Yonder Stands Your Orphan

SEVEN

CARL BOB FEENEY WAS STILL MISSING, AND EGAN WAS living in the lodge by himself. He thought, I will be going to Onward with Uncle Carl Bob soon. It could be by the time we get there I’ll be fit to be his roommate. God, I can’t stand this guilt. Nor the 30 percent interest. Mortimer called it the vig. Some sort of cut rate for taking him to the hospital. At least the old man had not taken his gun, and he had left plenty of food for the dogs in the pen and the cats in the house, five days’ supply at least. Egan prayed he would be back and that he wasn’t naked and dead already, or releasing animals from a shelter, which he had attempted before, driven to it by a man named Ulrich in a woody station wagon. Sunday morning, and Egan stood before his flock thinking these things.

Max Raymond was in the pews. He had bought a gun, an old Mossberg automatic. Spring-loaded, with a magazine that worked off the plunger in the stock. He convinced himself he had tried sincerely not to buy it, hadn’t owned an arm since rat shooting and the navy. Mimi hated even the idea of a weapon. It was that old boyfriend problem, that sin he couldn’t forget. He would one day buy the bullets, long-rifle hollowpoints. Would one day probably not use them.

Next to him, Mimi and three of the other bandsmen. The chubby trombonist, a professor from Memphis with a goatee everybody adored. The emaciated drummer, color of the street, ghetto bus smoke, with exquisite hand-eye talent. A flutist who was the only regular churchgoer, a Methodist in rebellion against Episcopal dryness, people like T. S. Eliot. Four dogs lay quietly. Sent as representatives of their world, it might seem.

Egan spoke. The pew crowd didn’t know if what he said was a poem or an odd psalm or what. “If you see my old uncle, tell him I love him,” Egan began. “He was right and Mr. Ulrich too. We should commence living for the animals after killing them for all these centuries. Go back, go back to their simple fur, their fun. Their ecstasy over the day, their oneness with the infinite. Their lack of memory. They are our heaven, our friends. Why did we imagine they looked so beautiful, only for our tables, only for the backs of selfish kings and lazy sluts? The Garden of Eden, can’t you remember, children? The animals were already there. We were made for their kinship, and they could speak and we lived in the peaceable kingdom. Until the woman broke the contract so that we should have knowledge, and now what do we know, even when the animals look at us through zoo bars and slaughterhouse gates. They are Christ every day, giving their meat, their coats to us, and we without gratitude to these creations, these that we call savage beasts.

“We take, we take without even a thank-you, when if we open the door for some woman we’d like a thank-you, would we not? The other day I opened the door at Big Mart for a woman, a woman shall I say better dressed than I. She had just used food stamps, in her lizard high heels, and going toward her Cadillac where children shouting vulgar things waited, and this woman never even thanked me for my little courtesy.

“How do you think you would feel if you were God? Would you feel unthanked for the universe that is yours? Almost any animal is more beautiful than anybody here today. What were they before the contract of the Garden was broken? For their eyes speak better than our best senators today. They use a language we can’t understand, so we kill them, tear them apart, even sell their parts for aphrodisiacs. The poor rhino’s horn. The liver of the poor black bear, poached by bowmen too cowardly and lazy to work alongside the rest of us in the fields of the Lord. I want my uncle and Mr. Ulrich back, wherever they are. They are apostles from the Kingdom. They have been Paul on the road to Damascus, they have seen the light and quit killing.”

Egan then began the — poetry, was it?

“Dee, thy charms shall not always be sweet.

Minister, thy rituals of the cross turn to babble.

Woods walker, thine feet shall be taken from you,

and proud ladies’ man, you are a boil on a

cadaver.

Be so happy he has not made you suffer yet, like

the animals, eaten

For our sins.

The snake may be kind, we cannot know. Even

our gentlest kill them with

Expedition, the automatic twelve-gauge shotgun.

The snake spoke and was made to be despised,

Even though they may be babies, mothers, they

stay alive

And as friendly as they can manage. But they

spoke. Now we cannot reach out

To them, many of us.

Born into a bad cause, lost at birth,

We late Confederates so proud and stuffed.

