“We do,” the wolf said. “Me and my sister and our parents.” The other creatures nodded. “I just wish we had a flashlight.”
“Well, say something,” Saul told him. “Say what they say. We don’t need a flashlight for that. This is what you all came for. I swear to you, if the wolf comes up with something. .” He left the sentence unfinished, and the darkness around him seemed to shift inwardly.
“L-l-l-l-l-l-lord, help help help hellllllp,” the wolf said, before giving up.
“That’s okay,” Saul told him. “Try some more.”
“Amen amen amen amen,” the wolf stuttered. “Please thou please thou let-t-t-t-t-t us depart in please. Peas.” There was a long silence. “I c-c-c-c-c-can’t do it,” the wolf admitted.
“Yes, you can,” Saul said.
“A-a-a-a-awake and mourn, ye heirs of h-h-h-hell,” the wolf said.
“No, that’s a curse,” Saul said. “Try again.”
The wolf began again tentatively, as if by rote, and then seemed to find his voice. “Many many many many. M-m-m-may the Lord may the Lord may the Lord may the Lord bless you and k-k-k-k-keep you,” he said, giving the foreign-sounding words a hallucinated, studied attention, as if he were dredging them up from his memory, and then, because he was half-singing, his voice rose in conviction, its pitch deepening with intensity. “May the Lord be g-g-g-g-g-gracious unto you,” he said, no longer intimidated by the words, since he wasn’t stumbling over them so badly now. “May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace both this day and forevermore,” the wolf concluded, reciting the final phrase in a high, steady, clear voice, as if the meaning of the words had come home to him and he was now their bearer. The hanged woman started to say “Amen,” then stopped herself. The crow appeared to be angrily agitated and shifted his weight from one claw to another. A fragment of the moon appeared from behind a cloud, and Saul saw the crow more clearly, saw how agitated he had become, how he hated the blessing: he was nearly in a fighter’s stance.
“There,” Saul said, keeping his voice authoritative and steady. “That was good.” He handed the shovel to the caterpillar. “Here,” he said. “You have to drop some dirt down there.”
Slowly and reluctantly, the caterpillar took the shovel and flung dirt into the hole. The shovel went around the group, all except for the malign, armless garbage can, until the hole was nearly covered up. At last the shovel returned to Saul, and he filled in the rest of the dirt. He tried to straighten up, could not, but at least knew what he wanted to say.
“Go home, children,” he instructed them. “Go home.”
The group of creatures trudged back across his backyard, around the house, into the front yard, one of them, the Himmel, picking up the gasoline can and the matches, and then they made their way toward the truck and the car. Among them, only Little Hans stood up perfectly straight. The others walked with the errant slouch of defeat.
“See ya,” the crow said, making the words sound like a threat. The garbage can had already positioned itself in the backseat. The crow got in behind the wheel of the Plymouth, next to the bubble-gum boygirl, put the car into gear, and with a spinning of wheels and a screeching, drove away, followed by the truck, whose radio was now playing Rush.
Carrying his shovel, with a last glance at the burning rosebush, now sputtering out, Saul, his own face burning with pain, limped toward the house, with its one broken window, its wife and child still safe inside, upstairs, for the moment, this one night.
Twenty-three
“You thought you were so tough,” the crow said to the boygirl. “You just chickened out. Just like a little girl.” He cackled. “The girl came out all over you. You have to have balls to be a boy, didn’t anyone tell you? Maybe you should have dressed yourself up as a chicken.” The crow was thinking that the evening was now totally and completely whacked: he had been planning on doing some serious hilarious damage and asking the boygirl to give him a blowjob later, when the fun was almost over, when the house was burning. Not that she’d do it, but it would be worth asking her just to see the look on her face lit by the flames. Now he didn’t feel like drinking, or fucking, or fighting — he didn’t feel like doing anything enjoyable. He was completely bummed out, and the feeling was conclusive.
“The air was cold,” the boygirl said. “Besides, I chickened out? What’s all that stuff in the backseat? Rocks, paint, paintbrushes, gasoline, dynamite? You could’ve, like, just set fire to his house if you had the nerve, like you were planning to.”
“Oh, right. Like you weren’t scared. Anyway, I didn’t go running and crying back to the car when he brought those ashes outside,” the crow said.
“Okay, then what are you going to do with all that?” The boygirl pointed to the paraphernalia of pranksterism and terror on the backseat next to the garbage can.
“I don’t know,” the crow muttered. “Keep it for later.”
“What later? This is later. To use on who?”
“There’s always people to use it on.” The crow laughed and reached under the seat and opened another can of beer. “Innocent bystanders and people like that.”
“That’s not very nice,” the boygirl said. “Opening a beer and not offering me any. Where’d you steal it from?”
“Sorrrrrry, bitch,” the crow said. “You want a beer?”
“Don’t you call me that. Don’t you call me a bitch.”
“Oh yeah?” the crow asked. He shook the beer can with his finger plugged over the opening and then aimed the spray at the passenger side, wetting down her face and her shirt and the leather jacket. Then he laughed. “There’s your beer.”
“You dickhead,” the boygirl said. “Take me home, you piece of shit. At least it’s your leather jacket you’re ruining.” The boygirl put her hands on the wheel to turn it. The car weaved unsteadily down the residential street, narrowly missing a parked car.
“Children, children,” the garbage can said, laughing.
The crow’s mood had changed. Now he would have to clean the car, thanks to what she had made him do. He would have to deodorize the Plymouth’s interior. His jacket could smell of beer just fine. Thinking about all this work in store for him, the crow recognized that his rage was her fault. Now he did feel like doing something: taking the boygirl by force if he had to, the bitch, with the garbage can watching — and the image of how he would do it settled down on him the way the robin settles down on the worm. He would take her out there into the dirt and the dark and pull her apart if he had to, just open her up and brute-fuck her to death. And when he was finished with her, he would leave her out in the middle of nowhere to find her own way home, that is, if she could still walk, bloody and seeping. He drank down the rest of the beer. At last: here it was: some serious damage.
The car accelerated, and the night, kept at bay till now by the neighborhood streetlights, gradually enveloped them as they hurried on toward the outskirts of the city and the fields of farmland beyond it.
Twenty-four
“It won’t work,” Patsy said. “You can’t import religion and ritual like that, not as a local anesthetic. It only works when the whole community believes in it. A ritual engaged in by part of the community is just schmaltz, just window dressing. If they’re going to make us outcasts of God, Saul, that’s it. We’re going to be outcasts of God forever.”