They could see tiny specks of life across the lake but no boat. They spoke of the boat as if it were at the bottom of the lake and the old men bobbing and yammering in their life jackets. And what each had planned to read next meditation way up the reservoir near Yazoo — the Indian word for death ghost, was it? Sidney reminded Harvard of all the artistic and nautical effort he had put in the project, forget the pile of money, which nobody else here had, combined.
“All for Miss Melanie too. We know that. A grand boat for a grand swank love, wasn’t it? And your poor wife dying at home all the while, smoking them cigarettes and building up her sad neglected ass with chocolate.”
“You are scum,” said Harvard.
All agreed the sheriff was a strange do-nothing about these troubles. That he was just another fraud of vocality like Bill Clinton. The law was fast cars with whip antennae racing around from one unsolved atrocity to another, screaming radios. Shield on the door ought to read Late, Lard-ass, Last to Know. But expert marksmen on small dogs ruffing in a driveway, or puffed actors in dinner theater, a fit of exhibitionism. Your taxes at work.
Then they spoke of Melanie. “There’ll come the day when it’s right, Harvard. You’ll propose marriage, she’ll accept. The two of you were made for each other. Get married on the barge by Parson Egan here,” Lewis said.
Egan watched the water east and west. He had not uttered a word, and he was ashamed of his carved face, the cross in stitched pieces.
“If you don’t care old sheriff boy been a-tappin it,” said Sidney happily.
“Please.” Harvard had found his own small voice at last.
“The two of ’em come ’round, why you can smell it on ’em,” Sidney insisted.
“You’re a wretched man, if not evil,” cried tall Lewis.
“Not no worse than the truth. Yeah, she got her glass animals and her books and music and now her lawman. She a complete woman.”
Harvard turned and walked up the hill, in grief, they presumed.
John Roman was about to reveal Sidney’s late career between the whores. He liked and admired Harvard tremendously. But then Wren spoke again, hopeful that the lying he had done about Wake Island was forgotten.
“You had to move your mouth and break the best heart here!”
He stepped forward and slapped Sidney across the face. His arm was long and he still had surprising power in it. It was not an idle blow. Sidney sat right down on the beach grass. It seemed Wren was not through, and John Roman moved up to restrain him. But you thought he might be wanting a piece of Sidney too. Everybody did.
Sidney, huddled down, delirious in spite, was glad to see that in their unhappiness the others now turned on each other. John Roman got Wren in a half nelson and started dragging him away from Sidney. Lewis kicked at Sidney’s face, missed, came again. Sidney took a blow right into the heaving place and began rolling and firing projectile vomit. Got some on the poor stitched Frankensteinish Byron Egan, who was attempting to intervene. Son pranced around, barking and wagging his tail. Across the lake they heard at an immense distance what sounded like serial gunfire and turned. All this while, Egan, silent about his attacker, pleaded for the flock to return to itself.
Ulrich and Feeney approached the pier and slowed, observing the etiquette of the small wake. They were doing fine, nothing going over had been senile or forgetful. It was just that Ulrich was relying on Feeney for a bit of navigation and Feeney didn’t see right, nor did he acknowledge this to himself, so he had taken them out of their way a bit. Now he thought he saw a sail come up on the pier, and a boat, hoisted by its small crew. What was happening was that armed children were making a barricade on the end of their pier at the behest of the camp founders, Gene and Penny Ten Hoor.
The couple was armed too. They did not expect the oncoming barge to be armed, but they guessed Mortimer might be aboard and intended to deliver a volley that would part the man fifteen ways.
They had made a flag, orange, black and white, with the letters OASS in black. They called themselves Oasis, Orphans Against Smiling Strangers. A slogan stitched on it:
WE HAVE ALREADY LOST, SO WE WILL WIN
WE SHALL LOSE MANY, WE SHALL KILL FEW
THE ONE WE KILL, SMILING STRANGER,
WILL BE YOU.
The changes were inspired by the awful revelations of the fifteen-year-old girls. Man Mortimer thought he had charmed them and sent them back to recruit fresher younger subjects for his new video company. But Sandra, the littler one, had been injured by Large Lloyd, who had grown angry and impatient in his work and felt ludicrous in a cape and mask. They intended to kill Mortimer, and Lloyd too. And Edie, Bertha and especially Marcine, who was hardly older than the camp girls and helped betray them. Both ruined for life by intimacies distributed widely as underground art.
Minny and Sandra had turned on Mortimer when he explained over the telephone, with compassion and sweetness, he thought, that they were too old now for his projects. One day, he promised, he would take them away and set them up in fine style. But day after day, Mortimer failed to show. Then came the day when they exposed him for what he was. They did not say how glad they had been to participate, but they mentioned drugs, blackmail and death threats that had never occurred. Gene and Penny were in violent sympathy with hurt children. A new spirit took over. They would not assassinate outside the camp fence, but anybody from outside who entered the grounds, well, the new spirit was on the end of the pier behind a canoe. They began to string razor wire from the cab of a pickup, but several were cut and the going was slow. They glued glass onto percussion grenades with Krazy Glue. Many a little one glued the grenade to his palm too. No discussion. No trust in the laws of men. Death to smiling strangers on the spot. Death by long-overdue Higher Law.
Both girls now knelt behind the canoe barricade with seven others, all taking aim not on the man in the wheel-house but on the one standing and trying to unblur his impressions, Carl Bob Feeney. Minny, the girl with breasts, had the honor of handling a Winchester lever-action.30/.30 with hollowpoint bullets. A telescope for sighting. She had known for a long time that Mortimer was not aboard, but Feeney looked a good deal like her second stepfather in Galveston, Texas.
Ulrich performed a slow turn about fifty yards out in a hail of lead. The pleasure boat was riddled, its wind-shield and stained-glass cabin windows shattered. Only the ineptness of the orphans’ rifle training was on their side. Outside of real estate, the Ten Hoors had no talents, though they presumed to emit rays of instruction by simply riding horses and setting a good example. Minny fired over and over at Feeney through the telescope and must have carved his outline in blue space around him. Somebody threw two grenades. Thumping, pumping geysers and minnow kill out of twelve feet of clear green water. The barge was on the way back at full throttle. Twin Mercuries churning all-out. Ulrich must have caught up to the point where most of the bullets and buckshot were going in their error, for the back of the right stern disappeared and smoke crept up.
After a year, it felt to Feeney and Ulrich, they were out of range. In another place and time they would have been commended to some award. Soon they were pretty well afire back there but making good time to Farté Cove. The Ten Hoors stood arm in arm behind the firing line, hating the vehicle that might have brought another Man Mortimer to their shores. An armed Carl Bob Feeney would have shot down the both of them.