Now she is showing Sally photos of her sorority house at college, telling her the life stories of each of the women in the pictures, whom they married or didn’t but should have, which are divorced or deceased (“I will be one of the first!”), the famous ones, the infamous ones, the lost ones. There are lots of photos taken at school dances with many different guys on her arm—her beaus, as she calls them. Sometimes in funny costumes, sometimes in jackets and dresses, often in tuxedos and formal gowns.
“Is that Mr. Cavanaugh?” Sally asks, pointing at one of them.
“No, that’s someone else.” She glances up at Sally over her wire-rimmed spectacles with a little half-smile much like the one on her own little-girl face in the photo of bawling Tommy. “Bring me the phone, will you, please, dear?”
Mrs. Cavanaugh’s mischievous look causes Sally to hesitate, but only for a moment. She winks (sisters!) and brings the phone on its long cord in from the hallway, waits until she puts the call through (“Is Edgar Thornton there, please? This is Irene Cavanaugh. That’s all right. I’ll wait…”), then slips away, peeking into the other rooms off the hall until she finds Tommy’s. The usual boy stuff on the walls and shelves, probably not much changed since he went off to college. Virtually no books, except for a Boy Scout manual, some baseball annuals and comicbooks, plus a few books he probably had to buy for freshman courses and has never read. Plato’s Republic, Homer’s Iliad, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, The Golden Bough. Not much to start a conversation with, except perhaps the Boy Scout manual. Mentally awake, morally straight should be good for a gag or two. She thumbs through for it and finds tucked inside a Polaroid shot of someone’s shaggy pudenda. Guess whose. Why would someone want such a thing? Back to history, memory, nostalgia. Anticipated nostalgia. So: basically good news. If he had some grass somewhere, she’d steal it, but there’s none to be found.
On her way back into the sickroom, she hears Mrs. Cavanaugh say, “No, she’s not from around here; by my calculations, she lives about an hour and a half away,” and she decides to wait in the hall. “A private what? Oh, you mean a detective. Well, thank you, Thorny, but I don’t think I want to know. What in eternity, where we’re all going, does it matter? Yes, I know. He told me he was going to do that. I’m sorry for you, Thorny, but we knew he wouldn’t take this lying down. Bernice? That poor noble woman! Well, you must defend her, Thorny. No, I’ve been cruelly cut off from those kind Christian people. I’m becoming a Catholic now, you see. That’s why I was hoping there was enough money left to go to Lourdes. My new nurse will take me. It won’t be cheap. I’ll probably have to be transported there on a litter.” Sally hears Mrs. Moroni returning downstairs and goes in to warn Tommy’s mother. “What? Oh, I have to go now. Yes, I know you switched to an evangelical church for my sake, Thorny. Now, for our sake, I’m asking you to switch again.”
First tee. “That’s a hook,” he informs her when his drive (“Watch this carefully,” he had instructed her) flies into the woods on the left. When he leans close to show her how to grip the club, Sally has to hold her breath. She misses the ball altogether on the first swing. “Keep your head down! Elbow straight!” The second follows his into the woods, though not so deep. She finds her ball then helps him find his. He explains that there is a course ground rule that allows him to put his ball back out on the fairway. That’s the swath down the middle with the mowed grass. The trees and high weeds to either side is the rough. Which, to the left, is where her second shot again goes and his soon follows. She helps him find it. It is a long hole. Par 12 for beginners. Bogeyed.
Second tee. She thinks about the grip, makes an adjustment, sends the ball not very far but straight down the middle. “How did you do that?” her father asks. She shows him. He tries it. Same result: hooked into the rough. He can’t find the ball. She goes to help but he gets impatient and throws another ball down in the middle of the fairway. “Charge me a stroke,” he says. This time she’s at the edge of the green in four, but it takes her another six to get it in the hole. He claims to be there in five, not counting the three times he moved the ball out of the rough, and says his four-foot final putt is a “gimme,” and picks it up without hitting it, nearly toppling when he leans over.
