Ray

XII

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

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

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

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

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

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

She went and got the Vaseline.

None of this should happen, but it does.

“What have we proved?” I ask Sister.

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

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

“Not near filthy enough for me.”

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

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

Sister lit a cigarette.

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

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

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

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

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

“All right, I’ll do it.”

“I appreciate it, Sister.”

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

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

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

“I need to make love too much.”

“Ditto,” said I.

“And pretty soon, I want it again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So now, class, I say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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