The presiding minister that night was the Reverend Buster Mahoney, CPA, Gamblers Anonymous member, honorary Laughlin deputy sheriff, and a licensed graduate of the Elko Religious Farm, a combination monastic retreat, soul aerobics center, and diploma mill. Reverend Mahoney possessed a rather baggy, outsized personality out of which surprises were being continually dropped or inadvertently exposed. Introduced to Tom and Kara, he began telling tales from the lost L. A. years when he was "into" death, working the fringes of the discount funeral business -- middle of a eulogy for a murdered drug dealer the deceased's beeper goes off, the mourners burst into laughter, Mahoney gets so flustered for the rest of the service he confuses this dearly departed's name with the one he buried two hours previous, and then sweats for days worrying what the insulted dealer's friends might do to him. In marriage, a more felicitous industry, he hadn't yet made a mistake. Minutes after meeting Tom, he was referring to him as Jerry.
For their ceremony Tom and Kara chose the Futuristic Chamber because the future, as Kara explained, quoting the mad Hollywood prophet, Criswell, from the infamous film
Plan 9 from Outer Space,
was "where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives, whether we want to or not." The room was a closed cube of mirrors decorated with countless strings of running lights; survivors spoke of being sealed within a stark depopulated casino extended infinitely into space or of being trapped inside a bizarre video game, all the lasers aimed directly at you. The loud piped-in music was a medley of classic science fiction movie themes, the youngest at least two decades old, leaving the intrepid matrimonial voyager in an oddly disorienting limbo, the future and its background score having already come and gone, in some cases well before bride or groom had even been born. Reverend Mahoney, apple belly, fatty breasts, and all, zippered into a skintight crash suit, officiated as if from the bridge of the starship Enterprise; at his back, in place of mirrored glass, a solid wall of television monitors to magnify, reflect, and duplicate each nuptial twitch and jitter, an impressive technological supplement to the general atmosphere of anxiety and embarrassment.
The happy couple had composed their own vows, she declaring from memory in a clear voice rich with emotion her ardent fidelity to this stranger from the east, strange no more, an uncommon man deserving of greater happiness than she could provide, but nonetheless assured of finding in her company, as long as she was capable of drawing a breath, house advantage, sound money management, and all the love he would ever need -- comped -- while he, reading in halting rhythms from the scribbled sheet of hotel stationary in his quivering hand, pledged his strength to a fierce defense of their continued bliss, promised to honor the snowflake-special particularity that was Kara, to cherish the utter incorruptibility of her butterfly soul.
They exchanged "I do's," Reverend Mahoney broke into a hacking cough, the lights chased one another across the walls with accelerating speed, hidden loudspeakers vibrated to the amplified strains of the
Forbidden Planet
theme. When they kissed, a charge went round the room, a brief roseate glow upon the genitals of everyone present.
The new bride was ecstatic. "I got up this morning Kara Lamm," she announced, proudly. "Tonight I go to bed Mrs. Tom Hanna. No other woman in the whole country can make that statement." The miraculous budding of her face, renewed cheeks bright as the flesh of raw petals, ritual's signet pressed into living tissue for all to mark and know once again the vivifying power of ceremony, the repetition of right word and gesture opening a circuit in the aisle of time, eternity's proof in the turgor of the heart.
Tonight's organist, Mrs. Billie Hardwick, Nikki's great-aunt and childhood confidante, began to cry, but then she cried at every wedding, and she had attended several thousand.
Tom, before he left, made a point of kissing every woman in the chapel, including Jessie, slipping a bit of unexpected tongue into her mouth, hand straying ever so lightly across her ass.
"Gross," declared Nikki, glad to see them go.
"What do you give them?" asked Jessie.
"Are you kidding? There are no odds on the game that woman's playing. Where she's going, there are no winners. Mister Snake Eyes. She'll be lucky to escape with her shirt."
