Because as Mimi Suarez’s grandfather said, When you eat well, you are eating memory. But here for a few cents less, you could eat no life at all. You could eat as much history as just ended in the kitchen, cooked in spite at great speed by an inmate of dead dreams. A sort of hospital food with more dread in it.
Oh yes, mambo, salsa, shake that tree, bitch, let them coconuts of yours fall down. Max Raymond heard the man in the crowd watching Mimi in Miami right then. Each heavy command resounded in his head. He’d never experienced anything like this before.
The red car was indeed heading for the lake, through Redwood, the low fields and waters. Grim bluster of new black clouds in the west. This was storm country. Vicksburg, 1959, a tornado came through, tore out half the town, created new lakes, killed scores. He watched breaths circle a lawn, lifting the leaves of a collapsed muscadine arbor. The smell somewhere as if lightning had opened a melon, electrified sperm. He thought of the hot grease pitched on the honeysuckle by a zombie of the restaurant’s kitchen. In a meadow he caught a wave of dead-fish smell. Oh, the Onward cemetery. Called There Now. Har.
He was closer to rot and birth with every mile. This place was lodges, bulks of mobile homes, old trailer villages where fugitive creatures abided. Modern doctors did not vacation here anymore, nor modern anybody much, although the fishing was good. The town would ghost out in a bad fishing season, a hot spell, and the loneliness left behind could hurt you physically in the eyes. Long tubal aches to the grand home of migraine and hot rain at noon. The doctors took their families skiing in the West or to the Islands, where they mimicked life as best they could with the new big money. The wives haggard from hanging on to beauty.
Max Raymond realized all of a sudden he had very little doctor money left. It was nearly all saxophone money now. Or Coyote money. Not too bad. He would buy the house and make the landlord happy that its haunted memories would stay in good hands. His life, this place where something was. The red car? A boomerang on the curves now, all red.
Fifteen miles behind him, Vicksburg, city of the bluffs. Gilbraltar of the West at one time. Now into these casinos dime-store Legbas bid the weak and bored come in. See the man with the wonderful saxophone! Illuminations of the bridge over Louisiana at night. Capitulant city! Shops crying deeds and titles for cash. Children out at the orphans’ camp because their parents were for sale without buyers. Drugs, car wrecks.
Lightning loved the swamp. The willows thrashed now where all the souls of dead bad poets roamed day and night. In their big sprawling cottage, what good storms Mimi and he watched together. Popping those souls that cannot die but must return to open-microphone poetry slams against an adjacent junior college. Catering by the bad restaurant. Pop, a soul in bliss for just seconds thinks it has actually died and is moving away somewhere beyond this green echo chamber. No such luck, only the cynical lightning.
Raymond had one model for a poet-warrior such as himself and his Mossberg. Or just forget the rifle. Be a man, use your new long-barrel.38, stuffed in the trousers. You go by even the orphans’ camp, there’s the mass popping of firearm training now. Nobody can touch them. It’s a legitimate sport. Then the thud of the bigger stuff. The lunatic couple ride horses now. The.38, you’ve got to be good. No real stopping power, no scatter-shooting. His model was a man he visited in the veterans’ hospital, a nationally honored poet, mad and with his shoes on contrariwise. The poet’s son in middle age said he had suffered all this while for being a man. He now wanted a woman operation. And as a woman he desired other women. His father the old poet could not understand.
Why was madness ever thought to be a transcendent state? What idiot waited how long around the raving to decide this? It was the nastiest and saddest condition Raymond had seen. The man had suffered Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Saipan. He wrote long electric poems, or tried, like an ecstatic writing in sand with a pickax, or something like that, a reviewer said. But then real madness drove him to real madness. Worse, perhaps the son wanted to change into the mother so he could at last have her. And on and on. How can life take this turn? Raymond himself still felt depressed by his short visit. His pity, his terror, his absolute disgust. But the poems. Were they worth the cost?
He caught up to the red car pulling out of the gravel lot of the little church, continuing around the lake toward the restaurant. Raymond drove up to the window with its stained glass raised to prevent explosion during the storm. Egan was leaning out, watching the sky. Then he looked at Raymond in his car window. Egan had a bloody face and he pointed. Raymond got out the.38 and drove back to the road, but not before he heard a quartet of trombones behind Egan in the church, playing sweetly and importantly some sacred number, oblivious to both the storm and Egan. He seemed to have gotten his cuts leaning out the window.
Raymond was chilled, but he drove on. Some kill for Christ, he reflected, and cannot be Christian but are Christ’s allies. They can never have close communion, only quiet thanks. They do not have visions. They have war.
He touched the pistol, then thought further about Christian soldiers. They live in a dream amid the valley bottoms of tall white pines, live and river oaks, palm trees, palmettos, wild magnolia. They live in a dream between paradise and purgatory. They sleep on hard thin mattresses. They sit down to dinner in the bad restaurant, today with its blue plate special of frozen prefloured meat, gummy white bread and gravy made from cut-rate mushroom soup in giant industrial drums. There should be pictures of ambiguous fiends through history on the wall, all dead by the efforts of the Christian soldiers. Every meal as they wait for the battle, somebody looks at dinner and says, “I’ve had worse.”
Raymond thought. Separation from Christ through murder for him.
But in his mind he saw again the church in the dell and heard the sweet trombone chorus chording through the window. “Nearer My God to Thee” was the tune.
On the barge that afternoon, Melanie and Dee and several men, including Sidney, began a tradition of meditation on the lake. The pontoon boat was both museum and church afloat, by far the most elegant hand-built craft on these waters, which opened as they went through the lock into a new reservoir.
The first meditation was to be led by Melanie, with comment from others as the rest of church. Essentially, they were floating Unitarians. Facetto was aboard for the first time, his and Melanie’s love in plain sight. Dr. Harvard was having a very hard time. Melanie was unconscious of this. They anchored in a cove. She stood at the wheel on the captain’s box.
Harvard introduced her. “Today’s meditation will be read by Melanie Wooten, a changed woman who now shares an altered worldview.” Harvard did not know about the tongue in the car window, so he did not understand Melanie. But she had a new sadness that Harvard liked, because her careering with this confident young lawman was not right.
Dee Allison and her little girl stood wearing church dresses, but they tended to recede from the group in uneasy shyness. The little girl was fine, but Dee had never been among dressed boat crowds and felt diminished by the blazers and Melanie’s smart suit.
“‘There was the snow, and her watch ticking. So many snowflakes, so many seconds. As time passed they seemed to mingle in their minds, heaping up into a vast shape that might be a burial mound, or the cliff of an iceberg whose summit is out of sight. Into its shadow dreams crowded, full of conception and stirrings of cold, as if ice floes were moving down a lightless channel of water. They were going further into darkness, allowing no suggestion that their order should be broken, or that one day however many years distant, the darkness would give place to light.