Yonder Stands Your Orphan

by Barry Hannah

  “Peter dropped the ball for Christ at the crucifixion, my friend,” said Morris.

  “That’s why he ain’t ever going to drop one again, Willie.”

  The past weeks, the weather come over his own grave now, Egan thought deeply of killing the both of them, nephew and uncle, with the gun. But he couldn’t. He was not good enough to see God yet, and the old man was worse. An alternative had presented itself, but Egan was not ready to admit it.

  Feeney’s dogs were all over the trunk, and the boys had to kick them back. But the Lord smiled on them then. They heard the old man go back to his lodge, called loudly by his nephew, who had a new car in the drive. A big shiny luxury SUV.

  Harold always had the tools. He was from an old stripe, those who fixed everything broken in history. You do not understand how they carry the right tools in those thin white overalls, but they were there around the P-51s and C-47s in the Big One. Nobody cared about them but the fliers who knew. Such a mechanic was Harold.

  He popped the trunk and pulled up the lid, and the two boys and Sponce ran backwards like hares through tall grass and bushes. So fast they were out of sight, and Harold was left caught in a cloud of rot, so bad he thought these things in the trunk were huge dead catfish for a minute. They weren’t, and he got back quickly too. Missouri tag. Who would leave the tag? Only a drugged idiot, the man who was now walking swiftly through the four acres of trees and fronds, having heard noise. He held his uncle’s rifle.

  The mother and child were collapsed in soured meat. So vile they arose with smell and commenced being skeletons almost instantly. To Harold they seemed to sigh while doing it. The boys had come back to within fifty feet.

  “This bitchin’ car’s older’n me,” said Harold. “Sorry for cursing, boys.”

  “Ransom,” said Sponce.

  “How you know their name?” the smaller boy asked.

  “Ransom is a thing, dickweed. Somebody kidnapped these two and held them out for ransom but cheated and killed them or nobody paid.”

  “These folks is ours,” said the older child.

  “What could you pissants do with them old folks?”

  The children began to behave as interns of science, walking and thinking, not too close to the trunk yet, but seeing the car might be saved.

  “That is a mother and child. You could boil them bones so they not putrid and set them up with wires and it would be a family, him Jesus the baby and her Mary at Halloween, and you could have Christmas both.”

  “They start Christmas the day after Halloween at Big Mart, anyway,” said Harold. “But what you mean, have? Where would you have them?”

  “Like on a float in a parade, or you could make that car into a convertible if the top’s not no good and ride them in the backseat.”

  “Why? Who the hell would be looking?”

  “To scare ’em.”

  “You mean the man that did this, if it is a man?”

  “Well him too, but he’d be dead too, wouldn’t he? If he was older than this car, or you, Harold.”

  “You boys ever hear of Sherlock Holmes?”

  “No.”

  “Well you ain’t him. You got your detective work running around the barn to hump itself.” This speech by Sponce made Harold very uncomfortable. Despite the T-shirts, he was on a new program to stop using the little bad language he did. He wanted to be an influence on these children, in hopes of giving Dee another one someday.

  Egan looked on from the last strand of scrub pine and winter wheat. My God. If I run them off and get that tag. If I can even make myself do that. You go through life asking when do I use the rifle. These boys aren’t even trespassing. The thing is, I could kill myself after I crawl in the trunk with that pair, if they would leave and give me enough time. What they want is that car. All the rest is my hell, not theirs.

  It is this far I am now from my Christ.

  Take me back.

  Or forward.

  There ain’t no standing here, Lord.

  I just as much as slaughtered Mary and child seven years ago.

  When Man Mortimer got out of the hospital, he wasn’t through hurting for a good long while and was almost unmanned. But then he watched his only video and felt the stirring of loin sympathy and was mildly satisfied. He drove to Monroe, Louisiana, in Egan’s old Nissan, ordered a meal at a drive-in, which he never did because he might be seen patronizing one of these things, and when the car waiter came out with the chili dog and diet Pepsi, Mortimer reached out the window as if to offer the boy a long column of change, but it was a box cutter instead. He cut down the whole length of the kid’s forearm, which caused him to shriek and almost faint, scattering the food. Mortimer drove off hastily and left behind smudges of the Nissan’s old tires.

  Last night at one of his homes, the big fifties-ranch-style one, he had watched on his large flat-screen Phillips television the film clips and recitation of a minister. A curious breed of faith, perhaps not even Christian.

  “Why do people look for science, science fiction and signs of the End? Why do they seek the Revelation of the Apocalypse here and there and chant the old chants of the coming of the Antichrist, the Four Horsemen? Science fiction has already been had, fools. It was the Battle of Kursk, German tanks against Russian tanks, fifty-seven years ago. It was Leningrad, Stalingrad, Moscow, Berlin, idiots! What does it take, a sock in the jaw for you to get it that the Forces of Darkness fought then? The Antichrist on both sides. Piss on Star Wars. Nothing touches WW Two for science fiction and wasteland.

  “What else do you need? Can’t you see that things are better now? That the prophets are winning more battles? Where they are losing is At Home. Plenty and boredom and people are killing because they got, get this, no other imagination! And you have Mormons, for God’s sake! What the hell is that? And who, by the way, is president of this Space Walk? You got any idea? You got a TV, don’t you? I thought so. You don’t have a clue in hell who our President or His Wifeness are. Now that’s some science fiction. Our President will never kill himself, but if he did, as he ought, he would wonder who was performing the act. And our First Lady would name a different murderer three days running. Is this what the school of Yale does for people? My aching ass. Give me Harry Truman from our worst community college. He’d be on the roll, The Roll, there at last! Shut up!”

