“Is that your red motorcycle up that hill?” asked Raymond.
“It is. It’s part of me now. I live it.”
“You can’t come aboard, not now we’ve heard you over there like that. What was that?”
“It was snakes. I was in snakes. You’re the saxophone man. You making the rules about the boat club?”
“No, there weren’t any rules until you went over the line. You think anybody’d want that sort of noise aboard? You’ve created the one rule.”
It was Harvard’s barge, but he was not interrupting this drunk. He was nodding his head.
“This ain’t right. He don’t have to prove—” began Sidney.
“You’re barely with us yourself, Sidney. You didn’t believe in it. Why don’t you be quiet?” scolded tall Lewis, surprisingly solid for one so translucent and veined.
Sidney was furious but quiet for a while. He was very confused because he had watched this very man hack off his father’s head through the glass of the stockroom door. It seemed to him old Pepper finally looked at the wrong man with contempt for supporting him.
Man Mortimer had known instantly the nature of Pepper’s heart and destroyed him straightaway, Sidney imagined, while others had known and borne cowards like himself. Sidney had never tried to hide his glee. He told his peers that old Pepper’s death was the sweetest gift the man had ever given him.
“And the store, of course,” Harvard added.
Now the same man who had killed Pepper almost in an accident of random frenzy told Raymond, “I don’t need your club. You’re drunk and I’m letting this go. Lots have nerve that’s full of liquor.”
“I’m as drunk as I ever get, and then I’m never wrong. I smell evil and it walks like you,” said Raymond.
“Weren’t you a doctor?”
“I was. At your service.”
“You don’t get many to just quit. You musta mouthed yourself right out.”
Mortimer turned and walked up the hill slowly. He did not look Dee’s way or toward the porch at all, except to mutter near it, and the women heard. “Old Sidney he said he saw through her window the other night. Little granny giving a blow job to the law.”
None spoke.
Dee had passed a line where the gin no longer obtained, but she pretended to sip. She saw herself trembling beneath a ghoul in a red chamber of sin. A creature whose veins were swollen blue. They swayed in a penthouse lit with gilt over the raving casino. Grim fun against laws of God and man. Beasts crawled away ashamed. I queen bring wreckage to my lover. For seconds she could not remember her relation to the present evening and its people. Everything was yonder except a central burning ruin, the howl of her counterpart. Then she recalled the man in the mud-smeared leather coat.
“That man, I’ve seen him in some other version,” said Melanie.
“He was pitiful, nasty,” said Mimi.
“He seems to be wanting to join things,” Melanie said. “I know who it was. The man on the orphans’ barge. He brought those teenage girls back to the camp. They’d run away. And Dee, he sat at our table uninvited at the casino music hall.”
“He is after me,” said Dee, blank, sad.
“You know him?” Mimi asked.
“I am his woman.”
“You are not.”
“He was trying to play with my children.”
“Child, you’re too young for him. His face is a deep map.”
“Oh no, Melanie. I’m very old. I’m all the ones that watched themselves move everywhere and go nowhere. Your face in the crowd that ain’t quite there in every picture.”
“My husband is a fool, but good mostly,” said Mimi.
“My husband turned gay in his seventies,” Melanie reported.
“Is that possible?” Mimi cried. “Then God will forgive you everything. Oh, God, I meant nothing by that. I meant you have license to be free, even dumb.” This caused a long pause, sighs, forlorn detachment.
“You gals made your deals with college presidents and doctors,” Dee said. “When your charms give out, you still got your own roof, your own music. You can piss and moan or strum a harp. You still get the roof.”
“Don’t you own your home?”
“I don’t know. Something on the verge. My kids always felt rented. Best I could do was leave them alone. Except for Emma there sleeping, the cherub. Me and her father were just clouds she passed through. I don’t think I had much to do with her.”
“Can I ask you an ignorant Cuban question?” asked Mimi. “Are you white trash, or do you just want us to think you are?”
“Well, it feels like home. It’s relaxing, really. I had every chance to choose and still do. I turned down another whole life in Minneapolis, Minnesota, one night.”
“Why was that?”
“I think I like it on the verge. I’m from people such as that a hundred years, they told me.”
“Would you be English, Welsh, French, what?”
“I would say soldier in a bus station, quick couple of spurts in a rest room at midnight with about a pint of liquor. What I am is when they repealed prohibition in Mississippi.”
“You’re very clever, Dee,” said Melanie gently.
“But I like a clean yard now.”
“Yes, yards. Light and shadow on yards down here at twilight. So much.”
“You’re very much in love, Melanie. You know that.”
“I know that, of course.”
“Well, then it is good,” said Mimi. “God allows.” Dee felt a groggy box of air around her, dusk shrunk down. Outside of which panic slept like big dogs.
The animals are in ecstasy even when they are eaten, Ulrich was telling Carl Bob Feeney. They stayed in Ulrich’s cottage or on the barge now, setting out short distances and tying up. All were sympathetic with the two except Sidney and Wren. Sidney felt the ex-priest had turned into a dog and belonged in Onward or jail. Wren’s position was that this fugitive situation would bring more law in, and you had one point in life, to get more law out. Egan, the nephew, was looking for his uncle still and keeping up his animals, himself verging toward feral because pursued by the vig.
So Ulrich and Carl Bob slept sometimes on the pews of the pontoon boat, sometimes in the unlighted basement of Ulrich’s house, sometimes in a single room in the rear of the doctor’s cabin. Harvard had threatened Sidney’s life if he revealed their whereabouts to anybody. Carl Bob Feeney might not have been the choicest seer at the lake, and Ulrich, now his secretary general, was just bogus guff mostly, but they were the only prophets they had now. Sidney threatened the doctor’s life back, but he was too busy running his old man’s store now and not doing that badly. He had a car, one of the new Chrysler PT Cruisers, a silver heartwarming car for anybody in love with the sixties Volvo coupe and forties grillwork.
One night when Egan was serving a prayer meeting at Rolling Fork, Ulrich helped Feeney break in his own house and steal his gun back, along with clothes including his old vestments, which he intended to put to new use. Feeney would not go to Onward if he could help it.
Ulrich would frequently stop talking and go quiet like a thief who had forgotten his mission. Carl Bob Feeney was a good listener because he was hearing himself now, in different words. They did not humanize animals, Ulrich and Carl Bob. They wanted to learn their language, and how indeed they had kept going despite depression, despair, even suicide. For instance, it is well known if a fire dog finds too many human corpses in the rubble, it will become inconsolable and stop looking. What of the amazing quality of forgiveness in animals? It broke your heart. Carl Bob often wept, but it did not weaken him. He had different kinds of weeping, some of it murderous, some of it clearly insane, a long purr-howl that frightened Ulrich.
“We are damned, but that is the way of the way. If you choose, you are damned somewhere else. We are deficient because we are tired of people. Bosnia, Ethiopia, Kosovo, the AIDS horror. We were not supposed to know so much despair at once. It has killed feeling for others. We are ready for the New Testament to be about dogs, monkeys, cheetahs. Ulrich, you must know we hate ourselves and accept it as right. The first thing you have to give up in belief is being admired and a friend to man. ‘Hail fellow well met’ is not a description down south, it is the vocation of most of the South. It has ruined it. We have lost something precious, Ulrich, and you must, must acknowledge this. We just don’t give a shit. Machines started it, but we finished the job. How is it possible a man could sit and read an average newspaper without attacking at least twenty people directly? Know that we are dangerous zealots now. Not just animal lovers.”