver at a broad and friendly horizon. But he would go in the navy. There was no money for college right away. His impressions were quicker and deeper than those of the others. By the time he knew something, it was in his roots as a passion. He led all aspirants in passion for music, weapons, girls, books, drinking, and wrestling, where operatic goons in mode just short of drag queens grappled in the city auditorium. Walthall, an actor, felt the act near too. He was a connoisseur and this act would be most delicious. He called the hermit’s name.

Sunballs! Sunballs! Hefting the Mauser, Lester Silk just behind him a foot shorter and like a wet rat with his big nose. Swanly stood in patient beatitude but with an itch on, Arden Pal and Bean away at the bluff. You been wantin’ it, Sunballs! Been beggin’ for it, called Silk.

Come get some! cried Bean, at that distance to Walthall a threatening hood ornament.

None could be heard very far in the noise of the river.

Tuck, who had followed in his car, did hear them from the bridge.

What could they want with that wretch Sunballs? he imagined.

He was not without envy of the hermit. What a mighty wound to the balls it must take to be like that, that hiding shuffling thing, harmless and beholden to no man. Without woman, without friend, without the asking of lucre, without all but butt-bare necessity. Haunt of the possum, coon, and crane, down there. Old Testament specters with birds all over them eating honey out of roadkill. Too good for men. Sunballs was not that old, either. But he was suddenly angry at the man. Above the fray, absent, out, was he? Well.

Tuck knelt beneath a cluster of poison sumac on the rim of the bluff. He saw the three naked in the water. There was Swanly in the pool, the blond hair, the tanned skin. Who dared give a south Mississippi pissant youth such powerful flow and comeliness? Already Tuck in his long depressed thinking knew the boy had no good father, his home would stink of distress. He had known his type in the Scouts, always something deep-warped at home with them, beauty thrown up out of manure like. The mother might be beautiful but this lad had gone early and now she was a tramp needed worship by any old bunch of rags around a pecker. A boy like that you had to take it slow but not that much was needed to replace the pa, in his dim criminal weakness. You had to show them strength then wait until possibly that day, that hour, that hazy fog of moment when thought required act, the kind hand of Tuck in an instant of transfer to all nexus below the navel, no more to be denied than those rapids they’re hollering down, nice lips on the boy too.

You had to show them something, then be patient.

They hated Sunballs? I could thrash Sunballs. I can bury him, he thought. I am their man.

Tuck was angered against the hermit now but sickened too. The line of pain over his thorax he attributed now directly to the hermit. The hermit was confusion.

I am a vampire I am a vampire, Tuck said aloud. They shook me out of my nest and I can’t be responsible for what might happen.

He knew the boy would be back at his store.

The storekeeper’s sons were grown and fattish and ugly. They married and didn’t even leave the community, were just up the road there nearly together. They both of them loved life and the parts hereabouts and he could not forgive them for it.

The boy would know something was waiting for him. It would take time but the something was nearly here. There had been warmth in their exchange, not all yet unpromising.

That night in another heat his wife spoke back to him. You ain’t wanted it like this in a long time. What’s come over you? Now you be kindly be gentle you care for what you want, silly fool.

As he spent himself he thought, Once after Korea there was a chance for me. I had some fine stories about Pusan, Inchon, and Seoul, not all of them lies. That I once vomited on a gook in person. Fear of my own prisoner in the frozen open field there, not contempt as I did explain. But still. There was some money, higher education maybe, big house in downtown Hawaii. But I had to put it all down that hole, he said pulling back from the heat of his spouse. The fever comes on you, you gasp like a man run out of the sea by stingrays. Fore you know it you got her spread around you like a tree and fat kids. You married a tree with a nest in it blown and rained on every which way. You a part of the tree too with your arms out legs out roots down ain’t going nowhere really even in an automobile on some rare break to Florida, no you just a rolling tree.

But you get some scot-free thief of time like Sunballs, he thinks he don’t have to pay the toll. You know somebody else somewhere is paying it for him, though. This person rooted in his tree sweats the toll for Sunballs never you doubt it. That wretch with that joker’s name eases in the store wanting to know whether he’s paying sales tax, why is this bit of bait up two cents from last time? Like maybe I ought to take care of it for him. Like he’s a double agent don’t belong to no country. Times twenty million you got the welfare army, biggest thing ever invaded this USA, say gimme the money, the ham, the cheese, the car, the moon, worse than Sherman’s march. The babysitting, the hospital, throw in a smoking Buick, and bad on gas mileage if you please. Thanks very much kiss my ass. Army leech out this country white and clay-dry like those bluffs over that river down there. Pass a man with an honest store and friendly like me, what you see is a man sucked dry, the suckee toting dat barge. The suckers drive by thirteen to the Buick like a sponge laughing at you with all its mouths, got that music too, mouths big from sucking the national tit sing it out like some banshee rat speared in the jungle.

Tuck had got himself in a sleepy wrath but was too tired to carry it out and would require a good short sleep, never any long ones anymore, like your old self don’t want to miss any daylight, to lift himself and resume. That Swanly they called him, so fresh he couldn’t even handle a Pall Mall.

There he was, the boy back alone like Tuck knew he would be. Something had happened between them. No wonder you kept climbing out of bed with this thing in the world this happy thing all might have come to.

It ain’t pondering or chatting or wishing it’s only the act, from dog to man to star all nature either exploding or getting ready to.

Tuck had seen a lot of him in the pool, the move of him. This one would not play sports. There was a lean sun-browned languor to him more apt for man than boy games. It went on beyond what some thick coach could put to use.

A sacred trust prevailing from their luck together would drive them beyond all judgment, man and adolescent boy against every ugly thing in that world, which would mean nothing anymore. He would look at fresh prospects again the same as when he the young warrior returned to these shores in ’53. It would not matter how leeched and discommoded he had been for three decades. Put aside, step to joy.

You boys getting on all right sleeping over there? Tuck asked Swanly.

Where’d you hear we slept anywhere? The boy seemed in a trance between the aisles, the cans around him assorted junk of lowly needs. His hair was out of place from river, wind, and sand. Smears of bracken were on his pants knees, endearing him almost too much to Tuck. My dead little boyhood, Tuck almost sobbed.

I mean is nature being kind to you.

The boy half looked at him, panting a bit, solemn and bothered.

Are you in the drama club, young man?

Swanly sighed.

You sell acting lessons here at the store?

Good. Very quick. Somebody like you would be.

You don’t know me at all.

Fourth year you’ve been at the river. I’ve sort of watched you grow at the store here, in a way. This time just a little sad, or mad. We got troubles?

We. Swanly peeked straight at him then quickly away.

When I was a little guy, Tuck spoke in his mind, I held two marbles in my hand just the blue-green like his eyes. It was across the road under those chinaberries and us tykes had packed the clay down in a near perfect circle. Shot all day looking at those pretty agates. Too good to play with. My fist was all sweaty around them. I’d almost driven them through my palm. The beauty of the balls. There inside my flesh. Such things drive you to a church you never heard of before, worship them.

I have no troubles, the boy said. No we either. No troubles.

You came back to the real world.

I thought I was in it.

You’ve come back all alone.

Outside there’s a sign that says store, mister.

Down at the river pirates playhouse, you all.

Where you get your reality anyway? said the boy. Gas oil tobacco bacon hooks?

You know, wives can really be the gate of hell. They got that stare. They want to lock you down, get some partner to stoop down to that tiny peephole look at all the little shit with them. If you can forgive my language, ladies.

So you would be standing there ’mongst the Chesterfields seeing all the big?

Tuck did not take this badly. He liked the wit.

I might be. Some of us see the big things behind all the puny.

The hermit Sunballs appeared within the moment, the screen door slamming behind him like a shot. He walked on filthy gym shoes of one aspect with the soil of his wanderings, ripped up like the roots of it. You would not see such annealed textures at the ankles of a farmer, not this color of city gutters back long past. All of him the color of putty almost, as your eyes rose. The clothes vaporish like bus exhaust. The fingers whiter in the air like a potter’s but he had no work and you knew this instantly. He held a red net sack for oranges, empty. It was not known why he had an interesting name like Sunballs. You would guess the one who had named him was the cleverer. Nothing in him vouched for parts solar. More perhaps of a star gray and dead or old bait or of a sex organ on the drowned. Hair thicket of red rust on gray atop him.

He pored over the tin tops in the manner of a devout scholar. The boy watched him in fury. It was the final waste product of all maturity he saw, a creature fired-out full molded by the world, the completed grown-up.

Whereas with an equal fury the storekeeper saw the man as the final insult to duty: friendless, wifeless, jobless, motherless, stateless, and not even black. He could not bear the nervous hands of the creature over his goods, arrogant discriminating moocher. He loathed the man so much a pain came in his head and his heartbeat had thrown a sweat on him. The presence of the boy broke open all gates and he loathed in particular with a hatred he had seldom known, certainly never in Korea, where people wearing gym shoes and smelling of garlic shot at him. Another mouth, Tuck thought, seeking picking choosing. He don’t benefit nobody’s day. Squandered every chance of his white skin, down in his river hole. Mocks even a healthy muskrat in personal hygiene. Not native to nothing. Hordes of them, Tuck imagined, pouring across the borders of the realm from bumland. His progeny lice with high attitudes.

Tuck saw the revulsion of the boy.

You ten cents higher than the store in Pinola, spoke Sunballs. His voice was shallow and thin as if he had worn it down screaming. A wreckage of teeth added a whistle at the end.

Tuck was invested by red blindness.

But Swanly spoke first. I warn you. Don’t come near me. I can’t be responsible, you.

The hermit whispered a breeze off rags where feral beings had swarmed. Ere be a kind of storeman take his neighbor by the short hairs like they got you dead in an airport and charges for water next thing you know.

What did you say? demanded the storekeeper coming around the register. You say neighbor and airport? You never even crossed through an airport I bet, you filthy mouthbroom.

Sunballs stood back from the beauty of Swanly but was not afraid of the anger of Tuck. He was too taken with this startling pretty boy.

Oh yes, my man, airport I have been in and the airplane crash is why I am here.

He pointed at the oiled floor swept clean by the wife who was now coming in from the rear in attendance to the loud voices, so rare in this shop, where the savage quiet reigned almost perpetual both sides of the mutual gloom, the weary armistice, then the hate and lust and panting. Only lately had her own beauty ebbed and not truly very much. She was younger with long muscular legs and dressed like a well-kept city woman in beach shorts. Her hair was brunette and chopped shortish and she had the skin of a Mexican. Her lips were pulled together in a purse someone might mistake for delight by their expression, not petulance. Her name was Bernadette and when Tuck saw her he flamed with nostalgia, not love. Brought back to his own hard tanned youth returned from the Orient on a ship in San Diego. Swanly looked over to her, and the two of them, boy and married woman, in the presence of the gasping hermit, fell in love.

What’s wrong out here? she asked gently, her eyes never off the boy.

Said they can have it if that’s what’s there in the modern world, continued Sunballs. It was a good job I had too, I’m no liar. They was treating me special flying me to Kalamazoo, Michigan, on a Constellation. We was set upon by them flight stewards, grown men in matching suits, but they was these beatniks underneath, worse, these flight stewards, called, they attended themselves, it didn’t matter men women or children, they was all homos all the time looking in a mirror at each other, didn’t stir none atall for nobody else in their abomination once the airplane began crashing. It took forever rolling back and forth downward near like a corkscrew but we known it was plowing into ground directly. These two funny fellows you know, why when we wrecked all up with several dead up front and screaming, why they was in the back in the rear hull a-humpin’ each other their eyes closed ’blivious to the crash they trying to get one last ’bomination in and we unlatched ourselves, stood up in the hulk and they still goin’ at it, there’s your modern world I say, two smoky old queers availing theyselve and the captain come back with half a burnt face say what the hell we got. Ever damn thing about it a crime against nature. No money no Kalamazoo never bring me back in, damn them, yes I seen it what it come down to in your modern world.

Tuck watched Swanly and his wife in long locked estimation of each other, the words of the hermit flying over like faraway geese.

People is going over to the other side of everything, I say, and it all roots out from the evil of price, the cost of everything being so goddamned high. Nothing ain’t a tenth its value and a man’s soul knows it’s true.

What? Tuck said, down from his rage and confused by everybody. You ain’t flapped on like this in the seven years you been prowling round.

Sunballs would not stop. Old man Bunch Lewis up north in the state, he run a store and has a hunchback. The hermit spoke with relish, struck loquacious by the act of love proceeding almost visibly between the boy and the wife, each to each, the female lips moving without words. It behooved him, he thought, to announce himself a wry soldier of the world.

Fellow come in seen Lewis behind the counter with a ten-dollar shirt in his hands. Said Lewis, What’s that on your back? Lewis got all fierce, he say, You know it’s a hump I’m a humpback you son of a bitch. Fellow say, Well I thought it might be your ass, everything else in this store so high. What he say.

Neither the storekeeper nor his wife had ever heard the first word of wit from this man.

The hermit put a hand to his rushy wad of hair as if to groom it. The plain common man even in this humble state can’t afford no clothes where you got the Bunch Lewises a’preying on them, see. After this appeal he paused, shot out for a time, years perhaps.

This isn’t a plain common boy here, though, is he, son? Bernadette said, as if her voice had fled out and she powerless. The question called out of her in a faint tone between mother love and bald lechery. Is it real? Has this boy escaped out of a theater somewheres? demanded the hermit. His eyes were on the legs of the wife, her feet set in fashion huaraches like a jazz siren between the great wars.

You never even looked at my wife before, said Tuck. Pissmouth.

Hush everybody. You getting the air dirty, said Bernadette.

Her own boys were hammy and homely and she wandered in a moment of conception, giving birth to Swanly all over again as he stood there, a pained ecstasy in the walls of her womb. He was what she had intended by everything female about her and she knew hardly any woman ever chanced to see such a glorious boy.

Tuck was looking at her afresh and he was shocked. Why my wife, she’s a right holy wonder, she is, he thought. Or is she just somebody I’ve not ever seen now?

Out of the south Mississippi fifth-grown pines, the rabbit-weed, the smaller oaks and hickories, the white clay and the coon-toed bracken, she felt away on palisades over a sea of sweetening terror.

She said something nobody caught. Swanly in shyness and because he could not hold his feelings edged away with a can of sardines and bottle of milk unpaid for, but he was not conscious of this.

I am redeemed, she said again, even more softly.

Sunballs left with a few goods unpaid for and he was very conscious of this. Tuck stared at him directly as he went out the door but saw little. It must have been the hermit felt something was owed for his narration.

The wife walked to the screen and looked out carefully.

You stay away from that boy, she called, and they heard her.

When Tuck was alone behind the register again he sensed himself alien to all around him and his aisles seemed a fantastic dump of road offal brought in by a stranger.

He was in the cold retreat from Chosin marching backwards, gooks in the hills who’d packed in artillery by donkey. You could smell the garlic coming off them at a half mile but my sweet cock that was my living room compared to this now, he thought.

