Free Ray by Barry Hannah Page A

hero.

XXXIX
    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.
    â€œWhat you laughing at?” said another big nigger behind me, wearing a helmet.

XL
    F OR no clear reason Ray will have it out with the plants in his place. His anger comes up whenhe 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.
    â€œAre you drinking, Ray?”
    â€œNo. 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.

XLI
    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 Mercurythat 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.

XLII
    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 wehad 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.

XLIII
    C HARLIE D ESOTO is in the office.
    â€œRay, 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.