One of them went up to the radio and tuned out the fuzz.
“Where you been?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“We been sick, Isaac. You don’t wanna know.”
“Where’s Mama?”
“At work. She about to quit. Some old lady is asking her sexual advice. They think Mama smashed up some animal glasses or like. They think our mother did that.”
“How can she quit?” Isaac said.
“She’s got Daddy and them men supportin’ her.”
“She needs taking care of anyway,” Hare put in. “Her health is important.”
“Her job’s the part of her isn’t nobody else’s,” said Jacob. “She can’t quit.”
“You want more money for her staying on?” asked Hare.
“I never thought the least about money.”
“She heard what you been up to. Hare lied and told her all y’all had was dummy zombies. Where are they?” Sponce demanded.
“Sitting in their own peace.”
“You a wart.”
“None of that’s the point,” Hare said. “The point is you were somewheres like two stray dogs. Off. Else I dreamt it.”
“You get well and fix up that car, Hare. Or we might go to the sheriff and stand back and wait for the reward. That was a car like songs are written about, and we goin’ to have it in red and a gold hood. Or else I’m gonna tell Mama alls you want is your weenie in her.”
“Mama doesn’t need that anymore,” Sponce snapped. “You shut off your pie hole, wart.”
“Here’s a story,” said Jacob the skinnier, taller. “These people is our ticket unless that car gets done. It might be some old rich man in Missouri missin’ his wife and child all this time. He’d be laying on his deathbed cryin’, and all this money and it never been no happiness since they were stolen. He misses the car too. Then you see us on television and him light up. And we would be friends, we wouldn’t need no daddy or dating men ever again. He wouldn’t let none of us six need nothing again, aside from the reward. We’d have a new house on a brand-new lake. If not a ocean.”
Hare turned even sicker. If that were possible, heaving a new tomb in a dry rock face from his bowels.
But he spoke in a whisper afterward.
“I’m going through some purification here. I got to have it. Them old stories hit at me. I’m all reamed out of everything nasty. I’m not listening to any more nasty stories. That ain’t right. We all better get us a better story. When I’m well, it’s going to be a good story.”
The next morning Hare awoke on the recliner on the porch in his pajamas. July was well on. The house was too big for its window air-conditioning units. Some corners sweltered, eighty-eight at night. He snapped his mouth to cut off a snore and slept. He had on no shirt. His lean muscles were packed closely.
Dee saw him when she went off to Onward in her whites. Her knees went a little weak. When will I get any better about men, she asked herself. She walked in a trance most of the day. Cautious, polite, gone milky and holy in the head, abstracted into kindness.
SIX
MORTIMER PICKED UP THE MAGAZINE. HE COULD NOT quite believe it existed, the gift of an old girlfriend who had found it on the Internet. New Deal, the organ for reformed country people who now hated nature. People who had lost farms. Settlers between town and country who wanted even less. The homes pictured were like mausoleums beside highways, no grass and not a stick of a tree in sight. Paved lawns. Good-looking women and whole families in chairs on brick and concrete lawns. Homes in bare sand neither in the desert nor near the ocean. Not a sunset in the magazine. No visible seasons. The only length of prose was an article about Hitler’s bunker in the last days of Berlin, not for the history but for the architecture.
Some dwellings were high-fashioned storm cellars. To hold off grass, leaves and the elements. Nearing airlessness even in the photograph.
Mortimer was loaded with himself. He had dreamed his history, and in this heavy automobile, in heavy calm, he was a creature of great velocity. He had forgotten to tell her what to wear, and this annoyed him. He went in the casino with her full of self-worth and clarity. It had been awhile and he was mysterious. She was intrigued. Then they walked across the lot and entered the hotel, a huge monster waiting for them.
He wondered why he was not three countries away, but not long. Edie and Large Lloyd were waiting in the penthouse suite. They drank drinks. The wallpaper was flocked with red kudzu and catfish forms swimming in it, gold traces. Somehow not trashy.
She told him in the elevator what a suck-up the sheriff was, coming around Almost There. He liked hearing that.
“Are you attracted to him?”
“I believe it’s the other way around.”
She thought she could hear the din of gamblers, glasses rattling, shouts expressed from a gilded maw somewhere. Impossible at this distance. The very air perhaps.
Large Lloyd and Edie waited in the room, wore sunglasses.
“Let me make an introduction.”
A show about sharks and rays was on a large television. Dee had not watched television since nature began to play such a part. The sharks weren’t bad, although Mortimer seemed frightened of them and presumed she would be. He looked without wanting to and could not even manage to get pensive before looking away.
On the big vanity dresser, his collection of knives stood in their case. Huge machetes to slivery stilettos, even razor knives. Velvet backing two inches thick, scarlet. Gold and silver instruments of despair against people in the golden excess of the room. They all simply stared at the collection.
“Here it is. I’ve shown you the houses over in Belhaven and Jackson, those English cottages and lawns. You didn’t want that. I’m going to play you some more nothing for two hours, and you can’t turn it off or I will come back and you won’t like it. It is a rehearsal of a man named Raymond on a saxophone, from a band called Caliente something. His wife, the Coyote, sings, and she’s good. But you see what you think about him. Then you decide between me and Frank Booth, who won’t be looking very good soon.”
Lloyd the Huge spoke. “My actual name is Lloyd. You will remember this night and my name. Large Lloyd.”
“And my name is Edie,” said the woman in the elegant dress, the ballroom heels. “I go deep.”
When Dee had listened to the dreadful saxophone, the endlessness of its despair and whining, then gaseous punctuations, she turned off the tape deck but kept watching the television for the sharks and rays. She was certain then that Man Mortimer was a disease and had assumed she knew this too for a while. He did make things happen, but the flow of these things had been redundant until now. He was only a man, even with this interesting disease. The others came in immediately.
Dee was not that averse. She had finished many men and loved to reduce them. The woman, when she began with her endearments, was not nightmarish or painful. Dee, who had never had a woman before, was thrilled by naughtiness more wanton and liquid than any since the first naked night of adolescence. An actual departure, as distinct as first leaving the Garden of Eden and perhaps the heavy air of earth altogether.
Lloyd, a mathematician and animal lover, was not accomplished, and they brought him to sighing infanthood quickly. But Man Mortimer was watching, fully clothed, and near the end of something. He rushed in and cut Dee’s thigh.