“‘Yet their passage was not saddening. Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them. Crying out against their implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep.’
“That was a selection from A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin,” said Melanie softly.
“Nice,” said Carl Bob Feeney, less insane than last week.
“I disagree,” said Sidney. He rose from a director’s chair near a side pew. “And I need a drink.” Sidney had taken to mixing Stolichnaya vodka with orange juice for his health. He had affected this weeks ago.
“Disagree?”
“Number one, it ain’t about me, or nothin’. It’s about snow and some time shit.” He looked down at Emma, the child.
“Any other thoughts?” asked Harvard.
“Well I’d like to know who she thinks she is,” said Wren.
“You mean the girl in that passage?” asked Melanie.
“No. You. ‘Unsatisfied dreams crying out against their implacability’ or such. Who the hell you think we are, schoolkids you’re trying to impress? You’re implying you go around the house saying implacability often? Ever? Or hoping many of us dumbos wouldn’t get it? Why, I understand the word quite well. And I find you and the author posing asses. Christ, I thought we’d get some Robert Frost or something. This is worse than Faulkner.”
Melanie was stunned.
Another man, Ulrich, wanted to speak. “You need to change again from wherever you’ve changed. You would have us think anybody gives a damn what white people think anymore. They are the killers of seals, baby seals, by clubbing. They shoot polar bears just because they’re there. What do these creatures think about our thoughtful moaning?”
“That’s not fair,” said Facetto. “It was a meditation to invite thought. It wasn’t her own writing.”
“She didn’t read it because she hated it,” said Wren.
“Maybe she read it because she ain’t getting enough dick,” said Sidney. You would not know he was drunk until he went suddenly about it at the drop of a dime.
Many turned. But nobody called down Sidney. He seemed satisfied. Statement, vodka, orange juice, his tweed vested suit, everything.
Melanie tried, but she could not help weeping the rest of the day. The sheriff left her early.
Sidney led a disordered party far into the night. Whores were still coming aboard at nine P.M. Large orphans mingled with them, and Minny and Sandra, now fifteen, had on backless cocktail dresses. John Roman and his wife, Bernice, who had not been out in weeks, were aboard celebrating the end of chemotherapy and the beginning of remission. The launch rocked. Chet Baker was heard in the middle of it all, though he was not a noisy man. The pier lit up with fireworks or gunplay. You couldn’t be sure. Harvard’s hair became disarrayed. He waded in the cove and cursed and howled, holding a bottle of Jack Daniels aloft, baying at the moon. All this practically in Melanie’s backyard that Sunday night.
“The best thing about dogs and kids,” Ulrich cried out near the end, feverishly intoxicated, “is they ain’t going anywhere. They’re already there!”
He dandled Emma the cherub on his knee, breathing tortuously, from the emphysema, in long tugs and seekings of his lungs. This angel was not frightened of Ulrich. She thought he was a train. Then one of the fifteen-year-olds took the baby girl in her own arms, saying, “Oh, this one’s coming home with me!” At one time Melanie pressed her nose against her own windowpane, watching down the hill in miserable incredulity.
And, thought Raymond, pulling into the parking lot of the bad restaurant, back almost to my front door. He didn’t shake as much as he expected he would, and he put the pistol in his belt against his stomach, put the coat on as he stood from his car. The red car, a Mercury Sable, was here all right. The tag wasn’t Memphis. It was local. He knew now. But he wasn’t certain why it should go on. One would make a quick move. The other would pay. A hum of grief came to his ears.
The air was solid with earth- and tree-frog song. They went kecka kecka kecka in the early night, the storm blown past.
The man was at a table next to the wall, tall even in his chair. His eyes were in shadow. Nobody else was about. His hair seemed too great for his neck, which had gotten thinner. Raised and swept to width, set like soft wire. He could be a singer, an evangelist, a small-town sinner living out a sneer established at seventeen. An almost effeminate elegance too, a man deep in self-study, a creature of mirrors.
Raymond looked into the backs of the man’s hands on the table. A meal hardly touched in front of him.
“I know you. What is it, Man?” asked Raymond.
“I came out here to get a second opinion. You the doctor?”
The doctor of yester-Memphis stood in the aisle. “Sit down,” Mortimer said. “Unless you planning your way out already.”
As Raymond sat, the trance that had brought him here was broken. The man at this level looked frail, whining, “You called me names and wouldn’t let me in your club. There might be a new vote, though. It’s a democracy everywhere you look. Sidney wants me to come aboard.”
Raymond had not expected wit, if this was wit. Could evil be witty? If this thing was evil. The hair almost its own life. The Everly Brothers. God recalls them. Two boys packed into one hairdo.
Somebody was in the back. They were the only ones still in the dining area. The hour was desolate, dim, redolent of fried meals. Scorched crust of meat in the nostrils.
“Raymond, let me tell you something that might get your attention. I had to see you. Where is that big knife or whatever? Show it to me.” Raymond reached inside to show Mortimer the butt under his coat. This did not feel unnatural. If he missed him here, he had the longer gun back at the house with the hollowpoints, and he was very good with that one at age eleven.
“You want some of me?” Mortimer raised his hands. He had thinned a good deal, almost to gauntness. He seemed ill.
“I came to destroy you. I don’t know much, but I know you’re bad straight through.”
“No, not at all. You going to help me find some friends. . acquaintances that went wrong, let’s say.”
“How would you get help from me? Can’t you see I’ve got a pistol?”
“I must have been blind.” Mortimer had a face under his face, grinning like a blanched skull. “You ain’t got the goods, sonny. After the oath you took. ‘First do no harm.’ I’ve had many a doctor acquaintance. Put them to work too.”
“Shut up.”
“Like the orphans’-camp job. There’s an opening.”
Raymond hated the word stare, but it was a verb that occupied half of art and life and that was what he was doing, as in a French movie. As if his eyes were, beyond God and law, the single powerful arbiter in the room. “I’m going home,” said Raymond. He was shaking.
Mortimer laughed. “Not that.”
Raymond turned, relieved totally and sopping wet under his arms. He was beginning the walk. A noise broke out behind him, but he wouldn’t look at it. Then a huge pain entered the flesh near his spine. He could not account for it, then did not believe it. He tripped and stumbled, flailing at chairs, never falling. Only at the last, before he knocked his head on a chair back, did he crane his head.