All the fat on him, the small bags under his eyes, the hint of rung at his belt he summoned out of himself. He must renew his person. Some moments would come and he could do this simply by want. Tuck felt himself grow leaner and handsomer.

Walthall had wanted the peach wine to become brandy but alas. He brought his viola to the river camp and Pal his bass flute, two instruments unrecognized by anybody in his school, his city, and they played them passing strange with less artistry than vengeance sitting opposed on a sunken petrified log like an immense crocodile forced up by saurian times, in the first rush of small rapids out of the pool. This river in this place transported them to Germany or the Rockies or New England, anywhere but here, and the other boys, especially the hearkening beatific Swanly, listened, confident paralyzed hipsters, to the alien strains of these two mates, set there in great parlor anguish swooning like people in berets near death.

Bean, the sternest and most religious of them all, set his gun on his knees, feeling a lyric militancy and praying for an enemy. Like the others, this boy was no drinking man but unlike them he did not drink the wine from the fruit jars. For the others, the wine went down like a ruined orchard, acid to the heart, where a ball of furred heat made them reminiscent of serious acts never acted, women never had.

The wine began dominating and the boys were willing slaves. When the music paused Lester Silk, son of the decaying army man who never made anything but fun of poetry and grabbed his scrotum and acted the fairy whenever it occurred at school, said, I believe in years to come I will meet a pale woman from Texas who plays clarinet in the symphony. Then we shall dally, there will be a rupture over my drinking, she’ll tear up my pictures and for penance over the freedoms she allowed me she will go off to the nun mountains in a faraway state and be killed accidentally by masked gunmen. Forever afterward I will whup my lap mournfully in her memory.

Somebody must die when you hear that music out here, I feel it, said Swanly, cool-butted and naked in the little rapids but full hot with the peach wine after five swallows.

Walthall, stopping the viola, wore a necklace of twine and long mail-order Mauser shells. He exclaimed, Send not to ask for when the bell tolls. I refuse to mourn the death by fire of a child’s Christmas on Fern Hill. Do not go gently in my sullen craft, up yours. He raised the fruit jar from his rock.

All that separates me from Leslie Caron must die, said Arden Pal. He held his flute up like a saber, baroque over the flat rocks and frothing tea of the rapids. Pal was a gangling youth of superfluous IQ already experiencing vile depressions. His brain made him feel constantly wicked but he relieved himself through botany and manic dilettantism.

Like a piece of languid Attic statuary Swanly lay out with a sudden whole nudeness under the shallow water. He might have been something caught in the forest and detained for study, like a white deer missing its ilk, because he was sad and in love and greatly confused.

Bernadette cooked two chickens, made a salad, then Irish Cream cookies, for the boys’ health, she said, for their wretched motherless pirates’ diets, and Tuck drove her down to the bridge with it all in a basket. Catastrophic on both sides of the washboard gravel was the erosion where ditches of white limesoil had been clawed into deep small canyons by heavy rains, then swerved into the bogs in wild fingers. Tuck pretended he was confused as to where the boys might be in camp and guessed loudly while pulling off before the bridge into the same place he had been earlier. Ah, he said, the back of their car, Hinds County, I recognize it.

But he said he would wait and that was perfect by Bernadette. Then he followed her, tree to tree, at a distance. Bernadette came to the head of the bluff and he saw her pause, then freeze, cradling the food basket covered in blue cloth with white flowers printed on. Through a nearer gully he saw what she saw.

Hairy Walthall, at the viola with his root floating in the rills, might have seemed father to Swanly, who was hung out like a beige flag in the shallows. She could not see Arden Pal but she heard the deep weird flute. Swanly moved as a liquid one with the river, the bed around him slick tobacco shale, and Bernadette saw all this through a haze of inept but solemn chamber music. She did not know it was inept and a wave of terrible exhilaration overcame her.

Tuck looked on at the boys from his own vantage, stroking the wound to his throat.

The hermit Sunballs was across the river before them in a bower of wild muscadine, prostrate and gripping the lip of the bluff. He owned a telescope, which he was now using. He viewed all of Swanly he could. The others were of no concern. For a while Tuck and his wife could not see him, flat to the earth and the color of organic decay. None of them for that matter would have recognized their own forms rapt and helpless to the quick, each with their soul drawn out through their eyes, beside themselves, stricken into painful silence.

It was habitual with Pal as he played the flute, however, that his eyes went everywhere. He was unsure at first then he thought he had invoked ghosts by his music, the ancient river dead roused from their Civil War ghoulments by the first flute since in these parts. He was startled by this for the seconds the thought lasted then he was frightened because they were on both bluffs and he mistook the telescope pushed out of the vines for a weapon. Perhaps they were the law, but next he knew they were not, seeing one was a woman.

They’re watching you, Swanly!

The boys, except Swanly, came out of the water and thrashed back to the camp incensed and indignant. Pal pointed his flute at the telescope, which receded. Then the hermit’s face came briefly into the frame of vine leaves. He could not tear himself away.

Swanly stood wobbling in the shallows, his hand to the slick shale rock, then at last stood up revealed and fierce in his nakedness. He swayed on the slick rocks, outraged, screaming. Then he vomited.

Keep your eyes off me! Keep away! he bawled upwards at the hermit, who then disappeared.

Pal pointed upwards to the right. They watched too, Swanly! But Swanly didn’t seem to understand this.

Walthall fired his Mauser twice in the air and the blasts made rocking echoes down the river beach to beach.

Bernadette and Tuck melted back onto the rooted path in the high cane and the woman came cautiously with her basket, trailed fifty yards behind by her husband who was trembling and homicidal toward the hermit. Also he knew the boy loved his wife more than him. The boy’s nakedness to him had had no definition but was a long beige flag of taunting and every fine feeling of his seemed mocked and whored by the presence of the hermit. Tuck felt himself only a raving appendage to the event, a thing tacked on to the crisis of his wife.

Yoo hoo! Oh bad bad boys. I’ve got a treat for you, called Bernadette. All wet in their pants they stared up to the woman clearing the cane above them, their beds spread below her. Their sanctuary ruined. Only Swanly knew who she was.

Oh no, is it a woman of the church? said Walthall.

There will always be a woman around to wreck things, said Pal.

No, she’s all right, Swanly intervened, though he was still sick. He came up from the shore roots and struggled into his shorts slowly. He seemed paralyzed and somewhere not with them, an odd sleepiness on him. Be nice, all of you, he added.

Big Mama Busybod, said Walthall. Courtesy of the Southern regions.

Out in the sun they saw she was not a bad-looking case though she seemed arrested by a spiritual idea and did not care her hair was blowing everywhere like a proper woman of the ’50s would.

Her husband came behind, mincing over the stone beach. She turned.

I heard the shots, he said.

Fools. Eat, said Bernadette. But she remained startled by Swanly and could not turn her face long from him.

Tuck didn’t understand it, but his jaw began flapping. You boys ever bait a trotline with soap? Yes Ivory soap. Tuck pointed under the bridge where their line was set on the near willow. Tuck was not convinced he even existed now outside the river of want he poured toward Swanly. He was not interested in what he continued to say, like something in a storekeeper’s costume activated by a pull-string and thrust into a playhouse by a child. Fish began biting on the substances of modern industry in the ’40s, boys. Why they’re like contemporary men they ain’t even that hungry just more curious. Or a woman. They get curious and then the bait eats them, huh.

Yes sir, said Walthall, annoyed.

Tuck kept on in despondent sagery then trailed off as the boys ate and he next simply sat down on a beach boulder and stared away from them into the late bower of Sunballs across the river.

When he twisted to look he was astounded by the extent of bosom his wife was visiting on Swanly. She was bared like some tropical hula but not. Swanly ate his chicken kneeling in front of her with his bare smooth chest slightly burned red and of such an agreeable shape he seemed made to fly through night winds like the avatar on the bow of a ship. That hussy had dropped her shawl down and Tuck noticed more of her in truth, her mothersome cleavage, than he had in years, faintly freckled and still not a bad revelation. Not in years atop her.

It was eleven years ago when he had pursued illicit love with another woman. This was when his boys were small and cute. He could not get over how happy he was and blameless and blessed-feeling, as if in the garden before the fall. She was a young woman with practical headquarters in the Jackson Country Club, a thing he felt giant pride about, her sitting there in a swimsuit nursing a Tom Collins, high-heeled beach shoes on her feet, talking about storms how she loved them. Now she was a fat woman and his children were fat men and it was not their fatness that depressed him so much as it was watching visible time on them, the horrible millions of minutes collected and evident, the murdered idle thousands of hours, his time more than theirs in their change. They had an unfortunate disease where you saw everything the minute you saw them, the awful feckless waiting, the lack of promise, the bulk of despair. The woman had been attracted to him through his handsome little boys and she would excite him by exclaiming, Oh what wonderful seed you have. He stayed up like a happy lighthouse with rotating beam. She had no children, never would, but she whispered to him he might break her will if he didn’t stop being so good. All the while he had loved Bernadette too, even more, was that possible? The woman didn’t mind. What kind of man am I? Tuck thought. Was time working every perversion it had on him, were there many like him? He felt multiplied in arms and legs, a spider feeling eight ways, he was going into the insect kingdom. Oh yes, lost to the rest.

He loved his boys but my God they were like old uncles, older than him, mellow and knee-slapping around a campfire. He loved his wife, but no he didn’t, it was an embattled apathy each morning goaded into mere courtesy, that was what, and he felt wild as a prophet mocking an army of the righteous below him at the gate.

Now isn’t that better? his wife said to the boys, who had fed themselves with hesitation before they fell to trough like swine.

You’re too thoughtful of us, ma’am, said Swanly.

I’m Bernadette, she said.

You are desperate, thought Tuck. I sort of like it. Hanging all out there, little Mama.

Was it how you like it? she said only to the boy.

My mother never cooked for me like that.

Ah.

Nobody ever has.

Oh. What’s wrong?

That hermit, you know. He saw me without anything on.

She could see he was still trembling, warm as it was.

I know how it is. She looked more deeply into his eyes. Believe me.

What is it? said Tuck, coming up.

This boy’s been spied on by that creature Sunballs.

Tuck leaned in to Swanly. The boy was evilly shaken like a maiden thing out of the last century. He was all boy but between genders, hurt deep to his modesty. Tuck was greatly curious and fluttered-up. All execrable minutes, all time regained. I would live backwards in time until I took the shape of the boy myself. My own boyself was eat up by the gooks and then this strolling wench, my boyself was hostaged by her, sucking him out to her right in front of me, all over again as with me. Woman’s thing stays hungry, it don’t diminish, it’s always something. A need machine, old beard lost its teeth harping on like a holy fool in the desert. They’re always with themselves having sex with themselves, two lips forever kissing each other down there and they got no other subject. Even so, I feel love for her all over again.

Lester Silk, Bean, and Pal studied this trio isolated there where the water on rills avid over pebbles made a laughing noise. Walthall raised his viola and spread his arms out like a crucified musician and he stood there in silence evoking God knows what but Arden Pal asked the others what was going on.

Wake up and smell the clue, whispered Silk. Walthall wants the woman and our strange boy Swanly’s already got her.

Swanly’s okay, Silk. He’s not strange.

Maybe not till now.

Leave him alone, said Bean. Swanly’s a right guy. He has been through some things that’s all. Ask me.

You mean a dead daddy like you?

I’d say you look hard enough, a dead both, but he wouldn’t admit it. Bean intended to loom there in his acuity for a moment, looking into the breech of his gun which he had opened with the lever. It was a rare lever-action shotgun, 20-gauge. Bean worshiped shells and bullets. Ask me, he’s a full orphan.

They blending with him, said Arden Pal. They watched us naked too. She didn’t jump back in the bushes like a standard woman when I caught her.

Swanly came over getting his shirt.

She’s giving me something. I’m feeling poorly, he said.

The rest did not speak and the three, Tuck, Bernadette, and Swanly, walked up the shallow bluff and into the woods.

Silk sighed. I don’t quite believe I ever seen nothing like that. Old store boy there looks like somebody up to the eight count.

Walthall, who had actually had a sort of girl, since with stubborn farm boy will he would penetrate nearly anything sentient, was defeated viola and all. Lord my right one for mature love like that. No more did he heed the calling of his music and he was sore in gloom.

Bean could not sit still and he walked here and there rolling two double-aught buckshot shells in his palm, looking upward to the spying bower of the hermit, but no offending eye there now, as he would love.

They closed the store as Swanly began talking. She went to the house and got something for his belly and some nerve pills too and diet pills as well. Bernadette was fond of both diet and nerve pills, and sometimes her husband was too, quite positively. Some mornings they were the only promise he could fetch in and he protected his thefts of single pills from his wife’s cabinet with grim slyness. In narcosis she was fond of him and in amphetamine zeal he returned affection to her which she mistook for actual interest. The doctor in Magee was a firm believer in Dexamyl as panacea and gave her anything she wanted. The pain of wanting in her foreign eyes got next to him. In a fog of charity he saw her as a lovely spy in the alien pines. He saw a lot of women and few men who weren’t in the act of bleeding as they spoke, where they stood. The pharmacist was more a partisan of Demerol and John Birch and his prices were high since arsenals were expensive. His constant letters to Senator McCarthy, in his decline, almost consumed his other passions for living, such as they were. But the pharmacist liked Bernadette too, and when she left, detained as long as he could prolong the difficulty of her prescription, he went in the back room where a mechanic’s calendar with a picture of a woman lying cross-legged in a dropped halter on the hood of a Buick was nailed to the wall and laid hand to himself. One night the doctor and the pharmacist met in this room and began howling like wolves in lonely ardor. Bernadette’s name was mentioned many times, then they would howl again. They wore female underwear but were not sodomites. Both enjoyed urban connections and their pity for Bernadette in her aging beauty out in the river boonies was painful without limit; and thus in the proper lingerie they acted it out.

Swanly, after the pills, began admitting to the peach wine as if it were a mortal offense. Bernadette caught his spirit. They adjourned to the house where he could lie comfortably with her Oriental shawl over him.

We don’t have strong drink here. Not much. She looked to Tuck. You don’t have to drink to have a full experience.

Tuck said, No, not drink. Hardly.

No. I’m having fun just talking. Talking to you is fine. Because I haven’t been much of a talker. That’s good medicine. My tongue feels all light.

Talk on, child. She gave Swanly another pill.

Tuck went to relieve himself and through the window he saw the clothesline over the green clover and he speculated that through time simple household things might turn on you in a riot of overwhelming redundancy. He had heard of a man whose long dear companion, a buckskin cat, had walked between his legs one night and tripped and killed him as he went down headfirst onto a commode. Cheered that this was not him he went back to listen to the boy.

But after all you wouldn’t have just anybody look at you all bared. Surely not that awful person, Bernadette was saying. I’d not let him see me for heaven’s sake.

It seems he ought to pay. I feel tortured and all muddy. I can’t forget it.

Just talk it out, that’s best. It seems there’s always a monster about, doesn’t it?

I feel I could talk all afternoon into the night.

We aren’t going anywhere.

