Exhaustion has also at last dropped Debra Edwards into a heavy sleep in her hospital bed, that and strong medication. Worried about her unresponsive state of mind, Police Chief Dee Romano called the minister at Trinity Lutheran, which he understood from Officer Bo-sticker was the church being attended temporarily by the pastorless Presbyterians, and said he was sorry to bother him again, but would he be willing to come down to the station to provide some urgent spiritual counseling? Of course. Reverend Dreyer took one look at the woman there on the wretched jail-cell cot and said she was obviously suffering from dangerously deep depression and should be kept in hospital overnight, where she can be kept under medical observation. Her dreams there are of dreaming, with Glenda Oakes sitting at the edge of her dreams like a dark angel and commenting cruelly on them even as she dreams them, so she keeps trying to wake up to be free of the one-eyed harpie, but she cannot. Down the hospital corridor from her, Mr. John P. Suggs — who does not dream, as he says — is suffering his own kind of nightmare: he is trying to think. He has the sensation of being in a large empty house with hundreds of locked closet-sized rooms for which he has no key. Brute strength alone frees him from any one room, only to leave him in another exactly like the first. Bernice Filbert, sitting nearby in a lumpy hospital easy chair, dozing fitfully, can feel his struggle and it translates into her own fragmented dreams as its opposite: the desire to push herself down into sleep, free from the cares of the world; but those cares resist her and will not let her go.
Cokie Duncan has no such problems. He is out cold on the floor of the Eagles Social Club and he is not dreaming, his bombed brain cells are not up to it, but he is alone now under a scatter of playing cards randomly dealt upon him by his departing companions. They are now piling past the bouncer at the door of the Blue Moon Motel and entering the sound track of the final Duke L’Heureux and Patti Jo Rendine number, an upbeat Elvis-influenced rendition of one of the motel’s theme songs, “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again,” the final number because the recording crew have quickly decided with the arrival of the whooping stag party that it is time to close up shop and get the hell out of here. Will Henry, too, is packing up his guitar and moving toward the door. The two singers are on a high, though — it has been the night of their lives — and when they get a clamorous request from the crowd pressing in around them on the dance floor for yet another refrain of “The Night My Daddy Loved Me Too Much,” they cannot resist. It is into this festive congestion that tomorrow’s groom-to-be Steve Lawson and his rampageous pals stagger, not meaning to throw elbows and knock drinks out of people’s hands but not meaning not to either, too drunk for decision-making of any kind. Their goal is the tableful of drinks ordered up for the singers in the middle of the room and not yet consumed, their own supply exhausted, and, when reached, these are snatched up and passed around with a lot of hollering and cussing and laughing and generally obnoxious behavior. The freelance civil servant, Giorgio Lucci, the leader of this wild pack, gives a wave to his boss the fire chief who is just leaving, lets out a resounding coma-ti-yi-yippee-yippee-yo in acknowledgement of the hayseed performers, tosses back a tall glass of beer in one long guzzle and finds himself face-to-face with the female half of the singing duo, no longer singing. He blinks in recognition, belches, grins his stand-up comedian’s grin. “‘Patti Jo.’ I’ll be damned! Patricia Josefina! I never forget a nose! You nearly fooled me with that hayseed act, Josie. Remember me? I once had my finger up your little patonza.” He grabs her in the crotch of her jeans, and sings: “So why not take all of me?” Doesn’t get past “all” before her musical partner and former bush league bullpen pitcher comes in with some high heat for his big K of the night. Which is the signal everyone has been waiting for.
Out at the lakes, far from the bench-clearing brawl erupting at the Blue Moon, Sally Elliott steps out of the cold lake waters as she stepped in, mooning the moon and musing about the whimsical customs of midsummer. A distant voice, floating with silvery clarity over the still waters, has just cried out: “Omigod! What are we doing?” “That was my mother’s voice,” she says, drying herself off with her shirt. “Let’s go.” Billy Don, still wearing his sunglasses, lingers in the water at waist level, wanting to stay cool as she has stayed cool and consequently self-conscious about his telltale arousal — which, for fear she will laugh at it, he is trying desperately but unsuccessfully to detumesce with prayer and the recitation of mathematical formulae and also with moral fortitude, the sort his baseball coach used to urge upon him, with equal lack of success, to discourage the sin of Onan. They have been playing a game of water tag that should have been more fun than it was, but Sally has done too much pool time and he has been unable to keep up with her, or else it was the beer (he’s not used to it), so he has rarely had his hands on her and then only fleetingly and not in the best places, which never seemed quite available. Like some kinds of knowledge he’s been offered in his life, but that he’s not been quite able to grasp, advanced calculus, for example. But just seeing her moonlit bottom bob up when she dove under water and feeling the swish of her as she passed suddenly between his legs have been enough to keep him in such an unholy fever it’s a wonder the water around him hasn’t started to boil. “Billy Don? Come on!” Still he hesitates. She seems to guess what’s troubling him and tosses him her shirt, the one that says give me a hug, turns her back and walks over to pull her jeans on. Using his boner as a shirt hanger is probably even more ridiculous than leaving it exposed and bobbing stupidly on its own, but that’s what he does, pretending to be drying himself off until he can reach his cast-off clothes. Still hasn’t been able to give her that hug. He doesn’t know why. Just too dumb, probably. This damp T-shirt between his legs, he’s pretty sure, is as close as he’s going to get.