“Yeah,” said Jones. “She liked it.”
“Goddamn!” boomed Castle. “It’s too much!”
“They both admit it was the greatest fuck they’ve ever had, if not indeed the greatest in world history. The rookery is a wreck, all whipped and shredded, blood here and there. Carl is nearly blind, but he can see that those flawless haunches are brilliantly striped and maybe for good. He apologizes about what he’d said, explains he really never knew her brother, he was just trying to snap her out of her doldrums. She says never mind, doesn’t matter. He says he is sure he was a great guy, the greatest, had to be: brother of a woman like her. And silk shirts were his favorite kind. She agrees and cuddles up in Carl’s arms and he ends up passing the night there. They couple three or four more times during the night and this morning. No comparison to the first round, but it is warm and satisfying, quoth our hero. He adds that his old lady really has her feathers up when he appears for breakfast this morning, clawed and bloodied and reeking of strange persons, but he’s feeling so afloat he doesn’t even take the bother to apologize, just eats his Wheaties in blissful silence, and wafts on down to the shop, advising everybody it is spring.” Jones pulled Himebaugh’s untapped beer toward him, leaned back and drained it, turned his attention to relighting the cigar: all signs that the tale was told.
It was too much for Castle’s restricted vocabulary. There was no expletive to do it justice. Finally, he just shook his tanned jowls and said, “What a story, man!”
“If it don’t beat all!” chirped Mick, mopping up the beer on the table with his apron. “Sometimes I think most of us poor bastards just don’t know how to live. This corrupt lunatic is — really! — ” He paused for effect and looked around at the others: “He’s a goddamn genius!”
“Yeah, you said it!” laughed Wally Fisher. He propped back on two legs again. “Goddamn genius!”
“It’s a fucking outrage, that’s what it is!” Castle laughed, relocating words. His voice banged in the still room. On the television, somebody won $33. Camera panned on the audience. Pasty sheep-faced smiles. Hands silently and dutifully slapping each other. “But goddamn if it ain’t true to life!”
“And twice as beautiful!” added Mick over his sopped apron, and they all laughed. He still sat, but now Miller’s interest in another beer had passed. He couldn’t help but keep Himebaugh in the edge of his eye: the man sat silently, shaking his bony head, his thin old legs crossed, hunched in such a way that his elbow was pressed into his groin.
“Miller,” said Fisher, “you oughta publish this!” The thought delighted them all.
“What’ll we call it?” Miller asked drily. “A Child’s Visit to a Whorehouse?”
“Now don’t take the fun out of it!” said Castle.
“What if this sort of animal madness were set up as a precept for humanity?” Himebaugh asked earnestly. He cleared his throat, shifted his position, straightened up. “What would we all turn into? It’s ghastly!”
“Aw, shit, Ralph,” Castle protested, “that’s stupid!” Himebaugh glared at the shoe salesman from across the round table, soft underlip turned in. “That’s goddamn plain stupid!” Castle repeated, rankled to have had such a good story tainted.
“Stupid! But this is grotesque! This disaster — I mean, in the middle of all this horror, this tragedy — that, that man — that beast — you’re all beasts!” Himebaugh was losing control.
“I thought it was pretty funny,” said Fisher.
“You’re a beast,” Jones said to him.
Himebaugh glanced darkly at their laughter.
Mick butted in: “Who do you suppose that’d be, Tiger? Reckon that’d be Oxford Clemens’ sister?”
“Sure,” said Miller. Bigmouth had given way on the screen to a smoking hunter. Miller lit one. “Dinah. I always wondered where Ox got those fancy shirts. I thought he stole them.”
“You used to get a little of that, didn’t you, Tiger?” Castle asked.
Miller smiled. For several days, he had felt his past sticking to him here like shreds of flypaper. “Well, she wasn’t the toughest teacher we had in high school,” he said, “but she was the sincerest.”
Mick stretched himself through the loose laughter to his feet and gathered up the beer glasses, lining them up on the bar. He got a bar rag to finish mopping the table. “That was sure one goddamn story,” he coda’d.
“Beasts!” bleated Himebaugh insistently and wiped his mouth nervously with a clean handkerchief. Castle snorted, and they started in again.
For an instant something seems to hover … enters him: his eyes open. They turn to her, blink in recognition. A hand faces its pale palm to her and she takes it. She assures him.
The phone rang. Everyone was gone. Miller, dozing upright in his swivel chair, listened to it jangle. Wouldn’t answer it. Looked at his watch. Seven. Home was an empty icebox and an unmade bed, didn’t feel like going there. Too bushed to go elsewhere. Still it rang, jarring him. He looked at it. Angry black fish, eyeing him with one gleam of reflection. He took it off the spit. “Hello?” He’d tell them it was a wrong number. But it was Marcella. He awoke. Giovanni was conscious and his condition was satisfactory. He listened to her voice, dreamed up questions to keep her talking, knew now there was a better place to go. But there was little more she could tell him. Except that Giovanni had been visited in the mine by the Virgin, a vision, so to speak. Yes, he could publish that. She had come to him in the form of a white bird.
Part II: The Sign
The first woe has passed; behold, two woes are still to come.
1
While the mine disaster reduced itself to numbers, repercussions, and causes, Eleanor Norton turned all her time — for school was closed of course — to a review of messages received in Carlyle and West Condon, reasoning that it was the Carlyle crisis that had driven them here, so a relevancy might well be expected. On the first page of each of her logbooks were the words, which she took from the apocryphal book of Baruch: “Walk in the presence of the light of this book, that you may be illuminated.” On a first reading, she found only familiar admonitions to live a deeper life and lessons in the cosmological verities …
A flower plucked, a fish’s leap: the distant star is tortured!
… preceded in Carlyle by simple warnings of imminent danger. But by Saturday she had read them all six times, and had begun to discover, beneath the placid surface, an emergent design of revelation. There was, for example, that peculiar reference of a year ago December to
… the one who is to come.
At the time, already harassed, she had supposed it to be merely another in the succession of warnings in Carlyle, for the “one” was to bring her suffering and injustice, and Domiron had urged her not to fear him. But now she remembered that she had received similar cautions three or four times in the past — she searched them out, astonished to discover the almost identical wording. Had she misread them all along?
Do not despair if One should come. Faith and truth have fled away, to be replaced by evil and violence and the lust for illusory things of the body. Oh men of the earth! only a cleansing can preserve you! Wash the earth from your hands and feet, and cast your eyes to the limitless stars!
Did this confirm her theory that the earth had formerly enjoyed a higher aspect of intensity? Was a cleansing to occur? And she, was she to be the agent? And then there was that exceedingly strange message, only a month old, that told her to