Carl Bob and Ulrich imagined they had a temporary grand theft going when they started up the luxurious pontoon launch that Harvard had conceived and largely built for Melanie Wooten and sailed it directly across the lake to preach to the orphans. But it was part Ulrich’s already by original charter, and the keys stayed in it all the time. The men were senile, sometimes raving and unkempt, but Ulrich had handled the launch several times before, and he did pilot well and knew the lake better than Harvard. Also he had no fear of water, although he would forget whether he could swim or not. Carl Bob Feeney simply couldn’t. He wore a fair barrel of life-preserving with two jackets, one in front, the other on his back. You couldn’t have held him under with a semi wheel rim and chains.
They plowed. This vessel required patience, although the Mercuries were powerful and magnificent. Patience and meditation were what it was all about. They had brought their own sermonettes to read when the orphans got aboard.
Ulrich would talk about the white teeth of animals, especially those of the lesser creatures. The traveling was perfect in late October, the sky orange-lit at midafternoon. The trees along the shore were still green, but a few were on fire in that incandescence born of lush summers, fat sopping roots.
Forgive us, little children, he rehearsed, he prayed. Our long years on this earth are an obscenity. They carried pictures of McJordan, the Jackson policeman notorious for shooting two smallish dogs, with a red X across his face. They had had it done at a LazerPrint in Vicksburg owned by an angry animal lover.
Ulrich wished he could sing, write songs and sing, but mainly just sing. So much so long in his bosom that could have been shared and vented to his auditors through the years. They would have liked him instead of fleeing. He wished he could sing all out, in a long exquisite howl for the animals and flight, but he was just croaking here and taking a nose hit now and then from his oxygen bottle. He had heard a story of a man, Roy Orbison, who sang so beautifully that he turned permanently pale. He wore nothing but black and dark sunglasses to memorialize his grief over his wife and children dying in a fire. That was a wonderful fate, thought Ulrich. He wanted to be pale and a bird with a deep throat. The animals would elect him their tongue.
We will have a ceremony in gratitude to the animals and then I’ll kill myself, he decided. Carl Bob Feeney bore straight ahead with his stare at the far shore, trying to piece together any orphans’ tableau on their pier that might be ready for them. He could not see well, though, and he was looking at a crowd of heifers with buzzards over them and trying to figure. Carl Bob loved the launch as his, an almost bold late gift to his years on the land with his dogs and cats. Loved his nephew, Byron Egan, a prince of the spirit, a boon relative. Blessed his sister, Egan’s mother, for providing him against this darkness. Sometimes old Feeney forgot he was not still a devoted Roman Catholic. And sometimes he felt he was a whole torn country, afire in all quadrants.
A greyhound, alert to kindness, stood next to Melanie on the pier. It was a gift from Facetto. They had come out after loving and discovered the two ancient loonies had taken the launch. They called Harvard, and he was a little concerned but said gruffly that he did not care to come down to the pier if the sheriff was there. He told Melanie, she thought bitterly, that it was consuming all his care to watch his beloved wife of all these years slowly slipping away. He had begged her not to smoke, to exercise, to eat better. So here they had the results of another individual, fully warned, taking her own road in mild spite against the odds in the newspapers. Betting on Harvard University upsetting Alabama in football. Oh, to be holding her hand again when they were twenty-three! Melanie said that sounded right and it made her cry.
She hung up the phone, bereft and held in the sheriff’s arms at the same time. She had never disgusted anyone before.
In their haste to renounce Melanie, the pier crowd did not notice that their cheerleader looked better than she had since middle age. The evidence was that she was reclaiming middle age right now, however briefly, and enjoying it backwards. A smile on some old women does not become them, and they look macabre in their glee. Not so Mrs. Wooten. She was backlit, it seemed, into severe blond on a blue field. She had admirable teeth, for one thing. But the sheriff was drawn and bag-eyed, more like a throttled immigrant at the turn of the century than the video lecturer. Some did now mock him for his race. They weren’t used to Sicilians except around the Gulf Coast, and he was noted as Mafia-eyed by several older viewers, as well as lying fool, for his failures to indict or even locate the killer of Pepper Farté and the butcherer of Frank Booth and Pastor Byron Egan. These people did not fear his wrath or respect his office. Sheriff Facetto despised being unpopular too. For the main part he had acted himself into this job and had intended to grow rapidly in office.
Melanie and Facetto. Love and despair go hand in hand. Sleep in the same bed. In full light she was not confident of herself, but she could not know Facetto was gone in love for her much deeper than appearances. The love was ruining him, he slept with her soul and never got enough of it. What lines bred Melanie? They ought to store the blood in a safe. He was twice in love with her just for lasting.
She studied the large bent dog. Its face made her think of T. S. Eliot’s famous line, “some infinitely gentle, / infinitely suffering thing.” It was an emeritus of the tracks in West Memphis, where Deputy Bernard had confiscated it from a man who had abused it. For Facetto, the greyhound stood for something. What else could comfort this startling creature better than another startling creature, with eyes haunted as if alarmed by its own creation. He gave it to be there in his absence from her.
“When I come back, I want you to’ve named our dog. We don’t know it. You’ll be at the door of your house and tell me the name, and then drop your gown and I’ll get on my knees.”
“Sweet man.”
He thought he knew his killer now and cutter too. It was long quiet work, but he would have him soon. Bernard had seen something and a church trombonist had seen something. But Facetto’s memory of their last acts was driving him around the bend, riding his Melanie to the tune of “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” on the stereo in the next room. She was taken by several supreme moments, a happy crisis she did not know as a possibility. She was sad after the outflow and wept deeply in gratitude. He said he needed to bring her home good news and wouldn’t return until he did. Then he was gone.
Melanie was very weary of what regular people thought. Their thoughts began to hurt and make her weak. Come let me be your grandmother harlot or whatever it is I’m called. Let me be the source of dissension. I never knew Ben Harvard loved me. But fine, fine — let me serve as not only sin but evil around here. I meant to be a scandal all along. Add me to all the hauntings and chaos and lunacy. I am so tired of these old jaws cracking about it. She went back into the house.
For his own pain, Dr. Harvard decided to come down to the pier and see Melanie by accident in his mission of concern about Ulrich and Feeney at large on the barge. Others had gathered when word got out they might be in trouble or lost. Wren, Lewis, the dog Son, who frightened the greyhound back indoors, John Roman and the pale and butchered Egan gathered at the end of the pier. Then Sidney dragged down from his bait-store duties, making a show of anger about his lost trade. Nobody remembered who’d called him. He was off on a mad consumer’s ride, a revenge against lost time and missed women, fun, dice, fine liquor. His language was tougher, glibber than his old talk. Nobody knew quite who he was now. He emulated Man Mortimer, who was changing gravely himself.