There was a time when we smiled and charged the

hills of artillery.

There was a time we did not doubt.

Now you lounge, rain in the trees outside, but you

see nothing.

You charge only at the sports store, the toy store,

the Radio Shack.

You have no cause, no belief, you don’t even have

faith in faith,

Or a prayer for a prayer. There is no paved golden

heaven ahead.

It is the Garden of Eden behind. We have already

seen heaven. Else

What else has this life on earth, this pavement

among throngs

And squalling choirs of sycophants, been preparing

us for?

Prepare to get naked and talk to the animals, right

now!

Given to us by the Lamb, the fisher of men.

But now the question. What are the animals going

to do about the overpopulation

Of so many billions of ugly people?

For we have fed on the blood of our own.

We are not even kind to our own retarded that so

fill the Southland.

We go off to other states and make fun and literature

And Hollywood movies about them.

The Best Southern Art On-screen is Stupid and

Heartwarming.

But you do not know what is beyond the window

of your own home.

The crumbs in your navel are your history.

We have pretended that Sherman caused anything

in the South too long.

We have spoken of the fall of Vicksburg as if it

mattered.

Wretched spectators, heads just out of your

mama’s womb.

Buy me sumpin, Ma. Plug me in.

All this blindness without no ON knob!

Parasites flourish in the lesions of bitten mother

sharks.

Shut up! Shut up! And talk to the animals. They

have soul, they have art.

Shut up and live with your gorgeous neighbors!”

Frank Booth lay in the hospital for three weeks. He had already had four operations. It was mid-September, but the heat had not broken as he waited for the last, a three-hour procedure by an expert plastic surgeon from Florida, in St. Dominic’s hospital in Jackson. He was fifty miles from Vicksburg, almost seventy from the lake, but only eight from Clinton, where Mortimer watched his big-screen TV for the return of the perverse evangelical bard he had seen only once. Perhaps it had been public-access television. He couldn’t remember, so he kept a vigil. He had acquired a taste just lately for a motorcycle, a Norton like Facetto had, a Commando. He had leather suits already, and he looked good with a knife and a monster key chain.

Frank Booth opened a letter block-printed and addressed to his room at St. Dominic’s. His hands trembled. Only three others knew where he was and he didn’t want two of them knowing. But he owed them jewelry, and he was an honest man. He barely recognized himself in the mirror even still, and he liked that. He felt hidden, passing for a thin-faced hermitic and pale sort. The letter was on good stationery but in printing like a child’s.

OLD FRIEND, HAVE YOU NOTICED MY OWN PATIENT FRIEND ON YOUR SAME FLOOR? HE CARRIES A FROG GIG AND HE’S BAD TO DO FOLKS’ EYES WITH IT AT NIGHT OR JUST ANY OLD TIME IT IS SHUTTY-EYE TIME. MAYBE YOU COULD GO THE MAX AND HAVE ZERO EYES.

Large Lloyd had printed the note for Mortimer. Lloyd was very literate and helped Man a little with writing it but did not ask what it could be about.

Jacob and Isaac fished in the cove and swam. They were childish, changed. They pretended it was a familiar activity under the gaze of their mother, who was not watching at all. She wondered too why the boys came close to her all softly of late to mimic a time with her they had never had.

She was drinking on Melanie’s porch. They had one day become friends. Dee quickly realized she’d always liked Melanie, just had a wearying time believing she was sleeping with Facetto. But Dee knew a woman in actual love when she saw one. It might turn out pathetic, but it was true. Melanie did not act as if much between them had ever been less than pleasant, and for people like her, it might be they didn’t register bad looks. These things were too foreign to their style.

So they drank and talked, joined by Mimi Suarez, who had recently performed at Almost There with her husband the saxophonist. The tone of his horn was sweeter now, blending with Mimi, with the lustrous hair and hot legs and little dresses. She seemed a good Cuban woman from Fort Lauderdale, and Dee could live with envy, for she had been envied and still was. Being envied was a burden, but these three could afford it, especially with the tequila and gin and vodka. Limes, salt, olives, whatever you wanted on the tray. And as for Mortimer, Dee was still certain she had won that night, although she had required stitches from Dr. Harvard with his old kit, whiskey and her big lie about a run-in with an electric knife.

