“Your witness,” Rutledge said.
Hamilcar Clede limped around the prosecutor’s table, walked to the witness stand, and stopped in front of Bowman. “ ‘A revenge-crazed and fleeting avatar.’ What the hell’s an avatar, Mr. Bowman?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Please indulge me.”
“Well, it’s like . . . one of the manifestations or forms of a Hindu deity.”
“A deity, Mr. Bowman?”
“Yes. A god.”
“Ah, you see yourself—or, to be fair, in attacking Mr. Thaxton several weeks ago, you saw yourself—as a revenge-crazed god?”
“No, I—”
“No futher questions.” Clede returned to his table.
Xavier felt that three quarters of those present wondered what Clede thought he had achieved with this ambiguous parting shot. Did he think that Bowman had wounded himself by grandiosely identifying himself with a deity?
Closing arguments began at nine o’clock the following morning. Neither Clede nor the defense team took more than fifteen minutes. The arguments themselves were summary recapitulations of points made the day before. Clede asked for a guilty verdict on the attempted murder charge and stated forcefully that nothing he had seen in Timothy Bowman’s courtroom behavior suggested that he was to be trusted again in the society of law-abiding citizens. Ms. Sheila Ling, summarizing for the defense, argued that a guilty verdict would of course be just, but that imprisoning their client for any length of time would be to punish a man no longer in need of formal correction and to deprive the world of an original artistic talent and a dreamer with an innate commitment to the public weal. Xavier wondered if Ms. Ling had forgotten that F. Deane Finesse had fired Bowman and that at present he had no ready outlet for either his skills or his opinions.
Perhaps this trial, a media circus throughout the state, would provide an outlet, but you never knew.
In less than an hour, the verdict came back: guilty.
With this verdict, the jury sent a recommendation for leniency. Perhaps probation was the appropriate sentence. Judge Denise Devereaux took the recommendation under advisement and returned one day later to establish a year’s supervised probation as the court’s official sentence.
The Mick was elated.
Xavier, however, felt anxious as well as gratified, like a man paying for his dinner in a café the health inspector has just entered with a warrant.
Even had he been wearing his Suit, Xavier knew that he would have felt no better. No matter how talented or remorseful, Tim Bowman—Xavier could never forget—had shot him three times.
65
Dinner at Lesegne’s
In the crowded courthouse lobby, Bari pulled Xavier aside and asked him if he felt well enough to meet her for an early dinner at Lesegne’s. The name of the restaurant gave him pause. Lesegne’s, of course, was the site of their first date, and they had not eaten there together in, well, in a long, long time.
“What’s the occasion?” Xavier asked.
“I’d like to buy you dinner.”
“For what? Not insisting that Bowman be clapped in irons until his last mortal breath?”
“Among other things, yes.”
“Sorry, but I’m not quite sure a measly year’s probation is a suitable sentence.”
“Forget that. Meet me in the Delacroix Room at Lesegne’s.”
“Should I bring Mikhail?” The Mick, Xavier saw, was standing on the edge of a group of reporters, two from the Urbanite, who were badgering a subdued Tim Bowman about his present feelings and his future plans.
“Mikhail can operate a microwave, can’t he?” Bari said.
“My Nintendo ace? You betcha. In any event, I think he planned to watch one of MTV’s artistes pantomime the decomposition of a Bolivian mudslide victim to the strains of a slowed-down Cold Grease on Cary CD.”
“Lovely. Be there at five-thirty. Sharp.” Bari affectionately nibbled his chin and disappeared into the milling reporters and hangers-on.
*
Xavier arrived at Lesegne’s at 5:28 P.M. The maitre d’, who obviously expected him, escorted Xavier to a candle-lit table in the antique radiance of the Delacroix Room. Bari was already there. So was their meal, piping hot on bone-china plates. By both its looks and its aroma, the fare was instantly recognizable: blackened pompano. In the wine stems at each place setting, Meursault white burgundy. Bari had arranged everything to recall the experience of their first shared visit to the restaurant.
She stood to greet him. In fact, she pulled his chair out before the maitre d’ could perform that service. “We’ll be fine now,” she told the man. “Give us thirty minutes of uninterrupted privacy.”
