Mortimer sat at the table with a silver penknife in his hand. It was a thin short blade but not short enough. Blood was on its hasp. Raymond held his wound and staggered out the door, then into the gravel, where he thought, There is a gun in my car. But he was wearing the gun, or rather now it had slipped, the long martial thing, into the crotch of his underwear with the barrel down his right leg, sinking lower even then and trying for his ankle. He was stiff-legged. The monster of pusillanimity. His house was a hundred years away. The Mossberg was in there. His interest in the avocation of gunning was on the wane, however. He felt Mortimer right behind him. He had fled nothing. The man was swift and quiet to boot.
“Let’s go right to the bone people in your backyard. I got the lantern, good buddy. You want to take a leak or anything?”
Raymond struggled with the descending.38, which was making for his knee that moment.
“Oh, go ahead and take your time. Go on in the house there and take a long leak. I don’t want you uncomfortable, Max. Sure, let’s both go on in. I’m wantin’ to look at that foxy lady again. Been missing her.” Mortimer walked ahead of Raymond, up the steps crowded by thick Carolina jasmine vine and honeysuckle, dead bees underfoot that got drunk and fell. He opened the door for Raymond. Raymond felt this was as lowly as his existence could get, but he had to sit on the couch.
“Can I look around? Boy, now that was selfish. It was me who had to take the good long leak. You can’t beat a good piss for clearing the mind and putting a plan to things. Boy, I might not leave. Uh-oh! Your bedroom, Max, somebody left their gun right on his pillow. Great Lordy son, this is one horny ol’ lonesome dude. I got girls too, Dr. Raymond. Your missus, as I recall, would be in Miami getting leched on by all the old folks from Cuba? The Cubans, now, they’re hung I hear, and greased, with a golden earring, bandanny. But she got you. That’s a good one. She ought to be wearing you for a Tampax. Little music boy don’t wanna be no doctor no more.”
Raymond was pondering the depth of his puncture and wondering how long it had been since anybody called him Max, as Mortimer did. High risibility. The wound’s nothing. He’s going to hurt me. He had hands on both kidneys and arose as a token of manhood.
“Come on now, Maxy. Follow the old lantern and let’s just see some bone, my man. I had an interview with Pastor Egan, the ponytailed cross-cheeked boy, and he told me just about where. Said you wouldn’t mind my dropping by and smashing up a few with me.”
“I don’t mind. They’re almost kids’ toys now, anyway. Wired-up.”
“You want to bring your gun for snakes?”
“I really don’t.”
“I’m afraid of those things. Well, snakes and guns. You remember how it was with me and snakes?”
“Yes.”
“That old — Christ, they’re all old, it’s hard to remember which one — said, ‘We don’t hear sounds like that from a man around here.’”
Raymond slapped at the fronds and walked him directly to the site of the people. When the lantern beam found them, Mortimer jumped past him like a dash man bobbling the light. He hurried straight to the woman and kicked her head off but it tangled in her rib cage and swung on the coat-hanger wire. But he followed with a field-goal boot to the plexus that sent the remainder of her affairs clattering.
Then he jumped on the skull over and over, grinding it with his Mountie boots, waving the light and demanding Max Raymond join in, take the child.
NINE
ISAAC AND JACOB WERE ODDLY WELL BEHAVED, DOMESTIC. They straightened the house and talked around the old Ford that Hare had pulled from the swamp. It was behind their garage, a sagging building with stacks of National Geographics in it from a previous tenant. The boys would ask if the house was really theirs, and Dee told them she was pretty sure it was. Her gone husband was bad at details, but he was a good provider, sometimes a flush one. She and the boys could satisfy myriad needs in Big Mart. They straightened the house again.
They hunkered in prospect of manhood, waiting on Hare to build the beam and trestle faster. The sun-grayed back of the garage was Hare’s drama curtain, they said. He had to tell stories in front of it while he worked and they sat. They pressed him for tales of other machines and major explosions.
Harold Laird stared off as if in conspiracy with other mechanics near the horizon. It was a labored stare of either profound stupidity or alienation. He had looked constantly in himself for a likeness to his progenitors but failed. His large teeth, big legs and no chest or much rear. Too late, but he had entered the black church up the road and stolen a book from its meek open library called How to Be a Teenager. He gave it to the little ones later, but they discarded it because it was about how to be a nice teenager, which Harold Laird had been. But he had gotten it for himself to see what he had been, and he was going back for How to Be a Man and wouldn’t share it. Laird had hung in the background of his own history. He could not read well and hoped that in the next book there would be pictures of Christian women naked, since he was going to be a husband.
Actually he had once, with others, participated in an event with a woman from Edwards in the bed of a truck, but he was still unsure whether he was manned or not. He was betrothed before to the silhouette of a woman on a bottle of some good-smelling Oil of Olay he found, but could break it off. She had owned him for years now. He could not leave himself alone sometimes, a sin.
The boys’ voices were quiet. They were hesitant to laugh or dream or curse. The heat kept up its unsurprising late misery. The mind was brown at the edges, the tongue dry and slow. Dee slept in the weak air-conditioning of October. Little Emma beside her was so good that her mother expected her to die any day, as angels were snatched away early to paradise. Once, when Dee had a migraine, the child she now held in sleep massaged her temples the entire night. When Dee opened her eyes at dawn, the child had fallen asleep with her doll’s hand on Dee’s forehead. Dee wondered if they were born twice as sensitive as normal women.
Emma was gone when Dee woke, knowing it was too late to get out of a story she had dreamed. She had few powers. But she was trying. The better part of her was that she liked to heal old people once she knew their pain. She was not a cynical nurse, not at all. She just did not like letting on to her sincerity in front of fools. She could change languages to soothe folks of wild diversity and wants, though her most natural posture was that of the slut paring her nails. In her dream she was chained in a basement with many sex parts that howled on their own.
Then she had dreamed she was running up a hill with women, hundreds of them, arms out to what beckoned at the crest. A row of cannons blew down on them, blasted them apart, but they were happy and they sang, like Japanese infantry, exploding into mists of ecstatic nerves. Then they arose and became everything, even the cannons. The hill, the tree, the barn, everything. She woke feeling she could commit suicide this minute with huge happiness because she would leave the world a finished job.
She was not sure the meaning of her dream. Without the help of gin, she felt no common sisterhood to women. She also knew she could not leave Emma until the girl was strong and ready. Like the younger boys but not Sponce, who shouldn’t even still be home. Thing was, Sponce was in love with her, her own son. He feared the uglier world.