Long, Last, Happy by Barry Hannah

Author:Barry Hannah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1964-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Hey, Have You Got a Cig, the Time, the News, My Face?

HIS DREAMS WERE NOT GOOD. E. DAN ROSS HAD CONSTANT NIGHTmares, but lately they had run at him deep and loud, almost begging him. He was afraid his son would kill his second wife. Ross often wanted to kill his own wife, Newt’s mother, but he was always talking himself out of it, talking himself back into love for her. This had been going on for thirty-two years. E. Dan Ross did not consider his marriage at all exceptional. But he was afraid his son had inherited a more desperate fire.

Newt had been fired from the state cow college where he taught composition and poetry. Newt was a poet. But a friend of Ross’s had called from the campus and told him he thought Newt, alas, had a drinking problem. He was not released for only the scandal of sleeping with a student named Ivy Pilgrim. There was his temper and the other thing, drink. Newt was thirty. He took many things very seriously, but in a stupid, inappropriate way, Ross thought. There were many examples of this through the years. Now, for example, he had married this Ivy Pilgrim. This was his second wife.

The marriage should not have taken place. Newt was unable to swim rightly in his life and times. The girl was not pregnant, neither was she rich. If she had made up that name, by the way, Ross might kill her himself. He could imagine a hypersensitive dirt-town twit leeching onto his boy. Newt’s poetry had won several awards, including two national ones, and his two books had been seriously reviewed in New York papers, and by one in England.

Ross did not have to do all the imagining. Newt had sent him a photograph a month ago. It was taken in front of their quarters in the college town, where they remained, Newt having been reduced in scandal, the girl having been promoted, Ross figured. Ross was a writer himself. He was proud of Newt. Now he was driving to see him from Point Clear, Alabama, a gorgeous village on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay. Ross and his wife lived on a goodly spread along the beach. He worked in a room on the pier with the brown water practically lapping around his legs. It was a fecund and soul-washed place, he felt. He drove a black Buick Riviera, his fifth, with a new two-seater fiberglass boat trailing behind. It was deliberately two-seater. There would be no room for the girl when they went out to try the bass and bream.

He saw ahead to them: the girl would be negligent, a soft puff of skin above her blue jeans, woolly “earth sandals” on her feet, and a fading light in her eyes, under which lay slight bags from beer and marijuana and Valium when she could get it. Newt’s eyes would be red and there would be a scowl on him. He will be humming a low and nervous song.

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