Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

Too bad, they were slowing down, and riders below him were getting off. Sheffield inched along in his swaying seat, when, all at once, hideous terror struck him full in the chest. Who should be standing just below him, first on the ramp of the impatient waiting line, but four of those Hell’s Angels! There they were! The two biggest of the men, the werewolf one and the sumo wrestler one who’d played the invisible guitar! Plus the girl driver with the propeller cap and the earring through the side of her nose, plus the girl with the crew cut who’d pulled down Raleigh’s pants! He was looking right at them, but they couldn’t see him. He’d recognized them instantly. The ones that had been wearing any clothes that night hadn’t even changed them, but the sumo guitarist now had on a leather jacket with a red devil’s face painted on the back. So, that’s where they’d been headed! The beach! They probably had paid for those Ferris wheel tickets with his money! Mingo leaned over and yelled, “Hey, you Hell’s Angels! Hey you, give me back all my money you stole!”

  The four looked up. So did everybody else. The devil sympathizers did not, however, seem to recognize the enormous man clutching the pink teddy bear, at least not before he was whisked away up the backside of the Ferris wheel. So, the crew cut with the werewolf and the pierce-nose with the guitarist, they fell into their own seats and joined the ride. By now, throwing caution to the winds, Sheffield had turned completely around in his seat and was hanging over the back in order to shout across the spokes at the two couples rocking on the other side. “Hey you! Hell’s Angels! You took our money and beat us up and threw us out in the rain! And you even stole Vera’s pink strapless! And I want it back! Hey you!”

  The werewolf slapped his head. “Shit, man, it’s that fat crazy fairy!”

  “Wow,” said the crew cut girl.

  Round once more everyone went, with Mingo yelling that he wanted his money back, and the Hell’s Angels shrugging innocently for the benefit of the crowd, and giggling to themselves. Finally, Mingo’s seat was stopped and he was bounced out, despite his protests that while he hadn’t been robbed right now on this ride, he had been robbed a few days ago in Mount Olive, North Carolina, by those very two couples laughing at him from the top of the Ferris wheel. “Try a cop,” said the frazzled attendant. But, instead, Mingo waited at the barrier, telling everybody around him how vilely he’d been mistreated in that hellish black van.

  Unfortunately, when the four hoods finished their ride, they shoved into the waiting line, and ran down the up ramp together, as fast as a horde of vandals. They knocked the gate over into the crowd, then loped off down the midway, howling some rock-and-roll song. Mingo, trying to squeeze around the barrier, was knocked down and then pushed swiftly back upright by the angry people crushed beneath him. He took after the hoods in his amazingly fast-footed weave, keeping his eyes on the werewolf’s hairy head and the spinning propeller atop the nose-pierced girl’s cap. For a second, he lost them. Then, there they were, piling into little cars that shot them through the doors of the House of Horrors. Without pausing to think that he was terrified of darkness, not to mention darkness with cackling fluorescent witches leaping out at him, Mingo used his last ticket to squeeze himself and his bear into the next little car, and follow the chase.

  As soon as the doors slammed shut behind him, chains rattled, bats screeched, and a casket flew open with a lit-up vampire in it. Mingo forgot all about the Hell’s Angels, burst into an icy sweat, and started praying, “God oh God oh God oh God!” as his cart whipped along the track from ghosts to ghouls to hanged men. Ahead of him he heard the werewolf’s “Yahhooo! Yahhooo!”

  “Give me back my money!” he screamed, which was a bad mistake. For a second later, something huge and furry jumped into the seat behind him, fixed him with a red glowing eye, squeezed a big arm around his neck, socked him three fast sickening times in the stomach, rumbled, “Fuck off, dork. And stop calling us Hell’s Angels. We ain’t. Yahoooo!” and disappeared. Mingo knew none of this was part of the ride. He was vomiting over the side of his cart when he bammed out through the doors back into the noise and neon. A woman waiting in line turned around and left, pushing her children ahead of her. “Forget it!” she said. “You’re not going in there if it’s that bad!”

