Mortimer could live on no middle ground. The fact that his last fight had reduced him nearly to ectoplasm terrified him. He had a nostalgia for himself. Now he toiled with the binoculars and cursed eagles who intervened between his eyes and the pleasure barge.
Harvard manned the boat, still alone with the boys on his way back to the cove dock. He did not want travelers. This was duly noted by half his friends, who had dressed less for the funeral than for the pontoon yacht ride and were ignored. Some had worked on the new craft and were angry. There can be no second maiden voyage, and having to wait on the shore struck them as rude and unfair. They watched these yard pups go solemnly with him in their new little-man suits; many groused.
Mortimer, with the big Pakistani blade, walked slowly, bently down to the cove. He saw the willow sticks budding where the snakes had lain. Where he had fallen and shrieked. The pontoon boat chugged without hurry its three miles. The boys had never had this view and it made them children again, knowing where they lived from the water’s point of view. They felt tiny and good. They were proud of themselves for holding out against this waving mass their long years.
“Hidey,” said Mortimer from the winter willows. “You ain’t trying to land on my side of this lake over here, are you?”
They saw the big blade and were only thirty feet from his face.
The head was floating toward them, the singer’s tall waved gray hair and the smaller creased face. He might now be Earl Clyde, lounge hawker and crooner, sixty-five and still going, reaching deeper and deeper into his throat for a tune. They saw the blade but then only his shoes, a spangling black pair of opera slippers. Could they be? Only Harvard knew what they were and doubted his eyes.
Who could remember a gun in a launch amid boarding his wife’s casket, the funeral, the suiting up of the boys, the pouts of old friends when they couldn’t come aboard, the sermon and music by bike scum, one of them with a black tattooed cross on his cheek? Who could remember?
The boys had the pistol. They had never forgotten. Isaac raised it, the original bullets in it. Five of the eight went off, but the child was no shooter. So he got Mortimer only once through the earlobe on the left, which hurt a great deal. His hand went to his ear and he howled briefly, the blade spinning as he let it go, nicking him across the shin.
Harvard saw a great deal of smoke for such a small black gun. He could not believe any of the five shots had hit nearly what was meant by it. He wheeled the boat into the dock but was all over the place, like a semitrailer on ice, berthing it.
He recalled the head shrieking in the willow sticks and now the thin body beneath and the opera slippers dancing on the early spring grass. The thing went up the hill like a black goat. The boys were fascinated. Mortimer was so much littler, benter. He could not move very fast, but he loped now to his car, holding his ear.
Harvard docked the boat with their help on the lines. He was having a stupid dream in which the boys were not at fault. He wasn’t over the shock of Isaac firing the weapon. He was no longer particularly sad or angry.
Melanie, outside her kitchen door, looked down to them with a hand over her eyes against the western sun. She waved.
She was dressed well, in black. He didn’t know whether she had been to the funeral. But he had been conscious of her the entire day. Released to feel what he would.
SIXTEEN
IN THE BAIT STORE THE PARENTS OF MAN MORTIMER were waiting. Lloyd, Edie and little Marcine were in the store too, with the elder Mortimers, who had just shown up at the car agency. They had come in a long old Ford wagon with canaries caged in the back. The gang was fascinated.
Mortimer ignored the long car, which had wandered slowly and sadly but stubbornly down from Missouri. When he burst in all sick and bloody and woofing, his short gray parents quailed, anxious in their thick spectacles, leisure wear, hard shoes. They would have worn stilts had that been the style when they were thirty. The father spoke.
“We’d heard you were doing so well. We were going to ask you up to Branson to hear a concert with us. Before we die. The Oak Ridge Boys are back to doing gospel.” Then the father saw the blood, the muddy patent-leather opera slippers. He saw Mortimer was not ripe for a concert right now and was not young.
Just a scratch, Mortimer insisted. He had shot himself hunting for snakes. He’d gotten bored and went down to get himself a few snakes. He guessed he was old enough to think about those nasty old guns now, but he’d forgotten how they could turn on you. He’d learned his lesson. Only got three small snakes anyhow. He felt a boy in front of these elders, sick and pouted out, puffy.
Big Lloyd came outside, where Harvard waited with the boys at the bottom of the steps. In their suits they seemed to have trailed Mortimer to be of service. And in fact they brought his great Pakistani knife to him, muddy at the golden gills.
“Is that your sword?” asked Lloyd of Harvard, who held it like a trowel.
“He dropped this knife-thing on the ground when he was hurt,” said Jacob. They handed the gaudy medieval blade over to Lloyd. They seemed a crew of pleasant neighbors doing what they could. Lloyd huge and bald in a tan leather suit.
“You can go home, and I know Mr. Mortimer will thank you.”
“He don’t have to get anywhere nigh that close,” said Jacob. “We ain’t got a home anyway. He don’t seem like he used to be when he was our mama’s boyfriend and had all this money and a different car every week. He ain’t old and ruint or anything, is he?”
“Don’t you worry. He’s the same. He’s had some bad luck.”
“Is he shot in the ear or the head?”
“Only the ear, son. We’ll see you now.”
“It was an accident.”
“I know that. He told us.”
Lloyd went in, closing the door. Marcine then came out on the steps. She was seventeen but looked twenty-one, pleasantly dressed like a secretary to a spangling car-agency showroom, which Bertha was training her to be. Her hair was naturally brown and full and French-cut. She thought she knew the boys and the grandfather guy.
“You boys live here?”
“No.”
“What house?”
“We got many houses. Nature. Porches. Sleeping bags. On the water. Wherever.”
“You dress in suits a lot?”
“There was a funeral. His wife.”
“I express my regrets. I bet she was pretty and kind.”
Marcine looked across the short valley and saw Melanie Wooten standing on her kitchen walk and holding her white hair with one hand in the breeze, still looking Harvard’s way, concerned. But in her church-funeral outfit, black with white pearls at her neck. That woman didn’t die. That’s good, thought Marcine, stunned by this vision across the tops of the sycamores and giant willows. She loved Melanie even more for still living. The points of early spring greening around her.
Inside, Man Mortimer was mellower, gracious even. A fresh towel to his ear, he was expatiating on the foolishness of guns, their cowardice, their chicken distances to things, the modern cheap craven world. With adrenal glands open yet, flooding away, he asked his seated parents whose old Ford wagon that was out there.
“It’s ours,” said his mother. She was uneasy. There is no behavior for a woman in a bait store unless she fishes. The racks of prophylactics near Mother Mortimer were huge, next to brassy naked covers of magazines in plastic thermal seals. Vixen eyes of large destruction.