“It’s not in great shape, but I suppose it’s doable.”
“Maybe we can get the prospective new owners to put a little money into it. Nick, what do you know about that group, the Roma Historical Society?”
“Not much. Italian Americans. With money. I think one of them is from a family that used to live here twenty, thirty years ago.”
“What family is that?”
“I’ll ask.”
“Unh-hunh. Nick, did the Roma Historical Society have anything to do with the hiring of Charlie Bonali?”
A guy comes in. Vaguely familiar. He’s wearing some kind of scarlet desert smock with blue robes. He announces himself as Jesus. Yeah, that’s probably who he looks like all right. “Son of God? That one?”
“Verily, my friend. The same yesterday, and today, and forever. All hail. But what is this? None of your shoes have laces!”
“Yeah, it’s a kind of plague. One your old man didn’t think of.”
“I count it more a parable, whose meaning as yet escapes me, though I will search for it.” Jesus points down at his feet, one sandaled, one bare. “Behold my feet,” he says.
“First thing I noticed when you came in.” Dave shows him one of his hand-painted CLOSING DOWN SALE signs, not yet up on the front door. “Perfect timing. First two pair free today.”
“I was hoping only to match the one I have.”
“All out. There’s been a run on those things. My entire stock got wiped out in a single day. Must be the weather. But I may have just the ticket. What size is your foot?”
He lifts the bare one to look at it. “I’m not sure. It belongs to someone else. But nine and a half, I’d judge.”
“I think you need to wash that foot, no matter who it belongs to.”
“Well, it has had no rest. If you will wash it, my friend, I will make you a disciple, for he that humbleth himself shall be exalted, as I myself, in a foreign tongue, have been erroneously quoted as saying.”
“That’s mighty generous, pal. I appreciate your pitch, but it’s not my line of work. Nor discipling neither, which is strictly against my principles. But, here, try these on. What do you think?”
Not far away, in the city firehouse, Georgie Lucci is pleading with the fire chief: “C’mon, Mort. Be a buddy, goddamn it. Lemme drive the engine in the big parade.”
“With your record, Georgie, I wouldn’t let you drive my kid’s tricycle, if I had a kid and he had a tricycle, which, thank God, I don’t and he don’t.”
“Is that a long way round of saying yes, Mort?”
They are drinking Mort Whimple’s double-strength coffee, Georgie sweetening it with the hair of last night’s mutt. Another big one tonight: Stevie Lawson’s bachelor party. Have to get braced for it. They’ve already dipped into Steve’s sister-in-law’s gift to them, which accounts for this morning’s hangover, but there’s plenty left. They’d hoped to book the Blue Moon Motel for the party, but he and Steve have been banned from there and they’ve got bouncers now, and besides, they’re dead broke and limited to the bottles of cheap rye supplied by Tessie, so it’s a B.Y.O.B. drift about town tonight. At least they’ll be welcome wherever they go.
Mort fills him in on all the raunchy new songs those hillbillies have been singing out at the Moon, songs about whoring in buses and trailer camps, a jukebox-killer sex maniac, and a new one called “The Night My Daddy Loved Me Too Much,” which Mort says so shocked the locals they couldn’t even clap or hoot afterwards, they all just sat there with their jaws gapping. But after a moment of dead silence everybody started hollering for them to sing it again. “The old beauty I was with started blubbering and couldn’t stop, like it had just happened to her. I never heard nothing like that before, not in mixed company.”
“That’s pretty wild,” Georgie says, sucking up coffee and wondering if he can hit Mort up for a plate of bacon and eggs over at Mick’s. The pressure’s off him now that the mayor has canceled his reelection campaign in the Italian neighborhood, but it also means most of the commissions have dried up. “I gotta hear that.”
“Well, tune in the radio tonight. They’re going live. Some big-ass record company is turning up. They’re headed for the big time.”
When Vince Bonali sees Sal Ferrero arriving with a bag of eggs and a plucked chicken, he nearly breaks into tears again, so he lurches to his feet, bites down on the cigar, and growls: “Hey, Sal. What the hell. Come for the goddamn wake?”