Xavier sat down. A faint apprehensive nausea coiled in his stomach. Without his Suit, he was again susceptible to the scattershot depredations of the Philistine Syndrome. Wearing one of her own creations, Bari looked like the insured contents of Fort Knox. The entire situation—the setting, Bari’s appearance, the cuisine—seemed designed to trip in him a hectic cascade of gonzo infirmities.
“I know,” Bari said. “Thus, no appetizer, no salad, no premeal small talk. Come on. Let’s eat.” She took his hand across the table and said a silent grace. Suddenly Xavier was hungry. The pompano, the green beans, the spiced carrots—everything was good. The wine gave every taste an ineffable edge.
“Do Mikhail’s parents ever intend to reclaim him?”
“Of course. I think so. ”A carrot halfway to his lips, Xavier considered. “I don’t know.” Lydia seldom wrote, and when she did, Mikhail was a footnote rather than a headline in her texts.
“Does the Menakers’ cavalier treatment of your nephew trouble you at all?”
“Lately, I haven’t thought about it much.” He added, “Maybe I’ve gotten used to having Mikhail around.”
“Not to mention that you had other things to worry about.”
“Sure.” But that was too easy an out. With a strange, and audible, conviction, Xavier said, “I like having Mikhail with me.”
“It shows.” They ate in silence for a few moments, and Bari said, “He’s lucky to have you, but he deserves a family.”
“The Menakers—”
“Are blood kin, but they’re no longer family. They’re busy. Busy doing good. And the ‘good’ they do translates into a benign neglect of Mikhail.”
“Benign neglect,” Xavier repeated dully.
“Benign in intention, but malignant in its potential effects. The Mick deserves—he needs—a family.”
Xavier opened his mouth, not to eat but to speak. He found himself wordless.
Bari laid a hand on his wrist. “Xavier, spend the rest of your life with me. With me and Mikhail. Be my husband. This is a proposal.”
“Xavier Carlisle,” he said. “Has a nice ring, doesn’t it?”
Bari took a small velvet box from her handbag and pushed it over to him. “Open it.” The box held a simple gold wedding band. “With that nice ring, I would make you my life-mate. Say yes.” She tapped her wine glass with a spoon.
“If you make me your ‘life-mate,’ Bari, you may shortly need another. Or else endure an awfully long widowhood.” He closed the box. “This is silly. I feel I’m being patronized—sweetly, but patronized nonetheless.”
“This is for me, not your problematic condition, and for The Mick, who’s one nool retropunk, right?”
“My condition”—Xavier weighed his words—“isn’t all that problematic. This may sound petty, but I doubt I’d pass the blood test.” He put his tongue to his palate and made a rapid series of Geiger counter clicks.
“Do I care?”
“Maybe you should.”
“You don’t want my name or I yours. We want family, and we can have it without blood tests, paperwork, hassle. Just say yes.”
“Yes.”
Looking smug, the maitre d’ arrived with a black-clad, blank-faced waiter in tow. “This guy’ll marry us,” Bari said. “With all the power vested
in him as a majordomo. The other fella’s a witness. Stand up, Xave. Let’s do it.”
Feeling light-headed and queasy, Xavier stood.
The maitre d’, in a French accent tinged with a clear Oconee drawl, joined Xavier and Bari in, as he put it, “a legitimate faczeemile of holy matrimony.” The ceremony took three minutes, and Xavier had the impression, not at all unpleasant, that the maitre d’ had rehearsed his part several times before this “official” run-through.
“I now pronounce yoo huzbun ’n’ wife. Lady, you may kizz ’e groom.”
Bari kissed Xavier, and the maitre d’ and his unsmiling second repaired to other dining nooks.
“Your place or mine?” Xavier said.
“Yours. Why live where I work?”
Bari left Lesegne’s on Xavier’s arm. He was glad—glowing, in fact. His wedding band spun on his finger like a well-greased washer, but so what? He had earned Bari’s respect, and that part of him earning it it had just received from her the grace of a lifelong commitment, however long that might be.
