A breast was a sexier thing than a schlong, is what it amounted to. She kept her list as it was.
Target
— That a “bereaved" right there, I’d say, Hod. He talkin bout beatin somebody up back inside the funeral home.
— What, that thing hears what they say too?
— I guess. How the hell you gone know they saw Forrest?
— By when they run into the next county if it’s anything like what Roopit showed us. Hodhawmighty, that fire thing was something—
— Yeah, but how you gone know what they thinking? Why they runnin, Hod? “Critical part,” I recall Mr. Mogul saying, and you noddin like a schoolgirl, like you in love with his ass, and now you don’t seem to remember what you noddin at.
— I am in love with a man what give me the kind of money we getting for aiming this… whatever the fuck it is at people, I confess.
— Say he should beat up a dork in there.
— Who?
— Damned target there, Hod. Hello? You spose dork-beatin-up is a positive character trait for the New Southerner?
— I would think that a outright indispensable trait, Rape. Track on him. I got to pee.
Certainty
— This was a nice room.
— Yes. Was?
— I think we should go.
— Why?
— A, because you busted up the floor digging your way in. B, fish can flood into the room, according to you. C, Bundy and Oswald are stalking us, according to you. D, its about time I consulted the sages on the sward, who will tell us where to go, what to do, in Life, they being Masters.
— E, you’re too tired to get up and do anything about Bundy and Oswald; F, how about I was the waitress in that cafe down there who had precious little else to do but try out a free
man upstairs, and did not eat through the floor. That, my friend, is a dumbwaiter patch from yesteryear. My name is Sally, but it wasn't Sally, if that makes any sense to you.
— That doesn’t make any sense to me, Sally not Sally. Don’t say those things. They are vicious and cold and true. You clawed through that floor, now miraculously repaired and our best asset, like a nutria after a honeybun, and you were, in some surreal fog that inhabits the better part of my real brain, a girl named Sally with whom I was so purely and gonely in love for a second five hundred years ago that I cannot now afford to remember the moment and hardly the fact but in discrete snatches or curly wisps if you will of that fog, and then a pitchfork tine in my heart, somehow. And then I saw you at my father’s funeral and you were new to me but I could not love anymore and so stood dully before you. Isn’t this the way it really was — is? Won’t you sit on that black-lacquered chair in that orange light and let me
behold your ligne pure? And can you deny Forrest?
— I never heard it called that before. No, I cannot deny Forrest.
— You cannot deny a man you have seen melt into the ground. There are positions and counterpositions in this logical postlogical plausible — deniability world of ours, where the cell phone and blather and the brain tumor rule, but you do not deny that a man has melted into the ground.
— If I sit on the chair, we do not leave the room?
— We do not. The chair, the window, the room, are all we need. And that radiator over there.
First Run
— What about them other boys there, acryin?
— No no, we want thatn what talkin about heatin up somebody inside a funeral home. That the one, Rape. Something about that perfect.
— Ready aim fire gridley, then. Here we go. Forrest, Hide, Rear, Saber, Silent ought to do it. Hodhawmighty, Hod, lookit this.
— Ats bettern the durn demo. Look at that sombitch. Sword look like a razor blade. I want me one a them coats he got.
— And look at our boy, Hod. And you right, them others cant even see it.
— He look like he peein his pants.
— And he is stopped talkin bout beatin up people in funeral homes.
— What he sayin?
— He sayin he went one year to Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, which it is very near to here.
— Naw Is it?
— How the hell I know, Hod? All I do know is they a man whose somebody done died back in there where he wont to beat somebody up about it, and now he talkin about goin to Forrest High School and peein in his pants.
— Close enough for me. What Roopit say we spose to do now we found him?
— I dont know, Hod. Why do you keep asking me all these questions? I have run this machine and found our man first one I aimed it at, and you want me to do everthang.
— Read the orders.
— Shit.
— What?
— Where them cigars, Hod?
Debate
There was some debate between Hod Bundy and Rape Oswald as to what to do in terms of bringing their man in now that they had located him. They watched him walk from the funeral
parlor to the gravesite, stoop and pick up the Swisher Sweet cigars wrapped in the media mogul’s orders, regard them closely, absently pocket the orders, and momentarily, in a
bizarre scene that it seemed only they noticed, they watched the man have the casket opened in the blistering air under the striped awning, talk to the deceased (he said, "Hey, hud," which
they knew because Rape Oswald was tracking his every move with the machine), lean into the ornate blue metal-flake box and appear to kiss the deceased, and then slip the cigars into the box with the deceased before signaling for the coffin to be resealed. He stepped back and looked around.
— He lookin to see did anybody see him kiss the corpse, Rape.
— He lookin to see, Hod, where Forrest is. Then they saw Sally Palmer among the mourners. They said “Hodhawmighty damn" in perfect unison, so that it sounded a little bit like a small choir singing a brief` tune.
— Son!
— Put that gun on her, Rape. See what she knows.
Rape Oswald was so thrown by the beauty of the woman that he could not operate the machine, and they did not determine whether she too could see Forrest. They were both in fact so dazed by her that they had difficulty even following their man from the funeral.
The man led them on an improbable three-state careering into a rented room in Holly Springs Mississippi. There, because they had lost the orders, which had been conceptually as opposed to technically procedural, and because the machine had possibly been damaged by beer in the course of their hauling it three states, they resumed operating the machine with some technical difficulties that had not presented themselves in the successful first run in Jacksonville.
They thought at times that the impossibly beautiful woman they now saw in the window of the rented room was the same one they had seen at the funeral; at other times they were convinced it was a second impossibly beautiful woman.
The competing theories in this domain fought in the minds of Rape Oswald and Hod Bundy like two good dogs. If that sombitch could find 0ne a them purty as at, Rape contended, he