  Sick at heart as well as stomach, Mingo Sheffield slumped back to the parking lot. Not only had he failed to retrieve his money, he’d been mugged all over again. On the other hand, he thought, as he drove, rubbing his bruised belly, along the luminous strip of beach motels with nice pools and appetizing restaurants with nice specials, gosh, at least he had chased the Hell’s Angels (or whoever they were); he hadn’t been too chicken at least to try. And, really, when you thought about it, he’d been pretty lucky. They hadn’t taken Raleigh’s money from where he’d hidden it in his windbreaker hood. Or stolen Vera’s bear. And one thing was sure: he probably wouldn’t ever be scared of any ordinary House of Horrors again. And he’d ridden the Ferris wheel and slide, and seen Calabash, and been to—if not a professional massage parlor—at least a whorehouse (which he’d never been in either, having promised his mother decades earlier), and he was having adventures right and left, that’s for sure.

  By the time Mingo had checked into the big brand-new motel, and checked out all the interesting things in the room (including cable TV, a bed vibrator, a cute little baby refrigerator, and some very nice shoeshine paper towels), he was so enormously cheered that he ate two orders of Chicken Cacciatore in the Mermaid Room, where he fell into pleasant conversation with the night manager, who advised him to take a motel-training course, as he himself had done when he’d been laid off by his clothespin company. This fellow was so affable, he agreed to carry out Mingo’s inspiration, which was to add to the motel’s huge illuminated highway sign that had plenty of space left, since it only said, “FRIDAY SPECIAL, PRIME RIBS, $9.95,” the hospitable greeting “WELCOME, RALEIGH & GATES HAYES!”

  Chapter 19

  In Which the Hero Finds Himself at Sea AT “PEACE AND QUIET,” Raleigh Hayes passed much of Friday in conversation with himself; he was trying to give himself the same advice he’d been annoyingly offered by sluggards all his life: “Slow down.” “What’s your rush, Raleigh?” “Where’s the fire, Raleigh?” “Rest easy, Little Fellow.” All his life, Raleigh, ignoring them, had hurried on, to get Somewhere, and if he couldn’t precisely describe that elusive place, he nevertheless knew it existed, and that he had not yet succeeded in reaching it. Instead, for example, here he was now, at the beach, in March, which was the sort of thing that his ridiculous relatives might suddenly decide to do. Moreover, he was stuck here until it was time to run Gates’s “errand,” whatever asinine and probably illegal activity that would involve. He did not for an instant trust Gates to go to Midway without him, and while Raleigh was not at all fond of Roxanne Digges, he did think (even beyond the fact that he had committed himself to carrying out successfully his father’s impossible instructions) it was only decent that a mother’s dying wish to see her son should be honored. Even a careless mother like Roxanne, even a careless son like Gates. Indeed, there was a certain satisfaction in compelling Gates to do the right thing. There always had been. Righteous indignation, properly nourished, had its own stern pleasures. Imagining the coming hospital scene, accomplished under his personally inconvenient supervision, gave Hayes the same satisfaction as the newly hinged door and the dripless faucets that he now surveyed in “Peace and Quiet.” Necessary tasks, well done.

  So, he told himself, he would slow down and endure these detours like Midway and Myrtle Beach. What else could he do? First of all, his infuriating father might be anywhere. The phone call had seemed to come from south of Midway; the telegram had come from Memphis. Memphis! The man might simply be, without plan or purpose, joyriding from one end of the country to the other with his young companion. The hideous image of a map of the United States with a tiny yellow convertible scooting like a bee all over it entered Raleigh’s mind. Earley Hayes had given no inkling of his future whereabouts between now a
nd the thirty-first of March, nearly two weeks away. Apart from bringing in the Bureau of Missing Persons (and, in any case, as Victoria Anna had pointed out, how were they to force Earley Hayes to return to the hospital?), there was absolutely nothing Raleigh could do but passively wait for further messages, which might or might not come, and might or might not completely change all previous plans. He had to wait. For two weeks.

  It wasn’t easy. Hayes liked to think of himself as a man of active virtues; he despised passivity and was contemptuous of sloth, in himself and in others. Every habit encoded in his muscles kept them twitching to return to Thermopylae until the day came to fly to New Orleans and nab his errant parent, to return to take up the plow of cultivating new insurance policies, to take up the rake of combing through the confusion of his home. Every earnest fiber in his brain was convinced that, surely, without him, his clients would vanish, his family would collapse; they and he would all sink quickly into a chasm of poverty and despair, and end their days morosely cramped together in a dank debtor’s prison.

