by Barry Hannah
“We are expecting two more guests shortly,” Egan continued, “and we owe them our attention even if we do not like them.
“There is the business of marrying Gene and Penny yet again, in renewal of their vows. The couple will soon be here with their best man, Malcolm, a new member of the lake community whose handicaps have not prevented his service to the children at the camp.”
“Malcolm is coming here?” cried out Max Raymond. “Will he be armed?”
“Well who isn’t?” Peden said from his chair. “I personally know a peaceful soul, a sculptor and motorcycle mechanic, in possession of over a hundred and fifty guns. He likes to hold the history.”
“Malcolm is an ex-patient of mine who wants to harm me,” Raymond said. “But let him come. Let him do what he has to do. I stand to pay, and if it’s my time, I’m ready to die for my sin.”
Mimi Suarez was seated next to her husband. On this outburst, she rose and slapped him very hard, then left the meeting. Mortimer hid himself entirely behind a tin out-building where spark-plug harnesses hung.
“Could I ask,” called out Sidney from his perch near the door. He had not been invited, and few had known he was there. “Is this a town meeting, a church gathering, or are you just screwing the pooch here?”
“Or just a debating society,” said Dr. Harvard angrily. “Led by two thugs who’ve exchanged one addiction for another and who want to rub our noses in junk. Your revenge on others who’ve tried to bring some beauty and light into the world.”
“Fine words, Doc,” Sidney sneered. “No noble rot about it.”
“Not one mention has been made of the animals. For whom old Feeney died!” Ulrich began weeping. He was smoking a cigarette and soon was hacking out bottomless gut calls, knocking over his oxygen tank. But he would not be helped.
“We’re going on our way,” said Harold, the new husband. “We’ve got underage kids and an automobile to find.” He picked up baby Emma, and Cato the Torontoan followed him, Sponce and Dee out the aisle between the chairs. Cato still with his suave readiness to fly toward northern sanity and newly claimed fatherhood.
It was a different audience who waited for the renewal of vows from Gene and Penny. They were getting remarried naked and had written their own nuptial poems, and so although the crowd was surlier, they were by no means less alert. Lewis, Wren and Harvard lingered only to get a full frontal on Penny, who, though insane, was still a fine looker with nail marks about her ankles. Gene had the hack marks on his thigh. Trim, he wouldn’t make a bad nude either, though his red beard and freckles and wild woolly hair looked as if they were fleeing in a red-and-white-confetti protest. The altar empty, people looked forward, backwards, sideways. Malcolm was late. Max Raymond was still there, determined to look his nemesis in the face. Peden had risen and was clear to marry folks again. It was his nature to get suddenly clear.
They awaited Melanie and Facetto. What arrogance was detaining them? Or were they deliberately missing the nude wedding? Gene and Penny were eager.
Mortimer stayed in the plug-harness shed. He would wait until all had cleared out but Peden. Then Peden was his. He already was, but he had forgotten and needed the touch of his master.
Why do we keep as keepsakes the implements of our own destruction and hang them on the wall? Mortimer wondered. As if they were not hung between our ears. Near Mortimer’s head, on the wall, was a kind of shillelagh wrapped with barbed wire that Peden had used in biker and mobile-home fights. There was either dried blood or shoe polish on it. It was three feet long, shaped like a narrow bowling pin, with all its weight in the head. Mortimer figured if Peden was so proud of this, the man should know what it felt like. He knew he did not have the strength of old, but this club should carry the day. He wondered about just a bash, repeated bashes, without the first softness, the gee, the little feathers at the base of his spine. Did Mortimer have it in him, or would his hand go to his rear pocket where the rug knife rested in joy?
He was wondering when the day would be that they would let him back into real life, which he had once thought possible, at age sixteen in southern Missouri, looking out back at the chicken yard. Little bit of rain coming down. Not lonesome. But the chickens looked happy and they were so dumb, scratching and lurching. Killed and ate them, but his mother was very tender with them. They had names for their short time. Mortimer began to cry. Just a little, and soon stopped. Then, through the smudged window, he saw Gene and Penny pulling off their clothes on the porch of the shotgun shack. They both had long gnarled feet, he noticed, as if these parts had married and grown alike in time. And Facetto and Melanie were about to walk right up on the disrobing couple before they realized it.
