Read Online Ray by Barry Hannah - Free Book Online

Westy.”
    She said, “I want you to screw me, darling.”
    â€œYeah. But I killed the old guy. Never did that before.”
    â€œHe deserved it. Let’s go dance and fuck.”
    â€œI forgot how to dance about twelve years ago.”
    â€œYeah. 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.”

XXIII
    â€œR AY?”
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œThey got me.”
    â€œContact, Ed. I’m hearing you.”
    â€œPut 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.
    â€”Female, 23. She has made one album and her next one is in process.
    â€”Her mother, almost nonexistent.
    â€”Her father, a philosopher.
    â€”Her family. Two sets of twins, one of them recently backed over by a bus, plus two others.
    â€”Her situation. Singer. Uses marijuana heavily. High blood pressure. 150/90. X-ray shows dark spot in the upper left lung.
    Prescription:
    â€”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.

XXIV
    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.

XXV
    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 whowas 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.
    â€œHow you been, Harry?”
    â€œRay! 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.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothing, really,” she says. “I handled it. I’d just sort of like you to run back here and dick me.”
    â€œI don’t have it in me,” I say.
    â€œOkay. There’s another message, from Westy.”
    â€œPut her on,” I say.
    â€œI 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