Yonder Stands Your Orphan

by Barry Hannah

  “A hand?” the husband said.

  “Myself, I had no mother or daddy either. I know where you’re coming from.”

  With their great smiles, they seemed unequipped to deny him. Like they had already assented when he was on the way over. Both of them nodded. Mortimer knew they were damaged, and this fact pleased him. He felt to be their senior officer the minute he set foot on the pier, looking for where those two girls could have got off to. They were over to the side, watching him, sullen, too old for this camp, their legs jammed to the grass in a stance both defiant and beckoning. Street-corner women.

  Mortimer found out he had much in common with the male adult. Their pain. As Mortimer walked up the pier to the lawn with the couple, the man in the boat whispered, “I heard a voice out there too. It said, ‘Freddy, watch out. You driving up some nasty river with this shark.’”

  THREE

  DEE ALLISON HELD HER BRA AND PANTIES IN ONE HAND AND watched the reflection of herself in the blank television screen. She wanted to see if she still had powers, and she was satisfied, looking directly at her breasts, stomach, the lush dark curls of her pubic hair.

  She was only thirty-six. Her husband was a memory since the birth of her baby girl, but she understood not being here. She was almost not here herself. Nor anywhere. At least he sent money. He was doing well. She didn’t care what he did or where he was. She was just about exactly what she looked like, a phlegmatic starlet, made lazy by her rolling daydreams. But cheerful. Life had not beaten her. She was glad.

  Each one has his master, and Mortimer had at last met a woman who moved him in all ways. Who could be visited but never occupied. He gave her money, a car, a television she rarely watched, drugs she threw away, drink she barely uncapped. She never asked for anything and was indifferent to her station in life, that of a nurse and single mother of four, in a sagging house on the scrub side of the lake not far from the new orphans’ camp. He met her needs for animal passion, but he knew another man could furnish her just as well. Dee was heedless of the fact that he was very special, or that she was.

  He told her dreadful tales about his business. The whores, the sharking, extortion, the ruined lounge rats who ran to do his will. With her, he had quit his laconic muttering. He had gone full-bore to revelations, which startled him. There was a desperate poet suddenly grafted onto him. She barely responded.

  She might writhe with him in bestial greed, but otherwise she seemed the nun of apathy. She was wearing him out both ways. Having her and not having her so quickly.

  The truth was, she had her daydreams and did not live much outside them. Television bored her, but she sat wishing musical scores and images onto its blank screen. She worked at the Onward Rest Home, called Almost There by wags in the county, and many remarked that she was too bright and lovely to stop there. She was not trash, she was clean and dressed well. Her four children lived with her. Two boys, a near man of twenty, and Emma, a baby girl with the disposition of an angel and startling beauty, often baby-sat by a nearby Mennonite couple when she was out on the town. She paid little attention to her home and let her children run wild.

  She did not know where the dreams came from, but she sometimes imagined men exploding into flame, and then the surrounding buildings, sometimes as she stared at them. Perhaps it was their strutting confidence that they belonged and were needed by their place. Women also drew her anger. The ones too assured, too comfortable with this world. Going down the road in their cars and thinking everybody waited for them like dogs, tongues all out and fawning. Her imagination was the Old Testament, although she had never read it and had no god.

  In her nurse’s outfit, white stockings, white shoes, she was a form of wreckage too. When she walked away from the old men at Onward, they witnessed the struggle of her rumpcheeks in the skirt and they knew hurt, even terror, and vast pity for themselves. She did not patronize them, never called them sweetheart or boyfriend, these convicts of time. She did not mean to harm them. They were all right, they were reality, they knew their place, deaf and aiming monologues out the window and across the river at Louisiana. The democracy of the pained, the fearful, the unheard. She was gentle and content to be the young beauty among them. On whom they fastened the dopey old fogs of their desire.

