Bell reared up shaking away Green’s mouth but the witless man still licked the air.
“God, man! Is this the end of the world? It was only women up to now. Anse got the last one to drop charges, insane bastard!”
Goon stood bereaved but mean in the face while his woman could be heard bellowing in a separate grief about a kitchen grease fire. Green ignored her as he tucked a loose gonad back into his briefs. Loud sad world and stinking, hog flesh and smoke. Both men standing thigh high in its wreckage. Mutual scholars and addicts of fire. Just over the north hill a jet screamed down to concrete. Out in the store the premium brands were pushed forward for these wealthy alumni and their sparkling second wives.
“I ain’t myself,” Goon apologized. “Where am I, what’s that burning smell?” Neither man turned to watch or hear the woman, her bare feet and legs scattering beneath the pan she held. Both deaf by liquor, Bell in an appalled trance.
“I believe your house is nearly on fire,” said Bell.
“Mizz Ann always manages. Good woman but got large in the ass on me.”
“Goon, you got weird prominent titties. Be kind. You have much to worry about.”
“These pages you read. That’s your scripture, ain’t it? Say you never get caught, s’how you work. Now I’m up on you. Got you in my sights. You tell Mr. Max Petraeus watch my smoke on the next pyrotechniques!”
“I’m telling you, you might already be dead for that propane rocket in the primitive church.”
“Dead how? Do you believe I fear any man in this town? Look out that window and you see maybe a fifth of my empire, fool.”
“I see a car lot, a bait shop, beauty shop, bail bonds office, a fleet of golf carts. Why are there iron bars on the bond building? I thought you were so tough and pro you could talk the shotgun off a maniac.”
“I can in fact. But I want to give back to the community. The office is a home for battered women at night. I found the one in the back through my work there.”
“I believe that as much as I believe those three whores prowling the used Cadillac section are flying nuns.”
Another executive jet, purple and gold, squeaked and stormed with blowback, made its keening cry as it turned toward the radio shack. It was game day, LSU richlings poured in, the noise of two tigers aiming squarely at the liquor store, where on the airport side Tico and Rez, with Bell’s painterly wit, had made a great billboard, with and deep, “FIRST STOP LAST STOP” bordered by the fierce helmets of the Southeastern Conference, whose boasted brutality and speed had long ago raised a sport to religion.
The kitchen fire was on the walls, Green yet clothed in only jockeys and Cole Haan brogans. He turned with low interest to the kitchen, walking like an unconvinced zombie to it even as Louise screamed louder. He slammed a door behind him. Bell managed a swat of vodka huge enough to straighten him out most genially. Next he knew the door opened on white smoke, dense but no flame. But both of Goon Green’s shoes were on fire. Not so that Green noticed. Backwater Mercury blasted down by antiaircraft rounds.
“Look down,” said Bell.
“Why? Well just fuck it.” He stomped himself left and right. Success at last. “Now what danger to my person were we talking about.”
“Petraeus. A man who does what he says.”
“I would put it another way. Say this: With what I know I can bury the both of you. You drunks can’t wait to tell a secret. Mr. Petraeus ought to kill you for starters.”
“He really doesn’t care that much. But he won’t stand for mockery. This is twice now. The armory at Millington, maybe Hattiesburg, too.”
“Didn’t I ever tell you the fact our government military is just plain stupid. Sure, you’ve got your experts. They move shit around and make noise. But they lose things and steal things right and left. You’ve got majors simpler than a cow, and a cow’s not good at anything but hiding her calf.”
“So you stole from then blew the sides out of two armories.”
“Impossible. I’ve got witnesses I was nowhere near, whenever they went off.”
“But you made me read the pages. The point was? Was any jackass who can move a mouse can build a bomb. And you’re in the big league now. But I asked you before. Where’s the joy? What makes you put a foot on the floor when you wake from the bed?”
“Like you with booze? The next drink?”
“Like me with booze, with art, with Max. My woman. My dear uncle. Really good raisin bran at midnight after a bender.”
“What a list. Somebody might mistake you for busy.”
“They’re not going to mistake you for breathing if you don’t stop. Now give me Uncle Ray’s money.”
“No can do, not now. Your unc gets nothing if any harm comes to me. And both of you get bad, bad assfucking big houses.”
Bell stood sodden with alcoholic sweat that made his suit feel heavy and absurd, a deep-diving outfit with globe head, lead pants. At once he felt the ghost of violent corn-holing in all this gear, weighted perfectly for bitches of the pen. He was out in his Porsche speeding up to leave the precincts.
At this moment a belch of fire raised most of an unpowered plane over the radio shack so you could see it over the smooth-lawned north hill whose south descended to a line of hangars for the new jet port. The explosion was terrific but seemed to be without human consequence. Bell was so used to exploding churches behind him and deaf from vodka he remarked it not at all.
No screams played out. The accident seemed to raise no further interest than a random column of swamp gas. Bell was far into his own land and recited as one hypnotized several facts from the pages he’d just seen in Green’s house.
“Napalm. . invented by Harvard president James Conant and colleagues at MIT Dupont, and Standard Oil. . mixing napthenic and palmitic acids with gasoline produced a Vaseline-like yellow paste. . burned slowly, stuck to materials. . could not be put out. Water only splattered this jellied gasoline. . hit the side of an edifice, run down it, find every opening until it consumed itself.”*
Green, like any nondrinker after nearly a full bottle, had sprawled out cold in his “study” recliner, smelling of burned leather, his brogans, still smoking, pages spread over his lap and strewn all over the room. The unreconciled gonad had crept out the slit of his jockeys again. The liquor bottle clutched by its neck as in a lewder Norman Rockwell village hearth-warmer. His woman then stood over him. The hang of Green’s hammer was no less a thrill and she knew secrets he guessed she didn’t, despite the mumblings to Tico and Rez. She was frightened seeing him drunk the first time and by the close explosion over the hill he had slept through. She was a woman slightly more handsome than rough-edged, spoke proper English, knew how to dress and show her long legs in slitted skirts that made Goon and other men hot around the forehead and lap. What she looked upon, in his shorts and burned shoes, was not a feast of love unless she followed his lead and poured down the whole bottle.
When she was on fire in the kitchen he showed no urgency saving her and did little but become a shoe torch when the last grease was slung out of the pan. The smoke detector was screaming, the stove wall burned, but it was her hand on the extinguisher when she remembered its existence. Next that fancy lush Wilkes Bell was leaving fast, the explosion erupted. There must be a string flowing through these events but she could not find it yet.