Ray (3 page)

Wently began openly weeping.

“But he owed us one, my daddy and me. My daddy was swamped with debt and in precarious health when he was supporting us and my grand-uncle Edward. Edward didn't always live in that big green house, you know. He's sucked off the family with his goddamn routine and righteousness for years. Until he had his own stack of green and a place. Tell you what, man. These people, these peaceful people leave as many bodies behind as those big war copters in Nam, where I also had to go.”

“Then you feel justified?” said DeSoto.

“No!” Wently stared at DeSoto. Then he bent and put his face in his hands, as DeSoto had seen him doing on the porch of the Wently house. “I feel awful guilty. I put him in the ground.”

“Come on. Get out of it,” DeSoto said.

“You
get out of it, DeSoto! Have you seen the crap spilling out of those pipes from this puking factory into the river? Where I used to fish when I was a little boy, there ain't nothing but nasty white soap twenty feet down.”

“Shoot me in the thigh,” DeSoto said. “If you shoot me in the thigh, I'll get you a job,” said DeSoto.

“I don't need it. I got his will money.”

“Then just shoot me in the thigh. I need some of the pain.”

DeSoto put his foot on the desk. Wently shot off one low in his thigh.

Wently went away with a new perspective.

That was all by way of showing you how I come to know Charlie DeSoto and some others. Because I met DeSoto and Eileen in the emergency room. Nowadays, DeSoto fakes a limp, happily. The bullet is in there so deep and harmless and near the bone, cutting for it would be a shame.

Eileen came by to see me by herself later. She was really something to grab, after you got through the usuals. But I liked Charlie and I had rules.

This was all when I was thirty-three and divorced.

L
AST
year I won some awards for my papers at the conventions: “The Nervous Woman and Valium,” “Three Seraxes a Day for the Alcoholic,” “Satyriasis and Acute Depression.” But I quit flying the jets for anybody. Too many pilots around today, especially in the rich class. Some
little eleven-year-old will crawl up in the cockpit with you and describe not only the whole panel but continue about your life and your girlfriends, know your astrology sign like the back of his hand, and scold you for lighting up a Kool at the point you'd like to light him up, open his door, and let him deal with the suck at twenty thousand feet.

Ray even teaches a popular night class at the university now. It's open to just about anybody except people I don't like or think I won't. People who work on foreign cars are good. I like botanists and geologists also. These men and women who run from five to twenty miles a day are pretty good sorts. And wrestlers, tennis players. But a category of worst is doctors' children in revolt. Give me an honest nigger any time of day. I'll even read his essays.

I got a little tight and flew right in the sun one afternoon for thirty minutes, and now old Ray has a little eye damage and is very selective about what he reads, which is very little. A man of medicine forgot to wear his sunglasses.

The Hooches are healthier. They've even spruced up their place a bit, but nothing very severe. There's not so much trash around the doors, and their yard looks better, maybe from the fact that their animals have multiplied and the stratum of dung over the grass is near solid. Mr. Hooch has a job and needs very little of the morphine
now. I think he's proud of himself as a gimpy tugboat first mate, and he can let his language go wild without worry because everybody else on the boat is bent in the mind too.

“I was saying the other day, Doc, I was telling Poot Laird, ‘The large bird flies and roars because it has the span. The small bird creeps and misses because it hasn't.' That's what I told Poot.”

“That doesn't sound half-bad,” I said. “What was Poot's reaction?”

“Nothing. He can't talk. A cottonmouth bit him in the tongue when he was little. Only expression he's got, is after a big supper and beer, he lifts a leg and—”

“Poots,” I guessed.

“But strange, like somebody mumbling.”