Third tee. She suggests his problem might be he is standing too near the ball and is hitting it with the heel of his club, which is why it keeps flying left. “I think you should stand back a half step.” “If I stand back any further, I won’t be able to see the dadblame ball.” But he takes a nip from his hip flask and has a try, teeing up the ball, assuming his stance, then stepping backwards. He trips over his own feet and sits down hard, which enrages him. He tells her to mind her own business. He struggles confusedly to his feet, takes a wild swat at the ball and knocks it into the woods again. His mood is worsening. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea after all.
Fourth tee. The hole is called a dogleg, because it has a bend—in this case around the woods that hide the old city cemetery off to the right. Yesterday, Billy Don told her a weird story. Darren supposedly went back there on his own and discovered that the small empty grave they found with the golf balls in it had been filled in. Billy Don said Darren’s face was completely white when he told him this. They both assumed it was a supernatural event, a kind of message from the beyond. “Like we got too close to the truth or something.” She considers knocking her next drive over in that direction and going to take a peek while pretending to be hunting for her ball. But it’s not in her nature to do less than she can do and she is beginning to enjoy swinging one of these dumb sticks with the ball-bopper at the end. Besides, another foursome is closing in behind them and her father will need help looking for his ball on the other side of the fairway. So she sends it down the middle again. By now she is beating her father even when he lies about his strokes.
Fifth tee. He finishes off the contents of his hip flask, and swinging loosely and more or less blindly, sends his drive deep down the middle of the fairway. She is strangely moved by the slow loft and arc of the ball. “Now that’s how it ought to be done,” he says. “But it takes practice.” For once he’ll be able to find his own ball. If he can walk that far. The other golfers are already approaching the green behind them: Tommy and his father, Reverend Dreyer in his straw boater, and the new town manager. The slicker who cost her father his job. She tries too hard to impress and tops her ball, sending it bouncing a few yards in front of them. Her father turns to the royal family and shrugs apologetically, what can you do, instructs her once more, loudly, on keeping her head down, eye on the ball.
Sixth tee. A climb to it from the green. One can see almost the whole course from up here—much of the old abandoned second nine just below, as well. They’d probably sell off that land if there was anyone to sell it to. After her flubbed first shot, she has still managed to reach the fifth green in fewer shots than her father, whose rage is building once more. Perhaps because the consoling hip flask is empty. Another long “gimme” has gotten them quickly off the green and up here. In the distance, one can just make out the Deepwater tipple and water tower, the top of the mine hill. Treasure Mountain. The foursome behind are growing impatient, leaning on their clubs as though in exasperation. Two holding up four. Her father hooks his drive into the rough again. “Heck fire,” he says, and without looking for his ball storms off down the hill toward the clubhouse over on the far side of the distant first tee. Sally tees up, swats the ball cleanly down the middle, her best drive of the day (does she turn to see if Tommy is watching? she does not), then follows her father clubward.
“Well, I think Dad’s offering her a one-way ticket, telling her that after the miracle she can swim back,” Tommy says.
“It’s that bad?”
“No, it’s that cool. He’s thoroughly pissed at what Mom has done and fed up with her religious yo-yoing, but he can see the humor in it, too.” They are talking about Irene’s fantasized pilgrimage to Lourdes. Sally wonders if they’d see the humor in his mother’s organiz
ing an afterlife affair with one of her old college beaus. The Christian illusion of spending eternity with one’s nearest and dearest: it’s such a smalltown idea. As Grandma Friskin says, What’s wrong with Heaven is your damned neighbors. They are sitting at the bar in the country club’s Nineteenth Hole after the disastrous Jester-and-Goose-Girl-on-the-Links Day, her dad, barely able to stand, having been whisked away by her mother. Archie and Emily Wetherwax offered Sally a ride home later if she wanted to stay, and she did. One place Angela Bonali will never show up. Babs Wetherwax and her gum-popping high school friends are at a table by the window drinking Shirley Temples and casting long giggly glances their way, but they’re no threat. “And he’s pretty sure he’s going to get it all back and send a few people to jail at the same time.”
“I know. Your dad’s being awfully hard on Aunt Debra.”
“The preacher’s wife? Well, as I understand it, she sold church property and kept the money for herself. Most everywhere you go, that’s a crime.”
