Long, Last, Happy: New and Collected Stories

Fire Water

THE WOMEN FISHED FROM A RENTED ALUMINUM BOAT WITH THEIR own big electric trolling motor, handled well by Dr. Haxton, a white woman of eighty years, the same as Betty Dew. They both fished with stout cane poles and goldfish minnows bought at the gun and tackle store ten miles north in Holly Springs, where Betty Dew had one of the mansions Grant spared in his first defeated assay on Vicksburg. The old women fished studiously and in a mild ecstasy in the black-green waters of Wall Doxey Lake here in twilight with a foggy gloom already set. Early October. They were catching large saddle-blanket white crappie and had four bass over three pounds. They wore straw hats as in their youth, and they could not give up this fortunate day yet. They violated the curfew of the state park the same as in their youth. No sound but loud bullfrogs and tree frogs and thick crickets. Such a day will not come the same to them again, ever. They knew this and wore the darkening end of this Thursday like the gown of a happy ghost.

But something was very different suddenly.

A fire seemed to be leaping around the entirety of this lake on every verge but the sand beach and riprap around the boat ramp.

Neither woman spoke. At first the fire seemed a dream ignited by their last conversation, two moving mouths alone on the lake, the boat tied to a lesser of the hundreds of dead cypress trunks when no fish bit for a half hour.

Both were literary women. Betty Dew had an expensive education and was an MD with a residency in pediatrics before she found she was terrified by children and parents and became an emeritus overnight. She rode a bicycle everywhere in this hill country of north Mississippi. She wrote poems, had received second place or honorable mention in half a hundred contests. She read with the young at the late-night open-mike poetry slams in the bars of Oxford.

Dr. Jo Haxton had been a neurosurgeon forty years. She was seventh in a family of nine geniuses in Greenville. She wrote quiet novels about villages of no ascertainable geography, real but hard-edged, too. Her theme was fairly constant. Small acts of kindness and charity countervened by such horror wherein nothing availed except violence by gentle persons. Perhaps inspired by the Civil War, but whose, ever? Her books were acclaimed by highbrow and middle. They sold well.

The fire caught up in all points of the compass, running, almost speaking in snaps of twigs mad orange all suddenly. But now they saw a darker high fire in and around an edifice two hundred yards south of them. It was a church here in the sticks that neither knew existed. A steeple, meager as blacks or poor whites could afford, covered by asbestos siding, which bore up for a few minutes. It was the last to fall into a heart of black and purple as the whole structure went down, wracking, gnashing what teeth were left. And briefly a crackling Japanese kind of song. Perhaps the piano was perishing. Loud spangs, then back to silence. It’s when the women thought and connected in great fright. The church, temple, and mosque burnings in the north half of this state and up through Memphis. One church exploded right by one of the grand casinos in Tunica, poorest county in the USA.

These healthy and astute women, pioneers long before feminism sucked its first tit and screamed, wanted off the lake and out of the dusk very badly. Dr. Haxton untied the stern rope and turned the throttle to full 5. They looked shoreward for a tall ranger with a pistol, but the park was dead, cabins and resident warden house dark, while the ring of fire dulled, then jumped in places where it got hold of straw grass and dead willows. But the church was the main nightmare, orange now, then green and yakking with a sound like burned souls would make.

Their last conversation haunted them.

They talked about a private fire, a grand bomb of organ music, about the fire in the bottle neither of them had a taste for, not the volume that white-heated his brain and forced silence into a hill march of county citizens puny and eloquent as God on the page. Compared, they were only mild grannies with a patient lightbulb inside. Some lucky flashes somedays, Betty Dew whispered to Jo in the throes of another poem. Jo spoke back low, limpid, and kind, remembering him alive. The little man of the manor on Old Taylor Road. He seemed weary of his daily resurrection. Both of them had worked in the shadow of this statue. Faulkner. Damn the organ tones, the way he wrote like an octopus with pencils. Sullen fire ran through all his books, the organ in his head brought forth by firewater so intense he couldn’t allow victrola music in the house, even when he was sealed behind his workroom door, where he lived with the falls and rises of geography beset by two-legged fires.

Or could you think all this while in this panic of curiosity, of hard-on terror? Jo wondered. When they were ten feet from the beach the two old ladies climbed as one mind out of the johnboat and walked in a foot of cold October water — to hell with the boat, the gear, the fish — to where fire wasn’t. On dry land in wet sneakers they heard something huge thrash in the water behind them. Impossible. A fat beaver dropped from thirty feet couldn’t make that noise. Maybe a gator, but they’d never seen one in the lake of Wall Doxey. This was not literary at all. Two women of eighty wracked by emphysemic gasping and deep chill.

Out close to the loosened boat in ten feet of lake, then coming toward them slowly in only a fathom, was the head and shoulders of a giant male who could have come from nowhere but the bottom of this black spring-fed pond with dying fires around it, the church beyond still showering sparks into the purple. Almost, I’m almost dead, Betty Dew whispered. The man was seeking them. He began the moan and the tale.

Jimmy Canarsis, seven-foot savant, was known to exist by very few. Because Jimmy, devout Christian, played the piano in the church, all day, every day, alone except Sundays and Wednesday nights, when others of the tiny flock gathered around him. He was always already there then they came. The church had caught fire and swiftly. He was surrounded by it on the bench in front of the keyboard before the flames got his attention and thus was badly burned walking out of it. Exploding cheap stained glass from the windows raked his face before he made his own door getting out the back of the church. He sensed a vacuum of the steeple high behind him taking the air from his lungs and scorching the meat that remained of them. So he walked up the beaver-sieved dam and then walked through the lake on its bottom since he could not swim. He had no fear of the water, he just could not swim it. Water is good, he thought, the way the cold springs soothed his burns and cuts. The shadowed ocher not on fire was his reckoning. Head at last out of the water he saw the two human figures, their boat floating near him. He reckoned these creatures were the arsonists so he would beat them as much as the Holy Lord would allow. It seemed like in the Old Testament you could beat on a multitude of folks but in the New, Jesus was not like your football coach screaming for you to kill somebody. Because Jimmy Canarsis had played some ball for Holly Springs in his last grade of school, either the tenth or the fourth. “But ball now, they said play it but wasn’t nobody hardly playing but flatout cracking faces or attempting to chop a fellow’s knees off, and the rest of them were running away. Say you were playing Byhalia and four of them was eviling on me, testicles or eyes or I’ve had an old farm boy with them hard hands like a Chickasaw spearhead rammed clear through past my aner. I’m going to crack these’s heads until the police can come get them, but wait, these is two old women and I’m burnt to agony out of that water. Or you’d have Olive Branch or Coma, their teams weren’t nothing but so they was just out to prove something it didn’t matter, offense or defense, all eleven of them would run straight at me and lay me out every play of the game and the coaches screaming at me to be tough Jimmy, these boys ain’t even up to your tits, kill one and the others would just quit, and we’d be like ninety to two over them, they only wanted to tell their sons or grandchildren they once laid out a seven-foot man, so that’s our family story and I’m’on go ahead and die now, tell them that’s the way it was, and one that played church piano. One game the only play we had was hand off to me up the middle, over and over. The little boy quarterback never learned that one play right, he kept getting in my route down the center’s back. I’m not fast or he’d of been in the hospital more than the four times he was, flattened over like a scarecrow man fell off his stick.”

“We aren’t that interested in your football season, you’re forty or more years old. Who are you, setting these fires? Stand off us. Betty has a gun, you ugly idiot.”

All three crept warily toward a low-watt bulb hung over the door to a homemade recreation vehicle the size of two outhouses. Jimmy Canarsis was in awful pain but some righteous battle was still in him. He’d been playing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” the Martin Luther classic, when the fire surrounded him. He was not interested in the mobile hut, and now he saw Betty Dew was holding no gun, only a long screwdriver from the tackle of their boat. He saw how thin these old women were, one short, one taller.

“This man set no fires, Jo,” said Betty. “He’s burned bad. Unless by his own gasoline. I know who he is. It’s the Canarsis child, a savant, a pianist. He could play. He could play in the Ford Arts Center, but he won’t leave the church. He can drive a car but doesn’t need to, he said. His parents brought him over to my house for a medical opinion. I’d told them I’d never practiced, but they insisted I was in baby doctor school seven years and wasn’t no way you’d forgot it all and you’re called doctor as we heard on it and some said a genius where they give you a award too big to get in this living room.”

Betty detailed the case of this giant in a daze, looking past Jimmy at the tall glow of the church. The sounds of the county fire trucks, police, and ambulances were all over the night then. At last there were nineteen vehicles howling.

“It didn’t take long for me to figure out the question here was financial, to get him on some concert tour. But they were not greedy. He was a big mouth to feed and he wouldn’t leave the church. They were exasperated for him, even as church people. Where you’d never know a church could ever be. You’ve got the beavers and the hard rains. It’s always been flood land.”

“I don’t believe it’s there yet. Just the fire of it,” said Jo.

“Women, I’m going back in the lake. I can’t stand this no more. You talking about me like I’m a baby right in front of my face. And Dr. Dew a real doctor. The church is real and I’m real.”

Jimmy acted on his words. They heard him sloshing in the water and both felt very ashamed. Ashamed in a common dream, watching the fire and hearing the men around it now five football fields away.

They had nothing but a screwdriver and a cell phone, and they were eighty, healthy but each minute brought to them personally like a tornado in the night come into their frailty, a thief before their eyes could perceive that death was a train in the window, permitting no peace. You were just old guts.

Sick Soldier at Your Door

ANSE BURDEN AT YOUR SERVICE. HERE IN OXFORD I’VE FOUND SIX soldiers from the ’91 desert war with Iraq. I flew the F-18 Hornet off the Roosevelt carrier, I believe. At the time I was loaded on Percodan and Dexedrine so maybe it was another. In the ready room we watched ourselves bombing and missing on CNN. Nobody else in my squadron was even nicked.

But a Stinger blew my tail off and I bailed, blown horizontally into the air as the plane was corkscrewing. The ejection seat was dead solid perfect, all it was supposed to be. I was in love with it and was not conscious the ejection had broken my back a little. It seemed I floated onto a beach of the Persian Gulf for no more than twenty seconds. I must have hit the silk at an altitude of less than three hundred feet. I believe I was in shock briefly because I was sitting in a shallow surf with black sand under me, still attached to the chute out in front of me in deeper surf water, rising up and down like a dirty white whale pulling gently at me with strings from its mouth.

Adrenaline, what a beauty, flowed through my shock and the Dex and Percodan. I felt wonderful, the finest high I’ve ever had. I was a child in an illuminated storybook, way off in a foreign brilliant home. The whale pulled on me and Persia was singing to me from across the water. And I was speaking baby talk into my radio, they said. Me down, me unhurt, me giggle, me see the spotter plane so Father will have the copter here soon.

What father? I later wondered.

I am certain it was Jesus Christ. Father, son, and brother, and most apparent of all, ghost, by all evidence. He carried a lamb under one arm and a Roman sword upraised by the other. This is how I saw him in a dream, a very hard-edged dream with red mountains behind him. Six feet tall. He was in a rough beige robe parted at the chest. Defined pectorals. Forearms lean and sinewy. I dreamt the dream that very night asleep below decks in the hospital.

Some decided it was not a Stinger missile, no SAM at all. They believe I shot my own jet out of the air. They did not court-martial me but they busted me down to lieutenant. I didn’t care. I kept smiling for days even when the break in my tailbone and one of my vertebrae began a long explosion of pain.

My squadron liked me and so did the skipper and an admiral. I had built up a store of good will and beat the drug dependency forthwith. The fact was I flew twenty missions and was terrified around the third one on. Maybe it was nerves. I have nerves. They got harder and harder to hide. I was a ninny among true men.

My father died on the day of my last mission, to spook it further. The navy let me out and paid me handsomely to quit its service.

Now I come to Oxford and I am war. I’ve found the six other vets and am now a lay minister. My wife Brazile left me but might come back. What else did you expect? I cannot tell whether I’ve got the guts to minister to the other vets because of confusion among love, war, peace, and former nefarious behavior on my own part. I bought a church near the casino in Vicksburg right on a bayou. I knew the law and the law left me alone. My congregants were rough and smooth but all wanted to talk about God and each was allowed to give his own sermon until it became Babel and I made the rule that we could only talk about Christ. Several cursed me and left in their leather and denim all Prussian with medals and pins all over, out to the motorcycles and gone. The sergeant at arms of the church was a close friend. We did not truly need a sergeant at arms but the office made him feel good. He carried a baseball bat with barbed wire wrapped tightly around the sweet spot, a fine piece of craftsmanship, and he came through and brought the others back into the fold with him. After all, the bikers were just oily Prussian children with no place to go. Three of them lived with my pal Dan, of the barbed wire bat, in a cabin near a colossal junkyard. They were on heavy metal, they listened to heavy metal music, and they breathed oily heavy metal on a good wind off the yard.

After church the gambling would begin. The church was a casino and a pawnshop. Folks not even remotely connected to God, and happy Vietnamese and Chinamen, Haitians, Black Muslims, and Mexicans with the smell of road tar, all gathered to gamble and pawn.

My wife was an inattentive Roman Catholic from Morgan City, Louisiana, who flew helicopters out to the oil rigs in the Gulf when I met her. She was from the upper middle class and wanted to prove something and she did. I could never figure what delight anybody could have piloting a copter but her moxie brought me over. That and she was a rare gem of a fuck, with long legs, bouncing bosoms, and the only hair I’ve ever seen that was naturally black and gold.

She was as tall as I was, five feet eleven.

I’m not going to say a damned thing about 9/11, by the way. I think the innocent dead will appreciate that. When will “poets” ever realize they’ve long since been irrelevant after Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising? And in all other matters by Dylan, et al.

Maybe all books must die before we form the peace.

I am war for Christ and my Brazile fled what she called outright insanity. She played the violin very well, I mean tempestuously while I entered her naked entrances from every angle possible. I wish her ears could suck. Get in there deep to her unarguable perfect pitch. I was a lucky man but I thought I had to prove something every day. I was thrown out of my war but am not comfortable with peace. Something always seemed left out of it. Like when we were kids and rigged a cannon that fired a two-inch shell of mule shit tightly wrapped in aluminum foil at the most beautiful white mansion in Natchez.

Too many books will deny their slaves the race to die in battle with the shout of victory in their ears. Otherwise you only get a cool nap in the shade and kick off with a little ah sound so they know to get you in the ground haste-wise before the public stink.

You dream maybe of Sam Houston whose own army ignored him and struck out to attack Santa Anna at San Jacinto. Old Sam yelled, “Gentlemen, I applaud your bravery but damn your manners,” as he watched the slaughter and rode his white horse five times around the battle, getting his own licks in with no choice left.

Two regiments clash by afternoon. Gluttonous killings. Mexican drummer boys stuck in the bayou mud, half-beheaded by musket butts. Thus the birth of Texas, the birth of all states by mob slaughter.

For me, my own scribblings in my Life Book must end. Burn your books or hand them to other slaves who’ve lost their voices, their silence, their souls to literature, a feeble sucking religion.

What dream was I in January and February, 1991, when I made my last flyover of Baghdad? All F-18 Hornet, hardly a human creature at all. No balls, no soul, just fire, lift, drift, roll over, bang. The gorgeous missile tracks oranger than orange, or your hand-rolled bomb for any occasion. What a heavy leap of fire down there. You never imagine the hunched-down earthling in the streets or sand. Sheet, burnoose, and sandals, a helmet held to his dick. Look out above!

