My wife wakes up. Then Gardiner, the chemist who keeps us in booze, wakes up.
Vince has grown even softer since the loss of his right hand. Larry (you don’t need to know any more about him) and his girl never wake up.
“Mrs. Neap wants to cook the man,” I say.
“What strength. She did a miracle,” says soft Vince.
When we get to the rotisserie, Mrs. Neap has the man all cleaned. Her Doberman is eating and chasing the intestines around the backyard.
My family goes into a huddle, pow-wowing over whether to eat the Doberman.
We don’t know what she did with the man’s head.
By this time she is cutting off steaks and has the fire going good.
Two more tenants come out on the patio, rubbing their eyes, waked up by the smell of that meat broiling on the grill.
Mrs. Neap is slathering on the tomato sauce and pepper.
The rest of the tenants come down.
Meat!
They pick it off the grill and bite away.
Vince has taken the main part of the skeleton back to the garage, faithful to his deep emotion for good taste.
When it is all over, Mrs. Neap appears in the living room, where we are all lying around. Her face is smeary with grease and tomato sauce. She is sponging off her hideous cheeks with a rag even as she speaks.
She says, “I accepted you for a while, you romantic nomads. Oh, you came and sang and improved the conversation. Thanks to JIM for protecting my place and my dried-out garden, wherever he is. But you have to get out by this afternoon. Leave by three o’clock,” says she.
“Why?” say I.
“Because, for all your music and merriment, you make too many of us. I don’t think you’ll bring in anything,” she says.
“But we will” says soft Vince. “We’ll pick big luscious weeds. We’ll drag honeysuckles back to the hearth.”
She looks around at all of us severely.
She says, “I hate to get this down to tacks, but I hear noises in the house since you’re here.” This old amazing woman was whispering. “You know what goes in America. You know all the announcements about food value. You, one of you, had old dangerous relations with Clarisse, the tenant next to my room. I heard. You may be romantic, but you are trash.”
She places herself with her glasses so as to fix herself in the image of an unanswerable beacon.
She says, “We all know the Survival News. Once I was a prude and resisted. But if we’re going to win through for America, I go along. Only oral relations are allowed. We must not waste the food from each other, the rich minerals, the raw protein. We are our own gardens,” Mrs. Neap says, trembling over her poetry.
It costs her a lot to be so frank, I can see.
“But you cooked a human being and ate him,” say I.
“I couldn’t help it,” says she. “I remember the cattle steaks of the old days, the juicy pork, the dripping joints of lamb, the venison.”
“The what?” say we.
“Get out of here. I give you to four o’clock,” says she.
So the four of us hit the road that afternoon.
We head to the shady green by the compass in my head.
I am the leader and my wife is on my arm.
There are plenty of leaves.
I think we are getting over into Georgia.
My wife whispers in my ear: “Did you go up there with Clarisse?”
I grab off a plump leaf from a yearling ash. In my time I’ve eaten poison ivy and oak too. The rash erupts around your scrotum, but it raises your head and gives you hope when the poison’s in your brain.
I confess. “Yes.”
She whispers on. “I wanted JIM. He tried. But he couldn’t find my place. He never could find my place.”
“JIM?” say I. “He just can’t hit any target, now can he?”
“I saw Clarisse eating her own eyelashes,” she whispers, from the weakness, I suppose.
“It’s okay,” say I, wanting to comfort her with an arm over to her shoulder. But with that arm I am too busy taking up good leaves off a stout little palmetto. And ahead of us is a real find, rims of fungus standing off a grandfather oak.
I’ve never let the family down. Something in my head tells me where the green places are. What a pleasure to me it is to see soft Vince, with his useless floppy red hand, looking happy as he sucks the delicious fungus off the big oak.
My wife throws herself into the feast. Near the oak are two terrapins. She munches the fungus and holds them up. They are huge turtles, probably mates. They’d been eating the fungus themselves.
“Meat!” says the wife.
“We won’t!” say I. “I won’t eat a hungry animal. I just want to hold and pet one.”
The hunting arrow from JIM gets me right in the navel when I take the cuter of the turtles into my arms.
The wife can’t cook.
JIM’s feeling too awful to pitch in.
So it’ll be up to soft Vince to do me up the best he can with his only one good hand.
All the Old Harkening Faces at the Rail
A few of the old liars were cranking it up around the pier when Oliver brought his one-man boat out. He was holding the boat in one hand and the motor in the other. Oliver probably went about fifty-seven or eight. He had stringy hair that used to be romantic-looking in the old days. But he still had his muscles, for a short guy.
“What you got there?” said Smokey.
“Are you blind, you muttering old dog? It’s a one-man boat,” said Oliver.
Oliver didn’t want to be troubled.
“I seen one of them in the Sears book, didn’t I? How much that put you back?”
“I don’t recall ever studying your checkbook,” said Oliver.
“This man’s feisty this afternoon, ain’t he?” said a relative newcomer named Ulrich. He was sitting on the rail next to the steps where Oliver wanted to get his boat down them and to the water. For a moment this Ulrich didn’t move out of Oliver’s way. “You buy it on credit?”
Oliver never answered. He stared at Ulrich until the old man moved, then went down the steps with his little boat to the water and eased the thing in. It was fiberglass of a factory hue that is no real color. Then Oliver went back up the steps where he’d left the motor. It was brand new. He pondered for a moment. Then he pulled the back of the boat up and screwed on the boat clamps of the motor. It was nifty. You had something ready to go in five minutes.
All the old liars were peering over the edge at his operation.
“Don’t you need fuel and a battery?” said Smokey, lifting up his sunglasses. One of his eyes was taped over from cataract surgery.
“A man that buys on credit is whipped from the start,” said Ulrich.
When Oliver looked up the pier on all the old harkening faces at the rail, he felt young in an ancient way. He had talked with this crew many an evening into the night. There was a month there when he thought he was one of them, with his hernia and his sciatica, his lies, and his workman’s compensation, out here with his cheap roachy lake house on the reservoir that formed out of the big Yazoo. Here Oliver was with his hopeful poverty, his low-rent resort, his wife who never had a bad habit in her life having died of an unfair kidney condition. All it’s unfair, he’d often thought. But he never took it to heart until Warneeta passed over to the other side.