“Morning, gents,” said Wren to the three at the rail. They waited for his maiden lie of the day. Something impossible about his sleep, perhaps.
“A car hit him and that queer just flew away,” he said.
“Say it again?” asked Lewis.
“Oh, I rented a video of Last Exit to Brooklyn last night. A queer ran out in the road, a car hit him, and that queer just flew straight up in the air away.”
“Could I see that?” asked Ulrich, intensely concerned with the flight of human beings.
“I might have lost the tape.”
“Already lost it, Wren?”
“It could be in there among my volumes of Shakespeare. I’ve got all ninety-five of his stories and plays. Given to me by my grandson, who just adores me.”
Though he meant nothing by it, Sidney Farte was insulted, recalling the anathema of his own grandson last spring. This began his day vilely, even lower.
“You diarrhea-mouth cocksucker,” he said.
“Here now, so early,” objected Lewis. A ninety-one-year-old man didn’t want to hear such filth announcing the day. That was the sort of thing they did in that vicious far-north horror, New York City. The saintly Wooten had established a certain spirit on the pier that was not recanted at his death. Sidney heard nothing beyond a direct blast in the ear, which Wren was determined to give him. He actually began feeling better now, recovering his purchase on the island of unconscious profanity that was his.
“Puts me in mind of Icarus,” said Ulrich.
“Like everything,” said Sidney. “Shit, I knew a rat once could fly. Throw that sumbitch cheese in the air. Shit in the air too.”
“You look thin today, Sidney. What’s your weight?” asked Ulrich, lighting another Kent.
He jumped into something running parallel in his brain: “Thing to do is wait out the pain. Most times it’ll pass of itself. Modern man has not let the body heal itself. The downfall was aspirin.”
“What in hell are you talking about?”
“Rock and roll kills a lot of men early. We know for a fact that the presence of rock and roll electrons in the air causes plane crashes. Some of that hip-hop stuff will take the wing right off your jumbo jet. Even makes cancer, too. They’re looking into it.”
“These people you say ‘looking into’ shit. Count ’em, it just about leaves only us on the pier that ain’t doing a survey.”
“It’s the age of high-priced nosiness all right,” said Lewis, whose bobber was going under as if a sucking thing were on. He let out an audible breath in sympathy. “Something’s on my shrimp, gentlemen.”
“I want to see this sea creature,” said Peter Wren, throat red with prevarication.
The huge bobber submerged and disappeared in the blackish green, down to legend they hoped, and the men hovered together into one set of eyes three hundred and twenty-three years old. The bobber came back up again, but Lewis raised the line and the shrimp was gone. Wren began rigging for bluegill, excited.
“A turtle or a gator’d bite shrimp,” said Sidney.
“I suspect sturgeon,” said Lewis. “They can breathe both salt and fresh. And they migrate long distances.”
“Your human being is made like the shark. If he quits moving and doing, he perishes,” said Ulrich.
“Now shark. I’ll eat any shark you catch raw,” said Wren. Though a liar, Wren was a man of some sartorial taste. He suddenly observed Ulrich with a jump. Ulrich wore a brown Eisenhower jacket over blue-striped polyester bell-bottom pants — something truly ghastly from the seventies, such as on a boulevarding pimp. Through a flashback of several connected untruths, Wren was visited by a haze of nausea, for everything wicked had happened to him in the seventies. He had lost his wife, his business; thieves had stolen his collection of guns. Music was provided by those skinny, filthy Lazaruses, the Rolling Stones. Carter had given away everything to the blacks and hippies; brought blue jeans to the White House. Every adult became a laughingstock and fool. Old Ulrich here was dressing right into the part. How Wren despised him now for his encyclopedic near-information. The world was in such a sorry state, it made a man lie sometimes to be sane. He tossed his line out grimly. Ulrich had ruined the fishing.
The lake, just alive, now seemed bright warm and dead, just a stretch of empty liquid at midmorning. A bad quality of light had suddenly come over. All of them felt it, like that mean gloom one feels after a pointless argument with one’s wife. Nobody spoke for thirty minutes, hearing the call of an unnamed flat accidie.
At last Lewis, back to his daybreaking thought about what he regretted having never done, his sin of omission, spoke. He asked the others what bothered them in this area. Lunchtime loomed — pleasant ritual of the hungry sun. More and more they talked about food, except for Sidney Farte, often too sick to eat.
“I guess what I missed most was having a significant pet,” said Lewis. “I was always talked out of them. Would be nice to have an old dog hearkening toward the end with me.”
“I guess I missed the Big Money,” said Ulrich. “That could have been sweet. Imagine the studies one could pursue. Perfecting one-man propulsion. I could have been the Howard Hughes of individual flight.”
“I wish I’d had a heart,” blurted Sidney Farte. “I didn’t even cry at my wife’s funeral. Knew I should, but I just couldn’t. My children looked long and expectant at me. Hell, I was like that as a little boy. Look on the worst things without a blink, eyes so dry they hurt. Something left out of me at birth. Begun lying ’cause there wasn’t nothing in true life that moved me.”
The confession was so astounding to the rest, who had known Farte for a decade and a half, that reply was occluded. His health must be sincerely bad. They all felt a surrender. Now noon, it became darkly clouded; something dangerous and honest seemed to be in the air. Peter Wren had a fish on, but was just ignoring it, reckoning on Sidney Farte. But it was Wren’s turn.
“That I could have sex with a child,” he said.
“My ugly God,” said Lewis.
“I mean a youngish girl, say fourteen. That she would adore me. I would be everything to her.”
Was he now adjusting himself to a public? they wondered. Or was he inwardly a vile old criminal, collecting photographs and near to wearing a garter belt? Fourteen was suddenly too legitimate, hardly a story at all. In their youth, fourteen was open season. There were many mothers at age fifteen, already going to fat. Four memories raked through the deep ashes of their desire.
“Shit, I had that,” said Sidney.
“Was she tight? Did she cavort for you?” asked Wren.
“Yes and yes. Couldn’t get enough. I tell you—”
“Shhh!” said Lewis.
Behind them, someone had lightly shaken the pier. In her tennis shoes, she had crept up unheard. The small vibration of the boards was all the warning Lewis had of her. She was right behind Sidney, attentive. It was Melanie, Wooten’s widow, the only woman ever to insist on coming among the men at the end of the pier. Farte despised having her near. The others could not quite decide. Something was always suspended when she came around. A sort of startled gentility set in, unbearable to Farte, like sudden envelopment by a church.
“We were talking horses, Mrs. Wooten,” said Lewis.
She’d brought them a snack of homemade sugar cookies. You could smell vanilla on her. She was an industrious person who had begun blowing glass animals after the death of her husband. That she came out there was somewhat aggressive, they felt, and she had begun talking a lot more since Wooten passed, finding a hobby and her tongue at about the same time.
“No, you weren’t talking horses. Don’t mind me, don’t you dare. I like man talk.”