John’s fraternal succor both rankled Waldo’s wife Lorraine and reconciled her in some small part to her wretched fate: how had a class act like herself — once voted “Most Likely to Marry a Millionaire,” a B-plus lit major, and a hotshot on the tennis courts — ended up a desexed overweight smalltown hausfrau chained to a shopping basket, three of the world’s most unabashed underachievers, and a prehistoric Ford stationwagon off Stu’s used-car lot, suffering from crankcase drip and a fatal skin disease? She should have left the sodden deadbeat she’d wed — madly, after a wild party — years ago, before she met him in fact, but not only were there the two kids to think about, tedious little louts though they were, the truth was, her lot once cast, her options were few. Alimony would have been zip in those shiftless years adrift, jobs she could have tolerated or even applied for were few, and the mirror on the wall told her plain she’d been condemned to a brief bloom: one pollination and the “Here’s Lollie!” show was over, nothing but bracken and stinkweeds after, only a drunk in a dark room could ever again get up a semi-tumescent interest. Which was how she got knocked up the second time, not even sure Waldo knew who he was with when, like a bushel of old winter apples, he fell on her, scattering himself mushily in all directions. So she was relieved to have someone come to their rescue, even if, as rescues went, it was a pretty half-assed affair, regretting only that that someone had to be the callous sonuvabitch who took the only maidenhead she ever had. Not that she missed it — what the hell, let it go, good riddance, it was just getting in her way anyhow — but she really didn’t want ever to see the capricious bastard again, much less live in the same goddamned town with him. Made her feel vulnerable and exposed, as though she’d stepped out naked from behind the doctor’s screen and found herself and her sagging ass on Main Street. She still didn’t know where to look when they were in the same room together, and in mixed-doubles foursomes on the golf course, it cost her a stroke each time John glanced her way or handed her a tee for one she’d splintered. Did he get a charge out of that? Probably, who knows. She sometimes had the weird feeling that John had brought to this town, not Waldo, but her, and no doubt others like her as well, not out of any sense of caring for an old flame (that was flattering herself), and not just to make her eat shit and feel the fool either, though she wouldn’t put it past him, but just because, a smalltowner to the bone, he’d started up these stories and wanted to keep them all around him, see how they all came out.
Beatrice would have been startled by Lorraine’s insight, had she known of it, so similar was it to one of her own. For her husband Lennox, too, whom Waldo called Knucks and the townsfolk Reverend Lenny, had by John been raised from the dead, brought here, and restored to a station of eminence and dignity not his since his days as fraternity chaplain and pledge master, and she, too, thought she might have been the secret beneficiary of John’s unexpected brotherly love — his midlife atonement, as it were, for the dissolute excesses of his youth. For which, at least as they affected her, traumatic as it had all been at the time, she forgave him. Lennox’s feelings, she knew, were more ambivalent, as they always were, part of his character really, a trait that sometimes approximated moral weakness, though now in his new pastoral career, he had learned to dissemble a certain steadfastness in his convictions, an appearance — most of the time — of equanimity and resolve, and so was held by his congregation in general good repute. They saw him, she believed, as a good man, honest and forthright, gentle in his chastisements, understanding at hospital bedsides and burials, artistic in his church services, if perhaps a bit vague and overly intellectual, and they saw her as the good man’s wife and helpmeet, his organist and choir director and mother of his three children. Most of which was nearly true.
Floyd, who taught Sunday school in Reverend Lenny’s church, thought of him as a candy-ass and a prevaricator, a pulpit flimflammer not to be trusted, sinful in not hating sin enough. The silly prat probably didn’t even know what it was. Did Floyd know? Too well. Still had nightmares, blood on his hands. This town, the church, the hardware store: a wall Floyd was throwing up between himself and his past. He was still tough as the nails he sold, old Floyd was, but now he was tough for the Lord. He and Edna had been in town a couple of years already and felt like locals when the new preacher turned up, some old college bud of John’s, people said, just like that seedy bozo Waldo, who came wallowing in the year after, tongue out and wagging his broad behind, and whose only serious job, as far as Floyd could tell, was to sub for John from time to time on the compulsory bridge nights, the female knee then under the table as alluring as a bend in a rusty drainpipe. These people all made Floyd feel old. And vulnerable. John was taking over the family construction company in those years, encouraged by his mother-in-law, not yet dead then but soon to be, and Floyd saw less and less of him, cut from the party invite lists, ignored at the old family hardware store while bigger things got done. Even Stu and they had drifted apart what with poor old Winnie dead and gone, these were lonely times for him and Edna, potluck suppers at the church, the bowling league, and TV quiz shows mostly what they had here of social life. Sometimes Floyd felt like taking a big hammer and smashing every cussed thing in sight. Even that wall he was so painstakingly building. He wanted to shove his fingers deep into the bloodred-rimmed fingerholes of his personalized bowling ball and roll a strike of such terrific force that nothing, nothing, was left standing after.
Intimations of covetous Floyd’s hidden yearnings reached young Clarissa and her friends through his Sunday school lessons, in which he seemed to take special delight — his thin wide lips twitching then in a scary kind of grin that the other kids, who called him Old Hoot ‘n’ Holler, often made fun of — in describing the tortures of hell and the terrific ways God smote his enemies and the day Jesus suddenly blew his cool and almost wackily set about “cleansing the temple,” as the Bible said, or supposedly said, a story which Clarissa tended to take personally, since she associated her dad with the temple, and probably rightly so, too. That man managed one of her father’s stores, and it was like he was working for her dad and against him at the same time. Still, you couldn’t take him seriously. Clarissa and her friends mostly regarded Old Hoot’s ravings as just so much overexcited horsedookie frankly, even her best friend Jennifer, whose own dad was the preacher and had told her it ain’t necessarily so, and the older boys at the church called him a dumb cracker who ought to go join the holy rollers, what was he doing in a serious church like this one anyway? There were exceptions, her something-cousin Little Maynard, for example, or Turtle, as he was now called: he was all eyes and ears, a disciple born and bred, so turned on by all the blood and gore he seemed almost to look forward to God wasting the earth and sending them all screaming into the pits of hell. He was always trying to scare her little brother Mikey and the younger kids with his weirdo ideas, and once when they were smaller Clarissa had even caught him tying Mikey and Jennifer’s baby sister Zoe down and pinching them with barbecue tongs, which he said were the devil’s pincers. They had a fight then, and she called him the name all the other kids were calling him, even though back then she didn’t like to use bad language, and because she was bigger than he was, she was able to give him a good slapping and take the tongs away from him and untie the two little ones, who then surprised her in a way she was never able to understand by siding with him against her. They didn’t really do anything, they just pushed at her and yelled at her to stop hitting him, all of them bawling like babies now and calling her names, so she left them in disgust, wondering why she had ever bothered to try to help in the first place. A lesson learned.