“Maybe you could get on the horn,” Avey said, “and call somebody. Think you can do that?”
The twerp picked up his radio and turned a couple of knobs. “For your sake I’ll pretend I didn’t hear nothing.” He rolled down the window and waved his hand at the world. “I don’t hear nothing but the cars passing by.”
When we pulled up at the reverend’s nearly an hour on, an old man and woman were in their garage, between two cars.
“Are you Reverend Rumsey?” I said.
A short man with a handlebar mustache and thinning hair, he wore a black wool blazer and collarless shirt played up by a diamond in gold, the size of a Canadian dime. “Friends call me Rev-Up,” he said, and noted the plates on his car. REV UP, it said, opposite the other, JMP 4 JOY. “Just like that,” the man said, “only with a hyphen.”
“You were going to conduct a service for us.”
“You know what time it is, son?”
“We had a blowout on the way up.” I gestured toward the ratman. “Our cab.”
“One-thirty,” said Rev-Up. “Or thereabouts.”
Avey flashed her best sad frown. “You said you weren’t going out today.”
“I said I wasn’t going out for work. Me and the old gal got thirsty.”
“So you’re not going to marry us.”
“Did I say that?” Rev-Up stepped to the door of the car his wife had got in and said, “Looks like they’re here, Dale.”
The place was warm and bright and smelled of potpourri and burning wood and mincemeat pie and spuds.
“Now I’m not criticizing you,” Rev-Up said, “but why in the heck did you kids choose today of all days to tie the old knot?”
Avey slapped her legs. “It’s another one of those real-long-stories deals,” she said.
“We know all about those,” said Dale. Her rhinestone brooch, in the shape of a cross, twinkled in the lights from the Xmas tree. “If only we had a nickel for every time we’ve heard that line—”
“—we’d be gazillionaires,” said Rev-Up. He was twisting the tips of his stache. Funny I hadn’t noticed, but his fingers were those of a woman, long and slender and tapered at the ends, with longish nails, too, that looked like they’d been shellacked. He was the type of guy, I saw, who studied his stamps in panties he nabbed from his wife. He finished with his twiddling and took a pipe from beside a red glass bowl of candy. “Any particular angle,” he asked, “you want to the service?”
“I’ve never gone in for too much Bible pounding,” I said. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Rev-Up said. He drew at his pipe and twiddled his stache. “Hows about some good old-fashioned spirituals then?”
“What do you think?” I said to Avey.
“With them,” said Rev-Up, “it’s about the Great Spirit and such-like.”
All this talk was making me nervous. It didn’t matter to me what the man said, so long as it was legal.
“Personally,” Rev-Up said, “for my money, I’d go with old Heyzoose Himself. The New Testament, straight down the line. But that’s just me, of course.”
“The other stuff sounded good to me,” said Avey.
Rev-Up looked to see I was with her. “Then the other stuff it shall be. Any time you two’re ready.”
Avey didn’t have a veil. Dale offered a rhinestone tiara, but Avey took my snowcap, the one I’d got from Dinky, and garnished it with toilet paper, green. And there we were, hand-in-hand to Rev-Up’s voice, sonorous and warm. “It is,” I heard him say, “an important moment when two people, who at one time were strangers to one another, are drawn together by an irresistible force, so that, henceforth, their lives will not be divided by space or by time…” And later a bit of Kahlil Gibran snuck into the picture, something about singing and dancing in the midst of being alone. “The strings of a lute,” Rev-Up intoned, “though they quiver with the same music, are alone. And you will stand together, yet not too near together, for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow… You are performing an act of complete and utter faith…” And then my head went south, a misty curtain draping from the wings. Rev-Up was asking for the symbols of our commitment. It took a minute to find the rings we’d got from the gumball machine at the diner. Our man was dismayed when he saw them, but discretely forged ahead. “These rings are a symbol in this your wedding ceremony and in your marriage of two things. First, they are made of a material that does not tarnish, and this symbolizes your love for one another remaining forever pure and untarnished. Second, they are made in a complete circle, having no beginning and no end. This, too, symbolizes your love for one another, remaining forever.”
A minute later found me saying, “With this ring I thee wed. Let it ever be to us a symbol of our eternal love,” and a minute later yet Rev-Up said, “By the authority vested in me by my church and by the state of Nevada, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss each other!”
And then Avey was on my back. Snow had somehow appeared, or maybe it had been there always, I don’t know, but we were piggybacking through the stuff, and falling in the stuff, and laughing and kissing and laughing. Just across the way an old pair of Czechs had set up a store that sold us cheap champagne. The ratman told us we were nuts, and we laughingly agreed.
BACK AT THE MOTEL, WE FOUND SUPER IN HIS truck with his Pall Mall, Fortinbras as ever by his side.
“We have the curious suspicion something heterodoxical’s in the air.”
“Super,” I said, “meet Avey vanden Heuvel, my new wife.”
“Well, well,” Super said. “Isn’t that a thrifty board you’ve set.”
“I don’t catch your drift.”
“What’s to catch? There’s not a fool this side of the pass that can’t see the funeral-baked meats’ll do fine for the marital feast. If that’s not thrift, we don’t know it.” The old man clapped me on the shoulder and said his heart was glad. Then, with a stiff but passionate dip of his head, he took Avey’s hand and kissed it. “Reap while you can, butterfly,” he said. “Reap while you can.”
In our room, alone at last, we dallied in love till solitude took us, followed by dreamless sleep. We woke to the sounds of laughter. The room now was black, I didn’t know where I was. Something brushed my cheek, a strand of hair, I thought, that made me think of a man I’d known, who when he saw hair on a motel bed thought it from a Turk. It’s true how rooms like these harbor what’s left of others, bits of tawdry fact crying out from time — the illegible guest books and marked-up scriptures in the Gideons by the bed, a forgotten pair of panties beneath the mattress and burns on the stand, the solitary clip of nail that scrapes your feet and conjures to mind this day or that long past. Once, as a child, my family had stayed at the only motel in town. Death Valley was the place, or maybe some dump near the waste that is Needles. It was hot and dry and dark, with a skyful of stars I remember as sad. The clerk that night had stepped out for a smoke and seen me by the fence round the pool, staring at the water. Don’t go getting any far out ideas, he’d said, about sticking your tootsies in that, my friend. But it’s so hot, I said. You don’t figure that fence ain’t there for nothing, do you? he said. I asked what he meant, and he knelt in the rocks and told of the boy who’d drowned last year, a boy, in fact, about my age. His parents had put him to bed and gone to eat, then come back to a TV lost in fuzz. It wasn’t till morning, after they’d phoned the police and firemen and county sheriff too that the man himself found the kid, floating in the pool by a little dead mouse. All my life I’d remember that story. And more than once I’d find myself thinking of the lights in the pool, the boy above, luminescent, void, bobbing with the ripples of the cruising snake…