“Well, get your birds and bags out for Lloyd. He’ll drive it in the lake tomorrow. I’ve got something else for you. Like new. I’m putting you up at the casino hotel, first-class, long as you want. All my houses are under construction, repairs. But we’ll give a party. A fine band. We don’t have to travel to Branson, Missouri, to any concert. Good as the Oaks are. They’ll be by here soon, unless they find out you’re here and too wild for ’em.”
They did not pick up on this joke, but he was their boy all over again. Mortimer felt this too, and this time he liked it, wounded, hiding his fury.
“Son, you’re badly hurt,” said his father. His mother touched him. She had been cleaving to her husband. Edie, middle-aged but with long good legs, got Mortimer out the door and drove him to the clinic, then home to Rolling Fork.
“Man comes back soon, Mrs. Mortimer. Don’t worry. His business is big. Big, big. It wears on him, but he’s a blue-steel spring,” said Lloyd.
When Sidney at last came in the store, half drunk and full of funeral gossip, Mortimer’s parents and Lloyd and Marcine had gone. But he saw the blood on the floor and heard tales from Pete Wren, who knew little but shared it anyway. He did know that Mortimer was hurt and that his parents had come down for him.
“He’s getting weaker. I could own it all,” Sidney whispered.
In a black Ford Expedition, alone, was Bertha, dead now. The windows were smoked, nobody knew for a long while she was there. She had swallowed Valiums and barbiturates with a cold quart of Country Club. Saliva webbed down her chin. She just couldn’t take it anymore. Her age, who she was, holding the smiles till her cheeks hurt. Leading Marcine into the life. Several hours would pass before any thought to find her, because she was like good old furniture to hand. She was cordial always, yet a quiet one too, and well dressed and combed to the end. Peden wanted her badly. He thought to save her and missed by one day. Their date would have been the day after Nita’s funeral. Gone. Blood now to her belly and the rigor passing through the smile.
Harvard backed the barge away from the pier and the boys, ever quick, helped on the lines. They wanted to drive, but he was making them watch carefully. He was afraid of being close to Melanie, so they sailed downshore to his own lawn and berthed on the grass. Although the launch was mainly his project, there were several zealous pilots and many of them keen to impress their own friends who were gathered to this beauty. But Harvard did not care. He would have his grief and his boys.
They went first to the room where Nita had died and took the flowers to all parts of the house so they could see them while they ate and talked.
Another funeral at the church. Preached by Byron Egan. Peden, heart breaking, was not allowed in. Egan did not want him to see Lloyd, Edie, Marcine; the other whores and reivers, black and white; car thieves wearing white socks with suits and thick rubber-soled cross-trainers. Speed and grip. Peden sat outside in the bleak blue Nissan. He listened through a window and held his gun.
Many robins got in the church from the trees and roosted among the congregation. They were drunk from some berries and fallen persimmons. Come into the mead hall out of the chill. In Viking history, once a Christian described human life as the flight of a bird through the mead hall. The outerness afterward, eternity.
The relations of Bertha sat in one sullen and miserable huddle in the front pews. Ronny the body-shop man was among them, barely recognizing his old girlfriend Marcine. Man Mortimer and his parents sat right behind them, concerned and prim in black and white mourning clothes newly bought in town. This was not New Orleans, where they knew best how to mourn drug addicts, evening ladies and jazz mothers. This place had none of that city’s archaeology of concentrated sin.
Bertha’s casket was open because she was at peace and made lovely by the beautician’s touch. The beautician was her weeping but fastidious cousin Elka, who wanted in the Mortimer business. She wanted to take Bertha’s place and knew well what she did besides shift car papers. She knew she could be tough and loved to fornicate anyhow. Elka wore white and pink today and sat near a quartet with whom she was committing three-cornered adultery.
Elka used to run in a circle of lower-Delta party girls who performed on crop dusters while they were flying and poisoning, just for the memory. Under the telephone wires, up quick. Then down for the gin and Costume Ball of the Scots in Panther Burn. Or dynamiting with bachelors in Robinsonville, making new homes in old levees and Indian mounds, where whole old guys might come out, and their pots.
Sidney Farté was in attendance to pick up his rumors. Many thought Bertha had killed herself because Sidney had been with her, and Sidney spread this rumor around as fact.
Frank Booth sat beside Ruthna, motionless. She had told him she knew Bertha and really loved her. Had once roomed with her at the Olympics in Atlanta. Booth was there for Ruthna, and to confront Man Mortimer with what he was now, a Conway Twitty face fresher than Mortimer’s own, unlined. Nobody knew what Booth had on his mind, although Edie, who always carried a North American.22 Magnum derringer, promised to blow his head off if he came near Mortimer in his feeble condition and new black ear. Especially with his parents visiting or maybe even come to live, and he was surviving by their ignorant ministrations as he brought them here and there to bits of his empire in the lower Delta and in Vicksburg. They were amazed the river was so wide, having never expended the energy to look at it directly in Missouri. They recalled only fearing it and now feared it more. They were eighty. They had retired in good financial condition, but it meant little to them with no son, no hobbies and the new small house. No chickens inside city limits anymore. They had been sad for thirty years and wondered how especially terrible they were that he had run away from them. They went to church often and desperately and watched Help Me on television, in case he called out or somebody found them.
Now they had found him, they dreamed separately that Man Mortimer was not a nice person, and they tried to force a good dream about him, but it would not come. Then they began to remember how selfish a child he had been. Yet their love loved this too. They recalled that he was vicious, calculating and secretive, and they could see right through his present act, yokels that they were, and parents, at this very funeral. His counterfeited sorrow for Bertha. Still they loved. It was too late not to love, and it did not matter anymore where they themselves were. It was having him close, that was what life was for in the end. It mattered not where they slept. They barely wrinkled the bedspreads in the Gold Bowl room he got for them, mermaids on the wallpaper. Mrs. Mortimer’s canaries thrived. The maid found the Mortimers so lost she took them on as a project. And they must help him, their son.
It was very intimate here, at the Church of Open Doors, open for the lost and dead of all causes. Raymond sat next to Mimi, his temples gray now and growing hair behind, as if to take up the ponytail Egan had shaved. He was disconsolate near the man who had stabbed him. He had tried to forgive him, but not very hard. He wished to be taken into a different room of heaven with Mortimer’s blood on his hands. He did not require whole salvation, just a little table with books and coffee, pens and paper, the saxophone. Now Mortimer was little and sick. The monster Lloyd was close to him. Raymond hid his murderous thoughts from Mimi, who had dressed up to hide her impatient body. Long dress, lapels. She had no allegiances here. She was weary of Raymond. Weary of the band. Of herself. Of the lake. Why were they still here?