“Cloudy noon,” Ulrich offered.
“Aren’t you going to pull your fish in?” the old lady asked Wren.
When he got the fish reeled in, they saw it was a Gaspergou, a frog-eyed crossbreed of bass and bream nobody had seen in ages. Everybody but the sulking Farte was fascinated.
“That’s your unlikely combination, a mutant, absolutely,” said Ulrich, “the predator and the predatee, crossbred. The eater and the eaten.” As Wren unhooked it and laid it out on the planks, Ulrich continued, in an excess of philosophy: “An anomaly of the food chain, hardly ever witnessed. We’ve got the aquatic equivalent of a fox and a chicken here, on your food chain. Reminds you of man himself. All our funereal devices are a denial of the food chain — our coffins, our pyres, our mausoleums, our pyramids. Pitifully declaring ourselves exempt from the food chain. Our arrogance. But we aren’t, we’re right in it. Nits, mites and worms will have us. Never you doubt it.”
They munched the sugar cookies and Ulrich was confident he had produced a deep silence with his gravity.
“I’m not that innocent, lads,” said Melanie Wooten. “I’ve cavorted. I was a looker, my skin they said seemed not to have any pores at all. Wootie was lucky. The man stayed grateful, all his life.”
“Is that what made him so kind?” asked Lewis.
He acknowledged, looking at her firmly for the first time, that she was no liar. Her skin was still fine for a woman in her seventies. There was a blonde glow to her. Her lips were full and bowed — quite beautiful, like a lady in films. The way she broke into life here toward the end he found admirable too. Many women of his generation remained huddled mice. You could not even imagine them straight in their coffins.
“I hope so,” said Melanie. “His gratitude. Without, I hope, sounding proud.”
“Not at all,” said Lewis. “Gratitude is what marks the higher being, doesn’t it?”
“But the thing came over him toward the end, which I’ve never much discussed. It came on just like diabetes. My love had nothing to do with it. In his seventies he turned gay. Isn’t that something? All those male students — he had a different infatuation every week. Poor Wootie. They fired him from the college. He couldn’t control himself.”
“What?” asked Sidney Farte, rather meanly. She knew the problem.
“He turned homosexual. Homosexual,” she emphasized, as if in a lecture to a pupil.
“Is it true?” asked Lewis.
They were not looking anywhere in particular, the others, when they noticed Lewis was weeping. He shook a little, and his long white face was drawn up in hurt.
“What is it?” Ulrich and Wren begged. “What’s wrong?”
“I want a dog. I want a dog. I get so lonely, nothing anybody can do about it,” Lewis cried out like a child.
“Well now, a dog can be had. Let’s be about getting you a dog,” said Ulrich.
“Certainly,” Melanie said, taking Lewis’s hand. “Did I upset you?”
“Just a dog,” Lewis sniffled.
“By all that pukes, get the man a dog,” said Sidney.
“That’s a dream you hardly have to defer,” said Wren. “That can be most painlessly had.”
They went back up the pier together, Melanie indicating the way to her station wagon. All in, they set out over to Vicksburg to find Lewis a dog.
Two Things, Dimly, Were Going at Each Other
THE OLD MAN OFF FORTY YEARS OF MORPHINE WAS FASCINATED BY guns. He was also a foe of dogs everywhere. They were too servile, too slavering, too helplessly pack-bent when not treacherous. The cat was the thing. Coots cut at the evening with his cane and wanted to “see a death” in the big city. He had been crazy for death these many years, writing about it and studying it in thick manuscripts. Many, hordes, died in his fictions. He dressed in a suit, often a three-piece, and looked to be a serious banker, with a Windsor knot in his tie. The scratch of the lower Midwest was in his voice. He was looking for a billiards parlor in Manhattan. In these blocks he had heard one rumored.
He knew of an afflicted man playing billiards — Latouche, ninety, a barely retired surgeon. The grofft was getting him. It was a rare Central American disease, making one hunt like a dog, bark and whine, the face becoming wolfish. The old man, Coots, despised the even older Latouche. There was just something, something — what? — about the man, perhaps his comfort, an obtuseness. And, sealing it, he owned a proud Hungarian sheepdog. The thing had gruesomely licked Coots at an underground firing range where he and Latouche shot their exotic weapons. It was their only similarity, this love of handguns. The old men would ardently blast away for hours, exchanging Italian, German, South African and Chinese pieces, barrels all heated up so that they would have made a pop of steam if tossed in water. Hunting and ordering correct calibers was a main part of their lives. Latouche was more the weapons technician, while Coots revered the history of each piece, or even more precisely, what kind of hole in what men in what time, entrance and exit; what probable suffering.
In Mexico once when he was young, Coots had shot his wife “inadvertently when the black thing was on me” as they were sporting around with the idea of William Tell, a glass on her head. Coots was drunk, but he insisted on “the black thing.” He believed in spells and even more in guns as he got old. He believed he could think spells on enemies and bring hideous luck to them, or so he wrote in his chilly fictions, where homicide and orgasm were inevitably concurrent and hundreds died in rages of lust and murder; a holocaust of young men perishing was always at least in the background, like wallpaper in a shrine. It was an ancient and beloved tyranny of the cosmos in which desirable bodies were given up religiously.
Coots, queer not gay, was an old-timer who hated “fairies” almost as much as women, or so he wrote. “Queens” were anathema, down there with the dreaded “cunts.” His manly Midwestern prose would scratch out at them. Physically he was a coward, and as he aged in the big city, his paranoia had a field day and became quite adorable to Coots cultists, who were always at him for interviews. His prose was no hoax. He wrote beautifully, especially when he was telling a straight clean story — something “linear.” But too much of this thirties stuff annoyed him and he was apt to launch off into his “genius”—spiteful incoherence, cut-up blather, free-floating time pirates corn-holing each other, etc. He was, though, dead accurate about the century often in this “shotgunning”—it seemed to thousands anyway — as only, perhaps, an old shy queer full of hate can be.
Coots had murdered nobody else (his wife’s accident had cost him a few days in a Mexican jail), but he was proud of the three dogs he had shot in a great city park one twilight, two German shepherds and a Rottweiler, just last year. Their hides were on the wall of the composing room in his “bunker,” a windowless warehouse apartment tremendously padlocked in a cheap nasty section of town. Coots had claimed an attack, and the young amanuensis with him (they were not lovers) did not deny it. There had been high adventure in secreting the gun, getting the animals back to the apartment in three separate taxis, and arranging for their skinning with a jubilant cultist now ten years on methedrine. The legend got out to everybody with whom the cultist had a beer, hundreds. Alcoholism was necessary to balance his speed habit, but nothing balanced his tongue. The story had all three animals, escaped from a wealthy high-altitude widow hag on Riverside Drive, tearing unprovoked at Coots’s legs, with the amanuensis sprawled in terror, and Coots fast-drawing a.44 from his Abercrombie & Fitch raincoat. Coots, swarmed by his interviewers and even by Time, demurred, but there were the three hides on the wall, head shots, no hole in the pelt. Of peculiar literary satisfaction was the fact that the methedrined skinner died a week later, as if taken off by a curse from the shy hermitic Coots.