In the cockpit I was nothing but quiet screaming head, watching the immolations with small concern. I may have burned up this self and soul when I accidentally saw the burning man on the ground. My handiwork.

But somebody down there owned a vector on me. When I blew out with my already dead copilot just behind me somewhere in the air and never found, I believe I went from a mild scream to nothing, not a long trip.

Now I have the soul of an abandoned hospital. The six other Desert Storm vets, I want to invite them into it. Fill me up. But I’m a coward and a bad host in my ministry, astride this yellow Triumph Tiger, 1970 and mint, given to me by good Dan Williams.

In my journey from needy ones to other needy ones, I smile and think of Dan, who taught me how to hide things, my airplane and my last hundred thou. He knew the IRS as the gestapo and planned to attack three of the jackals who stalked him, still after money rightly devoted to Jesus.

Lt. Cmdr. to grievous joystick gambler, money changer in the temple of God, to Idiot of Christ, then lay minister, then simply four diseases all at once. Two cancers and chemo with its attendant friends neuropathy, boiling claws inside my legs, and a maddening ring ever constant in my head, half a heart and lungs blown away, three invasive surgeries, the horror of waiting waiting waiting for doctors who don’t want to see you and cannot abide the idea of pain. How do I count the ways, fair pain, among the criminals and loafers of the drug, med, hospital, insurance white-collar-larceny colossus?

But will you believe this?

I am happy to just get down the road when I can, giving even unluckier muckers a ride if I can. Near death by pneumonia I had dreamed of all my pals and gals, foremost Brazile Varas Burden, the woman who will surely come back to me because she’ll understand I’m no longer insane. Rather, to the contrary, serene and filled with peace that passeth understanding.

May I say this. Mark this: I do not feel saved but only born again into a parallel world where all my animals, all the girlfriends and powerful pals, the handsome infants, all of us children of a quiet green meadow with the ocean over there just beyond the trees, where we live when misery that passes understanding knocks down our last doors to come and claw us. It will always be there when no pills, no help, no release are left, only the hard wall of stupid random torture and malicious indifference. Then Christ comes if you give this kind stranger a chance. Simplicity. Ecstasy, all speech and acts converted to a fundament of rest.

Plus I’m still a handsome dude, hung like a small bear. I am faithful to my wife in our separation and she is faithful to me. Time is all, a hard matter, time and its exasperations like minutes stretched to no horizon.

Now in Oxford, drawn by the church, mosque, and tabernacle burnings from northwest Mississippi to St. Louis along the river through Memphis, I admit again I am a worm. I am organizing walking tours from blackened ruin to blackened ruin. Some of the churches were not just burned. They were bombed expertly as well. They exploded as only the hand of a specialist could bring about.

This does not harken back to the Klan burnings of the sixties, which were done by imbecilic cowards cheered on by silence from miserable governors. This is new history. You think Iraq. Vets of Iraq. I know six of them but have not a clue if the crimes are connected to any, none, or all of them.

I forgot to say, because I am a worm, that there is a fee for enrollment in these tours. I have written some articles regarding medicine in literature and have an instructorship at the university, hired on by the kind chairman of English, Joe Urgo, now at Hamilton College. My ship was continued by the next chairman, Patrick Quinn, the important Graves scholar with the hair of Mick Jagger. Dan the junkyard preacher dropped out of the sad motorcycle gang that remained behind in his cabin mourning when he went to Texas Christian for advanced knowledge of the Bible. I understand his studies were thorough and he came out completely insane though functional like most seminary students. Then there is the Choctaw Indian, Pearl Room, from Philadelphia, Ms. and the Indian casino down there, who, well, lectures on the spirituality of the Indian culture, among Choctaws and Chickasaws, the two tribes of the state.

The fee for the walking tour is 5 K.

I came to gawk, just like the rest, and am now the most experienced gawker. In my case, as leader and an invalid I ride the motorcycle and wait around the ruins preparing my lecture for the pilgrims. We have enrolled twenty pilgrims so far, mainly wealthy retirees from the Great Lakes cities who need the exercise and are crazy for Southern Culture, outside of catfish, the leading export of these precincts. Half of them are Jewish, the rest Irish and Swedes. The Swedes, you recall, gave Faulkner the Great Prize, so we start at his home Rowan Oak under the cedars in the long driveway, because cedars were the Indian funeral trees, as Pearl Room explains.

The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.

My own church down on the bayou north of Vicksburg exploded.

On a hunch I told the pilgrims that from thirty-thousand feet above you see the black dots that connected into the face of Jesus of Nazareth. Then I found out this was true, with only a little push from the imagination.

It was a great shame my church exploded before the IRS could auction it.

But here’s the worst news: my nephew Wilkes Bell is one of the arsonists. My sister, his mother, Ellen, knows nothing about this. My love for them prevents me turning him in to the law. That is a bit of a lie. I’m dazzled and exhilarated and proud of him until my best self comes back.

All the way through art school at the university he painted indifferently but the subject was always fire. The art school was totally ignored by the university, lucky for him. His teachers were alarmed by nothing since it was shit anyway, his paintings. Not even coded fire. Just fire, what fire does to whatever — beginning, middle, and end.

It is true I was licensed by this nation and the navy to burn and explode structures and the humankind near them, this aloof and with impunity. Just as whatever blew me out of my plane was licensed. Burning a church is one sorry damned thing. What hopes, prayers, and dreams, humble houses of worship that civilize and make gentle the hearts clustered to them. When you see flames eating up what kind, thoughtful hands have prepared for their deity, it is the least mirthful matter on the table. Nowhere in my soul is there even pity for such arson, not at my worst. Only the insanely religious or the pathological can bring it off. Or the other crime of long passion: revenge.

My nephew lives in the townhouse apartment in the very room the famous Eli Manning had during his college days at Ole Miss. I’ve chatted with this lad. Both he and his dad, Archie, remind me of Huckleberry Finn at quarterback. Loosey-goosey, they can flat fling the football, and then an Aw shucks, wasn’t that good, toe in the sand. Grand boys, as are also the other two sons, Peyton and Cooper Manning. A national treasure under the miracle tree. God, I love the Harvard crimson and Yale blue of the Ole Miss Rebels. This fall under Houston Nutt we might get back to our 7–4 or even 8–3 seasons in the roughest toughest conference there is. At thirty my nephew Wilkes Bell is not a grand boy. He doesn’t want to be a trust-fund baby, but he most certainly is.

I go by his apartment in the second story of a storied brick hotel now given over to overpriced clothing for swanky hunters and smooth tan daughters just a little younger than their mothers who are also smooth and tan and with sandals and legs. At the north end of the block is the famous Off Square Books. I must get the New Testament on CD to work with the young mid-age mothers in my home church, a white shingled two-story farmer’s mansion with giant magnolias and thin wooden columns, a balcony from which I might one afternoon play the CD over loudspeakers with the women under me in lawn chairs and poolside wicker love seats. I can imitate the Pope. Whichever king of piety the Catholics have now. Yes, go again to Africa and preach in favor of exponential births where the sand and flies fight it out for misery. Has a pope ever held a bloated starving, dying infant in his arms speaking the last rites to it? But I rant. From the balcony I could simply raise my arms and look down. Because I hate to preach and congregations spook me. You must understand I’m no phony. Christ’s Sermon on the Mount on CD and I could look at the tan cleavage, sweating in summer heat much like the Holy Lands.

And I am faithful to Brazile. I look at the cleavages and enjoy them as the women would have me do. But I’m thinking of my lovely Brazile, finally. She’s a woman of mutating beauty. A fearsome beauty in wrath, a quiet madonna at peace, in joy. I have a hard time remembering her face, frankly. And lord I have other troubles.

There’s my nephew Wilkes on his balcony, drunk, hanging over the rail in his suit like a black flag and pumping his arm in a thumb-up victory wave, then a salute. He adores me. Once said he would follow me to hell. I’m afraid my influence on him has been vicious, even if I’m straight and sober now ten years.

Suddenly on my right is the French mockery of a restaurant, 208, yes named for its address on South Lamar, where another vet of the 2003 Iraq war rises and falls as bartender and kitchen man. He’s still a kid although bulked up from the army. They say he’s not doing well, and you know they say is truer than the Bible. Went over to help schools and hospitals. Then received fire. Returned it. The poor boy is pouring out of the mold that formed him.

By Mississippi standards, Oxford is a city. Pop 30,000 counting the university of 14 K. You can get lost merely changing your haircut, your car, your bar.

Could it be that I’m losing my very heart, Brazile. Didn’t I fight for her before we met in that feast for flyboys over Iraq? No. Christ the lamb, Christ the sword. Couldn’t He decide? Am I worshipping at the feet of nothing but a difficult poem? But most days I have Him. All pieced out into the meek and least of us. My ruin is insufferable but god, look at the alternative: the pampered zombies of most America.

There is a groove in all roads that leads this motorcycle to needy souls at home, as if the old Triumph can’t go anywhere else. Both my nephew and I are hopeless, helpless, maybe turning into souls as I speak but it feels like only fumes.

I’ll die if I lose her. She keeps our dogs down in Edwards, Ms. There’s barely enough of me left to be jealous of the sound handsome men who look on her when she walks the dogs in the nearby Civil War Park and Cemetery around Vicksburg. The war dead would snap awake too when they felt her and her several hounds’ feet above them. But she is faithful, she told me so. My mission baffles and frightens her, that’s all. Yes, laughing friends deride, oh smoke is in my eyes. I’ve got faith in my bones, she said, why make a pageant out of it? You’re always trying to make a comeback, putting your doomed march on, the biggest kid in the Children’s Crusade. I swear you want to die in some god-awful place, the nastier the better. I don’t, I want to die in your arms, Brazile, I said. Wherever and whenever.

My pathway is a foggy circle back to her. I pray to the motorcycle. Please do keep me in a fog. I’m weary of light shed on myself, the sick and whining always at your door. Help. Love. Service. Find, but time always whispers lost lost lost. And fool, fool astride this smoking rocket called Quo vadis?

I arrived at the first house where a man on disability is breaking the seal on his first bottle of the day. He dismisses his wife to the rear quarters, but not unkindly. They seem to have an agreement that she is a speechless ghost.

Christ is difficult enough. Do we have to meet his father, too? The man sits next to an end table where the bottle and ice and Sprite in cans rest. With his iron gray hair parted and combed straight back you can guess he was an authority somewhere, old school. Black business oxfords on his feet, lanky, more master than slave by far, maybe an old god himself. Things speak to him, he said over the phone, but as with homicidal maniacs the voices are of himself as god, no outer god speaks to him. God the father whose shrieks of laughter behind that tome of law and mass homicides they call the Old Testament this reader can’t doubt. Old Dad somewhere busting his ribs with glee over the misreadings of rabbis, monks, and the television preachers from the Academy for Significant Hair. Smiling charismatics trying to improve on Jesus because he’s just too mad and wild. Fishermen and failures were his chums, most of them confused even when they saw him walking on water. Why did he choose men who could never understand him? Father why hast thou forsaken me? is not the utterance of a man certain of his painless ascent into heaven. It’s the same cry I and billions make when wracked by undeserved pain.

I look at him in his Barcalounger in a clean white shirt. Indicates he is involved in a solemn vocation that did not brook meddlers. He looks like the deceased actor William Holden. He is watching Animal Planet on a big-screen TV.

“You want me to turn it off?” He lowered the volume with his remote.

“No. I love animals.”

“Three years ago one of those stingrays killed that Australian man.”

“Awful. But he was lucky. Happy in his work.”

“You’re here for Jesus, who died for these shits. Stay as long as you’ll drink with me.”

“I can’t. Well, a very light one I’ll nurse a good spell.”

“Hello to mellow.” He handed over a weak bourbon. My chair was new and overstuffed. I felt I was its first guest.

“Well it’s bon voyage to this old ship. I wish there was a fresh ocean we hadn’t ruined. I’m in the throes of nervous collapse, can’t bear to work with people anymore. I give them work and even love for thirty years but people piss on it. They drove to a shrink with a tackle box full of wonder drugs. Hell, I’m on four of ’em. Excellent if you want to shuffle around like the living dead and eat the ass out of your kitchen. I never had a big stomach before, I was trim. I was a fine old troubleshooter for Winchester worn out by people. People wasn’t the acceptable answer, but Dr. Meatloss signed the script for my long vacation. I was supervisor, got awards. You think I can afford this? I was handsome and some called me an intellectual. Now I couldn’t stand even you, one unlucky pastor, if I wasn’t well into the Beam.”

He wore rimless glasses. I looked at his stomach pouch slyly. I asked him what drugs he took. A depth charge for depressive manias, I wondered he could be awake with the Beam on top.

“Tell me what people are like, Mr. Perry.”

“Conrad. Conrad Perry. Rodents, but every one of ’em has studied the course Ratocracy. They’re angry they’re mediocre and believe you’re to blame. Feel my pain. Lookit my cancerous ass.”

“You’re describing the school, the church, the state, the nation.”

“E-mail opened the floodgates. We weren’t meant to know this much about so many.”

I agreed.

“I have half a college education. I was quiet and dumb then. Scared.”

“I’d take that as a reasonable state for all of us.”

“I’m well nigh on drunk already, Anse Burden. You have kin here?”

“No. Maybe long ago.”

“All those people standing around outside. You saw them when you came in.”

“No. Just me, right here alone.”

“You’re a minister and smoke Camel filters? I’ll take one if I can.”

“I set a low example. My pride is invested in cigarettes, I’m sure. Nobody tells me what to do,” I admitted. “And I’m nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof coming in homes like this, Conrad.”

“That’s a good one. I never heard that.”

“It’s an old one, a play by our native son Tennessee Williams.”

“What if those nasty people around the house sent you in, Anse, to finish me off?”

“You’re on too much medicine, Conrad.”

“I know that.”

“Good grief, man, I was sent here by Christ because you’re in trouble. I’m a piece of wreckage, myself. Love. I believe I’m just now learning it.”

“Who called you, Pastor Burden? What a name. Pretty heavy on you, I guess some buddy or my wife called you.”

“You called me.”

“Did? Oh I do remember. Commonality, isn’t that a word? I have a busted Harley-Davidson out back. Those men broke it. I never heard a thing. I heard you were a motorcycle man, maybe we could ride someday. Then second, your career as a flyer in the navy. I thought you could bring higher power against those dangerous idiots after me. I’m no chicken, I swear, but the two of us. See here, I’m not drinking in a bar and cursing blacks and immigrants. I already have a Jesus in me but he is tiny.”

“I can’t be violent anymore. But how did you get this information, Conrad?”

“Not much in this town gets past the wife. She barely speaks but she has damn near canine hearing. My nerves need a long rest. Nembutal, Percocet, oxycodone when I can get it. Got a vicious ache in my spine, center of my back. My heart pounds like it wants out. So I wash these friends down with the Beam. Then Jesus gets bigger in me, I get a beautiful floating kind of courage, like when you come out of the shower after whipping somebody in a football game.

“You could help me if you had the words, just some new words about this war. The words that would make me free again.”

“You’re still some kind of athlete to even be awake. I went through the Desert Storm shoot-out loaded on Percodan and amphetamines. Afterward, I stayed stoned and would’ve been busted out except for squadron pals and higher brass. No way no kind of hero, I assure you.”

