Ray (4 page)

A
FTER
a Ray kind of honeymoon in Florida, where I composed myself as a father and husband,
children from seven to twenty running around my mind and knees, I get a jet, the DC-8, a lovely bird that flies a lot of people, and sit back and dream until La Guardia in New York, queen of the Eastern shore.

At Columbia University there are fifteen doctors, three from the South I know, alcoholics themselves. I read them my paper. I get the applause and the check.

(I have another paper on women, unfinished. Like Freud, I threw up my hands.)

Columbia University got me a companion for dinner at the Russian Tea Room. She was Laurie Chalmers, a Jewess with large bosoms, very visible in a velvet dress. She was a tall, frank girl. After the meal we went back to the room they gave me at the Cornell Club, where Laurie Chalmers disrobed and lay on her back on the bed and described herself as constantly starved—for food and liquor and Southerners. Her family was in Charleston, South Carolina, and she said she missed the South despite her job, that was high-paying. She was an anesthetist.

She was a gorgeous and restless lady, with an amazing amount of beard around her sex. While she talked to me, she chewed a corner of her pillow. Her feet were perfect and unlined and un-knobbed in any way. She ate me, just like another delicious thing on her menu. I felt rotten, cool, and unfaithful, yet I came with an enormous
lashing of sperm, which made her writhe and lick. Then Laurie Chalmers fell sound asleep.

Ray, listen, I said on the plane back. You don't have the spiritual resources to cheat on your wife. You feel wretched and sinful and hung over, without having had any liquor. Adventures in sex are just not in your person anymore. You know too many people already. Your conscience is banging your head off and you can't even eat your eggs.

So I ordered a double vodka to hose down my conscience.

The idea to keep at it came on, but I beat it back with thoughts of Westy.

Westy fixing up our house in Tuscaloosa.

Westy with her big blue eyes.

But this lousy barnacle of unfaithfulness would not leave my mind. It is enough to be married to a good woman. It is plenty.

Ray, the filthy call of random sex is a killer. It kills all you know of the benevolent order of your new life.

Then the plane is in trouble. The bad things in my head have passed through the air and gone into the engines of the DC-8. Starboard engine is gone, finished, and the plane begins rolling. The stewardess loses everything. Her poise is all gone.

So I go up in the cockpit. One of the pilots has fainted. They're young boys, about twenty-eight.

“Want me to take it?” says I. “There's no big
disaster,” I say. “Keep the nose up, asshole. Keep the nose up. Yes. Pull back all the way. What's wrong with him?”

“We've never had any trouble before.”

I get the fainted pilot out of his seat, and while the other boy is leveling it, I try to get some action on the bad engine, meanwhile putting in my order for a second double vodka.

We're headed the wrong way, but that's okay. We set it down in Birmingham. Suits me. I didn't have to get another plane to Tuscaloosa. I called Westy and she came over to pick me up.

“Ray, are you all right?” asks she.

I asked her to pull over so I could get out and vomit.

“Darling. Did you drink liquor in New York, darling?” she says.

“Yes. I violated my rules,” I say. “Darling, let me have a piece of your Big Red gum.”

“I missed you, Ray,” she says.

Says I, “I missed you, Westy, in the worst way.”

She is such a clean German. The car is clean. I invent cheerfulness from my heart, the biggest engine.

“Ray, there's something else wrong. Not just the liquor,” Westy says.

“There's nothing wrong,” I say.

“There's something you should tell me. Something's with you. Something's lying heavy on you.”

“Basically, Westy, I would like, after we say goodnight to the children, that you sit on my face and let me lick your thing. Like on the honeymoon.”

“Oh, boy,” she says.

Westy is so happy. Her feet are moving this way and that way over the car pedals.

Sweet God, there is nothing like being married to the right woman.

W
E
have come up in a meadow, all five hundred horses. We are in the Maryland hills and three hundred yards in front of us are the Federals, about fifty of them in skirmish line. What they can't see are the five Napoleon howitzers behind us.

Jeb Stuart is as weary as the rest of us, but he calls for sabers out. Our uniforms are rotting off us. It's so hot and this gray cloth is so hot. There is a creek behind us. I dismount and we send the orderlies back to the creek. It is delightful to see them bring water back to the horses and me. The water is thunderously refreshing, though you can't drink too much if we have to fight. I would prefer not to fight them, but I can see they've rolled in a cannon and mean business.

Thing is, all the blue boys are going to die. And
we have to do something quickly or they'll tell General McClellan where we are.

Stuart says to me, “Hold two hundred horses with you, Captain. Let us start the cannons and I will go forward.”

Then we kissed each other, as men who are about to die.

Our horses covered the howitzers.

They let off theirs. It hits in the trees. These are fresh boys. They don't even really know how to shoot. Yet all of them must die.

I say, “General Stuart, I can kill them all from here. I suggest we don't charge.”

He made the order to hold the sabers up.

“What do you mean?”

“Observe us, General.”

We had captured an ammunition wagon and it had the twenty-pound shells in it. You could hit a chicken in the middle of the head from this range.

“Do it rapidly, Captain.”

I make the order. The cavalry feints to its left. The Federals are confused. Pellham fires the howitzers.

Ooooof Oooof Oooooof Oooooof Oooooooof.

Then again. Five of them are left, and all wounded. One older man is standing up, living but bewildered, with all his friends dead around him.