John Roman may have been the most uncomfortable at the nude wedding. The world wasn’t meant to be buttnaked and smiling ear to ear, he reasoned, and here came the poems. Peden presided woozily over the entire thing. Here was a man who in his bad, bad days had almost blown Roman over on a gravel road riding his giant Harley next to Roman’s little motorbike, loaded with fish. Now a Christian orator when he was not playing hooky from the Anonymous program.
Roman was there because it was a place to be out of the house with Bernice. He knew he could not shoot Mortimer if Bernice lived on and lived well, so he had deferred the head shot on Mortimer. Roman was the only trained killer on the lake. He could summon a chilliness beyond such huffers as Raymond, who had recently confessed to Roman his own wound at the hands of Mortimer. How could Mortimer risk all his whore world and his fleet of lust hearses, all his women and thugs, for a bit of fun like this?
Now in stumbled the best man. Clothed, thank the Lord for small favors, but dragging a leg and unable to make low sounds like, for instance, a whisper. But what protocol was appropriate when two fools rammed together in poetry to initiate some awful Eden all over again? Couldn’t Gene have combed his hair? Or worn shoes?
“Uh seen this guy in the tin hut!” Malcolm was moaning to the back row.
He was ignored. Penny picked up a guitar and began strumming and hooting a song directed toward the higher obedience of everybody to the untenanted, unastronauted moon.
When Roman first heard of integration, he thought it was a movement about meeting and drinking with people like Chet Baker, and he was a partisan. But it was mostly the Pennys and the Genes and the Pedens and the split-in-two Raymonds who were at the table.
Peden began speaking, looking neither left nor right. “Thank you for your arrival, Malcolm. It is good a husband and wife freshen their vows. We lose sight of the face of God, which we must at least try to see every day, and we lose sight of each other. We become annoying mists to each other, let’s face it. Egan said those words, I stole ’em.”
“No, wait, I’ve got my poem!” said Sidney. This grainy man was in the doorway watching all worlds. “Women. You can’t live with them and you can’t fuck their ears.”
Melanie alone was scandalized, but she had brought her own scandal with her and so she stayed quiet. The ceremony jerked on to its end, and Sidney, nervous as Judas, suddenly ran for his car. Mortimer saw this act, hoping the rest would leave shortly. He was not good at waiting.
Egan moved among the crowd, glad the wedding was quick. There was no reception. The sheriff began talking loudly.
“I wasn’t quite done, Facetto,” said Peden. “It’s my house we’re in.” Peden didn’t like cops.
“I’m sorry. Go ahead. I thought we were going to talk about the man.”
“Sure we are. Now I’m through talking. Go ahead.”
“We are needing testimony against Man Mortimer,” said Facetto.
“This sounds like you on television. The new breed of high sheriff,” taunted Peden. “What the hell is new about Mortimer?”
The sheriff was angry, red.
“You’ve gotten plenty of airtime, sir,” Harvard broke in. “Much expatiation on criminology. Little actual arresting of it. There is not much you have done except,” Harvard swept his hand toward Melanie
, “dally with a woman twice your age.”
“I am older than that. We are in love,” said Melanie.
“In heat,” spat Harvard. “I think Facetto should abdicate for the woman he loves. Or whatever negligent sheriffs do. Man, you can’t serve.”
Facetto was mad. He had been taunted by mail, the telephone, distant shouts, and now by this considerable old surgeon whose intelligence he could not deny.
“You’ve got an orphans’ militia over there,” said Lewis. “Somebody’s going to be hurt.”
“I’ve spoken to them,” Facetto said. Many folks stood up and milled, just absorbing him. Nobody else was listening. They were talking on their own and leaving. He was very sorry he had come. There was no face to maintain here, no walk to walk. He felt himself melting and near tears. His gun hand trembled. He was beginning to join the hate for himself. Melanie saw all this. She could not rush to him, and in fact she despised him a little herself.