“Yeah, soon as I heard, Vince. That’s rotten news. What’s up anyway?”
“Oh, nothing special. Angela’s fired and probably knocked up, Charlie’s suspended and may get sent to the pen, and the bank’s taking my fucking house away. I’m out on the street, Sal. Other than that…”
“Jesus, don’t cry, Vince. Look, I’ve brought some eggs. Had any breakfast?”
“Lard on stale bread, Sal.” He’s not talking, he’s croaking. “You can’t beat that at the Ritz.”
“Well, come on then, buddy, let’s scramble up the eggs. I also snuck out some bacon. I’m starved.”
At the stove, stirring the eggs with a fork while Vince brews up a pot of weak coffee from the last grains in the can, Sal says: “Listen, Vince, I can take out another loan on my house, and me and Gabriela, we can cover you for a few months and see if we can’t get this sorted out.”
“No, it’s not the mortgage. They’re after me, Sal. I won’t let them drag you down too.”
“Well, at least let me talk to Gaby’s cousin Panfilo. He’s a pretty good lawyer. Maybe he can fight this thing.”
“For free?”
“Sure, for free.”
Though he knows nothing will come of it, that somehow cheers him up, and he carries his coffee and plate of bacon and eggs out to the porch, feeling like he’s getting control of his life again. This is my house, asshole. My whole life is in it—just try to take it away.
Dreamers often remark on the vividness of their dream worlds, which are not perceptions but are very much like perceptions (where does all that stuff come from?), and at the same time on their instability, their dissolving boundaries, their lack of continuity. John P. Suggs is not a dreamer, as he has often said, but were he, he might describe his waking life as like one. Lights come and go. Sounds and talk make little or no sense; it’s like spinning a radio dial. The people at his bedside fade into one another. His personal nurse will be speaking to him in her yattery way and she will grow a beard and become his surly mine manager. This is not what really happens—he knows that, he’s not crazy—but it’s the way his damaged mind is processing the random fragments that it registers. His own thoughts are no better. He hears himself thinking things he doesn’t understand himself. He’s never quite asleep, nor awake, either. But he has these moments of lucidity, and he has to use them. He and the camp nurse—she’s not completely stupid—have worked out a rudimentary eye-blink code. Voiceless, he must act; there is much he must do, and the only action left him is instruction. He waggles his working finger, his call for attention. She pulls a chair up to his bedside with pencil and paper in hand.
Down the corridor from Mr. Suggs and beyond the double doors in the women’s wing, Clara Collins-Wosznik slumps despondently outside her daughter’s room, consulting with the doctor on his morning rounds. He talks too fancy for her troubled mind, but she nods her head at whatever he says. While he is talking, they wheel a dead body by, sheeted head to toe. Clara says a little prayer for the dead person, for herself, for Elaine. Were the doctor not here, she would drop to her knees. So much sadness in God’s world. It is getting her down. She has been able to resume her leadership duties at the camp, working several hours a day in the office in and around trips to the hospital, catching up on the budget and inventory and essential letter-writing, restoring all the weekly practices such as Bible study and Evening Circle, which had somewhat dropped away in her absence, and meeting with all the people out there individually to plan out the rest of the summer, but the old energy and concentrated
attention are not there. She feels like a prisoner of her own creation, able to do what’s demanded of her but no more. It’s still only morning and she’s dead tired. She knows it’s just from worrying and told the doctor so when he remarked that she did not look well and would she like to visit him for a check-up, maybe some blood tests, an X-Ray? She said she didn’t have time; she’d pick up again soon enough when Elaine started getting better. What she’s most distressed about this morning is that the poor child has been put back on the feeding tube again, her hands strapped to her sides, ankles in shackles, head in a kind of brace, and that ugly coiling thing snaking out of her nose like her innards are being pulled out through her nostrils. It is an image to rival the worst of the punishments of the Last Judgment. Ben, who has been somewhat distracted and not his old easygoing self, said in the office last week that maybe they just ought to spare her this suffering and leave it all in God’s hands, that they can’t keep on feeding her that way forever. She was upset by this and told him so, though she knew he was in deep pain, loving the child as if she were his own, and fearing for her. Truth be told, Clara has had similar thoughts and did not object when they stopped using the tube for a time to see if Elaine would go back to feeding herself or at least allow herself to be fed, and she was not sure she wanted the tube back if she didn’t. There’s a nurse out here who has been able to talk to the girl a mite and she did get a few spoonsful down her, but then Elaine clamped her jaws shut and that was that.
