Sister is knocking on the door, with a cry as dismal as when I first saw her in her funny gown on the railroad tracks.
Charlie DeSoto is knocking there too. He says he’s got a new bow and arrow. My God, that interests me about as much as a traffic jam.
“You want to shoot some gar?” he says.
Westy was out of town. There was nothing else crazy to do. So we went. We went out Highway 82 to the swamps of the Sipsey River. And there the huge, rolling, scaly, comb-toothed, vicious-snouted gar were not waiting. We were over our shoes in mud, and it was drizzling dirty rain, getting chilly, and the water was as still as oil.
There was one woodpecker going at it in the high branches of a dead tree. It was the only sign of life, and we’d been there two hours.
Charlie looked up at the woodpecker. Then he loaded the bow.
“Aw, Charlie,” I said.
“If I don’t kill something, I’m going to kill my wife,” he said.
Says I, “Go ahead. You ain’t going to hit it, anyway.”
But he did. The arrow rose from the bow as dead-sure as a heat-seeker and skewered the lovely redheaded thing, went on up into the air with the bird still on it.
LII
TO live and delight in healing, flying, fucking. Here are the men and women.
LIII
HE waded, then swam. Then he came back the same way, sand and tears in his eyes. I say, “You must’ve been shooting that bow for a while.”
“I been having hate in me since my wife turned lesbian or narcissistic or whatever,” Charlie says. “But look, I’ve killed this beautiful bird. Ray, you’ve got to do something for me.”
He looked like the creature of mud with a feather in his hand.
I have sympathy because a lot of the people I have loved and given to have never especially loved or given to me, and Westy is colding off like the planet, except I can’t believe it in either case.
Nothing really to say except in some reaction like on the television.
Now I am looking at the bird with the arrow through it.
And all it does is make me very sleepy.
LIV
RAY meets Westy at the fancy yellow restaurant. She’s looking pretty tired and old now. In the deep sparkling blue of her eyes I see a certain dangerous blank. Is Ray to blame? The rings and the other jewelry twinkle on her. I am looking at the other side of the hill now, at the sunken eyes, at the grim desperation of the earlobes. On her forehead Westy wears the wide frown of surrender.
“I am an old woman,” says some voice.
“No no no no no no no,” says mine.
“Ray, you care more about the sorriest scum than you do me.”
“No, I don’t,” I say.
“Among your friends there is not one decent straight solid person. They are entirely the mange, as far as I am concerned.”
I say, “What about Charlie DeSoto? He wears a suit.”
She just looked at me hopelessly.
“There is something about you, Ray, that wants to set yourself deliberately in peril and in trash. One of these days you won’t come back alive. You are drinking again. You’ve had three vodka tonics.”
I ordered a fourth. Some old hideous baby in me wanted to see Westy pissed.
“You lousy ignorant bitch,” says Ray.
Westy got up and left, leaving me to bum a ride back to the office.
At the office there were a number of people in line. I went over to the back window and looked out over the creek, then down to it and the slick granite rocks through which it rushed. Who was it said we were invented by water as a means of its getting itself from one place to the other?
LV
I AM looking at the swelling hordes. I know too many goddamned people, too many wretched Americans at this point. Between the hours of healing, I dream of dropping the ace on much home real estate in hopes that many citizens will get trapped inside in the wide handshake of phosphorus.
Nothing wrong with me. For example, somebody’s wife comes to see me. She says, Doctor, what’s wrong? She says, I seem to have given all I can to make everybody comfortable, yet they despise me. All of my food and laundry elicits nothing but contempt in their eyes.
Back over in Mississippi my friend Wyatt Newman and I invented this girl that you took to the drive-in. She was rather large and leggy with huge breasts. During the movie she would start, after putting one hand to her brow, humping and moving her sex back and forth in motions of her inner time. She would sigh and pant. The fool who had dated her, skinny and never had any, would move over to touch her tits and give himself ease as well as affection to this large woman who was about to have to come over the whole idea of herself. But when he touches her, she knocks him away.
“Animal!” she screams.
Women are fucking awful. Sister was the one exception.
LVI
RAY is crawling this afternoon. Many things have broken down in our nice house. The only glory I see is the glory I saw as a jet fighter. I went through the clouds and brought up the nose of the Phantom, lifting at twenty-one hundred land miles per hour. It was either them or me, by God. I loved those clean choices. And I loved my jet. I loved all those aerodynamics, the rising and diving.
Something’s wrong.
Westy and I are not close in the old way. My dreams are big discouraging monsters, hellish. Had one that was a walking building, which was my high school. It was my old high school chasing me down the block.
I tell you, if not for his old records and his Shakespeare, Ray would be a casualty of the American confusion.
Like yesterday. Eileen, DeSoto’s wife, wanted to talk with me at the office. She was pale and she had developed a dramatic deepness in her voice. It was huskier, more Northern. I think she comes from Selma, Alabama. I am not an expert on lesbianism, mind you.
“I want to describe what it is like, Ray,” she said.
I said, “First let me say that I am not an expert on lesbianism.”
“That’s okay,” she says, “I was shocked myself. I had fever and che shakes. It was like a big dream where you can’t help walking toward the place although it’s scary. There were a lot of voices and mouths. Then I became one of the mouths. I became one of the soft naked girls, and an ecstasy ran through every part of my mind. And I was there at the place and it was familiar, like coming back to something you had as a child.”
“Why’d you come see me?”
“Because you’re a friend of Charlie’s and he’s very hurt. Besides, you are a doctor, aren’t you?”
“Let me fuck you,” I say. “It will be good for you. Doctor’s orders,” I say. “Come on,” I say, “you crazy lesbian bitch — ohh, uhh, uhnn, touch it!”
LVII
AND yet without a healthy sense of confusion, Ray might grow smug. It’s true, isn’t it? I might join the gruesome tribe of the smug. I think it’s better with me all messed up.
I looked at the Nembutals this morning and thought for about three minutes about going over to the other side. Westy is snoring per usual. I love to hear her snore. I love to hear her come too. The whisper: “Aw, you made me come!” Puts it out there like a pratfall, footing lost. If I could only get her to wear the high heels when she’s nude, as in Penthouse. Going over to the other side, I’m not sure I could fuck, shoes or no. So I ditched the whole idea.