An hour later, dawn mustering a ragged world to attention outside her window, Jessie, conscientiously wiping the night's usual accumulation of smudges and prints from the glass counters, discovered the missing rings, a half dozen or so of the most expensive: the Shower of Gold, the Bird of Paradise, Crystal Blue Ecstasy, the Crown of Fire. She wanted to be mistaken, to have misplaced, miscounted the essentially interchangeable stock, but knew at once that no amount of wishful thinking, checking, rechecking the shelves, could erase the stubborn fact of loss gaping up at her from the mockingly vacant slots of the gem trays. There was no avoiding it. She'd been robbed. Nikki had to be told.
It did not go well.
Nikki glared at the evidence as if undiluted will were sufficient for the rematerialization of physical objects. "Pop will have an absolute shit fit," she said.
"I'm sorry."
She looked at Jessie as if she were a very young, very disappointing child. "How could you?"
"How could I what?" Jessie's voice rising on every syllable. "You act like I boosted the damn stones myself."
"Who was it? The Professor and Mary Ann, that loathsome couple who couldn't keep their hands off each other?"
"The woman's name was Kara. She was the only one who handled the rings."
"They were a team, obviously. His job was to distract you."
They exchanged one lengthy, mutually indignant look.
"Just what are you getting at? I show those crappy bands to dozens of couples every night. Anyone could have taken them. Who knows how long they've been gone? And frankly, I don't like the general tone of your remarks. If I'm to undergo an interrogation, then let's get some real cops in here."
"Great idea. Pop will be so pleased to have an official squad car pay a visit. Remember what happened when Roderigo dented the limo?"
"He'd fire me?" Jessie asked in disbelief.
"Why stop there? I'm the one who brought you into the business. No, we're just going to forget about this petty incident and pretend nothing has happened." She began arranging the remaining jewelry so as to minimize the appearance of a deficit.
"I'll pay for the missing merchandise. You can deduct payments from my monthly check."
"I don't believe I want to discuss this matter any further," said Nikki, and abruptly hurried from the room.
Jessie, dumbfounded, let her go, too dazed to open another round. She needed time and an undisturbed corner in which to assess her wounds, their seriousness, their motive, their intent. Was this unfortunate theft the issue or the issue before the issue? Had a wire been inadvertently tripped in the dreaded father-daughter territory, or had Jessie plunged haplessly down the rabbit hole of their life together, into the true history hidden away in these unexplored tunnels and warrens beneath the daily chitchat, the habitual sex -- the subterranean lair of the wily human relationship: a dark maze of pop-up demons, fun house mirrors, spooky dead ends, multiple false bottoms. If only she could feel her children in her arms right now, this moment -- sudden pangs of guilt at how few hours of the ever-shortening days she seemed to spend in their needy company. An incompetent bridal-shop drudge, she was a bad mother, too.
She perched on her stool behind the reprimanding silence of the cash register, counting off the minutes, the sole inebriated couple who stumbled in for nuptials and coffee at dawn perfunctorily attended to by a distant automaton on weak batteries. That absolute strangers could arbitrarily interpose themselves between you and those you loved was an intolerable horror. What Tom and Kara had done, while lifting a handful of relatively insignificant stones -- if those were their real names, if indeed they were the actual perps -- was a simultaneous ransacking of the contents of her heart. Absolute strangers. The commission of evil. For without trust the world became a howling waste of isolatoes, a postapocalypticscape of people, animals, trees, apparently untouched -- only the living links between them totally obliterated. The war was over and the monsters had won. In the bleak early morning light the neon palm out her window looked like a poorly sculpted cigar whose end had exploded.
Neither Nikki nor Jessie spoke a word in the car back or at home as they prepared for bed, passing one another in the hallway, entering, exiting rooms without a sound, emissaries from warring provinces mistakenly booked into the same frontier hotel. After an hour of tossing, turning, watching the cracks in the ceiling assume the hideous shapes of giant stinging insects, Jessie opened her mouth to insist dispassionately, "I didn't take those rings."
"I never said you had," Nikki replied at once, in a clear wakeful voice. "It was your job to make sure no one else did."
"Go ahead, speak your mind, don't hold back."
