From time to time I’d think on this, late at night, in the grip of my insomnia. The cicadas would whir. The great horned owls, six syllables to the hoot, would softly, repeatedly call. In the heat of a furnace-like noon, dreaming at the wheel, I’d think about it then, as well, and I’d hate us all in our cock-eyed ways.
Maybe it’s wrong to love the dead. Maybe that kind of love is nothing but the product of our selfish wants, unguent of grief, salve of messy guilt. But what are the options? Should I have committed myself to a life with the monks for not doing right by my friend? Flopped myself down on an old prie-dieu and waited for the Word? It’s not as though I’d intended this, this morbid, useless love. It’s not as though I’d needed Dinky dead before I could give him his deserts. Now and again, though, when the trick’s all said and done, you find yourself left with nothing to say but That’s the way it is. You can talk a lot of dirt in this world, everyone knows, but you can never say the way we love the dead’s got thing one to do with how we love the living.
THE LITTLE GNOME WAS GLEAMING ITS HORRIBLE joy when I stepped into the hall. I kicked its face and watched it blow down the stairs in a dust of plaster and paint…
Some human outside was whistling, “Blue Moon,” the reason far beyond. But out on the deck I understood: Super had returned with Fortinbras the dog. And yet something wasn’t right. Super, Fortinbras, Fortinbras, Super: nothing but a weird old man like rags on a stick — him and his henchman, and through the trees the mist on the lake.
“You got the truck?” I said.
Super had seen our disaster — he must have — and yet he was smiling. Here was a man who’d part for confusion every time. Here was a man who loved what was toppled, broken, spinning, and cracked, the man with the hands of ink and bone, the man with the monkey, the impervious match. O give me a plain where the wild things grow, give me a spread of broken dolls, O give me a national anthem.
“It’s as clear to us as a mountain spring that you smell this business with a dead man’s nose.”
“You think that’s cute?” I said.
“All right, all right, soothe yourself, now. Our wheels we do have.”
“That’s good, Super, cause Stuyvesant is dead.”
For the briefest of instants the old man assumed a pose so brittle it seemed impossible to contain. He might’ve been seized by some grotesque rash of meaning, a thing with talons and fangs, whose sole purpose was to hurl us through the void. He pulled out a watch and wound it so long I thought surely it would break. But then he stopped and looked into my eyes and let fall the watch to crush with his heel.
“Come on in,” I said. “As a favor to Dinky.”
The mannequin lay in a twist of stuff and tree. Bits of glass dully spangled, spears of wood harshly jutted, the mobile clinked, the curtains flapped, the cabin creaked and groaned. The rain had ceased for a time. Beads of grey plopped and plopped, from a dangling wire, a frond of fir, that stupid-ass Mexican boner-doll.
The old man’s eyes traveled the room with a helplessness he hadn’t yet revealed. It wasn’t the cabin’s state that had got him, I thought, so much as what it stood for. The place could’ve gone up like Sodom and Gomorrah, as long as Dinky didn’t watch. But Dinky had watched, and now, leastwise for Super, he’d become a pillar of salt. The geeze held my shoulder. His face drew near, so close his beard touched my chin, and hovered there infused with the grief in an old seal’s eye, perhaps, or the wisdom of a puppy. I began to weep again.
“We know this concern,” he said. “We’ve been where there is to be and seen what there is to see.”
The tears were coming so hard it was difficult to stay with Super’s words.
“Like we said, the world’s gone flat. Days’ll come and go and leave you shy of a whit of sun — of that you can be sure. But so long as you’re living you ain’t broke. No matter what you do, you can only go so low. You bend, you give, you give some more and then you bend again. And just when you think you’ve got to where you can’t go no more, you find yourself giving another pinch of sand, bending another inch. And then you twist back up and start from the get. You might want to, boy, trust him, old Super knows, but you couldn’t break if you tried. You’re too tiny.”
The old man stepped off with a face of good and held me till I laughed.
“What are we going to do?”
“We’ll take care of the Wainwright boy.”
I’d forgotten about Avey and the others. I thought of what Basil had said, that he’d wanted the old man dead.
“I’d better go let them know you’re here.”
“You do that. And when you’re finished, we’ll be waiting.”
The crew had by now fully zonked. I shut the door and whispered. No one stirred. I kneeled at Avey’s side, I stroked her hair, I gazed into her sleeping face. She murmured. Then I kissed her, and she murmured like before.
“Super’s back,” I said. “Wake up.”
“I don’t want to,” she said.
I kissed her face. I kissed her eyes, her mouth, her nose. “All we’ve got to do is make it to the truck.” When she stirred again, Basil jerked to with screwy eyes.
“Calm yourself,” I said.
“Where you been?”
“Listen. You do something stupid, you could really botch it up.”
“He’s back?”
“Yes.”
Basil tried to stand, but couldn’t. “Son of a bitching mother fucking shit!” he said as he collapsed.
I felt for him, a little. The guy couldn’t make any more trouble for Super now than he could for the pope. Of course this commotion had pressed our beauties to another go at life.
“What’s wrong?” Lucille said.
“His feet are all messed up.”
“That’s why you woke us?”
“The old man,” Basil said. “He’s back.”
“With the truck I hope.”
“Yup,” I said.
Lucille jumped. “What are we waiting for?”
“Super’s going to help us with Dinky. Okay?”
“You just make sure,” Basil said, taking up his bottle, “that that fiend ain’t pulling a fast one.”
Super appeared at the door. He looked at the girls and said, “Hello, butterflies.”
“Don’t take this personally,” Lucille said, “but I thought you had a truck.”
“It’s up the road,” I said.
“That,” Basil said, “is where he and his beast are going to chop us into suey.”
“Now, now, Laertes,” Super said, and extended a bony hand, “we were hoping there’d be no armored sentiments here.”
“My sentiments’re armored all right. I don’t feel a thing.”
“Come on,” I said. “Shake his hand.”
“I don’t want to shake his hand.”
I couldn’t believe it. The lunk was positively sulking. “Basil. The man is helping us.”
“You can stay here if you want to, lover,” Lucille said. “You want to stay here?”
“I’m like an elephant. I never forget.” Basil sat there blinking. His head was swaying, a balloon on a string. We watched him. “What the hell,” he said, and gave his hand. “If it’ll make you tits all happy.”