As soon as the fire died down, the mosquitoes would dive in again, drive Theodore crazy. They didn’t bother Roy at all, and the cripple wished he had blood like that. He woke one night with them buzzing in his ears, still sitting in his wheelchair, the guitar lying on the ground in front of him. Roy was curled up like a dog on the other side of the ashes. They had been camping in the same spot for two weeks. Little piles of Theodore’s stool and vomit were scattered over the dead grass. “Lord, we may have to think about moving,” Roy had said that evening when he got back from the store down the road. He fanned his hand in front of his face. “Gettin’ mighty ripe around here.” That had been a few hours ago, in the heat of the day. But now a cool breeze, smelling faintly of the salt water forty miles away, brushed against the leaves of the trees above Theodore’s head. He leaned over and picked up the wine jug at his feet. He took a drink and capped the bottle and looked at the stars set against the black sky like the tiny chips of a shattered mirror. They reminded him of the glitter that Flapjack used to brush on his eyelids. Up around Chattahoochee one evening, he and Roy had sneaked back into the carnival just for a few minutes, a year or so after the incident with the little boy. No, the hot dog vendor told them, Flapjack wasn’t with them anymore. We were set up right outside this redneck town in Arkansas, and one night he just disappeared. Hell, we were halfway across the state the next day before anyone noticed him missing. The boss said he’d show up eventually, but he never did. You boys know how ol’ Bradford is, all business. He said Flapjack was starting to lose his funny anyway.
Theodore was so tired, so sick of it all. “We had some good times though, didn’t we, Roy?” he said out loud, but the man on the ground didn’t move. He took another drink and set the bottle on his lap. “Good times,” he repeated in a low voice. The stars blurred and faded from his sight. He dreamed of Flapjack in his clown suit and bare churches lit with smoky lanterns and loud honky-tonks with sawdust floors, and then a gentle ocean was lapping at his feet. He could feel it, the cool water. He smiled and pushed himself forward and began floating out to sea, farther than he had ever been before. He wasn’t afraid; God was calling him home, and soon his legs would work again. But in the morning, he awoke on the hard ground, disappointed that he was still alive. He reached down and felt his pants. He’d pissed himself again. Roy had already taken off for the orchard. He lay with the side of his face pressed against the dirt. He stared at a mound of his fly-covered shit a few feet away and tried to slip back into sleep, back to the water.
32
EMMA AND ARVIN WERE STANDING in front of the meat case in the grocery store in Lewisburg. It was the end of the month, and the old woman didn’t have much money, but the new preacher was arriving on Saturday. The congregation was having a potluck supper for him and his wife at the church. “You think chicken livers would be all right?” she asked after some more calculations in her head. The organs were cheapest.
“Why wouldn’t they be?” Arvin said. He would have agreed with anything by then; even pig snouts would have been fine with him. The old woman had been staring at the trays of bloody meat for twenty minutes.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Everyone says they like the way I do ’em, but—”
“All right,” Arvin said, “get them all a big steak then.”
“Pshaw,” she said. “You know I can’t afford nothing like that.”
“Then chicken livers it is,” he said, motioning for the butcher in the white apron. “Grandma, quit worrying about it. He’s just a preacher. I’d say he’s et a lot worse than that.”
That Saturday evening, Emma covered her pan of chicken livers with a clean cloth and Arvin set them carefully on the back floorboard of his car. His grandmother and Lenora were more than a little nervous; they’d been practicing their introductions all day. “Pleased to meet you,” they had repeated anytime they passed each other in the small house. He and Earskell had sat on the front porch and chuckled, but after a while, it started getting old. “Jesus Christ, boy, I can’t stand it no more,” the old man finally said. He got up from his rocker and went around the back of the house and into the woods. It took Arvin several days to get those four words out of his head, that “pleased to meet you” shit.
When they arrived at six o’clock, the gravel lot around the old church was already full of cars. Arvin carried in the pan of livers and placed them on the table near the rest of the meats. The new preacher, tall and portly, was standing in the middle of the room shaking hands and saying, “Pleased to meet you,” over and over. His name was Preston Teagardin. His longish blond hair was slicked back over his head with perfumed oil, and a big oval stone glittered on one hairy hand and a thin gold wedding band on the other. He wore shiny powder-blue pants that were too tight and ankle-high boots and a ruffled white shirt that, though it was only the first of April and still cool out, was already soaked through with sweat. Arvin figured him for thirty or so, but his wife appeared to be quite a bit younger, still in her teens perhaps. She was a slim reed of a girl with long auburn hair parted in the middle and a pale, freckled complexion. She stood a couple of feet from her husband, chomping gum and pulling at the lavender and white polka-dot skirt that kept riding up her trim, round ass. The preacher kept introducing her as “my sweet, righteous bride from Hohenwald, Tennessee.”
Preacher Teagardin wiped the sweat off his smooth, broad forehead with an embroidered handkerchief and mentioned a church he had worshipped at for a while down in Nashville that had real air-conditioning. It was clearly evident that he was disappointed with his uncle’s setup. Lord, there wasn’t even a single fan. By the middle of summer, this old shack would be a torture chamber. His spirits started to flag, and he was beginning to look as sleepy and bored as his wife, but then Arvin noticed him perk up considerably when Mrs. Alma Reaster came through the door with her two teenage daughters, Beth Ann and Pamela Sue, ages fourteen and sixteen. It was as if a couple of angels had fluttered into the room and alighted on the preacher’s shoulders. Try as he might, he couldn’t keep his eyes off their tanned, tight bodies in matching cream-colored dresses. Suddenly inspired, Teagardin began talking to all those around him about forming a youth group, something he’d seen used to great effect at several churches in Memphis. He was going to do his best, he vowed, to get the young people involved. “They are the lifeblood of any church,” he said. Then his wife stepped up and whispered something in his ear while staring at the Reaster girls that must have agitated him greatly, some of the congregation thought, with the way he puckered his red lips and pinched the inside of her arm. It was hard for Arvin to believe that this pussy-sniffing fat boy was any relation to Albert Sykes.
Arvin slipped outside to smoke just before Emma and Lenora ventured forward to introduce themselves to the new man. He wondered how they would react when the preacher greeted them with “Pleased to meet you.” He stood under a pear tree with a couple of farmers dressed in dungarees and shirts buttoned tight around their necks, watching a few more people hurry inside while listening to them talk about the going price of veal calves. Finally, someone came to the door and yelled, “The preacher’s ready to eat.”