Yonder Stands Your Orphan Read online

  “We ain’t hurt you.”

  “But you stink and I don’t like you.” Mortimer sawed the boy’s hair loose and it fell in a black lank. He indicated the other to come over. The first was holding the back of his scalp but looking at the enormous knife, almost a cutlass. Mortimer sawed the other’s beaver hang, really just touched it, and it came off in his hand too. “Now you look more, more nicer. Like boy people. You shouldn’t wear your hair like rock and roll when you your age. Like you mated up with some old Mexican beaver.” He bent down to chat on their level. “Now where’s your cart with your friends on it?”

  The boys simply ran. Why could he not have thought about that?

  He looked for them awhile. Too tired for the same rage, he took on another one, a cold haunting in the cells of his blood that would not leave him until an awful thing was done. He hollered out into the thicker woods, though still scraggly, all around him. “I see you with it, I’ll put you in the orphanage or the penitentiary!” He walked short distances yelling this.

  When he left, the boys came out. It was within the hour. You could hear a car a long ways here, could almost hear the browning pines bake. So few cars came by at all. You would be cursed to have trouble here, amid the trailer hulks taking on shadows and figures down alleys, mouths. The boys ate from the box of raisins and vowed to go on home. The cart was way back on the other side of the lake, not too far behind the bad restaurant and Max Raymond’s cottage. Then Isaac looked down and saw the little pistol. He picked it up very carefully.

  “That sumbitch’s ass is mine,” he said.

  “You got to beat me to it.”

  They were ravenous and they decided to go to Pepper’s shop and get what they could. They walked three and a half miles with the pistol, which, small as it was, became weighty as a hand steam iron. Weak as they were, trading it back and forth by the mile. They went in the store and did what they said.

  They were clumsy shoplifters. Pepper stood right there and he knew. But the younger boy’s shoulder was bloodied, and hadn’t he seen a gun in the other’s back pocket? You just had no idea nowadays. Never did.

  In the early morning hours, Mortimer watched again for the prophet, on a television big as a closet in his British Tudor house in Clinton, hoping for more science fiction and apocalypse. But the prophet did not come on at the regular hour. Instead was an ordinary bloated carnival figure and his wife, evangelists. His wig of slate waves, her towering nest of curls and paint thick on her massive eyebags. An ex-hooker, shouting and laughing in raptures as she explained she was actually at the moment walking with Christ and his apostles on the shores of Galilee, hearing their laughter. Their laughter, thought Mortimer. Here was a new one. Repentant whore laughing with God’s men. He thought about some of his own women. He offered no retirement plan, no health insurance. This was no worse than he treated himself. What you did was just make money and watch out. He fondled a new purchase. A rainbow-painted clasp knife with a fillet blade.

  Outside in his driveway his ride was a long black Mercedes. He could not find the pistol in any of his cars. He had to cut down on the coffee. He wrote this down. Then he cried a little for having no friends.

  Sponce and Harold were very sick. They hallucinated odors of burning oil and monoxides to awful intensity. They smelled their own life tenfold. They could not rid themselves of the odor of sunbaked vomit. Both stood under headaches that drove them to the darkened back of the house. On separate cots they rolled in nausea and the jitters. Head of black air shot full of spangling pins. Sponce thought he would upchuck his heart itself. They could not keep down even Tums, only cold Gatorade, which Dee brought them in such quantity that she began to make it from powder. She took two days off from Almost There and was nervous in her home, but she didn’t mind.

  She saw they were clammy, too pale. She wore her white uniform and sat in a chair long into the night with a thermometer in one hand. Then fell asleep like that. She never turned on the television and did not think much of Man Mortimer, more of her real husband, which she seldom did. She had turned thirty-seven the day before. The boys were finally asleep at dawn. She amazed herself by her energy and tender domestic feelings. She had taken Emma to the Mennonite couple down the road two days ago. The couple had tragic pity for her. They took the child in with hardly a word.

