Swanly stood wobbling in the shallows, his hand to the slick shale rock, then at last stood up revealed and fierce in his nakedness. He swayed on the slick rocks, outraged, screaming. Then he vomited.
Keep your eyes off me! Keep away! he bawled upwards at the hermit, who then disappeared.
Pal pointed upwards to the right. They watched too, Swanly! But Swanly didn’t seem to understand this.
Walthall fired his Mauser twice in the air and the blasts made rocking echoes down the river beach to beach.
Bernadette and Tuck melted back onto the rooted path in the high cane and the woman came cautiously with her basket, trailed fifty yards behind by her husband who was trembling and homicidal toward the hermit. Also he knew the boy loved his wife more than him. The boy’s nakedness to him had had no definition but was a long beige flag of taunting and every fine feeling of his seemed mocked and whored by the presence of the hermit. Tuck felt himself only a raving appendage to the event, a thing tacked on to the crisis of his wife.
Yoo hoo! Oh bad bad boys. I’ve got a treat for you, called Bernadette. All wet in their pants they stared up to the woman clearing the cane above them, their beds spread below her. Their sanctuary ruined. Only Swanly knew who she was.
Oh no, is it a woman of the church? said Walthall.
There will always be a woman around to wreck things, said Pal.
No, she’s all right, Swanly intervened, though he was still sick. He came up from the shore roots and struggled into his shorts slowly. He seemed paralyzed and somewhere not with them, an odd sleepiness on him. Be nice, all of you, he added.
Big Mama Busybod, said Walthall. Courtesy of the Southern regions.
Out in the sun they saw she was not a bad-looking case though she seemed arrested by a spiritual idea and did not care her hair was blowing everywhere like a proper woman of the ’50s would.
Her husband came behind, mincing over the stone beach. She turned.
I heard the shots, he said.
Fools. Eat, said Bernadette. But she remained startled by Swanly and could not turn her face long from him.
Tuck didn’t understand it, but his jaw began flapping. You boys ever bait a trotline with soap? Yes Ivory soap. Tuck pointed under the bridge where their line was set on the near willow. Tuck was not convinced he even existed now outside the river of want he poured toward Swanly. He was not interested in what he continued to say, like something in a storekeeper’s costume activated by a pullstring and thrust into a playhouse by a child. Fish began biting on the substances of modern industry in the ’40s, boys. Why they’re like contemporary men they ain’t even that hungry just more curious. Or a woman. They get curious and then the bait eats them, huh.
Yes sir, said Walthall, annoyed.
Tuck kept on in despondent sagery then trailed off as the boys ate and he next simply sat down on a beach boulder and stared away from them into the late bower of Sunballs across the river.
When he twisted to look he was astounded by the extent of bosom his wife was visiting on Swanly. She was bared like some tropical hula but not. Swanly ate his chicken kneeling in front of her with his bare smooth chest slightly burned red and of such an agreeable shape he seemed made to fly through night winds like the avatar on the bow of a ship. That hussy had dropped her shawl down and Tuck noticed more of her in truth, her mothersome cleavage, than he had in years, faintly freckled and still not a bad revelation. Not in years atop her.
It was eleven years ago when he had pursued illicit love with another woman. This was when his boys were small and cute. He could not get over how happy he was and blameless and blessed-feeling, as if in the garden before the fall. She was a young woman with practical headquarters in the Jackson Country Club, a thing he felt giant pride about, her sitting there in a swimsuit nursing a Tom Collins, high-heeled beach shoes on her feet, talking about storms how she loved them. Now she was a fat woman and his children were fat men and it was not their fatness that depressed him so much as it was watching visible time on them, the horrible millions of minutes collected and evident, the murdered idle thousands of hours, his time more than theirs in their change. They had an unfortunate disease where you saw everything the minute you saw them, the awful feckless waiting, the lack of promise, the bulk of despair. The woman had been attracted to him through his handsome little boys and she would excite him by exclaiming, Oh what wonderful seed you have. He stayed up like a happy lighthouse with rotating beam. She had no children, never would, but she whispered to him he might break her will if he didn’t stop being so good. All the while he had loved Bernadette too, even more, was that possible? The woman didn’t mind. What kind of man am I? Tuck thought. Was time working every perversion it had on him, were there many like him? He felt multiplied in arms and legs, a spider feeling eight ways, he was going into the insect kingdom. Oh yes, lost to the rest.
He loved his boys but my God they were like old uncles, older than him, mellow and knee-slapping around a campfire. He loved his wife, but no he didn’t, it was an embattled apathy each morning goaded into mere courtesy, that was what, and he felt wild as a prophet mocking an army of the righteous below him at the gate.
Now isn’t that better? his wife said to the boys, who had fed themselves with hesitation before they fell to trough like swine.
You’re too thoughtful of us, ma’am, said Swanly.
I’m Bernadette, she said.
You are desperate, thought Tuck. I sort of like it. Hanging all out there, little Mama.
Was it how you like it? she said only to the boy.
My mother never cooked for me like that.
Ah.
Nobody ever has.
Oh. What’s wrong?
That hermit, you know. He saw me without anything on.
She could see he was still trembling, warm as it was.
I know how it is. She looked more deeply into his eyes. Believe me.
What is it? said Tuck, coming up.
This boy’s been spied on by that creature Sunballs.
Tuck leaned in to Swanly. The boy was evilly shaken like a maiden thing out of the last century. He was all boy but between genders, hurt deep to his modesty. Tuck was greatly curious and fluttered-up. All execrable minutes, all time regained. I would live backwards in time until I took the shape of the boy myself. My own boyself was eat up by the gooks and then this strolling wench, my boyself was hostaged by her, sucking him out to her right in front of me, all over again as with me. Woman’s thing stays hungry, it don’t diminish, it’s always something. A need machine, old beard lost its teeth harping on like a holy fool in the desert. They’re always with themselves having sex with themselves, two lips forever kissing each other down there and they got no other subject. Even so, I feel love for her all over again.
Lester Silk, Bean, and Pal studied this trio isolated there where the water on rills avid over pebbles made a laughing noise. Walthall raised his viola and spread his arms out like a crucified musician and he stood there in silence evoking God knows what but Arden Pal asked the others what was going on.
Wake up and smell the clue, whispered Silk. Walthall wants the woman and our strange boy Swanly’s already got her.
Swanly’s okay, Silk. He’s not strange.
Maybe not till now.
Leave him alone, said Bean. Swanly’s a right guy. He has been through some things that’s all. Ask me.
You mean a dead daddy like you?
I’d say you look hard enough, a dead both, but he wouldn’t admit it. Bean intended to loom there in his acuity for a moment, looking into the breech of his gun which he had opened with the lever. It was a rare lever action shotgun, 20-gauge. Bean worshiped shells and bullets. Ask me, he’s a full orphan.