She sat up and paid attention now and then to her boys, as she had seen Mrs. Cleaver and others do on ancient television shows. They were above the cove a hundred and thirty yards, and the grass was gray-green in the minor heaven of light when the subtropics finally cools. It is all man could want of this planet’s seasons. Many fall in love with anybody and vow marriage simply because they are in this lush afternoon light. Mimi bent to Dee’s beautiful daughter, Emma. She gave her a few glass animals that made a family.

“I know now,” said the Coyote, “that I want to have a child too. Seeing her almost makes you pregnant.” The animals were exquisite in her small palms. Pins of light from hooves, snouts.

Dee had lately come to like the gin, the tonic, the lime, the tingle. When she looked at Mimi again, she grew almost weepy with coziness. Then she felt daughterly to the old lady. It was a family, if you had steady gin. She was fluid in folks. She swam in Mimi Suarez, legs kicking down that canal of hers. Crying out hello, hello. These thoughts did not surprise her. But the next one did, so she said it.

“I got no reason to live.”

“No,” both rushed in. “Yes.”

“I’m just a nowhere cunt. I don’t even have a hobby.”

Nobody said anything. Mimi envisioned a helpless vagina hanging over the chair back. Melanie felt something on her spine, wet. Then this succubus went into the slope of the yard. They studied the swimming boys raptly as if they had never seen children or water.

“Well, dear,” Melanie said at last. “They also serve who stand and wait.”

“Crossword puzzles helped me through a bad patch a few years ago,” added Mimi.

“Oh God.” Dee laughed.

Melanie giggled. “Church is good for some.”

The boys turned from their violent wading to hear hoots and shrieks of laughter from the porch. The women seemed to tremble and reach for air around the wicker chairs. The boys’ infant sister stood between the women with a glass uplifted in her hands, into the gin.

The pleasure barge closed in on the pier from the western horizon. The engines puttered grandly, washing out the black water. But the men wore the look of mild disappointment common to travelers everywhere, having failed to find a miracle or endure a metamorphosis. Only a further gravity on the face. They could have returned from an expedition around the rim of a vast navel. Harvard, Max Raymond. Ulrich and the ex-priest, found near the animal shelter trying to speak words of love to the inmates through a door. Wren, Lewis and Sidney Farté, more confident since the hacking of his dad, a celebrity and a capitalist. Nobody spoke. Still, they were alert to something new at the pier.

It was Mortimer, down from the hill off a brand-new Norton, in a leather sports coat and fine boots in the style of the Mounties. They knew he was strange before they saw his face closely. Sidney hollered out, “You the man!”

The others looked over at Sidney doubtfully. Mortimer was still a little bent from the stab through the gonads, but he had the posture of a range warrior familiar to cow dung and burning oil. He held a child-size football in his hands, flirting with its shape, unused to it. He did watch the barge arrive and walked into the edge of the water. The boys ran almost on top of him, thrashing. Then they saw. They froze to the bottom of the lake. He had crept up on everybody in the shadowless remnant of the afternoon.

“Say, boys. I don’t know how hard you can take an old pass. What say let’s run for a few goals.” He fired the little ball at dangerous speed past the head of Isaac, and the ball skipped toward the willows behind. Mortimer went in up to his knees with his pants billowing. He waded for the ball.

“We got to make some memories here, boys. You got some bones for me? You best get me in a good mood.”

“I’ll blow your ass off for you,” said Jacob.

“Is he asking them for help or after them?” asked Melanie, at last seeing the man new to the evening.

Dee had never imagined Mortimer in this form. She could not comprehend this person had ever touched her, but she felt a sour loyalty that confused her. She was fascinated and drunk. A pipe organ went off through her head. Jangling lines of nerves like she was coming or vomiting.

Three fat moccasins hung in the willow forks behind Mortimer, and he was unaware. The boys saw. Isaac made a motion of a receiver through the water away from the willows. “I’ll play. Throw here. I’ll get her.” Mortimer fired the ball too high, but Isacc leaped and almost grabbed it. Then he waded out and retrieved it. “Go long, Mr. Mortimer!”

