Yonder Stands Your Orphan Page 16

  And, thought Raymond, pulling into the parking lot of the bad restaurant, back almost to my front door. He didn’t shake as much as he expected he would, and he put the pistol in his belt against his stomach, put the coat on as he stood from his car. The red car, a Mercury Sable, was here all right. The tag wasn’t Memphis. It was local. He knew now. But he wasn’t certain why it should go on. One would make a quick move. The other would pay. A hum of grief came to his ears.

  The air was solid with earth- and tree-frog song. They went kecka kecka kecka in the early night, the storm blown past.

  The man was at a table next to the wall, tall even in his chair. His eyes were in shadow. Nobody else was about. His hair seemed too great for his neck, which had gotten thinner. Raised and swept to width, set like soft wire. He could be a singer, an evangelist, a small-town sinner living out a sneer established at seventeen. An almost effeminate elegance too, a man deep in self-study, a creature of mirrors.

  Raymond looked into the backs of the man’s hands on the table. A meal hardly touched in front of him.

  “I know you. What is it, Man?” asked Raymond.

  “I came out here to get a second opinion. You the doctor?”

  The doctor of yester-Memphis stood in the aisle. “Sit down,” Mortimer said. “Unless you planning your way out already.”

  As Raymond sat, the trance that had brought him here was broken. The man at this level looked frail, whining, “You called me names and wouldn’t let me in your club. There might be a new vote, though. It’s a democracy everywhere you look. Sidney wants me to come aboard.”

  Raymond had not expected wit, if this was wit. Could evil be witty? If this thing was evil. The hair almost its own life. The Everly Brothers. God recalls them. Two boys packed into one hairdo.

  Somebody was in the back. They were the only ones still in the dining area. The hour was desolate, dim, redolent of fried meals. Scorched crust of meat in the nostrils.

  “Raymond, let me tell you something that might get your attention. I had to see you. Where is that big knife or whatever? Show it to me.” Raymond reached inside to show Mortimer the butt under his coat. This did not feel unnatural. If he missed him here, he had the longer gun back at the house with the hollowpoints, and he was very good with that one at age eleven.

  “You want some of me?” Mortimer raised his hands. He had thinned a good deal, almost to gauntness. He seemed ill.

  “I came to destroy you. I don’t know much, but I know you’re bad straight through.”

  “No, not at all. You going to help me find some friends . . . acquaintances that went wrong, let’s say.”

  “How would you get help from me? Can’t you see I’ve got a pistol?”

  “I must have been blind.” Mortimer had a face under his face, grinning like a blanched skull. “You ain’t got the goods, sonny. After the oath you took. ‘First do no harm.’ I’ve had many a doctor acquaintance. Put them to work too.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Like the orphans’-camp job. There’s an opening.”

  Raymond hated the word stare, but it was a verb that occupied half of art and life and that was what he was doing, as in a French movie. As if his eyes were, beyond God and law, the single powerful arbiter in the room. “I’m going home,” said Raymond. He was shaking.

  Mortimer laughed. “Not that.”

  Raymond turned, relieved totally and sopping wet under his arms. He was beginning the walk. A noise broke out behind him, but he wouldn’t look at it. Then a huge pain entered the flesh near his spine. He could not account for it, then did not believe it. He tripped and stumbled, flailing at chairs, never falling. Only at the last, before he knocked his head on a chair back, did he crane his head.

  Mortimer sat at the table with a silver penknife in his hand. It was a thin short blade but not short enough. Blood was on its hasp. Raymond held his wound and staggered out the door, then into the gravel, where he thought, There is a gun in my car. But he was wearing the gun, or rather now it had slipped, the long martial thing, into the crotch of his underwear with the barrel down his right leg, sinking lower even then and trying for his ankle. He was stiff-legged. The monster of pusillanimity. His house was a hundred years away. The Mossberg was in there. His interest in the avocation of gunning was on the wane, however. He felt Mortimer right behind him. He had fled nothing. The man was swift and quiet to boot.