Mrs. Hooch, Agnes, is happier to see less of Mr. Hooch and have more income. And what she has done with some of it is buy a cassette tape recorder that she uses to record her smaller children, unbeknownst to them, and play it back at supper time to prove to them how much of a dreadful curse they are. She makes them listen to it while they eat. She quit cigarettes, but she's worse than ever. She buys twenty pulp magazines a month and answers all the happiness and sexual quizzes in them. She won a Sony TV by coming in third on a mass-murderer quiz in
Oui
magazine. On the TV she watches Home Box Office movies, which cause her untold anguish for not being
slim, twenty-three, in a black dress and pearls, with a submachine gun in her hands, in an old fort on the Mediterranean. She bought clothes and combed her hair so she looks sort of like three decades away from something like that, and I could see Sister's lovely genes in the woman somewhat. In fact, with three ten-milligram Valiums in her, Agnes Hooch is beguiling. Until she opens her mouth, and there are the missing teeth.

I paid for Sister to go to the University of South Alabama in Mobile. She thought she'd like Mobile. But there was no way she could cut college, not even a semester of it. She fell in love with two different boys and they both dropped out too. Now she's a waitress in Atlanta, making a lot on tips and using marijuana by the wagonload. I received a scrawled letter and five one-hundred-dollar bills—her college fee—and a lurid photograph of her in skimpy waitress costume, receiving between her lips the huge member of a fat conventioneer, name badge on his coat, drink in his hand, eyes shut with pleasure and mouth open like a murdered boar. It was made up with the club's name on the bottom. It was clear she was involved in a filthy, lucrative industry. In the letter she wrote:

“Ray, I'm rich, but this ain't me. There's nobody to talk to and I'm turning into hate. Please come and marry me. This ain't me.”

I took the next plane out and got a taxi down to the club. I'd always liked Atlanta, and it was
grievous to have to despise every building and every bus stop, every mansion and its trees, every club with jazz music and rock and roll pouring out.

But I was Ray, ex—Navy pilot, who used to even have a pistol on me. Old valiant Ray from 1967 to 1969. Gas up, load up, get ready for the worst and give it worser back.

Sister was in Heloise's with two men around her. It wasn't long before she was in the cab with me. The thing was she looked even younger, fresher, long legs in black hose. She cried and we did a lot of kissing. Because of the photograph, I was cooled down toward much gesture of lust for her, though. Besides, I had already met my next wife over in Jackson, Mississippi.

“You ain't going to marry me, are you?” Sister said. “I guess that picture was too much for you,” said she.

“Yeah, it went over the line. I can take it in the abstract, but it's not the same photographed. You don't want any marriage thing or you wouldn't have sent it to me.”

“You're right, Ray. I just want this.”

We hugged in the cab and in the airport and in the plane back to Tuscaloosa.

It was football season and my girlfriend's son was a quarterback for Murrah High in Jackson. Early on, I knew I was in for another marriage, and this one full of love and a slight goddamned bit of wisdom. We went to all the games together
all over the state of Mississippi, and her handsome jock son was the star everywhere. He was a very cool, light-voiced lad who kept fish, had read a few books, and took off his cleats when he came in the condominium on the parquet floors. The house was gorgeous, snug in shades of blue and melon, lots of okay furniture around. The ex-husband was a doctor—Christ!—who was very busy and very important. Westy, my girl, was from Iowa, the daughter of a dentist and a corn farmer who is one hell of a feisty wonderful gentleman. He gets me in a corner and tells these old-fashioned clean filthy jokes to me. His wife shrieks and he laughs. He laughs so much he weeps for sixteen minutes. Westy's brother is an orthopedic surgeon in Omaha.

There is no escape from doctors. They surround me as I surround myself.

Westy has an uncommon adventurous warmth to her, a crazy hope in her blue eyes, and a body that will keep a lover occupied. I was gone for her about first sight.

She was forty, had another son off at the University of Wisconsin, and a thirteen-year-old daughter who received her entire sustenance, by what I could tell, from her private telephone. There was also Tina, the live-in maid, an illegal immigrant from Chihuahua, who cooked Mexican holistically and, with other Mexican immigrants in the community, read the Holy Bible every night. They had converted to Assembly of God and had
nothing for Catholicism and the priests. But the FBI knocked on the door one night when Westy and I were into a little wine and quiet, and the whole flock of Mexicans had to go underground with their Assembly of God friends.

It was a great storm and a great shame. Tina was worth, with her cumin and bay leaf, any ten doctors you can name.