  It was shocking today to hear Betty Hemans tell him business was going on as usual; it was shocking to hear Aura tell him that, while of course they missed him enormously, life was going on as usual, except more dramatically now that she had rediscovered, like an old forgotten bank account, a rich world of interests she’d set aside to raise the twins. It was almost a disappointment to hear that the house had not burned down, that the twins had not crashed the cars, that order had not slid off its throne and rolled away. It was almost a blow to his self-esteem. It was almost a foretaste of death.

  Yes, the first hard lesson Raleigh Hayes had to force himself to master this slow afternoon at “Peace and Quiet” was that he had to learn simply to wait, and the second lesson, even harder, was that he could stand still without the world’s stopping too, and so hurling out of its orbit into Chaos. He could let go of the reins without the horses smashing the sun into one planet after another, incinerating the universe.

  While, with rippled brow, Hayes thought all this through, he was not, naturally, gazing on the beach out over the eternal sea. He was busily repairing everything he could find in his rental property, busily firing his indignant realtor for failing to telephone him personally before giving Gates the key to his house, busily making collect phone calls full of instructions to Betty Hemans, and to Aura—telling her to deposit this money there, and that money here, and water the following plants, and instruct their lawyer to see Pierce’s lawyer about the deed to Knoll Pond, and so forth until she said, “Raleigh, slow down.” In fact, he’d set himself so many busy tasks, he’d barely finished checking the checks on his list when it was time to load up Gate’s motorcycle to run their “errand.”

  Nothing could have been more aggravating than to hear Aura tell him to relax and consider the next two weeks a vacation. He never took vacations, except to come to the beach and do what he was doing now—repair things. He couldn’t afford vacations; he didn’t have the time and he didn’t have the money. Now, the truth was, he did have both, and this was the third hard lesson Raleigh struggled all day to accept. The truth was, he could spare two weeks, and two weeks could spare him. The truth was, if he never worked another day in his life (and if he didn’t live too long, and if he continued his careful frugality), he could live until he died on what he’d already earned, saved, inherited, and invested, and, afterward, his family could live quite nicely on his insurance. Raleigh didn’t want to believe that he had time and money to spare; it rattled every plank of the foundation on which he’d built the stable scaffold of his Life’s Plan. On the other hand, he had a great respect for the truth, and therefore he was struggling.

  Nor did Raleigh want to believe that Aura was right when she predicted, “What fun! Oh, you’ll enjoy that!” upon hearing that he was going on a nightime deep sea voyage with his brother Gates. “I doubt it,” he’d said. And as it happened, Hayes proved to be terribly right.

  He did not enjoy riding in the rain on a motorcycle, straddled between Gates’s back and Gates’s leather luggage, nor going to a sleazy marina where Gates whispered for a long time to a man whose arm and nose were broken, a man who wished them “Good luck,” with nothing but hopeless calamity in his voice. Raleigh did not enjoy his first view of the motor craft called “Easy Living,” or rather “Easy iving,” for the L was worn away. Nor did closer inspection of this craft add to his pleasure, as the boat was a dirty, dangerous wreck, with rungs off its ladder, holes in its flying bridge, rusty cables thrown in its broken toilet, and ripped life jackets tossed in its sink. Its motor had to be kicked into cooperation. Its floor was a treacherous bed of nails, strewn with beer cans and stinking fish, one of which Raleigh stepped on, squishing out its malevolent eye.

  No, it was not all that much fun lugging aboard not only gasoline tanks but the motorcycle itself. It was certainly not an unmitigated treat to be bossed about by his little brother and told to cast off this line and pull in that bumper and check the starboard clearance and read out the depth gauge and stay aft, and other such conceited gibberish. It was less than a thrill to discover as they spluttered under a black whirring sky, out of the sheltered Cape Fear basin to head past Corncake Inlet, that waves rose up to try to stop them, and that “Easy iving” retaliated by slapping each wave as hard as she could, so that everything loose in her (including Raleigh) was flung front to back, back to front, or, as Gates insufferably corrected him, “Fore to aft.”

  At the wheel, Gates, grinning like Captain Blood, looked disgustingly at home in cold black winds and deadly riptides—so thought his brother, as he spun, headfirst, down the galley steps.

  “If you feel queasy, Raleigh, stay out on deck! But sit still. Stop running around. Little choppy.” Yes, Gates was in his element as, louder than the motor and the sea, he yelled laughing at the sky, “Hey, J.C., where are you when we need you, man? Calm these waves for my brother here, and turn this water into wine while you’re at it! Hey, J.C.! Hey Raleigh! Can you believe our old man was a minister?! One of Christ’s boys in the field! Man! What a pisser! Can you believe it?”

