We're All in This Together (28 page)

The
next
morning I sat on the old courthouse steps while Wayne slept in at the motel. People went by and bought tickets for tours at
a window at the top of the steps. On the sidewalk a television reporter was being filmed doing a segment. A juvenile delinquent
was jumping back and forth behind her, trying to get into the frame. The cameraman told him to beat it.

"Put me on, bro. Put my shit on television," the kid said.

Finally, a courthouse guard came down. The kid ran to the bottom of the steps. "What you gonna do now?" asked the punk.

The guard shrugged. "Nothing," he said. "Long as you stay where you are."

I closed my eyes and heard the sound of Traveler's hooves on the frozen mud of that early morning, the mist ghosting from
the torn street, the lace curtains limp in the windows of the townspeople's empty homes.

The Confederate officers milled about the steps in their heavy wool coats and black boots, talking in whispers, as if there
was something sacred about this patch of mud and clapboard, that was no different from the thousand other places they had
stopped to rest and bleed. But at the echo of the hoof beats, the whispering stopped, everything stopped. From out of the
mist, the old man and his horse appeared. How old Lee looked, as if his proud, straight spine might snap at any moment, and
his body crumble to twigs inside his uniform; and Traveler looked like a phantom of horse.

Lee reined in, but did not dismount. He said: "Men, we have fought through war together. I have done my best for you; my heart
is too full to say more."

The officers on the steps realized that their general was weeping. It was over. Without even knowing it, they had all surrendered.

A sudden gust shredded the mist, and Traveler reared up. The general tightened the reins, but the stallion replied with another
sharp kick, and the general pulled again, harder this time. The animal whinnied, snorted. Then, the old man bent down, and
whispered something into the beast's velvet ear—perhaps some secret that, after all, even General Lee's great, defeated heart
could not contain.

"Hey, mister, buy me a pack of Marlboros from that dude over there." The kid who had been bothering the cameraman was standing
in front of me. He pointed at a vending kiosk at the foot of the courthouse steps.

The kid gave me five dollars and I bought him his cigarettes.

"Thanks," he said when I handed them over.

"Stanley, what are you doing? He's a minor. What has happened to you?" I could hear my wife saying these things. It seemed
reasonable to me then, that she should love another man, a simple baker.

Clip-clop, clip-clop.

I knew what it felt like to surrender. I sympathized with both man and horse.

My wife's upbringing had been strict, and religious. For most of her formative years the only toy her parents permitted was
a Bible; and the only way she could play with the Bible was to make book covers for it. (My wife could knock out a perfect
book cover in about thirty seconds; take a paper bag, snip-snip, six precise folds, and there you had it.) To this day, the
walls of her parents' home were decorated with these childhood book covers, lovingly framed and hung alongside family photos.
The book covers showed elaborately painted action scenes: Jesus smashing the moneychangers' table with a kung fu kick, and
David taking a chainsaw to Goliath's spewing jugular, and "THE BIBLE" in bullet print above the pictures, like it was a Steve
McQueen movie. Each night, her parents contentedly ate dinner at their kitchen table, beneath a framed cover of Cain dismembering
Abel with a machete.

Throughout our wedding, these good people never took a seat on a pew, but remained side by side on their knees, praying for
their daughter to marry a God-fearing man, someone with an honest haircut.

My wife told me that she believed that her childhood stunted her imagination, and maybe that was the reason she never felt
quite whole. The only stories she knew were the stories in the Bible; her own story didn't begin until she went to college
and met me.

"But what about the time you escaped from those wild bears?" I asked her. We were lying in the dark. It was years before,
when we were poor, when my haircut could still be considered mildly corrupt, and when she still slept in the nude.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, how did you get away? There were wild bears. They could have killed you. They wanted to kill you."

• She blinked. Then my wife said, the words coming out quick, breathless: "It was the honeymooners. The honeymooners saved
me. Without even knowing it."

"Yes?"

They advanced upon her, the stinking, shambling monsters, the wild black bears with claws like scimitars, eyes rolling and
blood crazed, their steps shaking the ground. "I knew that my only chance was to show that I was one of them," my wife said,
and she leapt through the arched legs of the biggest bear, and fell upon the disemboweled and still-steaming bodies of the
two young honeymooners. My wife yanked out an organ and tore away a massive bite of tissue. The wild bears became confused;
after watching her devour an intestine, they realized she was one of them, and the beasts all went to sleep. "Later," said
my wife, "I killed them, skinned them, and sold their pelts to gain passage back to Sri Lanka."

The game became a regular part of our evenings. "Give me a question," she'd abruptly demand, as we lay in the bedroom dark.
Then, after a moment, I'd ask, "How about the banditos? The Spanish gold, the old mission, the blind girl? How did it play
out?" I turned on my side to watch her recount the escape and the crooked deal and the sweet revenge; and her eyes brightened,
and it excited me, the abandonment in that expression, but now I realized that I had made a mistake. I never included myself
in a scenario, or asked my wife how I would save her. I sent her into peril alone.

I tried the game on Wayne. "How did you escape from the wild bears?" I asked him.

"This is the screw game you played with the bitch, isn't it?" He was eating a roadside barbecue sandwich with one hand, strings
of juicy meat spilling down the front of his shirt, and driving with the other, tearing through Virginia at just under a hundred.

"Yes," I said. I could already see it wasn't going to work.

"Okay. I shot the shit out of the bears."

"Nice," I said, "that's really inventive."

"Sorry, but that's how it happened. Shot the fuckers. You asked, I told you."

"I cheated on her, Wayne," I said. This was something I had never told anyone.

He groaned. "Are you going to eat that?" he asked.

"No," I said.