“You can’t gang up and destroy this man. He’s a good man. He works hard,” Melanie was saying. This too was ignored, drowned out, mocked. They themselves left and Peden was alone.
Peden, with a coffee, fresh and hot French roast from his loyal Big Mart maker, was in agreeable shape finally. The last of the kicks of the lush, peaceful even during the last wedding. No longer threaded out and driven forward, he sat and reviewed the life he lived in the junkyard, and he found it good. These stacks and caverns of heavy metal around him. They had a quietness. A solid face. It was something, he was something that made it signify. He had the Lord, he had his time. Who suspected any would haul in this rotted rust and take the better version of the same ’48 with them? Peden still hoped he would get over it, and that his old debt would be forgiven.
The debt was this. Peden had once gone in to Mortimer while very drunk and asked him for $13,000 to buy a new Harley Davidson Softtail. Everything depended on it, Peden thought, for his own esteem. His soul was already in the bike. It was only a matter of what he would do to get it. He had a woman named Bertha at that time, from up at Redwood. She had satellite television and they had a good time, she mainly sober. Bertha fell off his new machine on a curve out of Panther Burn on Highway 14. She had no medical plan, only Peden. Peden borrowed more, and Bertha began working for Mortimer at the car place in Vicksburg. SUV demos. Good deals. Now Peden was in big hock, and the interest was berserk, but he and Mortimer kept smiling, and Bertha’s back and leg were okay.
Peden lit a Lucky, sat and stretched in front of the potbelly woodstove. Very nice to be out of the rain, very comfortable here. Didn’t need the television on, even if it was a good big fat Phillips like Bertha’s. He thought of Byron Egan, what a constant pal he was. How all was right when Egan cheered him. Peden had had another pal who died, Debord. Debord had simply gotten lung cancer and died, but Peden was certain his friend rode next to him still. Whenever he thought of Debord, and then Egan, he became spiritual. Perhaps he should not even read the newspaper, to keep it that way. The trio was all they needed. One happened to be gone and needing no coffee anymore. But riding with them, his white hair behind him like fleece in a legend.
Just then a man came in the window with a club, clambering over the windowsill from the shotgun porch. Peden couldn’t believe it was Mortimer or that he was coming straight at him this way. Later he thought Mortimer expected he’d be watching television when he came in. The club was big, with wire around it. Peden didn’t recognize it until Mortimer had limped away, with little effeminate screams. Mortimer hit him once on the shoulder, then Peden was all over him, picking up chairs and an old wooden Coke case. He thrashed on Mortimer very well, over and over. Saw he was going for the hip, where there was a knife, he well knew. Peden beat and beat on Mortimer until the man could take no more, found the door and dragged away. Without even a threat.
For a good long while, Peden rubbed his shoulder and thought about a trip to the hospital. Then he decided on it but grew cold when he thought of Mortimer. He doubted the man could stand and feared rooming with him in the emergency ward. This was not a problem. Mortimer was not in the building.
FOURTEEN
PEDEN WAS A STRONG MAN. HE WAS MUSCULAR IN total despite the years of hard living. His shoulder was bruised black but healed quickly.
Mortimer did not heal much at all. But he didn’t languish long. He hurt in every pore, every tissue. Even his lips had been hit. He was not angry at Peden. He would kill him, he was quite sure, and perhaps with his own hands. But he could not blame him. He hated his attitude, hopeful in his stupid mistakes, the ’48 and now fighting back. When he called up Peden, he told him to destroy the ruined ’48, take it to bits, every cell. His voice was even, and Peden wondered if the fight had proved something.
Mortimer himself wondered whether he would have to use a gun, for which he had no affection. He hoped not, but things would be coming up. His tongue was getting more tied, he could not explain and mollify as he used to do. The wedding. On my own property, Dee, and with a medium-size mechanic, a fool.
Frank Booth, too, chilled him with his bald head and Twitty face. What tribute was this? Or was the man deranged and unaware of what he had become? Bald Conway Twitty, if he had lived longer. Booth’s appearance was a bad thing of the shadows, and Mortimer was horrified he would come near with some other weapon.