  “Yes!” shouted back Raleigh, huddled shivering, despite his army jacket, against the strapped-down motorcycle. “Yes I can.”

  Yes, he believed Earley Hayes was precisely the kind of fool to follow a hobo like Christ over any and every hill and dale. Precisely like John and James, those two disciples who just threw down their nets and ran off as soon as they heard Him whistle, leaving their poor father Zebedee standing there in the surf wondering how he was going to keep the family fishing business together without any help. That was the annoying thing about Christ. He never bothered to think of the consequences. Like when He cast those legions of devils out of the madman and let the devils talk Him into putting them in the pigs instead. What about the poor farmer who’d owned those pigs? Imagine how that farmer’d felt when he heard his three thousand pigs had gone crazy and leaped off a precipice! Imagine how much industry in those hard times it must have taken to raise three thousand pigs! But what did Christ care?

  Thus Hayes brooded on the dark slapping waves. What he didn’t know (how could he?) was that along that very channel, three hundred years earlier, there had sailed, bucking and creaking through the Cape Fear Inlet, the very square-rigged oak galleon that was bringing to that silvery schemer Sir Walter Raleigh’s New World, the first American Hayes. Yes, right through these same choppy waters had come the gullible Obed—who by now knew just how nastily he’d been tricked into five years’ indentured servitude on an indigo plantation. And so tenuously lasting are the styles of blood that Raleigh Hayes was not only in precisely the same foul mood as his ancestor Obed Hayes had been so many centuries ago, felt not only the same heartburning urge to haul God into court and sue Him, he made precisely the same defiant gesture against the Creator. He leaned over the boat rail and spat at the sea—not very far from where Obed had spat in 1660. And Raleigh’s spittle, like Obed’s, was swirled into the vast waters of the dee
p and joined itself to the unchanging, uncaring whole.

  “How you doing, Raleigh? Okay?”

  “Just great!…Gates! Exactly what is it you’re delivering to Myrtle Beach? What is it and where is it?”

  “Oh, that. We haven’t got it yet. We’re picking it up a little farther out! Great night, right!” yelled his brother, wind lifting his curls and flapping the long black scarf he wore like a pirate’s flag.

  No, Raleigh didn’t at all enjoy drifting in a dark choppy cove on the tip of Smith Island at what Gates called “the drop-off point,” drifting while his brother sipped Amaretto right out of the bottle between drags on a marijuana cigarette. He didn’t enjoy having Gates “level” with him by explaining that he was not really in the drug-running business on a permanent basis, but merely substituting for the man with the broken arm and nose, because he, Gates, happened to have a little cash flow problem at the moment. Raleigh shouldn’t think that this sort of thing was his line, because he’d soon be on to Something Big, the details of which he did not, thank God, disclose, since it was already horrific enough for Raleigh to learn that by “gangsters” Lovie must have been referring to certain “South Coast characters” engaged in organized crime, and specifically to someone actually allowing himself to be known as “Cupid Parisi Calhoun,” who was “looking for” Gates in order to compel him to pay back the $15,000 he’d lost betting on greyhound dogs at a Florida track. It was horrific enough to find out that matters were “well, a little more complicated.” That, in fact, Gates had received $15,000 from Mr. Calhoun in order to pay some other people back about the dogs, but he hadn’t exactly gotten around to it yet.

  “You borrowed the money from this Calhoun?”

  “Not exactly.” If Raleigh really wanted to know, Gates had sold Mr. Calhoun, for $15,000, Mrs. Jefferson Davis’s Inaugural necklace, which would have been a remarkably good price had the jewels belonged to Mrs. Davis. But that hadn’t been exactly true, and they weren’t exactly worth $15,000, although their velvet case had cost “an arm and a leg.” Despite the universally accepted business principle of caveat emptor, the “pissant proud” Mr. Calhoun had taken such umbrage at the duplicity practiced upon him (for he’d been laughed at by a young woman on whom he had grandly bestowed the necklace—she knew nothing of Confederate history but was something of an expert on precious stones), so incensed had Calhoun grown that he had taken a public vow to do a number of unpleasant things to Gates Hayes (many of them with a knife).