  The small boys had been away three days, but that was not unusual. The little scutters. They were devoted to their skits. She had little say in their lives anyway. They seemed like vagrant lies she had told once, in the form of children. She wondered if she loved them or should.

  In the back, Sponce moaned at noon. “Feels like that old man puked straight through to my brain.”

  Harold whispered, “Lord God, don’t leave me hanging. Decide.” So sick he was not in love for hours.

  Out of torpor, Dee watched a religious channel finally. It was the Assembly of God folks. Appease the Lord, the absentminded Big Skull. You always had to get his attention or he wouldn’t recall you from an hour ago when he directed you up shit creek, and it raining. She decided these folks needed to be laughed at because their lives were otherwise flat and cold.

  On Saturday the next round of fishermen in their old cars and muddy boats and ragged families would buy their ice and nothing else at Pepper’s store to furnish a day at the spillway, where they fished for crappie and catfish or stripers from the bluffs not in sport but for meat. The men were not greedy, but they could carry a lot. The aerators chugged in the background like distant sucking hells. Miles and miles of fields and valleys had been flooded to make an entire county adjacent to Warren and Issaquena counties the biggest catfish plantation on earth. Cynical neighbors to the state had suggested the whole region be flooded so as to have a closer Gulf of Mexico to Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. But Alabama did not want Mississippi’s brown seawater interfering with the emerald coastline of the condoed and biker-barred Redneck Riviera. This delicacy, catfish, was now Mississippi’s leading export.

  Universally, nothing is better for bluegill than live crickets. Pepper had them fat and brown. The inside of Pepper’s store smelled like old minnow water and the stale bread he fed the crickets. Once Isaac and Jacob had caught crickets for Pepper to make pocket money. Now they left with their spoils, passing by the poor families on their ragtag fishing trips, and on to the bad restaurant, staying off the road.

  They knew the woman with curly hair might sing at sunrise, so they slept not far from their cart in the wet bottom under a holly bush and on soft pine needles from a stand of ten huge pines, unlumbered by some miracle of cross deeds. This was a hundred yards from Raymond’s back stoop, where the dark woman would come for her aubade to the animals after a hard night of thick cigarette smoke and rum and Cokes. They were becoming tristate stars, the band Linga Caliente with their Coyote, found out by a crowd new to this area like the coyotes who had swum the river or trotted across the bridge from the west two decades ago.

  Sometime during the night the boys awoke and took the skeletons one at a time off the Big Mart lawn wagon they had stolen from the orphans’ camp. They brought them to the edge of the woods but not visible to the house and sat them side by side in high cane under a hickory, seated like church members who had waited too long in the pews for Rapture. The pistol went wherever the boys went. It gave them confidence, and the feeling let them sleep.

  They fell asleep holding each other on the beach towels they had stolen from Pepper’s bait store. They simply wore them like ponchos and ran when he looked away. In their dreams the woman would wake them by coming to the little porch and singing in a foreign tongue, beyond Spanish.

  When she began to sing, they sat up. Whole blooms had leaped to whiteness overnight. The bones sat there, passengers of beautiful white in the moonlight.

  Her voice naked and not there. They forgot they wanted to see her without clothes and became only hearkening ears, like juvenile rats. This was sublime until the saxophone came in all sick from another part of the house.
An even more foreign country trying to converse with her.

  They imagined for a while the woman’s voice came from the mouth of the mother skeleton and was theirs alone. No saxophone could avail against it.

  “You know,” Isaac said when the voice and the horn stopped, “these shirts is nasty. The one who gave them to us is just another one wanting our mama.”

  He took off the black T-shirt rank with days of child’s sweat and blood drying from his cut. Jacob did the same, balling his up. They dug into the earth, an easy loam, with their hands. Buried the shirts.

  “We can get new shirts when her and the doctor leave.”

  “It’s Sunday and they might not. He might be having at her. Or watching football.”

  “The wife would have some good shirts that her titties woulda been in.”

  “We could meet them.”

