The Oasis flag still flew on its pole at the front of the barricade. The couple considered this a victory, and they celebrated with hot dogs and a long movie that night. Outside, older orphans patrolled the fence and beefed-up sections of unrolled barbed wire. Rifles slung on a rope across their backs. They gathered around the campfire for chats. An unwise salvo, bad military instruction. But there had been army error everywhere. A tradition carried on apace.
The pier crowd watched as Ulrich brought the barge over across the lake. There was a fire in the stern near the gas tanks. Saner men would have jumped overboard five minutes ago, but not these pilgrims. They plowed, they felt the power drop back to a single Mercury, they felt orange and hot on their backs. One of the tanks seemed a wall of flames and threatened to explode the next tank. It will blow, it will immolate, it will soon be over, Ulrich thought. Not a bad thing, as I am ready to go to the dead animals in that other world and spend my next life atoning. Carl Bob Feeney alongside. This is the hell never described, where you get a second chance to correct your miserable life by daily ministry to those you harmed or made dead. Perhaps these are the reincarnated ones, the saints we still have scattered among us. Hitler and Stalin working as good men in obscurity somewhere. And Mao, who never took a bath except in the organs of his young lovers, as he put it, and who murdered even the sparrows of the air to bring a pestilence of grasshoppers. Feeney and I will recognize them, workers in the vineyard.
Feeney would have been long gone in his double life jacket except he feared water so much and thought it capable of melting off the buckles. All deeper water to Feeney was a sucking vortex activated by contact with any warm thing that thrashed. Then there were the sharks. Great fat blond lake sharks that lay on the bottom until stirred by that music above, men flapping, kicking their legs, yelling for help.
“We’ll have to run her aground near the pier and call for help,” said Ulrich.
“Friend, there is no help here. Try to make the shallows out of the shark beds.”
“Feeney, you’re an old priest from Ireland. There are no sharks. Leave it to me. I know nature!” This was a lie.
All considered, Feeney thought, those children blazing away were very charitable. They might have killed us easily instead of this warning. We could have been the church, the state or landlords. Preachers and destroyers.
They neared the pier, jumped down from a fully engulfed floor of the bow and cabin. The pleasure barge was a collapsed charcoal hulk by the time Melanie got the Redwood fire department there. No obvious evidence of foul play, only the vague idiocy of two old fools. Ulrich and Feeney never mentioned they were fired upon and took the abuse with equanimity.
Nevertheless, sane fishermen avoided fishing the weeds and lily pads of the orphans’ camp shoreline. All that rifle range going, you might get into something stray.
Sidney was back at the bait store when he got word and almost wrecked his fine car several times racing over, wallowing on gravel and twisting on grass, fishtailing. With water on the road he would have hydroplaned. Then he limped wildly down the hill where others gathered. Ulrich had done this trying to light a cigarette aft, near the gasoline, he was told. One more chance before they hauled him and Feeney to Almost There. Sidney Farté was in ecstasy.
Sheriff Facetto had a lead. The last to see Pepper alive seemed to have been Ruthna, a somewhat notorious woman, and two men called Harb and Alexander. The sheriff had tracked them to the tame and brick-streeted town of Clinton, where the Baptist college was, and where Grant had once stabled his horses in a chapel in the midst of giant cedars. Now its suburbs defined it. Pine forests ripped down for the blocky bunkers of new businessmen and computer Christians fleeing the blacker Jackson to the east.
The sheriff met all three in Ruthna’s ragged house, an ersatz hacienda with failing cactuses and yuccas about. It was the home of her fifth husband, Harb, who was her ex but still came around to visit with Alexander over a bottle or two now and then. They were friends of Max Raymond and did see Pepper a few minutes before ten that night. But they were depressed and godless, divorced and alcoholic, and their memories were random. Once they were not suspects, they began to be drunk and pathetic in a short space, fighting for narrative time with each other. The sheriff was sorting, writing, reacting. Then he just asked them to shut up.
The night in question they had gnawed bones in a booth of the northside restaurant, Near ’Nuff Food, far superior to the restaurant right at the saxophonist and singer’s cottage. Raw beams, linoleum, spiderweb Formica tabletops, leatherette seats, happy waitresses. A theme. A waitress hurried out and dumped ribs on a heavy paper tablecloth, two rolls of paper napkins.
They wanted to be higher when they left to visit Raymond and the Coyote. They considered themselves urbanites, ignorant of philosophy but crammed with half-remembered songs, which served. They were unhappy, and if God existed, they blamed him for much. The whiskey still worked on them, but they needed more. Ruthna pulled the Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo into the gravel lot of the bait store for a last beer. At least ice and cups and Tums. The ribs of Near ’Nuff Food were loggy and scalding in their tender stomachs.
Harb and Ruthna had already begun to fight regarding her past. Alexander went inside and left them to it. A hound watched them all from the porch. Soon enough the fight grew tiresome. They passed a man on a high stool, a note written on an envelope on the counter before him. He was asleep, a football was in the aisle of the store and this was a curious thing, as if somebody had just left off a game of touch. They had a sense somebody was in the back but just left this old man to his sleeping. He was a dry white old creature, leaning on the bulwark of a Lucky Strike display case in which all brands of smokes were stacked. Old Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls and Roitan cigars, brands that seldom moved in modern towns. The note under his fingers must be a message to customers, they figured. Out to Lunch or the like, even though he was there. They got the sack of ice, the plastic cups, the soda, lemons. For a geezer he was well stocked in the needs of the drinking life.
Maybe he was deaf as well as asleep. They couldn’t get his attention. Alexander turned the note around, thinking maybe to wake him. The note seemed oddly personal but scrawled in excitement or carelessness.
I SEEN THE LIGHT AROUND THE CORNER OF THE TUNNEL THEM BASTARDS WAITING FOR ME.
His face was perhaps more purple than was good for a fellow. But he could damn well sleep and they decided this was quaint and in their sleepless tossings they envied him.
They grabbed a bottle from the shelf behind him and went out with the goods, pocketing the cash. They thought this was what the sheriff had come about and this they apologized for. The drink, the weirdness of the scene, their lightness of spirit. Really it was only a prank.
They continued a bit just to hear for themselves what happened the rest of the night once they got to Max Raymond’s. They told Raymond about the catatonic man. Old Pepper harked back to Raymond’s adolescence, his first night here in a cabin with other boys. The rare night it snowed here. A January with only a few crappie fishermen around. Somebody had insisted Pepper look out at the snow falling thickly in the porch light. He went out, peered briefly and returned.
“Nasty,” he said. Nothing else. Raymond insisted this was modern poetry.
Two thought Raymond was affected. Another fight broke out.
He and the Coyote had been drinking too. She told him the way he clung to his past was morbid. He accused her of having no memories. Fort Lauderdale, Memphis. What was that? She was nowhere, just tits and hair with a voice.