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Mother love, to be celebrated in Lennox’s forthcoming Sunday sermon, was also what roused Veronica at last from her backyard stupor and sent her out alone into the dark unfriendly night in search of her, well, her son, so to speak, her bad-penny Second John: slimy, hideous, mindless, but pathetic, too, utterly helpless, needing her, his only mom, how could she have wanted to hit him with an ironing board? Everyone at the party had been complaining about the slime trail, most of them blaming it on the monster woman, so even at night it was easy to find and then to follow, not from east to west but from dry to wet. Some streetlamps still burned but most were out and she walked through patches of absolute darkness where the power seemed to have failed with only the slime trail itself, faintly phosphorescent, to show her the way. It led eventually into a noisy bar, one she’d never been in before, a saloon more like, with a big bar made out of railway ties, the only thing vaguely familiar, and sawdust on the wooden floor and gaslamps hanging over wooden tables where loud drinking men played cards and broke into brawls and vulgar songs and laughter. She saw him in a corner, on the floor, still swaddled and hooded loosely in the dirty sheet he’d been wrapped in, the little mendicant with the big head and shriveled limbs, her boy, sort of, her Second John. The men were teasing him, flicking their ash and flinging their beer dregs at him, spitting on him, kicking him, and ridiculing in despicable ways his tendency to suck at anything that neared his hooded face. Veronica braced herself (why did this remind her of some of her most awful moments in high school?), then marched over to stand between them and her son, remembering only after she’d got there and they’d all rudely reminded her with roars of laughter that the borrowed linen dress she was wearing was split up the back. She scolded them in a high-pitched voice she could not quite control for being cruel to a handicapped person who could not defend himself and who wasn’t even a child yet. This sent them all into howls of finger-pointing laughter, spilling their beer and tipping tables over. “You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” she shouted, and knelt to give the poor thing, wet and squishy though she knew he was, a motherly hug, feeling herself poke out the back of the dress as she squatted, giving them all something fresh to whoop about. “You’re nothing but a bunch of bullies!” she cried. “That’s tellin’ ‘em, Ma!” Second John exclaimed, suddenly tossing back the cowl, as though peeling off a disguise. He stood before them, just a head above her doubled knees, bald and diapered and smoking a big black cigar. She gasped. “Why, you’re the—!” He spat and laughed and whipped a pistol out of his diapers and shot the hats off three or four of the men, all of whom were now diving for cover, then slapped Veronica on her exposed backside and, waving his pistol about, said: “You’re a real pal, Ma! Whaddaya say we sow a few wild oats here and teach these bums a lesson in family values?” “I–I don’t want any violence—!” she begged. “Who’s talking about violence?” he laughed. The bartender in his white shirt with sleeve garters rose up behind the bar with a twelve-gauge shotgun, Ronnie screamed, her son blew the gun out of his hands and then blasted away a row of bottles over the quaking barkeep’s head. “All I want’s a little tit!” “What—?!” “Ma, I’m your little baby!” “But I–I don’t have any milk!” she gasped. “That’s okay, I’m not hungry, I just need a little comfort,” he said with a sly affectionate grin, tonguing the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. He reached inside her linen dress and popped a bare breast out. “You’ve kept me waiting, Ma! All these years! It wasn’t fair!” “Darling, please—!” She felt sorry for him and what had happened, but much as she loved him, she wished he’d put her breast back. She seemed unable to do it herself or even to rise from her vulnerable squat, it was like she was paralyzed with shame and remorse. “They tell me the old man comes here from time to time on the arm of one floozy or another,” he whispered, “and next time we’ll be waiting for him, right, Ma? Blam, blam, blam!” He popped the other one out. Such a strong-willed child. It was not easy being a mother. In a far corner some men started laughing and singing “The Little Milkmaid” and her son whirled and shot the overhanging lamp off its chain, sending it crashing to their table with a fiery explosion like a fireworks display. “Hey, wow! That’s neat!” Second John exclaimed around his tattered wet cigar and shot another lamp down, and then another, jumping up and down and shouting with childish glee. “This is fun, Ma!” Just a little boy at heart, though he scared her with the games he played. He paused, peered inside his diapers. “Uh-oh. Help, Ma! It’s number two, I think.”
