Ruthna, Harb, Alexander and Whit arrived that afternoon. They had decided they could no longer abide the suburbs, especially since they could not make the house payments. They were something on the order of a middle-age commune and quickly agreed that nature and the lake were just the thing. It was changing them even as they hauled in their luggage, in fact. They had rented a modern, beamed ski-lodge affair, which gave the tourist the rare sense of having fallen off an alp into a steaming bog. They were near the Roosevelt lodge where Ulrich and Egan lived. When the dynamiting started, they were horrified. Their tall white sycamores trembled. They were hungover and in hell. Ruthna fell flat on the ground. Whit held his ears while his luggage scattered.
“He is always talking about his mother and father and Christ,” said Mimi once the scare had passed. Ruthna was becoming her confidante.
“Then he will be tired of talking, Mimi. All theological discussion will become shameful comedy. He has said people are snakes who love talking late at night about God. They don’t know God, but they surround themselves with other pretenders. These are direct quotes, I think,” said Ruthna, who knew Raymond too well.
“But what does Raymond have for acts? He has his saxophone, he doesn’t even have much money left. He has the friendship of punks and old men.”
“And you. Maybe he will do something for the orphans, like his mother did. He can’t forget her.”
“He tries, he speaks of his deaf absent father all the time, the gunner in the war against Japan. I think he was jealous of the orphans,” said Mimi.
“I’ve got to go. We’ll try to be sober next time we see you. Things have fallen apart and we’ve fallen here.”
“You’re at the right place, Ruthna. I don’t know anybody much who’s not decomposing. Even Max says people are hardly necessary anymore, and they have no acts. They tend to float away. It’s frightening.”
“If the Son of God has not visited us, Mimi, who are we? Am I just a lush and actress and tramp?”
“Well, he always said at least you were something, as long as you could stand it. I want to worship something bigger than me or I’m lost. It must be the music, but not always. Not at three in the afternoon. Only an idiot sings always.”
“My acts are all bad, Mimi. What about that? I have no imagination for a good act. Am I dead? I guess I’m normally courteous. So are the dead.”
“Max wants to see a chariot of fire or light one himself.”
“These poets keep wanting to suck the water out of the ocean with a straw.”
The boys were all driven out. It was hard to hide a car painted like this. But they did not want to see their new stepfather. They had seen their father for the first time since they were six and seven and wished he’d stayed longer. Though to them, Canada was just one of many places farther away than Sharkey County. He never heard about the car, and they knew nobody was in favor of small boys owning and driving such a machine. They imagined ogres of many types lost just behind them in their smoke, but nobody had gotten close. High speed over the gravel at the penultimate velocity, over rocks like low shoals of water. The amateurs are dead behind you. This is how the boys felt, and they had gone back to Benson & Hedges, long ones. They were also hidden in the last dry purchase of the swamp behind Raymond and Mimi’s house.
They waited until evening to announce themselves. Looking for Mimi’s titties through the window seemed beneath them now. They loved her singing too much. They sought her now because they were much growner. They had traded their mother for a car, and Harold was all the father they had left.
Lately Harold was picking up wheel rims and flexing with sledgehammers for his strength regimen. He ate two steaks and salads at a time, his acne went away, and he had found chemicals in the Big Mart pharmacy that cut and bulked you out. These were expensive, but the boys saw he did have a better body.
They did not take pity on their mother’s private needs. Nor were they aware that she liked Harold in the least, which she did. He had even begun higher mechanics at the trade school. He brought down the swearing in the house. He threatened to play games with the boys. He was not proud of providing these children with such a garish rocket. His breakneck labor, his theft, which still had to be paid for. He cringed now when he thought he could get away with the switch. One was a car, the other a hulk of gummy decay.
Yet he was a husband and Dee was patient with him. Under other circumstances he would have been glad the boys were gone again.
Dee liked her boys more, but there was something smaller about her. She wondered if marriage to this stern young man would mean much to her living world, such as it was. She was always away in her visions now. She saw men burning, crying out, and now children, great filthy explosions, deep and shallow water in which there were corpses, all in the shell of Big Mart, bombed and half covered by water. Men cried for water and ran up to her and she spat fire at them. This was a vision, but it had a sleepiness to it, as if it were being carried on by her closed eyes into night dreams. She began watching the color television that Mortimer had given her long ago, asking that it imagine her, because she was afraid. She had great anxiety, and the sight of Harold in his school clothes, with loafers and sweaters, would send her into such a foreign mood, she could not imagine how to address this young stranger, the boy naked in the bed beside her.
The boys were good fishermen when they bothered. Their gear was at the lost lake. It was a tiny oxbow lake three hundred yards from the rear of the bad restaurant, whose food exhaust could be smelled still, even here. Nobody was home at the Raymonds’, and they killed the time fishing, hardly saying a word.
The boys had spin-cast reels and a newish Shakespeare bait caster. Bless all the gambling failures and crack addicts, a man could really shop in the pawn. Were the laws not just a little too stiff, you’d probably have found used children there.
The boys kept the rods leaned to a tree at the little lake. They had discovered the place. Nobody else came. They cast with a single bait, never changing lures, the old Lucky Thirteen. If they could not hear the pop and see the strike of a big bass, they had no interest in catching one at all. They took five good bass in an hour. One of them was nine pounds. They did not eat much fish, and they released the others back into the black-green water. Then went back to their car, worn and with tight smiles. If they could see Mimi Suarez, it would be a fine day. They could go home soon.
“There must’ve been five orphans in that one tree watching us. Thinking we’re the car desperadoes. Didn’t think we’d even notice.”
“They scared the devil out of me, but I just kept on throwing,” said Isaac.
They were glad to be desperadoes, watched in secret by city children. The orphans were going outside the camp at will, several of them armed.
Harold and Sponce were hunkered down at the rim of the sinkhole, staring down at where the car had been. They watched and watched. As if the mother and son would come back to it, open the trunk in its mud and slip in again. So that their minds could get back to the moment and begin making order.
They were grave robbers, but who was it cared so much? Egan and Mortimer. Who cared so much that this ’48 hulk was swapped with another decent ’48? Mortimer. Who was after Jacob and Isaac in their custom-made red and gold teenage car? Mortimer.