by Barry Hannah
“May we come aboard slowly and singly? You’ve done a splendid job,” their captain, Gene, cried.
“What are all y’all so goddamned happy about?” demanded Sidney.
“Mister Mortimer brought back our silly runaway girls. Minny and Sandra tried to break in his Clinton house and he brought them back to us. He could have turned them in to the law. He’s what this world is made for!” said the woman at high volume, thrilled, radiated by the deed of another.
“Ain’t that forty-five miles or so?” Sidney wondered. “Well, unlawful hitchhike, true.”
Sheriff Facetto took Melanie Wooten to the high school football game in the last week of August. It was in a different county, east twenty miles in the town of Edwards, out of the loess hills. Facetto had once played the sport and done well. Big and quick but not a fast runner. A dodger. He was first team. He now reflected under the lights, sitting down with Melanie, that every other cop he knew was a second-stringer. Usually the ones who knew the game better than the starters, as they explained full-bore. The players tonight were a third again bigger than his team. He wondered if he would find his younger self here, running toward a line as if it mattered hugely.
God help me love these country lizards, he asked during the before-game prayer. Lord, may there be significant but not tragic hits made to the other side.
I run back and forth between them. So they sleep safe in their beds, thought Facetto.
He had gotten a call that afternoon, a wild, high voice on the other end saying, “My uncle put out cigarettes on my forehead for twenty years.” “Why didn’t you do something, or move?” the sheriff asked. “What could I do? He was blood,” the reply. His uncle had just died, the man said. He wanted his uncle’s corpse arrested.
Some fans recognized Facetto as they found their seats, and they thought he was there with the newly divorced governor’s wife. They could not fathom this bright scandal, but who knew? Mastodons, tapirs and buffalo had roamed here once. Coyotes had made a vast migration east to Connecticut. You just couldn’t tell even who was where anymore.
They adored the scandal until somebody said no, that isn’t her. Then they turned their wrath on this person, for otherwise that night was charged with wild meaning, and their lives attached to it, like the football. “She’s an actress,” the person said. “I seen her playing the modern queen of France.”
“There isn’t a queen of France, liar.”
“Fuck you.” A squabble broke out several rows behind Melanie. Facetto made a pacifying gesture and it settled.
Melanie looked ahead, understanding a bit of the game from her years with Wootie but more delighted now. Blown by the first cool breezes of the season. Once or twice he touched her knee. She went wet as an oyster, blind with tears.
A blond cheerleader twisted and hollered for the love of the night and her own fame. Usually the cheerleaders were watched by their parents and pals only. Except when a flash of thigh. Mortimer was watching.
The sheriff told Melanie, “Men don’t want eternal life so much as the years sixteen to twenty-three back, with what they know now and their bodies no longer middle-aged.”
“You’re not even middle-aged. Don’t try to impress me.”
The cheerleader struggled on. You don’t know me yet, wing and thigh launched in air. Know me. Eat me up.
Mortimer went to the men’s rest room and waited, leaning on a wall, then standing again. Between urinal troughs, doing nothing else. The teenagers, children and few fathers who saw him didn’t know his function. They couldn’t read his troubles. Nobody lingered in this bunker. There was no leisure space here. Somebody said he was half-time entertainment, but shit, why would he loosen up here? Maybe to escape pesky fans. Sure, but who was he? Not dick if he was playing here. Some were disturbed as by the ghost of Twitty, but they couldn’t identify his age, if he was supposed to be dead or if it was his son. The tall thick waves of hair, the thyroidal eyes that swept them, then looked out at the concessions. A celebrity down on his luck. One said he was Russian. In black polished loafers with that special glare when you’re either from the casino or in sales.
Then a small boy came in alone.
“You having a good time? Having a good game?” asked Mortimer.
“We’re not having the game, we’re watching it, mister.”
“Could I play?”
“I said we’re not playing it.”
“Come on. Tackle me. Show me some touchdown.”
“I’ll go get my daddy.”
“Sure thing. He could play run up my ass. But sonny, you see that man at the hot dog counter. That’s my friend Mr. Booth. Please go tell him to come in here. I’ve found his wallet. Call him Mr. Booth.”
The boy went out and Mortimer watched him call Frank Booth in the line. Booth felt his pocket, lifted out his wallet and looked puzzled. But he came.
