“Amen,” said Byron Egan, standing toward the front of the room.
“People are forgotten as soon as they are slaughtered, except by a few loved ones, you know that?” Peden went on. “Forgotten in these stains of blood you will find on the seat covers and floorboards, and ceilings around this yard. Don’t even take the little ones with you if you look.”
Peden raised his arms in the big suit. He did not look funny, just thicker than one supposed. “The Lord has given me this junken place, freed me of drink and drug, and sent a friend, Byron Egan, all the priest a Christian American ever needed. And best, He has given us His Book, which every man and every woman can read.”
Peden breathed long, for this was difficult, and Mortimer felt the sensation of another man standing up amazed inside his own body. Familiar shape, with its khaki sports jacket and its safari boots recently removed from the pelt of floor rugging in his great Lexus. “I announce that Dee Allison is Mrs. Harold Laird, and that Harold Laird is her husband. May the Lord bless this couple, I would say young couple, but a teenage separates them, as it were.” Dee lowered her head and Harold was not amused, although he liked Peden, who could have gotten the law on him before his confession and seeking of mercy. Harold wished he knew where the boys had taken the car. “Her last husband, Cato, is present, I believe, to confirm the divorce has been finalized and that he approves this union and defies any who might stand against it. And Harold has vowed to be the loving father and mentor of her four children. I say Cato, you are Cato?”
A tall man of graceful carriage, hair still black and thick, in a nice wedding suit, gray, leaned forward, as if he had learned a courtesy faintly European, a roll of the hand and a bow in the affirmative, and a calm smile on his well-cut face.
“Cato is here in protection of the boys and of his other boy or man, Sponce, for a while. The agreement to his protection and his support has been amicably decided upon, and his custody of the young Emma for an agreeable while during the honeymoon period and other adjustments. He seems a fine man, Cato, and will be a father to this favored lass, who smiles every time she sees him enter a room, and this makes her mother happy too. And they will be father and daughter in Toronto, Canada, for as long as the mother assents. Except for the filth and low-mindedness, he would still reside in the U.S.A., he says. Well, the America I know could have kicked Canada’s ass all the way back to Paris and London, but out of the generosity of its great high-minded cleanliness of spirit, it has refrained from that minor task. But why am I going on like this at a wedding? I would surmise I am now out of control and will hand the services off to Brother Byron Egan. I do hope I have married the right people here during this spell. I don’t feel shipshape right now and I apologize. Remember the good words, if they happened. I’m going to go take a nap.”
Egan stepped up and indicated a seat between Sponce and Emma. Cato looked discomfited but was trying to smile warmly. His smile grew thinner, then curved back with a will.
Mortimer could make out no more than a third of this matrimonium and was by no means certain whether anybody had been married, but he was amazed and baffled by the presence of Cato, Dee’s husband, who sent checks from Toronto. He was a better-looking and better-preserved man than Mortimer expected. Otherwise, he was outraged any ceremony was transpiring on his property, and in a junkyard. Why not the church, and what was Egan? Here he seemed to be only a lackey.
Egan’s face was three-quarters healed, and he looked the same but leaner, and his head was shaved. He had cut down severely on the number of rings he wore, and he now went with a woman named Lottie who sat in front of him admiringly. An ex-junkie, alumna of various mild lunatic communes, in which she was invariably the leading advocate and then the first to pack off. Now a nurse, mildly religious, wild for teas of all nations, a smoker, good legs and quite defined high rump, baby lips. She had recently become an advocate of sexual abstinence, which was killing Egan, and he preached to her as well as the flocks, wooing them both.
Mortimer knew Lottie too, although if asked, his memory would be hazy, tentative, as if she’d been confused with her cousin. He had collaborated with Lottie a few years before on a porn acupuncture video that went nowhere, exciting only Mortimer and Edie. They decided it was too educated and had no audience outside, oh, the Chinese-grocery dynasties in Vicksburg and upward through the Delta. Marketing to old Chinese grocers was too delicate. Besides, the plot was thin, and why were there so many white people hanging around in the background just looking incredulous? But Lottie had looked good as a Chinese woman.
Now Egan spoke. “Old Brother, sit down and strip off your burden. Good Peden has risked much when not in the best shape. All of us in this strange church on the border of a junk pyramid, in the very parlor of the man who has hurt many of us so badly and so permanently. Who has blackmailed us and cowed us and bullied us. Strip off your burdens, get lighter, unjunk yourselves. Peden has brought us into the halfway house of his life, is gainfully employed by the very wretch at the heart of our troubles. I think the wretch is attempting to play, to have friends.”
Frank Booth suddenly turned around in his cardtable chair and looked through the window directly at Man Mortimer without seeing him. Booth’s face had been reconstructed too, but radically. He looked exactly like Conway Twitty, midcareer, but instead of the tall thick hair, he had his own nearly bald head with strings of gray-white. Healthy sideburns. Mortimer quivered and nearly lost his legs, weak, firing with nerves. He knew he had not been seen, but he had sure seen Booth. He almost left the yard on his belly, crawling. His face.
“We are expecting two more guests shortly,” Egan continued, “and we owe them our attention even if we do not like them.
“There is the business of marrying Gene and Penny yet again, in renewal of their vows. The couple will soon be here with their best man, Malcolm, a new member of the lake community whose handicaps have not prevented his service to the children at the camp.”
“Malcolm is coming here?” cried out Max Raymond. “Will he be armed?”
“Well who isn’t?” Peden said from his chair. “I personally know a peaceful soul, a sculptor and motorcycle mechanic, in possession of over a hundred and fifty guns. He likes to hold the history.”
“Malcolm is an ex-patient of mine who wants to harm me,” Raymond said. “But let him come. Let him do what he has to do. I stand to pay, and if it’s my time, I’m ready to die for my sin.”
Mimi Suarez was seated next to her husband. On this outburst, she rose and slapped him very hard, then left the meeting. Mortimer hid himself entirely behind a tin out-building where spark-plug harnesses hung.
“Could I ask,” called out Sidney from his perch near the door. He had not been invited, and few had known he was there. “Is this a town meeting, a church gathering, or are you just screwing the pooch here?”
“Or just a debating society,” said Dr. Harvard angrily. “Led by two thugs who’ve exchanged one addiction for another and who want to rub our noses in junk. Your revenge on others who’ve tried to bring some beauty and light into the world.”
“Fine words, Doc,” Sidney sneered. “No noble rot about it.”