Smith poured Southern Comfort in a Pepsi can in order to make it through his lectures, which seemed a crucifixion. The crippled girl Angel B. seemed satisfied, liberated more thoroughly and writing even worse. As for his own heart, Smith wanted to get rid of it. He missed his wife terribly. The thing pounded as if it were an enormous fish in him. He was barred from his old home. The band was angry over his lack of endurance on the drums. One night Drum brought him over some chicken soup, vitamin B, and gluconate. He was worried.
“Look at you. Look at this room,” he said.
Smith’s SS overcoat was spattered with white paint. He had painted everything instead of cleaning. He had painted even Minny’s dog. It was under the table licking itself. He had nailed bedsheets to the floor. The novel he was writing was strewn out in copies all over the musical instruments. He and the band were singing his novel. The children from his first marriage were not allowed to visit him anymore. He had been fired at the college. Bare inside his overcoat, with a Maltese cross made by Drum hanging from a chain around his neck, he had grown so thin that his wedding band had fallen off somewhere. He was now almost pure spirit, as Minny called him.
“We need your big heart, Paul. The forces of good need you. Technique and facts and indifference are out there winning. Money is winning, mere form and the tightasses are winning. Commerce is making the town uglier and uglier. We Christians need you. You’re giving over to low anger and spite, drinking away your talent. An old bad thing coiled in the dust, that’s not you.”
Smith poured the remainder of a jar of cherries into a mug half filled with Southern Comfort. The overcoming taste would remind Smith forever of his last days in this town.
Drum had made the mug. On it was an ugly face with a cigarette in its lip. It was one of the forms of “Sarge,” an old army drunk Drum had known in Panama. The man had been only in his thirties, like Smith, but already grotesque. He would line up for review every morning, everything wrong with his uniform, but with a tiny smile and ruined goggle-eyes, maimed in every inch by the night before. He’d been busted from sergeant four times.
Later Smith fought with the band and threw them out. Minny ran out of Valium. Now living was almost impossible without constant fornication. People with police records began showing up in the house. Some played musical instruments or sang, then stole the equipment. One night while he was plying Minny, who poured out high spiritual sighs, he had to have a drink. On his way to the kitchen, he caught a thief in the house. The man sprinted out the back window as Smith pulled his father’s antique shotgun off the wall. Then out came Minny, screaming for him please to not shoot anybody.
In the morning he accused her and her dog, who had remained silent, of setting him up. He put the cur in her arms and kicked them both out. Then he fell out in a sleep of a few hours. When he woke up it was midafternoon, and he knew something was gone. The antique shotgun was not on the wall. He stumbled to his kitchen and pulled a hunting knife out of his drawer. He intended to cut Minny’s pre-Raphaelite hair off and drag her down the railroad tracks by her ankles. In a swimsuit and his serious coat he went out to the tracks. He seemed to remember her other place was near the tracks somewhere down there. So he walked and walked and then he was in a black section of town, there in his overcoat with lion-tamer boots on, holding the large saw of his knife, in the hottest summer on record. In the overcoat he was drenched, just an arm with the pounding awful fish of his heart inside him. A black teenager, tall, came out of one of the houses and asked him what he was doing with that knife out here, his mama didn’t like it.
“Hunting woman.”
“You sit down in that tree shade.” Smith gave him the knife. “How much you take for that coat? I can get that paint off it.”
“I’ll sell you the coat if you’ll call a number for me. I don’t feel good. I’m not all right. Here’s some money. Please get me some liquor too.” He gave his wallet to the boy.
“You wait.”
When Drum at last came out across the tracks and knelt beside him, Smith had terrible shakes, and could not pass out like he wanted to.
“You think you’re drunk, kiddo? Shit, this is nothing. I was drunker. And I was drunker alone.” Drum laughed.
Smith sold the black boy his coat for fifty dollars and got back his wallet. Then Smith stared into his wallet.
“Drum? I got exactly the same in my wallet. That boy bought my coat with my own money.”
“Forget it. It was a horrible coat. A chump’s coat. A pretender’s coat. It was the coat of a man with a small dry heart.”
“It was?”
Smith was out of money now, but he was waiting for a Reader’s Digest sweepstakes check very seriously. His unopened mail was a foot high, but none of it was the right envelope. Then a letter came offering him some work in Hollywood. He took it around town, running up tabs with credit on it. Some people still liked Smith. One night late he came in from drinking and misplacing his car. He felt there was something new in the place. Yes, there it was. On the kitchen table. The kitchen had been cleaned. But on the table was the final version of “Sarge,” the life-size ceramic head of the grinning old drunk, the butt of a real Pall Mall hanging from his lips. Drum, a year in labor on it, had given it to Paul Smith. There was a short note underneath it: “All yours. Go with Sarge.” Smith did not know it then, but this was as far as Drum would ever go in the arts. At first it made Smith afraid. He thought it was an insult. But then he knew it wasn’t. He laid his head down and wept. He had lost everything. He did not deserve this friend.
About three in the morning, into the last of his cheap wine, he heard a car in his drive and some bells at his door. It was Angel B., the punk crippled girl. She settled inside with her crutches and her bells on what was left of a wicker armchair.
“I know I can’t write, but you are a great man. I can get your job back for you. I know some things on the person fired you, some of them taped. This would destroy her.”
It seemed a plausible and satisfactory thing to Smith.
“I might not can write but I want a piece of a great man to remember. Would you dim the lights?”
He recalled the revulsion, but with an enormous pity overcoming it. In his final despair, the last anguished thrust and hold, he tried to mean actual love. He wanted to be a heavy soft trophy to her. The bells jangled faintly every now and then before he accomplished the end of his dream. Smith stroked Angel’s mohawk, grown high and soft. Then she was businesslike getting her clothes and crutches back together. She was leaving immediately. Smith suggested they at least have a wine together.
“No. I’m drinking with Morris, the Reverend. He’s out there waiting. We’ve got a tough morning tomorrow. We’re going down to the station and I’m putting rape charges on him.”
“He’s driving you? What, pleading guilty?”
“No, innocent. We’re still close. But I know what I know.”
She waddled out to the old Mustang. Morris waited in it like a pet. His dense glasses were full of moonlight.