It was a rebirth for old Ray. I hadn't seen high school football since I played it at one hundred and fifteen pounds and one cold night in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, got knocked over a fence and onto a cinder track in the middle of the cheer-leaders by some hulking freak who later found his way to the Chicago Bears. That was my last punt return, and I went seriously into Fine Arts after that, where you could play with yourself and get applauded for it. Murrah High was full of blacks now, and you didn't go in the rest-rooms at the stadiums, where they stayed by the hundreds for the entire game, talked mean, and got themselves numbed out on controlled substances. That is, those who weren't in the band or on the team. The band had an amazing queer black boy named Dean Riverside out in front of them who did more boogie and stretch than the law allowed, the band into “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” and the synchronized Chargettes throwing their legs around the whole affair. They actually made you enamored of the asinine, by God. Such style and earnesty!

One night, when I was in Saigon, a chicken colonel's wife walked past my Yamaha motorbike on the street. My eyes got wide and my heart was molasses. She walked by me, clicking her heels, tanned legs so lean, a fine joyful sense of her sex uplifted at the juncture of her thighs. Her face was serene, her eyes were blue, and she was, as they say, music. I recall the Rolling Stones' “Lady Jane” was pouring from the door of the nearest bar. But she was not mine. I could never have her, and my heart was broken. The image of her kept me pure for years. I resisted the whores in Saigon, mainly out of a horror of VD, and never cheated on my first wife, mainly because there was nothing I ever saw like the chicken colonel's wife again. Until I met Westy.

Westy does not talk much about the act of love. She just does it with all her heart. Her children are beautiful and polite, and she has never threatened suicide, which my first wife was good for at least once a month, maybe thinking her period entitled her to it. We're all God's creatures, but some of us can be especially ugly. I had from this union three beautiful children to present to Westy. She liked them, and the second night we were together, with my two youngest heavenly blessings running around, Westy said, “I want you and all of it.”

“Hey, Doc, I hear you're getting married,” says Mr. Hooch.

“That's right.”

“You look happy and good, Doc. Me and Agnes wanted to invite you to have the wedding right here at the house. We'll clean it up and the preacher will be free.”

“Thanks. I got a lot of sentiment for the place, John, but this lady is really fancy and I'm afraid it's going to have to be at the old Episcopal Church.”

“Well, could we get invited?”

“You didn't get the engraved invitation yet?”

“I don't know. I don't read much mail.”

We went out to a heap of circulars, letters from the police, utility bills, pamphlets from the Cancer Fund, and unread newspapers in the front hall. I picked through it awhile, but I couldn't find the envelope from Westy. Then there was a shriek from the top of the stairs. It was Sister.

“I've got the cocksucking invitation up here I”

Mr. Hooch looked very sad.

“She ain't right, Ray. She sings at night and smokes that marijuana all day and don't eat much. Go see to her, if you would.”

Her room was well set up. She had an expensive stereo system with Devon speakers, a microphone stand, a Martin guitar on the bed, which was brass and costly, a thick oyster-shell carpet on the floor, a tape deck, rugged white thick curtains on the window, and the walls were solid acoustic tile as well as the ceiling. It was a studio. It smelled like she'd lit ten joints about eight seconds
ago. It had its own refrigerator. The door shut behind me as if in a vacuum unit.

Sister was wearing only panties and a red halter. I'd never seen her look better. Actually, in good light, I'd never seen this much of her.

She had the invitation from Westy in her hand and sat on the bed.

“Ray, you told me once that you needed to make love twice a day or you got very tense and had headaches. But I need it four times a day and I'm getting to be a better singer every day.”

I didn't say anything. I was still taking in her and the room.

“There's a man with a glorious voice I sing with named Marcel Smith. We do duets and we are making a lot of money around town and we might get an album contract with some people up at Muscle Shoals.”

“That's wonderful,” I said.

“Just like your marriage,” Sister said.

“I've got this woman. You'd like her,” I said.

“I probably would. What do you want to do?”

“Find it and live it,” I said.

“Don't you want me too?”

“If it wouldn't be too much trouble,” said I.