Maybe he should call the sheriff. Mortimer smiled. Unbalance the man still more. He would say it was out of his jurisdiction, but Mortimer would keep after him. He dialed. He loved the whining answer, the trembling he heard, the remonstrations.
“Oh, it’s special all right,” Mortimer said. “Man mocking me like this. Got a whole new face to do it.”
“Why did he need a new face?”
“Don’t you even read the papers, man?”
“I read a lot of papers. You don’t want to forget who you’re talking to, sir. I don’t have to stand for this.”
“Yes, I’m sorry. Getting out of hand over here. It’s just spooky. Thought you could speak to him.”
“What would I say to the man about his chosen face?”
“Most of us don’t have that option. I see your point.”
“You don’t just go up to a fellow and say, ‘Fellow, I don’t like your face.’”
“You don’t? Well I do, all the time. Too much, I guess. Thanks for your time, anyway.”
“Who is this again? Mort Durr?”
“Yes sir, Commander Facetto.”
“They don’t call me commander. Sheriff is fine.”
“I’m sure it is. Bye now.”
He had a vision of piling all his SUVs together some afternoon and burning them while the sheriff’s department and other fools looked on.
Mortimer knew Sidney was his man when he wanted him, and he was able enough to drive to the bait store on a Thursday when he could also hold down some soft black-eyed peas and corn bread at the bad restaurant. Sidney’s lackey Opal was minding the store, but this girl told him Sidney was down to the new boat in Farté Cove. When he drove by, he saw Sidney amid a great mix of men and advisers nearly working on the boat. It was another barge going up, all right, and now Mortimer wanted it, to sail it and make it smell good and have something for his whores. He would be well known on the lake and finally a pride of the region when he became an elder, because you were colorful then and people liked to see you prosper. Get nostalgic about when times were colorful and wilder and better. Let go because of history and what you’d done for it. A picture of him shaking hands with the law. A giant three-deck riverboat with paddle wheel in the background. Rest Home of Old Whores and Fishing. This joke hurt his liver when he laughed.
Still, he liked Dr. Harvard and the suddenly plentiful crowd. He didn’t know a third of them, must be twelve, fifteen down there. Sidney was off the deck but the center somewhere at the end of the pier, jawing. The boat would be his in the future. I made Sidney famous, thought Mortimer.
They heard the big stuff over at the camp on a Saturday afternoon. It was d
ynamite. The Ten Hoors had decided to make an island out of their camp, and nobody could stop them after they got the explosives permit, which was fairly easy. You can blow up your own place if you’ve room for it. Harvard, Lewis and Wren, working on the barge, with Roman and Raymond lifting heavy pieces for them, and Sidney looking on, heard the whumps.
They were blowing canals. They had hired this company, but the leader of the gang was a man who lived to change the earth. He was seventy and loved his job. He had not gotten enough of this in Korea with the marines, blowing away bridges and roads in the famous retreat from Chosin Reservoir that cost the communists one million dead. But this man had not veered, he was happier then than he had ever been, except for right now. Imagine making an island out of your place suddenly, he said. Imagine. Right here at home. It was going to take a lot of bomb here. Across the lake the men and Melanie and Bernice could see the sky get humps of black along its horizon line. Perhaps whole trees and their dust. Sidney hoped for an enormous accident if this was not one already. Limbs and ash and bone-spray in the air. A real shame.
Ruthna, Harb, Alexander and Whit arrived that afternoon. They had decided they could no longer abide the suburbs, especially since they could not make the house payments. They were something on the order of a middle-age commune and quickly agreed that nature and the lake were just the thing. It was changing them even as they hauled in their luggage, in fact. They had rented a modern, beamed ski-lodge affair, which gave the tourist the rare sense of having fallen off an alp into a steaming bog. They were near the Roosevelt lodge where Ulrich and Egan lived. When the dynamiting started, they were horrified. Their tall white sycamores trembled. They were hungover and in hell. Ruthna fell flat on the ground. Whit held his ears while his luggage scattered.