  “No we can’t. We ain’t good-looking enough.”

  “That Lincoln-driving old fuck cut my hair off.” Isaac touched the back of his head.

  “You know it.”

  “That one’s ass is mine.”

  “And what you ain’t finished with, I’m gonna be on it.”

  Melanie slept alone and wondered if she could sleep alone another night. Too much seemed a mistake, a lack, a sucking away, she thought. Her pleasant yard, the rippling shore water, the night singing of the wetlands, did not feel kind to her anymore, in this furnace of midafternoon. Her bones felt dry. Then came evening. She wondered if this was all because of the smashed glass animals at Onward. The doves outside repeated their three-note griefs softly, never weary of them. Surely it wasn’t grief. She was awake at three in the morning. But I make animals from my loneliness, she thought.

  The next night she had a guest.

  She had “Greensleeves” from Ralph Vaughn Williams on the stereo box. He had brought Fantasia. She was happy he was an actor with the theater troupe. Otherwise how could he have imagined this?

  He drank two very fast cups of espresso and then his moves were sudden. She had planned to talk an age, but what did she know. She asked him to hang his pistol belt on the bedpost. He chuckled and then he was all over her. It was a long hour with several engagements. She could not believe it when he took her from the rear. She felt spasms and loved him backwards as if trained to this work because she was not only older, she was old, and she couldn’t have it that she seemed naive. That would be obscene.

  Then she imagined that he would want her aristocratic so there would be something to conquer, not a pliant, grateful old woman to make jokes about later. On the CD the violins were trembling, deep and long, into retreats and sighs. Moving things around was one of the great pleasures in life. Finding new figures in ordinary stuff. Like an artist, she thought. She believed they both were artists and not silly at all, not absurd unless air was.

  She held her own against his withdrawals and frantic reentries. What a gift to hear him cry out vanquished as his long spurts made ropes in her. She felt very rich in secrets for hours. Blushing with them.

  “I guess this is trouble,” she said to him after a while.

  “I don’t know what you mean, trouble.”

  He was marine-cut and muscular and did not smoke. She did. She lit a Pall Mall left from a pack John Roman forgot when they went fishing together with his wife.

  “Child, our ages. Us.”

  “Nobody is married. Nobody said no.”

  “That’s true. So, modern times. This doesn’t feel like sin or what . . . ugliness to you?”

  He watched her with her cigarette. She smoked rarely but truly needed this one. She watched the pistol butt in its holster, the golden bullets, the belt hugged to the bedpost. She needed sin.

  “Well,” he said, “it felt good, that good, like sin. If it hadn’t, I guess it would have just been ugly.”

  “Will you want me again? I’m asking at the wrong time.”

  He grinned. She wondered if he was handsome or just a fine package.

  “Maybe. But even now, a sapped ape, I’d say yes indeed.”

  “You were sapped?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thank you. One more thing. I’m sorry. Believe me, I believe in quiet too. But will you stay interested in me?”

  “Yeah. You’re what brought me to the dance. I wonder what it’s like to be as good-looking as you this long. You’ve got style too.”

  He dressed and drank another espresso rapidly. Then he was gone.

  She walked around the house, and then she cried for a few minutes. Extremely happy. He had asked her to go with him to a high school football game. The end of August. In this heat. At Edwards, a town back east twenty minutes or so. She had forgotten this was possible, even though she had gone with Wootie all the time those years ago. “The season is hot and school is too early and this is the subtropics,” she said aloud. Then she was sad a moment. There was no seduction. She was stunned and needy and already too attuned to him. Thirty-six years old. Did he have to be exactly the age of her only child?

  He had told her nothing about his business, although she had asked were there murders lately or what were the crimes he went to besides glass animals. Somebody had seen some skeletons on a lawn cart somewhere, and two fourteen-year-olds were missing from the orphans’ camp. But he spoke as if these matters might be local delusions. He had not left her out, but he had not been garrulous, as on his television five minutes.