  They knew full well they stood no chance with her, even had their health and worried fortunes caught her attention. She had her man, in fact two of them, the Mortimer one and the sixty-year-old one who some days quietly drove her away in a restored battleship-gray Chevrolet Bel-Air from the fifties with its Antique tag. He was a recessive man, gentle, and loved that Dee shared his bliss over the oldies from the tinny radio speaker. He had added the FM band just for her. Frank Booth was his name. He wanted old-time dates, with courting and the moon, and especially the voices of Patsy Cline and Connie Francis. And the heartbreaking teen-angel ballads with God and the chapels in them. Things had not prospered for him in his earlier years, and he wanted the softness and the victory of them now, although he was by no means a failure. He had a jewelry business in Edwards just off Highway 20. He did not want to just coo and sigh either, no, he wanted full, half-clothed intercourse with Dee on a lonesome road with high orange moons up there, and her brassiere off and her priceless white stockings. Lover’s Lane. He was sworn to this, he was sworn to stolen pleasure, so that God would barely know in the act’s hot brevity what might have transpired. Yes he was strange, but Dee liked the manners and cherished the nights, odd as they were. They made her feel young too. The man Frank, he asked permission to expend himself inside her. Asked permission. I’d be hurt if you didn’t, she’d say.

  Not until the evening they happened to sit together and cross napkins in a bar of the casino and became single-malt neighbors did they know of the other’s existence. It was a meal of crawfish lightly battered and with Chinese red pepper covering the best New York strips from Nebraska. They were having a tankard of Irish tea. This evening had begun early and rather lonesome and they could not quit drinking. Frank Booth seemed a man of more world than these parts required. He spoke of fine jewelry from his store in Edwards. Mortimer did not know jewelry except in relation to the necks and wrists and ankles of happier sluts, although he had once met up in Water Valley the poor man in a wooden shop who was compelled to make Elvis Presley’s Tupelo space clothes and rings and belts and studded capes for his Las Vegas patheticon. He told this to Booth.

  Mortimer had never heard of single-malt scotch. No real drinker, he did not understand what improvement single could be over more. He had been to California twice to talk to Larry Flynt the pornographer. In his opulent antiqued office, Flynt had expressed himself that a woman was the prettiest picture God allowed on this black earth. Mortimer’s man had stolen Flynt’s Lexus SUV and his secretary’s Infiniti SUV. Flynt was an atheist and democrat who was scared stupid by snake handlers in Kentucky when he was a tiny lad. Woman, the most exquisite vision in nature, he said. It was odd there was also a Venice, California, with slimy moats or what all in it too. Sea slugs, for God’s sake. He did not walk to the ocean.

  Mortimer and Booth became large in self-congratulations. It was early spring. They discussed life’s good old goodness. Then they gave their names. Then they talked about their fine hot women. Both women would lie a little, but that was somehow even more zesty. You had to say that for these days, they were living. They had it made, it might not get any better. Mortimer in sympathy imagined this gentle soul Booth with some pliant granny of a girlfriend he thought was a rich find.

  He noticed the fellow was, well, a tad effeminate. That was fine. All types. This great U.S.A. open for business, to even old guys, twenty-four / seven. He cheered Booth and cheered his own Conway Twitty–faced self. Booth was a navy veteran, no damned sissy anyway. It was the malt, though, had to be, when Booth told him he was a SEAL in peacetime. His man Lloyd was a SEAL, and Mortimer exercised the courtesy of not mentioning this to the silvery-haired old dreamer. Booth told him his mission was to train violent
assault dogs to swim underwater toward Japanese drift-net fishermen, the voracious everything-killing nets fifty miles wide in the Gulf of Mexico. Mortimer did not blink. He was just on the brink of handing the keys of his Lincoln Navigator over to his pal to use a week. Let him dream even bigger.

  Then the name Dee Allison came up. The same nurse over at Almost There nursing home. Onward, rather.

  “I’m proud to pick such a blossom off that tree, given my years,” Booth said. “I must have something left, because that is one satisfied thirty-six-year-old minx.”

  His new pal blinked and got sober.

  “You say Dee Allison? Then we both owe her something, Frank. Come on out here to the carport and let’s chat on it.”

  He pointed to the Mississippi River when they were outdoors, wide and powerful. Just an old barge road now, with its memories. The Siege of Vicksburg, Gibraltar of the West, 1864. The flood of 1927. Lanterns on the levee. Oyster barrels from New Orleans and Texas grapefruit up for Christmas plantationers. Mortimer did not know the dates. He did not like history or time.

