Ray (7 page)

I
BROUGHT
a new Goliath harmonica made by Hohner into J. Hooch's room. By then he weighed a hundred and thirty and was looking fairly decent.

“Gimme that son of a bitch. Whose is that?”

“Yours.”

A month later he was back at the Hooch house. I would put the MG on neutral to hear the strains
coming from Sister's studio. His bed was there. He's moved to it, all the guitars, the stereo around him. The old boy was playing the hell out of the harmonica. He was at a hundred and fifty and going normal.

“I'll be what my daughter was trying to be!”

“What?”

“Already got myself recorded. All I need is a drum. I read Sister's diary! Goddamn it, I'm a great old son of a bitch!”

The dirty dog was playing the harmonica every time I came by the house. I'd just shut the car down and listen to the tender sorrow coming through the forty-eight reeds.

Then with duty on my mind, I go by the emergency room. Nothing. The usual hurt niggers, but all's in control.

I am late coming home and Westy is pissed off. Yes, I had some bourbons, and I guess I just sort of threw her nightgown up and tried to.

Women enjoy conversation.

Lube does not come in before talk.

I got up to brush my teeth and prove I'm not drunk.

All right.

Afterward, I ate her slowly. I hadn't eaten much all day.

ERD. #92. #Doe4. Utap. At 40-50. Range. In Clear. Solid. Ventro.

T
HE
other night one of the deranged creeps got out of his car at the emergency room, swinging a Magnum in his hand. He had already swatted his granddaughter in the head with it, plus shot his regular daughter in the tit.

I had been shooting the .30/30 with my boy Barry that day.

I asked him to ride into the back lot with me, because I was a doctor who understood him. Something about my stern eyes that calms even wild men down. He gave me the gun. We got way out there where nobody could hear. I played some country music for him while I pulled a towel over the barrel of the .30/30 and rested it into his ribs.

“What was you going to say?”

“Light up a cigarette for me,” I said.

While he did, I let one go through him.

“What'd you do?”

“Let out some of your spleen and piss,” I said. He fainted, of course.

I took him back to the main entrance and kicked him out.

Now he'll live but be warned. I've still got his Magnum.

Now I guess I should give you swaying trees and the rare geometry of cows in the meadow or the like—to break it up. But, sorry, me and this one are over.

I G
OT
audited by the IRS because I hadn't filed in four years.

So I went up there to the Federal house. They had called me over the phone and finally got rude. I tend to procrastinate on business like this because I feel I don't owe anything and already fought for the country. I'm for the straight ten percent. I'd file before anybody then.

She was not so stern when she met me. I had all my forms. She went off in the room and talked to her boyfriend for thirty minutes. I went down to the first floor and got some coffee. Saw a nigger in a Federal suit and asked him if I could try out his gun. There was nothing else to do. Then I got
some Nabs. Those are fun. I ate two and spat out the third. Welfare niggers who don't work for a living are all over the place.

Finally she got back to the desk. She had to make another call or receive one.

This was enough. I went back in the other room, raised up her skirt, and stuck the meat in her. She was talking to her boyfriend and moaning.

Now I am clean with the IRS.

E
LEMENTS
of protein float in. B-12 for sanity, vegetables, and Oscar, the mysterious warrior that sails in the bloodstream. Can be cancer or the warrior
against
cancer. I'm dreaming of this. I'm dreaming of the day when the Big C will be blown away. I'm dreaming of a world where men and women have stopped the war and where we will stroll as naked excellent couples under the eye of the sweet Lord again. I'm dreaming of the children whom I have hurt from being hurt and the hurt they learn, the cynicism, the precocious wit, the poo-poo, the slanted mouth, the supercilious eyebrow.

Then I wake up and I'm smiling. Westy asks me what's wrong.

“Christ, darling, I just had a good dream, is all.”

“I'll bet it was some patient you screwed. You rotten bastard.”

She hits me over the head with a pillow.

Violence.

Some days even a cup of coffee is violence.

When I can find my peace, I take a ladder to the hot attic and get out the whole plays of Shakespeare.

Okay, old boy. Let's hear it again. Sweat's popping out of my eyes, forehead.