“I think she gave it to the cult.”
“Same difference.”
That she’s drinking beer at a bar alone with Tommy Cavanaugh is both fortuitous and the result of strategic planning. She borrowed the family car while her parents were at church and drove past the Cavanaugh house. Not only was the tangerine junker in the drive, the new college graduate himself was on the front porch having a late breakfast and listening to something with a big beat coming out of the living room. Babysitting his mom. Though Tommy’s welcome was underwhelming, he didn’t chase her off. In fact, he had a favor to ask. When his dad gets back from church, could she follow him out to Lem’s garage to turn in the rental, give him a ride back? His dad’s buying him a red Corvair convertible with white sidewalls as a graduation present and as consolation for not being able to travel to Europe this summer with some of his fraternity brothers, and he’s picking it up on Tuesday, the Lincoln available to him meanwhile as his dad has little use for it after tonight until an out-of-town business meeting on Thursday. Sally was feeling pretty grotty, still wearing the tee she slept in—her THERE’S A SUCKER BORN-AGAIN EVERY MINUTE shirt from her last ice cream parlor meet with Billy D—but she didn’t want to lose the opportunity. Anyway, they say that cleanliness is next to godliness, and she doesn’t really want to get that close. At the garage, after a ceremonial visit to the remains of Tommy’s mother’s wrecked station wagon, being harvested by Lem for parts, he and Tommy had a conversation about Carl Dean Palmers, Lem showing them Carl Dean’s burned-out van he’d been asked to haul away. “Fucking insane,” was Lem’s judgment about the burning of it. Yes, Lem said, he’d heard from Bernice the rumor about Carl Dean joining the bikers and doing bad shit at the camp before taking off, but he didn’t believe it. Not Carl Dean. Tommy said he didn’t believe it either, but later, riding back with her, he said he did. He also said he’d agreed to join his father in a round at the club this afternoon, which explained her own father’s gloomy gin-and-juice breakfast, he evidently having been bumped from his usual Sunday foursome slot by Tommy. So she decided it was time to do the father-and-daughter thing and ask him to teach her how to play the game, making him promise to stay off the sauce long enough to make it around the full nine—a promise he of course never kept. She showered, changed into shorts and a crisp white shirt—one of her dad’s old ones, only partly buttoned, no bra—and after the abbreviated golfing tragicomedy, here she is. “Well, a crime maybe. But not immoral.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Sure. Crimes are defined by lawyers and politicians. In some societies, ripping off the rich and institutions like churches is not a crime, it’s a public duty. Morality’s a private choice. The custom is to obey the law, but to defy the law can be a moral decision.”
“You think she did the right thing.”
Sally laughs. “No, a moral decision can also be a pretty stupid one.” She has been thinking about morality of late. The pursuit of aesthetic truth as a moral act. Concern with the trivial as immoral. Writing faults as moral failures. She’s aware that some people think of golf in the same way.
Tommy excuses himself to go, as he says, drain the radiator, leaving her with her notebook. She adds his expression to her scheisshaus list along with “shed a tear” and “squeeze the lemon.” On the way back from Lem’s garage this morning, Tommy wanted to know what the bad shit was, and though she probably shouldn’t have, Billy Don having asked her not to, she told him about the bikers and what they did. That was probably a moral lapse. What Tommy wanted to know when she told him was what was the girl doing there in the first place? You think it’s her fault, you mean? she snapped. She loves this guy? What’s going on? Of course, to be honest, she had wondered the same thing and asked Billy Don. He didn’t know.