“Still, I can help you. In your own bosom you have nursed the pyromaniac.”

I went cold. “Your wife again? What could you mean? She knows the arsonists?”

“Maybe one, who’s made friends.”

Perry stared at the ceiling nearly knocked out but smug enough to smile.

“What are we trading for here, Conrad? Because I am an empty and officially nobody. No connections with the law or the churches.”

“If you’ll have another weak one with me, I’ll show you my suicide guns.”

“I’ll have another weak one. How many choices do you need for suicide?”

“The quality of my departure is still out for debate.”

“I’m not drinking with you if this threat keeps up, Conrad. You’d have already blown your head off in the backyard if you’d been serious. Give my church the guns. One of the members, the sculptor, Beck, has donated over two hundred of them, historical pieces. We’ll have an auction.”

“On the straight?”

“The straight. Your weakness would be our strength. The odds are you and your wife Betty are stronger than this minister.”

“Well, this is my church.”

I walked in and saw the pistols on blue velvet, the rebel flag, the big trout he caught in Arkansas with the flyweight crawfish stuck in its lips and the nylon leader leading back to his fly rod leaned in a corner. But it was an unhappy male chamber with food and drink stains on the sofa and rug. A smell as if a fire had swept through just months ago, but there was no fireplace, no embers. Then I saw the great burned spot on the rug, stomped out by a white sneaker that still remained. Not much toil against unkempt here.

“You know the arsonists? Tell me,” I asked him.

He was nodding out on me on the crumby yellow sofa. “’Sman who can’t exist without being two men together. ’Sman of money, all these places, all these munitions. ’Nfaxt I thought it was you. You can get me Percodan and I would cheer you on. I’m highly in need. You can have all the pistols. Here’s a sack for them.”

He went to some rear shadows and wrestled out a croaker sack. You don’t see this burlap much anymore. I eased the guns into the mouth of it and was fascinated by these fine instruments, pearl-handled, a silvery.38 with recessed hammer, a gun of the noir forties.

I reached in my pocket and gave him four Percocets. Chuckled for this old bird’s knowing very well I was holding.

“What idiocy led you to think I’m the arsonist?”

“Exploded your own church for cover. Then a stranger to these parts, you arrive and the fires get widespread.”

“They were already doing that.”

He stood in front of me but his eyes were closed.

“Here I’ve been a fool thinking you wanted closer to Christ,” I said.

“You’re a little ungrateful. I gave the guns for Christ.” Conrad wobbled and I thought I’d have to catch him.

“Please call your physician. You’ve got way too much head medicine already. You’re asking for a coma of zero quality departure. Your wife mourning over a vegetable. You’ve got depression, Conrad. I don’t buy the insanity. It’s just your brain is carrying buckshot.”

“What about the people, all that mischief around my windows?” The man opened his eyes and smiled a hopeless smile, one of false discovery after long confusion.

“Since you’re not climbing the walls in terror, I think you know the answer. Take some steps toward getting well and maybe you’ll feel like helping people. They need you. I believe you once did help people. Now I’ve got another fellow down the road in much worse shape than you.”

When I said this he sat on the filthy sofa and went dead asleep. I was on the front porch making my way to my saddlebags with the sack full of pistols when I heard his wife speak very softly behind me through the screen.

“Thank you. You never know the form of the good one who comes.”

“Pray, Missus Perry, I’m the good one,” I asked her. I felt more like a busy malingerer.

I wonder if our Christ ever liked people. Plenty of evidence has him confused about them as well as his father, even as he loved them. He fled to the outlands when he couldn’t bear healing any more of them. The press of the crowds drove him to solitary meditations many times. Who was his friend, as we know friend? Or did the hungry and angry time of his ministry preclude friendship. He must have faced madness to know tragedy and glory up close and both at once. Did he know only pain from word go? Our dreary march of case histories. Nevertheless, I revamped myself on the optimistic noise of the Triumph, and got along the road, a merry old cowboy dressed in his corpse.

Talk, talk, talk. Much said and nothing settled. You’re not even certain of the subject anymore.

I knew an old gal and boy, married, who to anybody’s knowledge had never finished a sentence they started. They didn’t finish each other’s sentences. They didn’t even like each other. But perhaps the romance depended on the other never completing a thought.

Lastward, Deputy James

HE HIMSELF MIGHT BE ONE OF JUST ANOTHER CONFUSED BUT ADAmant sect. This idea had crossed his mind, since he was certain there was much to repay or regain from his past woes and he knew who had burned the small church on the verge of Wall Doxey Park that Wednesday evening. None but himself.

His wardrobe, the woman reminded him, improved past the penitent rags he had once stolen from Goodwill warehouses. He also quit stealing books. Formerly it just seemed he should, since he was outcast already. Before the church, he’d not burned anything for long months, either.

The woman he found himself with would barely leave home except to spend $200 almost exactly each trip to Wal-Mart. She watched television movies or she cleaned or threw out older new things. She rarely cooked. He figured this love would not last long but she had her good side when she was not directing scathing attacks on him or slapping him as he lay sleeping in the bed he had bought, in the diminished hacienda he’d bought for them. After the eruptions she was quiet a long while, which the deputy discovered after months with her was her form of apology. Because she was never wrong and never spoke an apology. He was to understand her moods, that was his constant homework.

Mainly she attacked him for once being a Montana deputy who refused to reattach himself at good salary to the law. She wondered where his money came from, anyway.

It was from his army savings and his father’s photographic inheritance, a prudent man young as he was when death popped him. His pension from Montana and an uncle’s inheritance, Old Ralph who loved him and pitied him in Toronto. But she would not leave him alone about the rest of his secret money for he was the sole source of her income now she had risen from near welfare and could throw out more old new things. She cleaned the house with the meticulous fury of a German analist, and she did enjoy dirty jokes. She was pleasant in the face, then grew pretty with expensive cosmetics. Her figure was in trim although she quarreled with her hips. She was angry about age, too. Her wrath and resentment were perfect like the work of flood or fire. No man or woman was spared.

He wondered idly sometimes why he did not kill her, but then in rare times she was good company and claimed to love him above all things in the world. She won him over, but he always knew what she was up to, which was to set him up for a sort of vicious theater where one character, himself, a bum with prospects, stands speechless while a harridan who owes everything to him attacks him up and down for not improving himself so that she could owe him even more. This debt was intolerable to her, she would never forgive him, especially now that she didn’t have to appear in the workforce at all.

He would leave slapping her to somebody else even though a comprehensive bitchslapping would help her. Her lone mission was to go out into town and berate others.

Now the taste for burning had left him he was practically a saint. Outside of the church, what he had burned was just a hobby, for god’s sake. He improved places by fire. He held himself in some esteem for not reattaching his talents to the law, the last career on his mind, and for doing almost nothing ardently except the secret trips. Like a great artist. His vocation was looking clean cut, now weeks away with a crop of recluse’s bush all around his head and chin, and staying awake for upward of eighteen hours. Even so, he owned an exceptional facility for falling asleep dead center of one of the woman’s attacks. This act calmed her and she was in awe of him.

Their house was a weathered one, old Spanish elegance as the realtors would have it, rented and tested by college men before they took it, the landlord negligent since many of the boys spirited themselves away to other quarters where mommy or granny lay waiting to spoil them and their creditors paid hard to find them. Our hero paid for a new roof and paint, white with slate trim, and a fence planted with Carolina jasmine soon thick and green, and her dogs could dig around the roots of the pecan and hickory trees safe from the highway out front. The dogs were a mix of corgi and shepherd, and he adored these oddly made creatures too. Our man, Franklin James, also paved the driveway where sat his carpentered hut with wheels, towed by a 600cc Ducati motorcycle from the seventies but in perfect repair. The hut’s roof was peaked, it had a shatterproof window on either side, a smart thing as huts go. Tan and lean, he could be handsome with his beard lost. He had lived in federal and state campgrounds for nearly four years. He’d lived almost without cost, for an adventure hostile to most. He had had a bad night, only one bad experience with a small pack of motorcyclists anointed wild by themselves and carrying their own priests and witches.

He carried a nickel-plated hammerless.38 but the weapon had acquired the status of a mere hammer about the cabin, a wide enough rectangle with a small electric heater so that he slept comfortably in innocence, doom, and fatalism all three.

James was Canadian French. In the early sixties his father was killed by suspicious gunfire called random because another had died, this at a campus riot against the entry of a black man to the university. His father was a photojournalist. The shooter was never found and barely sought. The state then was in apartheid hotly and there was little sympathy for outside agitators, as his father was labeled, a meddler with no credentials in this place of fire and blood. James himself was a lieutenant in the French Legion, riding a.50-caliber machine gun in a sand jeep during Desert Storm, but this was not important.

Important was that even though the Klan had been broken by the FBI and lawsuits, they and their fellow travelers might still live and worship or preach in certain wooden churches. Such people tended to stay undriven from their soil, holy to their feet regardless of their less genial reception or the rough success of integration decades-old now in the Magnolia State. The best band in these parts was a mixed pigment group, sons of the famous Dickinson, Kimbrough, and Burnside blues/rock geniuses. But old murderers and burners muttered against them, even as they were hauled to jail lately for crimes forty years old.

His father was Anglo-French, a Parisien by way of Toronto. A good-natured lively man who wrote and shot stirring photos heralded in many news magazines in both Canada and the States. He was strong. He worked long distances from home and always came back with happy presents from these regions. Franklin James had lost him when he was fifteen.

Now he was fifty-three, an ex-sheriff’s deputy from Missoula, sworn to fire anyway and also to a refinement to the precise gunman in golden years who now gained respect from his fellow churchmen and love from his teenaged grandchildren, which idea drove James near insane with rage. He would kill or find the grave of his father’s murderer. He tried to live out this disease, tried to burn it out of himself, but it was fickle with mere time and would rise like a flaming snake in even sublime nature, the staggering gorges and pools of America’s parks of prime natural glory. He hoped the killer played a fine fiddle and even rode on a scooter in a Shriner’s fez in a parade for the Christmas blind.

His woman, in her rages, never knew how he could snap her in two if she were the murderer’s niece, so her rages amused him, too. He did love her as she swore to love him. She knew nothing of his mission. He slipped ever easily into the brogue of love, that long hill-country moan that required slow action around the tongue and almost no lip opening to a song against coherence. Without her around he despised it, listening to men gossip at the barber’s, the cafés in Holly Springs and Oxford. General Grant was headquartered in Holly Springs, where the antebellum mansions still stood, although in a flat of lackness frozen in brine, much like those in Natchez, a back-lot set for zombies in a costume feed. The general had sent the drunker general, Smith, to burn Oxford three times, in reprisal for Forrest’s raids on his supply lines toward Vicksburg. Now Oxford had the university and life, restaurants, nightclubs, gorgeous women on its walks hurrying to nothing, cellphoning nothing, but gladly come spring wearing nearly nothing. Five hundred lawyers and a state-of-the-art county office building and jail, along with the storied Faulknerian courthouse, the pale redbrick Art Deco city hall, and it seemed five though only two state flags flew high and wide here, one quarter of each the stars and bars of Dixie. James saw nothing but the Confederate flag and spat on the pavement until he had no spit. He cared little about the history of anywhere, but the irony of his lost father’s body among all this formal law brought on a near faint of resentment. Like blood and vomit with a flag on it.

With his new accent he led conversations among suspicious men. He did hear things but the men lied and invented so much it was a jam box of hell to get anything of substance from them. Two men claimed to know his father during his short tragic stay. Not a prayer. He heard men from the church he’d burned and surprised himself by this sympathy with them, poor country sorts looking for a new hall of fellowship. A poor giant boy savant played sacred tunes on its piano day and night all week and was burned terribly because he would not leave his instrument until the flames were on him. The injury to the boy savant was an injustice that depraved him and made him soberer in his hatred. He made daily trips to eavesdrop on the boy’s condition after he left the burn ward in a Memphis hospital and came for further therapy to Oxford’s Baptist one. He had meant nothing like that, nothing near it, and he hated that he had polluted his mission. He could not tell the boy or his parents his sorrow and guilt. He could tell nobody. At night he writhed as if sleeping in a coffin on a king-size bed he’d wanted, and this was mistaken by his wife Goodie Drake as amorous hunger, and she supplied him as he gave to her afraid to hurt her feelings. Neither of them was listless in bed.

Teresa was her proper name. She bought the bed a headboard of Byzantine pattern befitting this name, and elevated it to nearly four feet on risers, then put many comforters and a phalanx of fat pillows over these. He slept in the effeminate pomp of a bed and breakfast resort. When there was too loud a fight, excruciating for a half hour while he stood silent, he slept out in the cabin, which she called his “pouting house.” Be a man, she commanded him over and over. He couldn’t tell her the kind of man he was. She didn’t know he had received and returned much fire in Iraq with French troops. She didn’t know what happened to make him an ex-deputy and a runaway from Missoula, Montana. He was tall and windblown like the actor Sam Shepard, she said, and she’d proclaim her love for him without once apologizing for her rages, a condition that came on like epilepsy. Another man would have left months ago.

The destruction of the guilty one would not make him right. He killed without hatred in the desert once, perhaps twice. He was in no way made right. To kill a man perhaps twenty years older than he, an oldster in the hallowed years as some called it, would be no more than shooting down an old rabid dog. But you had a mix of religion, Dixie patriotism, and blind hatred down here as you did in the countries of Islam. The worst of them were often old farts who could lead younger ones by the nose. Much was owed them by history and the black man. Franklin James was happy to do his part. To annul this living figment and his church with him was his dream since a boy, deprived of his papa.

His mild vocation for setting things afire had made the miserable jobs of the military happier. Standing around big fires where once were men and carefully constructed vehicles or buildings of great ingenuity for beauty and safety against all the elements, but now to no avail, no use, was not a bad assignment. Very meditative. Many a child will concentrate for hours on end to build a small town of cardboard only to stand back and incinerate it with licked big kitchen matches which sailed, smoked, then burst into flames like missiles. He had. But he did not run to conflagrations in Toronto when he was young or to smoldering Russian tanks in the desert, kind as they were to his eyes and gut. In Toronto, to be sure, he had made conflagrations almost beyond his will.

He was in a tank in which there was a boom box playing only three tunes. Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” about shooting a woman and going down Mexico way. The Rolling Stones’ “No Expectations,” about death. The Beatles’ “A Day In the Life,” about death, or most likely. They were the best three tunes he knew, still. They moved him. Over the gun sight he and his commander saw Iraqi tank fires while the music, funeral tunes, written for the men burning against the far orange twilight horizon, played away. Neither man thought the music apt to the point, though. Some unwritten song waited but they couldn’t guess what it should be. A tender symphony almost nonexistent as soon as it sounded. These days he listened to the tunes and smelled gas, cordite, and burned lamb, and saw tank carcasses against deep orange and black.

In the matter of his wife Goodie “Hey Joe” hung around his head but no song was exact to his suffering. Goodie despised lending her own possessions to him, she who took gifts from him — house, roof, bed, direct satellite TV — as a matter of natural transfer. She deepened her voice into one of a raspy carnival barker right in the microphone with loud hissing sarcasms about the low caste of his French mother and his infantile love for his murdered father. He had not described either of his parents to her. She’d had two husbands before James, and all he heard of them was their dullness and parsimony. James did not believe in Satan until a week after he married her.

