by Barry Hannah
“There was a funeral. His wife.”
“I express my regrets. I bet she was pretty and kind.”
Marcine looked across the short valley and saw Melanie Wooten standing on her kitchen walk and holding her white hair with one hand in the breeze, still looking Harvard’s way, concerned. But in her church-funeral outfit, black with white pearls at her neck. That woman didn’t die. That’s good, thought Marcine, stunned by this vision across the tops of the sycamores and giant willows. She loved Melanie even more for still living. The points of early spring greening around her.
Inside, Man Mortimer was mellower, gracious even. A fresh towel to his ear, he was expatiating on the foolishness of guns, their cowardice, their chicken distances to things, the modern cheap craven world. With adrenal glands open yet, flooding away, he asked his seated parents whose old Ford wagon that was out there.
“It’s ours,” said his mother. She was uneasy. There is no behavior for a woman in a bait store unless she fishes. The racks of prophylactics near Mother Mortimer were huge, next to brassy naked covers of magazines in plastic thermal seals. Vixen eyes of large destruction.
“Well, get your birds and bags out for Lloyd. He’ll drive it in the lake tomorrow. I’ve got something else for you. Like new. I’m putting you up at the casino hotel, first-class, long as you want. All my houses are under construction, repairs. But we’ll give a party. A fine band. We don’t have to travel to Branson, Missouri, to any concert. Good as the Oaks are. They’ll be by here soon, unless they find out you’re here and too wild for ’em.”
They did not pick up on this joke, but he was their boy all over again. Mortimer felt this too, and this time he liked it, wounded, hiding his fury.
“Son, you’re badly hurt,” said his father. His mother touched him. She had been cleaving to her husband. Edie, middle-aged but with long good legs, got Mortimer out the door and drove him to the clinic, then home to Rolling Fork.
“Man comes back soon, Mrs. Mortimer. Don’t worry. His business is big. Big, big. It wears on him, but he’s a blue-steel spring,” said Lloyd.
When Sidney at last came in the store, half drunk and full of funeral gossip, Mortimer’s parents and Lloyd and Marcine had gone. But he saw the blood on the floor and heard tales from Pete Wren, who knew little but shared it anyway. He did know that Mortimer was hurt and that his parents had come down for him.
“He’s getting weaker. I could own it all,” Sidney whispered.
In a black Ford Expedition, alone, was Bertha, dead now. The windows were smoked, nobody knew for a long while she was there. She had swallowed Valiums and barbiturates with a cold quart of Country Club. Saliva webbed down her chin. She just couldn’t take it anymore. Her age, who she was, holding the smiles till her cheeks hurt. Leading Marcine into the life. Several hours would pass before any thought to find her, because she was like good old furniture to hand. She was cordial always, yet a quiet one too, and well dressed and combed to the end. Peden wanted her badly. He thought to save her and missed by one day. Their date would have been the day after Nita’s funeral. Gone. Blood now to her belly and the rigor passing through the smile.
Harvard backed the barge away from the pier and the boys, ever quick, helped on the lines. They wanted to drive, but he was making them watch carefully. He was afraid of being close to Melanie, so they sailed downshore to his own lawn and berthed on the grass. Although the launch was mainly his project, there were several zealous pilots and many of them keen to impress their own friends who were gathered to this beauty. But Harvard did not care. He would have his grief and his boys.
They went first to the room where Nita had died and took the flowers to all parts of the house so they could see them while they ate and talked.
Another funeral at the church. Preached by Byron Egan. Peden, heart breaking, was not allowed in. Egan did not want him to see Lloyd, Edie, Marcine; the other whores and reivers, black and white; car thieves wearing white socks with suits and thick rubber-soled cross-trainers. Speed and grip. Peden sat outside in the bleak blue Nissan. He listened through a window and held his gun.
Many robins got in the church from the trees and roosted among the congregation. They were drunk from some berries and fallen persimmons. Come into the mead hall out of the chill. In Viking history, once a Christian described human life as the flight of a bird through the mead hall. The outerness afterward, eternity.