  “Let’s go right to the bone people in your backyard. I got the lantern, good buddy. You want to take a leak or anything?”

  Raymond struggled with the descending .38, which was making for his knee that moment.

  “Oh, go ahead and take your time. Go on in the house there and take a long leak. I don’t want you uncomfortable, Max. Sure, let’s both go on in. I’m wantin’ to look at that foxy lady again. Been missing her.” Mortimer walked ahead of Raymond, up the steps crowded by thick Carolina jasmine vine and honeysuckle, dead bees underfoot that got drunk and fell. He opened the door for Raymond. Raymond felt this was as lowly as his existence could get, but he had to sit on the couch.

  “Can I look around? Boy, now that was selfish. It was me who had to take the good long leak. You can’t beat a good piss for clearing the mind and putting a plan to things. Boy, I might not leave. Uh-oh! Your bedroom, Max, somebody left their gun right on his pillow. Great Lordy son, this is one horny ol’ lonesome dude. I got girls too, Dr. Raymond. Your missus, as I recall, would be in Miami getting leched on by all the old folks from Cuba? The Cubans, now, they’re hung I hear, and greased, with a golden earring, bandanny. But she got you. That’s a good one. She ought to be wearing you for a Tampax. Little music boy don’t wanna be no doctor no more.”

  Raymond was pondering the depth of his puncture and wondering how long it had been since anybody called him Max, as Mortimer did. High risibility. The wound’s nothing. He’s going to hurt me. He had hands on both kidneys and arose as a token of manhood.

  “Come on now, Maxy. Follow the old lantern and let’s just see some bone, my man. I had an interview with Pastor Egan, the ponytailed cross-cheeked boy, and he told me just about where. Said you wouldn’t mind my dropping by and smashing up a few with me.”

  “I don’t mind. They’re almost kids’ toys now, anyway. Wired-up.”

  “You want to bring your gun for snakes?”

  “I really don’t.”

  “I’m afraid of those things. Well, snakes and guns. You remember how it was with me and snakes?”

  “Yes.”

  “That old—Christ, they’re all old, it’s hard to remember which one—said, ‘We don’t hear sounds like that from a man around here.’”

  Raymond slapped at the fronds and walked him directly to the site of the people. When the lantern beam found them, Mortimer jumped past him like a dash man bobbling the light. He hurried straight to the woman and kicked her head off but it tangled in her rib cage and swung on the coat-hanger wire. But he followed with a field-goal boot to the plexus that sent the remainder of her affairs clattering.

  Then he jumped on the skull over and over, grinding it with his Mountie boots, waving the light and demanding Max Raymond join in, take the child.

  NINE

  ISAAC AND JACOB WERE ODDLY WELL BEHAVED, DOMESTIC. They straightened the house and talked around the old Ford that Hare had pulled from the swamp. It was behind their garage, a sagging building with stacks of National Geographics in it from a previous tenant. The boys would ask if the house was really theirs, and Dee told them she was pretty sure it was. Her gone husband was bad at details, but he was a good provider, sometimes a flush one. She and the boys could satisfy myriad needs in Big Mart. They straightened the house again.

  They hunkered in prospect of manhood, waiting on Hare to build the beam and trestle faster. The sun-grayed back of the garage was Hare’s drama curtain, they said. He had to tell stories in front of it while he worked and they sat. They pressed him for tales of other machines and major explosions.

  Harold Laird sta
red off as if in conspiracy with other mechanics near the horizon. It was a labored stare of either profound stupidity or alienation. He had looked constantly in himself for a likeness to his progenitors but failed. His large teeth, big legs and no chest or much rear. Too late, but he had entered the black church up the road and stolen a book from its meek open library called How to Be a Teenager. He gave it to the little ones later, but they discarded it because it was about how to be a nice teenager, which Harold Laird had been. But he had gotten it for himself to see what he had been, and he was going back for How to Be a Man and wouldn’t share it. Laird had hung in the background of his own history. He could not read well and hoped that in the next book there would be pictures of Christian women naked, since he was going to be a husband.