“Of course, emaciated females often suffer from amenorrhea,” the doctor is saying in his kindly but frustrating way, “but the urine samples seem to indicate…”
Clara doesn’t know what the doctor is talking about but is too ashamed to ask and she certainly doesn’t want to talk about urine samples, so instead she brings up the issue of forced feeding again. It was just such an awful thing, couldn’t they maybe stop it?
“I’m afraid she seems determined to starve herself,” the doctor says. “We could let her do that to herself, I suppose, but not to the baby.”
What?
“Unless…”
“What are we gonna do about Elaine, Ben? She won’t eat and won’t talk and won’t bestir herself. She probably wouldn’t breathe if she could find a way to stop. I can’t hardly bear to look on her with that thing up her nose.”
“Maybe it ain’t right to make her suffer so. Maybe we should just only leave her be. Let the Good Lord decide.”
“How can you say that, Ben? She’d just go and die! We can’t let that happen!”
“No…but then I don’t know what.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t of come back here.”
“It woulda been worse for her out on the road.”
“I know. (She sighs.) But, well, it’s not right to say it, Ben…but this don’t feel like—”
Darren, hearing someone outside the door in the main hall, hits the pause button, hides the tape recorder under a loose stack of paper, goes to check. It’s only Hunk hauling in a stack of wood for the partitions in the new women’s restroom next door. Hunk grunts and nods and heads off to the kitchen for breakfast, which may or may not be his first one. He eats enough for three or four people, but then his wife and kids hardly eat anything at all, so it comes out even. Clara, Darren knows, is at the hospital, Billy Don is sleeping in after night guard duty, and Mrs. Edwards will be down at her garden by now. The only one he’s not sure about is Ben, but he’s not likely to come to the office unless Clara is here. So, unless Billy Don staggers over early, he should have the place to himself for another hour at least for this urgent task. Which is his alone. The Prophet’s final resting place has been dug. The Fourth this year is on a Saturday; Darren has scheduled the graveside ceremony on the Mount the day after. He is not sure exactly what will happen but he must know everything he can know before then. Ben is less involved since he got back. Darker in mood. God has been a little slow to act, he has said on these secret recordings. Clara said he mustn’t talk that way, but she also seems full of doubt. Maybe those who opposed the temple were right, she allows at one point on the tapes. And now these thoughts that he’s just been listening to from a week ago about abandoning her mission here. Darren, sitting in the office, door closed and locked, ponders this waning conviction, which may be part of a larger scheme of things. It’s almost as though what happened to their daughter was ordained so as to weaken the present church leaders’ resolve, or to expose their hidden weakness, make them more vulnerable to the rise of new, more intransigent leadership strong enough for the end times. Clara and Ben have been brilliant at getting the message out, creating a large movement, playing their part as Ely Collins in his martyrdom played his, but now a new phase has begun, and maybe—Jesus himself had no patience with family sentimentality—they’re not up to it. Perhaps Abner Baxter should attend the ceremonial burial of the Prophet. It might be useful for him to hear these tapes. Darren punches the play button, leans his ear into the speakers, keeping the volume low.