The relations of Bertha sat in one sullen and miserable huddle in the front pews. Ronny the body-shop man was among them, barely recognizing his old girlfriend Marcine. Man Mortimer and his parents sat right behind them, concerned and prim in black and white mourning clothes newly bought in town. This was not New Orleans, where they knew best how to mourn drug addicts, evening ladies and jazz mothers. This place had none of that city’s archaeology of concentrated sin.
Bertha’s casket was open because she was at peace and made lovely by the beautician’s touch. The beautician was her weeping but fastidious cousin Elka, who wanted in the Mortimer business. She wanted to take Bertha’s place and knew well what she did besides shift car papers. She knew she could be tough and loved to fornicate anyhow. Elka wore white and pink today and sat near a quartet with whom she was committing three-cornered adultery.
Elka used to run in a circle of lower-Delta party girls who performed on crop dusters while they were flying and poisoning, just for the memory. Under the telephone wires, up quick. Then down for the gin and Costume Ball of the Scots in Panther Burn. Or dynamiting with bachelors in Robinsonville, making new homes in old levees and Indian mounds, where whole old guys might come out, and their pots.
Sidney Farté was in attendance to pick up his rumors. Many thought Bertha had killed herself because Sidney had been with her, and Sidney spread this rumor around as fact.
Frank Booth sat beside Ruthna, motionless. She had told him she knew Bertha and really loved her. Had once roomed with her at the Olympics in Atlanta. Booth was there for Ruthna, and to confront Man Mortimer with what he was now, a Conway Twitty face fresher than Mortimer’s own, unlined. Nobody knew what Booth had on his mind, although Edie, who always carried a North American .22 Magnum derringer, promised to blow his head off if he came near Mortimer in his feeble condition and new black ear. Especially with his parents visiting or maybe even come to live, and he was surviving by their ignorant ministrations as he brought them here and there to bits of his empire in the lower Delta and in Vicksburg. They were amazed the river was so wide, having never expended the energy to look at it directly in Missouri. They recalled only fearing it and now feared it more. They were eighty. They had retired in good financial condition, but it meant little to them with no son, no hobbies and the new small house. No chickens inside city limits anymore. They had been sad for thirty years and wondered how especially terrible they were that he had run away from them. They went to church often and desperately and watched Help Me on television, in case he called out or somebody found them.
Now they had found him, they dreamed separately that Man Mortimer was not a nice person, and they tried to force a good dream about him, but it would not come. Then they began to remember how selfish a child he had been. Yet their love loved this too. They recalled that he was vicious, calculating and secretive, and they could see right through his present act, yokels that they were, and parents, at this very funeral. His counterfeited sorrow for Bertha. Still they loved. It was too late not to love, and it did not matter anymore where they themselves were. It was having him close, that was what life was for in the end. It mattered not where they slept. They barely wrinkled the bedspreads in the Gold Bowl room he got for them, mermaids on the wallpaper. Mrs. Mortimer’s canaries thrived. The maid found the Mortimers so lost she took them on as a project. And they must help him, their son.
It was very intimate here, at the Church of Open Doors, open for the lost and dead of all causes. Raymond sat next to Mimi, his temples gray now and growing hair behind, as if to take up the ponytail Egan had shave
d. He was disconsolate near the man who had stabbed him. He had tried to forgive him, but not very hard. He wished to be taken into a different room of heaven with Mortimer’s blood on his hands. He did not require whole salvation, just a little table with books and coffee, pens and paper, the saxophone. Now Mortimer was little and sick. The monster Lloyd was close to him. Raymond hid his murderous thoughts from Mimi, who had dressed up to hide her impatient body. Long dress, lapels. She had no allegiances here. She was weary of Raymond. Weary of the band. Of herself. Of the lake. Why were they still here?
Then she remembered. They had no money. Even nature palled when you had no money. Nature was without religion sometimes when you looked at it poor, and all the creatures seemed bedraggled and begging, hardly getting by. You saw a fat one and wondered. Where was she getting her orders? They had the church. Then there was other money coming, the CDs, but that had proved a more difficult game than Raymond thought. He would always find some money somewhere, she believed.