  Actually he had once, with others, participated in an event with a woman from Edwards in the bed of a truck, but he was still unsure whether he was manned or not. He was betrothed before to the silhouette of a woman on a bottle of some good-smelling Oil of Olay he found, but could break it off. She had owned him for years now. He could not leave himself alone sometimes, a sin.

  The boys’ voices were quiet. They were hesitant to laugh or dream or curse. The heat kept up its unsurprising late misery. The mind was brown at the edges, the tongue dry and slow. Dee slept in the weak air-conditioning of October. Little Emma beside her was so good that her mother expected her to die any day, as angels were snatched away early to paradise. Once, when Dee had a migraine, the child she now held in sleep massaged her temples the entire night. When Dee opened her eyes at dawn, the child had fallen asleep with her doll’s hand on Dee’s forehead. Dee wondered if they were born twice as sensitive as normal women.

  Emma was gone when Dee woke, knowing it was too late to get out of a story she had dreamed. She had few powers. But she was trying. The better part of her was that she liked to heal old people once she knew their pain. She was not a cynical nurse, not at all. She just did not like letting on to her sincerity in front of fools. She could change languages to soothe folks of wild diversity and wants, though her most natural posture was that of the slut paring her nails. In her dream she was chained in a basement with many sex parts that howled on their own.

  Then she had dreamed she was running up a hill with women, hundreds of them, arms out to what beckoned at the crest. A row of cannons blew down on them, blasted them apart, but they were happy and they sang, like Japanese infantry, exploding into mists of ecstatic nerves. Then they arose and became everything, even the cannons. The hill, the tree, the barn, everything. She woke feeling she could commit suicide this minute with huge happiness because she would leave the world a finished job.

  She was not sure the meaning of her dream. Without the help of gin, she felt no common sisterhood to women. She also knew she could not leave Emma until the girl was strong and ready. Like the younger boys but not Sponce, who shouldn’t even still be home. Thing was, Sponce was in love with her, her own son. He feared the uglier world.

  Hare was at her door. He was not a bad-looking boy, and he seemed to have acquired more and more manners, even unnecessary ones. “Where is everybody?” she wondered.

  “They took the baby for a treat,” he said.

  “They never do that.”

  “We’re alone. They cleared the way for me. Us.”

  “Of which there isn’t any.”

  “I have changed since I first saw you. You are beautiful. So beautiful. My thoughts were animal-like. But now I’m like family. We’re all in it together.”

  “In what?”

  “A home.”

  “Who are Mommy and Daddy?”

  “They could be us.”

  “Do I look pitiful?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Just checking. I’m kind of married.”

  “I’m proposing me as husband. One, I am steady. Two, I am good with my hands. Three, Mortimer is out of the picture.”

  His hands were nice and he could fix things. She studied him across a moat of indifference and time. His throbbing youth softened her. He looked filled now, thicker. Like some boys she knew who had come back from the army.

  “It just seems like you need a home, Harold. I’m already here. My roof.”

  “I never saw a girl I needed before I met you.”

  “Is it the nurse’s outfit?”

  “It’s everything that gets to me.”

  “One day soon I’ll look in the mirror and see everything you like about me is over. I’ll know the day. You’d be stuck with an old bag of flakes. I’ll turn into an outhouse overnight. With heavy lipstick.”

  “No.”

  “Then you’ll know how bad I am. It’ll be on my face, every damn story writ in wrinkles.”

  “How can you say those things?”

  “Go up to the casino and see. It’s where us old party girls go to die and have a club. Some turned, some just about. Sulky old things with the girl cut out of them. It’s not the same with men.”

  “I’ll stick.”

  “Such hope.”

  “You’re my reason to live.”

  “Do you get it? I’m what men remember. I’m not what they need. It’s been said to me. What I am is foreign pussy.”

  “You didn’t mean to be.”

  “How do you know?”

  He dropped his head. The long gentle fingers of his right hand covering his face.

