"Honey, she's had a rough day. The D.O.T. paved her road stain."
"I want her off my property."
"Oh, what's the harm? It's almost dark."
Trish was in the kitchen, roasting a chicken for supper. Demencio had been mixing a batch of perfumed water, refilling the tear well in the weeping Madonna.
"If that crazy broad's not gone after dinner," he said, "you go chase her off. And he sure and count them cooters, make sure she don't swipe any."
Trish said, "Have a heart."
"I don't trust that woman."
"You don't trust anybody."
"I can't help it. It's the nature of the business," said Demencio. "We got any red food coloring?"
"For what?"
"I was thinking ... what if she started crying blood? The Virgin Mary."
"Perfumed blood?" said his wife.
"Don't gimme that face. It's just an idea is all," Demencio said, "just an idea I'm playing with. For when we don't have the turtles no more."
"Let me check." Trish, bustling toward the spice cabinet.
Under less stressful circumstances Bernard Squires might have enjoyed the farmhouse quaintness of Mrs. Hendricks' bed-and-breakfast, but even the caress of a handmade quilt could not dissolve his anxiety. So he took an evening walk alone, in his sleek pin-striped suit through the little town of Grange.
Bernard Squires had spent a tense chunk of the afternoon on the telephone with associates of Richard "The Icepick" Tarbone and, briefly, with Mr. Tarbone himself. Squires considered himself a clear-spoken person, but he'd had great difficulty making The Icepick understand why Simmons Wood couldn't be purchased until the competing offer was submitted and rejected.
"And it willbe rejected," Bernard Squires had said, "because we're going to outbid the bastards."
But Mr. Tarbone had become angrier than Squires had ever heard him, and made it plain that closing the deal was requisite not only for Squires' future employment but for his continued good health. Squires had assured the old man that the delay was temporary and that by week's end Simmons Wood would be secured for the Central Midwest Brotherhood of Grouters, Spacklers and Drywallers International. Squires was instructed not to return to Chicago without a signed contract.
As he strolled in the cool breezy dusk, Bernard Squires tried to guess why the Tarbones were so hot to get the land. The likeliest explanation was a dire shortfall of untraceable cash, necessitating another elaborately disguised raid on the union pension fund. Perhaps the family intended to use the Simmons Wood property as collateral on a construction loan and wanted to lock in before interest rates shot up.
Or perhaps they really didmean to build a Mediterranean-style shopping mall in Grange, Florida. As laughable as that was, Bernard Squires couldn't eliminate the possibility. Maybe The Icepick had tired of the mob life. Maybe he was trying to go legit.
In any case, it truly didn't matter why Richard Tarbone was in such a hurry. What mattered was that Bernard Squires acquire the forty-four acres as soon as possible. In tight negotiations Squires was unaccustomed to losing and had at his disposal numerous extralegal methods of persuasion. If there were (as Clara Markham asserted) rival buyers for Simmons Wood, Squires felt certain he could outspend them, outflank them, or simply intimidate them into withdrawing.
Squires was so confident that he probably would've drifted contentedly into a long afternoon nap, had old man Tarbone not uttered what sounded over the phone like a serious threat:
"You get this done, goddammit! You don't wanna end up like Millstep, you'll fucking get this done."
At the mention of Jimmy Millstep, Bernard Squires had felt his silk undershirt dampen. Millstep had been a lawyer for the Tarbone family until the Friday he showed up twenty minutes late at a bond hearing for Richard Tarbone's homophobic nephew Gene, who consequently had to spend an entire weekend in a ten-by-ten cell with a well-behaved but flamboyant he-she. Attorney Millstep blamed a needful mistress and an inept cabbie for his tardiness to court, but he got no sympathy from Richard Tarbone, who not only fired him but ordered him murdered. A week later, Jimmy Millstep's bullet-riddled body was dumped at the office of the Illinois Bar Association. A note pinned to his lapel said: "Is this one of yours?"
So it was no wonder Bernard Squires was jumpy, a condition exacerbated by the abrupt appearance of a rumpled stranger with bloody punctures in the palms of his hands.
"Halt, sinner!" said the man, advancing with a limp. Bernard Squires warily sidestepped him.
"Halt, pilgrim," the man implored, waving a sheaf of rose-colored advertising flyers.
Squires snatched one and backed out of reach. The stranger muttered a blessing as he shuffled off into the twilight. Squires stopped beneath a streetlamp to look at the paper:
ASTOUNDING STIGMATA OF CHRIST!!!!
Come see amazing Dominick Amador,
the humbel carpenter who woke up one day
with the exactly identical crucifiction wounds of
Jesus Christ himself, Son of God!
Bleeding 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.
Saturdays Noon to 3 p.m. (Palms only).
Visitations open to the publix. Offerings welcomed!
4834 Haydon Burns Lane (Look for The Cross in the front yard!)
And in small print at the bottom of the paper:
As feachered on Rev. Pat Robertson's "Heavenly Signs" TV show!!!
Bernard Squires crumpled the flyer and tossed it. Sickos, he thought, no matter where you go on this planet. Sickos who never learned to spell. Squires stopped at the Grab N'Go, where his request for a New York Timesdrew the blankest of stares. He settled for a USA Todayand a cup of decaf, and headed back toward the b-and-b. Somewhere he made a wrong turn and found himself on a street he didn't recognize the chanting tipped him off.
Squires heard it from a block away: a man and a woman, vocalizing disharmoniously in some exotic tongue. The tremulous sounds drew Squires to a floodlit house. It was a plain, one-story concrete-and-stucco, typical of Florida tract developments in the 1960s and '70s. Squires stood out of sight, behind an old oak, watching.
Three figures were visible four, counting a statue of the Virgin Mary, which a dark-haired man in coveralls was positioning and repositioning on a small illuminated platform. Two other persons the chanters, it turned out sat with legs outstretched in a curved trench that had been dug in the lawn and filled with water. The man in the trench was cloaked in dingy bed linens, while the woman wore a formal white gown with lacy pointed shoulders. The pair was of indeterminate age, though both had pale skin and wet hair. Bernard Squires noticed V-shaped wakes pushing here and there in the water; animals of some kind, swimming ...
Turtles?
Squires edged closer. Soon he realized he was witness to an eccentric religious rite. The couple in the trench continued to join arms and spout gibberish while scores of grape-sized reptile heads bobbed around them. (Squires recalled a cable-television documentary about a snake-handling cult in Kentucky perhaps this was a breakaway sect of turtle worshipers!) Interestingly, the dark-haired man in coveralls took no part in the moat-wallowing ceremony. Rather, he intermittently turned from the Madonna statue to gaze upon the two chanters with what appeared to Bernard Squires as unmasked disapproval.
"Kiiikkkeeeaay kakkooo kattttkin!"the couple bayed, sending such an icy jet down Squires' spine that he crossed the street and hurried away. He was not a devout man and certainly didn't believe in omens, but he was profoundly unsettled by the turtle handlers and the stranger with blood on his palms. Grange, which initially had impressed Squires as a prototypical tourist-grubbing southern truck stop, now seemed murky and mysterious. Weird vapors tainted the parochial climate of sturdy marriages, conservatively traditional faiths and blind veneration of progress anyprogress that allowed slick characters such as Bernard Squires to swoop in and have their way. He returned straightaway to the bed-and-breakfast, bid an early good night to Mrs. Hendricks (taking a pass on her pork roast, squash, snap beans and pecan pie), bolted the door to his room (quietly, so as not to offend his hostess), and slipped beneath the quilt to nurse a hollow, helpless, irrational feeling that Simmons Wood was lost.