66
Eulogies
Without yet raining, it threatened rain. Vapor freighted the air. Every person standing in the weedy graveyard, among the honeysuckle and the illegible stone markers set flush with the sodden clay, and every person facing the cemetery in the gravel drive of the Wilkinses’ clapboard church, and every person held clear of their last rites by a security force of beefy men in cheap polyester suits and scuffed work shoes, felt as a gravedigger feels in that fatiguing summer instant before his sweat pops. The pines behind the graveyard were hung with a heaviness like mist, loops of see-through pewter gauze. Xavier thought he’d swoon if the air took on one more drop of dampness and fall to the burr-matted grass like a hard rain.
“ ’T ain’t the heat,” said a sharp-chinned woman next to Xavier, Bari, The Mick, and Teri-Jo Roving. “What it is, is the humidity.” She was a Burrell, a relative of Missy’s by marriage, and, like everyone in Xavier’s party, she had a chit—a curious metal coin with an intaglio W in its center— authorizing her to stand inside the fenced cemetery of the Full Gospel Holiness Church during the formal prayers and eulogies. Her skin shone like a porpoise’s.
Three coffins—two adult-sized, one very small—rested on chrome bars over the pits that had been dug for the Wilkinses. A large, open-sided mortuary tent sheltered the immediate family—those who had come—from the floating May sun and the onlookers pressing near from the roadway and drive. Each casket was closed, and had been closed. Each was a sportily fishtailed box of fake mahogany. Just by looking, it was impossible to tell they were lead-lined, even heavier than the steamy air: blunt little boats meant to sink and self-seal.
“Cremate them!” cried a voice from the pickup-barricaded road below the church. “Burn ’em, damn you all!”
“Shoot them into orbit!”
“Don’t let these corpses poison our land and water!”
“Don’t let ’em pollute holy ground!”
The cries of the protesters—two dozen people from in and around Philippi, including congregants of the Full Gospel Holiness Church and some blood kin of the Wilkinses—drifted into the cemetery from a nearby dirt road. Their cries came like bad odors on slow gusts of air. The protesters were acting as if the Oconee state government, as it had done elsewhere, had named Silvanus County the site of a hazardous-waste dump. To Xavier’s surprise, they included not only ill-informed or superstitious country folks but also white-collarites from Philippi: quasi-rural yuppies in brogans, shorts, and slogan-screaming T-shirts. Bari leaned toward Xavier. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know.”
The Mick sported his Ephebus Academy blazer, a pair of clean blue jeans, and some new lizard-skin ankle-toppers. He steadied Xavier with one arm and a supportive shoulder. Feeling the rod of Mikhail’s forearm and the vulcanized hardness of his biceps, Xavier marveled at how strong the kid was getting. Without his help, Xavier would have fallen. His soul would have sublimed like a shallow saucer of booze. God, such mugginess! Who’d summoned today’s weather, anyway? Jacques Cousteau?
Teri-Jo Roving said, “Want to enter the church, Mr. Thaxton? You could stretch out on a pew. Get your strength back.”
“No, I’d like to see this funeral through.”
“Maybe so,” Bari said, “but you don’t want it ending up being yours too.”
“I’m okay,” Xavier said. “More or less. Possibly less. It’s as if all the people here had chunks of kryptonite in their pockets. It’s probably the humidity.”
“No one’s got kryptonite chunks,” said the Burrell woman, next to Bari. “They’ve picked ’em all up and th’owed ’em away. Dr. Woolfolk hopped on the first uns like a frog on a June bug. Then them REVACS people came.”
What was she talking about? Xavier didn’t quite know, but her certainty was comforting. He let his gaze swim back to the mortuary tent. There he saw the preacher, a short, compact man with a grey military haircut, and a band of eulogists waiting to praise the Wilkinses.
One spoke, slowly and ungrammatically, of Carrie-Lisbeth’s “sweetness.” Xavier knew that sincerity must always count for something, but he wished that the speakers’ individual testimonies had more fire, wit, more brevity, maybe even more outrage. When Carrie-Lisbeth’s eulogist finally hushed, Elrod Juitt, the owner of the Cherokee Junque & Auto Parts Reservation, stepped forward to speak.
“This was a really crappy thing that happened to Larry Glenn and his family—I mean, really. This was a boy who loved engine-tinkerin’, chassis grease, and free-style customizing assignments. He was good at what he did too. It pis—hacks me off that the slackbutts in Salonika’s police department could let a junked radiation machine get improperly warehoused that way, and then ripped off by a greedy tribe of shines that rode over here to Silvanus County to take advantage of a ordinary working stiff like me. And, yeah, like Larry Glenn. No wonder our society’s getting sent to Zoobalooba on a Afro-engineered fax machine.