Our third and last night on the road, we stopped at a drive-in in South Carolina to grab some shut-eye, but neither of us
could sleep. Wayne and I walked around the lot, trying to peep. We thought one guy was getting a hand job, but it was hard
to see; we couldn't tell for sure. Both ends of the double feature were about people dying of cancer, but in the second show,
the cancer gave the protagonist superpowers.

"You really torture yourself, thinking about it, don't you?" Wayne asked. He didn't have to tell me what "it" was.

I imagined my wife and Albert Michalkiewicz having sex atop the steel counters of his bakery kitchen. I saw the flour caked
to my wife's ass as she sprawled beneath him; the powder turning his chest hair white, making him old and repulsive and powerful,
like Anthony Quinn, like Zorba the fucking Greek. When they were done, I supposed they would feast—naked and ghostly and utterly
famished—gobbling pastries and pies with lusty abandon. I pictured Albert Michalkiewicz squishing a cannoli on my wife's chest
and smearing the cream filling all over.

"Well?" Wayne had discovered an almost full bag of popcorn lying in some weeds. On the movie screen, the superhero was terribly
withered from the disease, but still strong enough to shoot lasers from his eyes, and knock down buildings to block the tidal
wave. Crickets chattered, a girl giggled, protesting no, but giggling yes.

"Can I still buy my bread there? From
him}"

My brother shook his head. He held out the bag. I took a handful of stale corn and chomped.

We arrived in Starke on a Friday evening. We passed a bar marquee proclaiming, THIS SATURDAY: CRISPY CRITTER DRINK SPECIALS!
It seemed that Virgil Pendergast was still waiting for his stay of execution.

The penitentiary squatted in a barbed wire nest on a hill above the interstate. A half-dozen spotlight beams pointed ineffectually
into the gathering twilight. A few strip malls slept in intervals along the main street, advertising valuable merchandise
at low prices.

Pendergast's wife was staying at a Days Inn a mile or so from the penitentiary. We took a room of our own for two nights,
because the deal did have one catch: if Pendergast did receive a stay of execution, Wayne couldn't buy his car. The widow-to-be
didn't actually own the car until he was dead.

Wayne called her and she turned out to have the room next door.

Yolanda Pendergast was a lanky woman, pushing fifty, but not that hard to look at. First, she shook my hand, and then she
gave my brother a hug that lingered a little too long and clung a little too tight around the waist to be just sisterly. I
immediately realized how it was going to be, and a part of me wanted to slug my brother; only a couple of miles away a man
sat on death row, and here was Wayne, preparing to pork his wife, and take his Jaguar for a song. In the next instant, I found
myself wondering how I could think that way: Wayne was my brother, and Virgil Pendergast was a psychopath who had run down
squeegee men, and who had smugly informed his court-appointed psychiatrist that he had never run over an actual man, just
frogs. ("And then, in reference to the squeegee men, Mr. Pendergast stated, 'They's just frogs in disguise, that's what you
all are overlooking right here,'" testified the psychiatrist during the penalty stage of the trial.)

So the man's wife was moving on. These things happen.

Yolanda had a six-pack of beer and we sat on plastic chairs around the motel swimming pool.

"Last time they turned on the juice it knocked out the power all over town, blew
the
top clean off the penitentiary generator. Apparently there are some circuits mixed up with the chair's battery, but the county
engineer is plum perplexed," said Yolanda, not appearing especially concerned herself, as she sipped from a longneck and reached
over to trace Wayne's TCB belt buckle.

"I don't have to tell you that Virgil is some concerned."

Wayne clucked his tongue. "It's an ugly business."

The evening was mild. Venus was bright. Another guest was watching a war movie; a soldier was screaming for his mother. The
sergeant told the grunt to shut his hole, pronto.

"I miss Paula. I miss my wife." I blurted the words, almost spitting them out.

Either they didn't hear me, or they pretended they didn't, because no one said anything. Wayne stroked Yolanda's blond hair.
She squinted at the last light and smiled, and scratched a cold sore in the corner of her mouth with a long purple nail. The
war ended.

We finished the beer and Wayne suggested we go out for a few more drinks. Yolanda knew a great place.

In the motel parking lot I noticed the canvas-covered body of Virgil Pendergast's murder weapon. Only the bottom curve of
the Jaguar's silver hubcaps was visible beneath the tarp. I thought of secret eyes, peering between the gaps of a Venetian
blind.

We took the Malibu to the bar.

The painted awning of the bar pictured an alligator in a Florida State letter jacket munching on a Union soldier. The Yankee
soldier's tongue lolled grotesquely from his mouth.

We took a table on the veranda, which commanded a view of a balding hillside of scrub grass and the northbound side of the
highway. A couple of tall gawky chickens milled aimlessly on the dark slope, picking at the dry grass, occasionally producing
a raspy squawk.

There was a round of shots, a round of beers, another round of shots, more beers, and Wayne told the story about when we were
kids and the mouse got electrocuted. Only this time, I made the mousetrap and the mouse blew up. "In the next second, the
little bugger was gone, and there was nothing but a real fine vapor of blood hanging in the air."

"Oh, I just hate mice," said Yolanda.

"My point," said Wayne, "is twofold: first, Stanley was a sicko growing up; and two, electricity has a mind of its own."

"I used to shock the shit out of the dog, too," I said.

She gave me a glassy, pinched smile. "You know, Stan, I think you and Virgil would have a lot in common. He's real good with
science, also."

Wayne announced that he had a dick full of piss and tottered to his feet.

When he was gone, Yolanda put her hand on mine. "I can't tell you how supportive your brother has been to me during this difficult
time. Wayne met me every day for lunch at the chatroom—I just hate to eat alone. I swear, without him I think might've just
gone crazy, and lost control of my body completely: just stopped talking and crapped in my pants like a baby.