Mortimer seemed comfortable sitting by his parents, perhaps enjoying his slide to invalidism. Or coiling tighter. He did not know how to act at a funeral, so he looked tragic, but the effect was that of lurid grinning. Egan saw this and the face almost ruined his eulogy.
Which was that Bertha was quiet and unknown as in Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and that she hurt even in her prosperity like “Richard Corey,” the suicide who had it all, as others cursed their bad bread and envied him. Did God accept suicides? There was a case for His Own Son’s hesitant suicide on this earth. And so much cloudiness here as to shut up the meaner of us who wanted to keep souls out of heaven. Heaven was many houses, very big and wide. Many mansions, many houses, as the savior promised us, or He would not have told us so in His words. Many and large. “May heaven rest her soul in a home she can decorate at leisure,” Egan said. Some of the crowd laughed; most didn’t care but loved a good send-off where you met others who were horny from close death like you, among food and drink afterward. Four were simply dying for a smoke and had no opinion right now of God or the century just passed or Bertha. Bertha’s mother would weep later, with a Marlboro Light inhaled and going.
Max Raymond suddenly knew his vision would come at the end of his life and not a moment before. He was nearly blinded by the realization that he was a nuisance to both God and man. He repented. He would act. He felt expendable to a higher power and this was good. He was resigned but in no way sad. He thought of Bertha as she went now, and he prayed to her in that black paradise.
Elsewhere Ulrich watched Melanie’s greyhound. He couldn’t get over it. He loved the face of this gentle beast, hunched as if alarmed by its own aerodynamics, its eyes sliding away, seeking affection as if its whole soul were poised on ice and betrayal lurked beneath each footfall. Of course Ulrich wept, but not too much.
“Where do you live, son?” Mortimer’s mother asked. They were seated at a restaurant under the bluffs in Vicksburg. Beneath its foundation, it was said, were many who had received fire from Federal gunboats, who were losing to the rebel artillery very badly in 1863. Hundreds of bombs and cannonballs fired from the gunboats, many of them on fire or in other distress. Attack from the water was impossible, and even running the water was deathly. The river lit at night with all kinds of barrel flares and wrecks, perfect for gunners who could knock the heads off chickens at a mile. Lord God, war was fun for a while, till it crept up on you.
Now the riverbed’s mass grave held a high-beamed, wide-planked bar and grill, that served oysters, fish and pizzas, and fresh salads from gardens nearby, fine French bread twists. Mortimer liked the lassitude here in the ferns and shadowed glass, as if the dead boys dancing with death had built it just for him 135 years later in a flush Vicksburg, very paved and rolling. Thinking of those good boys and their wails really widened the head for thought.
Mortimer looked benevolently at his mother, but this look was another unnatural one for him and he wound up grinning like a coon. He didn’t like to be alone with them because they were getting heavier on him with questions, since they knew nothing beyond their county. They had no life except breathe the old air and sleep again. Mortimer thought, I don’t know anybody even nearly this old except the fools at the pier and Sidney, who was growing younger, curiously.
“I have several homes. The construction has been slowed by the rains.”
“Why do you lie, son? It ain’t rained,” said his father. “We don’t care if you live in a palace or a doghouse.”
“It has rained where they are. They’re in other counties, spread out. I haven’t got them ready for guest occupation. Can’t you wait? The Gold Bowl too racy for you? You’re afraid of gamblers and performers getting under the door?”
“No. We don’t even want to go to your house except to be closer to you. That doesn’t matter. We only want to know more about you and your life and friends. You know we have money. We have nothing but patience. We try to not even be here. I know that to you we are plants and hardly animals, son.” Mortimer glanced up at his father in shock. Not a finer man in the county than whatshisname, your postman dad.
His mother came in. “Yes. Why do you get shot?”
“I don’t get shot. I shot myself hunting snakes.”
“We never saw no gun. We saw that weird chopping dagger.”
“Don’t lie again. We’re old enough to smell out these stories, they don’t save us anything painful. They’re hard on us, they hurt. There’s no cause for lies here. Even if you were a gangster, a car thief or married to several women at once. We came to love and have you. Our right.”
