Raymond stood ashamed before Mortimer. A bootlicker to a phantom.
John Roman was also humiliated to meet his attacker. Getting shot was nothing like this. This little man had his number.
“Hello, Man,” Roman said, surprising himself. He and Raymond watched Mortimer climbing down from the stool. A head with his wig, exempted from blame, by a shape totally shifted into sickness. He might as well be a little girl, almost unbalanced by his large hair. Maybe he didn’t remember Roman.
Raymond and Roman moved off as Mortimer and Sidney laid hands on the glass. Eloquent hilts. Arcs and stilettos, a near sickle, smaller but heavy in the blade like a bolo. A sickness sat in the room, which they each seemed to have agreed not to discuss. Their faces blank, the men acted as though they had never met.
Mortimer said something had to be done, these evil children were all over the place. Uptown, other towns. Some had been making nude movies, was the rumor. Nobody had much shame left. Mortimer smiled ear to ear.
“I picked you up this tonic. Brings up the immune system, said the old boy at the herb store. I’m feeling better for it myself. Feistier. Heart’s back in my projects,” Man said.
“You ain’t looking it. You poorly.”
“We ain’t old yet.”
“I am, and sick as a dog,” Sidney lied. He awoke nowadays with a fine mean on.
But Sidney knew sickness. The way you could sink inside yourself and worship it. Shock them by your dilapidation yet refuse to fall.
Mortimer’s people had changed too. They were not as stupid as he thought. They had their own righteousness. They were no longer amazed by the excesses of his career. The SUVs, the strange empty homes, the small film production concern in Clinton. He knew they expected sin close to him. When he left for business, he saw pain in their looks.
His old man was interested most in the junkyard, where he played quarter poker with Peden. His man Peden, in the shotgun house, whom Mortimer was allowing to live unmaimed. Peden and Mr. Mortimer played cards and talked fifties automobiles.
Mortimer tried to find his mother a hobby, but her eyesight was not good and she preferred silence. It bathed her, she said. She loved telling clean, pointless stories in which her struggles were the only memorable thing. Changing a tire on her own and finding a neighborhood dog nestled in with a family of coyotes. The old woman had insight too. When he brought little Irma past his folks at his SUV agency and told them she was the granddaughter of a client, Mrs. Mortimer’s face went red.
Still, she said they loved him and owed him for being stupid about his needs in Missouri. She agreed how a chicken yard in back could humiliate a boy who needed cars and girlfriends. How they went to church too much, expecting the pastor to correct all troubles straight from the pulpit, and how some of these pastors were fools who had barely entered life before they began announcing on it. She hugged Mortimer over and over now, commenting on his new white hair.
He felt something for her and his father. It was intense, this feeling, a fresh one for him. Made him nervous and awkward around them. He gave aid needlessly, as out of a tube of charity inside his heart. He sat with them, saying nothing, three porch-bound elders watching for cars at the four-way stop.
At the house Mortimer finally had finished for them in Rolling Fork, they sat for three hours without a peep. Mortimer’s new shoes the only true expression hereabouts. Penny loafers, black, the leather stamped with leaping trout.
The house was plush leather furniture, gold and bright copper hardware set next to black for kitchen and bathroom fixtures. Stinking of fiberglass and new wool on the floors.
After the silence, while he was leaving, he said, “I’m happy we got all that cleared up.”
They laughed their first laugh together.
Mortimer drove to Big Mart to buy his mother flowers for her sitting room where she actually sat as if friends might arrive any second. He pulled up behind a man loading topsoil. Mortimer thought he recognized him, Bertha’s nephew Ronny, whose body shop he had used. The man did not know who Mortimer was, now in a Rolls Land Rover stolen in San Francisco. The man kept loading the topsoil in front of Mortimer’s windshield, with his car door out in the passing lane. Mortimer could not move, yet he was practicing patience, thought, depth. Then he put his face out the window and asked, “Would you shut the door so I can get by, please?”
A look of disgust crossed the man’s face. Mortimer reached to his ashtray, put on his new ring. He had lately been interested in the concept of irony. How on the face of others it meant insult, such as Pepper had shown him before his beheading. The man had figured Mortimer to be a small irrelevance. This man closed the car door with that irony on his face. He was, after all, a busy foreman at the body shop now. Who was this skinny sissy with big hair in his tank of a car? Mortimer saw all this. Then stopped his car in front of the man’s. “Excuse me, sir. Would that be a look of irony on your face? Would you be giving me irony right now?”
“Tire iron, you say? No, I don’t lend out.”
At this Mortimer’s right hand flew up and a ring-mounted razor swiped across the man’s chin and lip so there was an awful amount of blood. The man squalled through a dark mustache of it dripping over his hands, at his chin, his jowls. “It’s the rudeness, man. Everywhere. And you worked for me, forgot me, let your real self loose on me out here.”
The man recognized him then. He was astounded by his thinness and wild high hair. Puny Italian sandals and no suitable beach sand for hundreds of miles.
Ronny watched for Mortimer’s return and other strokes. Waited on the story of Mortimer’s fury. He could not believe his own lips bore the tale, pouring down his shirtfront. He did not know why it had angered the man to find him ungiving about the tire iron.
Mortimer walked in on Peden and his father. They were paging through Peden’s file box of calendar art. Motorcycles or cars with women. Lazing across a car hood, handlebars, a fender. On one a man’s great tongue against thighs, scrawled there by a jokester. Worship of moving parts, combustion, bodies these two could covet. More than a spaceship or a moon landing, this local steel mesmerized them. No destination but the thing itself.
They barely recognized Mortimer.
“I need meth to tide me over. To end the blues and the nasty world out there. You know how it is, getting well,” he began straight off.
“You at the wrong place. No meth for three years,” Peden told Mortimer. He looked at Mr. Mortimer’s face. “Even when I sold, you wouldn’t find me at home doing it.”
“Pawn guy said you holding.”
“That man is dead, the holding man,” said Peden.
“Peden is now a Christian minister. He won’t even touch a beer,” said Mr. Mortimer.
“Man, you got to help me past this day. I might kill myself. Myself.”
“Which pawnbroker?”
“The guy, man. Tattoos. Civil War sabers, metal detectors.”
“Who are you?” asked Peden.
“C’mon. You know me.”
“No I don’t,” said Peden.
“Everybody knows me.”
“So?”
“I exist, man.”
Mr. Mortimer gathered himself to Peden’s side. “You could be a demon to be dealt with by the Lord.”
“He would know me. He would.”
“But I don’t. You’ll have to forgive me.”
“I don’t.”
“I believe I killed somebody but it was in another country.”
“God help you, you haven’t gone anywhere,” said Peden.
“I exist, man,” said Mortimer.
“I took you for somebody you’re nothing like. Now I can’t remember that person. You’re the demon itself. I’ve seen them before and you too,” said Peden.