Nikki threw off the sheet and sat up in bed. "I wish there was a cigarette in this damn house. I can't believe we're having this discussion all over again. It seems to recur at monthly intervals, regardless of circumstances. What is it you want, Jessie, a notarized document testifying to my enduring faith? The problem's not with us, anyway. This isn't the first instance of unpaid goods slipping past the door on your shift. There was a wedding gown a couple weeks ago, and some other miscellaneous shit over the last few months that Pop already knows about. He doesn't need an update on this latest incident."
Jessie was shocked. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Wasn't that important. I knew it wasn't you despite what he might be thinking."
"Excuse me," said Jessie, angered by the overly protective, if not downright patronizing, attitude of Nikki's remarks -- from the root
pater,
patriarchal, peter puffer, "but I wasn't aware your father's feelings were more important than mine."
"Unfair, Jessie, royally unfair. But then you always have to do whatever's necessary to win every argument, to have the last word, just as you have to control each vacation and spend the last dollar. My God, you even have to come first. I might as well be living with a man."
There was a moment then of charred silence in which Jessie simply stared at this creature she had taken for a lover. How could this be happening? Fooled yet again by that sly trickster -- herself. She couldn't believe her abiding naï
vet
é
, the sheer bedrock intransigence of it, that, no matter how diamond-sharp the drill of the facts, seemed destined to remain embedded in her character to the final breakup and removal. Somehow, on the deepest, most profound levels, she had convinced herself she had finally arrived at a station of assured immunity from the plentiful and venomous relationship diseases, that the mere obstinate truth of loving someone of the same sex and weathering the abuse such outrageous heresy invariably provoked conferred a passionate unblemished love, a neurosis-free zone, in accordance with the natural economy of psychic checks and balances. What childishness. How little after all these years, all the long bitter accruing, the patient telling, of experience's bruises, how little of value she truly knew. The eternal innocent, perpetually amazed.
"I'm sorry," said Nikki, reaching out a propitiatory hand, but Jessie was up and through the door before she could be touched. She found refuge in the kids' room, on the edge of Cammie's bed, in the furry maternal softness of Mister Mac the talking bear, the sunny unambiguous cheer of the furnishings, an all-enveloping baking-bread aroma of small children, the consolation of domestic detail, neglected crannies where grace dwelt, as crisis proved time and time again, the moment when Garrett first struck her as tangibly present as the baby blue rocking chair in which she sang Bas to sleep on nights of fear for both mother and son. Was she to be required now, as penance for what obscure unexpiated crimes, to endure once more the exquisitely keen anguish of yet another separation? Already sobbing before she knew she'd even begun, she simply let herself go, tears a sacrament, purifying the mind, unshackling the rigidities of the flesh, life's salt offering to life. A dream had told her she'd cry today, but she'd apparently misinterpreted the symbols.
Nikki began knocking softly at the door, tendering sweet words of apology. Jessie wouldn't unbolt the lock. This was a private matter, this washing of her soul, and she wasn't about to be interrupted until crying stopped because crying was done. The little shirt of Bas's she dried her face upon felt as blessed as any veronica. Beckoned mysteriously to the window, she gazed off, in the ascending sun, to where gray mountains crystallized daily out of the clear blue solution of the sky like ancient forms resolving themselves in the dark chamber of the heart. And when the wrestling with shapes had concluded, one had to rise and rise again. She thought of Nikki and the viridescent planets of her eyes and the disarming crinkle of her smile and the untamed cowlick at the crown of her head and how she sometimes smelled of fresh french fries and Jessie thought: Nikki loved Bud loved Glenda loved Roderigo. She thought: Jessie loved Bas loved Cammie loved Mister Mac. And yes: Jessie loved Nikki loved Jessie. Love chains. The true length of each connecting inevitably with another until a single cardinal chain wound close about the riving globe to keep the reckless pieces of it from skirring to the clamorous end of it. No one could break a love chain. Not Tom or Kara or Garrett or Reverend Pop or Mamaw Odie or mean Mr. Moses in the adjacent duplex or the roving teen gay-bashers or the LVPD or the D.A. or the Family Court or even Melissa. The stuff from which a love chain was forged was guaranteed indestructible. The truth.
Seven
NIGHT OF THE LONG PIGS