Ray (6 page)

W
E
wear gray in the big meadow and there are three thousand enemy in blue, much cannon and machinery behind them. The shadow of the valley passes over our eyes, and in the ridge of the mountains we see the white clouds as Christ's open chest. Many of us start weeping and smiling because we will die and we know. Last week we thought we were immortal.

“Shall we charge, my commander, or shall we fall back? We have nothing but our sabers and our pistols, which are cowardly.”

“Up!”
yells the commander.

You take the saber from your left thigh and
hold it straight above. The pennants go higher. You put the cavalry hat down because the sun is against you. Around you there is nothing because the horses are in perfect line. The sun is coming over the raised sabers.

“Commander, we could fall back. Our horses can run away from this.”

There is no turning back. Hold sabers. We will walk to them until they shoot and then we will charge.

Everybody was killed. One Union private lived to tell the story.

If warriors had known this story, we would have taken the war to the gooks with more dignity.

M
E
and the machines saved Uncle Buster. He woke up wanting some wine. All ready to be a bum again. Go out there in the park, safe from vigilant idiots who get their haircuts at fifteen dollars.

“E
ILEEN
left you?” I hadn't been listening too good.

“For a month now. She didn't like my friends.
She used to be nothing but love. Now she's just complaint and fury. What happens to women, Ray?“

My clinic is on a small offstreet. Through the window I can see the trees waving back and forth as the thunderstorm comes on. Linda Ronstadt is on my tape deck. I turn her down. I was listening more to “Blue Bayou” than to Charlie DeSoto, honestly. One afternoon I saw a gorgeous stag raise his head out of the hedge of yellow flowers. Right here in the middle of the city. There is a creek that runs down to the Black Warrior River and there is a thick swamp as it meets another creek, where there are deer and immense snapping turtles. It's a haunted place, full of tales. Sister may be there now.

“What?” I light up a Vantage.

“I don't understand what happened to her after we got married.”

Charlie had acute gastritis over a peptic ulcer. Lots of buttermilk, if you can stand it.

“Look, Charlie. I'm going to stick you with some morphine and I'll drive you home. Drink the buttermilk and sleep as long as you can. But this is the only time. Morphine is dangerous.”

“Don't tell me. They used it in Nam.”

“Okay. Let us not use the Demerol or any of the other shit after this. We're just going to have to wait and see if your belly comes back for you. It should. A belly does.”

“I got a raise. I'm the plant manager now.
There's a girl at the office who's twice as good-looking as Eileen. She wants to lick my dick. I don't know what to do. I'm sick.”

“Your blood pressure is up. Knock off the salt. Buy yourself some garlic pills.”

“Garlic?”

“Trust me. We'll get them at the drug on the way home. You're the last patient today and i want out of this office. Catch ‘*A*S*H' and make love.”

“Why do women change after you marry them? She hates all my friends and is always tired when I try to get it on.”

“You want to go fishing soon? My son and I have been catching some nice bass.”

“You haven't told me a damned thing about women.”

“I tried to write a paper on the subject once. Pick up a
Cosmopolitan
magazine at the drug. Women read it to find out who they ought to be and then that's who they are. A guy whips his pudding when he sees the new look in bathing suits. If Jackie Kennedy sucked you off, your ulcer would go away.”

“Can you get her to do it?”

“No,” I say. “For doctors, they have Claire Bloom and Lee Remick, but simple street shits like you just have to buy
Penthouse
.”

Charlie smiled.

It is always a sign of health when the smile can
rise. His eyes are brighter. This handsome bastard will outlive me, and I resent it.

The nurse comes in with the needle. She's trained in the great med center at Birmingham and she is a knockout. Her hair is blond and curled. She's about five-nine, a tall girl, twenty-six, and her legs are an amazing long event. Beyond that, she's just a straight honest slut. I never had her. It is a perversity, but I hired her just to tempt myself and resist, as a man who's quit smoking keeps a pack of Luckies on his desk just to see what he won't do anymore.

Rebecca puts the needle in him. When Charlie phases out, he lifts his hands in prayer. She looks at me quickly. She takes down the top of her uniform. The large dark-nippled breasts are there. Charlie is lying in the leather chair and she lowers herself to him.

Certain things are private and it is tacky to witness them.