“Hello, friend,” I say.

“Are you Jeb Stuart?”

“No. I am his captain,” I say.

“It was too quick for us, Captain,” the man says.

Then the banjo player came up and we drank their coffee and ate the steaks on the fires. We threw earth over the dead. Stuart went out in the forest and wept.

Then all of us slept. Too many dead.

Let us hie to Virginia, let us flee.

I fell asleep with the banjo music in my head and I dreamed of two whores sucking me.

I
LIVE
in so many centuries. Everybody is still alive.

W
HAT
I liked was the tea and bridge club. There were a lot of people around, beautiful young women and handsome men, young and old. It was a large living room in a mansion, and they threw the curtain back after the bridge was over. Husbands and wives were naked in different positions. It was like a dream. A soft-spoken woman asked us to go up on stage and remove our clothes. We were a little bit ashamed. But once Westy and I
were into the act of love, we could not help it. There was a woman in real estate. She was wearing a violet gown, high-heeled silver sandals. She had a lecture stick. She did a lot of pointing with it at Westy and me. She said Westy and me were the newest thing.

When I had given my sperm to Westy, the audience stood up and applauded.

Good old Tuscaloosa.

T
HERE
is Ray's son Barry, a boy with a sweet brain and only fifteen.

There is Ray's sister, Dorothy.

There are Ray's parents, Elizabeth and Bill.

There are his nephews, Ken and Taylor, and his brother-in-law, John, another doctor and a good one.

How about we have us a nature walk? The trees, the mountains. Or let us dance at Lee's Tomb, the cavernous saloon near the river and the docking port for trucks.

Sister was there, as were Charlie DeSoto and his girl, Eileen. They are married now. And they look very sad. There is something about marriage
that brings on a certain sadness, as if burying the glad part.

Sister is prosperous now that she and Marcel Smith have an album out that is selling big. She has a marvelous suntan and she is wearing jewelry all over her. She looks very self-assured and gives me a self-assured kiss. The Locust Fork Band is playing. That's Asa, Dwight, Bill. God bless you, niggers, for the music.

Besides the small friendly vagina and the blue eyes, Westy has sympathy. We shall be married forever.

Westy, my wife, my darling.

I hate to depend on another human being this much. But nobody is his own boy. Her breasts, her lovely feet, her cheerfulness, her care.

But I still want to fight. I still want to put it to somebody, duke a big guy out. Like the asshole who came in who had shot two of his children and broken the arm of his wife. He was an alcoholic red-neck and had a lot of Beechnut chewing tobacco on him. He really smelled lousy. Before I could ask him anything, he found a razor blade and came at
me,
his doctor! Lucky that Ray still has his quickness. The bastard missed me with the razor, and I kicked him in the gonads.

Certain people are this way. They kill everybody around, for one reason or another. He went to the pen, but I would like to see him tortured in a dungeon to get back the suffering he has caused.

The waving grass of the prairies, the moon settling
over Minnesota over the lake. Me and my son Barry are having a good time. It is sunset and there are no loud noises. There are only us, and we've caught some bass and pickerel. My daughter Lee is paddling the canoe for us. Utter fucking peace.

Debbie, psychotherapist, is another person I'd like to see buried. She thinks you get the best out of people when you get them all in a room and ask them humiliating questions. She's about six feet tall and drives her Fiat convertible around town, being queen of the world. She's from Ohio, which is the worst state in the union.

Ohio is silly.

Ken, my nephew, once asked me as we were going to sleep after some snapper fishing in Destin, Florida: “Promise me something, Uncle Ray?”

“What?”

“That when I die I won't be from Ohio.”

H
ERE
is something about my class at the university. The pretty faces, the yearning to learn. Deborah, Sammy, Lenora, David, Edward Jurgielewcz, Ondocsin, Triola, Slubowski, Scordino, Edric Kirkman—they are all trying to learn.

The land is full of crashing jets, carbon monoxide, violent wives, and murderous men. There is a great deal of metal and hardness.

The subject of today is breast cancer. Why is there so much of it? Why the mastectomies, why the cancers of the uterus? Why in the hell is there so much cancer today, anyway?

Ray's humble opinion is that it serves us fucking right.

O
H
, help me! I am losing myself in two centuries and two wars.

The SAM missile came up, the heat-seeker. It stood up in front of me like a dick at twenty thousand feet, and the squadron captain told me what the hell was going on. He was a nigger from Louisiana. I think that was the first time a nigger saved my life. Flight Captain Louis Diamond saved my life and I shot the SAM missile out of the air.

Fuck you, heat-seeker! Take some cold steel!

Then when Quisenberry was down on the beach and the gooks were running out to capture my friend from Mississippi, I slowed it down and turned the nose of that Phantom almost perpendicular to the ground. I used the cannons and missiles to clean them away. I saw their heads fly off and their chests.

Tough shit, gooks! You ain't going to get Quisenberry.

He lives now, handsome and a credit to his race, a lawyer in Los Angeles.

I am very proud of the things I did for my country. I fought for the trees, the women, who, when they quit talking, will let you, etc.

Westy, Westy. It's a miracle.

When we get rid of the carbon monoxide, this will be a hell of a country again. Start with Ohio.

D
ROP THE BIG ONE ON
O
HIO.

W
HOEVER
created Ray gave him a big sex engine. I live near the Black Warrior River and have respect for things.

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.