They blending with him, said Arden Pal. They watched us naked too. She didn’t jump back in the bushes like a standard woman when I caught her.
Swanly came over getting his shirt.
She’s giving me something. I’m feeling poorly, he said.
The rest did not speak and the three, Tuck, Bernadette, and Swanly, walked up the shallow bluff and into the woods.
Silk sighed. I don’t quite believe I ever seen nothing like that. Old store boy there looks like somebody up to the eight count.
Walthall, who had actually had a sort of girl, since with stubborn farm boy will he would penetrate nearly anything sentient, was defeated viola and all. Lord my right one for mature love like that. No more did he heed the calling of his music and he was sore in gloom.
Bean could not sit still and he walked here and there rolling two double-aught buckshot shells in his palm, looking upward to the spying bower of the hermit, but no offending eye there now, as he would love.
They closed the store as Swanly began talking. She went to the house and got something for his belly and some nerve pills too and diet pills as well. Bernadette was fond of both diet and nerve pills, and sometimes her husband was too, quite positively. Some mornings they were the only promise he could fetch in and he protected his thefts of single pills from his wife’s cabinet with grim slyness. In narcosis she was fond of him and in amphetamine zeal he returned affection to her which she mistook for actual interest. The doctor in Magee was a firm believer in Dexamil as panacea and gave her anything she wanted. The pain of wanting in her foreign eyes got next to him. In a fog of charity he saw her as a lovely spy in the alien pines. He saw a lot of women and few men who weren’t in the act of bleeding as they spoke, where they stood. The pharmacist was more a partisan of Demerol and John Birch and his prices were high since arsenals were expensive. His constant letters to Senator McCarthy, in his decline, almost consumed his other passions for living, such as they were. But the pharmacist liked Bernadette too, and when she left, detained as long as he could prolong the difficulty of her prescription, he went in the back room where a mechanic’s calendar with a picture of a woman lying cross-legged in a dropped halter on the hood of a Buick was nailed to the wall and laid hand to himself. One night the doctor and the pharmacist met in this room and began howling like wolves in lonely ardor. Bernadette’s name was mentioned many times, then they would howl again. They wore female underwear but were not sodomites. Both enjoyed urban connections and their pity for Bernadette in her aging beauty out in the river boonies was painful without limit; and thus in the proper lingerie they acted it out.
Swanly, after the pills, began admitting to the peach wine as if it were a mortal offense. Bernadette caught his spirit. They adjourned to the house where he could lie comfortably with her Oriental shawl over him.
We don’t have strong drink here. Not much. She looked to Tuck. You don’t have to drink to have a full experience.
Tuck said, No, not drink. Hardly.
No. I’m having fun just talking. Talking to you is fine. Because I haven’t been much of a talker. That’s good medicine. My tongue feels all light.
Talk on, child. She gave Swanly another pill.
Tuck went to relieve himself and through the window he saw the clothesline over the green clover and he speculated that through time simple household things might turn on you in a riot of overwhelming redundancy. He had heard of a man whose long dear companion, a buckskin cat, had walked between his legs one night and tripped and killed him as he went down headfirst onto a commode. Cheered that this was not him he went back to listen to the boy.
But after all you wouldn’t have just anybody look at you all bared. Surely not that awful person, Bernadette was saying. I’d not let him see me for heaven’s sake.
It seems he ought to pay. I feel tortured and all muddy. I can’t forget it.
Just talk it out, that’s best. It seems there’s always a monster about, doesn’t it?
I feel I could talk all afternoon into the night.
We aren’t going anywhere.
We aren’t going anywhere, added Tuck.
I’m feeling all close to you if that’s all right.
Some people are sent to us. We have been waiting all our lives for somebody and don’t even know it.
Older ones are here to teach and guide the young, Tuck said.
Bernadette glanced at Tuck then looked again. He had come back with his hair combed and he had shaved. He was so soft in the face she felt something new for him. In this trinity already a pact was sealed and they could no more be like others. There was a tingling and a higher light around them. A flood of goodwill took her as if they had been hurled upon a foreign shore, all fresh. The boy savior, child, and paramour at once. Swanly spoke on, it hardly mattered what he said. Each word a pleasant weight on her bosom.
Walthall and the rest stared into the fire sighing, three of them having their separate weather, their separate fundament, in peach wine. Pal could swallow no more and heaved out an arc of puke luminous over the fire, crying, Thar she blows, my dear youth. This act was witnessed like a miracle by the others.
God in heaven, this stuff was so good for a while, said Silk.
Fools, said Bean.
Bean don’t drink because he daddy daid, said Walthall. So sad, so sad, so gone, so Beat.
Yeh. It might make him cry, said Pal.
Or act human, said Silk.
Let it alone. Bean had stood unmoved by their inebriation for two hours, caressing his 20-gauge horse gun.
Teenage love, teenage heart. My face broke out the other night but I’m in love wit yewwww! sang Walthall.
What you think Swanly’s doing, asked Pal.
Teenage suckface. Dark night of the suck.
They are carrying him away, far far away, Silk declared.
Or him them.
Having a bit of transversion, them old boy and girl.
You mean travesty. Something stinketh, I tell you.
We know.
The hermit made Swanly all sick. We should put a stop to his mischief, said Bean all sober.
That person saw the peepee full out of ourn good friend ourn little buddy.
This isn’t to laugh about. Swanly’s deep and he’s a hurting man.
Boy, said Pal. He once told me every adult had a helpless urge to smother the young so they could keep company with the dead, which were themselves.
You’d have to love seeing small animals suffer to hurt Swanly. The boy’s damn near an angel. I swear he ain’t even rightly one of us, said Silk. Bean did not care for Silk, who had only joined them lately. But Silk redeemed himself, saying, Christ I’m just murky. Swanly’s deep.
You know what, Walthall spoke, I felt sorry for all three of them when they left here. Yes the woman is aged but fine, but it was like a six-legged crippled thing.
So it was, said Pal. I declare nothing happy is going on wherever they are.
* * *
Whosoever you are, be that person with all your might. Time goes by faster than we thought. It is a thief so quiet. You must let yourself be loved and you must love, parts of you that never loved must open and love. You must announce yourself in all particulars so you can have yourself.
Tuck going on at dawn. Bernadette was surprised again by him. Another man, fluent, had risen in his place. She was in her pink sleeping gown but the others wore their day clothes and were not sleepy.
Listen, the birds are singing for us out there and it’s a morning, a real morning, Bernadette said. A true morning out of all the rest of the mornings.