In three weeks his ulcer was cured. He came by the office to tell me how delightful it was to be healthy. He told me he paid Rebecca for a week, but all the rest was free. Eileen was still in Georgia, waiting it out, knowing she was hurting Charlie. Women enjoy revenge more than the worst Apache.

Then sabers up and we knock the fuck out of everybody. With the cherished dream of Christ
in our hearts. Basically, the message is: Leave me the hell alone or give me a beer.

Yes, I have seen the rain coming down on a sunny day. I have seen the moon hot and the sun cold. I have seen almost everything dependable go against its nature. I have seen needless death and I have seen needless life. One old mule of eighty came into the emergency room who had abused three wives, beaten his youngest son, twelve, with a tire tool, and had borrowed from everybody in Gordo. He had a heart attack and he was in intensive care, all hooked up to the machines and the monitors. He wanted to talk to me.

“When I get out of here, I'm going to kill all those sons of bitches, Doctor.”

I'd brought Rebecca with me. She can bring a man back. She can bring a woman back. A lesbian on Methadone came in wanting to die one afternoon. Rebecca put the bottle up and I straddled her, looked down her throat, opened it, and eventually got a pint of buttermilk down her. Then she was fighting and weird and we had to get the heavy stuff in her. After she was calm, Rebecca took her skirt off and sat on her face and the girl licked her wide hairy organ. I watched this one because I thought the girl might die.

But Ray confesses he deliberately lost the bastard who was eighty. I told everybody to get out of the room and I bent down my face and looked him straight in the eye.

“What are you going to do when I get you on your feet again?”

“Kill the sons of bitches!”

I yanked out the connections and shut down the monitors and let him pass over the light into hell. By the time the crew came in, I had all the stuff going again.

“I lost him!” I screamed.

Rebecca saw me in the hall. We lit cigarettes.

“You killed him,” she said.

“Well, hell,” I said.

“You want to get it on, Doctor Ray?”

“I can't. I have a wife. Westy.”

She said, “I want you to screw me, darling.”

“Yeah. But I killed the old guy. Never did that before.”

“He deserved it. Let's go dance and fuck.”

“I forgot how to dance about twelve years ago.”

“Yeah. But we could just go to my place, and fuck. You ever hear Jimi Hendrix? You and I could've saved him, poor old genius nigger.”

“R
AY?”

“Yeah?”

“They got me.”

“Contact, Ed. I'm hearing you.”

“Put your spirit with mine now, old lieutenant. I'm ashes.”

Then he was.

The last time Sister came to me at the clinic, I wrote this record and this prescription.

—Female, 23. She has made one album and her next one is in process.

—Her mother, almost nonexistent.

—Her father, a philosopher.

—Her family. Two sets of twins, one of them recently backed over by a bus, plus two others.

—Her situation. Singer. Uses marijuana heavily. High blood pressure. 150/90. X-ray shows dark spot in the upper left lung.

Prescription:

—Valium, 25 mg. Every four hours until appetite returns. Prednisone, 200 mg. One every other day for two weeks. Then a half-pill every other day. 60 days. No refill.

P
AT
and I go out in my little MG. I don't have the Corvette anymore because of the gas. But I like my little 73 Midget and the sky. You get this low and you get to look at the sky.

So me and Pat go out to the airport to look at the new two-million-dollar Learjet, and we get in the cockpit, and I show Pat the controls.

Pat is a wonderful guitarist from Chicago, as well as a medieval scholar and poet. Nobody's killed him yet.

E
VERYBODY
I love is in the jet. We try New York, but it's no good. I've got the .32 machine pistol that I killed a gook in the head with. He was dead and he had a hand grenade in his hand. But he threw a knife into the neck of Larry. We were all fueling at Ton Sa Nut. Fifteen F-4s all in line. You couldn't ever kill enough of them. Vietnam was like fleas.

Never had a whore in Saigon. Never gambled my money. Quisenberry and I mainly just talked ourselves to sleep, then dropped Dexedrine when the horn sounded.

Harry King was flight control one night at the Tuscaloosa airport and brought Don in on autopilot from Chicago after he'd turned the plane in a storm and fainted.

Ray is out here with his beeper on his leg, just watching the planes come in over the blue lights, for no reason except to find my meditation again. Somehow the AM waves are getting into my beeper and I hear “Eleanor Rigby” from the Beatles. Where
do
all the lonely people come from? Ray is starting to sound like a man who
was once a disk jockey. Because he's run-down. I'm full of dopey tears and just as groping and lousy as the next citizen.

