“Oh for pity’s sake, sit down, Sidney. I was just going on.”
Sidney seemed relieved and did sit down on his proprietor’s high stool, a swivel chair new to his regime, fairly swank. He immediately jumped up and out in the air, screaming, holding his bottom. He pulled his hands from behind. Tiny points of blood on them. He held three or four map tacks.
Mortimer squalled, “He fell for it! Fell for it!”
Sidney grinned.
Who were they? What was this?
Roman thought they were like two little brothers. Who was leading who? His stomach turned. He drew off one of the ancient dusty cellophaned white handkerchiefs from a snap display and handed it over the counter to Sidney, who began eating off the wrapper and getting the cloth out with his teeth and fingers. A kid, a not unhappy kid in an old boyhood-prank cutabout. Buckwheat, Spot, Spanky. The other freckled goony-haired one. Alfalfa with centerparted hair, cross-eyed a lot. These two men were brats, that’s what they were. They were neighborhood bullies. I took three shots to the collar and jaw for them and their recesses.
The tall one with rock-and-roll hair was still holding on to that fish gaff, that shark gaff. What is the verb. The word? They are in collusion. Noun, I guess. Roman walked down the front steps with his new jigs and good minnows. Various geezers, Ulrich among them, were bunched at the base of the steps having at it.
“What was we looking at?” one said.
“The mother lode of weird,” said another customer.
Ulrich was in a bomber jacket with fleece and it eighty-five. He was real.
“Bad news with big preacher hair on it.”
“I don’t know what that cocksucker was. But this old fist would be his watch-out if he chanced to come close to me.”
“That man was crossbred with Lazarus.”
“That cut-up preacher?”
“I seen him before.”
“Said he ain’t said word one. Like he talked to a devil.”
“You don’t see nothing like that twice. But we did. That old boy in the Edwards football-game lavatory.”
“He seen maybe an unclean spirit, like.”
“Or trying to exorcise one, like.”
“You here one day and Stagger Lee cut off your face the next.”
“Or your head like Pepper. We ain’t never finishing talking on that one. Your hotshot sheriff wandering around like a mascot.”
Ulrich in the moth-eaten bomber jacket, the corduroy trousers much too big now in this skinnier madness, spoke again. “Spiders hold the altitude record for earth-bound creatures. Mount Everest.” He seemed on the verge of tears, then was over it. “Up there above the murder of men, these fine little creatures. Their thin legs. Having their families. Those delicate eggs. The winds must howl and howl outside.”
Roman was sorry he had not gone straight to fishing, but these were fine minnows. He might seine his own, keep a little pool of them behind the house. He headed off to his car.
When the fishing was over, he would be glad and sorry both to return home to Bernice. She was suddenly an old sick woman like Harvard’s Nita, and he felt just paces behind him, unable to drag her back from the maw of huge nonsense ahead.
The spider of Ulrich, he considered abruptly. Wind howling on the jagged mountaintop. Their little legs. Shuh. Down between them rocks. Icy winds the only weather, only world. Get aholt of something heavy, don’t never quit. New babies coming, feel the wind outside their shells already. Get born a half foot from ruin between a rock and another rock.
When you knew death was not far off, you always got a strange arrangement of the usual facts. You almost saw the spirit itself. An essence of the familiar, shifted. Sound, smell, dirt, sky. Thirty-three years ago, three times he had left where a sniper’s bullet struck seconds later. Then on a hot afternoon he had known the strangeness but was weary and, he knew now, curious. He had made no move and gotten shot.
Roman hummed around the remnants of a tune. “Time After Time,” Chet Baker’s version of airy sweeter days. He kept a pistol in his kit for snakes, but he knew he didn’t need that much caliber. You lived long enough, mildly on the lake. That was the plan. Nothing greedy or hungry about it, hardly even a dream. Now some sullen force came in to take away this small existence. No harbor. Us small craft, cracked against the wall by mean winds. Now he realized he had bought the pistol for men and lied to himself about it. Men in this new newspaper headline shoot-out, even on the school yards. How many niggers drove down a road like this to die fifty or a hundred years ago. They’d looked wrong, they’d whistled like wolves, they’d voted.
If, say, some fool in a smoked-glass car came up beside him running parallel and wouldn’t stop it, kept looking at him, he would pull the gun and fire a magazine through the glass. Death worked on Bernice at home. Here, Whoever, here’s some for you too. He had changed and hated his changes.
Pastor Egan lay silent. The other patient was watching a television show about a hospital as he lay there in the hospital. Maybe he wasn’t convinced enough he was truly here. Egan knew better. His inner voice had just returned and he liked himself again.
Episcopals, your rituals are babble, it muttered. Robed baboonery. Lukewarm, I spit them from my mouth, even while loving them and their gold and whiskey and cable-knit sportswear.
You are postwar, postmodern, posthuman. You sweep up, is all. The waste of the stores and storerooms find their place in each consumer heart to rot and reek. You are lukewarm, my people, my people. No decisiveness. Saith I the pastor. The man who owes thousands to the pimp who butchered him. Something large is in the woods. Not what you planned. You have not decided, so the thing in the woods is deciding.
TEN
IN THE PAWNSHOP WHERE THE SAXOPHONE RESTED IN its velvet-lined dark alligator case, Max Raymond had not been as misled as he supposed. His nemesis Malcolm, the afflicted past lover of Mimi Suarez, had gone by the window. He knew where Raymond was and intended to have a showdown with him but was in no way connected to the red Mercury Sable. He was looking for a weapon, probably a twelve-gauge double, when he missed the pawnshop and was led on by another rank of pawnshop signs down the way. He’d turned into an alley by mistake, tired from hitchhiking down Highway 61. Seven different rides and a grinding wait in all weathers, October going hot, cold, rainy and balmy, freezing. He could not drive, and his old gang did not approve of his pilgrimage.
Malcolm walked out of the mouth of the alley after Raymond had followed the car. Had he bought fast and, leaving Raymond dead behind him, taken the man’s car, he would have arrived at the house with Mimi Suarez away visiting relatives and singing in Miami. Neither he nor Raymond had seen the other. But they never lived a day without the other on their minds. In the next pawnshop was a more comprehensive collection of guns, and in this state of enormous sympathy for gun owner and hunter, where the legislature has even designated a specified season for dwarfs to hunt deer with crossbow, he found sympathy surrounding him on all sides. The pawnshop owner wanted stroke victims armed for whatever.
In the shop were the Ten Hoors and many bigger, meaner orphans and the now fifteen-year-old girls. It was not just a summer camp anymore. It was also less announced what it was now. They were not survivalists, nor religionists, nor paramilitary exactly. They needed guns, ammo, water and canned goods, barbed wire, and already had dynamite and four live grenades from the National Guard. The percussion kind, which they needed more of. You could add shrapnel to the outside of these very easily in the shop. The couple and the others liked Malcolm instantly and they had a much better gun for him. He left with them, he who was skimping on food to buy the twelve-gauge.