Let's hear it again. Between the lines I'm looking for the cure for cancer.

L
ET'S
get hot and cold, because, darling new thing, we're going through the weeds and the woods and just the sliver of the moon comes in through the dead branches, and the running rabbits and squirrels are underneath and above. Henry David Thoreau is out there thinking, loping around. Louis Pasteur is out there racing with the bacteria.

We went to the planetarium in Jackson, Mississippi, my hometown. Elizabeth, Ray, Lee, and Teddy. Elizabeth is on the couch with her crocheting. Lee is reading her new bible, Proverbs. It's raining out. We've cut the yard in the front, and the train whistle is hooting.

“A gentle answer quiets anger, but a harsh one stirs it up.”

“It is foolish to ignore what your father taught you. It is wise to accept correction.”

They say, “Dad, take it easy. Quit going so fast.”

My daughter has a secret friend named Fred, and my son Teddy has a secret friend named Jim.

We all sleep together in the big wooden four-poster where I grew up, tiny innocent arms and legs and imaginary friends on top.

Ike, Ken, Carol, and Ginger are at my ex-brother-in-law's place, and I join them to fish at the wide kidney-shaped lake at the bottom of their rolling lawn. Dr. John and Dr. Ray trade a few compliments. John would give you the shirt off his back. It's a shame my sister, Dot, isn't with him anymore. There were differences. His wife, Mindy, is sweet and has Buffy and Moffit. I forgot to mention my beautiful nieces, Hannah Lynn and Maribeth. Everybody's around and we are flying kites over the tall oaks, the Black Angus cattle are roaming comfortably in the taller weeds, and the geese control their placid squadrons.

Ike is a playwright and Ginger has just come back from Europe with her Gitanes, one of the essential deeds of young females. Looking back at the house, it's a low wooden castle.

T
HEY
asked me where I wanted to go to graduate school and I said Tulane, for medicine. Finished in three years. Or maybe it was four.

O
NE
of the great bad strokes I did was marry the prettiest girl on campus. I was so horny and everything else was pretty nothing except red bricks and Baptists, a few queers in the drama and English departments. I got thrown out of my room by a senior who thought he could box. I knew nothing about boxing. This was supposed to be my roommate. He was a blond, acned guy, and he was punching me. So I said, “Stop.”

He quit, though he was still shifting, bouncing.

“My name's Wild Man Thomas,” he said.

I
T'S
quiet, utterly quiet, except for the air conditioner going in my room. The companionship is with the air alone. I am asking forgiveness for all my sins, on my knees. I got to get my mind in a higher sphere.

I
WAS
treating a large old woman who spat in my face. I fell backward into the heater, face-forward. This is to prove that I'm not always the hero.

N
URSES
have saved me. I wander through the day like a horde often. I can't hit the directional signal on my car. I trip over my unredeemable cockiness. I drop a can of 7-Up in the hall and fall down in front of Dr. Everything, the world surgeon I always wanted to meet and impress.

One evening, late, I was watching a nigger up in a tree picking his nose. The nigger worked for the electric company and was apparently new. He'd climbed up the tree next to the light pole.

“What you laughing at?” said another big nigger behind me, wearing a helmet.

F
OR
no clear reason Ray will have it out with the plants in his place. His anger comes up when
he looks around at the expensive greenery and all the deathly care people give to plants when, if let alone, all plants are fine. Plants can talk, he's heard: “Eat me. Eat me.” That's all Ray's ever heard. Anybody besides Ray see
Little Shop of Horrors?
A great plant in some creepy Jew's flower shop starts calling out, “Feed me, feed me!” He eats people. So the Jew goes and accidentally kills a number of people and their faces appear in the blossoms of the plant.

Ray has lost it. He kicks over the plants and yells abuses. Mainly, it's because his poems are not going well and he still can't come anywhere close to old J. Hooch.

Westy comes in. She's disturbed.

“Are you drinking, Ray?”

“No. Get me a drink.”

She's wearing beige sandals and her toenails are maroon. She has a glass of milk with her, reaches back with it, pours it over the crease of her buttocks and fetches my tongue in.

