It was only eight in the morning, but he drove straight for her house.
SEVEN
CARL BOB FEENEY WAS STILL MISSING, AND EGAN WAS living in the lodge by himself. He thought, I will be going to Onward with Uncle Carl Bob soon. It could be by the time we get there I’ll be fit to be his roommate. God, I can’t stand this guilt. Nor the 30 percent interest. Mortimer called it the vig. Some sort of cut rate for taking him to the hospital. At least the old man had not taken his gun, and he had left plenty of food for the dogs in the pen and the cats in the house, five days’ supply at least. Egan prayed he would be back and that he wasn’t naked and dead already, or releasing animals from a shelter, which he had attempted before, driven to it by a man named Ulrich in a woody station wagon. Sunday morning, and Egan stood before his flock thinking these things.
Max Raymond was in the pews. He had bought a gun, an old Mossberg automatic. Spring-loaded, with a magazine that worked off the plunger in the stock. He convinced himself he had tried sincerely not to buy it, hadn’t owned an arm since rat shooting and the navy. Mimi hated even the idea of a weapon. It was that old boyfriend problem, that sin he couldn’t forget. He would one day buy the bullets, long-rifle hollowpoints. Would one day probably not use them.
Next to him, Mimi and three of the other bandsmen. The chubby trombonist, a professor from Memphis with a goatee everybody adored. The emaciated drummer, color of the street, ghetto bus smoke, with exquisite hand-eye talent. A flutist who was the only regular churchgoer, a Methodist in rebellion against Episcopal dryness, people like T. S. Eliot. Four dogs lay quietly. Sent as representatives of their world, it might seem.
Egan spoke. The pew crowd didn’t know if what he said was a poem or an odd psalm or what. “If you see my old uncle, tell him I love him,” Egan began. “He was right and Mr. Ulrich too. We should commence living for the animals after killing them for all these centuries. Go back, go back to their simple fur, their fun. Their ecstasy over the day, their oneness with the infinite. Their lack of memory. They are our heaven, our friends. Why did we imagine they looked so beautiful, only for our tables, only for the backs of selfish kings and lazy sluts? The Garden of Eden, can’t you remember, children? The animals were already there. We were made for their kinship, and they could speak and we lived in the peaceable kingdom. Until the woman broke the contract so that we should have knowledge, and now what do we know, even when the animals look at us through zoo bars and slaughterhouse gates. They are Christ every day, giving their meat, their coats to us, and we without gratitude to these creations, these that we call savage beasts.
“We take, we take without even a thank-you, when if we open the door for some woman we’d like a thank-you, would we not? The other day I opened the door at Big Mart for a woman, a woman shall I say better dressed than I. She had just used food stamps, in her lizard high heels, and going toward her Cadillac where children shouting vulgar things waited, and this woman never even thanked me for my little courtesy.
“How do you think you would feel if you were God? Would you feel unthanked for the universe that is yours? Almost any animal is more beautiful than anybody here today. What were they before the contract of the Garden was broken? For their eyes speak better than our best senators today. They use a language we can’t understand, so we kill them, tear them apart, even sell their parts for aphrodisiacs. The poor rhino’s horn. The liver of the poor black bear, poached by bowmen too cowardly and lazy to work alongside the rest of us in the fields of the Lord. I want my uncle and Mr. Ulrich back, wherever they are. They are apostles from the Kingdom. They have been Paul on the road to Damascus, they have seen the light and quit killing.”
Egan then began the — poetry, was it?
“Dee, thy charms shall not always be sweet.
Minister, thy rituals of the cross turn to babble.
Woods walker, thine feet shall be taken from you,
and proud ladies’ man, you are a boil on a
cadaver.
Be so happy he has not made you suffer yet, like
the animals, eaten
For our sins.
The snake may be kind, we cannot know. Even
our gentlest kill them with
Expedition, the automatic twelve-gauge shotgun.
The snake spoke and was made to be despised,
Even though they may be babies, mothers, they
stay alive
And as friendly as they can manage. But they
spoke. Now we cannot reach out
To them, many of us.
Born into a bad cause, lost at birth,
We late Confederates so proud and stuffed.
There was a time when we smiled and charged the
hills of artillery.
There was a time we did not doubt.
Now you lounge, rain in the trees outside, but you
see nothing.
You charge only at the sports store, the toy store,
the Radio Shack.
You have no cause, no belief, you don’t even have
faith in faith,
Or a prayer for a prayer. There is no paved golden
heaven ahead.
It is the Garden of Eden behind. We have already
seen heaven. Else
What else has this life on earth, this pavement
among throngs
And squalling choirs of sycophants, been preparing
us for?
Prepare to get naked and talk to the animals, right
now!
Given to us by the Lamb, the fisher of men.
But now the question. What are the animals going
to do about the overpopulation
Of so many billions of ugly people?
For we have fed on the blood of our own.
We are not even kind to our own retarded that so
fill the Southland.
We go off to other states and make fun and literature
And Hollywood movies about them.
The Best Southern Art On-screen is Stupid and
Heartwarming.
But you do not know what is beyond the window
of your own home.
The crumbs in your navel are your history.
We have pretended that Sherman caused anything
in the South too long.
We have spoken of the fall of Vicksburg as if it
mattered.
Wretched spectators, heads just out of your
mama’s womb.
Buy me sumpin, Ma. Plug me in.
All this blindness without no ON knob!
Parasites flourish in the lesions of bitten mother
sharks.
Shut up! Shut up! And talk to the animals. They
have soul, they have art.
Shut up and live with your gorgeous neighbors!”
Frank Booth lay in the hospital for three weeks. He had already had four operations. It was mid-September, but the heat had not broken as he waited for the last, a three-hour procedure by an expert plastic surgeon from Florida, in St. Dominic’s hospital in Jackson. He was fifty miles from Vicksburg, almost seventy from the lake, but only eight from Clinton, where Mortimer watched his big-screen TV for the return of the perverse evangelical bard he had seen only once. Perhaps it had been public-access television. He couldn’t remember, so he kept a vigil. He had acquired a taste just lately for a motorcycle, a Norton like Facetto had, a Commando. He had leather suits already, and he looked good with a knife and a monster key chain.
Frank Booth opened a letter block-printed and addressed to his room at St. Dominic’s. His hands trembled. Only three others knew where he was and he didn’t want two of them knowing. But he owed them jewelry, and he was an honest man. He barely recognized himself in the mirror even still, and he liked that. He felt hidden, passing for a thin-faced hermitic and pale sort. The letter was on good stationery but in printing like a child’s.