Yet her beauty. She was quietly stunning in the face. Goodie, Teresa when she was kind and romantic. He would never know her. He wondered if, after his reckoning with the man who shot his papa, he’d be roused to more fury and annihilate her.

Her beauty, and she was hungry in bed. She was smart. After retirement from chief reference librarian once they were married, she used her pension to finish a college degree in Greek and Roman history. This was brave, a woman in her midforties sitting with spoiled children who drove BMWs. She called most of her professors fools and losers. She had dyslexia but memorized her way through tough biology and math classes. She dressed very well and owned a mink coat worth upward of thirty thousand. When she graduated, James took her to Paris, where she wore the coat as she believed the city demanded. He wore pressed jeans and a jacket, with suede boots. She could not bear his unconscious cowboy habits, as she called them. Once, when beauty and smarts mattered, she had been an airline stewardess. Now she found herself among lax slobs too often. A former husband had beaten her. Her attitude toward love was very rocky, very tense. Goodie seemed to like it that way. When would he ever find decent professional work? Versed in her own degree in history and art, she was decorating the house.

She did not know he had burned a Boston Whaler boat in berth at Pickwick Dam in Tennessee, or a white Cadillac Esplanade, or the church with the giant boy playing inside.

She only knew he was moody and once for four days hardly rose from his bed. Afterward he disattached his mobile cabin and rode the Ducati away to unknown parts while she cursed the motorcycle and the cabin both, standing in her driveway, the spectacle of a grease monkey, the sorry outhouse parked like a hillbilly joke in the drive. The front lawn had high cactuses, a rock garden, and a pool. Nothing like it stood near them in these rolling horse hills. The traffic on the highway beyond the entrance arch grew heavier. The house was something of a joke but Goodie meant to fix that by a high wooden fence around the grounds, and she goaded James into getting the cheap Latino labor for it. During their courtship she said his machine and abode were clever and cute. She made long protests over receiving all his gifts, rescuing her from that awful job at the library. Her vocation was a homemaker and landscaper now. She could see river birches all around the home, azaleas, roses. They needed the wooden fence for privacy and elegance. Their guests would be vetted by a Mexican in the right shirt. One day they might give a magnificent ball, people dressed to the nines, but her friends numbered two, a beautician and a gymnast.

Franklin James had no even near-friends but he studied the deep South with more care than Goodie suspected. On the matter of bad grammar, these people seemed to have taken courses in it. They took pride in being normal, dumb, and prejudiced, as if they’d won an award in these areas recently. Their voices dropped when the matter of race came up. To the man, they were close with good blacks but true niggers ran the show too much. Even those who lost children to cancer or car crashes believed in God. They spoke of secrets that should not be revealed. They knew crimes and killings the law could never uncover, just as it should not, because some needed killing. The murder of a bad seed who’d taken a life was ruled a suicide by the sheriff even though the instrument of his death, an axe, lay ready to hand. The men greatly admired James’s motorcycle. It would spark narratives long held secret and spoken in lowered voices.

He rarely thought of his own history, but now he did. He had turned hermit and built the wheeled cabin for good reason although he felt little eccentricity in himself, as most men believe. But he was wrong, wrong, wrong. Then he was slightly racist against black people. He’d known few of them, and these few were good soldiers, good lawyers, good whores, and good garbagemen. Then a few months ago he was assaulted by the motorcyclists in the Kentucky park. Even more he was racist against white Southerners and especially those who had religion. He imagined the white-hot righteousness of the man who shot his father during the confusion of the riot, which might be the essence of the man who’d told him the story about the slain bad seed. This righteousness, biblical, hailed by the loud and cowardly brethren, kept him awake at night when he was not copulating with Goodie. He twisted, he pretended to sleep, a haggard man in the morning, when it arrived with depressing horror. The Hendrix masterpiece “Hey Joe” would replay as an anthem over and over in his head. You only had to change “old lady” to “old man.” You could ride this tune through false sleep, sincere intercourse, and the solo trips he took on his motorcycle and in her Mazda with the sunroof down, CD of the sweet blue voice of Hendrix prevailing. Ride to where, where else but blowing the killer into his evil sky after all these years untouched by the depraved indifference of Southern law.

He did hate the Southern voice, with its presumed charm, even among its educated. The drawling masturbation of the mouth, the self-worship they knew as culture down here, and their frat-boy scions. He could shoot or burn down more than one killer with this rage.

Goodie was from California with a different voice or he couldn’t bear her, but even she was affected and went into a drawling mush-mouthed countryese when she needed more charm. In the service he’d known pleasant, smart, efficient Southerners. But their voices were an agony, a ball of grub worms in the throat.

With decent representation, given the overcrowded penitentiaries, a white man could expect about seven years or even less when he killed a man in the passion of revenge. You could premeditate and kill and be out in a tenure of med school, internship, residency. He might go down Mexico way or even study medicine in the joint. The newspapers and the NRA might hail him.

He’d once heard an adage: When you read military history, read standing and count yourself as one of the dead. In a book of essays on the Civil War, James read about Burnside’s stupid command in Fredericksburg as he fed regiment after regiment against Marye’s Heights, where rebel troops four and five ranks deep with nine-pound muskets and rifles loaded with ball and buckshot delivered volley after volley from behind a sunken wall and reaped a slaughterhouse against blind and ignorant Federals. Such a vast murder that Lee, atop his horse on the hill, commented, “It is well that war is so terrible or we would grow fond of it.” James threw the book down and sailed into a blind rage of swear words. He frightened Goodie, thinking the odd rage was directed at her. She stayed quiet for three days. Then she asked him if he was over whatever that was last Tuesday.

Now he held sway over her and heard no more scathing research of his personal clouded history or where his money was.

But he grew a new problem. He had lived in worse places than Lafayette County, Mississippi, much worse. On his sorties, people of all ages and callings were unfailingly kind to him, even when he was gruff or sarcastic. These were church people, pastors, police, riffraff, and elderly square-spitters, two Corsair pilots in the Korean War, a newspaper photographer, old blacks in Freetown, the county sheriff, old and young lawyers, and a professor who knew this Mississippi, a vertical rectangle of woe from the Gulf to the north hills, all the Indians, all the lynchings, and much about the ’62 riot. He spoke to the head of the university library and received patient guidance from him in the place he’d met Goodie and asked her out. Married her in days, maybe a fortnight, the ancient measure accounting for happy and tragic collisions forevermore.

He became a better listener although half-deafened by the running hound inside him. Young black men always asked him how much he would take for his yellow Ducati. This seemed to be a form of courtesy. They could not raise two hundred for it. They knew it, he knew it. Impossible to sell, he said. Know what you mean, they agreed. Smooth, smooth, you say Italian? He feared liking these folks, yet grew easier with them.

* * *

In Montana, Missoula, he used his deputy’s position to distance himself from men. In his office and patrol car he was a tyrant about silence, his conversation blunt, short, and dead-ended. Well respected though access to him was rare. Just a few years ago Montana, enormous and sparsely populated, its earth and humbling, humorless mountains stretched by horizons into beauty almost devastating to a man, was a force that drew mute isolators, some of them dangerous and armed. And free. You could drive ninety and salute an oncoming highway patrolman with a beer in your hand.

He was not a friendless man. He was close with pals in school and the Legion, who knew inside him was a big strange edifice he could give no key to. Grief is a strength after a great weakness, so he was told by his colonel once. Maybe that was Franklin James now and ever. The silence came on him when his woman quit loving him.

The Toronto of his youth was quadra-cultured, rich in art and big water, Ontario beyond the gorgeous wharf. A clean and efficient city. Safe for children to roam. His mother educated him early in two languages, her hands were soft on him. Her young beauty seemed permanent, but now he recalled only her long black hair pinned up or let down, and her mouth that kept whispering something out of shock long after his father was murdered. Possessed by disease and unaware her mouth moved while neighbors and his pals looked on, dismayed or embarrassed for her son.

He then despised his city for still carrying on and thriving, stupid as a giant horse towing a boxcar of shit. All things around him were noxious, frantic with idiocy.

He began to express himself in acts of sabotage and pointless theft and was never caught. He attended the very university where two statues were beaten headless by his sledgehammer. He was too sly. He loved himself as the professional innocent in the face of his good mother Celestine when she exclaimed about a fire-bombed city bus or his spray-painted masterpiece in the art museum. They were two against the world, but she never knew how far he took this war.

In Missoula his patrol was one through largely peaceable denizens and a few violent drunks, but once the actual Hell’s Angels stayed at a bar nearly a week. One of them beat up the girlfriend of a lawyer with a cocaine habit. After a night of sleepless fury fed by powder, he shot down dead this Angel in the street. James was first to arrive, before the city police. His hand never came near his weapon, snapped down by the tongue of his holster. The lawyer was staggering on the bricks near the body and its blood, waving his pistol toward everywhere and nowhere. With contempt and quick study of those who might be dangerous to him, he disarmed the man and led him uncuffed into the front seat of his cruiser. Wide fame for his coolness and restraint attended him. But he avoided interviews. No charges were ever brought against the lawyer. The Angel got what the Angel begged for. The lawyer cleaned up and praised Franklin James all over the town and all the Northwest where his practice led him into fortune and fame. James was promoted to deputy captain. He got a letter from his married ex-girlfriend congratulating him and assuring him of her true affection. He tore it to pieces.

He already planned to leave the force when out in the brown hill sticks toward Lolo Pass he drove a dirt road in the grounds of an Aryan survivalist cult and received a.223 round through his rear window from an unseen sniper. The act was so stupid he was incredulous. But he turned the cruiser around and told his sheriff it was a stray round from a deer hunter he had arrested and seriously warned.

Two days later he drove the same road with a new rear window in the car. He eased toward the settlement without incident.

Everybody was gone from the barracks, likely into their caves and bomb shelters, two of them Hitlerian bunkers smartly constructed. With a wheeled propane flamethrower he burned down all the barracks and the cafeteria, standing for an hour like a pest exterminator in a sculpture of boredom. He quit the force a week later. Then he knew he was capable of many, many more fires. Perhaps the art-movie house still run by his old girlfriend and her family, who now came to mind as gargoyles fallen off its roof and mocking him in roars and farts. He was wired his due salary and retirement money in Toronto while he visited his dying mother. The chief sent him a note pleading for his return to the force, at more salary.

He told Goodie only enough to satisfy her nosiness about his career and money. The French army continued paying him a good monthly amount for combat pay and the RPG fragments in his calf, for which he had due decorations. His mother had seen little of him for decades but she was proud of him now, even though she could do little but cry as the lung cancer took its last course to her brain. After he buried her he went completely within himself and away from the touch or voice of man.

He found the marvelous parks where ten or twenty dollars got you hookups without another demand. You chose your favorite season and moved to it on the Ducati with the hut in tow. His mother had left him more money. He spent almost nothing. Seeking further and further deprivations became as art for him, though he stole books and wrote with a pencil between the lines of these histories. He took two Gideon Bibles on rare visits to hotels, in whose rooms he slept for two days and destroyed the telephones, just for the hell of it.

To Goodie he told a true tale of unexpected riches.

“You mean off dead soldiers?” she asked.

“Yes. They coptered some of us over to Kuwait City and northward. We overran many corpses loaded with American cash and loot of all kinds. Some priceless diamonds. I got about half the amount of priceless in order to get the money in a bank account, but at prime interest rate. You might’ve seen the exodus of Iraqis on the highway cut up by our air, Mercedes, and Rolls-Royces.”

“I did see it. On teevee.”

“Other French and me were in the southmost tail of it.”

“A soldier of fortune.”

“Definitely.”

“You deserved it.”

He laughed. He liked his wife, silly as she was and screwed up, wrapped all tight. Everything was appearances to her, even when there was nobody to look on or give a damn. Our personal environment, she said, bespoke our tone, our pride.

“I’m working even when I’m not working right now. A longdistance project to make us even happier,” he said.

She nodded. “I’m hot for you, Franklin. Can I get some of that long-distance project from you right now?”

“I don’t notice one thing stopping us.”

He told her the next day he was fifty-four years old and that he’d been shaken by an episode in Kentucky when he realized his loneliness after four years as a vagabond in camps. The episode had brought him to Oxford and to the university library where he found her.

He was in his cabin reading and writing under his hundred-watt bulb at sunset in a Kentucky state park famous for its caverns. Came a knock on the door, not an odd event, and usually from a friendly ranger in aid to his safe and comfortable stay, say a black bear warning. From the war he was almost deaf in one ear but his right ear heard uncannily well. He found the.38 where he’d almost forgotten it in the toolbox. Strange and subconscious, because this rapping was different.

Thick woods stood fifty feet behind them when he opened the door. They were black motorcyclists. Their leader said they’d come to admire his Ducati and cabin. Like the Wise Men for the Saviour. But in leather and the minute he stepped out on the ground he knew he was in trouble. The leader said they would cut him bad with the knife in his hand and wanted everything he owned.

“Whether you dead or alive don’t matter to us but it’s up to you.”

The other three were opening the door to his hut when he told them, Stop. He had the pistol out of his back pocket. He felt the world and nature were begging him to kill them and, despite himself, he began to cry great tears of sorrow. All of his long grief broke out in his eyes. He could barely see the men under the station halo when they obeyed and spread out in a straight packed rank as if to die as one or rush him. He was cool when the tears stopped, very close to murder. He knew he would be exonerated if the law ever found him. All his service and medals backed him. They knew he would shoot and stayed as quiet as altar boys except for agreeing with him when he robbed them, Yes sir, Yes sir. In four bags was $104 thousand in baled hundreds. They put it all and also their crack cocaine and methedrine in his hut, the latter in big plastic freezer bags. They knew he was the law but could not imagine how he’d imagined this bust. They handed every bike key over to him and then stripped naked. He broke every spark plug he could see with his hammer, had a second thought and told them each to open the lid of their gas tanks and drop a lighted match into it. They were slow about this until he shot a round through the nearest gas tank.

When he’d got to Jackson, Tennessee, making only fifty miles per hour max, he had long since ceased being wily. He kept south into Mississippi, the very place he’d vowed never to go.

It was only when he rested in a motel in Holly Springs that he became aware of how lucky he was the black men were so befogged on their own product and he began weeping again, this time loudly, moans and rending sobs. Except for the Pakistani couple who lived in the office, no other people were in these rooms. This was a shame. He wanted others to hear him, hug him, and stay as company to his grief until it subsided.

The license tags on the motorcycles of the black motorcyclists read Mississippi. Once his weeping spell was over he was pleased by the idea they might find him again. He knew methedrine and carefully measured some grains into his morning coffee for the next several days. He kept a modest high putting eastward to Tishomingo and Iuka, where he bought two boxes of.38 hollow points simply because he was high. At the same Wal-Mart he bought new propane tanks. He felt free and less threatening than in ages, happy that somebody might kill him. He was not goofy, perhaps had never been, not once. James could not reckon what he was now but his dead father rose and stood inside him. He walked the earth of Tishomingo, but that chief’s magic was just a part of the spirit in his arms, legs, eyes, and preternatural ears so that he walked and glided on a narrow river impervious to harm and quite happy to be a burner and a killer when he met those who begged for him to guide their fates. He’d come near this feeling in the war but it had not filled him as in this time and place.

