Ulrich had fallen asleep, but before he did, he was agreeing with what Feeney was saying. Then he awoke and they had a cup of fine dark coffee made on the hot plate of the steerage cabin. The coffee was too good here in the night. Ulrich brought some cigarettes out from a locker and they both lit up these Camels. He shouldn’t, but the night, the coffee, the ripple of the water and slap of bass.
“Most animals live a short while,” said Ulrich, “but I had a revelation. That we cannot know the intensity of their lives, which is hundreds of times more attuned than ours. They don’t talk because they don’t need speech. A dog, when it puts its head out a car window, smells almost everything in a county, a world we never even suspect and have no description for. That is why I am daft. I have flown and smelled the smells, Carl Bob. I have known life by my nose. That’s why the dog looks so ecstatic sniffing in the wind. They smell a thousand times more than we do. We could only know it as hallucinatory sense. Dogs are in space and time. We can only know one or the other, plodding, toddling. Not to mention hearing. And taste. Water is fifty times more delicious to them. We must not pity them, a cheap passive hobby. They live huge lives before they die. Watch how happy sleep is to them, and right next to waking. They live both at once. We are predators of not only meat but of essence, my friend. We want to be them because they have spoken to us without speaking and we can hardly bear their superiority.” Now Carl Bob had fallen asleep, the lit Camel in one hand, the coffee in the other. It was by the glow of their cigarettes that Egan found them and waded out the short way to the barge.
They were both startled by the voice from a man standing above them on the planks of the stern, just ahead of the engines. “I’m so tired, Uncle Carl Bob, chasing you. How could you doubt I loved you? How can you wear me out this way? Who is your friend?”
“I’m Ulrich. Son, he can’t go with you. We heard about your sermon. You said you had to find him and help him. But you’ve found him and you mean to follow him, don’t you?”
“I’m worn out with the dogs and cats. Come on home, please. I can’t do it by myself. Nobody can. I love them too much. I can’t get nothin’ else done. I can’t stand for one to get hurt or left out, great or small, I’m goin’ round huggin’ ’em and pettin’ ’em and cooin’ over ’em. I’m a silly ass. I’m in trouble with God. I’m in trouble for some old bodies. I’m preachin’ bad. And let me tell you, somebody broke in the house.”
“That was us, son,” said Ulrich. “We needed some things. And we needed protection. I agreed with your uncle.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I knew who that was. This person left something square in the middle of the front room. They didn’t take anything.”
“Left something?”
“A football.”
“Why?”
“It was sitting on top of the Edwards newspaper about some game a few weeks back where somebody in the men’s room got his face nigh cut off.”
“I saw the old bodies, the old bones myself,” said Carl Bob.
“You’ve got to stop that. Somebody’ll hear and haul you off. You couldn’t have seen the bodies. They were in a car underwater till a sinkhole took the water out.”
“I don’t mean underwater. I mean behind the doctor’s house. I looked out the window at night and there were two skeletons and some little boys sitting beside them like in church.”
“That’s right. He told me,” added Ulrich. “Three nights ago when the girl was singing on the back porch. Some animals come up too. Two deers, a bear, a ghost of a orangutan.”
“No orangutans,” said Carl Bob.
It suddenly occurred to Egan that his uncle looked like Basil Rathbone and Ulrich looked like an elderly Mortimer Snerd. Then the name Mortimer passed through him.
Roman was riding his motorbike with Melanie Wooten clasped behind him. These were grave times, but they were not sure how grave. Roman’s wife waited for more tests. Basal cell lymphoma. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which wasn’t too bad. But she had begun bleeding, masses had shown. She was up and about but weak, and they had her in the chemo now. Roman did not know what to do with disease. Except for his wounds, his wife and he had been healthy and they were not old and they had done nothing much dissipating or poisonous. He smoked a little. She could eat a great deal without gaining, and she liked two stiff drinks of Maker’s Mark now and again. Melanie had helped as she could, but Bernice Roman did not take to help, although she was pleasant enough. The woman acted distinctly outraged by her luck, as if still misdiagnosed.
This was not as much fun as Melanie expected, but it was trouble of a sort that she still wanted. She had never had a black friend, and she thought it ridiculous that she could die without having this man as one. He liked her and reminded Melanie of early playmates in Texas. But she wondered if there were any left around the lake who might shoot them. She was so tired of race. She was warier since the destruction of the glass animals. The world with that person out in it, wild and needy and ugly.
A man stood in the road, just a man alone. He was staring at her and Roman, but a flat field suddenly interested him and she couldn’t see a car. They came to a little bridge over a creek after passing the man, and the motorbike wobbled on twelve-by-twelves. You didn’t want to catch a tire between them. But then they shook as a car came up behind them. She turned and watched as a Lexus SUV neared them. The windows were smoked. Roman drove to the right to let it pass, but the Lexus stopped when they were abreast the front passenger door. Roman drove around it across the road to his left to force a decision, but it passed them. Roman stopped. Holding the motorbike between his spread sandaled feet. Melanie tapped him on the shoulder to show the Lexus had stopped with them.
Nobody opened the door. The sun glare off it was hot. You could see the car as the house of whatever your mind held. The people inside were not visible, so you guessed many and not one. The elevation and headroom were preposterous even for a large rich fool. Still it sat blind, dumb, glaring. The whole world was the gravel and this vehicle. Roman got off the bike and kickstanded it. The two of them walked up to the window, a bright maw next to opening but not. There was some activity behind the smoke. It was a human tongue circling the glass, licking and sucking it. They could see nothing except the mouth working dimly. But the glass went down inches, and Man Mortimer looked over the top of the window at them. Devoid of expression, yanked-in tongue, flat, overall. The rearview reflected the ones in the back who did not know they were revealed. It was old Sidney without his shirt, very mottled and speckled, silvered concave chest. Marcine and Bertha, the car-lot girl, were working on him.
Then the glass rose and stopped the view. The Lexus went off at urgent speed.
“That’s a lot of car,” said John Roman, “to be fucking with you. I’m sorry I said that, but—”