I'm as earnest as an evangelist when I mount her.

B
ILL
, my dad, came over to check on me again. He's been everywhere, from hard-crushing Depressionville to Russia. Got him the new Mercury
that gets twenty-seven miles per gallon on unleaded, high visibility. He still looks handsome. Still the man who gave me life. Seventy-five years old. Afflicted only by deafness and arthritic feet. Always got money, maybe pull out a thousand of the five hundred of them he's worth now.

Bill roomed with Senator Eastland at Ole Miss. He and the great senator were going to be law partners. But Bill had to go back to Homewood, in Jefferson County, to support his family. Bill is a naturalist and is determined not to let Ray not listen to his advice now because he never had any advice for Ray when he was young.

Bill looks good.

He has the open, eager eyes of a man who has confessed and tried to put it back right. He always gave me the advantages.

C
OMING
back from the convention in Omaha, I was thinking about my first wife. Because you have to be honest. You are packed with your past and there is no future.

We got married stupid and frantic, Millicent and me. Things at one point were lovely. The children were lovely, and waiting for them was a miracle like the rainbow. And although you try to get shut of those gorgeous moments when we
had nothing but good neighbors, the pines, and the sky to look at, it's true, we had a sublimity. Our children are ready for the world, and they are handsome enough and know enough science.

I have seen so many people not worth saving, not worth putting the tubes into.

God jokes with his best ones.

What release, to look into the past the way I just tried. A petrified log just rolled off my heart.

C
HARLIE
D
ESOTO
is in the office.

“Ray, I've discovered that my wife is a lesbian, or at least so far divorced from usual commerce between us that love words do no good. Love-making hurts. It seems to be an inconvenience. It's smelly, messy. She makes me feel like a raper. I can never satisfy her. This baffles this poor fool who married her and had so many, I can't tell you, uh, loves with her. She prefers to sleep with her old coloring books. Nothing sensual I can say to her touches her. I've been drinking too much. I've used cocaine, LSD, listened for the phone, waited for her letters, since we've been apart. What do I do?”

“Split. Get out of this
CM.”

“But I still have wonderful love dreams of her.”

“You can have dreams of somebody else.”

“I envy you and Westy. You sit there very smug.”

“Get off of it. Westy's a hell of a woman, but I've had three months with no nooky. People are like weather where she grew up. I'm terribly sorry your wife's queer.”

I went by Hooch's house. The yard is cleaned up. The backyard is raked and the grass is growing around it like a billiard table. They are clean and neat now that Sister is dead. He's working on the tugboat and looks two decades from his real age. He and Agnes don't sleep in the same room anymore. He lives in Sister's acoustic-tile room, and he plays those records and he writes his poems that beat the hell out of mine.

And the old man is sixty-seven. He's got himself an Olivetti automatic typewriter and plays Sister's album over and over.

He picks up her brassieres and her pictures and her underwear.

He handed me one:

Grief is

Looking at the wooden Indian where your little ones should be.

I bought a new color teevee.

All the people you should be are on the screen.

Everybody is pretty.

T
HERE
will never be, stepson, another person that I have respected and loved as much as you.

Your stepfather will not fall down. Your step-dad Ray has created abuse and horrors in the house because of him and drink. I wasn't born straight. God gave me a hundred-and-fifty IQ and perfect pitch on instruments. Sometimes I don't hear. I am having a constant burn-out on communications. Nobody means any harm. Everybody is swell. Just can't get through to anybody.

You, boy, will travel with beauty. Not just righteousness, which is easy, but beauty too. I saw you at Murrah move like a genius. You are a chieftain. You threw the ball, you scrambled, and the niggers dropped it.

Never be cruel, weird, or abusive.

I promise not to take a jet anymore.

I love your mother.

Amy, Bobby, too.

This boy is so full of loves the juice comes out his eyes.

Alt. 2000, 1000, 500, 120, flaps down, lights on? Yes. Port. Pork and beans.

Pick the football up, travel rearward on your legs, the way is clear, there is your receiver, arms up in the lights on the green field. The football
leaves your arm like a quail. He's got it. Runs into the last green zone.