Immediately he went to work, which came easily. A tall lank man with acne scars, native of Oxford, swore to others in a café how his motherfucking yacht was tiresome to him now and he stood to gain more from the insurance on it. Another swore he’d had to drive up from Meridian in his wife’s Cadillac Esplanade, a nigger car, but his was in the shop. Still another with even more vodka in him was a wealthy minister built like a football linebacker. He had a televised Sunday morning sermon in his huge protestant cathedral surrounded by his wealthy congregation in Germantown, the affluent suburb of Memphis dense with white flight. This man too had a yacht on the Tennessee River. However, what called to Franklin James was this man’s erotic success with a divorcée who lived just off Highway 30 between New Albany and Oxford. Her real name was Teresa but she was called Goodie. He asked the men at the table to guess why. Grins went around. The minister had a wife and several other women, whom he described in detail for the delectation of the others. The church, he declared, was actually a castle and city unto itself as in feudal times. Here was much money to be made, many wives and single women in graduate school, medicine, the arts. These were often confused and lonely souls, you could not imagine the loneliness and compliance of these lovely, soft, and wet creatures, demanding he take them in all ways granted the healthy, wild prophet of God that he was. They may laugh, but he did believe and was beloved like King David of the Psalms, and what memory did we have of Solomon except for his wisdom and love songs? Men of many wives, concubines, the wives of other men. The other men grew quiet beneath this sincerity, a sermon itself, unexpected among drunks in a rib house built on stilts in a womb of granite hill near Pickwick Dam.

James harked to this minister four booths away. It seemed these men formed a club that met four times a year with the seasons. Each was a singular financial wizard, were men of the lusty world, and here was their chaplain, second-team All American out of Tulane in the late eighties. He could turn pro or turn demigod, so he went to seminary at Sewanee.

James was newly bathed, soap in a cold creek, but no longer had his thick bush of a beard, so his face was both sunburned and white. He might be a bargeman or professor. He wore round tortoise prescription spectacles that changed with light. He was happy, again mildly high from methedrine granules in his iced tea. Beside his plate of rib bones lay a Gideon Bible open to his pen, the matchless Pilot Precise rolling ball. Between the lines of Acts of the Apostles he wrote down much of what this minister said.

He was not unusual here. Most likely, since it was Saturday night, a deacon on vacation preparing his lesson for Sunday school, that was all. The minister who talked and bragged could drink an entire bottle of Stolichnaya vodka with no ill effects the next day. In fact he would preach on television tomorrow, a suntanned and berobed hunk of love with just a few white strands in his black hair. James was already in church with this man at the podium on the dais before him. He was a seeker of heat and light, attentive in the pews. The good pastor was not even drunk, just savvy and loquacious, as he described the geography, portfolio, and erotics of his circuit. He did not neglect his visits to the hospitals and to the shut-ins, the ancient lunatics of the rest homes so happy to will wild portions of their nest eggs to him. He told how his congregation loved him as a sportsman casting wide for bass and sauger, loved his prosperity, his fine auto.

But you might hurt and burn, thought James happily. This bliss I ride. On the edge of things there and then reduced to ash. He had just painted his cabin slate gray. After the fires he headed to Oxford. He threw away all the powder and crack in hides and kudzu all the way from Corinth to New Albany.

The minister had called his church the Neo-Fortress Village, out of California theosophy. The others were not too drunk to take him seriously. Franklin James also took him seriously. He watched him that Sunday on his motel TV.

The die was cast. He cared nothing for his body even though it was trim and well muscled from sprints through the meadows of everywhere.

After his heated affair with Goodie, after his marriage to her, once the preacher’s but available no more, he took trips to Jackson where he could stand the history of his father’s killing. There was the building with the newspaper whose clarion was well nigh the voice of Goebbels in the early sixties. Obfuscators of the weak search for the assassin. Then he was at the door of the First Baptist Church, a very big one on North State where the pastor remained a silent, good German with big hair, chicken guts, who never made a stand, never a whisper, about the Klan, the killer, their Old Customs, as racists would have it. These of the Southern Baptist Church bore the most sins as good Germans in apartheid sweetly. This is where the redundant sheep of fundamentalism took a stand on nothing, except for wanting the Jews to hurry up Armageddon in the Holy Lands.

Now he had burned a small church in the wildwood and despised the fact his guilt made him kinder toward small houses of worship.

He walked the grounds of the state capitol but did not go inside. He had no doubt that half its body were grandchildren of the blood that brought down his father. James knew that the advent of television and blacks owning their own guns had done as much for defeating the Klan and status quo as all the sermons and marches of Dr. King, because I told him so. He spat on the capitol grounds as much as salivation allowed him to. His hatred grew back to its perfect fury when he thought of his mother, a priest-bound sick woman who never achieved fury, only the flattened presenility of mourning, this vivacious French lady of culture, quickest to laugh a laugh in any room, the laugh that brought tears of thanks from James, then and now in his memory. She became a dead woman he could not bear to visit. All natural love was cut and down. He was too weary of his fury now, like bricks on his head until he ran down his man, who was very much alive and, a loud churchman, a tattooed deacon of the boondocks.

Why had he begun his mission so late then? Why had he circled it so long? Why the petty necessity of marriage to Goodie and in the near future the sophisticated immolation of the great cathedral in Memphis, venue of Goodie’s former lover, that pastor he had overheard in the Pickwick rib house? In which the organist died of molten pipes in avalanche.

He only half knew himself. And he could not have known the organist slept with the pastor and was thinking of suicide already.

I am still unclear whether after the first fires he appeared reincarnated as Captain Max Petraeus who began his long campaign of church arsons up and down the Mississippi Valley. He seemed too chastened for this after the woman died. He sent anonymous money to help the concert career of Jimmy Canarsis. But James’s vendetta against the old tattooed man was settled also, and you’d imagine also his love of flames, for a good long while.

* * *

The riot and anarchy on the Ole Miss campus in 1962 has often been called the last civil war, and I was square in the thick of it as a captain of the state National Guard. All that fire and shooting, three dead by gunshot and the shooter never found, against the entrance of James Meredith, a black man. What you had was both students and the Klan, with their fellow travelers. I had boys in my own command who wanted to join the rioters. It was rot, the last of an old cancer on us.

The Nobel laureate William Faulkner died in the hot July preceding the September riots. It was good he didn’t have to watch. He was a racial moderate, read nigger lover in these parts then, and left much of his estate to the United Negro College Fund. I mention him only to place this story on the map and call to memory, now I’m an old man, that not all of us were rot. I did understand much of Faulkner’s greatest books. Personally I disliked him as a snob who with no effort at all could have been kinder to the neighbors in the village we were then. He was passing strange and spiteful to many. You had to reckon with some conceit as birthright, which made him contemptuous of the very humble folk he was celebrated for taking to his heart on the written page. You will often see pure words in a great wash of self-atonement, no people necessary to them. Like your pastors of the pulpit James despised. If masturbation had an echo, he said.

Well James found me and made me honest, without threat. It was way high time I unburdened. I sit in front of a glass of peach schnapps on my lake south of town. Prime woodlands, thick elder pines, spruces. I was privy too long to the grievous matter. Now my hands are red, not a prayer of a peaceful death, but some wonderful living behind me with the wife and daughters so fine. I served in Korea, came home almost cursed with life after being with many gut-shot fellows with snow falling on ice, temp minus 30. It was nighttime, but I knew James’s man and had never divulged the true rot of him, although I brought him up on charges of cowardice. I believe I witnessed the event itself, him in a tree and raising the M1 Garand.

But there were all kinds of gasses in the air, all kinds of flares, gunshots, overturned cars burning. This done by handsome young frat boys. The man was dishonorably discharged from the army, but that was a slap on the wrist.

The town of Water Valley in Yalobusha County sixteen miles below us hired him, nevertheless, on its patrol force. One soggy night, say 1977, me and the old gang were coming back from an Ole Miss/State game that we’d won when a gust of wind like out of the Bible blew the state kicker’s try for an extra point backward from the goalposts. I mean dead missed a sitter. I was both drunk and speeding and this patrolman in Water Valley put his face in the window, sniffing around six old boys all soused and hollering. Guess who he was. He had his ticket book open and his gun hand on the butt. Oh he had some live ones. But he took a long look, went white in the face. Walked quick back to his black-and-white chariot all whipped around and ass-important with way high antennas, and just eased off ahead of us, like now, Captain, go ahead and arrest me please. All our gang, me and two of them who’d serve in the spoils of the Republican administration in three years, got soberer but I was white in the face, too, until I told them who that cop was, and they almost broke the car laughing, hooting. A charmed day all around.

But that’s when I learned the fellow had gone off into lay preaching and multiple deaconage around small county churches. I got white in the face as he was, all those pictures racing back from fifteen years ago, and the picture, the sickest. He did lay preaching along the white supremacy line, they said, not unusual for the race killers getting dug up nowadays by a reporter from the Jackson paper, the Clarion Ledger, and a special prosecutor out of the state attorney general’s office after forty-five years and more. I don’t believe I joined in the howling with the others in my van.

Somebody said something like all that is required for evil to prosper is the silence of good men. I count myself one of those. Too many of us stayed good Germans, a term I first heard in Eighth Army, Chosin Reservoir, 1950, staying quiet when a heinous thing is about like Hitler. The rest only knew him for a coward in the Guard, just now in the worst face-to-face you could pull on him. On race matters I remained quiet. You can’t overestimate the difficulty of my Guard command, largely filled by boys sympathetic to the rioters but serving John Kennedy much against their instincts. We heard this was a police action at Ole Miss, but there were eventually thirty thousand troops in town, tents everywhere, a way station for the movement of troops to south Florida during the Cuban missile crisis. Wild boys or insurgents from the Klan of neighboring states were dropping railroad cross ties into the windshield of Army Reserve troop carriers from the overpass on Jackson Avenue. Still, I sent the order down that if any live ammo was discovered off their belt clips there’d be hell to pay. We were pure bayonets regardless of provocation, just like the federal marshalls who were trapped inside the Lyceum with Meredith courtesy of a bulldozer driven against its door by the apostles of the lunatic General Edwin Walker, who led the assault himself with a goddamned cavalry sword. It was a miracle no more than three were killed, among them James’s father, a man I never put eyes on.

Our governor was Ross Barnett, a purebred mule-faced jackass rabble-rouser, about states’ rights and sovereignty, but when I was a young captain I did not think he was such a bad sort. He was our jackass, was the issue. Nevertheless I dressed my command and told them their asses belonged to the federal government and me, rough as it was. You had to keep an eye on them. You never knew what mean little bastard would break ranks and try to make a name for himself.

I told this to James at Smitty’s café just south of the courthouse and looked into his kind Canadian face, a face that had mesmerized me into this revelation over a good breakfast, eggs, country ham, redeye gravy, grits, the best big light biscuits. He ate the same as me, listened courteously without interruption. Then I saw the new look to him and knew that if the point of this story was that I killed his father, he would kill me on the spot with still the courteous look. It had been a long time since I had killed a gook or two. Not very long for him. Iraqis, the church organist.

The man was courtly. He out-captained me. We were just talking acquaintances, then, I don’t know how he did it. Suddenly when I got to his man in the tree that night nearly half a century ago, of all things I thought of the Lord. I mean Our Heavenly Father. I leave the Lord alone since Korea and hope He’ll do the same for me. You have to hand it to Him, He’s done a damned pro job of evaporating these last centuries. I can’t tell you the bodies, the pain. What was that about? Well, we turned South Korea Christian, and now our labor gets shipped off to them, Zenith TV and all. But it’s not worth one gut-shot private, one lance corporal from Wyoming with a sucking chest wound. What Lord? What wondrous ways His works to perform?

The secret spoke itself like a tired bad ghost walking out of my throat.

Then for a while I didn’t see him, only heard about the acts. I had peace for half an afternoon. But then my hands were bloody. My calm had a frown on it. Yes I’m going funny. This peach schnapps ain’t doing it for me.

He made love with Goodie with a writhing ardor she’d not experienced, perhaps, ever.

“For the love of God, thank you,” she whispered. She put on her kimono and white slip-on keds. Her body was remarkable. Without exercise except for five minutes of work and standing an hour around machines that would have perfected her in a Baptist hospital gym. Or remarkable because he stared at her as through a magnified pipe, and straight past her to their familiar replicants in a museum of devolution until the final sullen corpus, his man, stood at age twenty with the Ml Garand in his hand, a clip of live ammo snuck into its chamber, all the auto fires and tear gas and flares in the air, students shouting curses from as deep in them as the very heart of rot in Old Dixie. Punk Guardsman, punk city cop, his conversion to the Lord Jesus Christ and belting out hymns, earning thereby the right to walk among free men, even preach to them, the low son of a bitch. But he must have felt a bona fide hell at his shoulders these years, or something right around the next door he opened, especially after the firebombing of the little church where he had stood recently. Was the man his man, or was the man himself? What a stupid meditation.

He left two days later for the archives in the attorney general’s office in Jackson, three hours southward. The sunroof of the Mazda Miata was open. On the CD box was Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy. This sound like the reunion of a battalion in steel walls. Intense moments in Iraq, his sick mother. He needed more hate. Soon he was not rightly human. He could imagine himself howling on the street corner of a burning city. His eyes were wide. Purpose, what purpose did he serve against the lassitude of grief that filled his mother and himself all those years? Their avoidance of the topic and word Mississippi.

He found himself speaking aloud in French to his dead mother Celestine. In your hands how does the finish of this vendetta feel? He asked her. He recognized that all the earthly goods he’s heaped on Goodie, Teresa more now, woman of tears, were meant for his mother. He’d just bought her a new car, Saab SUV sculpted like a space shuttle. These days, like millions of the talentless, she’d developed pretentions to art photography. This black wagon would hold her leather and canvas cases. You were nearly a saint, Mother, and I deserted you, he spoke. Now “Hey Joe” by that Mozart of the electric guitar, Jimi Hendrix, grabbed and dragged him to Iraq, lolling beside the 105 as he watched men burn in their T-34s on the red horizon. Allons enfants to this good hell.

Unsolved, said the state. Unsolved means all senses hover, loom, linger, harken. Nobody, however, knows a thing for sure. But I do.

So his Teresa sleeps as his nightmare it moves across the meadow, hooves in wet clover, toward the charred ruins of the little church. Canarsis’s piano still stands, only half consumed, only half dead. The man, a sixty-four-year-old tattooed deacon and lay preacher. Destiny run toward him. James had the.38 and the wheeled propane and napalm flamethrower in the car.

Now in the cold January twilight he looked the man full in the face and told him to walk. The man had a round white ordinary face, more youthful than James expected. He held a pistol but James told him to throw it away and the man complied.

“Let’s walk to the pier where they found Jimmy Canarsis and saved him. You may have heard about his success on the concert circuit. He began at the Castellow Ford Center. Then Memphis, Philadelphia, New York.”

“Yeh. Why are you speaking these words?” asked the man, whose name was Dee Gale.

“Because Canarsis is so beautifully different from such sorry jackasses as us. Wouldn’t you like to have lived in complete innocence and made as much of your gift as he has, nearly burned to death?”

“You the man who burned the church?”

“Well, I did not finish. You seem to want something remaining in it, too. You came back to the charcoal. What would that be? Your pilgrimage?”

“It had a good true spirit to it, that giant boy on a piano that seemed like a kid’s toy measured to him. He brought God down from heaven with his music.”