The man was half out of the water pantomiming a varsity end, for as he recalled from Missouri, you ran long and then barely missed, every time. A sort of coolness toward completion. He was too suave to really try. He jumped a bit in inches of water, but the ball sailed over him into the snake roost. Mortimer plunged on by momentum right among the fat sleepers, one of them seven feet.

The boredom of the men on the barge was interrupted by a man screaming and flinging in the water. Wails pitched like a woman’s. You did not hear this much in men. Mortimer shook his hands and you thought he might die of your shame for him. Then he began scrambling out of the water and up, up the grass. His leather coat was flecked by shore mud. The bargemen looked downward.

Sidney was in despair. The others could not know why he had invested trust in this man. Mortimer straightened and walked slowly to the pier and to the bow where Harvard and Raymond tied up. Raymond was drunk.

“Hello, sir,” said Harvard.

“I was admiring your ship the other day, and I came over to see if I could join the club. You boys seemed to’ve got things all smooth as a baby’s ass.”

“Is that your red motorcycle up that hill?” asked Raymond.

“It is. It’s part of me now. I live it.”

“You can’t come aboard, not now we’ve heard you over there like that. What was that?”

“It was snakes. I was in snakes. You’re the saxophone man. You making the rules about the boat club?”

“No, there weren’t any rules until you went over the line. You think anybody’d want that sort of noise aboard? You’ve created the one rule.”

It was Harvard’s barge, but he was not interrupting this drunk. He was nodding his head.

“This ain’t right. He don’t have to prove—” began Sidney.

“You’re barely with us yourself, Sidney. You didn’t believe in it. Why don’t you be quiet?” scolded tall Lewis, surprisingly solid for one so translucent and veined.

Sidney was furious but quiet for a while. He was very confused because he had watched this very man hack off his father’s head through the glass of the stockroom door. It seemed to him old Pepper finally looked at the wrong man with contempt for supporting him.

Man Mortimer had known instantly the nature of Pepper’s heart and destroyed him straightaway, Sidney imagined, while others had known and borne cowards like himself. Sidney had never tried to hide his glee. He told his peers that old Pepper’s death was the sweetest gift the man had ever given him.

“And the store, of course,” Harvard added.

Now the same man who had killed Pepper almost in an accident of random frenzy told Raymond, “I don’t need your club. You’re drunk and I’m letting this go. Lots have nerve that’s full of liquor.”

“I’m as drunk as I ever get, and then I’m never wrong. I smell evil and it walks like you,” said Raymond.

“Weren’t you a doctor?”

“I was. At your service.”

“You don’t get many to just quit. You musta mouthed yourself right out.”

Mortimer turned and walked up the hill slowly. He did not look Dee’s way or toward the porch at all, except to mutter near it, and the women heard. “Old Sidney he said he saw through her window the other night. Little granny giving a blow job to the law.”

None spoke.

Dee had passed a line where the gin no longer obtained, but she pretended to sip. She saw herself trembling beneath a ghoul in a red chamber of sin. A creature whose veins were swollen blue. They swayed in a penthouse lit with gilt over the raving casino. Grim fun against laws of God and man. Beasts crawled away ashamed. I queen bring wreckage to my lover. For seconds she could not remember her relation to the present evening and its people. Everything was yonder except a central burning ruin, the howl of her counterpart. Then she recalled the man in the mud-smeared leather coat.

“That man, I’ve seen him in some other version,” said Melanie.

“He was pitiful, nasty,” said Mimi.

“He seems to be wanting to join things,” Melanie said. “I know who it was. The man on the orphans’ barge. He brought those teenage girls back to the camp. They’d run away. And Dee, he sat at our table uninvited at the casino music hall.”

“He is after me,” said Dee, blank, sad.

“You know him?” Mimi asked.

“I am his woman.”

“You are not.”

“He was trying to play with my children.”

“Child, you’re too young for him. His face is a deep map.”

