Free Ray by Barry Hannah Page B

I’ve used cocaine, LSD, listened for the phone, waited for her letters, since we’ve been apart. What do I do?”
    â€œSplit. Get out of this CM.”
    â€œBut I still have wonderful love dreams of her.”
    â€œYou can have dreams of somebody else.”
    â€œI envy you and Westy. You sit there very smug.”
    â€œGet 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.

XLIV
    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 footballleaves your arm like a quail. He’s got it. Runs into the last green zone.

XLV
    A RE we here? Is everybody here? I have scored six points, the lights are up, but the stadium is empty. Want to do it again, Westy? Want to get married again? Want to be in the day instead of just walking through it and paying the bills? The deck has gone out from under my legs and we’re on the rocks and we’re on fire. Handsome craft, pure white, with sails up and now it’s not going anymore. She was blue-eyed, white. But now it’s raining fire. Everywhere you lift your eyes, a rain of cinders.
    You get to the end, and you’re still swimming.
    The people sing. My heart is all over my front yard. I am still reading Bill Shakespeare.
    Bob Moony’s here. Mr. Hooch is here. There’s no other reason to be in Tuscaloosa.
    Mike White is here. For God’s sake, where else
is
there? That’s why a lot of people are here.
    All we have is together.
    And sometimes I cure others.
    Christ be with my friend Phil Beidler. He has a polyp on his vocal cords. I thought he might have C. Called Ned Graves in Jackson, Mississippi. Best one in the world with the knife on thethroat. Phil was knocking down two packs of Marlboros a day. Like me, he loves his ciggies. Called Ned up. He was drunk, but wanted to fly over and get the C out of Phil. But good old Phil didn’t have it. Ned’s only twenty-eight, works in clear weather. No damned war memories. He just walks in with five knives, and can see cancer