So I just wander into flight control. Harry's very lonely with all the Teletypes. What in the hell comes in but an F-4 from the National Guard in Birmingham. He touches down, then off, wheels it out, gone at five hundred miles per hour. Beautiful Phantom.

“How you been, Harry?”

“Ray! Goddamn, you're here I”

Here looking at the flat charts of the flight territory all over the world and Harry, still wearing his tie from WW II. He's driving his crummy Toyota since the gas crunch and we talk about that. We share one of those huge TV dinners made for two. Not much to do here now.

The beeper sounds and it's Rebecca.

“What?”

“Nothing, really,” she says. “I handled it. I'd just sort of like you to run back here and dick me.”

“I don't have it in me,” I say.

“Okay. There's another message, from Westy.”

“Put her on,” I say.

“I just cured three creeps with a light assist from your buddy, Doctor Litchens. You can't imagine the swine I'm going to have to do a number with tonight.”

“Put Westy on.”

It was fifteen minutes. Harry and I were finishing up the chicken on the plate when she called. I hadn't heard a straight and clear message from her in three months.

“Ray? Raymond Forrest?” My first two names.

“I hear you, darling.”

“Ray. We can make lovesies again.”

“Holy Christ!”

“Yes,” she said. “I want to be lovely all over you again.”

I was so entranced I forgot Harry King was right there beside me. You never get a whole conversation over the beeper like this unless you got somebody relaying it. Rebecca did it and was listening in.

I
NEVER
woke up feeling better. Made coffee, eggs, bacon for all my six children.

No complaints.

T
HE
beeper goes off when Westy and I are doing something. We have our tongues so deep into
each other's and I am sucking her beautiful feet. It's Rebecca.

“Mr. Hooch and Agnes bought a propane lantern and it exploded. He's almost dead from burns, Doctor. She has second-degrees.”

Hooch was burned to a crisp and he weighed about a hundred pounds. His system was so exasperated, it was a total moan. The protein and the platelets and the nerves were wrecked and closing. His kidneys were going out. His liver count was as high as a man's who hadn't eaten in three months. The calcium was not protecting his lungs. Yet on fruit juice and plasma, his mind stayed. Even brighter. What an organ. You got a third of it left and you can still be a genius. For a while we couldn't even get creamed field peas down him. He was burned down to the condition of the inside of a steak as Texans like them.

“You tried to kill yourself, didn't you?”

“No.”

“Yes, you did. You know better than to light up a leaking propane tube.”

“I get tired of my wife and me. There ain't much going on since Sister except my mouth.”

“Gimme a poem, Mr. Hooch. Let's hear the best.”

One of the humiliations of my life was that my own secret poems never touched the poems of this old fart. All his genes must have run a pretty direct route into Sister.

Fire at Night

by
J. HOOCH

Fire at night and it's me. I've been born with pain

So this is sort of the same.

Agnes talks about forty years ago.

Her love is around, but I never got her mind's number.

Love is above and behind you,

But someday, honey, I've got to find you.

We bad luck together and it ain't ever going to get better.

We worse when we try to get better.

We got the jinx and the voodoo visited upon us.

But it's New Year, so I'll light myself up

With a cup of gas.

It'll be a hell of a feeling,

And this one will really, really be the last.

“Not bad,” I say.

I go back to the dinette and sit with Rebecca. I smoked about four Luckies in a row and looked into her face without saying anything for a while. Rebecca's face is a charm. She goes heavy on the blue eye makeup. Her neck is a longish classic from the old paintings of what's-his-name. Her nose is forward and long. She lights a Lucky and the exhaust is gray through the large sensitive nostrils. She's half-Jew, the rest Greek. Okay,
now I've come back from the humiliation of never thinking up a better poem than Mr. Hooch. Then we go through two cups of coffee apiece. Modigliani.

“No, he's not, goddamn it.”

“There's not much here at the hospital.”

“There's the Freon tube.”

“They won't let us use it yet.”

“I have a key that's copper-colored in the far right drawer of the front desk in the office. There is a forty-five pistol right next to it. Put it, the key, in that little safe. If you can't open it, get a pillow from one of the chairs, push it over the muzzle of the gun, and shoot out the lock. I'll meet you at the hospital.”

“The FDA won't …”

“Do it, bitch. Move it quick.”

It worked. Then I sent him over to plastic surgery.