We aren’t going anywhere, added Tuck.

I’m feeling all close to you if that’s all right.

Some people are sent to us. We have been waiting all our lives for somebody and don’t even know it.

Older ones are here to teach and guide the young, Tuck said.

Bernadette glanced at Tuck then looked again. He had come back with his hair combed and he had shaved. He was so soft in the face she felt something new for him. In this trinity already a pact was sealed and they could no more be like others. There was a tingling and a higher light around them. A flood of goodwill took her as if they had been hurled upon a foreign shore, all fresh. The boy savior, child, and paramour at once. Swanly spoke on, it hardly mattered what he said. Each word a pleasant weight on her bosom.

Walthall and the rest stared into the fire sighing, three of them having their separate weather, their separate fundament, in peach wine. Pal could swallow no more and heaved out an arc of puke luminous over the fire, crying, Thar she blows, my dear youth. This act was witnessed like a miracle by the others.

God in heaven, this stuff was so good for a while, said Silk.

Fools, said Bean.

Bean don’t drink because he daddy daid, said Walthall. So sad, so sad, so gone, so Beat.

Yeh. It might make him cry, said Pal.

Or act human, said Silk.

Let it alone. Bean had stood unmoved by their inebriation for two hours, caressing his 20-gauge horse gun.

Teenage love, teenage heart. My face broke out the other night but I’m in love wit yewwww! sang Walthall.

What you think Swanly’s doing, asked Pal.

Teenage suckface. Dark night of the suck.

They are carrying him away, far far away, Silk declared.

Or him them.

Having a bit of transversion, them old boy and girl.

You mean travesty. Something stinketh, I tell you.

We know.

The hermit made Swanly all sick. We should put a stop to his mischief, said Bean all sober.

That person saw the peepee full out of ourn good friend ourn little buddy.

This isn’t to laugh about. Swanly’s deep and he’s a hurting man.

Boy, said Pal. He once told me every adult had a helpless urge to smother the young so they could keep company with the dead, which were themselves.

You’d have to love seeing small animals suffer to hurt Swanly. The boy’s damn near an angel. I swear he ain’t even rightly one of us, said Silk. Bean did not care for Silk, who had only joined them lately. But Silk redeemed himself, saying, Christ I’m just murky. Swanly’s deep.

You know what, Walthall spoke, I felt sorry for all three of them when they left here. Yes the woman is aged but fine, but it was like a six-legged crippled thing.

So it was, said Pal. I declare nothing happy is going on wherever they are.

Whosoever you are, be that person with all your might. Time goes by faster than we thought. It is a thief so quiet. You must let yourself be loved and you must love, parts of you that never loved must open and love. You must announce yourself in all particulars so you can have yourself.

Tuck going on at dawn. Bernadette was surprised again by him. Another man, fluent, had risen in his place. She was in her pink sleeping gown but the others wore their day clothes and were not sleepy.

Listen, the birds are singing for us out there and it’s a morning, a real morning, Bernadette said. A true morning out of all the rest of the mornings.

By noon they were hoarse and languid and commended themselves into a trance wherein all wore bedsheets and naked underneath they moved about the enormous bed like adepts in a rite. The question was asked of Swanly by Tuck whether he would care to examine their lovely Bernadette since he had never seen a woman and Swanly said yes and Bernadette lay back opening the sheet and then spreading herself so Swanly saw a woman as he had never seen her for a long while and she only a little shy and the boy smiled wearily assenting to her glory and was pulled inward through love and death and constant birth gleefully repeated by the universe. Then husband and wife embraced with the boy between them on the edge of the bed, none of them recalling how they were there but all talk ceased and they were as those ignorant animals amongst the fruit of Eden just hours before the thunder.

Long into the afternoon they awoke with no shame and only the shyness of new dogs in a palace and then an abashed hunger for the whole ritual again set like a graven image in all their dreams. The boy had been told things and he felt very elegant, a crowned orphan now orphan no more. Bernadette, touched in all places, felt dear and coveted. All meanness had been driven from Tuck and he was blank in an ecstasy of separate parts like a creature torn to bits at the edge of a sea. Around them were their scattered clothes, the confetti of delirium. They embraced and were suspended in a bulb of void delicate as a drop of water.

Sunballs came around the store since it was closed and he wore a large knife on his belt in a scabbard with fringe on it and boots in white leather and high to the knee, which he had without quite knowing their use rescued out of a country lane near the bridge, the jetsam of a large majorette seduced in a car he had been watching all night. At the feet he looked blindingly clean as in a lodge ceremony. He walked quickly as if appointed and late. He looked in one window of the blue house, holding the sill, before he came to the second and beheld them all naked gathering and ungathering in languor, unconscious in their innocence. He watched a goodly while, his hands formally at his side, bewitched like a pole-axed angel. Then he commenced rutting on the scabbard of his knife grabbed desperately to his loins but immediately also to call out scolding as somebody who had walked up on murder.

Cursed and stunned Tuck and Bernadette snatched the covering but Swanly sat peering at the fiend outside until overcome by grief and then nausea. His nudity was then like one dead, cut down from joy. Still, he was too handsome, and Sunballs could not quit his watching while Swanly retched himself sore.

He might well be dying, thought Sunballs, and this fascinated him, these last heavings of beauty. He began to shake and squalled even louder. There was such a clamor from the two adults he awoke to himself and hastened back to the road and into the eroded ditch unbraked until he reached his burrow. Under his bluff the river fled deep and black with a sheen of new tar, and the hermit emerged once on his filthy terrace to stand over it in conversation with his erection, his puny calves in the white boots.

The boys labored with oaths down the bedrocks of the river. All was wretched and foul since waking under the peach wine, which they now condemned, angry at daylight itself. Only Bean was ready to the task. They went through a bend in silence and approached water with no beach. They paused for a while then flung in and waded cold to their chests. Bean, the only one armed, carried the cavalry shotgun above his head.

I claim this land for the Queen of Spain, Bean said. God for a hermit to shoot. My kingdom for a hermit. Then he went underwater but the shotgun stayed up and dry, waggled about.

When he came up he saw the hermit leering down from his porch on the bluff. Bean, choked and bellicose, thought he heard Sunballs laughing at him. He levered in a round and without hesitation would have shot the man out of his white boots had this person not been snatched backwards by Tuck. All of them saw the arm come around his neck and the female boots striding backwards in air, then dust in vacant air, the top of a rust hut behind it. A stuffed holler went off the bluff and scattered down the pebble easements westerly and into the cypresses on either side. Then there was silence.

He was grabbed by something, said Walthall, something just took Sunballs away.

By hell, I thought he was shot before I pulled the trigger, swore Bean. Bean had horrified himself. The horse gun in his hand was loathsome.

Don’t hit me no more in the eye! a voice cried from above.

Then there were shouts from both men and much stomping on the terrace.

Tuck shrieked out, his voice like a great bird driving past. They heard then the hysterical voice of Swanly baying like a woman. The boys were spooked but drawn. They went to finding a path upwards even through the wine sickness.

Swanly, he ain’t right and that’s him, said Pal.

Well somebody’s either humping or killing somebody.

We charging up there like we know what to do about it.

I could’ve killed him, said Bean, dazed still. Damn you Swanly. For you, damn you.

Then they were up the fifty feet or more and lost in cane through which they heard groans and sobs. They turned to this and crashed through and to the man they were afraid. At the edge of the brake, they drew directly upon a bin buried three-quarters in the top of the bluff, this house once a duck blind. In front of it from the beaten clay porch they heard sounds and they pressed around to them like harried pilgrims anxious for bad tidings. They saw the river below open up in a wide bend deep and strong through a passage of reigning boulders on either side and then just beside them where they had almost overwalked them, Bernadette and Swanly together on the ground, Swanly across her lap and the woman with her breasts again nearly out of their yoke in a condition of the Pietà, but Swanly red and mad in the face, both of them covered with dust as if they had rolled through a desert together. This put more fear in them than would have a ghoul, and they looked quickly away where Tuck sat holding his slashed stomach, beside him the hermit spread with outstretched boots, swatted down as from some pagan cavalry. Sunballs covered his eyes with his hands.

They thought in those seconds that Tuck had done himself in. The big hunting knife was still in his hand and he gazed over the river as if dying serenely. But this was only exhaustion and he looked up at them unsurprised and baleful as if nothing more could shock him.

I can’t see, moaned Sunballs. He never stopped hitting my eyes.

Good, good, spoke Tuck. I’m not sorry. Cut your tongue out next, tie you up in a boat down that river. See how you spy on those sharks in the Gulf of Mexico.

I ain’t the trouble, moaned the hermit. You got big sons wouldn’t think so either.

Nothing stands between me and that tongue, keep wagging it.

Them ole boys of yours could sorely be enlightened.

Sunballs moved his hands and the boys viewed the eyes bruised like a swollen burglar’s mask, the red grief of pounded meat in the sockets. The fingers of both Tuck’s hands were mud red and fresher around the knife handle. But Tuck was spent, a mere chattering head, and the hermit in his agony rolled over and stared blind into his own vomit. His wadded hair was white flecked by it and the boys didn’t look any more at him.

It was Swanly they loved and could not bear to see. He was not the bright shadow of their childhoods anymore, he was not the boy of almost candescent complexion, he was not the pal haunting in the remove of his beauty, slim and clean in his limbs. This beauty had been a strange thing. It had always brought on some distress and then infinite kindness in others and then sadness too. But none of them were cherubs any longer and they knew all this and hated it, seeing him now across the woman’s lap, her breasts over his twisted face. Eden in the bed of Eros, all Edenwide all lost. He was neither child, boy, nor man, and he was dreadful. Bean could barely carry on and knelt before him in idiocy. Walthall was enraged, big hairy Walthall, viola torn to bits inside him. He could not forgive he was ever obliged to see this.

We’re taking our friend with us.

You old can have each other, said Bean. He had forgot the shotgun in his hand.

Bury each other. Take your time.

The woman looked up, her face flocked with dust.

We’re not nasty. We were good people.

Sure. Hag.

Come on away, Bean, Pal directed him.

Bring Swanly up. Hold him, somebody, help me. Walthall was large and clumsy. He could not see the way to handle Swanly.

Bernadette began to lick the dust from Swanly’s cheeks.

There ain’t nothing only a tiny light, and a round dark, sighed Sunballs. It ain’t none improved.

We are bad. Tuck spoke. Damn us, damn it all.

Silk and Pal raised Swanly up and although he was very sick he could walk. There was an expression simian wasted on his face, blind to those who took him now, blind to the shred of clothes remaining to him, his shorts low on his hips.

They kept along the gravel shoulder the mile back to their camp. Bean with the handsome gun, relic of swaggering days in someone else’s life. He seemed deputized and angry, walking Swanly among the others. Sometimes Swanly fell from under him completely, his legs surrendered, while they pulled him on, no person speaking.

In the halls of his school thenceforward Swanly was wolfish in his glare and often dirty. In a year no one was talking to him at all. The exile seemed to make him smile but as if at others inside himself he knew better than them.

His mother, refractory until this change in her son, withdrew into silent lesbian despair with another of her spirit then next into a church and out of this world, where her husband continued to make his inardent struggles.

Some fourteen years later, big Walthall, rich but sad, took a sudden turn off the regular highway on the way to a Florida vacation. He was struck by a nostalgia he could not account for, like a bole of overweening sad energy between his eyes. He drove right up to the store and later he swore to Bean and Pal that although Tuck had died, an almost unrecognizable and clearly mad old woman hummed, nearly toothless, behind the cash register. She was wearing Swanly’s old jersey, what was left of it, and the vision was so awful he fled almost immediately and was not right in Boca Raton nor much better when he came back home.

When Walthall inquired about the whereabouts of Swanly the woman began to scream without pause.

A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis

WE WERE OUT EARLY IN THE BROWN WATER, THE LIGHT STILL GRAY AND wet.

My cousin Woody and I were wading on an oyster shell reef in the bay. We had cheap bait-casting rods and reels with black cotton line at the end of which were a small bell weight and a croaker hook. We used peeled shrimp for bait. Sometimes you might get a speckled trout or flounder but more likely you would catch the croaker. A large one weighed a half pound. When caught and pulled in the fish made a metallic croaking sound. It is one of the rare fish who talk to you about their plight when they are landed. My aunt fried them crispy, covered in cornmeal, and they were delicious, especially with lemon juice and ketchup.

A good place to fish was near the pilings of the Saint Stanislaus school pier. The pier gate was locked but you could wade to the pilings and the oyster shell reef. Up the bluff above us on the town road was a fish market and the Star Theater, where we saw movies.

Many cats, soft and friendly and plump, would gather around the edges of the fish market and when you went to the movies you would walk past three or four of them that would ease against your leg as if asking to go to the movie with you. The cats were very social. In their prosperity they seemed to have organized into a watching society of leisure and culture. Nobody yelled at them because this was a very small coastal town where everybody knew each other. Italians, Slavs, French, Negroes, Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics. You did not want to insult the cat’s owner by rudeness. Some of the cats would tire of the market offerings and come down the bluff to watch you fish, patiently waiting for their share of your take or hunting the edges of the weak surf for dead crabs and fish. You would be pulling in your fish, catch it, and when you looked ashore the cats were alert suddenly. They were wise. It took a hard case not to leave them one good fish for supper.

That night as you went into an Abbott and Costello movie, which cost a dime, that same cat you had fed might rub against your leg and you felt sorry it couldn’t go into the movie house with you. You might be feeling comical when you came out and saw the same cat waiting with conviction as if there were something in there it wanted very much, and you threw a jujube down to it on the sidewalk. A jujube was a pellet of chewing candy the quality of vulcanized rubber. You chewed several during the movie and you had a wonderful syrup of licorice, strawberry, and lime in your mouth. But the cat would look down at the jujube then up at you as if you were insane, and you felt badly for betraying this serious creature and hated that you were mean and thoughtless. That is the kind of conscience you had in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, where you were always close to folks and creatures.

This morning we had already had a good trip as the sun began coming out. The croakers swam in a burlap sack tied to a piling and underwater. The sacks were free at the grocery and people called them croaker sacks. When you lifted the sack to put another croaker in you heard that froggy metal noise in a chorus, quite loud, and you saw the cats on shore hearken to it too. We would have them with french-fried potatoes, fat tomato slices from my uncle’s garden, and a large piece of deep sweet watermelon for supper.

It made a young boy feel good having the weight of all these fish in the dripping sack when you lifted it, knowing you had provided for a large family and maybe even neighbors at supper. You felt to be a small hero of some distinction, and ahead of you was that mile walk through the neighborhood lanes where adults would pay attention to your catch and salute you. The fishing rod on your shoulder, you had done some solid bartering with the sea, you were not to be trifled with.

