Yonder Stands Your Orphan Read online

  Melanie had seen the old man weeping for loneliness in the middle of the pier crowd one afternoon. This emotion did not surprise her, and she drove with Wren to get him a dog from the Vicksburg pound. Now, with Son, a furred brat needing all kinds of attention, Wren seemed better. Though the dog, an Australian cattle dog, was a neurotic bother who would dive underwater to retrieve a fishing lure. Sometimes Lewis and his bride, Moore, only seventy, came to paint or sand. They were both in chemo, but active and inseparable. Moore was always overdressed, like a creature of ancient television housewifery. She wore heels and a pearl necklace when she shopped in Vicksburg. She retained these habiliments when naked and mounted by old Lewis, and this fact somehow got out to the rest, but the couple were unashamed in this scandal. In fact, honored by it.

  When Ulrich was told of the scandal, he blinked and seemed pained, showing teeth in a yanked smile of incomprehension. It was feared he was headed for a breakdown. Ulrich watched the dog Son constantly, always near tearbreak.

  Among these denizens Melanie moved. Lean, clean beige skin, bowed lips. An elegance on loan from the cinema, they thought. She was frank, to the point, with a high brow under pulled-back white hair, a visage of permanent gravity. The men almost quit their lies when she appeared, and this disgusted Sidney Farté, who felt it squeezed him into a church pew. It had been the same with the near-saint Wooten, her dead husband, such a clean little statesman who had rebuilt the cove pier and given it handsome rails. Sidney felt censored around him and was overjoyed to hear, after Wooten’s death, that he had begun running queer in his last days at the Methodist college.

  Sidney’s old papa, Pepper, ran the bait store and was even nastier than Sidney, who waited on him to die. Sidney suspected both of them were born without a heart, but this did not alarm him. He had been in a position to improve himself and leave these counties for happier parts, but he had turned down each chance out of spite.

  After a month’s visit, his nephew from Yale had told him he was a poisonous old coot who ought to be ashamed of himself. This floored Sidney for a week, but when he arose again, it was to enjoy this legend. He had been at it for seventy-eight years. Four years ago, when his wife died, he stood, dry in his eyes, blaming her for the cold rain over the hole but loving the fact the burying minister was a Korean Baptist who would have horrified her. Her form of dementia the last years was suspecting that Koreans were taking over all the acting parts on television.

  During the actual Korean War, Sidney had volunteered to kill Koreans, having never known they were a possible race. The army turned him down for premature belligerency. Nevertheless, Sidney lied that he slaughtered gooks of all stripes over there and this was what had changed him. Not the guilt but the present absence of such happiness. Melanie, who wanted to know about men and war, looked through him with piercing gray eyes. He could hardly stand her presence. Oh, he wanted to sodomize her and puke on her back, but he certainly didn’t respect her.

  Even to Melanie herself it wasn’t clear why she stayed here by the lake. Wooten’s old boat hung by ropes in the carport next to her station wagon. She could live where they delivered drugs and groceries. She could live in a house next to Eudora Welty, the grande dame of American letters, over in Jackson, the capital city, if she wanted. They would say what a striking woman in the aisles of the Jitney-Jungle, and she could return to a home of bleached, ivied brick, three stories. But the land of wealthy widows and elderly divorcées was not hers anymore, and she feared it.

  In Vicksburg, on the asphalt, the deflected minions of want walked, those who lived to care for and feed their cars, and she watched them outside Big Mart. And the sad philosophic fishermen who lived to drag slabby beauties from the water, that dream of long seconds, so they told her. About the same happy contest as sexual intercourse, as she recalled it, though these episodes sank deeper into a blurred well every day. She loved the men and their lostness on the water. Their rituals with lines and rods and reels and lures. The worship they put into it. How they beleaguered themselves with gear and lore, like solemn children or fools. She had spent too much time being unfoolish, as if that were the calling of her generation. As you would ask somebody the point of their lives and they would answer: horses.

