“Say that again,” says the chiropractor to Mark Habeeb.
“Or would it be more accurate to classify him as coonass or redneck?” Mark asks Max.
It is difficult to say which is the greater insult to Billy Matthews, to be called a coonass, a derogatory term for a Cajun, or a redneck, equally unflattering for a North Louisianian.
“Kike!”
“As a matter of fact, I’m Syrian.”
“Atheist!”
“Coonass!”
“Communist!”
“Holy Roller!”
“That’s not true. I am a Southern Baptist.”
“Christ, that’s worse.”
“Un-American!”
“Kluxer!”
“One Worlder!”
“Racist!”
“Nigger lover.”
“Knothead!”
“Liberal!”
For some reason, these last two epithets, the mildest of the list, proved the last straw. In a rage, yet almost happily, the two fall upon one another, fists flying. They grapple for each other, fall to the earth with a thud and roll into the sand trap.
“No!” I cry, getting up and staggering around. “Don’t fight!”
“Don’t jump in there,” says Max, grabbing my arm.
The brimstone smell is stronger. Smoke swirls between us. Stryker, I see, is most strongly affected by the noxious vapors. His eyes go vacant and lose focus. The Heavy Sodium ions hit his pineal body, seat of self, like a guillotine, sundering self from self forever, that ordinary self, the restless aching everyday self, from the secret self one happens on in dreams, in poetry, during ordeals, on happy trips—“Ah, this is my real self!” Forever after he’ll live like a ghost inhibiting himself. He’ll orbit the earth forever, reading dials and recording data and spinning theories by day, and at night seek to reenter the world of creatures by taking the form of beasts and performing unnatural practices.
I even fancy that I see his soul depart, exiting his body through the top of his head in a little corkscrew curl of vapor, as the soul is depicted in ancient woodcuts. Or was it no more than a wisp of smoke blown from the bunker?
“Over here, Doc.”
“What? Who’s that?”
I open my eyes. A fog must have rolled in from the swamp. The sodium lights have turned into soft mazy balls. Voices come from the highway, but the bunker is deserted.
“Come over here, Doc.”
It is Victor’s voice. I follow it into the woods, staggering into a pocket of ground fog that has settled into a saucer-shaped glade.
“Is that you, Victor?” I say to a shadow tall as a cypress.
“No,” says a different voice, muffled and flat. “Victor’s gone. I sent him for you. Sit down.”
It is Uru. He points to a stump. I sit down in a pool of fog, which is as thick and white as a CO2 Transylvania fog.
“What do you want, Uru?”
“I want your machine.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know what’s going on here but Victor and Willard say you know something and that your machine works. Let’s have it.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Well, I’ll find one in your house.”
“It wouldn’t do you any good. You wouldn’t know how to use it.”
“We’ll be the judge of that.” Uru takes another stump. Hunched over in his monkhu6, he looks like a benched pro in a poncho. His face is in darkness.
“If we live through this, I’ll bring the lapsometer wherever you like, test your people, and treat them if they need it.”
“We can take care of our own.”
“Very well. I’ll be going.”
“All we want from you is you off our backs.”
“Very well. You got it.”
Uru picks up his izinkhonkwani, which hangs between his legs like a Scotsman’s sporran, and slings it to one side.
“We’re taking what we want and destroying what we don’t and we don’t need you.”
“Is that what Victor says?”
“Victor’s got nothing to say about it. Let me tell you something.” Uru hunches forward on his stump. We sit knee to knee like commuters but I still can’t make out his face. “We got two hundred Bantus just from this town and not one of them, not one, got any use for Victor or sweet Jesus.”
“So?”
“So we don’t need any help from you or Victor in what we’re going to do.”
“Then why did you send for me?”
“You want to know what’s funny, Doc?”
“No.”
“The way you chucks sold Victor on sweet Jesus and he out-Jesused you. You beat him with Jesus but you beat him so bad that in the end he out-Jesused you and made liars out of you and that was the one thing you couldn’t stand. So Victor won after all.”
“Victor wouldn’t think that was funny.”
“No, he wouldn’t but Victor doesn’t matter now, not you or Victor. What matters is what we’re going to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Like I said. Take what we need, destroy what we don’t, and live in peace and brotherhood.”
“Peace and brotherhood.” The map has come back, crooked capillary county roads and straight stretches of interstate arteries. “Well, you’re right about one thing. I couldn’t help you now even if you’d let me. We’re not talking about the same thing. We’re talking about different kinds of trouble. First you got to get to where you’re going or where you think you’re going — although I hope you do better than that, because after all nothing comes easier than that, being against one thing and tearing down another thing and talking about peace and brotherhood — I never saw peace and brotherhood come from such talk and I hope you do better than that because there are better things and harder things to do. But, either way, you got to get to where you’re going before I can help you.”
“Help us do what?”
“There is no use my even telling you because, Ph.D. or not, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. You got to get to where we are or where you think we are and I’m not even sure you can do that.”
“Like I told you, Doc, we can do it and without your help.”
“Good luck, then.” I rise.
“We don’t need that either.”
“Yes, you do.”
“You better go back, Doc, while you can.”
“Papa, have you lost your faith?”
“No.”
Samantha asked me the question as I stood by her bed. The neuroblastoma had pushed one eye out and around the nose-bridge so she looked like a Picasso profile.
“Then why don’t you go to mass any more?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because you don’t go with me.”
“Papa, you’re in greater danger than Mama.”
“How is that?”
“Because she is protected by Invincible Ignorance.”
“That’s true,” I said, laughing.
“She doesn’t know any better.”
“She doesn’t.”
“You do.”
“Yes.”
“Just promise me one thing, Papa.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t commit the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”
“Which one is that?”
“The sin against grace. If God gives you the grace to believe in him and love him and you refuse, the sin will not be forgiven you.”
“I know.” I took her hand, which even then still looked soiled and chalk-dusted like a schoolgirl’s.
I wonder: did it break my heart when Samantha died? Yes. There was even the knowledge and foreknowledge of it while she still lived, knowledge that while she lived, life still had its same peculiar tentativeness, people living as usual by fits and starts, aiming and missing, while present time went humming, and foreknowledge that the second she died, remorse would come and give past time its bitter specious wholeness. If only— If only we hadn’t been defeated by humdrum humming present time and missed it, missed ourselves, missed everything. I had the foreknowledge while she lived. Still, present, time went humming. Then she died and here came the sweet remorse like a blade between the ribs.