The only dangerous thing in the bay was a stingaree, with its poisonous barbed hook of a tail. This ray would lie flat covered over by sand like a flounder. We waded barefoot in swimming trunks and almost always in a morning’s fishing you stepped on something that moved under your foot and you felt the squirm in every inch of your body before it got off from you. These could be stingarees. There were terrible legends about them, always a story from summers ago when a stingaree had whipped its tail into the calf of some unfortunate girl or boy and buried the vile hook deep in the flesh. The child came dragging out of the water with this twenty-pound brownish-black monster the size of a garbage can lid attached to his leg, thrashing and sucking with its awful mouth. Then the child’s leg grew black and swelled hugely and they had to amputate it, and that child was in the attic of some dark house on the edge of town, never the same again and pale like a thing that never saw light, then eventually the child turned into half-stingaree and they took it away to an institution for special cases. So you believed all this most positively and when a being squirmed under your foot you were likely to walk on water out of there. We should never forget that when frightened a child can fly short distances too.

The high tide was receding with the sun clear up and smoking in the east over Biloxi, the sky reddening, and the croakers were not biting so well anymore. But each new fish would give more pride to the sack and I was greedy for a few more since I didn’t get to fish in saltwater much. I lived four hours north in a big house with a clean lawn, a maid, and yardmen, but it was landlocked and grim when you compared it to this place of my cousin’s. Much later I learned his family was nearly poor, but this was laughable even when I heard it, because it was heaven: the movie house right where you fished and the society of cats, and my uncle’s house with the huge watermelons lying on the linoleum under the television with startling shows like “Lights Out!” from the New Orleans station. We didn’t even have a television station yet where I lived.

I kept casting and wading out deeper toward an old creosoted pole in the water where I thought a much bigger croaker or even a flounder might be waiting. My cousin was tired and red-burnt from yesterday in the sun, so he went to swim under the diving board of the Catholic high school a hundred yards away. They had dredged a pool. Otherwise the sea was very shallow a long ways out. But now I was almost up to my chest, near the barnacled pole where a big boat could tie up. I kept casting and casting, almost praying toward the deep water around the pole for a big fish. The lead and shrimp would plunk and tumble into a dark hole, I thought, where a special giant fish was lurking, something too big for the croaker shallows.

My grandmother had caught a seven-pound flounder from the seawall years ago and she was still honored for it, my uncle retelling the tale about her whooping out, afraid but happy, the pole bent double. I wanted to have a story like that about me. The fish made Mama Hannah so happy, my older cousin said, that he saw her dancing to a band on television by herself when everybody else was asleep. Soon — I couldn’t bear to think about it — in a couple of days they would drive me over to Gulfport and put me on a bus for home, and in my sorrow there waited a dry redbrick school within bitter tasting distance. But even that would be sweetened by a great fish and its story.

It took place in no more than half a minute, I’d guess, but it had the lengthy rapture and terror of a whole tale. Something bit and then was jerking, small but solidly, then it was too big, and I began moving in the water and grabbing the butt of the rod again because what was on had taken it out of my hands. When I caught the rod up, I was moving toward the barnacled pole with the tide slopping on it, and that was the only noise around. I went in to my neck in a muddier scoop in the bottom, and then under my feet something moved. I knew it was a giant stingaree instantly. Hard skin on a squirming plate of flesh. I was sorely terrified but was pulled even past this and could do nothing, now up to my chin and the stiff little pole bent violently double. I was dragged through the mud and I knew the being when it surfaced would be bigger than me and with much more muscle. Then, like something underwater since Europe, seven or eight huge purpoises surfaced, blowing water in a loud group explosion out of their enormous heads, and I was just shot all over with light and nerves because they were only twenty feet from me and I connected them, the ray, and what was on my hook into a horrible combination beast that children who waded too far would be dragged out by and crushed and drowned.

The thing pulled with heavier tugs like a truck going up its gears. The water suddenly rushed into my face and into my nose, I could see only brown with the bottom of the sun shining through it.

I was gone, gone, and I thought of the cats watching onshore and I said good-bye cat friends, good-bye Cousin Woody, good-bye young life, I am only a little boy and I’m not letting go of this pole, it is not even mine, it’s my uncle’s. Good-bye school, good-bye Mother and Daddy, don’t weep for me, it is a thing in the water cave of my destiny. Yes, I thought all these things in detail while drowning and being pulled rushing through the water, but the sand came up under my feet and the line went slack, the end of the rod was broken off and hanging on the line. When I cranked in the line I saw the hook, a thick silver one, was straightened. The vacancy in the air where there was no fish was an awful thing like surgery in the pit of my stomach. I convinced myself that I had almost had him.

When I stood in the water on solid sand, I began crying. I tried to stop but when I got close to Woody I burst out again. He wanted to know what happened but I did not tell him the truth. Instead I told him I had stepped on an enormous ray and its hook had sliced me.

No.

Yes. I went into briefer sobs.

When we checked my legs there was a slice from an oyster shell, a fairly deep one I’d got while being pulled by the creature. I refused treatment and I was respected for my close call the rest of the day. I even worked in the lie more and said furthermore it didn’t much matter to me if I was taken off to the asylum for stingaree children, that was just the breaks. My cousin and the rest of them looked at me anew and with concern but I was acting funny and they must have been baffled.

It wasn’t until I was back in the dreaded schoolroom that I could even talk about the fish, and then my teacher doubted it, and she in goodwill with a smile told my father, congratulating me on my imagination. My father thought that was rich, but then I told him the same story, the creature so heavy like a truck, the school of porpoises, and he said That’s enough. You didn’t mention this when you came back.

No, and neither did I mention the two cats when I walked back to shore with Woody and the broken rod. They had watched all the time, and I knew it, because the both of them stared at me with big solemn eyes, a lot of light in them, and it was with these beings of fur then that I entrusted my confidences, and they knew I would be back to catch the big one, the singular monster, on that line going tight into the cave in the water, something thrashing on the end, celebrated above by porpoises.

I never knew what kind of fish it was, but I would return and return to it the rest of my life, and the cats would be waiting to witness me and share my honor.

Two Gone Over

I WAS IN NORTH DAKOTA AROUND THE SAC BASE IN MARCH. THE WIND blew hard across the beet fields and the tarmac, wherever it was. I had done my duty in Grand Forks and we talked in a bar. She and her girlfriend were both in cowboy boots. The woman I was interested in had very excellent calves. Her face was high cheekboned with huge eyes like china marbles. Her forehead was touched around by brown bangs that made my stomach ache. She was a Florida beauty, Tallahassee, just a slight quarter inch heavy with winter flesh, that’s all, a slight quarter inch.

I told her she was the one who broke my heart in high school and made me cry on my pillow. She was the type. Little Anthony and the Imperials sang about her. I loved Little Anthony because he could gasp so good, he wrung it all.

Later, when I was alone with her, she said she wasn’t really that type. She was a simple Southern girl, but her father was Satan. We were in those couples apartments near the SAC base. The apartment was similar to rooms I had down South when I was first a bachelor, divorced. But they were even smaller and poorer, with a feeling of transience, little attempt at decoration.

My home woman and I had become, I think, old friends more kindly than passionate. In fact she was still married although long separated. We had hung together in a vast common loneliness almost like love. I liked to see her onstage in a gown playing her flute in the orchestra, very well. She had a doctorate from Boston University, which I understand is something.

She had lent me some money in a humiliating emergency, and now in Grand Forks I had a check in my pocket. I could repay her and I felt square, decent, and very American all of a sudden, as when you leave a gym with your hair seriously combed, wet, and walk into the cool evening. The earth is glad to see you.

The girl from Tallahassee was only twenty-four. I was forty-two.

She showed me album after album of B-52s in the air and on the ground. Her husband had wanted to be a fighter pilot but had not come up to the mark when he left Colorado Springs, the academy. I didn’t mean to be ugly but I thought this was boring, the sky and the bombers, the ground and the bombers, the squad and the bombers. I might have said this. But she thought they were beautiful and told me so again and again. She was divorcing her husband, who was in the air now, but she thought the B-52s were exquisite. She wanted something beautiful in her life, these pictures, and I should not have commented at all, especially since her father was the Devil and she did not have him either.

After the tour through the photos I told her I ought to go back.

This is not turning out like I wanted it to, she said.

Well, this is your home, your married home. I couldn’t possibly do anything here, don’t you understand? Their married bed, and besides the husband might come in from an aborted mission. She could understand that, couldn’t she? I couldn’t have her here.

But — looking back — maybe her point was to have it here, right here. Don’t be fast, be slow, she insisted. Right in the middle of the B-52 pictures. However, we drove in her car back to the motel. Crying cold black wind outside, all over Dakota.

I knew it would be like this, I could imagine, she said when we were in my room. She was downcast. I felt sorry for her. My clothes were strewn around. I didn’t care for the look either, although I had never planned on much in this town. I wanted her in an almost crippling way now. It seemed more urgent with the black wind out there. Don’t be fast, please. Just don’t be fast, all right? she asked me.

You have other experiences?

No, only with my husband Nicholas. Now you.

By this time I was flooded with gratitude. I was little but a token offered in her satisfaction. I did not quite understand this. I did not want to be greedy. Her face all this while was never ironic, always sincere. She had set about this evening with conviction. I could hardly believe it, but we were becoming friends, and I found this very arousing.

I’m a little old for you, I guess.

No. What, forty-five?

Only forty-two. She thought I was even older and it seemed not to matter in the least. I may have been in my last blaze of attraction, whatever it was. But I could hardly believe my fortune. I began feeling sorry for her husband. Nicholas, she said, not Nick. Lumbering around the sky, obsolete.

In my memory, she was at school and in airports, peeling me with her eyes, just a few seconds, then turning and gone on her belly-dropping legs, off to better zones. She was the girls I could never have, in one. Then too I was having the air force and all the frigid black wind of the Dakota night, all that black wind between the places you have left behind that don’t want you anymore.

All over America from shore to shore such lovely women as this marry too soon because somebody wants them too much. They are wanted so much they can’t deny the hunger. The loves are too hungry and quick, the men fall on them and ravish them and use up the love almost instantly. They must eat every part. Then nothing is left, only two husks with their manners and they are just sitting there together glum and naked in the hats of their choice, not another word to say, not a drop left to give. Nature is through with them for a long while, and they begin friction over nothing, except that each feels cheated, always cheated, cheated every minute. Somebody once told me, as a thought in consolation, when you see a beautiful woman, always remember: somebody is tired of her. Like most advice this is probably true and absolutely useless except to the wise dead. The dead sit around us in their great hats, nude, yammering away nevertheless.

I have felt of consequence to the universe only while drunk or at the moment of orgasm. These are lies too, I know, but good ones, an inkling. Maybe next for me is prayer, but with her I was praying only not to be too fast. She had drunk three wines at her apartment while going through the photos, I nothing for a long while now. Now she was lying naked on the bed, heavy breasts with dark exhuberant paps, her head propped on one arm, facing me under her pixie-cut hair with her high cheekbones, cheerful even though we were not lying on the B-52 pictures.

I was thinking of all that black wind outside the motel window, with her lying in the wind, only her. I saw nothing else in the room, just her and black rushing air around her. It was wonderful, this picture, but with an edge of terror too, an image come alive out of regular life. The wind was screaming and her husband’s big plane, the size of a football field, was screaming through and breaking up.

When I was with her I did not have her so much as melt twice inside. My word, I became a woman in her, is what it felt like. All the excitement, the hard passion from her place to here — I was sighing as if penetrated and then wrung out. Never in my life before, nothing like this. I would tell only you this, pal. I have nothing to boast about, nothing to leer at, I promise. No, there was hardly any pride. She was all the power, every minute of lost lechery in my life, a sucking dream in a black wind.

But when she left the room, she still smiled as if she were my friend, everything was lovely. I felt unsatisfying, my spine was vapor. She had admired my body, but I was the chew toy of a dog, pal, a sad man. I had wanted too much, I think, waited too long. I had dragged her back to the motel. This was wrong. So was her apartment wrong. There was no good place, there was no right place for us.

In the airplane home to Memphis I tried to raise myself, have my esteem back. For a few minutes I would recall her beauty and then boast inside, but this went away fast. Then I tried to attach a profound narrative to myself.

My uncle, a laughing athletic monument of a man, had mysteriously gone down in his B-26 while chasing Rommel in North Africa. For years my mother waited for news of her brother. In my infant memory I recalled her crying for him, didn’t I? His widow was a delta beauty who remarried an important man, maybe a college president. I would see the two of them pictured in the paper. She stayed fine looking for at least thirty years. I admit to strange family thoughts about her. At fifteen I imagined that one day she would call me up and have me over to show me the ropes, in honor of my uncle’s memory. All this was fitting for his nephew, perhaps even decreed in the Old Testament. They were twenty-three when my uncle disappeared. The woman of Grand Forks was twenty-four. She acted as if all this were inevitable. Witness our easy, instant friendship. Said I must see the bombers, must see how beautiful they were. We would have toiled in the photographs of the bombers. This was a profound narrative.

But it wouldn’t stick, although I tried. I wanted badly to be a part of weeping history but the ghosts in this thing would not line up. Every now and then I would catch myself in a gasp, even a sob. Something was overcoming me, a kind of weak shame.

Life went on with my woman back home, but not for long. She left teaching at the college for banking, which was the profession of her father, a grim man in a characterless brick town on a hill in east Texas. I went around town dopey. The words fill me, fill me came to my lips constantly without my will. This would have been frightening but I was not that alert. I saw her play flute with the Tupelo Symphony a last time when an old man — once a master, I guess — was featured at the piano in a Gershwin concert. Either my ears had gone totally out or the man was simply possessed and awful. He thrashed on the keys way too loud and without sense. The audience sat there as if everything were sweet and ordained, but couldn’t they hear that this old man in tails was awful? He might not even be the musician they invited. He might be someone deranged, an understudy who had killed the master and was now mocking him. Was I the only one appalled? I kept listening, then I suddenly saw him naked in a tall hat. A nude hatted monster, banging down with closed fists. Nobody around me reacted, of course. It was a sorry thing, and again, I would have been frightened, but I was dull as if doped.

Finally I could not stand this feeling anymore and went on a bender, after a year without a drink. I dragged the woman away from her commencement duties and took her to a reservoir in the northeastern corner of the state near Tombigbee. I imagined the woodsy rocks and bluffs with a cold stream down the middle. We never found this, a place I thought very necessary, very much an emergency. The cool wet rocks and mountain laurel with fish to catch. I conceived of our eating fish and living off the land, a rebaptism of ourselves. My fishing rods lay helter-skelter in the back of the car. But there was no proper place, then the moment was gone and I was just a fool. We stayed in a motel with thin pseudowood walls owned by Pakistanis, the poor woman exhausted, her last loyalty expired. I couldn’t sleep well, and when I did I dreamed a number of the tall naked dead in extravagant hats, standing about like cattle.

Within the month, the woman got an abortion as I waited in the car. It was early on. I think I cared more than she did. She had never had children and didn’t want any. Then, out in Texas while she worked in her father’s bank beginning her new future, she met a blond man of new interest. I wrote to her but she didn’t write back. I smelled something wrong and went on another bender, using every room in my house, a huge rented country estate — modest to be sure — to have pretentious toddies in. I was intent on finding the safe and happy mix. No sick loonies this time, surely not.