  TWO

  NEAR THE BAD RESTAURANT A MILE AROUND THE LAKE lived the ex-doctor Max Raymond with his wife, Mimi Suarez, the Coyote. She was a good deal younger. They performed Latin jazz with their band at the casino in Vicksburg. The Coyote was Cuban, the singer. She had shining black ringleted hair, very fetching to men and to Melanie too, who adored watching her. She swayed and waved her arms, a torso in a storm of mutiny, the legs beneath her another riot trying to run away from her underwear. And the sheen of sweat under the lights. She was made for tiny dresses and flashbulbs under her face. But this was not the best. Her voice was. Men and women stared at her mouth when she began her singing, startled as if by a ghost flying from her lips. A review had once compared her to Celia Cruz.

  But her husband, nearby with his saxophone, the one who enjoyed her pleasures, was a sullen middle-aged creature and seemed to stand knee-deep in unseen wreckage. You could imagine him her jailer. His playing was vengeful, abstract, learned at some academy of the fluently depressed. He played against her, mocking or blaming her for her gifts. He had his fans too, but they were ugly people, sneering bumpkin punks and those who had always had the wrong hair. He seemed driven into low postures by her beauty, clawing at a pole to rise, spit, curse and hurl imprecations at her. During his solos, the rest of the band, men, would look up into the rafters as if incredulous about this tax on joy. His few smirking fans wished he would bitch-slap this Coyote woman once they were home. Because she was so fine, fine, and beyond. Bring her back to heel.

  But although he held her responsible for some of his grief, Raymond was gentle to Mimi Suarez in their big decrepit cabin on the lake. He was a sort of Christian, but he despised striving, waited for visions. And was a poet. The Bible and whiskey on his desk, read randomly, drunk grimly. At one time he had thought Mimi Suarez would save him from all lost time. Her fire and rapture and flesh. But time had quit forgiving him and begun running short. He knew his poetry was not good, like his life, but he waited through the weak words for a vision and an act, as you would pan for gold by ten thousand wasted motions. He could get higher, higher to God, by his saxophone, an instrument resuscitated from his high school days when it was only a hole to hide his miserable head in. He needed music, the Coyote and God. And he needed to live close to evil. Mimi Suarez was unaware of this last need.

  She did know that Raymond, as the attending physician, briefly, of her violent ex-boyfriend Malcolm, had destroyed the man by urging on his wish to commit suicide, a thing he would announce after beating her. Malcolm became the patient, the weak one needing help, while she sat in the waiting room, black and blue and cracked in the ribs.

  Raymond saw her and wanted her. Both he and Malcolm were high on drugs, but Raymond’s drug was cleaner, Demerol straight from the hospital. He was certain he had identified intransigent evil in Malcolm. He dared him to be a man of his word and sent him off with several prescriptions. Malcolm succeeded only in giving himself a stroke. He lay now or stumbled, unable to remember nouns, no longer a songwriter, watched loosely by his old gang, who demanded a hearing on Max Raymond as a medical doctor.

  Raymond resigned the profession without much remorse and took Mimi Suarez to live with him at a lesser house in Memphis. She too had been threatened by the old gang. Raymond joined the Latin band she sang with by first managing it and buying new horns and electronic refinements, then stepping into Malcolm’s old spot on saxophone. They rode the trend for Latin and were very prosperous, as bar bands went. Now they played the long casino job. Because Raymond knew the casino was evil. It meant nothing for a Christian visionary to live among the good and the comfortable, he thought. He wanted no cloistered virtue.

  But he began seeing his splendid wife as the cause of his despondency, which
increased until he played his way out of it. He felt unmanned by their lovemaking. It was all right when it was a big sin, but now that it was a smaller one undertaken with regularity, he felt weakened. He was both voyeur and actor when he took her, in all her spread beauty, but the part of voyeur was increasing and he knew he was a filthy old haint, as far from Christ as a rich man. He could have lived better with the memory of Malcolm dead, but as a stroke victim who might wander in through a door in Raymond’s head at any time, slobbering and gesturing, the guilt he inflicted was infernal, with no finality.

