“She shot you. She shot you, man.” Chub hunched over him. “I wanna hear you say it. ‘Nigger.’ Before you go and croak, I want you to act like a upright God-fearin’ member of the white master race and say that HI word just once. Kin you do that for me? For the late, great White Clarion Aryans?” Chub laughed berserkly against the pain.
“Come on, you stubborn little prick. Say it: N-i-g-e-r.”
But Bodean James Gazzer was done talking. He died with the gun brush in his cheeks. His final breath was a soft necrotic whistle of WD-40 fumes.
Chub caught a slight buzz from it, or so he imagined. He snatched up the aerosol can, struggled to his feet and staggered into the mangroves to mourn.
28
The pilgrims were restless. They wanted Turtle Boy.
Sinclair wouldn’t come out until he had a deal. Shiner’s mother sat beside him on the sofa; the two of them holding hands tautly, as if they were on an airplane in turbulence.
The mayor, Jerry Wicks, had rushed to Demencio’s house after hearing about the trouble. Trish prepared coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. Shiner’s mother declined the pancakes in favor of an omelette.
Demencio was in no mood to negotiate, but the crazy fools had him pinned. Something had gone awry with the food-dye formula and his fiberglass Madonna had begun to weep oily brown tears. Hastily he’d hauled the statue indoors and shut down the visitation. Now there were forty-odd Christian tourists milling in the yard, halfheartedly snapping photos of baby turtles in the moat. Sales of the “holy water” had gone flat-line.
“Lemme get this straight.” Demencio paced the living room. “You want thirty percent of the daily collection and thirty percent of the concessions? That ain’t gonna happen. Forget about it.”
Sinclair, still numb and loopy from his revelations, had been taking his cues from Shiner’s mother. She pressed a smudged cheek against his shoulder.
“We told you,” she said to Demencio, “we’d settle for twenty percent of the concessions.”
“What’s this ‘we’ shit?”
“But only if you find a place for Marva,” Sinclair interjected. Marva was the name of Shiner’s mother.
“A new shrine,” Sinclair went on, brushing a clod of lettuce from his forelock, “to replace the one that was paved.”
He hardly recognized his own voice, a trillion light-years beyond his prior life. The newsroom and all its petty travails might as well have been on Pluto.
Demencio sagged into his favorite TV chair. “You people got some goddamn nerve. This is my business here. We built it up by ourselves, all these years, me and Trish. And now you just waltz in and try to take over… ”
Shiner’s mother pointed out that Demencio’s pilgrim traffic had tripled, thanks to Sinclair’s mystical turtle handling. “Plus I got my own loyal clientele,” she said. “They’ll be here sure as the sun shines, buying up your T-shirts and sodey pops and angel food snacks. You two’ll make out like bandits if only you got the brains to go along.”
Trish started to say something, but Demencio cut her off. “I don’t need you people, that’s the point. You need me.”
“Really?” Shiner’s mother, with a smirk. “You got a Virgin Mary leakin’ Quaker State out her eyeballs. Who needs who? is my question.”
Demencio said, “Go to hell.” But the loony witch had a point.
Even in his blissfully detached state, Sinclair wouldn’t budge off the numbers. He knew a little something about business—his father ran a gourmet cheese shop in Boston, and there were plenty of times he’d had to play hardball with those blockhead wholesalers back in Wisconsin.
“May I suggest something?” Mayor Jerry Wicks, playing mediator. The manager of the Holiday Inn, fearing a dip in the bus-tour trade, had implored him to intervene. “I’ve got an idea,” said the mayor. “What if… Marva, let me ask: What would you need in the way of facilities?”
“For what?”
“Another manifestation.”
Shiner’s mother crinkled her brow. “Geez, I don’t know. You mean another Jesus?”
“I think that’s the ticket,” the mayor said. “Demencio’s already got dibs on the Mother Mary. The turtle boy—may I call you Turtle Boy?—he’s got the apostles. That leaves a slot wide open for the Christ child.”