“Oh no, Melanie. I’m very old. I’m all the ones that watched themselves move everywhere and go nowhere. Your face in the crowd that ain’t quite there in every picture.”

“My husband is a fool, but good mostly,” said Mimi.

“My husband turned gay in his seventies,” Melanie reported.

“Is that possible?” Mimi cried. “Then God will forgive you everything. Oh, God, I meant nothing by that. I meant you have license to be free, even dumb.” This caused a long pause, sighs, forlorn detachment.

“You gals made your deals with college presidents and doctors,” Dee said. “When your charms give out, you still got your own roof, your own music. You can piss and moan or strum a harp. You still get the roof.”

“Don’t you own your home?”

“I don’t know. Something on the verge. My kids always felt rented. Best I could do was leave them alone. Except for Emma there sleeping, the cherub. Me and her father were just clouds she passed through. I don’t think I had much to do with her.”

“Can I ask you an ignorant Cuban question?” asked Mimi. “Are you white trash, or do you just want us to think you are?”

“Well, it feels like home. It’s relaxing, really. I had every chance to choose and still do. I turned down another whole life in Minneapolis, Minnesota, one night.”

“Why was that?”

“I think I like it on the verge. I’m from people such as that a hundred years, they told me.”

“Would you be English, Welsh, French, what?”

“I would say soldier in a bus station, quick couple of spurts in a rest room at midnight with about a pint of liquor. What I am is when they repealed prohibition in Mississippi.”

“You’re very clever, Dee,” said Melanie gently.

“But I like a clean yard now.”

“Yes, yards. Light and shadow on yards down here at twilight. So much.”

“You’re very much in love, Melanie. You know that.”

“I know that, of course.”

“Well, then it is good,” said Mimi. “God allows.” Dee felt a groggy box of air around her, dusk shrunk down. Outside of which panic slept like big dogs.

The animals are in ecstasy even when they are eaten, Ulrich was telling Carl Bob Feeney. They stayed in Ulrich’s cottage or on the barge now, setting out short distances and tying up. All were sympathetic with the two except Sidney and Wren. Sidney felt the ex-priest had turned into a dog and belonged in Onward or jail. Wren’s position was that this fugitive situation would bring more law in, and you had one point in life, to get more law out. Egan, the nephew, was looking for his uncle still and keeping up his animals, himself verging toward feral because pursued by the vig.

So Ulrich and Carl Bob slept sometimes on the pews of the pontoon boat, sometimes in the unlighted basement of Ulrich’s house, sometimes in a single room in the rear of the doctor’s cabin. Harvard had threatened Sidney’s life if he revealed their whereabouts to anybody. Carl Bob Feeney might not have been the choicest seer at the lake, and Ulrich, now his secretary general, was just bogus guff mostly, but they were the only prophets they had now. Sidney threatened the doctor’s life back, but he was too busy running his old man’s store now and not doing that badly. He had a car, one of the new Chrysler PT Cruisers, a silver heartwarming car for anybody in love with the sixties Volvo coupe and forties grillwork.

One night when Egan was serving a prayer meeting at Rolling Fork, Ulrich helped Feeney break in his own house and steal his gun back, along with clothes including his old vestments, which he intended to put to new use. Feeney would not go to Onward if he could help it.

Ulrich would frequently stop talking and go quiet like a thief who had forgotten his mission. Carl Bob Feeney was a good listener because he was hearing himself now, in different words. They did not humanize animals, Ulrich and Carl Bob. They wanted to learn their language, and how indeed they had kept going despite depression, despair, even suicide. For instance, it is well known if a fire dog finds too many human corpses in the rubble, it will become inconsolable and stop looking. What of the amazing quality of forgiveness in animals? It broke your heart. Carl Bob often wept, but it did not weaken him. He had different kinds of weeping, some of it murderous, some of it clearly insane, a long purr-howl that frightened Ulrich.

