“Not one mention has been made of the animals. For whom old Feeney died!” Ulrich began weeping. He was smoking a cigarette and soon was hacking out bottomless gut calls, knocking over his oxygen tank. But he would not be helped.
“We’re going on our way,” said Harold, the new husband. “We’ve got underage kids and an automobile to find.” He picked up baby Emma, and Cato the Torontoan followed him, Sponce and Dee out the aisle between the chairs. Cato still with his suave readiness to fly toward northern sanity and newly claimed fatherhood.
It was a different audience who waited for the renewal of vows from Gene and Penny. They were getting remarried naked and had written their own nuptial poems, and so although the crowd was surlier, they were by no means less alert. Lewis, Wren and Harvard lingered only to get a full frontal on Penny, who, though insane, was still a fine looker with nail marks about her ankles. Gene had the hack marks on his thigh. Trim, he wouldn’t make a bad nude either, though his red beard and freckles and wild woolly hair looked as if they were fleeing in a red-and-white-confetti protest. The altar empty, people looked forward, backwards, sideways. Malcolm was late. Max Raymond was still there, determined to look his nemesis in the face. Peden had risen and was clear to marry folks again. It was his nature to get suddenly clear.
They awaited Melanie and Facetto. What arrogance was detaining them? Or were they deliberately missing the nude wedding? Gene and Penny were eager.
Mortimer stayed in the plug-harness shed. He would wait until all had cleared out but Peden. Then Peden was his. He already was, but he had forgotten and needed the touch of his master.
Why do we keep as keepsakes the implements of our own destruction and hang them on the wall? Mortimer wondered. As if they were not hung between our ears. Near Mortimer’s head, on the wall, was a kind of shillelagh wrapped with barbed wire that Peden had used in biker and mobile-home fights. There was either dried blood or shoe polish on it. It was three feet long, shaped like a narrow bowling pin, with all its weight in the head. Mortimer figured if Peden was so proud of this, the man should know what it felt like. He knew he did not have the strength of old, but this club should carry the day. He wondered about just a bash, repeated bashes, without the first softness, the gee, the little feathers at the base of his spine. Did Mortimer have it in him, or would his hand go to his rear pocket where the rug knife rested in joy?
He was wondering when the day would be that they would let him back into real life, which he had once thought possible, at age sixteen in southern Missouri, looking out back at the chicken yard. Little bit of rain coming down. Not lonesome. But the chickens looked happy and they were so dumb, scratching and lurching. Killed and ate them, but his mother was very tender with them. They had names for their short time. Mortimer began to cry. Just a little, and soon stopped. Then, through the smudged window, he saw Gene and Penny pulling off their clothes on the porch of the shotgun shack. They both had long gnarled feet, he noticed, as if these parts had married and grown alike in time. And Facetto and Melanie were about to walk right up on the disrobing couple before they realized it.
John Roman may have been the most uncomfortable at the nude wedding. The world wasn’t meant to be buttnaked and smiling ear to ear, he reasoned, and here came the poems. Peden presided woozily over the entire thing. Here was a man who in his bad, bad days had almost blown Roman over on a gravel road riding his giant Harley next to Roman’s little motorbike, loaded with fish. Now a Christian orator when he was not playing hooky from the Anonymous program.
Roman was there because it was a place to be out of the house with Bernice. He knew he could not shoot Mortimer if Bernice lived on and lived well, so he had deferred the head shot on Mortimer. Roman was the only trained killer on the lake. He could summon a chilliness beyond such huffers as Raymond, who had recently confessed to Roman his own wound at the hands of Mortimer. How could Mortimer risk all his whore world and his fleet of lust hearses, all his women and thugs, for a bit of fun like this?
Now in stumbled the best man. Clothed, thank the Lord for small favors, but dragging a leg and unable to make low sounds like, for instance, a whisper. But what protocol was appropriate when two fools rammed together in poetry to initiate some awful Eden all over again? Couldn’t Gene have combed his hair? Or worn shoes?
“Uh seen this guy in the tin hut!” Malcolm was moaning to the back row.
He was ignored. Penny picked up a guitar and began strumming and hooting a song directed toward the higher obedience of everybody to the untenanted, unastronauted moon.
When Roman first heard of integration, he thought it was a movement about meeting and drinking with people like Chet Baker, and he was a partisan. But it was mostly the Pennys and the Genes and the Pedens and the split-in-two Raymonds who were at the table.
Peden began speaking, looking neither left nor right. “Thank you for your arrival, Malcolm. It is good a husband and wife freshen their vows. We lose sight of the face of God, which we must at least try to see every day, and we lose sight of each other. We become annoying mists to each other, let’s face it. Egan said those words, I stole ’em.”
“No, wait, I’ve got my poem!” said Sidney. This grainy man was in the doorway watching all worlds. “Women. You can’t live with them and you can’t fuck their ears.”
Melanie alone was scandalized, but she had brought her own scandal with her and so she stayed quiet. The ceremony jerked on to its end, and Sidney, nervous as Judas, suddenly ran for his car. Mortimer saw this act, hoping the rest would leave shortly. He was not good at waiting.
Egan moved among the crowd, glad the wedding was quick. There was no reception. The sheriff began talking loudly.
“I wasn’t quite done, Facetto,” said Peden. “It’s my house we’re in.” Peden didn’t like cops.
“I’m sorry. Go ahead. I thought we were going to talk about the man.”
“Sure we are. Now I’m through talking. Go ahead.”
“We are needing testimony against Man Mortimer,” said Facetto.
“This sounds like you on television. The new breed of high sheriff,” taunted Peden. “What the hell is new about Mortimer?”
The sheriff was angry, red.
“You’ve gotten plenty of airtime, sir,” Harvard broke in. “Much expatiation on criminology. Little actual arresting of it. There is not much you have done except,” Harvard swept his hand toward Melanie, “dally with a woman twice your age.”
“I am older than that. We are in love,” said Melanie.
“In heat,” spat Harvard. “I think Facetto should abdicate for the woman he loves. Or whatever negligent sheriffs do. Man, you can’t serve.”
Facetto was mad. He had been taunted by mail, the telephone, distant shouts, and now by this considerable old surgeon whose intelligence he could not deny.
“You’ve got an orphans’ militia over there,” said Lewis. “Somebody’s going to be hurt.”
“I’ve spoken to them,” Facetto said. Many folks stood up and milled, just absorbing him. Nobody else was listening. They were talking on their own and leaving. He was very sorry he had come. There was no face to maintain here, no walk to walk. He felt himself melting and near tears. His gun hand trembled. He was beginning to join the hate for himself. Melanie saw all this. She could not rush to him, and in fact she despised him a little herself.
“You can’t gang up and destroy this man. He’s a good man. He works hard,” Melanie was saying. This too was ignored, drowned out, mocked. They themselves left and Peden was alone.