Don’t you have anywhere to go, I ask.
Somewhere maybe, he says, someplace.
I give Finger some heat from my bottle of gin.
My mother died in a city by the mountains, he says. I never wanted to sleep under a roof.
The Holy Ghost visits my sleep. She tells me a story. It is a story about gold bricks and blow jobs. I wake up drunk at the Starlight.
You were talking in your sleep, says Darling.
An angel in the wild, I say.
You’re high.
Will you come to my boat?
No, she says.
I’m sorry, I say. A very sorry saint.
Eli, let’s ride your new motorbike and sidecar out to the countryside. There are foggy pastures where we cruise. A barefoot man rides a horse bareback. A teenager does a doughnut on a four-wheeler. Whole fields of white cotton grow. We go to Wise Jane’s. A former Delta debutante turned intellectual redneck. She once slow danced with Matthew Barney and he gave her a piece of the Berlin Wall. We take golf carts to the lunar surface, a patch of sand in the middle of the cotton field. We howl at the moon and say wild toasts and confess sins. Eli, you are screaming at the huge moon like a banshee.
St. Lucy’s eyes are gouged out. But she regains her sight. Then is beheaded.
When do they get saint status, you say, Eli.
I don’t remember, I say. Pass the wine.
I’ve been putting tiny ships into bottles. You cannot know the ancient secret of the ship bottlers. Don’t touch. View it on the mantle as the mystery it is. Out the window the carnival truck leaves town. We eat astronaut ice cream from the children’s museum.
You’re a son of a bitch, Maloney.
What’s that you say?
You heard me.
Lord, you give us tornadoes and purple sunrises. We praise your beautifully illogical ways. You performed great miracles long ago and nothing since. Why such confusion? We love you, wonderful idiotic Lord.
Eli, I counsel a woman who resembles Sigourney Weaver in the movie Aliens. I’m drunk at the session.
Are you saying your prayers at night, I ask.
My mother told me I should quit the prayers and do yoga, she says.
Yoga, I burp. There should be a jihad on yoga.
Finger gets a job at the pawnshop. One night he is sitting behind the counter reading Lolita and Dick Dickerson comes in and slaps him with his antique cane.
No reading, says Dick Dickerson.
OK, says Finger.
Then Dick throws the book at the wall.
Become a better person on your own time, he says.
Eli, we find a note Boom wrote you when you were young:
There are not many true sunflowers and you are one of them. You are a small bird with small wings. For you there is music that no one else can hear. Yes, you are a bird with tiny, tiny wings. You follow the sun like a soul reaching to heaven. There is music that only you can hear. You are Eli.
Today I’m viciously attacked by BB gun fire. Is there a sniper in the trees? Then an all-out ambush of twelve-year-olds. I run back onto the boat.
Finger, thank God you’re here. I’m being attacked.
You must have crossed them, Maloney.
More tornadoes in the Midwest clearing whole towns flat, but the streets of our little town are peaceful. The little shops and houses and churches and schools.
They have popcorn at the bank on Fridays. Sorority girls are near black from the tanning bed, cashing checks from their daddies. A scout in new boots does The New York Times crossword puzzle on a bench in front of the courthouse. A boy calls him Charlie Cheeseburger from across the street. He does tricks with his butterfly knife. Back on the boat, Finger is laughing at a bad sitcom.
It’s not that funny, I say.
Yeah, he says, but everyone else is laughing.
There is a man, a born again Christian, on TV who draws perfect circles on a chalkboard, a metaphor for Christ’s love. But there is no such thing as perfect, Eli. Someone said once the sunset was perfect and I told him to shut his stupid mouth.
I wish I had a chance to be brave, an opportunity to be a hero. This morning I cared for a sick dying squirrel I hit with my car but it wasn’t good enough. I have never delivered a baby in a cab or saved an old man from a river. I want to continue life in a noble way.
A dream: Darling and I are together riding jet skis on Lake Norman, near my childhood home. You are on the shore, Eli, beating Finger in chess and waving the Bonnie Blue. This is a dream but could be life someday.
St. Joan of Arc is raped by an English lord then tied to the stake. She asks the executioner to give her a cross to die with and he fashions one with two twigs.
She was just schizophrenic, you say, Eli.
One man’s mental illness is another man’s sainthood, I say.
I wonder what she’d been like in the sack?
Definitely a screamer.
She’d bite your head off, man.
Eli, your chess abilities are sharp and we hustle in the park. I’m your barker and manager. I only take 10 percent.
Don’t outright beat them, Eli. Let them win a few. That’s the hustle.
No mercy, you say. I don’t throw matches.
Two wizards watch. You win blitz games against a couple of park regulars and one long game with a twelve-year-old upstart.
People start to huddle around your matches.
One of the wizards climbs a tree.
Are you on the Holy Ghost hit list? Will you be taken down to her river of milk and honey? Darling sighs in the orchard of my dreams. She laughs in that way of hers. The Holy Ghost tickles her toes. We feed each other peaches and moonshine. I gain knowledge of her.
Let’s talk about the moon, Eli. There are the phases, wax and wane. We sit on the highest hill in town and watch the airplanes.
Ever wish one would crash, I ask.
You got a weird head, Maloney.
No souls lost, Eli, just something to break the silence.
Listen to the words coming out of your mouth, you say.
A bloom of smoke and fire and everyone lives. What a beautiful thing.
You need to go to church Maloney.
I am church, I say.
Finger is doing jumping jacks on the dock. His health is better and he is eating meat again.
I even started smoking, Maloney.
Why?
It makes you tough.
Those things will kill, I say.
All the good people smoke, says Finger. Puts you in touch with death.
I’m in touch with death, I say. It’s life I can’t get together.
I’m at the Starlight watching Darling pour hot coffee with her perfect pitching arm. She comes over and says there’s a call for me. It’s Tuesday on the line.
I’m in Bhutan seeking the light, she says. How is Eli?
He is fast on his way to becoming a chess master. Next week we go to the big tournament.
I sent him a wisdom prayer.
Do you pray for me?
It was good to talk to you, she says. Goodbye.
St. William is tied to the stake, strangled and burned. He coined the phrase Give up the ghost.
Eli, do you feel alive?
Most of the time.
What about now?
I would say yes. And you?
Can’t rightly say.
Another gin?
Why not.
This is what passes for conversation here on the boat.