In the midst of this the girl in North Dakota called and said her divorce from Nicholas was accomplished. She was headed back South and would drop by on her way to Florida. This was good, I was happy. There may be something serious here. I smiled in my mansion under the oaks, my dogs racing around the yard beneath the giant magnolia. Christ, I was baronial, you couldn’t stop me, man of many parts, hear, old son?

When she came in the house I was in a Confederate cavalry hat. I have no clear idea why, except I had become also a pilot. I could not refuse the conviction I was a fighter pilot. The hat gave me a certain authority, I felt. The passion of my race ran high in me. I talked in this vein while she sat and watched. She had lost weight and was all sun browned and lithe. I spoke directly into her black eyes, unconstrained, possessed. She seemed charmed and amazed. My powers wanted out of me. I could not hold them back.

I had a long drink in the kitchen, staring out at my rented orchard. The future looked bright now with missy in the house. Yes, there would be great carrying on. When I returned she was gone.

My nephew walked through.

Who was that? That was the best-looking woman I’ve seen in my life. Now she’s just up and gone. Didn’t even get her name.

Old son, you fool. Don’t you understand she’ll be back? She has no choice, I told him.

I got a letter from her in Florida. Who are you? she began.

It couldn’t have occurred to me then, and didn’t for another year, that I must have been, in my cavalry hat, a lunatic older version of the very man she had left behind in the air force. Even days after she left I could not quit being a pilot. I woke up in the mode.

Then the other collapse of that summer. A butchy wife and her namby husband, lawyers, bought the rented estate right out from under me. I had to pile my belongings into a two-story hovel next to a plowed field, an instant reversal from baron to sharecropper. My nephew had to drag me out of a bar where I was attempting to buy a coed with a roll of hundreds. My ex-woman was driving around town with her new smiling blond Texas boyfriend. She had changed the locks of her doors. I lost my driver’s license. I went broke. I could not eat, I went to the doc for depression. I was a wraith. Once, after some business in San Diego, as a passenger from the Memphis airport to home I was arrested for drunken riding. I have a clear memory of the dream I had those few hours in jail. The naked dead, all in hats and a foot taller than I, were in the jail cell. They said nothing. But they were mute with decision, letting their height speak.

The woman from Tallahassee wrote about her affairs. Living near her father who was Satan. Becoming adjusted to freedom. She was easy and friendly as if nothing had happened. However, I thought I detected a patronizing tone. She took me for a common fool, I decided. I drove to the home of my ex-woman. When she came out in the yard I promised her that in the future evil would come upon her. Or perhaps we could get married, I added.

At the end of a bender I have, like thousands of others, been stricken with righteousness. I wanted to have discussions with the naked dead but I could not dream them back. At the gate of an air force base near Columbus, Mississippi, I was thrown out by APs after certain demonstrations. I claimed to have friends on the base, imperative that they see me. I drove following a contrail in the sky to New Orleans, got out of my car dropping money, and was mugged before I could let out I was in the secret ground air force they had better stand wide for. The mugging did not make much of an impression on me. Unlike other drunks, I remember almost everything. Only the humiliation is left out, until later it leaps and is unbearable.

I turned toward Florida, seeking Tyndall air base beyond Panama City. I would have a chat with the pals there who didn’t know me yet, perhaps even her ex-husband down on a mission, then on to Tallahassee where I would explain to the woman I was not a fool. No, I was in control, in vast control. But first I took a turn into Magnolia Springs on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, where an old student of mine lived.

We talked a while. His parents were in the back, visiting, but he did not want me to meet them. Then he asked me to go, please. So I took my bottles and left in a huff. It seemed to me the world was certainly turning rude here lately, a lamentable sign of the times, those times you read about. Oh I was high into my righteousness, and just out near some swamp and palmettos I went way off into it and attempted to set fire to my car, which would not fly and was really hot on my feet. I threw matches into it, a ’73 MG convertible. Then somebody stopped my arm. He put out the little rug fire I’d started. He was the son of a strange nearby family who fed me for three days. I could not decide whether they were white or colored.

They didn’t pay much attention to me and did not speak much, but I thought I caught a foreign brogue, not creole, when they did. They ate rice and collards. This brought my health back in little angry fragments. One morning I was suddenly very sober, just very frail. They didn’t mind how much I ate because they had their eye on my car over there out of sight. Then my old student came back and told me he was taking me home. I never gave them the car but I gave them the keys and was ashamed to return a week later. My student took a look around my cottage, then took a U-turn back the long trip. I still did not understand I had been gently but seriously kicked out of his county, 350 miles far.

My old girlfriend married the Texan. In the fall I got a call from my nephew who had heard from a musician that she was killed in a robbery of her bank in Jacksonville, Florida. Killed by crack people. She was no doubt in her smart executive suit, all bright and cheerful. New leaf, new man. She was not good with people, she once told me. Maybe a bit of a snob. I understand the new breed of crack killer is much concerned with respect. Something in her eyes, maybe. Maybe nothing at all, she was white and too lovely. She was there. I thought of her father, the dour banker on that hill in the east Texas town, her tiny thin mother. One of their daughters was a lesbian psychiatrist and the other was now dead from banking. He hustled peas in the Depression and now he was in modern life, on the hill there with the wind blowing the last of his hair.

Nevertheless, it is said we are predators, eyes forward, and we go on towards the hunt, as if nobody had eaten it all before us. As if just around the corner is the really fine feed, the really true woman, the world that will call us son. Somebody is missing to our left but we only sniff deeper, it must be there, there.

I was doing this in the aisle of a small local grocery when I turned a row and was shocked chilly, down to the bones of my hands, nearly crippled from a swat of cold nerves into my thighs and scalp. It was a very tall man all naked, in a large hat. He had a long gray country face I was certain I knew, a man confined somewhere too long.

The crown of the hat was above the top shelf of cans. He was turning my way to look but I did not want him to look at me. Then I noticed he was in a bleached pink set of long underwear, not naked, but the possibility was so close it was jolting. He opened his mouth. I ran away with my hands and groceries in my ears, with his lips twisting up there over me.

I went out in the street with the groceries still in my hands. Nobody called me back. I was well home before I was aware I had them, still locked in my fingers. I had no excuse for running out with them, for running away, nothing manly anyway. My act could not be explained. I was ill and ashamed, and jerking with breaths.

Next day I got a letter from the woman — now twenty-five — in Tallahassee. My hands still shook a little and my breathing came hard. I was without sleep because I didn’t want to dream.

She wrote that things were not going very well. She lived with her mother, but Satan, her father, lived close by. Not going well. Too close, this man. As if he could move away but not very far. It felt like forever. It hurt to discuss certain things.

She asked me to forgive her. She had visited me with her winter pounds shed and with a dark suntan so as to hurt me, in her vanity. To make my mouth water. But yet I was her friend and this could no longer go unconfessed. She had wanted to change and ruin me for a while, with her beauty. It was an unfortunate trait. Her father had accused her of it all her life, but only now she was truly adult could she admit she enjoyed inflicting pain this way, always had. Her mother, a beauty, was fast losing her looks and was always in a state, afraid to go out with anybody new. She and her mother spent the days simply keeping a watch on each other. They had begun going to church together. Even there, they knew the great Satan was in one of the cars in the parking lot, watching them.

You must never write about me, she wrote. You think I am special but I am not. I am to be forgotten, do you understand. We have had a bad house, wherever I am is a bad room.

A week later I won an award from the governor. My old parents were there glowing in the mansion. I was in a suit, now a goodly time healthy, but in my short acceptance speech I was conscious of sneering ironic people somewhere in the crowd. When I looked at the rear rank of those standing I did see three hats way above the rest and flashes of beige skin. I may have broken all forms for modesty, unwilled actually, but from a diminished heart, and held my work in an esteem equal to that of a scratching worm drowned in ink and flung against a tombstone. Through all this too I confess I was coming on to the governor’s wife — helplessly, God — and finished in a burst of meekness coupled with hideous inappropriate lust. I could hear the laughter and was led away.

I was looking at the plaque and stroking myself a couple days later as the phone rang. A voice I could not remember began. At once I could feel the black wind of North Dakota between us on the lines. She was a friend of the Florida girl. I had not seen her since I chatted with them at that bar near the Minnesota line. She was clear for a while but then started sobbing and stalling. Her friend. Our friend. You were kind to her, she said. Always she mentioned your kindness. What?

In Tallahassee the father had run her over in her own living room and killed her. The car came in through the bay window and crushed her as she sat on the couch in her bikini swimsuit. Her mother, also in a swimsuit, was broken up badly but would survive. Abruptly after the collision, the father, still in the driver’s seat, put a pistol to his ear and destroyed himself. The women were having lunch after sunning. He must have known all their moves. You are a good person, the woman said — a scrap of memory through the black air of days and days ago — and I had to tell a good person. Somebody who knew her.

I am not a good person, I told her. This is too awful.

Do you believe in God?

Foxhole Christian. When all else is lost.

Nothing else was said and she hung up.

I was suddenly something fresh to her, a way I did not know. Then she was destroyed by a monster I had never believed in, who was true. My pity was so confused I could not accept I was even worthy of having it, for weeks. Or worthy of her, or my former girlfriend.

It is true now that, years later and desperately married (to the daughter of a World War II pilot named Angel), whenever a flute plays I have the woman sweet in my ears and think of our laughter. Wherever I see a headline beauty I brag quietly: come on, I had better, with a sad smile, I’d imagine, that fine appreciation of ourselves when we have bittersweetness right on time.

I have not had that many women, is the truth, and this, pal, I know seems crammed with serial romance and grief, but I’m not quite through, and you will understand me at last as more that poor man on the east Texas hill with the wind in his last hairs, too thick in modern life, too thick in dream, too sad for years now. Maybe the girl in North Dakota mistook my sadness for kindness; defeat for gentleness. I look at an old photograph of myself at eight when I was just a boy and his dog under a cowboy hat. I was looking at the world across the cornfield, all ready to touch it all under the shade of my tall Hoot Gibson. Now I understand I have been witness to the worst fifty years in the history of the world. A tragedy that might make Caligula weep in commiseration. And I have had, you know, a relatively pampered life, although you see me puffing away on my smoke like a leathered vet, a tough cookie.

I used to be a considerable tennis player. So in my health I took it up again and got the game back quickly. I just had a tough time giving a damn about the score. Once I was playing with a friend and noticed a very tall pale woman through the fence on another court. She had her back to me. I saw she struck the ball with authority and grace. I wanted her within seconds of seeing her. I needed her. I had never had a tall woman, blonde, and I was already in my mind rocking with her in great abandon like a dying cannibal. The nourishment would be endless, so generous.

My friend and I played well. We sat down exhausted in that fine chill of Southern twilight that heaven might be. I looked to my right and somehow, in the flesh, the tall pale woman was sitting between us. You never see that kind of European paleness in women on a Southern tennis court. I was amazed at her musculature, like strands of soft wire. Then I saw the hat. She had been wearing a big unusual hat that must have given her seven feet in height. She was looking toward my friend. I had never seen her face. When she turned I looked away and in great fear I stared through the woods. I wanted her more than ever but I would not see her face. I heard her voice, though, just the once up close.

I believe I’ve got something you want.

I grabbed my bag and got in my car and was almost home before I remembered my friend had no ride home, a long way. But I couldn’t go back and I almost threw up.

He called me, however.

Man, the woman was fast on you. What the devil, did you see all of her, fool? I’m much the better-looking, but all she gave me was a pouting ride home.

Who is she?

Somebody’s relative. Can’t remember. Too busy stealing looks. That’s quite a drink of water, long and cool, old son. You never knew her?

Never set eyes on her.

You’re an uncommon fool. And sober.

She has been around town now for a couple of years. I see parts of her here and there, but I walk or drive right away. I don’t intend to see her face because I know I’ve already seen it. When we touch one of us will die and be in the other’s dreams.

I am not insane. My affairs are composed in vicious sobriety. I did not see my tennis partner either for several months. Then he called at the end of the summer.

You don’t play anymore?

A few times, other places.

The tall one was back on the courts the other day. I swear, fool, she’s like something from the heart of winter in a foreign land. Same old story full of wolves where you’d stumble into a woman lying in the woods. I’m going to use a word. Alabaster.

I swallowed. You mean living or dead?

I’m not sure, mister.

Wolves.

I wonder, when she dies, likely by violence, will she be named like the lesser creatures in that story? Certain people believe all are given names when we die, not at birth.

The creature goes to heaven very baffled.

My God, what was all that about? it asks.

God says: Well, you were a wolf.

I see, says the wolf.

I wonder will it be that simple for her, or for me.

Drummer Down

HE HAD NEVER LIKED THE YOUNG DANCING ASTAIRE, ALL GREEDY AND certain. But now he was watching an old ghost thriller, and he liked Astaire old, pasted against the wall of mortality — dry, scared, maybe faintly alcoholic. This was a man. He pitied him. Everything good had pity in it, it seemed to Smith, now fifty and a man of some modest fashion himself. Even as a drunkard he had been a bit of a dandy. It was midnight when he turned off the set. He had begun thinking sadly about his friend Drum again, the man whose clothes were a crying shame. Drum two summers ago had exchanged his.22 for a pistol of a large bore, one that was efficient. In his bathtub in a trailer home on the outskirts of that large town in Alabama, he had put the barrel in his mouth. He had counted off the days on his calendar a full month ahead of the event of his suicide, and on the date of it he had written “Bye Bye Drum.” The note he left was not original. It was a vile poem off the bathroom wall, vintage World War II. He had destroyed his unpublished manuscripts and given away all his other art and had otherwise put his affairs in order, with directions he was to be cremated and there was to be no ceremony.

But two young friends had organized a ceremony for themselves. Many had loved and needed Drum. They had pleaded over the phone for Smith, of all people, to gather with them, but the town was such a valley of the shadow to Smith, with an air choked by rotten cherries and whiskey, he did not go. He felt cowardly and selfish, because it was ceremonies of pity that most moved him now, but he could not take his part. He asked his sons to appear at the ceremony for him. They wore suits and went to the funeral home and stood with a mournful group of people in wretched cheap dark clothes, and stood quietly for an hour before they discovered it was a rite for another person.

Smith did not like arithmetic or its portents, but he recalled Drum at his death was sixty-six, twice the age of Christ at Golgotha. With Drum this was relevant, and overbore the vile poem. Drum had been a successful carpenter several years previous.

But in Smith’s class ten years before the end, Drum was fiftysix and looked much like Charles Bronson. Big flat nose and thin eyes with a blue nickel gleam in them; three marriages behind him, and two sons by an opera singer far away in Germany. He held a degree in aeronautical engineering from UCLA. He could fix anything, and with stern joyful passion. He had written six unpublished novels. He served in the army in Panama in the years just after the world war, which he would have been a bit young for. Smith stole glances at Drum while he taught, or tried to, with his marriage and grip on things going to pieces. He tried to understand why this old man was in his class, whether he was a fool or a genius. There were indications both ways.

