“Egan my holiness,” he erupted as if with a thought roaring straight out of his gonads, lost in hurt. “There are near a million coyotes in this state. What the hell’s happening?” All this stuff with eyes was crawling around the bodies in the trunk. Or it might be in the ocean. This boy Egan, the good shepherd. Once beat up women.
“You’re wicked all the way through,” Egan said. “Another day I’d already have jacked up a switchblade to your throat and you’d be forgetting you look like Conway Twitty.”
Mortimer understood from his own grimmer days that it was not good to beat up women you thought weakened by speed and heroin. He understood this the afternoon he hit an almost giant girl with superb legs, messed up on everything. He’d never heard of some of the chemicals, and this girl beat him mercilessly. She was pure girl but could look done for when really she had another whole tank left.
“It’s Fabian, Fabian, boy,” he rallied.
“You might of once looked like Fabian. Not no more.”
This assertion made Mortimer angry. But then he felt sick over the whole night, and small. Very weak, with the pain of monsters. Maybe he was in adrenaline shock. His legs sought a ladder of escape where there was none.
He read the card in his hand quickly.
IF YOU ARE HERE YOU ARE IN TROUBLE
MANY HAVE DIED HERE, LOST FROM BOTH MOTHER
AND CHRIST OUR LORD JESUS.
THIS IS HELL, FRIEND.
LET ME TAKE YOU TOWARD A HAPPY WORLD.
The Byron Egan Ministries
In front of you as you stand.
Mortimer was filled with sorrow and pity, for this boy and for himself.
“I believe,” said Egan, “you are hurt, my man.” Gold teeth, the brown but graying ponytail. The black tattoo of the cross on his cheek.
“I am hurt, Egan. Would you take me to Warren General Hospital? Would you?”
“I came for no other purpose.”
Egan, not young anymore either, set a stack of his cards on the roulette table behind him.
They walked out and rose into Mortimer’s behemoth Lincoln Navigator. Egan drove. Mortimer saw by the dash light that his car was very bloody on the seats, the carpet, even the visor where Booth had put the stiletto back. He asked Egan if he’d like him to put on a religious station. Egan said no. When he worked with evil, he worked with evil.
“Brother Egan.” Man Mortimer rethought this. “Little Cousin Egan, Byron Egan. I never had the time to be good. You understand me? Something pushed me. I never liked it, but something always pushed me. Like Elvis, Twitty, George Jones. I feel uglier than Jones right now. But let me tell you. You ever write any songs or a book?”
“No, friend. I don’t believe in it.”
“Believe? Well you wouldn’t, I guess. I just say to you, for me I’m happy I never wrote a song or any book. I did the world the grace of keeping my no-talent mouth shut and my fingers quiet.”
“The first good thing I know about you, whore trader that used to be Fabian. Books are a very mortal sin. Books are not wrote by the Christly. I got no idea why a writer of a book should have respect. Or even get the time of day, unless he’s a prophet. It’s a sign of our present-day hell. Books, think about it, the writer of a book does envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, larceny, greed or what? Oh, vanity. He don’t miss a single one of them. He is a Peeping Tom, an onanist, a busybody, and he’s faking humility every one of God’s minutes. Especially those Christian ones that write about lawyers or accountants killing each other.”
“That’s a sermon’s sermon, boy. Well done. Drive on, my good man, drive on.”
FOUR
DEE ALLISON’S SONS ISAAC AND JACOB WERE NINE AND TEN, but they already wanted a car, and they planned to take some orphans from the camp on a ride within the year. The car appeared one afternoon in June standing dry out of a former deep bayou that disappeared in a sinkhole. The earth opens and water goes downward in five or six seconds and you have a hole where a pond was, or a service station. Florida, because of its vast underground riverine passages, is first in sinkholes, but in other states wet over long periods you will hear of trailer homes, and a few times fishermen blandly working a pool, suddenly disappearing and the soil gray as lunar earth within the week.
The Allison boys had found the car all bare in the hole yesterday, on the back edge of the insane Irish ex-priest’s land, with one of the priest’s dogs messing around it in high anxiety. The car seemed to be a vintage something none of them had seen in person, but it was a ton and a half of rust mange in a coupe shape when they found it. They very much wanted this for their teenage car, the boys, and their older brother, Sponce, who did not confess it. You had the sense you could chip it out like a hunk of ocher marble and release a beauty within.
Isaac and Jacob did not care who they stole from, and they were also used to obtaining things just by guileless asking. But Carl Bob Feeney was an unbound hermit anxious to fire on trespassers. He loved his Irishness, had always been lonesome, and he compared himself to the expatriate atheist writer Samuel Beckett. He was given to patrolling the woods, as at this moment, with a.22 Magnum rifle, along with his dogs. There were eight of them, pound dogs ill used by deer hunters who’d run them for a season and then deserted them. When Feeney found them, they were feral and starved and had battled coyotes much more sophisticated and swift. Now they were merely loud and always in trouble. Not so much treeing creatures or baying at the moon or pursuing trespassers as rediscovering one another, beasts they seemed never to have encountered on this baseball field — size domain before, and beginning blind fights all over again. Most dogs do not have much recall or shame about recent hostilities. These dogs appeared not to recall other dogs as a possibility.
Today the boys had brought Sponce and his friend Harold Laird, who had such a sick crush on their mother. He fixed engines, but his main vocation was waiting for her to turn up from work in Mortimer’s gift, the Range Rover, used and hunter green, and emerge from it in her white stockings and wary boredom. Harold could fix anything to run, like Ulrich’s lost Jet Ski, given a strong limb and a chain and another working vehicle. He would show them the ropes once the thing was started. He owned a rugged high-horsepower ATV that they all sat on now, soberly driving short distances with a good muffler so Feeney wouldn’t hear them.
The ex-priest’s ears were not that good, anyway, from alcohol and heavy-metal music. Soundgarden, Motorhead, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Marilyn Manson, the forgotten Irish rappers House of Pain. He may have stolen from the collection plate to buy the vast stereo system of 150-wattage that he and his nephew Egan thoroughly enjoyed.
The late seventies and eighties brought on the music of the homicidal charge, a home war after the lost war of Vietnam. This is the land of Visigoths, Picts, Celts, Zulus, Huns, Indians, Scots, Vikings and Tripoli corsairs, with many substrata of Mongols, banditos and racial marines in a polyglot of fierce challenges. The ex-priest himself had been chaplain to the marines in Korea and still believed them the toughest armed force in the history of the world. What other kind of music was inevitable for these people? The armed services know it is classical and employ it freely. And civilians, dressed in the GI-black T-shirt with something nasty printed on it, hair long behind, short at the sides, greasy blue jeans and jackboots tougher than anything they might wear them to do, which is mostly listening to heavy metal and imagining a horde assault against dance majors and carrying off their willing women on their shoulders. The little boys joined the ex-priest in this enthusiasm unknowingly. Harold had gotten them small T-shirts to match their long hair behind. One shirt read: There’s Shit in My Ear Were You Saying Something? The other on the nine-year-old said: If You Ain’t a Hemorrhoid Get Off My Ass. These shirts were made for car drivers.