  So far Raymond remained a hero to Mimi Suarez. Before Malcolm beat her, mainly for being beautiful and healthy and a drag on his addictions, she was attuned to the old precept of the Indian. Life was a river, not a ladder, not a set of steps. She knew something was wrong, but she was unconscious to living with a dead man, which Raymond in his current state nearly was. She knew many musicians looked reamed and dried and skull-faced, but she did not know that many of them, although mistaken for the living by their audiences, were actually dead. Ghouls howling for egress from their tombs. Pale, his black hair drawn straight back, deep startled blue eyes, Raymond was an older spirit gone into mind, a figure of desperate romance to her still. He hurt for things, and she pitied him as you might a deaf and dumb orphan around Christmastime.

  He had chosen the very lake house, which he threatened to buy, for its late history of chaos. The landlord had told about these people proudly. He was in ownership of a rare legend. It was a poor county except around the huge lake and could not even afford much local color. Three years ago its tenants were middle-aged, a proclaimed witch and her sissy husband. The witch had been discovered leading a coven of teenage boys in turning over ancient tombstones in local cemeteries. She had plied the boys with oral sex at midnight. The authorities found the matter too stupid and nasty to prosecute. The youth were from good families the witch woman lived squarely among, in a grid of Eisenhowerera brick homes. Her husband stuck by her, and she meant to corrupt another bourgeois suburb in Shreveport when they left the lake house.

  The next lodger was an embezzler who had drunk strychnine while the law pounded on the door. The enormous man, with his hound’s eyes, survived, but only as a shrunken wraith in draping skin at a federal pen in Missouri. He had betrayed hundreds of Baptist alumni at the school where he was president, many of whom still prayed for him and were shocked by his transformation. Heretofore he had been taken for brilliant and righteous. But years ago he had lost a teenage daughter, and the more generous said this must be when he turned against God and man. Many of his fellows remained confused, even when they reviled him. He had run with harlots in faraway cities, he had stolen two million dollars, he had become a scholar of hidden offshore accounts. One dear friend said that when he looked in his own bathroom mirror, he saw the wrath of evil just behind his own regular features. This friend was the man who brought the law to the door. He was devoted to the embezzler and thought him the best man he ever knew. He felt a Judas when he turned in his friend. Many spoke of broken hearts, but this man was an actual case.

  Two weeks after the arrest, this man, ex–football coach at the college and a fisherman to whom every second on the water was dear, every bass, crappie, bluegill hoisted dripping from the lake, the effluvia of marine oil and gasoline at dawn, the shuddering motor, the skate across the glassy reds at evening. This man returned to the cabin, spent one night there, went out early in his boat and died. They found the boat making circles in the water a mile out. His body, the sixty-four-year-old body of a once second-team all-American guard, finally dead from an attack on the heart. A chorus of moans back at the little college, and agreement. They had never watched a sadder man. A man who perished from belief in a soul brother.

  Then two springs ago, the landlord told Raymond, the realtors he was using, a married couple, moved themselves into this place on its small hill, with its vine-wrapped fence, its bee-loud honeysuckle, dwarf magnolias and the palmettos farther into the dark of the riverine bayous behind. At night you could hear the bull gators, hunka hunka, and the bullfrogs. Throats of bleating tin. At dusk, against this forest night, you saw a crane take flight, big as a spread greyhound and purest white.

  The couple, Gene and Penny Ten Hoor, were no longer enthralled with each other, but they had a long fishing partnership. Penny sometimes dove from their boat to swim in the green-black lake. The water was still chilly from Tennessee streamlets into the Yazoo and Big Black, which fed the lake. She was in perfect shape and could stay underwater long distances.

  In their slick boat, berthed at the eastern landing, was a cell phone. They were very prosperous in real estate, and they bought and sold lots in the pleasant venues remaining around the lake. Only local poverty stood in the way of a vaster development. It was a fishing, not a sports, lake. Bass fishermen do not as a rule care where they stay. Neither do they have much money left over after the outlay on the boat, trailer and tackle. They have brought their home with them.

