Crime was not particularly rampant, in fact it was calm, but Hoover insisted Facetto was lax. He wanted pawnshop spies, vigilante groups against whores parked in neighborhoods, did Hooks. He derided Facetto as a schoolmarmy dramatist whose body was in too good a shape for him to be doing his job.
“Who” accused him of wearing Man Tan and shining his haircut.
The subject of Melanie Wooten also had floated to “Who,” and a campaign of rumor began, to the effect that Facetto was deeply odd. Melanie was aware of her bad name, and she drank.
Dee did not get around much anymore. She was a bit softer if not heavier. Inside she suffered high winds, terrible lightning and hail. She saw pictures that would not stop, the dead and wrecked, children, guns, high explosives, felt hellish thunder. She stared as if down a string of blocks through a town flattened by a tornado. She saw Mortimer holding an oyster on a tine, dipping it in Tabasco, hunting her with glances.
Facetto could hardly believe this man had come toward him a few months before on a Norton Commando motorcycle like his own, in Mountie boots, laughing like a twin. The man who had wanted to join the nonexistent launch club after he fell shrieking into the snakes.
“Dee?” Melanie asked brightly, “how’s your thing? I mean, when you really get down to it, we old things want to keep up.”
Dee smiled for the first time in the evening. Mortimer’s table had heard.
“Is she a harlot?” whispered his father.
“She’s my woman,” whispered Mortimer. “The younger one. The old lady’s just drunk and lively. She can’t stay away, Dee Allison. Married now, but we belong together.”
They were relieved, truly, that he had at last confessed to something clandestine. They had made way. They were loving him.
“Is there a tragedy in this situation?” asked his mother. She looked like an old pie somebody had drawn in, he thought.
Mortimer’s empire was collapsing. Reduced to a showroom of fairly new SUVs, with some older models stolen from the coasts and Chicago. Some women, twenty-nine actually, roaming three counties. A junkyard, prosperous for junkyards. He wandered to his houses and they did not comfort him. The large-screen television in his bare Clinton home.
I got to get Peden where he lives, he vowed. I see him letting his debt to me go, as if it was canceled when he whipped me.
Who will I be serving in my older years? he thought suddenly. Where will I be? Still home, counting my money and wondering what to give it to? Maybe the orphans. I could go straight and healthy after all this, I could make it. Just thinking of it makes me feel better. Using my talents, growing toward a light. I’m old history around here, and history itself must feel uncomfortable a right good part of the time. It’s been good brooding here at the table, staring at Dee and hearing that old lady drunk. The world turning new for you.
The world’s a little thing, he concluded as his cognac came. Peden owes me and he lost my car. He lost my history, worse, and he should learn how to suffer now.
They’re going to catch me one day, or I’m just going to walk in and give them my story, calm as a bard of old. Then it’ll be over when I say it is. Maybe old sheriff boy could play the sheriff in the movie. I’d let him, I’d smile. Another way of his being mine.
A local college-age boy walked right up to the table where Mortimer sat with his parents, who were almost asleep from the unusual big dinner. “I know who you look like, but you’d have to be dead. Brother Dave Gardner. My dad played all his albums. Thought he was the funniest man in the world. Are you related?”
“Get out of here with that. I don’t like you this close to my face. You understand me?”
His parents awoke to this talk and were frightened.
Ulrich had lost the dogs, or the dogs had lost him. The late-spring air was too thick for him and he worked, shouted, then stumbled toward the cool shade and ferned banks of Green Trout Creek. Then he was a bit lost himself. His compass became stars as his lungs fought for air, and he blacked out before he could turn up the oxygen on the bottle at his waist. What was left of his lungs after the cigarettes smoked since the days of German jet airplanes? When he revived, he wisely followed the creek toward the highway, but he wound up a mile west of the Raymonds’ house. He tried to call the dogs again but could make no sound. It was his intention that morning to give them a good forest run, then wash his favorite dog and give it to Mortimer. All his plans went bust now. The dogs never ran away from him of a sudden like this.
Ulrich was very sick, staggering. He was terrified that ruthless deer hunters would kidnap his dogs for deer season next fall, then either shoot or abandon them, as they had done many times before. He knew all the dogs’ names. He sent telepathy to them. Prayers, really. He knew he could not remain horrified much longer and live. He must get cool, take off clothes, get in the water maybe, strike his fist against his chest. They were smart dogs. He was the dummy. He had petted them too much.
Then he thought he saw a woman in a flowery dress in an alley of tall grass. Almost a flag, and foreign.
All his years came to right here. He began breathing again.
“Old man, who are you?” asked the woman’s voice, unafraid, only curious. His sight was blurring. But he knew she would be a pleasant woman. Her hair would be black like the dress with flowers. She would be foreign to America but at ease.
“We smokers must be helpful to each other,” she said coming up. She held a long, lit Winston.
“I’m a pitiful lost man. Lost my dogs. Maybe my life, running after them.” He could not recall a personality for himself before the blackout. “I need help, I think.”
It was Mimi Suarez. She was serene in her black flowered dress on a hot spring day, even in this vale of mosquitoes. Ulrich knew he was alive when her shoulders gave him pause. Spilling ringlets to her clavicle.
“I think I might be dying,” whispered Ulrich. As fatigue and repetition prepare men for death until they seek it, Ulrich felt a final tiredness. No pressing on, no other place. He sat down and all of his failures went past in a brief caravan beyond him.
The woman rested with him on a stump where he sat with his oxygen bottle. He thought of the dogs again. He thought he heard them whimpering not far off.
“You decide,” she suggested. “Either go ahead or stay behind for others. My grandmother in Cuba, and still there, told me this once when I was a little girl with an awful disease, a high fever. Only a few pictures in my young head, and them already mixed with dreams of my future in the U.S.A. I didn’t know what they were, but here I am having them. The fever left, here I am.”
They both smelled something very sweet and bad, and they heard the dogs running and whining below an old pecan farm, which had once had a mansion to go with it. Fever and then the Depression finished it off. The pecans themselves were enormous. Up to the grove was beige wheat. They saw the dogs now, and Ulrich pulled himself up with Mimi’s help, grasped his bottle. Got a bigger blast into his lungs. They made their way.
This was where they found the little girl’s T-shirt, cut to shreds, thrown over human dung, lying on an anthill a foot high. Ants were all over it. The dogs were circling and very concerned, but they had not torn the shirt. They were circling, and it was plain they were in the deepest grief over the child’s shirt.