Men wrote and called telling Billy their car radios exploded in the word, their power tools cried out, their names went dead, all of a sudden no one remembered who they were. They did not remember their own names either. Their fillings played his broadcasts in their heads. Their mothers had warned them and they hadn’t listened. Men called trusting Billy with outrageous infidelities. Men wrote dying of enlarged hearts, enlarged prostates, of deep boils, of foul weather, of senile madness, of a wasting virus, of the kiss of tsetse flies, of food, of garden herbicides, of home-owner’s accidents, of thrombosis, of clotted veins, of black depression, of cancer, of cancer. All night, through the whole night, the bank of telephones doodled and whined, and our people recorded these salvations. In the morning cheap onionskin littered the desks and floors and the testimonials were dragged across the carpet on the feet of tired typists to the bottom of the stairs.
“I CAN TELL it was a good trip,” Billy said.
“Yes,” I answered.
He put his hands on either side of my face, gazed into my eyes. He didn’t really see me. He was looking at his own reflection. He was watching himself watch me and between him and his own regard of himself I was invisible.
“I like train rides,” I said, so relieved I could taste blood in my mouth.
Then he said, “If you ever leave me, Marn, I will take the children. I will keep them. And you know what I will do with them.”
He smoothed his hands across my hair, closed me against him, and then we shut the door to our room and he did as he sometimes did, one of the ways. He stood me next to the bed, took off my clothing piece by piece, then made me climax just by brushing me, slowly, here, there, just by barely touching me until he forced apart my legs and put his mouth on me hard. It took almost an hour, by the bedside clock. It took a long time after that. He came into me without taking off his clothes, the zipper of his pants cut and scratched. I cried out. He pushed harder, then withdrew. He held my wrists behind my back and forced me down onto the carpet. Then he bent over me and gently, fast and slow, helplessly, without end or beginning, he went in and out until I grew bored, until I wanted to sleep, until I moaned, until I cried out again, until I wanted nothing else, until I wanted him the way I had the very first time, that first dry summer.
The next morning, I took out the money in circle, counted it, and offered it to Billy. He set it in a pile before him, blessed it, and handed it over to Bliss, our treasurer. She was a heavy blond woman out of Aberdeen, South Dakota, very competent and self-proud. She had a bulldog’s heavy face, drooping cheeks, a big ugly smile. And to think, sometimes I had to laugh, I’d brought Bliss here. I had saved this woman from venereal disaster. She had been a sexual dynamo, full of blasted encounters, confessions, and still a kind of raw blood energy leached right from her through the boards of the floor. She was diabetic and used long needle syringes for her injections, not the short kind I’d seen others use. She gave the pain up, an offering, she said. I thought she gave off a charred smell, myself. I thought she reeked, but she professed to like me, and because she was also my children’s spirit mother I was forced to like her too, with all my heart. In fact, she was a woman I was pledged to give my life to if she ever asked me for it. Billy Peace had chosen Bliss, but she had, I thought, looking at her that new morning, the thick and punished hands of a butcher.
She rose now, a larded green warrior in her sweat suit and army jacket. She held out her thick hands and for a long moment we put ours out, too, returning the energy. A song started and we had to let it go around twice. Then she put her hands down and gave the financial report. She shouted it out as though it were a kind of prayer, and since it was all numbers and dizzy quotes of percentages and tax advantages and ways that the money would go in here, come out there, look nice, still work for us, we all nodded at the right time, any time she asked for it, and smiled.
“All right,” she said at last. “Bottom line. We need three to work a day job and give assistance with the profits.”
“Let’s all meditate on who,” suggested Frenchie, lowering his head.
We did, all of us. Deborah’s hand in mine was cold, cold as light. If I had anyone whom I counted as a friend it probably was Deborah, whose children were close in age to mine, and with whom I’d battled small temptations in the garden and the kitchen. She was a dark longhaired meek woman with exhausted eyes. My skin was pale, the palest it could be, Snow White pale, ghost pale, grass pale. Good skin, nice skin, not marred by a vein or freckle. Lilith had the same fine skin, the perfect covering, the wonderful elastic veneer that allowed for every interior change, compensated, stretched or shrank at will, smoothed or roughened with each change in weather. Sensitive skin that wrapped itself exquisitely over our bones. I sat there, holding hands, letting the energy pass through me and over me, absorbing the invisible rays of ardor and togetherness that we shoveled from ourselves into the middle of the circle. We basked in this communion, wallowed in it like animals on those mornings when we woke bereft.
I squeezed light from Deborah’s palm, and she startled in surprise or pain.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, just the day before my cleansing,” I whispered back.
She nodded and lowered her head again, into the steaming twilight of the morning’s meditations. I looked up, a thing I’d never done before in circle. I unbolted my eyes and from under the edges of my scarf I looked straight into the eyes of Bliss, who was watching me with the money eyes. Empty eyes. I knew better than to meet those eyes. I had nearly tipped my hand. If she knew what I was thinking, what I wanted to do, it would be over before it started. If she even suspected. Bliss, the one I had to watch, the undoer, the stone turner. I smiled vaguely, as though I was confused, waking from and then submerging once again in my dream. I closed my eyes again and from inside my own dark consciousness I stared down, far down, into the shaft of an empty mine.
We were imaging gold. We were visualizing total and complete original support. We were seeing chunks, flakes, beads, veins, whole nuggets. We were seeing through the rock and gumbo, through igneous peat and shale, through the vestiges of lost black time, through the ivory teeth and petrified wood, through the bones and the tarry blood of dinosaurs. We were seeing gold, tasting it, biting gold coins, believing. We were going to start digging in the back field pretty soon.
I BEGAN TO keep a diary — not the usual written record, but a mental diary of important moments. Here is a list I memorized:
Billy walked into the bedroom one night and took a deep breath and sucked all of the air out of it.