The red dog has him by the throat and swims him deep into the dark waters and it is as if the sides and boundaries of his body flop open and pour out his being like hot syrup, mingling it with the juices of the world until he experiences his spirit thinning out to a film and himself at the same time bobbing and cuffed by foul breeze and without the ability to gather himself. Plus a headache like an infernal hammering. In thick serpentine dreams he flies to Chattanooga and lies in the shed chuckling at the Ghost as the Ghost feeds iron filings to Old Bob the lead horse, listening to Mr. O talk about his boyhood escapades as a gandy dancer in a Birmingham yard. Then a jump to a recount of the misery of Mr. O’s actual Klaudio jailhouse visit. How, accompanied by insults and taunts and by somebody smearing yellow plum jelly from a jelly and butter sandwich on the back of his suit coat, he entered the narrow room where Delvin sat shackled at a scratched and spit-sticky table. How he strode with a full resolve of dignity up to the table as if he was about to walk right through it to embrace Delvin, but before he was all the way there his strength gave out and he stumbled and staggered against the heavy table, crying out Delvin’s name, and then stood slumped and overcome until Delvin despite the guards yelling at him and his own shackled state climbed over the table and on the other side pressed his body against his benefactor’s, nudging him and poking at him with the edge of his wrist until the guards beat him down to his knees, picked him up and flung him back over the table into the big square chair he had leapt out of.
“God help us,” Mr. Oliver said over and over and sobbed. “God help us.” Tears running down his face like water.
In his delirium Delvin cries out these words. God help us. But no God does. As the professor said, the gods are gone from the earth.