“We are damned, but that is the way of the way. If you choose, you are damned somewhere else. We are deficient because we are tired of people. Bosnia, Ethiopia, Kosovo, the AIDS horror. We were not supposed to know so much despair at once. It has killed feeling for others. We are ready for the New Testament to be about dogs, monkeys, cheetahs. Ulrich, you must know we hate ourselves and accept it as right. The first thing you have to give up in belief is being admired and a friend to man. ‘Hail fellow well met’ is not a description down south, it is the vocation of most of the South. It has ruined it. We have lost something precious, Ulrich, and you must, must acknowledge this. We just don’t give a shit. Machines started it, but we finished the job. How is it possible a man could sit and read an average newspaper without attacking at least twenty people directly? Know that we are dangerous zealots now. Not just animal lovers.”

Ulrich had fallen asleep, but before he did, he was agreeing with what Feeney was saying. Then he awoke and they had a cup of fine dark coffee made on the hot plate of the steerage cabin. The coffee was too good here in the night. Ulrich brought some cigarettes out from a locker and they both lit up these Camels. He shouldn’t, but the night, the coffee, the ripple of the water and slap of bass.

“Most animals live a short while,” said Ulrich, “but I had a revelation. That we cannot know the intensity of their lives, which is hundreds of times more attuned than ours. They don’t talk because they don’t need speech. A dog, when it puts its head out a car window, smells almost everything in a county, a world we never even suspect and have no description for. That is why I am daft. I have flown and smelled the smells, Carl Bob. I have known life by my nose. That’s why the dog looks so ecstatic sniffing in the wind. They smell a thousand times more than we do. We could only know it as hallucinatory sense. Dogs are in space and time. We can only know one or the other, plodding, toddling. Not to mention hearing. And taste. Water is fifty times more delicious to them. We must not pity them, a cheap passive hobby. They live huge lives before they die. Watch how happy sleep is to them, and right next to waking. They live both at once. We are predators of not only meat but of essence, my friend. We want to be them because they have spoken to us without speaking and we can hardly bear their superiority.” Now Carl Bob had fallen asleep, the lit Camel in one hand, the coffee in the other. It was by the glow of their cigarettes that Egan found them and waded out the short way to the barge.

They were both startled by the voice from a man standing above them on the planks of the stern, just ahead of the engines. “I’m so tired, Uncle Carl Bob, chasing you. How could you doubt I loved you? How can you wear me out this way? Who is your friend?”

“I’m Ulrich. Son, he can’t go with you. We heard about your sermon. You said you had to find him and help him. But you’ve found him and you mean to follow him, don’t you?”

“I’m worn out with the dogs and cats. Come on home, please. I can’t do it by myself. Nobody can. I love them too much. I can’t get nothin’ else done. I can’t stand for one to get hurt or left out, great or small, I’m goin’ round huggin’ ’em and pettin’ ’em and cooin’ over ’em. I’m a silly ass. I’m in trouble with God. I’m in trouble for some old bodies. I’m preachin’ bad. And let me tell you, somebody broke in the house.”

“That was us, son,” said Ulrich. “We needed some things. And we needed protection. I agreed with your uncle.”

“No, I don’t mean that. I knew who that was. This person left something square in the middle of the front room. They didn’t take anything.”

“Left something?”

“A football.”

“Why?”

“It was sitting on top of the Edwards newspaper about some game a few weeks back where somebody in the men’s room got his face nigh cut off.”

“I saw the old bodies, the old bones myself,” said Carl Bob.

“You’ve got to stop that. Somebody’ll hear and haul you off. You couldn’t have seen the bodies. They were in a car underwater till a sinkhole took the water out.”

“I don’t mean underwater. I mean behind the doctor’s house. I looked out the window at night and there were two skeletons and some little boys sitting beside them like in church.”

“That’s right. He told me,” added Ulrich. “Three nights ago when the girl was singing on the back porch. Some animals come up too. Two deers, a bear, a ghost of a orangutan.”

“No orangutans,” said Carl Bob.

It suddenly occurred to Egan that his uncle looked like Basil Rathbone and Ulrich looked like an elderly Mortimer Snerd. Then the name Mortimer passed through him.