As in Smith’s progress toward the condition of a common drunkard.

Smith wanted to be both lost and found, an impossibility. He was nearly begging to be insane. He saw this fellow of great persuasive ugliness, with his small airy voice and his sighs; the weariness about him, even with his blocky good build and the forearms of a carpenter. He was popular in class even these short weeks into the semester. Drummond was his last name. He pleased the girls around him. He was avuncular and selfless in his comments, with a beam of patient affection in his eyes. Somehow he scared Smith, Drum holding his smile, the flattened great bags under his eyes from rough living and failure. He spoke often of “love” and “quest.” He prefaced many things he said with “I am a Christian,” sadly, as if he were in some dreadful losers’ club.

Paul Smith looked at the table in front of him and had a brief collapse.

“I’m sorry.” He put his hands down flat. There seemed to be a whole bleak country in front of his eyes, the ten hills of his fingers on the desert floor of linoleum, speckled by gray lakes, all dry. “I’m sorry to be confusing. Things aren’t going well at home. Bear with me.”

Drum befriended him. He seemed to be just all at once there, his hand on Smith’s shoulder and the grave twinkle in his eyes. The little smile of a prophet on his lips. Two of the very attractive girls from the class, right behind him, were looking concerned. Maybe they liked Smith. He didn’t know. He couldn’t get a read on much at all these days. Arrogance punctuated by bouts of heartbreaking sentiment had come on Smith since the publication of his last book, which was hailed by major critics and bought by a few hundred people.

He didn’t want to be arrogant, but he was experiencing a gathering distaste for almost everybody. He would nowadays mumble and shout a few things in anguish that seemed loud and eternal, then call class. To others that might seem derelict, but many of his students grandly appreciated the quick hits and release, right in the manner of a punk lecture. Punk was all the rage that year, and in his class was a lame girl wearing a long sash with sleigh bells on it, so that when she wallowed along in the hall on big stomping crutches, a holy riot ensued. She wore enormous eyeglasses but was otherwise dressed and cut punk, wearing a hedge of waxed hair atop her tubular head. She was the punkest of them all, a movement unto herself. Smith noticed that Drum was very kind to her and cheered her various getups every class meeting. The girl was unceasingly profane too. This seemed to interest Drum even more. He grinned and applauded her, this funny Christian Drum.

Nevertheless, she had gone to the chairwoman about Smith’s asthmatic style. She loved his hungover explosions, but complained that he cut them too short and she was not getting her money’s worth. Smith was incredulous. It was his first experience with a vocal minority, the angry disabled woman. Angel B. was very serious about her writing — very bad — and viewed it as her only salvation. He was not imparting the secrets of the art to her. She must know everything, no holding back. All this with a punk’s greediness and nearly solid blue language, the bells shaking. Smith noted that he made no complaint about the bells. Smith planned to kill her and insist on one of her prettier banalities for her headstone, so that she could be mocked for centuries. But this man Drum loved her even as the talentless bitch she was. How could he be here offering to help Smith?

“What can we do, Paul?” Drum was whispering and uncleish. The two girls nodded their wishes to help too. Smith looked them over. He was already half in love with the taller one, pretty with lean shanks, who looked like she was right then slipping into a bathtub with Nietzsche, that lovely caution about her. The other was pre-Raphaelite, a mass of curly hair around a pale face very oval, the hair coiled up on her cheeks and separating for the full lips.

“We could drink,” said Smith, dying for a taste. He was imagining a long telescope of whiskey and soda through which to view these newcomers to his pain. He liked people waving like liquid images, hands reaching toward him.

At home the end was near. His wife, just out of the tub, would cover her breasts with her arms as she went to her drawers in their bedroom. Smith watched, alarmed and in grief. No old times anymore. She meant, These are for something else, somewhere else down the road. He had hoped to hang on to ambivalence just a little bit longer. He wanted her more than ever. He said unforgettable, brutal things to her. His mouth seemed to have its own rude life. Here he was, no closer to her than a ghoul gazing through a knothole to her toilet, the hole rimmed with slobber, in their own big smart house.

They all went to the Romeo Bar on the university strip. Smith saw Drum drive up with the girls in a bleached mustard Toyota with a bee drawn on it at the factory. Smith thought it was an art statement, but it was not. Drum was poor.

He wore unironed clothes, things deeply cheap, dead and lumpy even off the rack at bargain barns, and the color of harmful chemicals, underneath them sneakers with Velcro snaps instead of shoestrings. The clothes of folks from a broken mobile home, as a pal of Smith’s had described them. Drum at fifty-six lived upstairs in a small frame house of asbestos siding. In the lower story lived his mother, whom he called the Cobra. The brand of his smokes was Filter Cigarettes. His beer was white cans labeled Beer.

Nothing surprised Drum, and the girls were rapt as Smith poured forth. He was a bothered half-man, worn out by the loss of heart and music of the soul.

Drum agreed about the times, entirely. “There should be only a radio in every home, issuing bulletins on the war. The war of good against evil. That’s all the news we need,” he said, directing the bar air like a maestro. “But all they give us is facts, numbers, times. Enough of this and nobody cares about the war anymore. Why, all television addresses is the busybody in everybody!

“We’re born to kill each other. First thing in the morning we take something to numb us, then parachute into the sordid zones of reality. Layers of dead skin on us, layers!” he finished.

Everything surprised the girls. They seemed to adore being confidantes in Drum’s presence. They were anxious to become writers and have sorrows of their own. The grave male details of Smith’s distress the girls thought exquisite. That through a knothole looking at her toilet thing was beautiful, said the pre-Raphaelite Minny.

Later, they all stayed over at Smith’s green hovel by the railroad tracks he’d rented as his writing place, a heartbreaking first move toward divorce. Minny took ether and began talking about her enormous clitoris, a thing that kept her in nerves and panic every waking hour. Pepper passed out before she could recall any true sorrow. Drum went back in the kitchen with some of Smith’s stories. He had on half-glasses bought at a drugstore, and Smith saw him foggily as a god: Charles Bronson as a kitchen god. Smith retired with Minny.

Then in the morning his wife knocked on the door. Smith answered in a leather overcoat, nude underneath. He was stunned by drink and ether, and his wife’s presence simply put a sharpness on his wrecked eyesight. Behind him in a bedsheet sat Minny in front of a drum set. She was sitting there smiling at Smith’s palomino-haired wife. It was her first scandal, she told them later.

His wife said something about divorce papers, and Smith slapped her. She rammed the door shut.

“Oh, how Old World!” Minny cried. She dropped the sheet and rose naked and curly like something from a fountain. Already Smith was tired of her. He loved Pepper, the lean beauty who could not get her sorrow out, asleep in the rear room.

“That’s no good, Paul. You shouldn’t hit.” Drum had awoken and come out. His big fingers were around a fresh cold beer. “Oh, I hit my second wife. She thrived on it. Some women like hitting, they work for it. But it’s a bad thing. A man of your sensitivity, with that sad little child in you, you won’t survive, is what I’m saying.”

“I love the sad child!” said Minny.

“But it makes an end to things at least. You need to end things, Paul. Purgatory is much rougher than hell. Well I know. You’ve got to wish them well, and be off. Wish them well in love, hope they have good orgasms.”

“My God!” Smith could not imagine this charity.

Sometime later in the week Smith asked Drum how he’d lost three wives.

“Because I was a failure, man!” Drum seemed delighted. “I wrote and wrote and couldn’t get published. I quit all my jobs. I’d had it with facts, the aeronautics industry. Working plans to fly in a coal mine, baby! The heart, Paul, the heart, that’s where it is.”

On the last of his GI bill the man was taking ceramics, photography, sculpture, and Smith’s writing class.

“I pride myself on being a dilettante! I am looking for accidental successes. Heart accidents. I want to slip down and fall into something wonderful!”

As for Drum’s physical heart, there was a bad thing running in his family. His father and two older brothers had gone out early with coronaries, and he himself took nitroglycerin tablets to ward off angina.

Even Smith’s punk band excited Drum. Anything declamatory of the heart moved him. He was very often their only audience. He applauded and commended, through their vileness. They switched instruments, versatile in absence of talent. It didn’t matter.

“Everything must be explored! Nothing left untouched!” Drum shouted, slugging down his cheap beer, smoking his generics.

They played their own “Yeast Infection Blues” and a filthy cover of George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” The regular guitarist was a vicious harelip pursued all over town for bad checks. The singer was a round man with dense eyeglasses and a squint who sold term papers to fraternity boys. They called him the Reverend. The bass man was a boy who never wore shoes, hardly bathed, and in appearance approached the late Confederate veterans around Appomattox — gaunt, hang-necked, and smutty. Drum absorbed them all. They were his children, junior alcoholics to Smith. Sometimes he’d dance with Minny or Pepper. They shook the little green house and the police came. Perfect.

Smith poured Southern Comfort in a Pepsi can in order to make it through his lectures, which seemed a crucifixion. The crippled girl Angel B. seemed satisfied, liberated more thoroughly and writing even worse. As for his own heart, Smith wanted to get rid of it. He missed his wife terribly. The thing pounded as if it were an enormous fish in him. He was barred from his old home. The band was angry over his lack of endurance on the drums. One night Drum brought him over some chicken soup, vitamin B, and gluconate. He was worried.

“Look at you. Look at this room,” he said.

Smith’s SS overcoat was spattered with white paint. He had painted everything instead of cleaning. He had painted even Minny’s dog. It was under the table licking itself. He had nailed bedsheets to the floor. The novel he was writing was strewn out in copies all over the musical instruments. He and the band were singing his novel. The children from his first marriage were not allowed to visit him anymore. He had been fired at the college. Bare inside his overcoat, with a Maltese cross made by Drum hanging from a chain around his neck, he had grown so thin that his wedding band had fallen off somewhere. He was now almost pure spirit, as Minny called him.

“We need your big heart, Paul. The forces of good need you. Technique and facts and indifference are out there winning. Money is winning, mere form and the tightasses are winning. Commerce is making the town uglier and uglier. We Christians need you. You’re giving over to low anger and spite, drinking away your talent. An old bad thing coiled in the dust, that’s not you.”

Smith poured the remainder of a jar of cherries into a mug half filled with Southern Comfort. The overcoming taste would remind Smith forever of his last days in this town.

Drum had made the mug. On it was an ugly face with a cigarette in its lip. It was one of the forms of “Sarge,” an old army drunk Drum had known in Panama. The man had been only in his thirties, like Smith, but already grotesque. He would line up for review every morning, everything wrong with his uniform, but with a tiny smile and ruined goggle-eyes, maimed in every inch by the night before. He’d been busted from sergeant four times.

Later Smith fought with the band and threw them out. Minny ran out of Valium. Now living was almost impossible without constant fornication. People with police records began showing up in the house. Some played musical instruments or sang, then stole the equipment. One night while he was plying Minny, who poured out high spiritual sighs, he had to have a drink. On his way to the kitchen, he caught a thief in the house. The man sprinted out the back window as Smith pulled his father’s antique shotgun off the wall. Then out came Minny, screaming for him please to not shoot anybody.

In the morning he accused her and her dog, who had remained silent, of setting him up. He put the cur in her arms and kicked them both out. Then he fell out in a sleep of a few hours. When he woke up it was midafternoon, and he knew something was gone. The antique shotgun was not on the wall. He stumbled to his kitchen and pulled a hunting knife out of his drawer. He intended to cut Minny’s pre-Raphaelite hair off and drag her down the railroad tracks by her ankles. In a swimsuit and his serious coat he went out to the tracks. He seemed to remember her other place was near the tracks somewhere down there. So he walked and walked and then he was in a black section of town, there in his overcoat with lion-tamer boots on, holding the large saw of his knife, in the hottest summer on record. In the overcoat he was drenched, just an arm with the pounding awful fish of his heart inside him. A black teenager, tall, came out of one of the houses and asked him what he was doing with that knife out here, his mama didn’t like it.

“Hunting woman.”

“You sit down in that tree shade.” Smith gave him the knife. “How much you take for that coat? I can get that paint off it.”

“I’ll sell you the coat if you’ll call a number for me. I don’t feel good. I’m not all right. Here’s some money. Please get me some liquor too.” He gave his wallet to the boy.

“You wait.”

When Drum at last came out across the tracks and knelt beside him, Smith had terrible shakes, and could not pass out like he wanted to.

“You think you’re drunk, kiddo? Shit, this is nothing. I was drunker. And I was drunker alone.” Drum laughed.

Smith sold the black boy his coat for fifty dollars and got back his wallet. Then Smith stared into his wallet.

“Drum? I got exactly the same in my wallet. That boy bought my coat with my own money.”

“Forget it. It was a horrible coat. A chump’s coat. A pretender’s coat. It was the coat of a man with a small dry heart.”

“It was?”

Smith was out of money now, but he was waiting for a Reader’s Digest sweepstakes check very seriously. His unopened mail was a foot high, but none of it was the right envelope. Then a letter came offering him some work in Hollywood. He took it around town, running up tabs with credit on it. Some people still liked Smith. One night late he came in from drinking and misplacing his car. He felt there was something new in the place. Yes, there it was. On the kitchen table. The kitchen had been cleaned. But on the table was the final version of “Sarge,” the life-size ceramic head of the grinning old drunk, the butt of a real Pall Mall hanging from his lips. Drum, a year in labor on it, had given it to Paul Smith. There was a short note underneath it: “All yours. Go with Sarge.” Smith did not know it then, but this was as far as Drum would ever go in the arts. At first it made Smith afraid. He thought it was an insult. But then he knew it wasn’t. He laid his head down and wept. He had lost everything. He did not deserve this friend.

About three in the morning, into the last of his cheap wine, he heard a car in his drive and some bells at his door. It was Angel B., the punk crippled girl. She settled inside with her crutches and her bells on what was left of a wicker armchair.

“I know I can’t write, but you are a great man. I can get your job back for you. I know some things on the person fired you, some of them taped. This would destroy her.”

It seemed a plausible and satisfactory thing to Smith.

“I might not can write but I want a piece of a great man to remember. Would you dim the lights?”

He recalled the revulsion, but with an enormous pity overcoming it. In his final despair, the last anguished thrust and hold, he tried to mean actual love. He wanted to be a heavy soft trophy to her. The bells jangled faintly every now and then before he accomplished the end of his dream. Smith stroked Angel’s mohawk, grown high and soft. Then she was businesslike getting her clothes and crutches back together. She was leaving immediately. Smith suggested they at least have a wine together.

“No. I’m drinking with Morris, the Reverend. He’s out there waiting. We’ve got a tough morning tomorrow. We’re going down to the station and I’m putting rape charges on him.”

“He’s driving you? What, pleading guilty?”

“No, innocent. We’re still close. But I know what I know.”

She waddled out to the old Mustang. Morris waited in it like a pet. His dense glasses were full of moonlight.

A week later Drum drove him to the airport.

“I think that was it, Drummer. Pit bottom. And I can still taste her.” Smith was trying to get a long march out of sips of Southern Comfort.

