They knew well who the backseat lovebird was, but it took minutes to get their three or four images of Mortimer together. These still did not make one man, because they had little but a forehead and a mouth. Old Sidney perched right in the love nest, at ease in the rearview mirror. He could enjoy his money and new friendship, a major change from his old man. The shamelessness of it shook Melanie, the ugliness. But she who with Facetto. . it was not good to pursue this concept. The SUV all black and swollen, it hurried as if recently parted from a gathering of its fellows in a wealthier country.
It was getting hard to have innocent fun. All seemed driven toward a calculated nightmare. The football game, Pepper, poor Bernice with her cancer, the tongue in a fretting black ghoul of a car.
They never rode the motorbike together again. She missed the touch of Roman’s fat shoulders. She had never felt the war wounds beneath his shirt, as she suspected she might.
The pleasant day erased by that thing on the window of the Lexus.
It occurred to her how many motions people made to simply present themselves to a window, a mirror, a sea of nobodies. These groomings, pulling straight the pants, licking a finger for the hair out of place. She had heard these all were movements of those before execution. Why else so circumspect? Your first impression on the gallows.
John Roman thought. He fished with a spinning rod. He had delayed the pleasure of artificial bait — casting deliberately until he retired. Times were wretched in many ways. Bernice and cancer, tongue on window, old men on the run from relatives for loving animals too much and learning to talk with the beasts, a grown white man shrieking with a sound that should not be heard when he stumbled close to snakes in the willows. But you could get as good a spinning reel and rod as the pros for cheap at Big Mart, against which there was no competition. The local fishing-supply stores didn’t even attempt it but went rather for a fishing class that imagined itself temporarily detained by Mississippi until it could get to the glossy lakes and streams in magazine photographs at the doctor’s office.
Roman fished long and guiltily because Bernice did not want him home fretting about her condition. She’d lost some weight and looked even more Indian now. Perhaps the last trace of the Natchez tribe. He was another sort of Indian partly, Chickasaw, lost in the South.
Melanie was on his mind, how she was doing. He hadn’t fished close to her house for a while. She was a friend in a panic to live, and he didn’t want to be her instructor. Life itself was not much of an instructor but more like the fits of a runaway child. It would shock you with depravity and staggering kindness within the same hour. If you could get used to that, you might learn, but life itself didn’t especially want to follow up on anything.
It was his own time alone with his memories. The wash through the head, a wash of half-stories, peace and war. No screaming or banging or outer noise, just this steady action, floats of rooms and lamps, rolling of women like happy seabirds riding the first of the storm waves. No radio, no beer, but you sat there on a bucket and collected them all.
Nobody had the right to touch the stories, the pictures, the silence. That was your due. Nobody could enter. No government was here. No phone calls, no mail, no knocks on the door. You saw old men on benches and you pitied them for all bereft, but you were wrong. They had the time of their life. The deaf ones even more so. Inside and away. They were inside a pure dream.
Roman resembled his grandfather on his mother’s side, a man struck blind by a train in his sixties. The old man sat in the chair grinning. Roman couldn’t recall a whine or complaint from him. As if he had crashed up safe somewhere, the water of an ocean bathing his feet. You would go to him for a memory and he spoke it.
Melanie was a fine lady but didn’t have enough stories in her, ones of her own. She borrowed from him. This was not so much too late as just impossible. If you couldn’t sit without stirring into somebody else’s life at age seventy-two, you had either bad stories or too few of them. When you had too few stories, you went mad. When you had only one, they took you away to the asylum until you got more.
The army had been a long mistake, but he could let that go. Somebody must be there as the platoon’s old animal and it was him. Sergeant major, watching West Point, Virginia Military and Citadel killed over and over. He regretted he was not a singing jazz-trumpet man like Chet Baker, but somebody had to be there regretting too. The army would rise up and grab you because it was vacant. You went to it young when even an army barracks was something fresh. The place filled you, or the unplace of it. Then you got wise enough to live. Others came close to you wanting to live also.
Roman hooked into something large and squirming. All his evenings contracted into this sweet emergency. Muscles underwater struggling against your arms, the line alive down to your belly and the butt of the new rod, Shakespeare the brand, answering. It had to be a cat, very big. As clear a gift as anything in the world. If he were a preacher, he would say that fish was God’s mercy. You never got closer to it than above the water for a long, long time. Here, bringing it home like a lost friend.
When he was young he cursed fish as he pulled them in. He no longer did. That was evil, stupid, greedy. Should lose your thumbs for it. For your mean and larcenous spirit. Now he loved this fishing peace above all things. He had not once been let down, even when nothing came home for him. The stories inside had been better over green water.
At the mouth of another cove near the bad restaurant, the one that he called Gristle and Sons with Cold Beer, he saw a pale-faced but arm- and shoulder-burned cracker bounced up and wallowing on a Jet Ski, a horrible and noi-some bully of a water motorcycle built in spite for the northern snowmobile, on which other punks roared and beheaded themselves on fence wire. The boy was doing about fifty over Roman’s quiet water. The wash from the machine was immense into the shallows, whipping water weeds and terrifying minnows and young bass toward Roman. The big catfish rolled in behind this local storm. Roman cursed the ski and saluted this bully. Old whiskered heavyweight at last snatched from its appetites. At last we meet. It was too big to be succulent, and he was glad to let it go after petting it.
When he turned to the lake again and threw his nightcrawlers and light sinker toward a stranded bough on a black strip of deep, he hoped he would not see another living soul, and he didn’t. Heard only the distant nagging whine of the ski.
The cracker Sponce was on the far side of the lake, seeking other audiences. A mad Protestant in a cathedral too green and black and silent for him, bent on fouling these spaces with the great I am.
EIGHT
THE COYOTE WAS IN HER COTTAGE BACKYARD SINGING to the edges of the swamp. She was naked in her solitude with nature. She sometimes saw deer and raccoon coming up to hear. And a thickage of squirrels, red and fox and gray. She saw mistletoe high on a dead post-oak limb and wanted it for her hair. She hated guns, but Raymond shot the mistletoe down for her with his newly confessed Mossberg. Now she had it in the hair above her ear.
The Coyote was much like John Roman. The young should have been seeking her instruction, but it was Raymond after her, and sometimes hard, wanting evermore an answer to her easy talents, her simple life. Still doing homework for his soul in his forties. His nervous dissertation.
He was a late-blooming prodigy on the saxophone. She could not read music much but she knew. Grant him that, even though he bought the band and managed it toward himself almost unintentionally. He had somehow gotten good through pure want. Triumph of his burnt doctor’s will. It was a puzzle why he played certain needy and vicious ways, or would even want to, like a tomcat dragging away from a long fight down an alley. Imprecations, hisses, mewlings, threats. Why develop this style when there were so many others?