Edie shouted out, “Oh God, no!”
Lloyd remonstrated but held Dee. Until then she had been winning and asserting her pleasure on others. She felt the long cut on her thigh. It stung and then throbbed. Mortimer left the room. Perhaps never to return to her in friendly form again.
The three remaining were embarrassed and sad. The woman had expected just to slap her a little and Lloyd to insist on familiar desecrations passing for ecstasy in pornographic circles. They brought her a wet towel and then played poker with her while swallowing pills. She swallowed them too. She knew she had been sliced long and deep by a razor of some kind. Her own blood, in this prison, was a relief to see, curiously. Because that had to end it, she could still win.
She believed she had wrecked them all and they were burning now. She had reduced Mortimer to spite and outright crime. She could look him in the face, but she doubted he could look back at her. She guessed she knew him fairly well. But she drank too much and took narcotics with Edie and Lloyd, the towel bunched around her thigh. They tried to play cards but were numbed in giggles. Dee did not understand what trouble she was in until she called Edie a name and Edie hit her very hard in the mouth. Then Lloyd twisted Dee’s arm out of its socket. They were gone and she was in the elevator riding up and down when she woke up. A fifty-dollar bill was pinned to the front of her dress.
She stumbled into her kitchen in early morning, brought all this distance by a sympathetic Vietnamese cabdriver whose family fished out of Biloxi. There were a few hundred thousand of his citizens on the Gulf. They even had gangs now, he explained.
She did not know what she wore or what her hair was like. She was after ice water, then many aspirin in a large bottle. She missed her mouth with the glass. She spilled the aspirin bottle and it clattered on the tile. Her lap was full of melting aspirin when Hare walked in to see her under the hanging light at the table where nobody ate. The little boys sometimes cleaned fish on it or ate cold cereal and used the toaster on it. Enriched white bread, molasses, jam. Some of this food was on her forearms.
“You sick? Hurt?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“You can’t hardly talk.”
“You can’t know.”
“You’re woozy. And faraway. I’ll take care of you.”
Her lips were swollen, saliva in the corner, her nose chapped. A dried rivulet of blood out of one nostril.
“You’re not in love with him, are you?”
She looked at him as if he had just sung in Latin.
“I’ll fix things, Dee. Not to brag. I’ve used this home to grow up in. Now I’ll take care of you.”
It floated, it worked, it launched against a bottle of cheap champagne swatted on the bow planks by Melanie. It was August, and they all wore boat shoes. Ulrich dressed, as usual, as if he had shoplifted in a hurry from a clothes barn in the seventies. Military jacket, purple jean bell-bottoms. Harvard had a cravat, a gold chain from Melanie. For being captain and largely the builder and finisher. Engineer’s cap like Admiral Halsey’s. Because it was somewhere between a railroad saloon and a boat. Twin Mercuries carried them briskly. The pontoons made an oversize wake. You could fish and swim from it. There were lockers with this gear. Sidney, after mocking them like Noah’s neighbors during the laying in of planks, the rail and pews from a razed country church, the stained glass on either side of the cabin, the teak wheel, was aboard as if it had been his idea and he’d never doubted it. He loved hawking into the water the phlegm that rose easily like a permanent natural resource. They were eating burgers cooked on a grill right on the afterdeck and close to the happy engines. John Roman was aboard but not his handsome silver-haired wife, who was sick with something bad, they feared. Life jackets were everywhere. You sat on them, you used them as pillows on the pews. The big cabin was much like a chapel simply portaged over out of the church.
Sidney wore eyeblinding Rod Laver shoes, the old original leather ones his father had got ahold of by lot last month. Pepper worked with people who looted stores that neither had sales nor declared bankruptcy but whose owner simply up and walked away from their stock after a failed fire.
The huge lake today was a suspension of silver. At creek mouths and around treetops you saw fishermen like ants on sticks, this side of a moody horizon. Another barge came out from the orphans’ camp dock, loaded with an extra adult, Man Mortimer. He wore a blazer, double-breasted, with khaki linen breeches and high-gloss rubber-soled moccasins. The two teenage girls, Minny and Sandra, were near him and all aboard were happy, especially the insane couple.
They could not tell their mood from Harvard’s boat, but it seemed roisterous even from a half mile away. Sidney wondered if they would collide. A short-barreled.410 shotgun and a flare pistol were on board and he knew where they were. Inevitably the two pontoons plowed toward each other, as two cars on a desert highway must mate.
A storm could be making. The old ones hoped so. The roof had not been tested, but it looked as sweet and snug as all of Harvard’s work. The pleasure barge had taken a year and a month to build. None of them knew how to build anything but Harvard, and Ulrich, putatively. But all but Sidney had labored with care.
They were roofed, windowed, unsinkable. They stormed forward, a chapel on the top of adventure. They were going uncharted places up the river and into the new catfish reservoir flooding down from Yazoo City.
At Yazoo Point something raced out from the creek. It was Sponce Allison on Ulrich’s old Jet Ski. The rooster tails high. Driven in anger at troubling speed toward them, they thought. Closer, you saw a pale boy clutched aghast to its arms, as if the vehicle had stolen him. The boy didn’t seem to know how to slow down the ski. Sidney went for the flare pistol, interested in its stopping power. Sponce barely missed the barge, then came back in a circle beaten seriously by their wake and flying high, wobbling. The smackdown knocked the boy away, and the Jet Ski slowed to the boat’s spirited crawl as the boy looked over at the passengers in both fear and spite.
He saw Sidney gawking at him and straightaway collided with the pontoon.
Sidney had been seasick since the first movement away from the pier, but in an angry active way of his own. Now possessed by three nauseas, he was tamping down a cylinder of puke by main will until it backed into the last of his gorge. A major muscle group undeveloped in other men sprang forth so hard his head recoiled. Nigh ten feet out, some specks may have found Sponce’s foot. The boy went wild with incredulity. He had set against this man void of any purpose and without a final destination. He shrieked over and over.
Ulrich noted that this was his old Jet Ski bobbing, wasn’t it?
Sponce floated on the dead thing and it would not start again.
The old man peered at him. Wren, with skin you could nearly see through. Lewis and Moore, the sexual gymnasts in chemotherapy, were dressed for fun, and she should not, as the girls would say, be wearing a bikini with green stilt cabana heels. The boat stopped.
“No. You ain’t towing me, and I ain’t getting on neither,” said Sponce.
So they left him, and ahead the oncoming orphans’ barge puttered down to bump into them. They were no longer feral, these children, but disciplined by a uniform glee like that of their counselors, the insane couple. The Ten Hoors, Penny still a svelte looker, Gene in better shape and seeming savvy with his freckles and mustache, were distinctly in charge and adult. But they were in beatitude still. The whole group shone, and were much cleaner, and knew what they were doing on the boat. They were having love and the outdoors was what. These things were good. The four engines of the two crafts stopped entirely and they shuddered up against each other. Melanie, Lewis and the Ten Hoors tied up the boats with the wharf lines.