“It probably wasn’t, sport. You get to go to California, stomping grounds of all my failures. Be patient, Paul. Nobody gets well quick, not with what you’ve got.”

He remembered Drum taking his luggage. The man wore a shapeless blue-green jumpsuit with plastic sandals on his feet. The porter was a diplomat, compared.

Smith was not a success as a screenwriter. After he destroyed two typewriters, he spent a month in a hospital, where they talked about the same little child inside that Drum had often mentioned. Smith was befriended by a kind genius of a director, one of his heroes. The man gave him money that put him right with his child support, but Smith was unable to compose anything worthy for him, for all his effort. The bright healthy weather and opulence mocked him. He could not get past stupid good feelings. His work was entirely made up and false. There was no saving it by pure language. He could not work sober and was greatly frightened by this fact. He was failing right along with the old Drummer. He had to take another teaching job in the Midwest. It was a prestigious place, but Smith felt dumb and small.

He kept up with Drum through the years left. The Drummer was making a lot of money as a carpenter in house construction. He wrote to Smith that he could have, if he were not a Christian, any number of miserable lonely housewives. The Cobra, his quarrelsome mother, died. He moved out to a big mobile home on the outskirts of town, near Cottondale. He attended the high school graduation of Smith’s son. He took and sent over a photograph of the boy in his gown receiving his diploma. He gave Smith’s children presents at Christmas. Many times he took them fishing.

Three years ago, Smith had bitten the bullet and visited Drum in his trailer. Drum had had a heart attack six months previous. He told Smith he could hold in pain, but this was too much. He drove himself to the hospital. Un insured, he paid out a ghastly amount. The trailer was all he could afford now. A preacher had become his landlord. Smith offered to lend him some money. Drum refused.

“Oh no. We don’t want money to get into this, baby. Somehow things go rotten with money between friends. Believe me. This thing we have is too beautiful.”

The streets of the town were a long heart attack themselves to Smith. Everything felt like sorrow and confusion, and tasted like Southern Comfort with cherry juice poured in — a revulsion of the tongue that had never left him. He felt the town itself was mean and fatal, each street a channel of stunned horror. He feared for Drum’s health. How could he carry on here?

He met Drum’s woman, a handsome lady of Greek descent. Drum was wild for her. She stayed over the night in their larger bedroom at the other end of the trailer. When she left, Smith told Drum he was very happy for him.

“I worried you’d turned queer,” Smith kidded him.

“You ought to hear her moan, boy. I’m bringing happiness to that one.”

Now Smith saddened, and his teeth cut into his tight under-lip. Drum all those years without a woman, the uncle to everybody, in the background, cheering them on; urging them on to the great accidents of art and love. Drum the Drummer. Keeping the panic out, keeping the big heart in. He had convinced Smith he was worth something. He had convinced others that Smith was rare. Many days in California Smith had nothing else to take him through the blank stupid days.

“I’m living on borrowed time, man. Nothing is unimportant. Every minute is a jewel. Every stroke of pussy, every nail in the board.”

He had lived that way every minute Smith had known him. That seemed very clear now. He looked at his friend and a shock passed through him. Drum was old, with wisps of gray hair combed back. He was pale, his eyes wet. The strong arms gestured and the mouth moved, but Smith heard nothing. Then the voice, like a whisper almost, came back. What was he saying? The vision had overcome everything.

It occurred to Smith later that success did not interest Drum. When Smith told him of some publishing luck and gave him a book, the man just nodded. You could see the boredom, almost distaste, freeze his eyes. He was not jealous. It simply didn’t matter.

Near the end he had broken off relations with the Greek woman. His oldest son had come back from Germany to live with him, but he could not live with anybody. He asked him to leave the trailer.

And then the poem when they found him:

Here I sit all brokenhearted.

Paid a nickel to shit,

And only farted.

A common piece of trash off a bathroom wall, a punkish anonymity.

How could he? Why not even a try at high personal salute? The way he had believed in work, the big heart, the war.

Smith was angry a long time that Drum had left nothing else.

The waiting on borrowed time, the misery of his heart yearning like a bomb, the bad starving blood going through his veins. Smith could understand the suicide. Who was good for endless lingering, a permanent bad seat and bad magazine at the doctor’s office? And with heaven looming right over there, right next to you salvation and peace, what Christian could hold out any longer?

Yes, but the poem.

So common, so punk, so lost in democracy, like an old condom.

The wretched clothes, beneath and beyond style, the style of everybody waiting intolerable lengths of time in an emergency room. Clothes the head of Sarge belonged on, the smile of ruin on his lips. Here, sir. All accounted for.

Uncle High Lonesome

THEY WERE COMING TOWARD ME — THIS WAS 1949—ON THEIR HORSES with their guns, dressed in leather and wool and canvas and with different sporting hats, my father and his brothers, led by my uncle on these his hunting lands, several hundred acres called Tanglewood still dense in hardwoods but also opened by many meadows, as a young boy would imagine from cavalry movies. The meadows were thick with fall cornstalks, and the quail and doves were plenty. So were the squirrels in the woods where I had been let off to hunt at a stand with a thermos of chocolate and my 28-gauge double. At nine years old I felt very worthy for a change, even though I was a bad hunter.

But something had gone wrong. My father had put me down in a place they were hunting toward. Their guns were coming my way. Between me and them I knew there were several coveys of quail to ground, frozen in front of the dogs, two setters and a pointer, who were now all stiffening into the point. My uncle came up first. This was my namesake, Peter Howard, married but childless at forty-five. I was not much concerned. I’d seen, on another hunt, the black men who stalked for my uncle flatten to the ground during the shooting, it was no big thing. In fact I was excited to be receiving fire, real gunfire, behind my tree. We had played this against Germans and Japanese back home in my neighborhood. But now I would be a veteran. Nobody could touch me at war.

My uncle came up alone on his horse while the others were still hacking through the overhang behind him. He was quite a picture. On a big red horse, he wore a yellow plaid corduroy vest with watch chain across, over a blue broadcloth shirt. On his bald head was a smoky brown fedora. He propped up an engraved 16-gauge double in his left hand and bridled with his right, caressing the horse with his thighs, over polo boots a high-gloss tan. An unlit pipe was fixed between his teeth. There was no doubting the man had a sort of savage grace, though I noticed later in the decade remaining to his life that he could also look, with his ears out, a bit common, like a Russian in the gate of the last Cold War mob; thick in the shoulders and stocky with a belligerence like Krushchev’s. Maybe peasant nobility is what they were, my people. Uncle Peter Howard watched the dogs with a pleasant smile now, with the sun on his face at midmorning. I had a long vision of him. He seemed, there on the horse, patient and generous with his time and his lands, waiting to flush the quail for his brothers. I saw him as a permanent idea, always handy to reverie: the man who could do things.

In the face he looked much like — I found out later — the criminal writer Jean Genet, merry and Byzantine in the darks of his eyes. Shorter and stockier than the others and bald, like none of them, he loved to gamble. When he was dead I discovered that he also was a killer and not a valiant one. Of the brothers he was the most successful and the darkest. The distinct rings under my eyes in middle age came directly from him, and God knows too my religious acquaintance with whiskey.

The others, together, came up on their horses, ready at the gun. They were a handsome clan. I was happy to see them approach this way, champion enemy cavalry, gun barrels toward me, a vantage not many children in their protected childhoods would be privileged to have. I knew I was watching something rare, seen as God saw it, and I was warm in my ears, almost flushed. My uncle Peter tossed a stick over into a stalk pile and the quail came out with that fearsome helicopter bluttering always bigger than you are prepared for. The guns tore the air. You could see sound waves and feathers in a space of dense blue-gray smoke. I’d got behind my big tree. The shot ripped through all the leaves around. This I adored.

Then I stepped out into the clearing, walked toward the horses, and said hello.

My uncle Peter saw me first, and he blanched in reaction to my presence in the shooting zone. He nearly fell from his horse, like a man visited by a spirit-ghoul. He waddled over on his glossy boots and knelt in front of me, holding my shoulders.

“Boy? Boy? Where’d you come from? You were there?”

“Pete, son?” called my father, climbing down mystified. “Why didn’t you call out? You could’ve, we could’ve. . ”

My uncle hugged me to him urgently, but I couldn’t see the great concern. The tree I was behind was wide and thick; I was a hunter, not a fool. But my uncle was badly shaken, and he began taking it out on my father. Maybe he was trembling, I guess now, from having almost shot yet another person.

“Couldn’t you keep up with where your own boy was?”

“I couldn’t know we’d hunt this far. I’ve seen you lost yourself out here.”

An older cousin of mine had had his calf partially blown away in a hunting accident years ago, out squirrel hunting with his brother. Even the hint of danger would bring their wives to their throats. Also, I personally had had a rough time near death, though I hadn’t counted up. My brother had nearly cut my head off with a sling blade when I walked up behind as a toddler, but a scar on the chin was all I had. A car had run me down as I crossed the street in first grade. Teaching me to swim the old way, my pa had watched me drown, almost, in the ocean off a pier he’d thrown me.

But this skit I had planned, it was no trouble. I wanted them to fire my way, and it had been a satisfactory experience, being in the zone of fire.

I felt for my father, who was I suppose a good enough man. But he was a bumbler, an infant at a number of tasks, although he was a stellar salesman. He had no grace, even though nicely dressed and handsome, black hair straight back, with always a good car and a far traveler in it around the United States, Mexico, and Canada. His real profession was a lifetime courting in awe of the North American continent — its people, its birds, animals, and fish. I’ve never met such a humble pilgrim of his own country as my father, who had the reverence of a Whitman and Sandburg together without having read either of the gentlemen. But a father’s humility did not cut much ice with this son, although I enjoyed all the trips with him and Mother.

From that day on my uncle took more regard of me. He took me up, really, as his own, and it annoyed my turkey-throated aunt when I visited, which was often. We lived only an hour and a half away, and my uncle might call me up just to hear a baseball game on the radio with him as he drove his truck around the plantation one afternoon. On this vast place were all his skills and loves, and they all made money: a creosote post factory, turkey and chicken houses, cattle, a Big Dutchman farm machinery dealership; his black help in their gray weathered wrinkled houses; his lakes full of bass, crappie, bluegills, catfish, ducks and geese, where happy customer/friends from about the county were let fish and sport, in the spirit of constant merry obligation each to each that runs the rural South. Also there was a bevy of kin forever swarming toward the goodies, till you felt almost endlessly redundant in ugly distant cousins. Uncle Peter had a scratchy well-deep voice in which he offered free advice to almost everybody except his wife. And he would demand a hug with it and be on you with those black grinding whiskered cheeks before you could grab the truck door. He was big and clumsy with love, and over all a bit imperial; short like Napoleon, he did a hell of a lot of just. . surveying. Stopping the truck and eyeballing what he owned as if it were a new army at rest across the way now, then with just the flick of his hand he’d. . turn up the radio for the St. Louis Cardinals, the South’s team then because the only broadcast around. I loved his high chesty grunts when one of his favorites would homer. He’d grip the steering wheel and howl in reverential delight: “Musial! Stan the Man!” I was no fan, a baseball dolt, but I got into it with my uncle.

Had I known the whole truth of where he had come from, I would have been even more impressed by his height and width of plenty. I mean not only from the degrading grunting Depression, beneath broke, but before that to what must have been the most evil hangover there is, in a jail cell with no nightmare but the actual murder of a human being in your mind, the marks of the chair legs he ground in your face all over you, and the crashing truth of your sorriness in gambling and drink so loud in your head they might be practicing the trapdoor for the noose over and over right outside the door. That night. From there. Before the family got to the jurors. Before the circuit judge showed up to agree that the victim was an unknown quantity from out of town. Before they convicted the victim of not being from here. Before Peter himself might have agreed on his own reasonable innocence and smiled into a faint light of the dawn, just a little rent down on any future at all. That was a far trip, and he must have enjoyed it all every time we stopped and he, like Napoleon, surveyed.

He taught me to fish, to hunt, to handle dogs, and horses, to feed poultry. Then, one day, to stand watch at the post factory over a grown black man while he left in a truck for two hours. But this I highly resented.

“I want to see if this nigger can count. You tell me,” he said, right in front of the man, who was stacking posts from the vat with no expression at all. He had heard but he didn’t look at me yet, and I was afraid of when he would.

Such were the times that Peter Howard was hardly unusual in his treatment of black help around the farm. He healed their rifts, brought the men cartons of cigarettes. He got them medical treatment and extended credit even to children who had run away to Chicago. Sometimes he would sock a man in the jaw. I don’t believe the etiquette then allowed the man to hit back. In his kitchen his favorite jest, habitual, was to say to a guest in front of their maid Elizabeth: “Lord knows, I do hate a nigger!” This brought huge guffaws from Elizabeth, and Peter was known widely as a hilarious crusty man, good to his toes. But I never thought this was funny, and I wanted my uncle to stop including me in this bullying niggerism, maybe go call a big white man a nigger.

While he was gone those two hours in the truck I figured on how mean an act this was to both me and the man stacking the fence poles. I never even looked his way. I was boiling mad and embarrassed and could not decide what the man, my uncle, wanted from this episode. Was he training me to be a leader of men? Was he squeezing this man, some special enemy, the last excruciating turn possible, by use of a mere skinny white boy, but superior kin, wearing his same name? I couldn’t find an answer with a thing decent in it. I began hating Uncle Peter. When he came back I did not answer him when he wanted to tally my figure with the black man’s. I said nothing at all. He looked at me in a slightly blurred way, his eyes like glowing knots in a pig’s face, I thought. He had on his nice fedora but his face was spreading and reddening, almost as in a fiend movie. Too, I smelled something in the car as from an emergency room I’d been in when I was hit by that car, waking up to this smell.

“Wharoof? Did you ever answer? Didja gimme the number?”

“Have you been in an accident somewhere, Uncle Peter?”

“No. Let me tell you. I have no problem. I know you might’ve heard things. This”—he lifted out a pint bottle of vodka, Smirnoff—“is just another one of God’s gifts, you understand? We can use it, or we can abuse it. It is a gift to man in his lonesomeness.” To illustrate he lifted it, uncapped it, turned it up, and up came enormous bubbles from the lip as in an old water cooler seriously engaged. He took down more than half of the liquor. The man could drink in cowboy style, quite awesomely. I’d never heard a word about this talent before.

“I’m fessin’ up. I’m a bad man. I was using you out here as an alibi for having a drink down the road there, so’s your aunt wouldn’t know. She has the wrong idea about it. But she knew I wouldn’t drink with you along.”

“You could drink right here in front of me. I wouldn’t tell, anyway.”

“Well. I’m glad to know it. It got to my conscience and I came back to make my peace with you about it. Everything between you and me’s on the up and up, pardner.”

“You mean you didn’t need me counting those poles at all?”

“Oh yes I did. It was a real job. It wasn’t any Roosevelt make-work.”

“Don’t you consider that man over there has any feelings, what you said right in front of him?”

“What’s wrong with shame, boy? Didn’t you ever learn by it? You’re tender and timid like your pop, you can’t help it. But you’re all right too.”

