Dance, then, wherever you may be,

I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he.

"Come on, Bill--let's go sing with 'em," Slick Eddie said.

"Are you comin' back as a girl?" Bad Bill asked Jack.

"Not today," Jack told him.

They were going inside the building when Jack heard Slick Eddie say: "You're an asshole, Bill."

"Of course I'm an asshole!" Bad Bill said.

Jack went back to Mrs. Oastler's house and stretched out in a hot bath. Leslie came into the bathroom in her black bikini-cut underwear; she put the lid down on the toilet and sat there, not looking at him. "How many of them are there?" she asked.

"About thirty motorcycles, maybe forty riders," he told her.

"Most of the tattoo artists your mother knew weren't bikers, Jack. The bikers are just the tip of the iceberg."

"I know," Jack said. "We better call Peewee."

"We better call the police," Mrs. Oastler replied. "They can't all sleep at St. Hilda's--not even in the gym."

"Some of them could sleep here," he suggested.

"Your mother intended to do this, Jack. Maybe if we had slept with each other, she would have spared us this final indignity."

"I don't know," Jack said. "I get the feeling that Mom couldn't have kept them away."

Peewee called later that afternoon. "I should be driving a van, not a limo, mon--there's no room for more booze in the limo, Jack."

"Better make two trips," Jack told him.

"This is the third trip, mon! If you and Mrs. Oastler don't get your asses to that chapel, you won't have any place to sit!" Peewee was a born alarmist. Jack knew that Miss Wurtz was in charge; he trusted Caroline to save him and Leslie a couple of seats.

The Wurtz did better than that. She stationed Stinky Monkey, like an usher in the aisle, to guard the pew. Bad to the Bones was there, too--and Sister Bear and Dragon Moon. They were all there--everyone Jack had imagined, and more.

A group came from Italy. Luca Brusa (from Switzerland) wouldn't have missed it, he told Jack. Heaven & Hell came from Germany, Manu and Tin-Tin from France. The Las Vegas Pricks were there, and Hollywood's Purple Panther.

They crammed the pews, the aisles--even the corridor, halfway to the gym. A small, frightened-looking gathering of Old Girls--Mrs. Oastler's trembling former classmates--were huddled in two front pews on a side aisle, where Ed Hardy, Bill Funk, and Rusty Savage appeared to have appointed themselves as the Old Girls' bodyguards. At least they weren't letting their fellow tattoo artists anywhere near these older women, who were (like the schoolgirls they'd been long ago) holding hands.

Miss Wurtz had marshaled her two choirs--the boarders and the bikers--to take their positions on either side of the aisle, where these disparate groups faced the largely baffled congregation. The tattoo artists who hadn't arrived early could make no sense of "God Save the Queen."

"Who's the Queen?" a broad-shouldered man in a bright yellow sports jacket asked Jack. He had so much gel in his hair, which stood straight up, that the top of his head resembled a shark's dorsal fin. Both the bright yellow jacket and the hair were familiar to Jack from the tattoo magazines he'd seen--Crazy Philadelphia Eddie; there could be no doubt.

The Reverend Parker arrived late. "There was no place to park!" the chaplain peevishly complained, before he had a closer look at the congregation--the tie-dyed tank tops, the tattooed arms, the open collars of the Hawaiian shirts, the exposed chests, also tattooed. Real snakes and mythological serpents regarded the chaplain coldly; in the reptilian tattoos, there were creatures that the Garden of Eden and the Reverend Parker had never seen. There were many depictions of Christ's bleeding heart, bound in thorns--lacking the usual Anglican reserve. There were many skeletons--some breathing fire, others speaking obscenities.

In the blaze of all this tattooed flesh, The Wurtz had outdone herself with "Lord of the Dance." The boarders, whom Leslie described as "a choir of not-quite virgins," sang all five verses--the bikers joining them for the five refrains. The wrecked blond boarder who'd lost her shoe at Emma's memorial service sang the fourth stanza solo, and a beautiful soloist she was; though they'd rehearsed this together several times already, she had the bikers in tears.

I danced on a Friday

When the sky turned black--

It's hard to dance

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net