“You killed my father, holy man. What was your favorite hymn? A man like you.”

They walked around the dam in silence. No creature stirred, all cabins were empty, the house ranger dulled like a sloth as he watched the evening news, settling in to his Pepsi and Orville Redenbacher’s sublime pour-over cheddar popcorn. The perfection of winter muteness, happily dead in the mind, his contented good woman close to hand. James imagined them in an alternate universe. The gun was in his right hip pocket, forgotten, the flamethrower easy on its wheels. They walked to the end of the pier in dogged duty. A beaver fell from a dead cypress with a loud percussive entrance to the water.

“‘Just as I Am’ would be the one. We all are worms with guilty secrets. He forgives all even though we are without one plea.”

“You don’t have one plea right now?”

“You notice I’m not screaming for help, like I could. I stand absolved.”

“I stand as your delayed executioner.”

“But I’ve got a feeling you’ve killed before. You stand guilty and unforgiven.”

“Can you do something for me then? Can you make up a hymn about why it was necessary to kill my father?”

“He was one those outside agitators helping bring on niggers adulterating our way of life. I only say this about the shooting. If the state thought I was guilty of anything but delaying these niggers I’d of been brought up on charges a long time ago. After what happened you didn’t find no French meddlers and liars in these parts.”

The flames were already reaching him then, and they kept reaching him as the napalm stuck. James was amazed the man could stand so long without taking to the water. He used a boat paddle to push the surviving stump of Gale into the lake. But the end of the pier was still on fire and he left in moderate haste to his car.

I watched him afterward. He was a kind of friend, always at Smitty’s talking over the good country vegetables, fried okra, collards, world-class cornbread. He had fantastic eyes, jarred awake like a man whose head had just been severed. He was the saddest man I’ve ever known.

I can’t know what you’ve heard of these parts, but there is law. More of the sheriffs voted, not appointed, into office, are college educated in criminology. Whatever that vague science is worth.

But no man showed at his door, no man raised a hand against him. Three men he knew, I was one of them, voiced the wish very sincerely that he would vanish from these parts, as he had from Montana. But no sheriff told him this. When James had swallowed it all he was dead for a while. He was in the tomb although the stone had been rolled aside for his free walk around the water or to the Arctic. This state with only a million whites is one backyard, and it is solid mouth to ear. Faster than you could trace it on the Internet, certainly faster than the sheriff’s office women could find it on those grandmother computers, the worst is known, the gossip is dead-on to the comma. The lynching of blacks by vigilantes is gone forever, hope to God. We have a new aristocracy and they are black men. Morgan Freeman, B. B. King, Muddy Waters, the ghost of Robert Johnson making his deal with the Devil at a crossroads on Highway 61. But we are a state that still loves the vigilante. The climate is ripe for vengeance.

Franklin James became friends with a black emeritus professor out of Rust College in Holly Springs. Amos Pettigrew. They shared some subject, it was unclear what it was for a while. Pettigrew seemed to hold sway over whether James stayed, fled with or without Goodie, destroyed himself, or lived abundantly, propelled like a bird from the opened tomb into wild freedom. Pettigrew was a calm force for both James and Goodie. She did not know she might be deserted for a while or for good. I saw Pettigrew’s old Buick in their drive many times. James told the man his whole story. Goodie was much afraid. The terror was all over her. She began a series of very expensive shopping trips. James, the killer, said nothing about this mania. He just stared at the bags. She acted as if the purchase of some choice item might be her soul and she could catch it and hold it in a shopping bag. Some of the bags she never touched, although they were full of goods, jewelry, God’s own amount of purses.

Dr. Pettigrew had degrees from Dartmouth and Yale. He had worn himself thin striving against the darkness in young blacks. He had left his heart in the college. Now he was a hoarse and skinny man, going to frail. He knew every living fact about the struggle for civil rights in this area, every night attack, bombing, miscarriage of justice, even every fistfight. I don’t know what afternoon exactly he told James he had burned up the wrong man. The right man was dead of natural causes. He had killed a man who emulated the dead one, dressed like him, had the same tattoos, the same voice, and was even fiercer and louder about his lay preaching and deaconry church to church with the biblical evidence for white supremacy. Two churches had obtained restraining orders against him, a first within anybody’s memory.

When I noticed the yellow motorcycle was gone for several days, I crept up to their bedroom window, yes, like a common Peeping Tom and at my sadder age. I had to peep and eavesdrop. What I saw I call pornography, or some order of necrophilia. She was lying on the bed in a black nightgown revealing an amazingly fit nudity beneath. She did not move for an hour, as if commanded to lie still by a man out of sight. But James was long gone. I could not believe that frozen specter was all about grief. That’s why I said pornography, some militant sexual exercise. I was guilty I saw her. My hands felt heavy when I crept back to the highway. They were bloodier and bloodier.

Out-Tell the Teller

Rangoon Green

Trophy Holder, Third Place in the National Storytellers Tell-Off

Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 2011

YOU MAY HAVE HEARD OF MY BEHAVIOR AT MURFREESBORO LAST YEAR when they announced the winner, runner-up, and next, third, that would be me. Of course I made a noise. The winner, a long-haired creature with a lute who read barefoot, slept with one of the judges, and I know it truly because I saw her disappear into his trailer at ten thirty the previous night. Second was the old bushy man who lived in Murfreesboro. He circulated a fancy brochure about his wins not only here but out west and up north. His wife made cheese sticks, the pepperish kind, and got a tin of them to each judge. If that ain’t cheating take me out to the pasture and shoot me. I’m still not over it. I don’t get over robbery quick. If ever.

After the second propane fire here in Oxford the marshalls came to my door at the liquor store near the airport, right next to Supreme Used Auto, which I also own as well as the bail bondsman office straight across the street. Yes, women do sleep in the cars of Used Auto, but that doesn’t make it an operation, a brothel. Men do come to them in the cars, but that is trespassing. If they have the keys to the autos, my right knows not what my left is doing. I cannot control sleepy women, poor gals down on their luck without the price of a motel, you can’t say a thing. How could I organize sleepy women off the highway, as a lawyer said for me once?

On the mean-o-meter, if there was such a contraption, all right, I might score high. But much of that is rooted in the acne on my face and shoulders. When I finally got to a skin doctor, he told me about recent discoveries about vitamin A that would have cleared me up, but it was far too late. I don’t look that bad except for the big pit on the left cheek, and there we have some serious ugliness. As a boy I hid my face behind the barn while others pissed and jacked off on each other. I have been called Frankenstein, Wolfman, the Flying Pitface. But what brought the marshall was the history of serious fireworks I had in the army, stations and bases in Texas, California, Michigan, and Georgia. Yes, true facts reveal I barely missed a court martial and did receive a dishonorable discharge from the bastards but that was twenty-five years ago, for making two oil drums rise a hundred feet with a propellant in my keeping. Just old boy fun but not to the sullen-ass army.

This smug Marshall Root, whose Montana ass shall be lined up for gutting after I have a word with my sidekicks Tico and Rez. The one Latino as it sounds, and the other named for his hesitancy to ever leave his bass boat and trotlines on Sardis Reservoir boat launches ten miles north at Coontown and sixteen miles west on Clear Creek, passing over the famous glory hole for bass, Tobby Tubby Creek. English for a long unsayable Chickasaw name centuries old. You can take centuries old and cram it. I don’t care a thing about naught but today. You get into your golden history and you just walk around with this paralysis of mud on your boots, ask me. Another marshall, Bitters, lording it over me, put a word on me such as I made him write down. Smell this diction: hypermnesia. I got red knowing he reviled me and my unswept liquor parlor. My woman in the back where we live ever lazy except in the science of nooky.

It’s plenty of room amounting to a five-bedroom home, two full baths, halls, kitchen, oversize pantry, wide screen porch where no mosquito or gnat penetrates. You ask about my woman, Louise. Well there she sits. Good figure, foxy in the face, some kind of coiled searching curls in her hair, shiftless as a hound dog in the song that eternal shaker from Tupelo, Elvis Presley, sang. She says she’s even kin to the man, and there is one rule when you hear this claim. The claimer is not worth a shit, but they want the throne. I do not beat women. My father’s violence toward my mother cured me forever of that notion. But Louise is hesitant to move even while looking crosseyed at a fly that got in the front screen door after some long-jawed whiskey customer has let it in. I say the fly on the end of her nose can be setting up his fly stand and tuning his fiddle and she’ll stay transfixed before she moves to another cube of air that might be flyless. After all my pains making the place ladylike for her, making it double the catalog lacey look so it would not be viewed as just a hell of a butt to a liquor store. Two HD televisions, purple drapes with cord pulls, satin sheets. And an even better set up on Lake Pickwick on the Tennessee River, which is flat-out a condo. We sit with the mighty there. Judges, expensive Memphis lawyers, a whiskey preacher out of a crystal cathedral, televised on Sunday. Well, I mean one, Dr. Quarles the Fourth, who could put away a bottle of Stolichnaya Saturday night and you’d watch that cathedral service Sunday morning, he’d be coming on strong fresh as a rose. Louise will loiter, but that figure of hers gets into action and you forgive and forget a host of sins. She can’t warm a pot of peas and who cares.

Did I tell the truth to Marshall Root, was I afraid, so fraidy that I caved into Marshall Bitters? About the propane missile that wound up in the city hall bathroom? Oh no, not on your ass. Fear don’t hunt here especially when it’s anybody at the counter in tie and coat. I wonder if the man knew I was marking him for death or at least serious maiming when he held me there with his badge out, blah blah blah. Of course I was guilty, but guilty only of a little fun. We don’t have a lot of raw fun hereabouts. And it was copycat, as far as that goes, except I started with fire in the army a good long time before these church fires began a dozen years ago. Let me put it this way. The army wanted me to work with fire and demolitions, then they did not, snuck to my back and called me down as some lame kind of example, an attack of conscience suddenly, oh no, what have we created in this master sergeant?!

And named Goon Green, formally Rangoon, because my mother liked rain and thought monsoons were a romantic weather period in the far-off gaudy East. Ignorant sow. Never said she wasn’t a good woman. Just that she was an ignorant sow and I cannot imagine another kind of mother. A smart, kind mother I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I did at last come close to killing my father when he was beating on her. That earned me the road and a duffel sack. The old man thought it would make me all sad but it was the happiest day of my life. That night I blew up his pickup outside the eatery where he flirted with a woman with big titties.

One side of my face is good looking and I was holding that half toward the marshall, saying, “I’m not only innocent, you will see a lawyer if you come back. The damage to my reputation as a businessman will come to many, many thousands, I mean you even being around.”

Not only the bondsman office, out of which I run bounties, too, sits across the street, but the big pawnshop is mine. Louise helps a little, shuffle, shuffle, moan, moan. I never heard anybody moan serving a customer like this woman. Goes against her looks, you understand. I free her to be a laboring feminist but her spirit is all fettered, an old-fashioned gal. Oh but liberated to hell when you show her a vacuum cleaner. “It ain’t elegant,” she says.

I can look a man in the eye and make him squeal. I can look a man fleeing from bond collapse and cry with his arms around my ankles. I began the pawnshop several years ago when I noticed the crack riffraff hanging around the corners of our fair little city. The Tunica casinos, where fat Wisconsin women play like they’re in Las Vegas, are an hour and a half away, but broke riffraff spreads out in a great radius topped by Memphis and bottomed by us. Let me say others saw them as riffraff, and these suspicious persons were picked up and prosecuted on the old vagrant charge when they couldn’t show fourteen cents in their pockets. But they also came with ridiculous merchandise on them if they could get to me before the cops got to them. I saw money in the trees while others saw just a nasty forest. This money tree might also include two gambling lawyers from the army in town. Well, they’ve got mini tape recorders, police scanners, fancy or antique pistols I need not know the getting of, as well as supreme boats with large engines. At least six in this town have lost everything to the casinos. They come to me for money. I can look their wife square in the face while I cut their husband’s throat, as a figure of speech, of course.

Before that Marshall Bitters got off the bastard went so far as to use the word maffick on me, and I asked him what? three times, the last with the curse he deserved. It means to celebrate. The marshall knew enough of my history to step off. Come around speaking maffick at me. He left confused. I was not confused at all.

I had my fingers in at least four pies, and here I’m not counting the boyhood fun Tico, Rez, and I had constructing that V-1 missile from the propane tank. The shell on these mothers is not strong enough to penetrate the ceiling and roof of even a flimsy church like the Free Will at the end of Van Buren East. You have to know liftoff angle and be certain your power is large enough to begin right off. This you do not obtain with merely a propane tank just lying there. Well, I did even better and got a SCUD that penetrated two roofs. City hall was an accident, but I will accept the admiration for it. I wish two lawyers had been working late and found this flaming tube in their lap. You ask why. Because it could be done. I did not think the marshalls would be at my door so fast, but I knew they didn’t have anything definite. Just tidying up a few loose ends. This loose end I told I would fold him five ways and stick him where the sun don’t shine. I look at people and they stay looked at. I’ve never laid hand on a bond jumper. They jump right back in the car with me, shivering. See, the bad side of my face, pitted cheeks and nose, does work for me. I’ve taken such as I was given, no whining, and manufactured a man nobody messes with, no brag. That side of my face also worked for me when I got the fingers in the pies.

Wilkes Bell is a common drunkard except he wears Armani and other Italian suits, aristocratic shoes of a deep grained shine so you know it. And subtle thick-weave ties. Has thick light hair, you know, tossed this way and that and curled back from his forehead. Rich delta daddy in chemical fertilizers and rice. And while he was at the university thirteen or so years ago he was an art student and even now had paint on his skin when he was in the store sweating through his suit. You could smell the liquor coming out of those pores. My nose is trained for your lush. Half of those sleepy women who bed down in the cars of Used Auto are lushes, of course, and some of their boyfriends. One day Wilkes Bell staggers into the liquor store and whispers, that is mildly screams, a secret he had about his person in a big Ziploc bag. Lord help me if it wasn’t forty or fifty thousand dollars of his uncle Anse Burden’s money. He wasn’t certain himself, since he’d scrambled around in it for a few night’s drunks. His uncle had left it with him for safekeeping, what a made fool this uncle was, and he was thinking to catch up on his tab here, $6500 with interest, and let the money hide with me in my freezer. When he described his uncle as a down-at-the-heels lay minister I feared nothing. So the damned fool leaves it with me and starts staggering around replenishing his thirsty liquor cabinet with the blurred math he always had, meaning a 20 percent markup on every bottle for me, and I do this stupid playacting as I delicately lift the money bag and take it to the kitchen. Funny part is, the boy had such an attitude about himself he thought I was being used by him, I mean this unbreakable attitude. Hair tossed back and forth like some genius conductor and sweat popping out on his forehead like fury. Well, when they walk right into the vault with money for you, you take it. He asked this sum minus his tab be refrigerated against the IRS or other long noses and I said you have it, I’m like an eagle on it.

He said it was the last of his uncle’s preacher money. Maybe he didn’t hear me say, “Indeed it is.” He couldn’t understand anything anyhow, you know that stretched careful way the very drunk have when they think nobody suspects but they are sober. My god, this boy lived in that outfit, always in a play doing sobriety over and over, the fool. So you know what a colossal gift he was to anybody needing an edge. You didn’t need much but to fake complete assurance it was business us usual.