  He stood at the door just briefly, saying these things, and she was almost deaf looking at him, tall but without cowboy boots. Here was your seduction.

  They knew no old things about the other. No months of dances, no convertible under the moon. But in the old days you always knew the end. People could look through you and see the children, the house, the lawn, the dog, just up the road. Not like this.

  Let me keep this sweet life in me for a long while, she demanded of nobody.

  Were they even friends? Or simply something else, like nothing in the old books, the old songs.

  “What was your name meant to be?” asked the deputy, eyeing Mortimer’s license.

  “It was meant to be what it is, goddamn free to be itself like this goddamn country.”

  “Man. You don’t hear that much. Never, in my experience.”

  “Did you go to a name college?”

  “Sir?”

  “You stopped me for having an uncommon name?”

  “No sir. I stopped you for running a stop sign on County Road 512 and Hill Bagget’s Road.”

  “A country stop sign. And for having this Lexus. You thought I was a dope runner.”

  “I couldn’t see much at all through those windows all smoked. These windows make us nervous. We don’t like them, you know.”

  Mortimer relaxed. “You see I’m not a black man now. You must be pretty fresh on the force.” The car might look ill-gotten around here unless you were a plastic surgeon or an antique queer, but Mortimer was part of the fabric here. They were lucky he didn’t move off from them, not even after that tornado came close to one of his houses and tore the third one to pieces. You got forty thousand employed by the casinos in this state, sure, but you got at least forty thousand wrecked lives to go along with them. More. You got Cash for Your Title civilization, you got pawnshop villages. Me, how many lives have been wrecked? Twelve. Maybe thirteen or fifteen, tops. I even brought Edie back from Valiums. You got me who got stabbed in the wang from loving a woman.

  Big Lloyd and Edie were on a mattress in the rear and had stopped eating each other briefly while the patrolman talked. Mortimer had been driving them and watching in the overlarge rearview mirror above the dash. For his personal entertainment. Personal was your operative word here. My country ’tis of me.

  “Mr. Mortimer. Do you have farming land in Sharkey or Issaquena County?”

  “Farmland? Would that be a high crime?”

  “No. I just thought you might know some of my folks.”

  Mortimer could not believe this fool.

  “No, I
don’t know farm people. I’m driving on your soil, your folks’ soil?”

  “None of my folks talks like you.”

  “Are you saying I got stopped for talking?”

  “Sir. You know, you look like Conway Twitty. A good man, I hear.”

  “Except he’s dead, Officer, sir.”

  “Yes. But they say things about the King too.”

  “My aching.” The license came back to him through the little slit of window.

  “The Kang. What if I called your boss?”

  “The sheriff? The High Sheriff?”

  “Yes, Deputy. The sheriff.”

  “Well, I’d just say I had probable cause. But I’m not ticketing you this time.”

  Mortimer said nothing until the deputy had driven away. “I have a life. Shoot me.”

  The deputy told the sheriff privately in the office who he had stopped and why, and how sassy the man was. The sheriff seemed unimpressed. Mortimer had no record. Then the deputy described their nasty conversation.

  “He didn’t really miss the stop sign, did he?”

  “Sort of.”

  “No. You stopped him because it was a black Lexus SUV and you’d never seen the inside of one, or you thought you had a dope-hauling African-American sort of dude, or a casino entertainer. No?”

  The sheriff threw himself on his knees in front of the deputy. The deputy had seen a minor version of this theater offered to others but never had he come in the way of it himself.

  “God, please save me from Boy Scouts.” Facetto put his hands together in worship.

  The deputy was astonished, sick with embarrassment. He worshiped this sheriff. “Sir?”

  “Yes, Lord Deputy?”

  “Do you know any Conway Twitty songs?”

  “Your life began about the last season of the eight-track tape, Bernardo. ‘You’re standing on a bridge that just won’t burn’?”

  “I’m what?”

  “One of his tunes, Bernardo.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Get rhythm, son. I beg you.”