Now they heard through Egan, who’d invited the newlyweds to church services, that Peden had whipped the hell out of Mortimer, who had come at him with a bat. But Hare was haunted by his own romance. In his serious college clothes, Hare was turning Christian under the influence of Egan. He and Dee attended church now.
About this time Harold lowered his head, and a high-grain bullet of less caliber than a.22, called a Bee, parted his hair and lifted it. They were not aware they were being shot at from an immense distance, and the pops seemed irrelevant to the tragic hole they now studied. There was no blood but a curious burn down the part of Harold’s hair. He could not account for this. He had been mad with lust and plans. Now that he was preaching to Dee, he was wild with guilt. He trembled when he recalled the bones still with meat on them. The unreported dead. It took a sort of Jesus to remember them, with that sweet smell, the ligaments draped down from the sockets. He heard the child’s screaming from his head wound once the wind started.
They sat on different pews.
Peden and Egan argued with Max Raymond about who owned a church. You couldn’t just buy them, although this one, owned by Reformed Presbyterians, was very much for sale by its richer child in Vicksburg. Raymond was going to buy it. He had promises of money, and a CD with his wife and band that was going somewhere. The band was ebbing at the casino, but they were getting gigs as far as Biloxi and New Orleans now. He had found some old doctor money he had forgotten, from his old drug days when he feared the worst at every turn. It was quite a lot. The firm paid you even for being high and invested wisely for you. Funny, the way he didn’t care for money and yet fell into it.
“You can buy a church. And you’d have to let me in if I bought it,” said Raymond.
“We’d let you in anyway. The definition of a church is open, isn’t it?” asked Byron Egan. He looked at Peden, because the junkman was nervous, his cheeks jumping.
“Nobody denies the wanderer,” said Peden. This didn’t seem quite on the mark. The three men shut up awhile.
“My emphasis would always be on acts, not chats,” said Raymond. “I have turned around on this matter and gone against Luther and the rest, I know. I’m not sure there was ever even a sect of me. Offshot from in fides sola. You can have a church without firm belief, is all I’m saying. Most churchmen can’t tell you what they believe anyway.”
“All right,” Egan said. “Christ himself said whoever is not against us is on our part, and he might know the church. Buy it. We stand. I and Peden have a church and the doors are wide open.”
“For none of us knows who lives tomorrow, who may tarry yet come the sun dead on his pillow,” Peden burst out. He rose from the pew as if delivering an involuntary oath and strode toward the trombonists gently tuning in the little chair gallery to the left of the pulpit. These five men were dark black and were cousins. They had no interest in recording or selling their music. Many said they blended like the best tea of heaven, and they could make you cry with their hymns. Only one read a note of music, and he was not the leader. The leader was James. He played the enormously belled bass trombone. Two others had valved trombones. So intense were these men in their harmonies that there seemed no other world for them.
Now the trombonists stopped and looked at Peden as if he were a goat wandering into their music.
“Say, men,” asked Max Raymond, with his instrument case between his legs, “you think I could sit in with you a few tunes? James?”
“No.”
The men, dropping the saliva out of their spit valves, looked at one another. “It ain’t no place to make your entrance,” said James. “Nor get out if you was in.”
“It be in there like a piece of hair on a bar of soap,” said another seriously. They were musicians but much like deacons too. They frightened Raymond a little. They began playing again, silvery, in trouble and then deliverance. One of them with the bell of his horn under the church light going gold to bronze to red.
Christ, we are your throat.
FIFTEEN
MORTIMER AND SIDNEY MET IN THE BAIT STORE AFTER hours. Sidney’s emporium was prosperous now. It needed both Opal and Iona, his new helper. A yellow Lexus sports wagon was parked behind the store. Sidney watched Mortimer with pleasure. Thin, bent, elderly in almost every movement. Pain on his face. The pretty boy home sick from school.
When all was clear, they went out and told the girls to exit the Lexus newly stolen from Sevierville, Tennessee. It was yellow with a cream white grille in front. It was a little girl’s car, in fact.
Mortimer put on a CD in the jambox. The girls had done this before. The music was elvish dancing music that Mortimer had gotten at a bargain in the mall. Nobody had ever bought it. It was a junior college symphony from Kansas.
The orphans, Betsy and Irma, began by holding hands and skipping together in the aisles of the heavily stocked store, knocking over flashlight batteries, sardines, bananas. Since Sidney had restocked, you could see the equipment for much iniquity. Magazines about muscular naked girls.
The girls walked to the tunes and disrobed privately behind a far aisle. They were not certain how to carry on, but the elvish meadow dance music urged them onward, and they came out demurely in nothing. Mortimer cheered them to continue to dance. No hand touched them. It was an arrangement by the artist in his last creative fever.
He and Sidney watched from padded chairs. They shared a single-malt scotch bottle between them. Farté Bait House glasses to drink from. They seemed to desire nothing else; they were not anxious but meditative. Once Sidney accidentally touched Mortimer’s arm reaching for his drink, and Mortimer’s knife hand flew to his back pocket. But there was nothing there, the movement was involuntary.
At the end they gave the girls money and said it was a very fine audition. This was the form of Mortimer’s current sin. Sidney was the more lecherous of the two and had gotten tight enough to hold the shoulder of the child Betsy. But this act was so repellent to her that she almost fainted, so he left her alone to return to the yellow Lexus and home to Clinton, where they had pallets and a large television in a vacant room, with snacks and sodas and their own phone, in Mortimer’s very teenage hangout.
Melanie, Bernice and John Roman ate at the rib house, Near ’Nuff Food. Its theme was medieval chaos, and people dumped buckets of ribs on a tablecloth of butcher paper, then tore off a length from the top and bagged the rib bones in preparation for the next arrivals. It was festive and harsh, and a success. Employees of the bad restaurant ate here.
The face of Frank Booth passed by a window, and Roman was shocked again by the surgeon’s ability to bring a third Conway Twitty into the world. He reached for his big rib knife, a heavy steel thing, and awaited Booth’s appearance at the door.
Booth came in the door, with Ruthna and the very drunk Whit and Alexander. Ruthna was not drinking and looked cleanly figured, getting some of her womanly curves back. Melanie admired her and thought she had seen her around the lake. Bernice was deeply affected by Melanie, who had stayed close to her through the illness even though Roman sometimes had doubts about the lady’s curious goodness. His reservations were gone now. He saw she could not help being a good woman, and he was sorry for her pain as an old lover. He was a happier man now that Bernice was back among the living, but the Booth man hovered near him, and the women noticed him too.
“Is he that singer, or isn’t he?” asked Melanie. “‘A Bridge That Just Won’t Burn’? He’s bald now. Doesn’t he wear a hairpiece when he comes here to eat?”