The others took her side. Mimi Suarez said she was not pregnant and was glad.
After a while Alexander and Harb insisted Mimi sing. For song was what was left in the world. Ruthna felt her powers waning and began taking off her clothes. She went out to the back stoop like that and thought she heard boos from nature and her feelings were hurt. She came in and the Coyote passed her and began singing out there with her back to them. Raymond passed the naked Ruthna, dancing. Harb was swaying before her in boxer shorts and black shoes. Alexander watched Mimi’s back as she faced the swamp and sang. Presently Raymond accompanied her on the sax. Then he tore her dress off.
Raymond and the weak porch light on Mimi’s shoulders and buttocks. Out there kneeling and spying, Sponce, Harold and the little ones were at pains to keep their faces behind the fronds. Mimi was the first woman Harold had seen naked. He looked straight through her as through a lens to his beloved Dee. This woman was not his stopping place, pretty as her voice was, strange as his vantage. The younger boys stayed close to the skeletons.
“I’ve got more confidence. I’m not scared of melody anymore,” they heard Raymond call to the others. Nobody cared.
The guests lumbered about the rooms in a great sweat, dancing, one nude, wishing themselves lost from their species.
ELEVEN
CARL BOB FEENEY WAS DEAD, THE SHERIFF LEARNED, arriving at the mortuary in Vicksburg. Feeney’s nephew had identified the body, but he was not here now. Loved ones do not linger in these precincts. Only the women who sought Christ in the tomb to pay their respects and discovered the resurrection, announced by a frightening young man in all-white garments. Perhaps the writer of the gospel Mark himself, who had fled the law and run naked out of this garment one night long ago at Gethsemane.
But Facetto was not here about Feeney. The mortuary staff had called him with a problem. It was after nine, but lights were on in the basement. A man had been telephoning them at regular intervals, then random ones, about the embalming of an Uncle Ricky, who was not there in any form. Yet the caller insisted they save Uncle Ricky’s head to be arrested. Who would arrest him? the mortuary director asked him, the caller. Sheriff Facetto, said the caller. He knows this case. Uncle Ricky put his cigarette out on his forehead for twenty years and now his head needed to be arrested. The calls became harassing and then stopped, but they threatened the mortuary and the sheriff both if Uncle Ricky’s head did not stand trial alone. It must not go underground or into cremation.
Have mercy on these people who see the living become a thing, thought the sheriff. Look here, said the dead, I’m going now, but I’ll leave you this gray meat to lug around a few hours more. No matter what rattlesnakes the dead were, the living had to salute the leavings. All must submit. He thought of his father, a small savage marine, proud of his dry heart. The old soldiers around his grave, lying through their teeth. Oh he was the salt of the earth, a man’s man. His mother a tall beauty desiccated and driven nearly mute by his company. Like an old television antenna finally, obsolete decades ago.
The man at the car door surprised Facetto. He was already scared.
“I’m Sheriff Facetto. You called?”
“Oh yes, Sheriff.”
“This is about the telephone calls. Uncle Ricky and all that.”
“Yeah, he called again just now.”
“What was the cause of death on Feeney, by the way?”
“A coronary, I think. He had very bad lungs. His nephew said he had become a chain-smoker since leaving the Catholic Church. He was once a priest. He had other diseases. But Lord, he was eighty-two. He came from Ireland and was a missionary to Mississippi. My wife informed me this was a third-world mission field to Irish Catholics.”
“Ireland. All their broods and terrorists. Well.”
“Anyway, we wondered if you could put a trace or stop the calls.”
“This isn’t my county. I don’t know who’s calling, either, or I’d act on it. Sorry, friend.”
Facetto drove off. He felt pulled by dread to nowhere. He’d never even gotten out of his car and had spoken only through the window. He might wobble if he walked, or thrust headlong like a swimmer through this fog. Next week he was onstage again in a production of the Vicksburg Theater League. Now he couldn’t remember who he was playing, or what he spoke.
He acknowledged he was a fearful man, but why had this Uncle Ricky call shaken him so much? Horrible laughter and Facetto’s ruin were in the voice over the phone. That specter every man might feel at his shoulder. You would turn and here was the shape and face, the awful laughter, the thing pointing at you. It knew who you were and had caught up with you at last. It had seen you faring back and forth in that old woman. Hot Granny. Pulling a long one out of Granny. Hiding her false teeth. He needed sleep. He needed to be out of love.
He felt he reigned in a county which everyone of worth should have left decades ago, all breeds. He dealt with refuse, squatters, the ones gathered around their own nastiness, their own echoes, like night dogs.
Max Raymond returned to the church in the glen where Egan had beat his fists, demonstrated his hypodermic, tossed his ponytail. It was empty but open and he walked to the pinewood altar. All was poignant since Egan’s uncle had died and Egan’s face had been mutilated. Egan still refused to name the mutilator. Raymond remained silent as well, the bones, his disgrace, the stab wound, which still throbbed in his buttock when he walked or played the sax or even stood too long.
Rain hit on the tin roof. Early shots from the pickets before main engagement. The rain pleased Raymond immensely, as it always did. It whispered, cancel your duty to the outer, get fetal, think of caves. He had loved it at Tulane, where he went to school forever, it seemed. Rain out of Texas and the Gulf. Twilight now, the last of radiant heat sweeping out in the new breezes under the cracked windows with their purple and green glass. Last swirls of color before you drowned, maybe. You could imagine yourself purified by them, you wanted it. Clear this mess, Lord. Save me while you’re at it.
Raymond waited and then picked up a hymnal. The altar was lit by a single bulb in a reading lamp. He was about to tear out a page and leave a message to Byron Egan.
Outside, a car crunched alongside the church on the pea gravel. He went to the window and saw two boys in an amazing automobile, a 1948 Ford coupe in deep red with a gold hood. The driver could barely see over the panel. The driver did not cut off the engine. The car pushed out a considerable white cloud from the rear. Perhaps blown or crippled by a break. But the thing kept throbbing. The boys seemed to have been stolen by it and made to do its will. Well, if you can shoot and drive at ten, then it’s still the South, Raymond thought. He raised the window and leaned out as Egan had done many nights ago and lost his face.
“Are you the preacher?” asked the boy behind the wheel.
“No.”
“Are you his friend?”
“I think so.”
“Tell him we wanted him to do this thing right. We gone to have some fun. Might even shoot somebody if we can get him to follow us. We think he seen us and took the bait all right.”
“Stop the car and come in. Don’t be rash or dumb now.”
“We carryin’ his own pistol. Mortimer’s.”
“That’s what I mean. No reason to make more trouble.”
“You think the preacher’ll be back soon?”