“Larry Glenn wasn’t greedy, though. He wasn’t a saint, Gawd knows, but he had his standards. He did his work. He loved his family. He thought his missus the Madonna of Lickskillet Road. He thought Carrie-Lisbeth was the universe, the Philippi Inn’s brightest Budweiser sign. I felt the same—even if Missy didn’t like me much, even if Carrie-Lisbeth could tighten your jaw with her puley whine. Who’d’ve wanted this damn radiation crap to happen to ’em, though? None of us. Least of all me. They was the salt o’ the earth.” As soon as Juitt walked out from under the mortuary tent into the crowd, two men in dark suits flanked him and took his arms. They struggled, mostly successfully, to direct him through the churchyard gate and then down a treacherous roadside cut to an unmarked late-model car. “What the hell!” Juitt shouted. “What the hell!”
Beside the Wilkinses’ caskets, another eulogist was talking, a cousin of Missy’s, a woman remembering how much, as a girl, Missy had liked to play mumblety-peg. . . .
The men bookending Juitt forced him into the car, a black sedan with polarized windows. No one else among the mourners gave this arrest much thought, but Xavier, fascinated, watched the car slink down the road through a picket line of roped-off protesters brandishing homemade signs that said, among other things,
KEEPING OUR GROUND WATER PURE IS GROUNDS FOR ACTION.
DON’T LET THE WILKINS [SIC]GET PLANTED WITH OUR CROPS, and
WHEN IS A CORPSE NOT REALLY A CORPSE? WHEN IT’S AGLOW.
Juitt’s abductors, Xavier decided, were OBI agents. They had spirited him away without incident in spite of the crowd. First, though, they had let him incriminate himself in his off-the-cuff eulogy (which they’d probably taped as evidence), and then they had kidnapped him. Your tax dollars at work. For once, effectively.
“Look!” The Mick pointed at the coffins. “Jesus, is this unreal or what?”
Striding to the center of the tent, through a row of mourners on folding chairs, was Gregor McGudgeon, fresh from the Augustine-Graham School of The
ology at Skye University in Salonika. He wore khaki work pants, a short-sleeved white dress shirt open at the collar, and maroon sandals. Halted at the foot of Larry Glenn’s casket, he faced the families beneath the tent and the crowd beyond the graveyard’s cast-iron fence. With no accompaniment but pine creakings and the protesters’ ceaseless buzz, McGudgeon sang “Amazing Grace.” His voice, sometimes high-pitched, sometimes throaty, shaped each word as if on a lathe. He concluded with this stanza:
“When we’ve been there ten-thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we first begun.”
By the end, only the ragged pines were crooning with McGudgeon. The protesters had fallen silent. Xavier, drained by the humidity, the parade of eulogists, the resurgence of his syndrome, sank to the grass, his heart thumping like a forty-year-old gas-powered generator. Several people witnessed his collapse, but only Bari, The Mick, and Teri-Jo Roving cared. He hardly cared himself.
We’ve no less days, he thought. No less days . . .
God forgive him, he doubted that sentiment.
67
Fast-Forward Decline
Without his Suit, Xavier grew sicker and more feeble. He did not bloat or vomit, did not develop cataracts, or dermatitis, or any verifiable signs of leukemia—but he aged at the rate of five physiological years a week: thirty years in the next six weeks. His hair turned grey and receded, his facial muscles slumped, his eyes lost their electric quickness, his heart grew fibrotic, his lungs swelled and ached, and his genitals shriveled—it seemed to Xavier—like scuppernong clusters under a parching sun.
Bari hurried to intervene. She petitioned the Oconee Bureau of Investigation to ask Wilbon T. Stickney to return Xavier’s Suit, on the theory that Xavier’s dressing out in it again would reverse his unaccountably accelerated aging. Even understanding that he might suffer a relapse, Stickney yielded the Suit, and the OBI had it airlifted from his safe-house exile on the Gulf of Mexico and rushed to Salonika General in an Emergency Medical Service vehicle as if it were the heart or kidney of a traffic fatality meant for immediate transplantation.
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