Soon enough he flat out told me he was burning things. The church fires up and down the river were all over the papers and television. I doubted he was fit to take off from his labors at the bottle, this kid could do two a day, but he kept talking, in that god-awful shrieking whisper he thought was most confidential. Sure it was, all the way to Louise’s ears and the ears of Tico and Rez on the back loading dock in this large whiskey palace, working the airport and the filthy alumni who can’t get rid of their lucre fast enough when they’re here buying memories, all of them in some form of Colonel Rebel, the mascot, who looks like he could put away more than his rightful serving. If you want to know, I might not look it, but I could be half these sporting fools in button-downs and penny loafers and executive jets.

Not to get off my story, I listened to him about burning and it began to ring true. Because when he isn’t lying he takes a long time combing a part in his sweated-up hair, like he wants nothing to impede his veracity.

Still, how could he manage to do all that climbing and heaving of his demolitions and accelerants and stay out of suspicion all by his drunk self? Then it snuck out that he didn’t. I spotted somebody in the parking lot preparing to enter the shop and quieted him. The man wanted a golf cart to buy or rent and I kept a fleet of Harley-Davidson carts just next to the entrance to College Hill Road where lies the golf course. I don’t have a trade that doesn’t prosper.

But all through his histrionics I was in a state of delight because I do hate a church. I’ve been cast into darkness by many a preacher for the booze and the Used Auto. Isn’t it funny I get along fine with Dr. Quarles the Fourth at Pickwick in the condos and chicken-wing joint, although his massive church was also exploded. No dead, as with the big Roman Catholic cathedral. I say I was delighted, I was in fine fettle, anxious to get back to hear Bell’s whispery screaming and believing it.

Our good buddies the firebugs had a wonderful supply of napalm from some loosely guarded armory, I’d say the National Guard at any of a dozen bases. They’re even more prone to accidental leakage than our fine army, which is a laugh when you say security. You can’t imagine the waste in our services. There’s not a lost and found office big enough. I should know it, I worked this lostness personally for five years. Before they caught on to me. A small nation could whip California with just the crap that rolls off a convoy or an army railroad caravan. I know an old boy took home a fully operating.50 cal and ammo for a souvenir when his time was up. Now that is class.

But back to ready delight. I gave the man after the golf cart a good buy. If you keep a part of your trade fair then they’ll stand in line to be cheated next time. Et cetera with the drunk Bell boy.

He had got all mysterious but had two half gallons in front of him on the counter. He was hinting at something but was too drunk to get the right hint in, so I got immoderate. What in hell are you trying to say, just say it, you overdressed sputtering fool! So thick drunk he didn’t even take this insult in, although he knew I wanted the secret from him. Thing is, he didn’t give it to me promptly, and swore this business was very tight and dangerous. So next day I had my car curbside across the street just to watch what unfolded out of his grand apartment on the square. Soon enough, Wilkes Bell came down the stairs followed by a gent of middle age but holding it well and with that unmistakable rigor in the back you get from serious military time. They can’t help it. They don’t even know how to slouch anymore. A suit on them looks like a costume from a foreign nation. I guess it’s us lowly sergeants that get familiar with our slouches. Yes he stepped along in something rich, Brit, bespoke. I learned that term from Mrs. Ferguson in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. You could hear his heels click across the street, a man in a clicking contest when all they were up to was eating at the Bottle Tree Bakery on West Van Buren, bagel, lox, cream cheese. Big deal. Or you would’ve supposed it was because heel-clicker was deeply studious, and drunk (yes, eight in the morning) Bell was trying to ape his manner like an earnest monk. I knew our older fellow was the other fireman. He had hard eyes and that sort of dismissal of everybody in front of him so as soon as they quit helping him they ceased to exist. A major hate engine in him set on fast idle when it wasn’t wholly engaged.

Well I eased off to my much lesser acres without being seen, of course. If I play the better-looking half of my face right folks simply forget me, and I don’t mind, I work in the murk just fine. The other side makes people drop their dinner fork. I don’t mind, I just hate my parents for not having the drive to get me better treatment. They didn’t have the drive to learn their own language. I got my decent English from a middle-aged blonde woman with good legs who took pity on me and my temporary passion for books. I was so depressed I had no passion that lasted long. But she lasted long, Mrs. Ferguson. I wanted a style and she came near giving it to me. Another life. I’d been a harmless drudge at everything. Just lucky, I guess, best of both worlds even though my freedoms came late. I have finer points due to Mrs. Ferguson. You will see them, along with brotherhood, compassion, mercy. But I do hate church and loved the broken hearts all warming themselves by blackened rafters, warm stone, and melted glass.

But know we are speaking of two years while I remained innocent as a lamb, as to fireworks at least. Yes, I lay in wait like your alligator or your mule, who had a long mean memory that’ll all of a sudden flash out and catch you guessing with your underwear down and a hoof print dead center of your forehead. A gator twenty years until the time is perfect to eat a flamingo. This creature, tell me not, knows it has longevity. Even if what you have is a slug with little arms and one long slosh of a tail with vise-grip jaws. I lie in turds to accomplish the right moment. Even the promise of what I’d do to these specific turds, the bond jumpers, is enough, if I have that side of my face to them. Oh I’m licensed to carry a.357 Magnum revolver, but it’s never used. I believe the jumper knows I’ve yet to use it and hastens to the backseat of the car not wanting to be first under the gun. The only fights I’ve ever had were with two women. I guess they thought I’d be a gentleman. Some shocked fool standing on tradition. They slugged me. But hit bad once, almost everbody sits down and asks the quickest route to jail. And I did swat them good.

I’m working on a children’s story as well as my entry to that corrupt gallery in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. If I detect certain biases I plan to be not only assertive but persuasive. I don’t care if third’s the highest I ever placed. Many a listener told me I was the clear winner. Explosion bears repeating. I love being a bad loser. I got a hard-on for unsportsmanlike. I get to mock both fire-setting Bell and partner and the angry, miserable sheep inside what used to be the doors of their houses of worship. But why, why, why? you ask. A grown man with my skills, how can I stoop to this like the others wreaking havoc.

Poetry, I think, is the answer. To live that zigzagged deathlessness of the poem, as taught me by Mrs. Ferguson. It’s how you know you’re young, you’re a gamer, and bantam rooster, your face in a curl of loogie-launching at the law. And that is paradise, to confuse the police with half their eyelids down over yellow eyes. Flies on their head, lazy waddlers who’d rather do nothing except compare their muscles, shoot at the range, and beat the heat with beers and chattering wives in their cheap-ass project houses where they all, except the chiefs, commiserate about their punk salaries and hard service.

I had my time in glory with these people, or their military equivalent in Georgia. The charge: blowing up useless surplus shit on the firing precincts, harming red dirt. Experimentation. I’m not kidding. I was too old for a juvenile delinquent and what’s more a master sergeant. The brass knew my projects had been going on weeks before they decided they needed a whipping boy to take the higher brass’s eyes off another big scandal of their own, and that would be a wife-swapping club fueled by the liquor of Uncle Sam. Yellow-gilled loafers. I was at least employing my skills in the future guerilla actions of Their Man’s Army. Blowing up a few gasoline and ancient artillery barrels, launching a short arc missile, things to save some of our boys’ lives woeful down the line. So a bus ticket to ride I got at age thirty-two and a reaquaintance with my father in his putrid lounge chair. A letter arrived and I didn’t have to tell him about the dishonorable proceedings because the old woodpecker got to the mail and opened the letter addressed to yours truly. I picked him up by the shoulders and came close to killing him, but it was the worst day of my life because he never stopped laughing and the old lady called me a rottener name every time I swatted my honored patriarch.

So I was sent into all parts of trade by necessity until I had constructed my own realm, which I did here in the swanky back end of my liquor store. Oh, I had fun with the bonds and the jumpers and the drunks charging way over their head, taking care of the blurred math for them. It is always a hoot to see a lush get an attitude about charging booze, as if he’s earned a pricey berth and can’t be bothered with small change. Still, he’s overcharged and doesn’t even scratch his head, because he’s weak and guilty and feels he owes the world. Or he sees the pitted side of my face and my unnegligible bulk in arms and legs and understands it is not good to call this man a liar.

On the other hand I have been bemused by this burning. I know Bell doesn’t have the drive. He’s been to the drying-out clinics about four times, then promptly appeared at my counter like a boomerang that came the world around, stopping in exotic clinics long enough to make off with their terry-cloth robes, a thick oozy warm for his travails through the shakes. The man has worn these robes with, say, “Palo Alto Chemical Dependency” or “Dr. Fang’s Heat Cure” on their front pockets to the store, and shower sandals like such as you and I have never even seen to buy. I’ve given him dribs and drabs of the money, less his tab, which could launch a small satellite into space.

I understand he’s now in constant quarrel with this uncle, but I fear little from a lay preacher running from the IRS.

Now comes a hard pass for me to set down but I feel it necessary you even know the, well saltier parts of this man who was robbed down to third place in Murfreesboro and for the last two years failed to place. See here, you now have gay hillbillies and phony hillbillies who’ve studied in the drama department in Knoxville or Louisville. Yes, Asheville, too. It’s not fair that these ringers win. But I was a good loser to these privileged little weasels anyway, and as an artist I withdrew to my studies on my long-awaited children’s book. Me and the wife have no children. But I’ve made a story for the little ones a goal all my life, and I know what moves, what bores them. It’s a bookish town and I join right in. I was once with a friend, a writer, and we visited the great historian Shelby Foote in his Memphis mansion. I’d brought a gift crate of good whiskey to him, which he deeply appreciated. He showed us his working study, his foolscap and the nibs on his pens, which he ordered from the only place in the world that carried them anymore, a town in New Jersey. So I obtained for myself the staffs and nibs, ink and mini blow-dryer that completed the kit of the Civil War master and go about my slow but careful work. The antiquarian process slows the head until the absolutely correct word comes to it, so it is slow going and brain beating. I stay in my study and dress in a business suit, with tie, for hours, hours. This child’s tale is not all for kids, but one of hurt and early hardship, which the boy works through with wiles and slyness. I can give away that much. My wife is charmed I’m in there looking good and working so hard. If it’s good enough I might even publish it myself instead of having some far-off New York printer steal his cut.

But here is the hard pass, much harder to tell than Who’s Laughing Now?, the child’s book. Now five or six years ago we had several odd fogs come over the town. You couldn’t find my liquor store, the airport shut down, it was unsafe even to drive until about ten in the morning. I’m writing. If I come out of my “den of the scribe” in my suit and catch a woman customer waiting, I could be irresistible to her. Some of the wimmens, they like rough faces and boldness. Ahead of myself here. These fogs kept up but one morning I heard a plane buzzing out of it with fog thick as soup and wondered how this pilot ever got clearance when the tower itself was shut.

Then who comes in all sprawling and emaciated, whirling his rich thick mane of hair around but Wilkes Bell, drunker than I’ve ever seen him. Instantly he’s asking for the money in the freezer bag in my kitchen where no man goes. It’s just a thing with me. I tell him it’s out gaining interest in Harley-Davidson stock, which was true about the thirty K he had remaining, and that you just don’t move that money around, it’s got to stay to grow just like a seed. From the little scripture I know I cited Christ in favor of interest when he said the master had reprimanded the man who hid his money in fear of the master and congratulated the man who put his money out to make money. Some of the money was in H.D. stock and climbing. Then he told me the plane that just left was his uncle Ray flying to the bedside of a dying pilot he’d known in that old Iraq war of ninety-one. The man has no money and it’s all my fault! he cries out. I’m quiet. Not quite a man of stone. Then quit drinking and I’ll see what I can do, I tell him. At which he goes berserk and ends this flailing drama by begging for a bottle of Wild Turkey. His thirst is approaching the danger point, he says. People could get hurt. Sure, by your throwing up on them and/or falling off your balcony, I say, handing over the bottle. He left with two.

Then he spoke with his back to me. “Do you know who blew up the storyteller’s stage in Murfreesboro, Tennessee?” he asked. I gave a long pause, I governed it. “No, but I wish I did. That place needed refreshing, a real makeover.”

“I went up and saw you tell your tale,” says Bell.

“Well, you went but were promptly thrown out for drunk before the competition started.”

“It made the Memphis paper, which I’m sure was its aim. This drunk is more aware than you know. It wasn’t till after your tale telling that I was fully wise to your coming on as a homey old pea picker. It didn’t work. Whoever blew that pitiful stage up might pray for certain of his acquaintances staying quiet. For a half column of newsprint. It wasn’t very mature or original.”

He’d had one or two nips from the bottle, but this is the most forceful I’d ever heard him. The change took me aback. I went mute, then placed my hand on an original billy club I’d made from a child’s bat. This action surprised me, because I never intended to harm Bell. His business was too good and just too interesting to give up. I believe I was scared.

“And you and your broomstick-up-ass buddy are mature, of course.”

“We are constant, you hunk of burning white trash.”

He walked on out, a changed man, a man with sudden convictions. The fog lay out so thick he disappeared into his dented Saab SUV with only the sound of the door to give him away, ten in a July morning. This fog, I say, I’ve never seen the likes of it. Curling around getting thicker like in a stew pot. But none of this is the embarassing part, which came almost immediately. After Wilkes Bell’s car left, some other car rolls into the lot and a form walks to me slowly. At one or two times in a man’s life he fears everything in his world. Such was this figure closing to me out of the insane weather; I swear I saw hell walking and shook. But it was only a woman. I’d worked myself up to a lather.

Here’s my secret: I lick the sweat off women.

And I do sing as I lick, it’s an involuntary thing with me, a lullaby or children’s graveyard whistling. I believe it proceeds from the id part of Freud’s teaching. I saw droplets of sweat or fog or both on this delicious young lady’s back. I was still in my formal composing suit, which in afterthought might have reminded her of Wilkes, and I was around the corner and in a deep suck thitherto, a word I’d been working out lately in the child’s book. My arms around to that sweet depression above her rump as the back convexes itself, my tongue busily tasting, my senses way heated and wetness spreading down. Well, she did take offense, but she was too stunned to take immediate action. I’ve had two who returned the licking, beside themselves, and then turn sick. I tell you that if my woman Louise was up front, which almost never happens, I’d be doing the same thing.

She shook me off with surprising strength, but then I remembered she was a dancer and aerobics instructor. I offered my handkerchief and quickly said, “You’re so wet, beautiful, and sad!”

From fury she changed to a broken creature who was simply lost as to how to act.

“You ought not to do that. Maybe you think I’m somebody else.”

“You came in once before. I can tell you’re normal. Some women suffer from unceasing sweats. I know you because you came in once and Wilkes Bell talks about you in words sublime. I’m a writer and a yarn spinner myself.”

“You don’t call that horrible licking attack anything but crime.”

“I’m sorry but something that sweet can’t be a crime.”

Well, she drilled me with hatred in her eyes and then she did almost collapse.

Women’s throats in the summertime, that perfume and randy ooze the fairer sex has that we don’t. So I’ve out and said it, and it’s nothing I can help and lucky nobody’s turned me in to the law. Five of them positively enjoyed it, and never knew they would until I was across the counter fast as a werewolf and as thirsty for salt as a sponge. Oh I lick them.

This woman was Charlotte Barrios, girlfriend to Bell. She’d never been here before.

“I’m sick with worry about him. Something’s come over him where he thinks the end is near. He’s nothing but woe and morbid surrender. He is changed to an upright corpse and just stumbles along.”

