“I am the Lord’s servant, branded.”
“I’m taking these old scraps of bone off with me. But they might be employed again. I’m getting to be the caretaker of these slivers, looking for the owner.”
“Get out of here. You’re the black seed itself.” Egan thrust the money at Mortimer, who gathered up the bone sticks haphazardly, dropping pieces, unmindful. Then he got in the car and went.
In this life, last things are never said, nor can they be. The preacher pocketed the knife. His knees were weak, his neck stiff. He was certain the Lord moved in his fingers and did not understand this fear, or even the words he had just uttered. He thought he heard a crackling, or a sigh, just outside the south window, and he watched out for what glistened in the mist. He listened for the living sigh of evil, if it was bigger now. Echoes from the casino were all he heard.
Then Ulrich’s old woody wagon rolled up to the church, glistening. Both ancient and new, phantom of a heavy past but joy manufactured right into it. First Ulrich climbed out slowly, then on the other side Max Raymond. Egan was very happy.
“We’ve come to worship, to discuss, to live,” said Raymond, somewhat practiced, Egan thought.
“I’m scared, I’m alone. I’ve come to ask you to let me move in with you and the dogs. I’ll be no bother. I must be close to Feeney’s dogs. I’ll clean and watch the house for you,” said Ulrich.
Egan did not doubt he was given two miracles. He loved the old man. The man needed him. The dogs needed Ulrich, even with his oxygen and nose tube. The man who had once flown and dreamed himself away all his life afterward.
Egan himself was suddenly wrapped twice by a high lonesome and a circle of fear. But this night was good. The wine of gentle conversation, other like spirits directly near to hand in the nights. Good, good. The old friendly strength came back to him.
“I want revenge,” said Max Raymond. “I’m a dog myself, the dog of a zombie.”
“Come in, come in. What we have is one old sinner out there trying to be legion. He doesn’t even trust his help anymore. He is nearing his breakdown. He took my money and drove away muttering, afraid of my knife.”
“You are an armed Christian?” asked Raymond.
“I believe the Lord approves if they get you in the face. And no little slap on the cheek. I don’t think the Lord is training any knife bait no more.”
“He called my home and offered my wife a job as queen of whores if her performance with him was sufficient,” said Raymond. “Said she needed breaking in a little and English lessons.”
CUBANISMO! GOT TO HAVE IT! read the flyer.
The band blared and chopped along, aroused by itself, uncertain of ever descending. The weekend crowd was big, less derelict than usual. A few college people, a bus crowd from Wisconsin, stunned dentists and their strap-shouldered wives, some of them without a social event since high school. Lone dancers from dead Protestant crossroads where meager churches jutted like tombstones with steps. Ignited, undulant, gay, half drunk, friendly. The rage of the casino just behind them, red and gold, a lost football crowd.
The wives and husbands were startled by the Coyote, who shimmered under her black ringlets, curved in her gown like promise itself. The women wanted her for a pet, the men to be an anonymous head eating away at her. Many changed race. Some tried to have ecstasy in Spanish. The band made them doubt there had ever been another life.
One who danced alone was John Roman, who could no longer stand the pain at home. His shoulders went up and back. His gray head sweated, his eyes closed. He wanted down the river of trumpet, saxophone, trombone, the raft of rhythm underneath him. Dance some of the gray sick off me, he prayed.
Max Raymond searched the crowd even as he played the horn. This was half impossible for the spotlights. He did not play so evilly tonight. His playing was not firmly anything. His coveted wife was nothing to him now, his horn nothing, he was not certain he was clothed. His entrances and choruses with the trombone and trumpet were tepid, staggering, reeling without heart, like a tune wounded but still carrying on down the road in bedroom slippers. It was Costume Night, and many of the crowd were wearing masks. The Coyote was always in the contest, he thought grimly. In her natural stuff, the minimal mini memorable, her legs. We have a winner.
Raymond began to relax during his break, when he did not see Mortimer in the dancers or tablesiders or anywhere costumed or uncostumed. He settled into a fine jar of Wild Turkey on ice, with a soda and lime to the side, and began his lean, bumped by a few fans, those angry and sullen laggards to whom he could play no wrong. Some of them had homemade CDs of only him. Anybody could make a disc now. Our great democracy. Perhaps he and the band were due one. This Latinismo thing would fail, he feared, but it would always be around as long as there were butts and rumbas. It was a shame these baby nihilists creeped him out so, with all their love, and always too early drunk, and their females too, little skanks latched on to the wrongest punks in town. He could not know he was looking straight at his own youth. All that was missing was a war and a pet wolverine.
Beside him was a strange figure, unmasked, hooking his drink with a claw made out of only natural hand, and moaning, perhaps a jester ignored for all his private comedy. Except for some vision half suppressed since the awful night with the bones, Raymond was not aware that Malcolm was lakeside. Now, with a thrill to the pits, Max Raymond recognized him, accompanied by the leaner and sterner couple to his right. He turned away quickly. It was Mimi Suarez the three of them were watching, onstage alone now with piano, bass and drums. Malcolm was the only one who watched with love. The other two seemed saddened by her ballads and intent on suffering. As if they were reviewing their own lunacy, their own love, their own cause. They each seemed alone. Separately crucified once more. Penny and Gene Ten Hoor.
Raymond would play the rest of the night with his back to the audience, like an old idol of cool, Miles Davis. His punk following would think he had outdone himself. He hurried back to the stage now, through couples panting and sweaty. A college football man misunderstood Raymond’s need and slammed him across the shoulder. He went down into the legs of a screaming mulatto woman bigger than he was. He rose through her kicks while somebody screamed, “He’s with the band, bitch!” He wondered where this had commenced as her curses followed him through the crowd of masks, Reagan, Nixon, dancing together even without music. Donald Trump’s rubber face on a very short man. Even Alan Greenspan. Hillary Clinton pouting but with mouth open, perhaps raving, pop eyes. Momentum rang through him like an urgent telephone somewhere ahead. He rushed past John Roman with a handkerchief to his neck and then Man Mortimer. He could not credit they had been dancing together, but he did not slow. Drugged women passed like a discord of mannequins. Or was he drugged? When his head cleared, he was high but did not know quite what floor he stood on. It was the curling bandstand.
As he held life dearly, so he also yearned to leave it. But now he would play himself somewhere on the instrument. Play it well, with heart and no more belly lint and asthma.
Now, when the music began once more, it was John Roman, dancing, who was incredulous. His partner was Mortimer, uncostumed except in a silk bandit’s mask and the slick beam-shoed costume he felt compelled to wear against all contigencies. He raised his hands and shuffled violently, an enormous grin on him. “Can you boogie? Can you do the dog? Get down, get down, John Henry! Oldies but goodies. C’mon c’mon c’mon.” He was an uncommonly bad dancer, Mortimer, and here with a solitary black male with silver hair, he did not mimic one well either.
Just behind him, perhaps betrayed in partners, was Sidney Farté in a very large old-timer’s party suit and vest, white shoes. He troubled the floor with some spastic revision of anything right, perhaps clogging or just stomping. But he was happy and grinning and drunk. Looking on the back of his bad influence, and not a finer man in the county, old Man Mortimer. He the man!