“That is not Conway Twitty. That is another man who looks like him. And it ain’t right,” said Roman.
“My word. With the woman and her poor drunken friends.” The group of them sat down at a near table. Whit and Alexander had brought brown bags with liquor in them, allowed on dry Sunday evenings.
The bald man with Twitty’s face was paying serious court to Ruthna. He was touching her face and being most solicitous about her hair and comfort as she combed away at a snarl. He seemed to be feeling just capital, but there was an appalling quality to this, seeing a dead singer making time with Ruthna, just back from the dead herself and nearly as pale as her drunkmates. These men had not turned into mean drunks yet, a miracle for the decades they had been lushes. They sweated and carped merrily, waiting on the fat ribs, the cowgirl wenches, the huge fruit-jar glasses with ice and lemon setups. Melanie saw that Ruthna was not as ardent as Booth, but she was not disinterested.
Roman snorted. “Skank.”
“You ain’t the total darling you once were,” said Bernice. His healthy wife. He could hardly believe she was here. Maybe he suffered from Mortimer for her life. That night of the masks. Her pain had seemed to have had no reason, her waiting, his watching. He could not keep his eyes off Booth’s face. He felt lifted from his seat, memory throbbing in his wrist. The thing, as if warned, turned and beheld him directly. Help me, the lips seemed to form.
Roman held his rib knife tensely, poised. The women were scared and jittery now, including Ruthna, who seemed at last to recognize the mask of her date.
Ulrich and Egan were visiting Peden in his house by the junkyard. Peden now had a gun he rested in different rooms. He had reports of Mortimer in good humor, but scrawny, aged. Lloyd drove for him almost always. Edie gave him rubdowns in Clinton and Rolling Fork. She was showing her age too. Maybe she was back on the Valium.
Sponce had only his stepfather Harold’s connection to Peden when they stole the ’48 together. They knew the call for the car was out and that Mortimer intended to hurt somebody about this matter. The boys had not come home at all since their mother’s wedding weeks ago. They might be legal drivers before they were seen again. That or dead in the trunk of their ’48.
Sponce could hardly stay at home with Dee and Harold. He did not understand his own position there anymore. There was no family left, only the marriage, a queer thing that seemed to make his mother weaker and Harold officious, strutting and lecturing Sponce about life, now that he was almost a graduate of the mechanics college.
Sponce became a wanderer with no home and barely a car, only Harold’s old Chevrolet El Camino with its truck bed and car cab. It smelled like very lonely oil men. It looked like their wallets inside. A web of rusted veins ran all about. It had a good engine, but sleeping in it was hard when he quit playing like he was training for the air force. But where could he go?
He went into the orphans’ woods and walked, knowing they were all around him from across the canal around their island fortress, and he held a rifle as if he were an idle hunter of deer, perhaps lost. He sought their company, but he did not know how to acknowledge them. He wanted a confrontation so he could shout out his innocence, but he fled when nobody pursued. He walked himself into a ragged hungry thing. By the time he made it to Peden’s house, he was stunned, sleepy, a scarecrow driving a car from the era of eight-track tapes. But he stumbled onto the porch and held out his hand.
“I come to give myself up.”
“Have a seat, boy.”
“Could I have some of that coffee? I don’t want to put you out.”
“Come on in. We were all having some.”
“I been everywhere. I’m wore out by three counties. But I’m telling what I know.”
“What did you think we wanted to hear?” asked Egan. The boy worried him with his hungry look. “You been looking for your little brothers?”
“Partly, partly. Just stopping by, how you do. Ship in a storm. Winter is cold and wet and dull. On old Mortimer, he might not care about much. How the woman at the store said. He gambles some, but he don’t care. He’s like kind to animals.”
“He is?” put in Ulrich. “Then we could be friends. We could be eagles together.”
Egan and Peden looked at Ulrich, a benign affliction, standing plump in his suspenders in front of the woodstove. Sandals over big wool socks. Vast assless pants. He smiled at Sponce, and Sponce knew him for a father.
Peden relaxed from the news in this boy’s narrative. He put his arm around the boy’s neck, smelled the oil and sweat, drew back. Peden was from nowhere people in Pocahontas, and his formative years were much staring at kudzu, wondering how it could be faster than him or his uncle Ed and do whole school grades in just one summer. He knew this boy better than he knew himself.
He crossed the room and raised his pistol, only a.22 but a Buntline barrel on her, hollowpoints, long rifle. The illusion of self-defense. It looked like a gun.
“We’ve got a choice here. I’m not worried about that car, I’m worried about your brothers. But brother Sponce, can I have a gun and love Christ?”
“You asking me?” asked Sponce. “Yes. I do. Or have. Christ used a whip on the money men. Turning the temple into a money changer.”
“Let me ask you this, then. Where is the temple?”
Sponce couldn’t answer.
“You want to get a bath and clean clothes while I’m making you some tamales and you think about it?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
“A man has to sleep with as many animals as possible,” Ulrich blurted. “But not in the sexual way. By no means. An execration. No. Just get in the bed there with them, invite them on in, know their smell and their cold nose. You smell the good dirt in their fur. Fur is individual. No two alike, like a snowflake. It ought to be a state law.”
The others listened, but he was through and at peace.
It occurred to Egan that every one of them in the room was old beyond his years except Ulrich, who looked like a stupid, lined boy. Harried and singed into senescence, red in the eyes, the rest. They were rushing to die.
She called him into the room to watch her die but then said she didn’t want him to suffer and tried to send him out. The moment was vague, but the nurse told him she was gone. So Harvard’s wife, Nita, died in their bedroom in their house, a large stone one, overlooking the lake and a front lawn full of century pine trees eighty feet tall.
Isaac and Jacob lived in Harvard’s front room now. The ’48 was parked behind the garage. That Mardi Gras car. These strange boys he had pulled off the roads with some order of new strength. How he loved them. They loved Nita, and she smiled at them the last week too.
Harvard did not have deep thoughts the two days her body was gone to prepare for the funeral. He would drive her in the pleasure barge to the church in the glen, where Egan would preach the funeral for a woman he had never seen and Harvard would ask himself, Where the hell have I taken us when this man Egan stands at the gates facing either direction?
He had useless thoughts and intense ones. Such as the storms that gathered then left, so you wondered were the same storms simply circling the lake. Such as nobody has ever left home. Nobody has brought news back from anywhere. Every awful scene rotates to somebody else, and they will not believe it either.
Nita, honey. Fifty-two years with you. Married in ’48, so I had to have the car too, along with the boys. This may be a miracle, something meant beyond my plans. I hope so. It felt like it. Without the boys I’d now be dead, I think. He thought of Melanie. It sometimes happens that the wife outlives her husband by thirty years. But more often, two.