Booth walked in, and by the time he had opened his mouth to say thanks but he had his wallet on him, Mortimer had seized him by the face and cut him so quickly over and over on his cheeks, brows, even neck with a carpet knife that he was not yelling until it was over and his face was streaming blood. Then as he knelt squealing, Mortimer straddled him, knowing he could strike across the throat. But he did not. He said something about higher law and Booth’s not wanting to find Mortimer because he might want to keep his eyes, then ran from the blockhouse with a clap of loafer heels. The concessionaire who watched him said, “That sonofagun went out of here like a running back.”
Mortimer entered a strange car. It was his but strange. The car was new and had a grumbling muffler and nobody on a bet would guess he’d be caught dead in it. It was a Trans-Am with a firebird painted across its hood such as the car punks of every trans-Appalachian district would use to demonstrate muscle and arouse fright and disgust. He had never had the thrill he had watched richer boys have, North and South. Burning gas loudly and for no point whatsoever except to warn the universe. He saw them chase girls, the cars of troubled librarians, teachers at the end of their rope. The muffler spoke to his blood. Leave rubber, leave pavement, leave governance. You got your foot in something, but it feels like you’re kicking it. Cock-deep in internal combustion, metal, fire and gas.
It was five minutes before anybody could remember a sheriff was at the game. Two local officers had gone out into the parking lot, hunting between cars slowly on foot. But with grim authority, warning all others to stand back. This was not really an issue, as nobody was standing anywhere except for the small group around Frank Booth outside the Masonite bunker. Milling, they watched this stricken man, and you could not have paid them to follow that monster into the night.
The sheriff told them he had no power here. He was out of his jurisdiction and not armed. He did not offer to help, did not even arise and walk to see the man’s ravaged face, and this was held against him. He had swollen up beyond the workingman, him on TV. Him and his sugar woman. They would go off and drink their wine and forget where they were from, which was where?
Melanie was not aware of their ebbing popularity. Her smile was radiant under the lights, she was a moist girl, serene. To the east the ambulance crept in with dogs barking around it. The crew took off a beswathed thing who cursed God through a hole in the gauze.
Facetto said they had better leave.
The cheerleader, ignored all around, stared at the powdered dirt on her shoes as if her face had fallen there.
The sheriff was not affectionate in the county car and let Melanie out in a mood he apologized for. He said for her to lock her doors well, and she looked at him curiously. For all his build, he seemed a frightened boy. The night, or the people in the night, concerned him, reached out and held him. She had never seen him nervous before.
At the office late, he was hoping he saw somebody who admired him, but there were either those who didn’t or other subhumans. Help me, he thought. I’ve acted my way into this job. I am now an officer and a coward. There was a note on his desk from an anonymous ha
nd: PLEASE REMEMBER TO ARREST THE CORPSE OF MY UNCLE.
The next morning a call came in at four A.M. and dispatch awoke him at his nice apartment near the old Catholic school and convent. They had found the old owner of a bait store early this morning with a missing head and a football stuffed in its place.
It was six before Facetto arrived at Pepper Farté’s bait store. Facetto didn’t even live in the county, and this was not known yet. He seemed to push them and dare them, didn’t he?
The smell of minnow water, cricket refuse, crawfish aerated in a tank where hundreds of these bait crustaceans clicked together in the sound of sprayed mist on aluminum, each on its way to digestion by one monster or another. Pepper despised everyone, a deputy told Facetto, but he was up to date on bait, he missed nothing in colors, wiggle or odor that was the rage nationally on black bass, white and black crappie, blue and yellow catfish. The black bass was so sought after for its hard hit and pull, sometimes a full minute before boatable, and the expenditure so enormous per decent fish, that you came close to an industrial religion of bassers. Pepper would have sold colored New Testaments with hooks in them if that’s what the bass wanted this season. Because the fish tire of the same colors, trim and wobble after a season, like high-fashion ladies. Crawfish were big this year for largemouth bass. The next year they might be ignored altogether. There was an era when fish hit bath soap as it dissolved underwater. Pepper knew all this. He knew that bassers expend a ration of money to bass almost exactly that of modern warfare. In Vietnam, for instance, the budget was one million dollars per dead Viet Cong. Bassing was a war, in fact, and the exorbitant fiberglass boats doing sixty over water spread in miles of honey holes was about like an airport where no machine did anything but taxi. This was music to Pepper’s ears, if he heard music at all. He was an institution and not a poor man.
A part of his store was devoted to army surplus. This was a brisk trade too. Fishermen are fetishists about equipment. They are high-lonesome folks and need to surround themselves with goods like knives with good edges, whetstones for sharpening hooks, superior lanterns, army rain ponchos, machetes and cut-down twenty-gauges for snakes. Pepper had been done in, after general laceration by some other sharp edge, by one of his own bolo knives. These short and thick machetes will take down an old kudzu trunk, which is like a sapling. They cut so quickly the parted end stays in the air a millisecond before falling. The Bolos were frightening commandos and guerrillas in the Philippines. Heads rolled.