“I’m a lot too old myself to have to tell everything to my folks.” Mortimer spoke to the side of his parents’ ready faces.
“I guess you always were. Old that way,” answered his mother. They saw him now after long staring, and he didn’t like it one bit. But on the other hand, he liked being the suspicious boy, charged with secrets, staring out at the rain and the chickens with tears in his eyes.
Sheriff Facetto and Melanie walked in along with Harold and Dee Allison. The married woman was using the last name Laird now, neither happy nor unhappy about the new echo of herself. Dee A. Laird. They sat very close to Mortimer and his parents before they knew who was there, at booth two over near an aquarium of riverine life and the oyster bar. The parents remained unfazed when Dee and the others saw them. Bland mysteries, aged, to the arrivals. They seemed too soft for him even now when he was ill and hurt. Perhaps they were his angels, his salt of the earth, as all men have somewhere. Or perhaps they were midwestern corn money, that very serious corn money you heard about, come down to blow some at the casinos.
The sheriff stared at Mortimer, and Mortimer knew he would do something merry and humiliating to this boy soon. He looked Dee over slowly as if he were a total devoted stranger. Recalling their nights. Dee was looking nowhere, then suddenly directly at him.
Harold had gained weight in his shoulders, his forearms were muscular, his brow and spectacles, new, were intent. Serious mechanic, his own business, his own solid woman.
The sheriff wondered how Mortimer was hustling these old people of the Corn Belt. They dressed in checks and hard shoes. They might be Creationists gambling for their church fund. He had encountered this oddness a few times. They won too. Seemed to have a system or better prayers. What changes the man had, even looking now like that lounge comic with the enormous head and hair, Brother Dave Gardner. Weird interpretations of the Bible, impressions of crashing yokels who couldn’t handle technology.
Harold was into a long declamation on mechanics, and it gave the sheriff time to think. His woman was drunk, and he was deeply in love with her. Her white hair was in some disorder, and he did not know what to do. He was adoring the world more and yet losing in the eyes of men, and this was plain in the sad look he gave himself in the mirror each morning as he combed his short hair. He wanted a smart marine look. Acting, acting, he was a ham and never denied it. Several still loved him for it
, especially women he did not respond to at all. The only one who moved him was Melanie Wooten. Maybe he was making up for his failure to save his mother from his father, who had them both cowed. He didn’t care. He was at the end of his sheriff’s term and opposed by a very tough dumb man with a history of penal administration. Hoover “Who” Hooks put his posters up quick. “Who” despised Facetto.
Crime was not particularly rampant, in fact it was calm, but Hoover insisted Facetto was lax. He wanted pawnshop spies, vigilante groups against whores parked in neighborhoods, did Hooks. He derided Facetto as a schoolmarmy dramatist whose body was in too good a shape for him to be doing his job.
“Who” accused him of wearing Man Tan and shining his haircut.
The subject of Melanie Wooten also had floated to “Who,” and a campaign of rumor began, to the effect that Facetto was deeply odd. Melanie was aware of her bad name, and she drank.
Dee did not get around much anymore. She was a bit softer if not heavier. Inside she suffered high winds, terrible lightning and hail. She saw pictures that would not stop, the dead and wrecked, children, guns, high explosives, felt hellish thunder. She stared as if down a string of blocks through a town flattened by a tornado. She saw Mortimer holding an oyster on a tine, dipping it in Tabasco, hunting her with glances.
Facetto could hardly believe this man had come toward him a few months before on a Norton Commando motorcycle like his own, in Mountie boots, laughing like a twin. The man who had wanted to join the nonexistent launch club after he fell shrieking into the snakes.
“Dee?” Melanie asked brightly, “how’s your thing? I mean, when you really get down to it, we old things want to keep up.”
Dee smiled for the first time in the evening. Mortimer’s table had heard.
“Is she a harlot?” whispered his father.
“She’s my woman,” whispered Mortimer. “The younger one. The old lady’s just drunk and lively. She can’t stay away, Dee Allison. Married now, but we belong together.”