“Anybody ever shame you real bad, Uncle Peter?”

He looked over, his jowls even redder and gone all dark and lax, gathered up by his furious eyes. “Maybe,” he said. An honest answer would have been, had he come out with it all: “Once. And I killed him.” I wonder how much of that event was in his mind as he looked at me sourly and said, “Maybe.”

He feared my aunt, I knew it, and let me off at the house, driving off by himself while I gathered my stuff and waited for my folks to pick me up. I heard later that he did not return home for three weeks. For months, even a year, he would not drink, not touch a drop, then he would have a nip and disappear. Uncle Peter was a binge drinker. Still, I blamed my aunt, a fastidious and abrasive country woman with a previous marriage. It was a tragedy she could give him no children and I had to stand in as his line in the family. She blundered here and there, saying wrong and hurtful things, a hag of unnecessary truth at family gatherings — a comment about somebody’s weight, somebody’s hair, somebody’s lack of backbone. She was always correcting and scolding when I visited and seemed to think this was the only conversation possible between the old and young, and would have been baffled, I think, had you mentioned it as an unbearable lifetime habit. I blamed her for his drinking and his insensitivity to blacks. He was doing it to show off to her, that’s what. He was drinking because he could not stand being cruel.

The next time I saw him he had made me two fishing lures, painting them by hand in his shop. These he presented me along with a whole new Shakespeare casting reel and rod. I’d never caught a fish on an artificial lure, and here with the spring nearly on we had us a mission. His lakes were full of big healthy bass. Records were broken every summer, some of them by the grinning wives and children of his customers, so obliged to Mister Peter, Squire of Lawrence County. On his lands were ponds and creeks snapping with fish almost foreign they were so remote from the roads and highways. You would ramble and bump down through a far pasture with black Angus in it, spy a stretch of water through leaves, and as you came down to it you heard the fish in a wild feeding so loud it could have been schoolchildren out for a swim. I was trembling to go out with him to one of these far ponds. It seemed forever before we could set out. Uncle Peter had real business, always, and stayed in motion constantly like a shark who is either moving or dead. Especially when he came out of a bender, paler and thinner, ashen in the face almost like a deacon. He hurled himself into penitential work. His clothes were plainer, like a sharecropper’s more than the baron’s, and it would be a few weeks before you’d see the watch chain, the fedora, or the nice boots — the cultured European scion among his vineyards, almost.

I did not know there were women involved in these benders, but there were. Some hussy in a motel in a bad town. I’d imagine truly deplorable harlots of both races, something so bad it took more than a bottle a day to maintain the illusion you were in the room with your own species. He went the whole hog and seemed unable to reroute the high lonesomes that came on him in other fashion. But had I known I’d have only cheered for his happiness against my aunt, whom I blamed for every misery in him.

At home my father meant very well, but he didn’t know how to do things. He had no grace with utensils, tools, or equipment. We went fishing a great many times, never catching a thing after getting up at four and going long distances. I think of us now fishing with the wrong bait, at the wrong depth, at the wrong time. He could make money and drive (too slowly), but the processes of life eluded him. As a golfer he scored decently, but with an ugly chopping swing. He was near childlike with wonder when we traveled, and as to sports, girls, hobbies, and adventures my father remained somewhat of a wondering pupil throughout his life and I was left entirely to my own devices.

He had no envy of his wealthy brother’s skills at all, on the other hand, only admiration. “Old Peter knows the way of things, doesn’t he, son?” he’d cheer. It seemed perfectly all right that he himself was a dull and slow slob. I see my father and the men of his generation in their pinstripe suits and slicked-back hair, standing beside their new automobiles or another symbol of prosperity that was the occasion for the photograph, and these men I admire for accepting their own selves and their limits better, and without therapy. There’s more peace in their looks, a more possessed handsomeness, even with the world war around them. You got what you saw more, I’d guess, and there was plainer language then, there had to be. My father loved his brother and truly pitied him for having no son of his own. So he lent me to him, often.

In the dullish but worthy ledger mark my father down as no problem with temper, moodiness, or whiskey, a good man of no unpleasant surprises that way. He was sixty-five years old before he caught a bass on a spinning reel with artificial bait. He died before he had the first idea how to work the remote control for the television.

At last Uncle Peter had the time to take me and himself out to a far pond, with a boat in the bed of the truck and his radio dialed to his beloved Cardinals. We drove so far the flora changed and the woods were darker, full of odd lonesome long-legged fowl like sea birds. The temperature dropped several degrees. It was much shadier back here where nobody went. Uncle Peter told me he’d seen a snapping turtle the width of a washtub out in this pond. It was a strange, ripe place, fed by springs, the water nearly as clear as in Florida lakes.

He paddled while I threw a number of times and, in my fury to have one on, messed up again and again with a backlash, a miscast, and a wrap, my lure around a limb six feet over the water next to a water moccasin who raised its head and looked at me with low interest. I jerked the line, it snapped, and the hand-painted lure of all Uncle Peter’s effort was marooned in the wood. I was a wretched fool, shaking with a rush of bile.

“Take your time, little Pete. Easy does it, get a rhythm for yourself.”

I tied the other lure on. It was a bowed lure that wobbled crazily on top of the water. I didn’t think it had a prayer and was still angry about losing the good one, which looked exactly like a minnow. We were near the middle of the pond, but the middle was covered with dead tree stumps and the water was clear a good ways down.

A big bass hit the plug right after it touched the water on my second cast. It never gave the plug a chance to be inept. It was the first fish I’d ever hooked on artificial bait, and it was huge. It moved the boat. My arms were yanked forward, then my shoulders, as the thing wanted to tear the rod out of my palms on the way to the pond bottom. I held up and felt suddenly a dead awful weight and no movement. The bass had got off and left me hooked on a log down there, I knew. What a grand fish. I felt just dreadful until I looked down into the water when the thrashing had cleared.

The fish was still on the plug in ten feet of water. It was smart to try to wrap the line around the submerged log, but it was still hooked itself and was just sitting there breathing from the gills like some big thing in an aquarium. My uncle was kneeling over the gunwale looking at the fish on the end of the line. His fedora fell in the water. He plucked it out and looked up at me in sympathy. I recall the situation drew a tender look from him such as I’d never quite seen.

“Too bad, little Pete. There she is, and there she’ll stay. It’s almost torture to be able to look at your big fish like that, ain’t it? Doesn’t seem fair.”

Uncle Peter didn’t seem to enjoy looking in the water. Something was wrong, besides this odd predicament.

“No. I’m going down for it. I’m going to get the fish.”

“Why, boy, you can’t do that.”

“Just you watch. That fish is mine.”

I took off all my clothes and was in such a hurry I felt embarrassed only at the last. I was small and thin and ashamed in front of Uncle Peter, but he had something like fear or awe on his face I didn’t understand.

“That fish big as you are,” he said in a foreign way. “That water deep and snakey.”

But I did swim down, plucked up the fish by its jaws, and came back to throw it in the boat. The plug stayed down there, visible, very yellow, as a monument to my great boyhood enterprise, and I wonder what it looks like now, forty years later.

My uncle had the fish mounted for me. It stayed in our home until I began feeling sorry for it after Peter’s death, and I gave it to a barber for his shop. The fish weighed about nine pounds, the biggest I’ll ever catch.

I was not the same person to my uncle after that afternoon. I did not quite understand his regard of me until my father explained something very strange. Uncle Peter was much the country squire and master of many trades, but he could not swim and he had a deathly fear of deep water. He had wanted to join the navy, mainly for its white officers’ suits, but they had got him near a deep harbor somewhere in Texas and he’d gone near psychotic. He seemed to expect great creatures to get out of the sea and come for him too and it was past reason, just one of those odd strands in the blood about which there can be no comment or change. Since then I’ve talked to several country people with the same fear, one of them an All-American linebacker. They don’t know where it came from and don’t much want to discuss it.

When television appeared I was much enamored of Howdy Doody. Some boys around the neighborhood and I began molding puppet heads from casts you could buy at the five-and-dime. You could have the heads of all the characters from the Howdy show in plaster of paris. Then you’d put a skirt with arms on it and commence the shows onstage. We wrote whole plays, very violent and full of weapons and traps, all in the spirit of nuclear disaster and Revelations, with Howdy, Flub-a-Dub, and Clarabell. I couldn’t get over my uncle’s interest in the puppets when I brought them over and set up the show in his workshop.

The puppets seemed to worry him like a bouncing string would worry a cat. He looked at me as if I were magic, operating these little people and speaking for them. He had the stare of an intense confused infant. When I’d raise my eyes to him, he’d look a bit ashamed, as if he’d been seduced into thinking these toys were living creatures. He watched my mouth when I spoke in a falsetto for them.

I still don’t know what the hell went on with him and the puppets, the way he watched them, then me. You’d have thought he was staring into a world he never even considered possible, somewhere on another planet; something he’d missed out on and was very anxious about. I noticed too that he would dress up a little for the puppet shows. Once he wore his fedora and a red necktie as well.

A number of years went by when I did not see my uncle much at all. These were my teen years when I was altogether a different person. He remained the same, and his ways killed him. I don’t know if the dead man in his past urged him toward the final DTs and heart attack, nor will I ever know how much this crime dictated his life, but he seemed to be attempting to destroy himself in episode after episode when, as he would only say afterwards, the high lonesomes struck him.

The last curious scene when I recall him whole was the summer right after I turned thirteen. We were all around the beach of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, where we’d gathered for a six-family reunion of my father’s people. The gulf here was brown, fed by the Wolf and Jordan rivers. It provided groaning tables of oysters, shrimp, flounder, crabs, and mullet. Even the poor ate very well down here, where there were Catholics, easy liquor and gambling, bingo, Cajuns, Sicilians, and Slavs. By far it was the prettiest and most exotic of the towns where any of the families lived, and my Uncle Max and Aunt Ginny were very proud showing us around their great comfortable home, with a screened porch running around three sides where all the children slept for the cool breeze from the bay. All over the house were long troughs of ice holding giant watermelons and cantaloupes and great strawberries. Something was cooking all the time. This was close to heaven, and everybody knew it. You drifted off to sleep with the tales of the aunts and uncles in your ears. What a bliss.

Most of us were on the beach or in the water when Uncle Peter went most bizarre, although for this I do have an interpretation that might be right. He had been watching me too intently, to the exclusion of others. He was too around, I could feel his eyes close while I was in the water swimming. He was enduring a sea change here at the sea, which he was supposed to be deathly afraid of. I believe he was turning more urban, or more cosmopolitan. He’d been to a Big Dutchman convention in Chicago. Somebody had convinced him to quit cigarettes, take up thin cigars, get a massage, and wear an Italian hat, a Borsalino hat, which he now wore with sunglasses and an actual designed beach towel, he and his wife sitting there in blue canvas director’s chairs. He had been dry for over a year, had lost weight, and now looked somewhat like Versace, the Italian designer. If this was our state’s most European town, then by God Uncle Peter would show the way, leading the charge with his Italian hat high and his beach towel waving.

He was telling all of them how he was getting rid of the bags under his eyes. He was going to take up tennis. He had bought a Jaguar sedan, hunter green. Now on the beach as he sat with the other uncles and my father, watching us kids swim, he seemed all prepared for a breakout into a new world, even if he couldn’t swim, even in his pale country skin. Here he was in wild denial of his fear of the water. His wife, my aunt, seemed happier sitting there beside him. She’d been kinder lately, and I forgave her much. Maybe they had settled something at home.

I’ll remember him there before the next moment, loved and honored and looking ahead to a breakout, on that little beach. He could be taken for a real man of the world, interested even in puppets, even in fine fabrics. You could see him — couldn’t you? — reaching out to pet the world. Too long had he denied his force to the cosmos at large. Have me, have me, kindred, he might be calling. May my story be of use. I am meeting the ocean on its own terms. I am ready.

The New Orleans children were a foulmouthed group in general out there in the brown water of the bay. Their parents brought them over to vacation and many of the homes on the beach were owned by New Orleans natives. The kids were precocious and street-mouthed, sounding like Brooklynites really, right out of a juvenile delinquent movie. They had utter contempt for the local crackers. The girls used rubes like me and my cousins to sharpen up their tongues. And they could astound and wither you if you let them get to you. They had that mist of Catholic voodoo around them too.

Some sun-browned girl, maybe twelve, in a two-piece swimsuit, got nudged around while we were playing and started screaming at me.

“Hey cracker, eat me!”

“What?”

“Knockin’ me with ya foot! Climb on this!” She gave me the finger.

You see? Already deep into sin, weathered like a slut at a bingo table, from a neighborhood that smelled like whiskey on a hot bus exhaust. I guess Uncle Peter saw the distress in my face, although I was probably a year older than the girl. He had heard her too. He began raving at her across the sand and water, waving both arms. He was beside himself, shouting at her to “Never say those things! Never ever say those things to him!”

I looked at her, and here was another complicating thing. She had breasts and a cross dangling by a chain between them and was good-looking. Uncle Peter had come up to the waterline and was looking at her too, forcing his hooked finger down for emphasis, “Don’t ever!” But she leaned back to mock this old man, and she confused him and broke his effect.

Another uncle called out for him to come back, I was old enough to take care of myself, there wasn’t any real problem here. But Uncle Peter hurled around and said: “There is a problem. There is.”

Then he left the beach by himself and we didn’t see him the rest of the reunion. I saw my aunt sitting in their bedroom with her shoulders to me, her head forward, alone, and I understood there was huge tragedy in my uncle, regardless of anything she ever did.

A couple of the brothers went out on his trail. They said he began in a saloon near the seawall in Waveland.

Could it be as simple as that my uncle saw, in his nervous rage and unnatural mood, that girl calling me down the road to sin, and he exploded? That he saw my fate coming to me in my teens, as his had, when he killed the man? Or was he needing a drink so badly that none of this mattered? I don’t know. After that bender he didn’t much follow up on any great concern for me. Maybe he gave up on himself.

It took seven years more. My father came and got me at my apartment in the college town and told me about his death, in a hospital over in that county. My father had white hair by then, and I remember watching his head bowed over, his arm over the shoulders of his own, their mother, my grandmother, with her own white-haired head bowed in grief no mother should bear. My grandmother repeated over and over the true fact that Peter was always “doing things, always his projects, always moving places.” His hands were busy, his feet were swift, his wife was bountifully well off, forever.

A man back in the twenties came to town and started a poker game. Men gathered and drank. Peter lost his money and started a fight. The man took a chair and repeatedly ground it into his face while Peter was on the floor. Peter went out into the town, found a pistol, came back, and shot the man. The brothers went about influencing the jury, noting that the victim was trash, an out-of-towner. The judge agreed. The victim was sentenced to remain dead. Peter was let go.

I’ve talked to my nephew about this. For years now I have dreamed I killed somebody. The body has been hidden, but certain people know I am guilty, and they show up and I know, deep within, what they are wanting, what this is all about. My nephew was nodding the whole while I was telling him this. He has dreamed this very thing, for years.