OLD FRIEND, HAVE YOU NOTICED MY OWN PATIENT FRIEND ON YOUR SAME FLOOR? HE CARRIES A FROG GIG AND HE’S BAD TO DO FOLKS’ EYES WITH IT AT NIGHT OR JUST ANY OLD TIME IT IS SHUTTY-EYE TIME. MAYBE YOU COULD GO THE MAX AND HAVE ZERO EYES.
Large Lloyd had printed the note for Mortimer. Lloyd was very literate and helped Man a little with writing it but did not ask what it could be about.
Jacob and Isaac fished in the cove and swam. They were childish, changed. They pretended it was a familiar activity under the gaze of their mother, who was not watching at all. She wondered too why the boys came close to her all softly of late to mimic a time with her they had never had.
She was drinking on Melanie’s porch. They had one day become friends. Dee quickly realized she’d always liked Melanie, just had a wearying time believing she was sleeping with Facetto. But Dee knew a woman in actual love when she saw one. It might turn out pathetic, but it was true. Melanie did not act as if much between them had ever been less than pleasant, and for people like her, it might be they didn’t register bad looks. These things were too foreign to their style.
So they drank and talked, joined by Mimi Suarez, who had recently performed at Almost There with her husband the saxophonist. The tone of his horn was sweeter now, blending with Mimi, with the lustrous hair and hot legs and little dresses. She seemed a good Cuban woman from Fort Lauderdale, and Dee could live with envy, for she had been envied and still was. Being envied was a burden, but these three could afford it, especially with the tequila and gin and vodka. Limes, salt, olives, whatever you wanted on the tray. And as for Mortimer, Dee was still certain she had won that night, although she had required stitches from Dr. Harvard with his old kit, whiskey and her big lie about a run-in with an electric knife.
She sat up and paid attention now and then to her boys, as she had seen Mrs. Cleaver and others do on ancient television shows. They were above the cove a hundred and thirty yards, and the grass was gray-green in the minor heaven of light when the subtropics finally cools. It is all man could want of this planet’s seasons. Many fall in love with anybody and vow marriage simply because they are in this lush afternoon light. Mimi bent to Dee’s beautiful daughter, Emma. She gave her a few glass animals that made a family.
“I know now,” said the Coyote, “that I want to have a child too. Seeing her almost makes you pregnant.” The animals were exquisite in her small palms. Pins of light from hooves, snouts.
Dee had lately come to like the gin, the tonic, the lime, the tingle. When she looked at Mimi again, she grew almost weepy with coziness. Then she felt daughterly to the old lady. It was a family, if you had steady gin. She was fluid in folks. She swam in Mimi Suarez, legs kicking down that canal of hers. Crying out hello, hello. These thoughts did not surprise her. But the next one did, so she said it.
“I got no reason to live.”
“No,” both rushed in. “Yes.”
“I’m just a nowhere cunt. I don’t even have a hobby.”
Nobody said anything. Mimi envisioned a helpless vagina hanging over the chair back. Melanie felt something on her spine, wet. Then this succubus went into the slope of the yard. They studied the swimming boys raptly as if they had never seen children or water.
“Well, dear,” Melanie said at last. “They also serve who stand and wait.”
“Crossword puzzles helped me through a bad patch a few years ago,” added Mimi.
“Oh God.” Dee laughed.
Melanie giggled. “Church is good for some.”
The boys turned from their violent wading to hear hoots and shrieks of laughter from the porch. The women seemed to tremble and reach for air around the wicker chairs. The boys’ infant sister stood between the women with a glass uplifted in her hands, into the gin.
The pleasure barge closed in on the pier from the western horizon. The engines puttered grandly, washing out the black water. But the men wore the look of mild disappointment common to travelers everywhere, having failed to find a miracle or endure a metamorphosis. Only a further gravity on the face. They could have returned from an expedition around the rim of a vast navel. Harvard, Max Raymond. Ulrich and the ex-priest, found near the animal shelter trying to speak words of love to the inmates through a door. Wren, Lewis and Sidney Farté, more confident since the hacking of his dad, a celebrity and a capitalist. Nobody spoke. Still, they were alert to something new at the pier.
It was Mortimer, down from the hill off a brand-new Norton, in a leather sports coat and fine boots in the style of the Mounties. They knew he was strange before they saw his face closely. Sidney hollered out, “You the man!”
The others looked over at Sidney doubtfully. Mortimer was still a little bent from the stab through the gonads, but he had the posture of a range warrior familiar to cow dung and burning oil. He held a child-size football in his hands, flirting with its shape, unused to it. He did watch the barge arrive and walked into the edge of the water. The boys ran almost on top of him, thrashing. Then they saw. They froze to the bottom of the lake. He had crept up on everybody in the shadowless remnant of the afternoon.
“Say, boys. I don’t know how hard you can take an old pass. What say let’s run for a few goals.” He fired the little ball at dangerous speed past the head of Isaac, and the ball skipped toward the willows behind. Mortimer went in up to his knees with his pants billowing. He waded for the ball.
“We got to make some memories here, boys. You got some bones for me? You best get me in a good mood.”
“I’ll blow your ass off for you,” said Jacob.
“Is he asking them for help or after them?” asked Melanie, at last seeing the man new to the evening.
Dee had never imagined Mortimer in this form. She could not comprehend this person had ever touched her, but she felt a sour loyalty that confused her. She was fascinated and drunk. A pipe organ went off through her head. Jangling lines of nerves like she was coming or vomiting.
Three fat moccasins hung in the willow forks behind Mortimer, and he was unaware. The boys saw. Isaac made a motion of a receiver through the water away from the willows. “I’ll play. Throw here. I’ll get her.” Mortimer fired the ball too high, but Isacc leaped and almost grabbed it. Then he waded out and retrieved it. “Go long, Mr. Mortimer!”
The man was half out of the water pantomiming a varsity end, for as he recalled from Missouri, you ran long and then barely missed, every time. A sort of coolness toward completion. He was too suave to really try. He jumped a bit in inches of water, but the ball sailed over him into the snake roost. Mortimer plunged on by momentum right among the fat sleepers, one of them seven feet.
The boredom of the men on the barge was interrupted by a man screaming and flinging in the water. Wails pitched like a woman’s. You did not hear this much in men. Mortimer shook his hands and you thought he might die of your shame for him. Then he began scrambling out of the water and up, up the grass. His leather coat was flecked by shore mud. The bargemen looked downward.
Sidney was in despair. The others could not know why he had invested trust in this man. Mortimer straightened and walked slowly to the pier and to the bow where Harvard and Raymond tied up. Raymond was drunk.
“Hello, sir,” said Harvard.
“I was admiring your ship the other day, and I came over to see if I could join the club. You boys seemed to’ve got things all smooth as a baby’s ass.”