Roman was riding his motorbike with Melanie Wooten clasped behind him. These were grave times, but they were not sure how grave. Roman’s wife waited for more tests. Basal cell lymphoma. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which wasn’t too bad. But she had begun bleeding, masses had shown. She was up and about but weak, and they had her in the chemo now. Roman did not know what to do with disease. Except for his wounds, his wife and he had been healthy and they were not old and they had done nothing much dissipating or poisonous. He smoked a little. She could eat a great deal without gaining, and she liked two stiff drinks of Maker’s Mark now and again. Melanie had helped as she could, but Bernice Roman did not take to help, although she was pleasant enough. The woman acted distinctly outraged by her luck, as if still misdiagnosed.

This was not as much fun as Melanie expected, but it was trouble of a sort that she still wanted. She had never had a black friend, and she thought it ridiculous that she could die without having this man as one. He liked her and reminded Melanie of early playmates in Texas. But she wondered if there were any left around the lake who might shoot them. She was so tired of race. She was warier since the destruction of the glass animals. The world with that person out in it, wild and needy and ugly.

A man stood in the road, just a man alone. He was staring at her and Roman, but a flat field suddenly interested him and she couldn’t see a car. They came to a little bridge over a creek after passing the man, and the motorbike wobbled on twelve-by-twelves. You didn’t want to catch a tire between them. But then they shook as a car came up behind them. She turned and watched as a Lexus SUV neared them. The windows were smoked. Roman drove to the right to let it pass, but the Lexus stopped when they were abreast the front passenger door. Roman drove around it across the road to his left to force a decision, but it passed them. Roman stopped. Holding the motorbike between his spread sandaled feet. Melanie tapped him on the shoulder to show the Lexus had stopped with them.

Nobody opened the door. The sun glare off it was hot. You could see the car as the house of whatever your mind held. The people inside were not visible, so you guessed many and not one. The elevation and headroom were preposterous even for a large rich fool. Still it sat blind, dumb, glaring. The whole world was the gravel and this vehicle. Roman got off the bike and kickstanded it. The two of them walked up to the window, a bright maw next to opening but not. There was some activity behind the smoke. It was a human tongue circling the glass, licking and sucking it. They could see nothing except the mouth working dimly. But the glass went down inches, and Man Mortimer looked over the top of the window at them. Devoid of expression, yanked-in tongue, flat, overall. The rearview reflected the ones in the back who did not know they were revealed. It was old Sidney without his shirt, very mottled and speckled, silvered concave chest. Marcine and Bertha, the car-lot girl, were working on him.

Then the glass rose and stopped the view. The Lexus went off at urgent speed.

“That’s a lot of car,” said John Roman, “to be fucking with you. I’m sorry I said that, but—”

They knew well who the backseat lovebird was, but it took minutes to get their three or four images of Mortimer together. These still did not make one man, because they had little but a forehead and a mouth. Old Sidney perched right in the love nest, at ease in the rearview mirror. He could enjoy his money and new friendship, a major change from his old man. The shamelessness of it shook Melanie, the ugliness. But she who with Facetto. . it was not good to pursue this concept. The SUV all black and swollen, it hurried as if recently parted from a gathering of its fellows in a wealthier country.

It was getting hard to have innocent fun. All seemed driven toward a calculated nightmare. The football game, Pepper, poor Bernice with her cancer, the tongue in a fretting black ghoul of a car.

They never rode the motorbike together again. She missed the touch of Roman’s fat shoulders. She had never felt the war wounds beneath his shirt, as she suspected she might.

The pleasant day erased by that thing on the window of the Lexus.

It occurred to her how many motions people made to simply present themselves to a window, a mirror, a sea of nobodies. These groomings, pulling straight the pants, licking a finger for the hair out of place. She had heard these all were movements of those before execution. Why else so circumspect? Your first impression on the gallows.

John Roman thought. He fished with a spinning rod. He had delayed the pleasure of artificial bait — casting deliberately until he retired. Times were wretched in many ways. Bernice and cancer, tongue on window, old men on the run from relatives for loving animals too much and learning to talk with the beasts, a grown white man shrieking with a sound that should not be heard when he stumbled close to snakes in the willows. But you could get as good a spinning reel and rod as the pros for cheap at Big Mart, against which there was no competition. The local fishing-supply stores didn’t even attempt it but went rather for a fishing class that imagined itself temporarily detained by Mississippi until it could get to the glossy lakes and streams in magazine photographs at the doctor’s office.

