They put something called a jellyball in horses’ stables to give them something to do. Or they put chickens, goats or radios in their stalls to be their friends, or a Jack Russell terrier. Otherwise they would get bored and kick themselves lame. Hurt others, bite. Maybe she was Raymond’s jellyball. And he needed another too, his talking saxophone. But who would not? Standing alone drives most mad in a single week. Look at Castro’s and Stalin’s prisoners. Mimi was on the right, happily and with great health. Her talent was committed on the day the Iron Curtain fell. She felt new lightness in her voice, the old gray seriousness with its laws left her. Her dispossessed grandparents were mocked in Havana for once having money and an ink factory. She could spit twenty feet across the room into the eye of a communist.
She was needing Raymond less and this would go on, but she loved him. They could walk together like a pair of face cards. It did not frighten her that their love was sometimes dead. It would come back and surprise you. She was fierce for loyalty.
Now she parted the limbs of the wild magnolia and froze at the sight of two skeletons sitting in the soil watching her. She did not hear the six males whispering not far behind them. Ulrich, Jacob, Isaac, Sponce, Carl Bob Feeney, his nephew Egan. Choir of voyeurs? Hunters? Lake idiots? They could be tourists spying on this cottage haunted by its terrors and chaos. Rude bastards. Where was the woman nailed to the wall? Where did the graveyard witch sleep?
She gave a yelp for Raymond and shut her eyes. When she opened them, she saw every male coming forward through holly hedges and giant ferns to assure her with their kindest apologies. Hurt on their faces. Max Raymond now right behind her with the stupid mistletoe rifle. Everything absurd was borne by this ministry, like a strange rural basketball team that had lost its ball. The skeletons smelled too.
“I love you,” said small Jacob.
Mimi screamed again, but with less power.
“Lady, we ain’t—” Jacob was paralyzed by her scream and jumped backwards into some vines, struggling, feet tangled.
“We’re sorry we seen you naked.”
Not us, the adults thought together.
“We tried not to look.”
“I don’t care whether the children. . Who are you?”
She lowered herself before the two boys now standing together. She would not look at the skeletons. When Raymond saw them, he chambered a round. The skulls with their stunned hilarity. Arms resting on the soil. Now the wiring job obvious, coat hangers. Done with pliers. This was the empty swamp she had been singing to without knowing. All this lively rot. Mimi went back to the cottage and grabbed her robe off the porch rail.
“We don’t know,” said Egan. “These bones have nothing to do with any of us. The boys put them together with wire. I’m a minister of the Lord Jesus Christ.” She’d already heard from Raymond about the tattoo of the cross on the man’s cheek.
“Were you hunched down here listening to me or waiting for me to have a heart attack when I saw these dead bodies?”
“Please, lady. We meant good.”
“They did. They told me,” said Sponce. He was seeking the level of maturity, at least to that of Egan of the cross and gray ponytail. At least a trustable ass.
“We sharing these folks, but they ain’t ours. The sheriff can call up north and get us a reward,” said small Jacob.
“That’s not a good idea, little boy,” said Egan. He had been sweating mightily even before this conversation.
The boys now hunkered. She could barely perceive they were waddling toward her. Raymond shared lust for vision with the eldest, Ulrich. She saw they were fascinated by her black curls. Her Cuban Florida face. They wore her shirts, but she didn’t notice. Blanched coffee beans with faces on them, these boys. No Indian or black. Small earnest Ulstermen looking for a mother and her music.
She began singing, incredibly, facing away from them all but facing Max Raymond and his weapon, lowered. The song was about a baby, the mountain and the sea. She sang it quietly, but there were high notes that made the boys quiver. At the end Jacob reached over to touch her wrist. She held his hand. The three of them walked toward her kitchen. Isaac and Sponce knew they weren’t meant to follow.
She had become used to the smells out here. It was no longer only decay but richer life, she understood. Soldiers, slaves, Indians, lost women, all under her in the earth. Same as Cuba, with a crown of living creatures and fat vegetation on it.
She had once sung a song taken from the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho.
Summer grasses,
Where soldiers dreamed.
Now she sang that one to her new swamp acolytes, rapt twice over for being nearly in her face. She sat on the back steps after feeding them ham and Gouda on French bread with mayonnaise and a tall bottle of orange soda pop. Spanish words, Japanese thoughts, for these elves of Confederate trash. Sister singing away the last days of her youth.
Raymond had gone back inside and was sleeping. The preacher Egan had hung around for a reason unclear to her. He went back and forth to and through the border of tree arches, unseen at the foot of the swamp.
Raymond suddenly knew it was time to return to the bad restaurant and then his ache for visions would be satisfied. The bad restaurant would stay when only zombies prevailed. It served food for the dead, tired fishermen and humble vacationers worsened the instant they sat down and had the bad water. Thousands like it at state lines, watering holes in the great western deserts, far-flung Idaho and Maine. Their owners say, “We just couldn’t help it, we were food people. We never said good food people.”
Raymond was in the pawnshop looking at a delightful saxophone and about to buy it when the feeling hit him. What he would see and be transformed by was right next door to his own cottage, not out in the fars, the wides, the bars or churches. He put the saxophone down and within seconds saw a shadow pass the shop. It was a man hobbling and slurring the few words he could manage, and Raymond was positive it was Mimi’s old ex, what was left of him after the suicide attempt in Vicksburg, rolling and pitching up Market and the pawns to find Raymond. He went out to the walk and saw nothing but a red car leaving, and he followed it in his own. Mimi was in Miami singing with another band for a couple of weeks. He was alone. He knew this was right. He had not eaten for two days, for no good reason. The moment was pressing.
A zombie had just waited on him in the pawnshop, a man who stood there remarking on the history of this saxophone. In apparently good health, in decent clothes and well groomed, polite, but quite obviously dead and led by someone beyond. You look at them and know they are spaces ahead into otherness. Not adolescent either, that natural Teutonic drifting or the sullenness without content. They might still be people, but unlikely.
Everything about the zombie is ravaged except his obsession, thought Raymond, following the red car. Dead to every other touch. They simply imitate when there is movement or sound. They imitate the conversations around them to seem human to one another. He had seen them in scores from the airports to the bandstands imitating one another, mimicking the next mimicker in no time, no space, no place, no history.
The bad restaurant even had bad-food loungers and loiterers, hard to shake when they got a good imitation of you going. The restaurant with its RESTAURANT sign. Its mimicking of the dining life, yet no edible food, bad water and a weak tea to go with that. Refill that beige for you, sir? Every dish served in contempt for what used to be human. Rations for an unannounced war.