  The couple had dreamed once of an empire of condominiums at Eagle Lake, but that had stopped. Three times they had been threatened by angry callers. In this state live men and women nostalgic by age eleven. For things rambling, wooden, rain-worn, wood-smoked, slightly decrepit. The heft of dirty nickels. They flee to lakes from hateful pavements, concrete and glass. They are certain the great wars were fought for cheap fishing licenses.

  More than by the telephoners, the couple had been stopped by the death of their young son in a school-bus accident. The lad was smashed, tossed. They had done nothing but fish since they lost him. Bass, crappie and bluegills. They favored the fly rod, an Episcopalian method in these parts. They fished too for catfish at night with a lantern on their boat. Monsters lay deep in this lake, so strong they could move their boat around like a sea fish when they were on. Gene and Penny frowned all the while now, as if trying to read a book in a foreign language. The book of rising each morning and for what? They hardly looked at each other. They returned to the huge cottage worn and sunburned.

  When they ate at the awful restaurant, which some of the old fellows from the cove frequented, they were perfect consumers of its fare. They cared nothing for what they ate and barely noticed it. The old men thought it remarkable that the two of them had settled into this speechless apathy at so young an age, when two of the old fellows had waited decades to earn this pleasure from their own wives.

  Sidney loved it. “They chanced to look at the other one and they’d kill the bastard, seems like. My word, it stirs the memory.”

  Unbeknownst to the other, each had saved up the tranquilizers prescribed for them in their grief over their lost son. They did not begin taking them until the second week in the house, in a lull of energy for fishing. She complained that both the fish and the water smelled like birth, and then they came back to the cabin on the lip of the swamp, which smelled like birth and diapers, itself. Then the restaurant, where the bathroom was the same. But they could not quit going to these places. They began leaving clusters of fish, uncleaned, ignored, around the house. They were barely eating. They began drinking vodka with Gatorade.

  After four days in this haze, she saw him lying naked and fat on the bed asleep and cut his member with a fillet knife. He bled a great deal and needed stitches, but they went nowhere. He rocked with a towel in his lap and they talked it over and he forgave her. The next day they went fishing together.

  At suppertime she called him to the kitchen, where it was dark. The rest of the house was dim, two bare bulbs somewhere. She stood at the doorjamb with a finger to her lips for him to be quiet. He stood by her awhile, and she said, “He’s there, eating.” She meant their son. He blinked, and he did see something in the chair at the table. “He needs all his nourishment. So long now without eating,” she said. When she left for sleep, he walked to the chair and found the shape to be a tree limb she had brought in from the back and placed there. He cried but embraced the limb.

  Then she began calling
the ground evil, she could feel the evil in it right through her boat shoes. She felt men fighting, women struggling, animals fleeing. The groans of it shook her feet. They launched their boat on the water, but they drove it, a very nice cedarwood classic, very slowly, like old people with no purpose in an automobile. They never changed clothes anymore except to sleep naked.

  They left the lake now and then, driving a Saab, again at the speed of elderly people in bad weather. The woman could not stand the voices that came in the window if they went any faster. They went to a cash machine in Vicksburg and withdrew thousands of dollars. The money was piled or scattered all over the house and they paid no attention to it. Apparently it was intended as getaway money, but they never left. They continued to fish and leave the fish about. Big catfish too, from the lantern fishing. They were pros. They answered neither the phone in the house nor the one in the boat. The phones kept ringing.

  In the second week they bought tools in Vicksburg. Every movement was very slow now. If they heard the hammering from the restaurant across the meadow, the denizens might have wondered why anybody would put such effort into rental property. The husband began nailing everything he owned to the walls. Pants, belts, underwear and his fishing tackle, plug by plug. Nailed right through the breast of Lucky Thirteen, Dive-bomber, plastic worms.

  Then he nailed up the fish, what grip he could find on what had rotted from the first week. He nailed up her clothing, panties and even Tampax. Then he slept, with the unnailed piles of tackle and money around him. He had begun nailing the money, but there was a lot. Pictures of his real estate office, photos of desirable lots. Big red Seconals and other pills scattered across the throw rugs.