“Miss, that’s the normal style. He was just here saying those kind of things and hurling around like an actor from a great tragedy. For god’s sake, he’s a drunk, Charlotte.”

“Who are you? You with that huge bow tie. Bob Cratchit? You can’t just. . lick a woman without. . consequences.”

“It’s not my choice, Charlotte. It’s an old compulsion. I’ve had treatment.”

“Well you need more. You’re lucky. . What is wrong with him? Where had he gone?” She was all to pieces again and I knew I was safe.

“I’ve a feeling he will keep to a small radius unless somebody else is driving. Wilkes is one for diablerie,” I said, taking charge in my composing suit, my best shoes and shirt. I matched that ass Bitters for obscure names.

She just stared at me.

“I was so worried I drove over to the delta to see if his folks could help. It’s no secret he’s been a mess for years.”

They’re all hopeless trips. He speaks of them. He speaks of you. I know.”

“Fuck you. You can’t know.”

The cursing surprised me, but then I looked at the full buffed bod under that warm-up suit of hot pink, and it didn’t. How did Bell ever hang on to this?

I get a good neck sweat of my own eye-drilling her right back and by use of the eye on the good side alone I see her as a long picture of bare beige woman. Christ, if I’d had a golden youth to pour all over her. My eyesight was your abstract impressionism, probably. Maybe he painted her nude? The idea almost brought on another dire need to werewolf her.

“No, I never was his model,” she answers, then sits in the counter chair, moving and crossing her legs for most of an hour. “We met when I saw him in a drenched suit with a brown paper sack of liquor six years ago in the Grove near the art department, maybe early October. Skinny where if he ate a full meal he’d look like a snake that swallowed a biscuit whole. That old cliché. I pitied him and told him he’d get in trouble. No liquor allowed on campus. What got me was his courtesy even messed up as he was. His big gray eyes so concerned for my well-being. You knew he was from blue bloods. His voice was beautiful. He said he had a weakness for painting, painting those fires, in fact painting was all he had, my man, and that day we met he was too drunk to remember where the Fine Arts Building where he’d spent four years was. I’ve seen him lose his car for an hour and a half after we tried to attend a Tulane football game.

“He told me his father despised him, was rather proud of it, then told me he was capable of great harm, his father was lucky. His courage struck me. Never did he complain of his own misery, which was constant. When I guided him to his own show that first afternoon, I saw he was a good draughtsman but had not broken out to another dimension. Maybe he was on the edge of it. As in dance when you do a skilled presentation of the movements, but not the true movements. He felt deeply and gave directly to the poor. Was wonderful with black children.

“Said he knew what I was thinking about his work, how it was not there yet but that life, not study, would give it to him and there was a black burning maw in the earth that ate the spirit of people and spat it back in the image of frozen brick and glass. In short, churches. He also said we did badly at peace and needed catastrophe closer by to stir us to life. These United States had made too many artifices between life, dirt, and blood, and every day we should do a good turn to a poorer person and give this person our flesh, dirt, and blood. In our world people were waiting earnestly for a happy deep-blue square of death.”

“Whoa?” I say.

“He was not a reincarnationist. He was assured of misincarnation, where millions had just missed being born to their correct art and spent their days in sorrow wondering what was wrong. When what was wrong was that they were forced into occupations and beliefs they did not match, unhappily squirming toward their correct skill, even their correct bodily shape and health, and most of all, the fact that they were at one neither with their skills or their loves.”

“He had time to think all this up? Or did he have a teacher? I never heard it, and we chewed the fat for hours over one bottle of single malt, Charlotte—”

“Wilkes said he was born into yet another category, perhaps the worst. That is getting born almost into your right form, almost a painter or almost a happy, loyal son. He squirmed every second, he stared and glared, he lay in cotton fields drunk under the stars in two-thousand-dollar suits. Suits to put a good face on his misbirth. To help his fellows and especially the black children see that you could bear bad luck in style.”

“Please, this is quite enough talking. Have some water, lady. Frankly, old Wilkes, for all the hours we talked, was not that original a man. He was all over the place drunk but at the bottom of it, dull normal dressed up and forever wanting that next drink—”

“No!” Now she was angry. I was baffled why. “He drinks because he was a friend of the poet-philosopher William Blake, but he’s better than Blake, I think. The Misgenitor is the villainous force in this world, he says.”

“I see more sweat on you neck. Could I—”

“God, no! I can’t believe he spent time with you. You hold the money of his uncle in bondage, you with the tongue, and that queer, what? old-timey poet’s suit, if that’s not misborn, you horrible old fuck.”

“Woman, you should—”

“You shut up! You don’t deserve to be in the same room, the same town, on his road. Now he’s just out there lost in the damned fog. Someday his painting will become as natural as rainwater to him. He tries, he hurts himself so badly for it. A mystic in the middle of yahoos.”

Her voice was rising and I heard Louise rising in the back. I was in a state. If she had come out front I’d have swatted her. Privacy reigned here.

“Lady,” I said, “whoever told you you were that interesting? Come in my store. I am not a goddamned ear you work on till it’s callused all over.”

But then God, there’s always a woman. Those death-row-marrying kind. She’d been up for nights and couldn’t do anything but talk like one of those heads guillotined and fallen in a basket. That weird fog creeping outside.

The price you pay for some harmless licking.

Some months later Green was back from another storytellers convention in Tennessee and had not even placed. He did not speak to his common-law wife Louise for a week. He took to drink himself for the first time in his life. You could then hear him cursing in impotent rages through the curtains and back in his domicile connected to the liquor store. He would peep through the curtains or push only his face out through them if he heard a familiar voice at the counter run by his men Tico and Rez, who spoke very little anywhere, any day. The disattached face was red and puffed like the ass of a baboon, fearsome, fearsome and foreign even to customers who thought they knew him. When he heard Wilkes Bell baying for vodka he was way back in his “study” with the book but he was out of the curtains instantly and rushing around the counter in his jockey briefs, tall and gangling, specked by liver spots and sagging teats, sparse white chest hair. Bell was shocked into a long fart and a near blackout. Green dragged him back through the curtains as four other customers watched with a quick sickness. Green drew up a beach chair and pushed the floppy Bell into it.

Then he hauled him and the chair over to his desk to read the Wikipedia.

The No. 76 was an incendiary grenade based on white phosphorus and used during World War II.

The design was the suggestion of the British phosphorus manufacturing firm of Albright and Wilson at a time when the UK faced possible invasion by the Germans. . It would be used by organized resistance units as part of a last-ditch attempt.

It was a glass bottle filled with white phosphorus, benzene, a piece of rubber, and water. Over time the rubber dissolved to create a sticky fluid that would self-ignite when the bottle broke. The grenade could either be thrown by hand or fired from the Northover Projector, a simple mortar; a stronger container was needed for the latter and the two types were color coded. As any breakage of the glass would be dangerous, storage under water was recommended. Like the sticky bomb it did not engender much confidence in its users.

Mark 77 bomb.

The MK-77 is the primary incendiary weapon currently in use by the United States military. Instead of the gasoline and benzene fuel used in napalm, MK-77s use kerosene-based fuel, which has a lower concentration of benzene. The Pentagon has claimed that the MK-77 has less impact on the environment than napalm. The mixture reportedly also claims an oxidizing agent, making it more difficult to put out once ignited.

Use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

MK-77s were used by the U.S. Marine Corps during the first Gulf War and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Approximately five hundred were dropped, reportedly on Iraqi-constructed oil-filled trenches. They were also used at Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

Green held Bell by the back of the neck, forcing this matter on him. Bell was shaken but he had the vodka open nevertheless and nipped, then raised his head enough to drink from the saving bottle.

“Read, son. You read this and maybe your saint uncle’ll see his forty K even though you drank it up long ago. I saved you by the investment.”

“Why am I reading? What investment?”

“Even in these lame prime-rate times, you’re a lucky-assed loser. And you know damned well what you’re reading. I’m warning you.”

“Please. Get your hand off so I can get drunk enough to read, Goon. Items of fire. Items of fire. Napalm, phosphorous. Where’s the joy here? Your face. You’re drinking?! God, do I look as bad as you? Red ass of an ape?”

“I’m not used to it. But you shut up and read.”

“I will read.”

He read about Greek fire, naptha, and thermite, thermate-TH3. Then he read about the fat bombs project, WWII, proposed against the Japanese whereby these winged creatures attached to incendiaries would fly into wooden homes and castles. Wilkes Bell wore horn-rimmed spectacles, pulling at his sweated yellow collar against his pink tie, his throat well wet and slightly yellow itself. Pondering soft hawk’s face near emaciated. He felt Green at his shoulder not as a sodomist. He drank a long one from the Stolichnaya and wondered what the proper reaction would be to remove this long naked threat from his back. He chanced a look sideways and never completed the word no before Green was fastened on his neck and licking with such force it felt subdermal.

Bell reared up shaking away Green’s mouth but the witless man still licked the air.

“God, man! Is this the end of the world? It was only women up to now. Anse got the last one to drop charges, insane bastard!”

Goon stood bereaved but mean in the face while his woman could be heard bellowing in a separate grief about a kitchen grease fire. Green ignored her as he tucked a loose gonad back into his briefs. Loud sad world and stinking, hog flesh and smoke. Both men standing thigh high in its wreckage. Mutual scholars and addicts of fire. Just over the north hill a jet screamed down to concrete. Out in the store the premium brands were pushed forward for these wealthy alumni and their sparkling second wives.

“I ain’t myself,” Goon apologized. “Where am I, what’s that burning smell?” Neither man turned to watch or hear the woman, her bare feet and legs scattering beneath the pan she held. Both deaf by liquor, Bell in an appalled trance.

“I believe your house is nearly on fire,” said Bell.

“Mizz Ann always manages. Good woman but got large in the ass on me.”

“Goon, you got weird prominent titties. Be kind. You have much to worry about.”

“These pages you read. That’s your scripture, ain’t it? Say you never get caught, s’how you work. Now I’m up on you. Got you in my sights. You tell Mr. Max Petraeus watch my smoke on the next pyrotechniques!”

“I’m telling you, you might already be dead for that propane rocket in the primitive church.”

“Dead how? Do you believe I fear any man in this town? Look out that window and you see maybe a fifth of my empire, fool.”

“I see a car lot, a bait shop, beauty shop, bail bonds office, a fleet of golf carts. Why are there iron bars on the bond building? I thought you were so tough and pro you could talk the shotgun off a maniac.”

“I can in fact. But I want to give back to the community. The office is a home for battered women at night. I found the one in the back through my work there.”

“I believe that as much as I believe those three whores prowling the used Cadillac section are flying nuns.”

Another executive jet, purple and gold, squeaked and stormed with blowback, made its keening cry as it turned toward the radio shack. It was game day, LSU richlings poured in, the noise of two tigers aiming squarely at the liquor store, where on the airport side Tico and Rez, with Bell’s painterly wit, had made a great billboard, with and deep, “FIRST STOP LAST STOP” bordered by the fierce helmets of the Southeastern Conference, whose boasted brutality and speed had long ago raised a sport to religion.

The kitchen fire was on the walls, Green yet clothed in only jockeys and Cole Haan brogans. He turned with low interest to the kitchen, walking like an unconvinced zombie to it even as Louise screamed louder. He slammed a door behind him. Bell managed a swat of vodka huge enough to straighten him out most genially. Next he knew the door opened on white smoke, dense but no flame. But both of Goon Green’s shoes were on fire. Not so that Green noticed. Backwater Mercury blasted down by antiaircraft rounds.

“Look down,” said Bell.

“Why? Well just fuck it.” He stomped himself left and right. Success at last. “Now what danger to my person were we talking about.”

“Petraeus. A man who does what he says.”

“I would put it another way. Say this: With what I know I can bury the both of you. You drunks can’t wait to tell a secret. Mr. Petraeus ought to kill you for starters.”

“He really doesn’t care that much. But he won’t stand for mockery. This is twice now. The armory at Millington, maybe Hattiesburg, too.”

“Didn’t I ever tell you the fact our government military is just plain stupid. Sure, you’ve got your experts. They move shit around and make noise. But they lose things and steal things right and left. You’ve got majors simpler than a cow, and a cow’s not good at anything but hiding her calf.”

“So you stole from then blew the sides out of two armories.”

“Impossible. I’ve got witnesses I was nowhere near, whenever they went off.”

“But you made me read the pages. The point was? Was any jackass who can move a mouse can build a bomb. And you’re in the big league now. But I asked you before. Where’s the joy? What makes you put a foot on the floor when you wake from the bed?”

“Like you with booze? The next drink?”

“Like me with booze, with art, with Max. My woman. My dear uncle. Really good raisin bran at midnight after a bender.”

“What a list. Somebody might mistake you for busy.”

“They’re not going to mistake you for breathing if you don’t stop. Now give me Uncle Ray’s money.”

“No can do, not now. Your unc gets nothing if any harm comes to me. And both of you get bad, bad assfucking big houses.”

Bell stood sodden with alcoholic sweat that made his suit feel heavy and absurd, a deep-diving outfit with globe head, lead pants. At once he felt the ghost of violent corn-holing in all this gear, weighted perfectly for bitches of the pen. He was out in his Porsche speeding up to leave the precincts.

At this moment a belch of fire raised most of an unpowered plane over the radio shack so you could see it over the smooth-lawned north hill whose south descended to a line of hangars for the new jet port. The explosion was terrific but seemed to be without human consequence. Bell was so used to exploding churches behind him and deaf from vodka he remarked it not at all.

No screams played out. The accident seemed to raise no further interest than a random column of swamp gas. Bell was far into his own land and recited as one hypnotized several facts from the pages he’d just seen in Green’s house.

“Napalm. . invented by Harvard president James Conant and colleagues at MIT Dupont, and Standard Oil. . mixing napthenic and palmitic acids with gasoline produced a Vaseline-like yellow paste. . burned slowly, stuck to materials. . could not be put out. Water only splattered this jellied gasoline. . hit the side of an edifice, run down it, find every opening until it consumed itself.”^*

Green, like any nondrinker after nearly a full bottle, had sprawled out cold in his “study” recliner, smelling of burned leather, his brogans, still smoking, pages spread over his lap and strewn all over the room. The unreconciled gonad had crept out the slit of his jockeys again. The liquor bottle clutched by its neck as in a lewder Norman Rockwell village hearth-warmer. His woman then stood over him. The hang of Green’s hammer was no less a thrill and she knew secrets he guessed she didn’t, despite the mumblings to Tico and Rez. She was frightened seeing him drunk the first time and by the close explosion over the hill he had slept through. She was a woman slightly more handsome than rough-edged, spoke proper English, knew how to dress and show her long legs in slitted skirts that made Goon and other men hot around the forehead and lap. What she looked upon, in his shorts and burned shoes, was not a feast of love unless she followed his lead and poured down the whole bottle.

When she was on fire in the kitchen he showed no urgency saving her and did little but become a shoe torch when the last grease was slung out of the pan. The smoke detector was screaming, the stove wall burned, but it was her hand on the extinguisher when she remembered its existence. Next that fancy lush Wilkes Bell was leaving fast, the explosion erupted. There must be a string flowing through these events but she could not find it yet.

Goon was no sloppy man but look at all the ransacked pages off the clipboard on his lap. This moment marked a bad, a maybe terrible thing, she was certain of it. And not much else.