“—home no more. Them Baxters has near ruint it for me…”
“When Clara cries, it sounds more like Balaam’s donkey.” Bernice Filbert, using the private phone in Mr. Suggs’ room during one of his blanked-out times, is describing Clara’s newest crisis to Florrie Cox. When Bernice took a break from her bedside duties in Mr. Suggs’ room a while ago, she walked down the corridor to see how Elaine was doing, and she found Clara down on her knobby knees, looking red-eyed and broken. “Near worse off than her own child,” she tells Florrie. Clara wouldn’t say anything past the noises she was making, but Bernice guessed the problem right away, for she had picked up rumors from the nurses—and the girl’s face breaking out like that, those tiny give-away bumps on her nubbles—rumors confirming what she had been worried about since the day it all happened. She tried to help that day with her nursing skills and miracle water, which does not work for everything, but which, if she could have used enough of it, might have worked for that, but Elaine fought back like a wild thing. Of course, she was scared to death and hurting, but it was more than that; something had got inside little Elaine and it was changing her. “Now the prognosis are that the child is on a straight path to the madhouse if she don’t die first.”
“That’d be a shame,” Florrie says. “I hardly don’t know what to think.”
Bernice remembered that Reverend Hiram Clegg has worked some exorcisms, from what they were saying when he was here a couple of months ago, though when she said to Clara they should ask him back, Clara squeezed up her face like she was having gas pains and shook her head no. She hasn’t told Florrie any of this, simply saying that Elaine has taken a turn for the worse, is back on the feeding tube, and Clara is in a dreadful state. Mr. Suggs is shifting out of his more or less silent seven-sleepers state into his lively speaking-in-tongues mode, which is sometimes followed by a short period of furious clarity, but more often is not. The one thing he seems to appreciate at those times is when she dabs his forehead with her miracle water and recites the magic words, something she did every day back when he was unconscious in his coma, and it does seem to make him better, if only for a moment. She also sometimes adds a drop of miracle water to his bath water, but this so far seems less efficacious. Florrie, hearing him carrying on in the background, asks after him, and Bernice says he’s about the same, though some parts of him are shriveling up and some parts are getting longer. She can hear Florrie trying to imagine what parts she is talking about, so she adds: “His nose, for example,” and doesn’t say whether it’s growing or shrinking.
“Mostly, he looks next thing to a dead man, Florrie. He’s outa his head more than he’s in it, but at them moments when he’s got his wits about him, he’s full up with notions, and he keeps me trotting.” At such times, they use an eye-blink code, which she proceeds to explain to Florrie. “We got blinks for numbers and letters and all that, but mostly we do it by me asking him questions and him blinking once for yes and contrariwise not blinking at all. Like, I say does it begin
with A, and he just lays there, and I try other letters and finally I say does it begin with F, and he blinks, and I try A again, and he just lays there again until I get to L, and he blinks, and I ask, you mean Florrie? And if he blinks we go on to the next word, and if he don’t we keep working on that one.”
“Really? He ast about me?”
“No, for goodness’ sake, I was just giving a for sample, Florrie. Showing you how hard this is.” When Mr. Suggs’ brain attack struck him down, Bernice felt struck down too, for he was what stood between her and a life in prison. But one day a lawyer from the city turned up. Big ballooned-out gentleman with a bunch of chins, dressed in a tailored suit with a hankie in the pocket, and a tailored shirt, too, because all his buttons were fitting just right. Shiny shoes and shiny up on top as well, with just a few yellow-dyed hairs pasted down. He said he knew the sick lady she and Florrie had been caring for, but, no, he wasn’t a friend of the family. It took a lot of eye-blinking, but eventually Mr. Suggs gave the lawyer limited power of attorney, witnessed by her and Maudie and the physical theropest who sits him up every day. The lawyer, whose name was Mr. Thornton, worked out a salary for her, saying she was sort of like a private secretary, taking dictation in this special way, and he seemed to hint that if all went well, there’d be more for her, though he didn’t say exactly what “well” was. He also promised her he’d fight all the thieving and embezzlement charges against her and he did not expect any of them to even get to court because everything was on the up and up, he himself had seen to that. At first she’d thought he might be one of those rascally humanits, but now she knew who he was because she had helped Mrs. Cavanaugh place the calls. Mr. Suggs was so tired out by all these negotiations that he slept for a whole day after, and the first thing he asked when he woke up the next day was where did that lawyer go he was just talking to? “I only wisht I was a better speller, Florrie.”