Roman fished long and guiltily because Bernice did not want him home fretting about her condition. She’d lost some weight and looked even more Indian now. Perhaps the last trace of the Natchez tribe. He was another sort of Indian partly, Chickasaw, lost in the South.

Melanie was on his mind, how she was doing. He hadn’t fished close to her house for a while. She was a friend in a panic to live, and he didn’t want to be her instructor. Life itself was not much of an instructor but more like the fits of a runaway child. It would shock you with depravity and staggering kindness within the same hour. If you could get used to that, you might learn, but life itself didn’t especially want to follow up on anything.

It was his own time alone with his memories. The wash through the head, a wash of half-stories, peace and war. No screaming or banging or outer noise, just this steady action, floats of rooms and lamps, rolling of women like happy seabirds riding the first of the storm waves. No radio, no beer, but you sat there on a bucket and collected them all.

Nobody had the right to touch the stories, the pictures, the silence. That was your due. Nobody could enter. No government was here. No phone calls, no mail, no knocks on the door. You saw old men on benches and you pitied them for all bereft, but you were wrong. They had the time of their life. The deaf ones even more so. Inside and away. They were inside a pure dream.

Roman resembled his grandfather on his mother’s side, a man struck blind by a train in his sixties. The old man sat in the chair grinning. Roman couldn’t recall a whine or complaint from him. As if he had crashed up safe somewhere, the water of an ocean bathing his feet. You would go to him for a memory and he spoke it.

Melanie was a fine lady but didn’t have enough stories in her, ones of her own. She borrowed from him. This was not so much too late as just impossible. If you couldn’t sit without stirring into somebody else’s life at age seventy-two, you had either bad stories or too few of them. When you had too few stories, you went mad. When you had only one, they took you away to the asylum until you got more.

The army had been a long mistake, but he could let that go. Somebody must be there as the platoon’s old animal and it was him. Sergeant major, watching West Point, Virginia Military and Citadel killed over and over. He regretted he was not a singing jazz-trumpet man like Chet Baker, but somebody had to be there regretting too. The army would rise up and grab you because it was vacant. You went to it young when even an army barracks was something fresh. The place filled you, or the unplace of it. Then you got wise enough to live. Others came close to you wanting to live also.

Roman hooked into something large and squirming. All his evenings contracted into this sweet emergency. Muscles underwater struggling against your arms, the line alive down to your belly and the butt of the new rod, Shakespeare the brand, answering. It had to be a cat, very big. As clear a gift as anything in the world. If he were a preacher, he would say that fish was God’s mercy. You never got closer to it than above the water for a long, long time. Here, bringing it home like a lost friend.

When he was young he cursed fish as he pulled them in. He no longer did. That was evil, stupid, greedy. Should lose your thumbs for it. For your mean and larcenous spirit. Now he loved this fishing peace above all things. He had not once been let down, even when nothing came home for him. The stories inside had been better over green water.

At the mouth of another cove near the bad restaurant, the one that he called Gristle and Sons with Cold Beer, he saw a pale-faced but arm- and shoulder-burned cracker bounced up and wallowing on a Jet Ski, a horrible and noi-some bully of a water motorcycle built in spite for the northern snowmobile, on which other punks roared and beheaded themselves on fence wire. The boy was doing about fifty over Roman’s quiet water. The wash from the machine was immense into the shallows, whipping water weeds and terrifying minnows and young bass toward Roman. The big catfish rolled in behind this local storm. Roman cursed the ski and saluted this bully. Old whiskered heavyweight at last snatched from its appetites. At last we meet. It was too big to be succulent, and he was glad to let it go after petting it.

When he turned to the lake again and threw his nightcrawlers and light sinker toward a stranded bough on a black strip of deep, he hoped he would not see another living soul, and he didn’t. Heard only the distant nagging whine of the ski.

The cracker Sponce was on the far side of the lake, seeking other audiences. A mad Protestant in a cathedral too green and black and silent for him, bent on fouling these spaces with the great I am.