Hare was at her door. He was not a bad-looking boy, and he seemed to have acquired more and more manners, even unnecessary ones. “Where is everybody?” she wondered.
“They took the baby for a treat,” he said.
“They never do that.”
“We’re alone. They cleared the way for me. Us.”
“Of which there isn’t any.”
“I have changed since I first saw you. You are beautiful. So beautiful. My thoughts were animal-like. But now I’m like family. We’re all in it together.”
“In what?”
“A home.”
“Who are Mommy and Daddy?”
“They could be us.”
“Do I look pitiful?”
“Not at all.”
“Just checking. I’m kind of married.”
“I’m proposing me as husband. One, I am steady. Two, I am good with my hands. Three, Mortimer is out of the picture.”
His hands were nice and he could fix things. She studied him across a moat of indifference and time. His throbbing youth softened her. He looked filled now, thicker. Like some boys she knew who had come back from the army.
“It just seems like you need a home, Harold. I’m already here. My roof.”
“I never saw a girl I needed before I met you.”
“Is it the nurse’s outfit?”
“It’s everything that gets to me.”
“One day soon I’ll look in the mirror and see everything you like about me is over. I’ll know the day. You’d be stuck with an old bag of flakes. I’ll turn into an outhouse overnight. With heavy lipstick.”
“No.”
“Then you’ll know how bad I am. It’ll be on my face, every damn story writ in wrinkles.”
“How can you say those things?”
“Go up to the casino and see. It’s where us old party girls go to die and have a club. Some turned, some just about. Sulky old things with the girl cut out of them. It’s not the same with men.”
“I’ll stick.”
“Such hope.”
“You’re my reason to live.”
“Do you get it? I’m what men remember. I’m not what they need. It’s been said to me. What I am is foreign pussy.”
“You didn’t mean to be.”
“How do you know?”
He dropped his head. The long gentle fingers of his right hand covering his face.
“Stop playing house,” she said. “Build what you want on your own.”
“But you’re clean. You don’t smoke or drink, much.”
“They aren’t my drugs. Please go on now. I don’t care to break your heart.”
Laird went out onto the front porch, shivering in the warmth, lost between homes. Engorged by despair and desire. He had heard her words as the wail of a kidnapped queen. Unransomed these two decades of his spindly life. He thought of the marines, or the long honest life of an expert mechanic.
Both of them seemed chores in hell now.
Life was just this, you got a lot of money and you bought things. No other game. You bought her, a house, a family. You didn’t pull fifty-three-year-old things out of a swamp and fix them. He was angry and small. A gnat. He turned and went inside.
She was staring at the blank television.
He had no story to put on its screen for her. But he would have her and then tell it. It would begin with an old Ford coupe, red with a gold hood like the boys wanted. He would dump this bucket of rust and just steal the one he’d seen at a junkyard on the south edge of Vicksburg, not well protected. The lot belonged to Man Mortimer and a junkman who lived on the premises. To steal Mortimer’s trash and make a classic from it would be a story, not just life. Moreover, he knew the junkman, who was a Christian and had cheated or betrayed or connived at no man.
The junkman, Peden, was a Baptist lay preacher, but cars were to him like whiskey to an Indian, his addiction, and they kept him poor. He had preached before to Harold about the naked Bathsheba when King David saw her at her bath and betrayed her husband, Uriah, sending him to the front lines of battle to die, so that he could possess her and know her forever. David who had all, Uriah who had nothing but Bathsheba. The story implied to Peden that Bathsheba had no choice. Who would not lie with the king? Peden would turn through the Psalms and say he had found the one David wrote to Bathsheba but that it was too dirty to read to the young.
But Sponce could get him to read it while Hare stole the coupe right out from under him. If he was successful, God would forgive him, probably.
The boys had real power over Dee, Harold Laird knew. She was guilty and served them. Now he was helping them mature. They were becoming, not overnight, but steadily more and more, Boy Scouts.
The day would come when the couple would stand in the yard, each actor glistening in happiness, the little boys especially. They would have a long talk with her and she would discover the truth that Harold Laird, genius mechanic, body man, paint man, was her future. He could see her in a bridal peignoir with her hidden softnesses all meant for him, but he couldn’t think long of this because he hurt himself, again and again.
John Roman saw Mortimer, looking pale and bent, in the aisle of the bait store. Roman was picking up a beer and pig knuckles and saltines for his lunch. The slab crappie were biting near the spillway. He drove a car this time, wanting to fill a freezer box with this succulence, which Bernice in normal times would broil or fry lightly. Eating didn’t get any better. It was so good that many thought the fish was French, crappé. Sac du lait is its name in Louisiana. Speckled, a frisky white steak swimming. They bite softly, like a suckling child. You take them with minnows and jigs. That was why Roman was in the store. But he was there also in curiosity about Sidney’s run of the store since Pepper lost his head.
Mortimer made a quick movement past some cans, knocking them over, and didn’t bother to set them back, didn’t even look back. Roman was fairly sure he was the man with the tongue in the Lexus, but that afternoon was vague. He and Melanie had not spoken since the event.
But Sidney in the Lexus was a thing of utter clarity. Even thrown into that rear seat in the black chariot between two sluts and caught unashamed like some mollusk in the light all of a sudden. Gray hairs on the chest of an oyster.
Roman had noticed how sensitive Sidney was to the pain of others. He was not sympathetic, but he was deeply concerned when he heard or saw the hurt, then took its measure against the longest disease of all, his life. He was just alert and, well, hungry for news of his fellows’ ills. He began to sort of eat the air and whimper over someone’s asthma, scabies, cancer, chest wound. You might make the mistake of thinking he cared, but it was simply an emotive topic and began the peristaltic writhings of his gorge, always about to blow from various bloatage. On the other hand, Roman was sickened by sickness.
He watched Sidney behind the cash register standing and watching him back as if he might be a common shoplifter. To his left in the mouth of another aisle, Mortimer walked out from his own shopping with a sea gaff in his hands.
“You know John Roman, Mr. Mortimer?” Sidney began, strangely formal. “He’s a veteran. Wounded. One of our brave ones from the lost battles.”
“Oh, I’ve heard. And he dates white women, I’ve heard. I have knelt on my knees at the graves of such white women. Is your name Ramp?”
“No. John Roman.”
“All right. Guess my name.”
“I know it. You’ve stood five feet from me.”
“Death by sea or death by mother. Morte de Mer or Morte de Mère. Merman, seaman, see. Did anybody tell you I now own a big piece of this store, John? Your feet are walking on my—”
Sidney began to protest. “N—”