The football concerned Facetto. They had left it in, the deputies, one of them Bernard. The corpse had no family to horrify, for his son stood right there, conversing too cheerfully around it with the police and photographer. It might have been an exotic cargo just in that Sidney had ordered for a conversation piece. The store was his now. He told stories about the old man, none of them pleasant, since Pepper’s fatherhood of Sidney at the age of fifteen. No mother came into any of these stories. Three of the cops knew Pepper for a rude bastard, but still. There was blood everywhere and one of the cops was a woman. She noted the mother was dead and now the father was dead. In this family, dead meant dead. Sidney’s wife had been dead for four years, and he recalled little about her.
Facetto told the deputies about the mutilation the same night over at Edwards. It was not his investigation, but somebody had called him about midnight just to chat about committing his uncle to a mental ward or Onward. A pastor Egan. The old man was loose on the fields as they spoke, and nobody had seen him for days. So he was a missing person too, and a candidate for the bin when and if he was run down.
The football game, the football game, Facetto kept saying to Bernard and the woman corporal.
“Conway Twitty and football,” said Facetto. Sheriff Millins of Hinds County, who liked Facetto, had called him earlier too, right before he left the office. A man resembling the singer Twitty standing around the urinal talking football with a child. The little schoolboy knew more about the game than the tall man. Very odd. Another eyewitness said the man dressed like a pedophile. This witness was the boy’s father and the description meant little besides shiny black loafers, as far as Millins could tell. He could run fast, this perp. Somebody heard an open muffler or glass pack. A driving nun had been threatened on the road by a car with wings on it, loud muffler, she said. Wings on it.
“Did your father play football?” Facetto asked Sidney. “In high school, that you know of?”
“He didn’t get to but seventh grade. He never played nothing, except he was in the merchant marine in a liberty ship that was blowed up right outside its own harbor in Port Aransas, Texas. He started swimming. He couldn’t swim, but he damn well did swim. A German Nazi torpedo boat was chasing them sailors too. It couldn’t just shoot the boat off the water. Them Nazis was mean.”
This was the only near-positive story Sidney had ever told about his father, who leaned off the stool stiff with rigor mortis and with a football for a head. The actual head lay just to the east of the stool on the filthy oiled floor where he had stood for fifty-five years. Sidney appeared to have a lump in his throat all of a sudden.
“He cared about his own life, I guess, back then. Well, folks change.”
“You don’t think he cared for his life?”
“I don’t give much of a shit for mine,” said Sidney. “Do you?”
“My life, or your life?”
“Well sure you care for your life. You tappin’ Mrs. Wooten. You tappin’ that old pretty grandmother, son. You gone break ol’ Bennie Harvard’s heart when he finds out.”
Everybody there, twelve, turned to look at Facetto and Sidney. Facetto simply went out and got in his car. Bernard was the only one who noticed his hurt and confusion. That was a mean little fuck himself, Sidney. They had a tradition here that broke with southern civility. French. Just straight mean and rude and unnecessary, this line.
Facetto had two idols as investigators. One was the well-known sheriff of Coweta County, Georgia, the man who had no unsolved crimes in his county during his tenure in the forties. A man of humble genius and savvy. But look. What about the population. Small. Homogenous. Everybody a cousin. Little to kill for. Finding a murderer might be like finding Frankenstein in an elementary school. What would he do with crack, folks killing for cell phones, sneakers. Fiends off the highway rearranging someone’s body for some aspirin, for methedrine, sometimes just for the hell of it.
The other was a brilliant investigator in Mexico City. Plenty of unsolved untold everything. But the quick deduction. The five-minute profile. No, not a murder, a suicide. See here. Exactly the right thing. Piece of bird shot in the ceiling. Feather on a finger from a pet pigeon. The blood on it there. No other bird would stay close to a gunshot. So his first model would be Lieutenant Maury Fuentes.
The sheriff seemed nonchalant, but he was afraid. These cuttings and the phone calls drew him into a family of hurt he did not want to know. He was paralyzed.
He could not think about this case and had no interest. He wanted only to pull the panties off of Melanie Wooten and enter her and listen to her make her joyful noises again. Straightening and pumping her nice legs and girl’s bottom. He was consumed by love for her. And afraid anywhere she wasn’t.
It was only eight in the morning, but he drove straight for her house.
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 E
gan 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.