  “Stop playing house,” she said. “Build what you want on your own.”

  “But you’re clean. You don’t smoke or drink, much.”

  “They aren’t my drugs. Please go on now. I don’t care to break your heart.”

  Laird went out onto the front porch, shivering in the warmth, lost between homes. Engorged by despair and desire. He had heard her words as the wail of a kidnapped queen. Unransomed these two decades of his spindly life. He thought of the marines, or the long honest life of an expert mechanic.

  Both of them seemed chores in hell now.

  Life was just this, you got a lot of money and you bought things. No other game. You bought her, a house, a family. You didn’t pull fifty-three-year-old things out of a swamp and fix them. He was angry and small. A gnat. He turned and went inside.

  She was staring at the blank television.

  He had no story to put on its screen for her. But he would have her and then tell it. It would begin with an old Ford coupe, red with a gold hood like the boys wanted. He would dump this bucket of rust and just steal the one he’d seen at a junkyard on the south edge of Vicksburg, not well protected. The lot belonged to Man Mortimer and a junkman who lived on the premises. To steal Mortimer’s trash and make a classic from it would be a story, not just life. Moreover, he knew the junkman, who was a Christian and had cheated or betrayed or connived at no man.

  The junkman, Peden, was a Baptist lay preacher, but cars were to him like whiskey to an Indian, his addiction, and they kept him poor. He had preached before to Harold about the naked Bathsheba when King David saw her at her bath and betrayed her husband, Uriah, sending him to the front lines of battle to die, so that he could possess her and know her forever. David who had all, Uriah who had nothing but Bathsheba. The story implied to Peden that Bathsheba had no choice. Who would not lie with the king? Peden would turn through the Psalms and say he had found the one David wrote to Bathsheba but that it was too dirty to read to the young.

  But Sponce could get him to read it while Hare stole the coupe right out from under him. If he was successful, God would forgive him, probably.

  The boys had real power over Dee, Harold Laird knew. She was guilty and served them. Now he was helping them mature. They were becoming, not overnight, but steadily more and more, Boy Scouts.

  The day would come when the couple would stand in the yard, each actor glistening in happiness, the little boys especially. They would have a long talk with her and she would discover the truth that Harold Laird, genius mechanic, body man, paint man, was her future. He could see her in a bridal peignoir with her h
idden softnesses all meant for him, but he couldn’t think long of this because he hurt himself, again and again.

  John Roman saw Mortimer, looking pale and bent, in the aisle of the bait store. Roman was picking up a beer and pig knuckles and saltines for his lunch. The slab crappie were biting near the spillway. He drove a car this time, wanting to fill a freezer box with this succulence, which Bernice in normal times would broil or fry lightly. Eating didn’t get any better. It was so good that many thought the fish was French, crappé. Sac du lait is its name in Louisiana. Speckled, a frisky white steak swimming. They bite softly, like a suckling child. You take them with minnows and jigs. That was why Roman was in the store. But he was there also in curiosity about Sidney’s run of the store since Pepper lost his head.

  Mortimer made a quick movement past some cans, knocking them over, and didn’t bother to set them back, didn’t even look back. Roman was fairly sure he was the man with the tongue in the Lexus, but that afternoon was vague. He and Melanie had not spoken since the event.

  But Sidney in the Lexus was a thing of utter clarity. Even thrown into that rear seat in the black chariot between two sluts and caught unashamed like some mollusk in the light all of a sudden. Gray hairs on the chest of an oyster.

  Roman had noticed how sensitive Sidney was to the pain of others. He was not sympathetic, but he was deeply concerned when he heard or saw the hurt, then took its measure against the longest disease of all, his life. He was just alert and, well, hungry for news of his fellows’ ills. He began to sort of eat the air and whimper over someone’s asthma, scabies, cancer, chest wound. You might make the mistake of thinking he cared, but it was simply an emotive topic and began the peristaltic writhings of his gorge, always about to blow from various bloatage. On the other hand, Roman was sickened by sickness.