“Because I feel the same way.”
“Crumley says when you turn on the faucets, stand back. You’re a good boy.”
“I’m no boy.”
“You sound like you’re fourteen, when your voice changed and you tried to grow a mustache.”
He moved and touched, then looked with his sightless eyes at the ancient residue on his fingers.
“All these have to do with Constance?”
“A hunch.”
“You got a powerful stomach; I know from having your stuff read to me. My mama once said a powerful midsection is better than two brains. Most folks use their brains too much when they should be listening to that thing under their ribs. The gang—ganglion? My mama never called it that. House spider, she said. When she met some damn-fool politician, she always felt right above her stomach. If the spider was twitching, she’d smile: yes. But if the spider tightened into a ball, she shut her eyes: no. That’s you.
“My mama read you. She said you don’t write them weary stories (she meant eerie) with gray matter. You pull the spider legs under your ribs. My mama said, ‘That boy will never be sick, never get poisoned by people, he knows how to upchuck, teasing that balled-up spider to let go.’ She said, ‘He don’t stay up nights in a bad life, getting old while he’s young. He’d make a great doctor, cut right to the pain and toss it out.’”
“Your mama said all that?” I blushed.
“Woman who got twelve kids, buried six, raised the rest. One bad husband, one good. She got fine ideas which side to use in bed so you untie, let your gut free.”
“I wish I had met her.”
“She’s still around.” Henry put his palm on his chest.
Henry surveyed the unseen mirrors, pulled his black glasses from his pocket, wiped and put them on.
“That’s better. Rattigan, these names, was she crazy wild? Was she ever honest-to-God sane?”
“Offshore. I heard her swimming way out with the seals, barking, a free soul.”
“Maybe she should have stayed out there.”
“Herman Melville,” I muttered.
“Say again?”
“Took me years to finish Moby-Dick. Melville should have stayed at sea with Jack, his loving friend. Land? When he lived there, it tore his soul from his heart. Onshore, he aged thirty years, in a customs shed, half-dead.”
“Poor son of a bitch,” whispered Henry.
“Poor son of a bitch,” I echoed quietly.
“And Rattigan? You think she should’ve stayed offshore, not in her fancy beach place?”
“It was big, bright, white, and lovely, but a tomb full of ghosts, like those films upstairs forty feet tall, fifty years wide, like these mirrors here, and one woman hating them all for unknown reasons.”
“Poor son of a bitch,” murmured Henry.
“Poor bitch,” I said.
Chapter Thirty-Two
“Let’s see some more,” said Henry. “Switch on the lights so I won’t need my cane.”
“Can you feel if lights are on or off ?”
“Silly child. Read me the names!”