It is this place where Ulrich died.
Little Irma.
Who had recently, during her flight, talked to the boys on Harvard’s lawn. She knew she was pursued by Malcolm, but he was crippled and she did not think he would kill her once he caught her. She was starved, skinny and alone. Malcolm would not let her have her own suicide like Bertha’s. She was on the way to becoming Bertha, she had come to the orphans’ camp with suicidal urges, which she had acted on twice in Indianapolis when she had living parents.
She stumbled upon the Allison boys in Harvard’s driveway busting up a long-dead pecan limb for the simple reason that it was whole. She did not know where she was, but the house was so wide and nice, with its pine-needled lawn, that she thought it might be a church or a fort, and she dreamed of it as if it were in a book right before her. She had had friends who lived in such homes, but it seemed two eras ago. She was playing Ping-Pong in a garage of one in Indianapolis and an old man came out of the house and said, “I see it now, child. You will become a medical missionary somewhere and be a great woman.” He was the grandfather of the house, and she took him for mad and giggled along with her playmate, but now it seemed a deep saying and a future waiting on her, if she could walk out of here now, away from Malcolm, who claimed to love her, him an old hairy man.
He loved Irma, but it was Mimi Suarez he wanted and her husband he wanted to exterminate. He was lost in waves of passion. Driving him down a gray wall. Like those motorcyclists in the velodromes at the state fair.
The boys looked like they belonged here, and she was encouraged, even in her weakness. They were her age, native to this boondockery. The pines, the briars. She felt like a ruined hibiscus, the most exotic plant she knew. Stomped, gums bleeding, perhaps white around the mouth.
“You an orphan?” Jacob asked her.
“Yeah, I’m an orphan, a real orphan, on the move. Nobody stops me,” Irma said. She almost fainted but smiled.
“Are they after you?”
“One man. I think I’m on my way to being a medical missionary.”
“You real skinny and pale. We’ll get you a cola.”
“All right.”
Jacob went off to the house and Harvard came out on the porch, but it was not clear he could make her out at this distance. A big old smooth yard.
She sat on the lawn in a sweaty Big Mart T-shirt with a little cartoon girl and an enormous flower on it. This cartoon girl had big eyes. I will work with tiny orphans like her on my shirt, thought Irma. There’s so much I could tell her. Jacob returned with a cold wet towel and she pressed it to her face and arms, then stomach. They watched her belly button with no apology. It was pretty, a deep tunneled shadow. She also had the buds of breasts in the cartoon shirt. It unsettled the boys, the idea of her, their age. They weren’t ready to be like her. In fact, they were closer to infants.
“You couldn’t live here like us, but you could stay and play with the boats Doc Harvard made us for a while till they came got you. Eat some popcorn and get ice from the machine on the refrigerator,” said Jacob.
“No. I have to walk on.” She was in a dream and taking care of foreign children in it.
When she walked away, she had only enough energy to last for the mission. She believed health would rise in her as it had many times before. I could begin with those boys. I will tell them about Jesus and Mary. How they are better than parents.
Irma suddenly heard something after a mile in the woods. She wondered if there were great apes left in these thick woods, with its little alleys of sawgrass. Then she knew it was Malcolm thrashing toward her. A thing fighting its own sweat, tall pink stumbling, hair streaming.
Irma knew he was coming from her dream mission in the foreign lands. She said to the thing, “Go ahead and eat me.”
“You notice anything new about me?” asked Malcolm.
She took off.
“You ran and made me mad, now,” panted Malcolm, covered in burrs and scratches. “You ain’t got nothing but me now. You want to see my new moves.” She ran as he was beset by an attack of diarrhea over an ant mound.
Mortimer, all he did was look. Betsy had a book about Conway Twitty. This man had changed his name from something like Vernon to Conway Twitty, from the names of two ugly towns in Arkansas and Texas. Or because he had a sense of humor, but by his eyes she did not think so, if photographs told the truth. He was a family man, upright, embarrassed by lewdness or even rumor, although he was sexy with his tunes, the writer wrote. Mortimer sat across the room watching the gigantic Japanese television while Betsy read. She tried to find Twitty in his bone structure.
She did not think of this, but it was a strictly adolescent house they occupied, nothing but a few sticks of furniture and thick throw rugs and the giant-screen television, sloppy at the base with mixed videos. Not a plant or even salt. Loaded with snacks and sodas. Otherwise a clean kitchen, no odor except the smell of manufacture.
“I will tell your mother and father what you do with me,” she said once.
“You’re not even going to see them. Don’t be an idiot. You’re not here against your will.”
“Some of it. I’m thirteen.”
“Get back in the book. Nobody’s hurt you.”
“You and me, old man, are orphans from normal. Remember? But I can change.”
“Stay quiet and you can be anything you want.”
“We’ll see.”
A curious pause on the front porch of the bait store. Mortimer’s yellow Lexus parked, no others. Dark clouds but not a speck of rain, only this deep shadow. Raymond and Roman could see Mortimer and Sidney at the counter inside peering into a glass-lidded case full of knives on velvet. They seemed at church. Not yet touching these treasures.
See this little man, the high wavy bush of hair, the thin ankles in tasseled and buckled moccasins that seemed trimmed with actual coral snakeskin. Raymond and Roman had meant to buy supplies for crappie fishing on Harvard’s launch, then have some talk of cancer, music, the history of Roman’s Indian tribe, Jesus Christ as a man of the whip, taking time to make it right there in the temple. Raymond had not known a black man since the days of southern apartheid, although he called their names.
The fifties. In Raymond’s small town, there was a tiny college campus on which the faculty and students lived in three-storied Edwardian brick houses. The snow and then vicious ice had been on three days, a storm of the century for where they lived, in southern Mississippi near the capital city. A professor’s house caught fire. He was a veteran and had brought back live German rounds and weaponry in glass cases. It was not clear whether he just taught Nazis or taught them because he loved them, their flags, their helmets. Much of this ambiguity in the early fifties.
The water pipes were frozen. Nothing to do but throw snowballs into the fire engulfing the professor’s house. Then they saw the glass cases, and the bullets began exploding. Two men were scraped, the crowd widened. A hopeless single fire truck, officious yokels wringing their hands but having fun too. Germany rearing up on three stories and blowing its flak around. Raymond had no better memory. That evening of the fire and the booms and the thrilled citizens, a bullet of the Reich could touch anybody. The professor might be in there, on fire and lecturing.
What I am, thought Max Raymond suddenly, is an overprepared man. Here I am back at the burning place, where I keep returning ever since I was eleven. Shiloh. Where man meets God, but the man has come too early and wearing the wrong things. I have suffered. If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.