Orders
THE ONE CALLED HOD Bundy said to the one called Rape Oswald, “Read me the orders again. I was too nervous to hear them good when Turner read them. Plus that Jane is a distraction.”
Oswald put down his half of the equipment, which appeared to be a heavy power supply, connected by a large-gauge, multistrand umbilical to the half of the equipment carried by Bundy, which looked like a camera or radar gun. Bundy was jerked to a halt by the tautening of this umbilical, because he had kept walking after Oswald deposited the power supply.
— God damn, Rape.
— God damn what, Hod?
— You might give a warning signal.
— You said stop.
— I said read me the orders. I didn’t realize it was chewing gum and walking for you.
— The orders is tucked away.
— I see that now.
Oswald procured the orders in the form of a linty wad from his pants pocket. He procured two Swisher Sweet cigars from a box in his shirt pocket and handed one to Bundy and lit them both and read the orders aloud.
Locate a man who can recognize the hologram cast by this unit — which is charged out to your account and for which you are responsible — and moreover recognize the significance of the hologram (Bedford Forrest). My people in science tell me the emotionally disturbed man may prove most sensitive to this kind of image, but I do not want an unstable candidate. The successful candidate will serve as a prototype man for the New Southerner, a man, if I may say so, much like me, whom I will then have eugenically engineered to found a line of men in the New South who will perforce raise up the Old by eliminating the genetic dearth effected by the War, thereby eliminating contractor’s bottom and other ills. Bring him to me.
Mrs. Hollingsworth thought it funny having Turner say “contractor’s bottom.” She was perfectly aware it was a “manipulation” of Turner, putting “her” words in “his” mouth, also a laughable idea at this juncture. Turner would say “plumber’s ass,” and Jane would stop him, Hanoi Jane would stop him. How a girl like that got a stud like Turner who could make money and sail a boat was beyond Mrs. Hollingsworth.
Bundy said to Oswald, “You get all that?”
Oswald said, “What does ‘moreover’ mean?”
“It’s a word people like Turner use. I have no idea.”
Oswald discarded the Swisher Sweet box, took a bite from the corner of the hologram orders, made to chew it, made a face, spit the paper out, wrapped the remaining cigars in the orders, returned them to his shirt pocket, and then had the idea that he and Bundy should take the equipment just over the hill to the Jacksonville Memorial Gardens and aim it at bereaved men coming out of the viewing parlor until one of them reacted right. In silhouette against the dusking sky, they went over the horizon yanking at each other with the umbilical and cursing and stumbling. Sounds that suggested a fight drifted from their progress.
“And what the hell is contractor’s bottom?” one of them said, from the dark.
Skeleton
MRS. HOLLINGSWORTH HAD MORE doubts about her list, and she was getting tired of them. As ’twere a profanation, she said to herself, recalling the little Donne she knew and liked, of Forrest and the bones of boys — and what about, in sketching these two fond lunatic fools, profaning the memory of the victims of Ted Bundy and indeed — look both ways! — the memory of John Kennedy. What about this?
She put an egg on to think and put eggs on the real list.
It came down to this: how do you profanate the already profane? As much as she detested the craven driving around in their Volvos with their children in crash helmets, there was a reason they were driving around out there like that. Bundy and Oswald were out there littering Wal-Mart parking lots with used Pampers and otherwise trying the burglar bars on their homes. The prisons were full of bad dudes, which was alleged an expression of racism and classism, but it seemed to her, and to the people in the Volvos, that it was an expression of bad dudes knocking people in the head. It was a wreck out there. Forrest had not hidden, and she was hiding, so there be it.
Silly or not, the little love and hope in her golden room over the café were greater than those that operated outside that room in the world outside, or inside, her kitchen. Turner’s contractor’s bottom was handsomer than the plumber’s ass likely to come into her own kitchen if she made a real phone call. She could do nothing about the casualties of war, past or present, and nothing about the souls of the victims of murder, except to entertain herself as best she could while she herself became a spindly skeleton preparing to get into her own uneven grave.
Her Bundy and her Oswald were proving noble in the vigor of their lunatic stupidities. Like any party crashers, they stood a chance of livening things up, if they did not turn out to be utter boors. She was starting to like them, uninvited or not. Where had she got the notion that she could invite, or not, to this party? If to list was to listen, and you listened, you did not speak, you heard.
Breast?
ONE MORNING AN EARLY part of the list caught Mrs. Hollingsworth’s eye. She had entered an item called First Breast Not of One’s Mother. Why had she not entered an item called, say, First Member Not of the Father? Why would a woman enter a Breast and not a Member? She had written of the man’s desire for the woman, and not of the woman’s for the man. She could not entertain a section called Member. What Sally thought of Lonnie’s tallywhacker, a word it occurred to her Sally might have used back then, for reasons she could not fathom, she had no idea. Had Sally been in love that way with Lonnie? She thought so. So why all breast, no glans?
It was as good a thing in the erotic landscape as a tit, certainly, but she did not want to dwell on it. Why would not a fully modern woman want to ponder a penis if she was prepared to dwell on a breast, and in particular on a man’s fond apprehension of a breast? Was she a fully modern woman? She hoped not, but this did not convey to her what she was, or what she preferred to be instead. Women had been martyrs, angels, seed vessels, plowhorses, helpmeets, home economists, hearth sweepers, sucklers, stand-by-their-mans, and now were soldiers except for combat and had cell phones in their pants pockets talking worse realtor/CEO goop than their male peers. What was she?
What did it, life, amount to? If you actualized yourself, became as talented as you could at what you could, bettered yourself in every way indicated desirable by the arbiters of culture in your surround, well then were you not but a fattened bee among the not so fattened bees all around you, all of you going to buzz along chewing something up and spitting something out until you buzzed no more? Now this here was a better bee than that one there. See? It’s got more a them little hairs on it, like. Was it going to be better if you had hummed to Mozart?
A breast was a sexier thing than a schlong, is what it amounted to. She kept her list as it was.
Target
— THAT A “BEREAVED” RIGHT there, I’d say, Hod. He talkin bout beatin somebody up back inside the funeral home.
— What, that thing hears what they say too?
— I guess. How the hell you gone know they saw Forrest?