Billy Don was more upbeat when they last met, another two-sundae lap-up day. Still a lot of gloom and apprehension in the camp, but he also had a funny story to tell this time about the night Darren discovered he was sleeping with a prairie kingsnake. He screamed and ran out of the cabin yelping that the Devil was after him, and that set off Colin next door, and they soon had the whole camp in a stir. One of the men killed the snake and then the camp cook calmed everybody down with milk and cookies. This happened just after they moved into their new cabin, which has given Billy Don a little more breathing space, for Darren now views himself as a prophet and is very full of himself, more obsessed and bossy than ever. Aunt Debra is evidently now helping Darren with his prophesying career, having come up with some quirky notions about the bikers and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse that people are taking seriously, and Darren is now treating her as something of a seer like Colin, who Darren believes is, in effect, specially wired for divine transmissions. Why it is that dangerous schizophrenics are so frequently taken as holy prophets, she replied, is one of those timeless mysteries of the fucked-up human race. She likes to use expressions like that because they always make Billy Don grin sheepishly and duck his nose in his ice cream, glancing about the drugstore nervously from under his brows to see if anyone else has overheard her. She showed him the invitation she’d received to Franny Baxter’s wedding and he said it was news to him. About all he knew about the Baxters was that they are said to be living in a field somewhere.
Babs and her friends have stopped lifeguard Tommy to ask him when the pool will open. Memorial Day weekend, everyone knows that, it’s just a ploy to get his attention. It works. Maybe she has underestimated the lure of Babs’ boobs. One of the girls drags a chair over and Tommy joins them. Babs glances over at her. Someone laughs. A schoolgirl titter. Who’s going to pay for these drinks? she asks herself, rising. She’s not.
III.2
Friday 29 May – Sunday 31 May
“She was dreaming that she was playing tag with other children. I didn’t exactly recognize none of them, but you know how it is in dreams—especially someone else’s dream. I was one of the other children and I almost hardly didn’t recognize myself. Whenever she tagged someone, they fell down dead. Really dead. Their flesh melting off. I didn’t run away, the one who was me. I said I wanted to be tagged, but she couldn’t do it. She said that wasn’t the way the game was played. If I didn’t run, I couldn’t be caught. Only it was like I was saying that to the person who was me, and I was impatient that she—I mean, me—didn’t get it.” The country and western singer Patti Jo Glover is telling them the dream that Marcella Bruno dreamt one night inside her own dream. Everyone in Mabel Hall’s caravan sitting room is completely spellbound. Lucy Smith has never heard anything like it before, but the way Patti Jo tells it, it seems completely natural. Thelma Coates is sitting across from her and her jaw has literally dropped. Her bottom teeth are showing. Thelma had said she could only stay ten minutes, but it has already been much longer than that. Her husband Roy has forbidden her to come here, so what she does is hurry up her grocery shopping and dash by on the way home, hoping word doesn’t get back to Roy. He’s a mean man. She has a dark bruise
on her cheekbone, and she probably didn’t get that by bumping into something. Lucy’s husband Calvin, who was upset at the way Reverend Baxter and his family were made to go out and live in the fields like animals, would also rather she stayed away from these people, but she always has lots of things to tell him when she gets home and he appreciates that, so he has not put his foot down. He only scowls when she brings him the news, even when it’s funny, to let her know he doesn’t really approve. When they first got married and she did things he didn’t want her to do, he would turn her across his knee and spank her, and though it hurt and sometimes made her cry, it was also kind of fun and often ended better than it began. After a while he stopped doing that, but he can still be pretty severe and occasionally lashes out in a fit of temper that’s not fun at all, though he always apologizes afterwards and they pray together, and when she asks him if he loves her, he says yes.
“Then everything changed,” Patti Jo says. “She was still dreaming and she was still in my dream, but I wasn’t in hers anymore. A man was. I could feel how happy she was at seeing him, and I wondered if it was Jesus she was seeing, but I don’t think it was. For one thing, he didn’t have clothes on and you could see everything and that didn’t seem like something Jesus would do, even in a dream. He was standing in water, or else he stepped into it, and although I was enjoying her dream without thinking too much about it, I could feel Marcella begin to worry. The man dipped his hands in the water, like as if to baptize himself or her or someone, and when he raised them, they weren’t there anymore, just the parts of his arms that hadn’t touched the water. And then I started to worry on top of Marcella’s worrying. The man stepped deeper in the water, or else the water rose up, and you just knew he was losing parts of himself. The business between his legs dipped into the water and when the water went away for a tick you could see that half of it was gone just like you drew a line through. The water got deeper, or else he sank into it, until there was only his head on top. He closed his eyes and his mouth gapped opened and the head floated away like that. And then Marcella woke up crying and I woke up crying.”