Accustomed to the games Bruce played and prepared for the worst though John (the first one) was, he was still taken aback by the scene that confronted him up at the cabin when he finally arrived. The worst that he’d prepared for? That he’d find them dead. Nevada had suggested that Bruce could be thinking about “checking out,” and might take the kid with him. She’d also held off telling him about Bruce’s departure with Lenny’s child until he’d had a several-hour head start and in his new jet to boot, so whatever John found up there, he figured, would have to be old news. Unless it was all just an elaborate scheme, using a preacher’s daughter as bait, to mock John’s smalltown proprieties and lure him out of secular duty into holy play, a lesson Bruce never tired of trying to teach him. “At heart a religious man,” Bruce called him in his farewell note, “who sometimes lost his way.” Farewell? Yes. No bodies maybe, but John had no reason to suppose they were still alive, and Bruce’s final instructions gave him every reason to suppose that they were not or soon would not be. Why had he come up here then? To try to stop it, to save his friend from himself and so save a friendship he did not want to lose. John had been guilty of few futile gestures in his life, but this was one of them. Bruce’s plane was nowhere to be seen when he flew in, but the cabin, ablaze with florid light in the dark night (his landing beacon), was as though inhabited by a menacing presence, and John entered it with his cocked rifle gripped in both hands, by now supposing that Bruce had the rifle that was missing from his gun case. The cabin had been transformed into a kind of hothouse, brimming with flowers, piles and piles of them, heaped up so high one had to crawl through special wickerwork tunnels to move from place to place. It was like a kid’s back-garden fantasy house, except that there were niches along the way with pornographic photographs mounted in them, lit from behind, some little more than marriage manual posturings, others more exotic and violent. John himself was in one of them, that bastard. How’d he get that shot? Here and there: a shoe, a sock, a ribbon. In a mirrored niche, a pair of panties, a spot of dark blood in a bed of white petals. It was all a bit suffocating and John was glad to leave the flowers behind and emerge at last in the main bedroom, which felt like an amphitheater after the claustrophobic tunnels. He was less glad about what he found there: ropes tied around the bedposts, cuffs, whips, including ragged twists of thorny long-stemmed roses and a horse crop, blood-soaked sheets and towels, here and there other stains, more excremental. A flayed summer dress, once white, lay in grisly shreds on the floor and, in a corner, like a proxy for its former owner, a little overnight bag, lifelessly agape, its contents spilled out and crushed underfoot. On the chest of drawers: a sheaf of documents with Bruce’s personal cover note, anticipating John’s arrival, though perhaps in Nevada’s company and not so soon, for it spoke at length about the revised handwritten will, attached, and accompanying power of attorney forms and notarized instructions to be used as authority while the will, for probable lack of a corpus delicti, was contested. All of which clearly enriched their busy little troubleshooter. There was even an envelope of cash for Nevada which, Bruce suggested, should best be laundered before using. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” he wrote, continuing the religious theme introduced in the opening lines: “As a religious man, dear John, you will appreciate what you see here as a sacramental act of extreme devotion and exaltation, and will accept it as guide and precept on your own irresolute route to sainthood. Many years ago, on the eve of your disappointing compromise with the profane world, in that wayside chapel known as the Country Tavern, you effected my own conversion, doubting Thomas that I was, by announcing that what was about to follow was in reality a church service in a holy sanctuary, and indeed it was, one of many such revelations I’ve been granted in your company. I have ever since been the voice of one crying in the wilderness, calling you back to your true vocation, your existence in nonexistence, your authentic life beyond the edge.” The nihilistic wiseass was insufferable, but the “Goodbye, John” at the end still hurt. John scanned the documents: many of Bruce’s women were rewarded but Jennifer was not, so probably bad news. Not much he could do about it. Nor about this place either. Finished. Should just burn it down, but he was too practical a man for that, he’d have to put it up for sale. Needed a good purging first, though, and John had a lot of tensions to work off, so he built a fire out in the incinerator, starting with the bedding, clothing, photos, overnight bag, and Bruce’s revised will. The flowers and all the rest would follow. He figured he’d be done in time to get home by dawn.