  They sat in the behemoth Navigator, large as some fighting machines in Desert Storm.

  “Dee Allison should be floating dead down that water right now,” he said to Booth. “We both guessed we got all of her. We gave her everything. All we had was another cheat. I love her, Frank, if I’ve ever had love. But she just grabbed for the leavings, likely just for spite of us both. I cannot believe you trained underwater dogs, old man. But I believe you came in my woman, unless this is a prank.”

  “No it isn’t. I forgot your name.”

  “Man’s my name. Man Mortimer. Means death by sea.”

  “Well this is a shock, with Dee.”

  “Just think on this a minute.”

  They talked about the sickening whirlpools down in that river. The Civil War dead in their sniper pits, still yearning for a clean head shot on Sherman or Grant. They agreed one expert Navy SEAL sniper could have won the war that month. When slavery would have perished as an institution. It was common wisdom that the South would have given the slaves their freedom the instant they kicked the North’s ass, but that the slaves would have chosen to remain. This thought had brought tears to the eyes of many, many old southern frauds, some of whom still owned retarded black men as slaves, retainers, hostelries, cooks, deer dressers. The South was so good. Why was this never discussed? Someone should make an objective documentary, but you couldn’t have it now, all this correctness.

  “Was it correct when Dee Allison took your cock in her mouth?” Mortimer all of a sudden asked.

  Frank Booth did not hate Dee Allison, but he was a bit afraid for her now. “You aren’t talking hurting her, are you, truly?”

  Mortimer said no, no, probably not. Booth was festering on his nerves. “You old queer. You ain’t no navy man, just a jeweler, you lying son of a bitch.”

  A stiletto knife, which he used for a letter opener though mail was rare for him, was tucked in the sun visor, the handle above his right hand. It was a cultural item like from Sicily. It was the first time Mortimer had taken up any deadly weapon.

  He rammed the stiletto into Frank Booth’s left side. This was the side of the liver, he thought he recalled from a movie. The liver brought quick death. He did not expect it to go in so smoothly. Booth, he thought, was suddenly a cadaver, promptly delivered out of the night. Wet ghoul. Mortimer was up to the hilt in him. He heard the song “Mack the Knife” in his head. European-like, a jazz killing, so here it was. Or leaving him bad-off wounded.

  Booth was effeminate, but he had been an actual lieutenant. He had known contact with heavy metal. He had swum underwater ten feet with a knife in his teeth and a Rottweiler right beside him in a scuba mask with a tank on its back, for two miles. He withdrew the knife from his side and then rammed it right back to its owner, his fingers slipping on the blood of the hilt. His mind was on his own nameless grief, but he was not destroyed. He knew full well where the liver was and he was in it, he thought.

  Man Mortimer’s belt buckle had bumped the point to a side. The stiletto faced down straight through his root and went then into one testicle, searching the underloin with its needle point. He left it there awhile, did Booth, then jerked it back and returned it to the crease of the velvet sun visor where it lived, now bloody but not all that much.

  Mortimer bawled, then whined. He whimpered. He called to his mother without remembering her first name. Emmie? Lumpkin was his daddy, no use here. He couldn’t see her or hear her.

  The last sting to the groin was the worst pain now, beyond the balm of any mother, any history, any face.

  Booth thought, I split his cock. I didn’t need the liver, didn’t want it. He’s going insane and I can’t listen. I hated the navy.

  Then he let himself down from the huge Navigator, joining a saner planet although garish with lights. Orange, mustard, puce. This paramilitary scout stuff with these people. Like they needed another reason to keep one another’s hands on their dick and their women, he thought clearly, but Mortimer’s pain terrified him. Except for the blood in his jacket pocket, Booth was almost strolling away, down the casino esplanade. He called back, “I won’t be seeing you or your woman again. But I’ll have the law and my own gun so far up your ass if you come close to me, you’ll want to forget this.”

  Again Mortimer was convinced this was a dream. Dee, double-tongued. She would laugh now. He cried in a hard sob. Over his middle age, his former life. Smooth, purposeful, prosperous, sane, on the downward slope. Oh Mother, Mother. He needed to put his head above his sunroof and scream. Call somebody. Edie? Lloyd! Bertha! I got too high. Mother can’t see me now.

  For God’s sake, what is a man with no dick!?

  You go to the emergency room now, Vicksburg, and all the porky and black-root dye jobs going Assembly of God on you at the glass windows, already waiting on you for the paperwork with a Chevrolet dealership cheap-ass ball-point on a chain. I ain’t got any Blue Cross Blue Shield, never had any, never been to that Warren General Hospital but twice when Edie had the Valium problem and wrecked my Mercedes SUV.

  The bitch Dee. Giving it up to the old navy nancy. Now she’ll pay. She’ll be vomiting my trinkets back to me and signing every one in blood. Them rotten kids’ll pay too. They never took a kind look at me.

  He walked into the concert side of the casino. Even maimed, he was drawn here. The hot Latin music, now slower, the relaxed crowd. Classier. Softness of just folks and glasses and the slowly turning woman onstage, the Coyote. She glistened from a Spanish picture book. It was a family scene. Nobody was hustling, nobody screaming for minutes or colors or change or keno or slots. He wanted to rest here. The Cuban woman sang nearly too well. He wetted up. Tears, blood, pants humidity. What you call the sweat that runs down the crack in your sister-in-law’s ass. Relative humidity. The husband saxophonist managed a pleasant reprisal to the misty Cuban ballads his wife sang. She was not just loins and squalling voice box. Were Cubans a race? Nice folks then. Could she sing while cunnilingusing new little Marcine, who’d never even thought of a woman that way? He could just see it: Cinema Marcineté: New Love. The Coyote, whoa what a moment, in the Now, baby, in her flimsy skirt and strappy take-me-now pumps. Hugh Hefner should be stuffed and cornholed, right here, tonight. Chicago-ass Rodin in some pageant hailing his revolution, set a river on fire in the shape of Raquel Welch.

  Larry Flynt was more Mortimer’s style. Office in a black skyscraper in Los Angeles. The man assured him that none of his women were forced—no heroin or cocaine or poverty necessary for a real party girl. Throughout known history, a constant line stood at his door, clamoring to advocate themselves by public acts of eroticism. It was always fresh like a new colony shipwrecked on a far island. The women were like those busty Ph.D. women in rocket-ship movies. Present for no clear reason. Otherwise, they had boyfriends and lesbian lovers who respected their power.

  This wisdom pleased Mortimer, especially as he pictured his fleet of SUVs circl
ing down the counties even to Natchez, New Orleans; over to Jackson and Little Rock. These flush homes on the best tires, holding any number of men and women in them. The smoked windows behind which would be revealed to what state trooper or hamlet rubberneck no drugs, no weapons, little cash, the sweetest pop ballad of the minute licking the stereo four ways. An urban chauffeur like Lloyd, locked in his seat belt beside Edie, who could talk chocolate into your ears.

  Think of the tiny beginnings from that old white hearse and limo rental in Cape Girardeau. A mom-and-pop affair. Five girls. He could get tearful about it. Somebody should’ve taken a picture. They couldn’t afford a Polaroid.

  But now, as a eunuch, what was he to them? Girls smiled over at him. Foxes. Those shoulders, those greedy eyes. Here was Dee, sitting at a long table. Dee was surprised to see him sit down at the table, hunched, hushed. The lying whore saw nothing but mirth. She must be drunk, chattering with Melanie Wooten. He knew Dee envied Melanie her natural style and charity, her clothes and carriage.

  The only mistake he’d made was loving this woman.

  Before he made his appeal for help and all would change at the table, yes they would love to hustle around as Samaritans, pushing each other out of the way to help, he could watch a bit longer. The Latin music was soft, the singer pliant, sumptuous. You wished she’d sing that way for you. Her husband now a voice of restraint and muted refrain in answer to her. But he looked like a thin prisoner of disgust.

  Mortimer continued the casting in his head for a video. You’d take away the oldest here. Not Mrs. Wooten. She still has something that shocks you, that ageless grace, could be the wise elder madam. You couldn’t do with the colored veteran John Roman, though. He’s got a fine name, but you got no appeal with an older black hero. This man looks like he’d sing “Old Man River,” anyway.