  Mortimer thought he himself was the point of this address, that he was still suffering from a dizziness rushing from the nads. Behind the man, pictures of Nazis and Russians blowing each other apart in the cauldron kept running, and one of the Russian soldiers in the bowl-shaped helmets looked a great deal like him. This man was directing fire and using binoculars near artillery pumping up and down in a plain of mud. The man looked like the singer Fabian but stealthy and gung-ho, as if he had stumbled into an important movie.

  The afternoon after his work at the Monroe drive-in, Mortimer was still in Egan’s car, a blue thing going for a record in mileage and fading. He was not sure why he had traded cars, but now he was glad for the incognito and ease of parking. He had a feeling he would get more hooks into Egan yet. He parked under a century oak curved over the drive at Onward. He waited until the hour satisfied him and went around back. When he looked inside the door, he was clear. There was nothing to hurt in the first room, just chairs and a blood pressure cuff. In the next, however, was a nice cabinet with all of Melanie Wooten’s glass animals in a miniature African-plains scene, done with extraordinary patience and care. Giraffes, wildebeests, tigers, lions, monkeys, panthers, elephants. He picked up the whole scene in the swathe of green burlap and crushed it under his Johnson & Murphy wing-tip loafers. He had dust and glass specks on them now. He heaved up the sack and set it as a bag of trash, matchstick trees, shoe-dye water holes, on the cabinet where it had waited for the patients to enjoy. Then he slipped out the back, just about on the spot when nap time at Almost There was done.

  Much dither broke out on the discovery of the animals soon afterward. Melanie came in for her
readings while it was going. She didn’t want this, but one of the elderly patients had already called the sheriff’s office by the time Melanie arrived. Dee Allison awoke without actually sleeping, as she often did. “Number one, Mrs. Wooten,” she told Melanie, “I have no idea who did this. But the sheriff is not going to come out about a case of smashed glass animals.”

  “Oh I know. I’m embarrassed. He can’t be that bored. Who would even take the time to do this?”

  “I don’t know anybody who would even come here on purpose,” said Dee.

  But the sheriff did come out. He had a good build and short hair and, when he neglected to modulate his voice, did not sound even remotely southern. Delaware, maybe. He admitted he liked espresso very much and was pleased there was a machine here, along with very modern books on all subjects, weight loss, sexual improvement, racy novels. Bleden’s huge child-psychology tome If They Were My Child. The sheriff’s name was Facetto. He performed in plays with the Vicksburg Theater League and had never played a lawman, even when he was in college in Mexico. Dee Allison had not seen his television meditations on the law and the world on the evening news each Saturday night, but he did have a presence. They said he was New Breed, this young high sheriff of Issaquena County. He knew, or talked anyway, psychology and the demographics of crime.

  “This is the work of a teenager who may be having early bursts of schizophrenia. Most likely. I’ll get prints, but it won’t lead anywhere, I’ll bet. The girl won’t even remember doing it, I’d guess. Tragic. We had a boy in a youth group when I was young, we all went to the circus, but he attacked the bedroom of our den mother and tore it to shreds. He didn’t know why, we surely didn’t, he’d been urged to go to the circus with us. He was quiet, tall, barely whispered. The attack was his language. I’ll never forget him. Dillon Brad.”

  “A girl? Why?” asked a man in a wheelchair. He had a deep crush on Melanie Wooten and was the angriest of all.

  “The temperament. This was meant to inflict the most hurt on something delicate and painstaking and artful. A more feminine principle. If she had any intentions at all outside of fury. I think so. It took preparation.”

  Dee Allison was very attracted to the sheriff, who was thirty-six. When he slipped back and forth from southern to East Coast accent, she felt at home. She was good at her work that way. She spoke illiteracy and literacy, depending on the patient. They had all kinds at Onward now. Even Vietnamese, Cuban, Korean, Pakistani. The ones who first owned the tourist courts had gotten old right along with the rest. There were the few vicious hicks too, of course, who had never had a right day and intended to live until they found one. Facetto looked directly at Dee’s bosom and blinked in approval without being coarse. But he returned his look to the victim here, Melanie, and held up an uncrushed zebra figure, crystalline and delicate.

  “This is art. It is precious, priceless. So we are talking sacrilege of a sort. There may be even religious overtones.”

  What an ass. Dee thought of another nasty T-shirt she had ripped off her son and scolded Harold for, which made him beg and beg forgiveness. He had not read it, bright white against black black. Medium-size. But it belonged on a bumper sticker. If I Had Wanted to Hear an Asshole I Would Have Farted. It seemed appropriate now.

  The ex-doctor Raymond was having tenderer moments with his wife, Mimi Suarez, and she was learning to love the big cottage. Now she knew that animals listened when she sang on the back stoop, because she saw them hearkening. Once two little boys were hidden, doing the same thing. The boys were in love. It was a difficult love somewhere between the need for an actual mother and the affection a pagan yard ape might have for the Madonna, with the delicacy of all women’s laps and breasts. The voice was what brought it all together, though, the night when they first saw her and she didn’t see them, out under a wild magnolia with its pod mulch underfoot, and she was bare-breasted. In no boastful way, no criminal way, no way wicked. Because who would she be seducing?

  Max Raymond no longer liked to think of himself as a former doctor at all. He had met and chatted with a real doctor, Harvard, many times, and he understood that much of his life consisted simply of a failure to fail. Now he was a saxophonist and bad poet. He thought more and more of his mother, was working on writing about her. Most thoughts that were any good, he recalled, were merely getting frank with an ancient truth.

  His mother was a powerful Baptist who thought constantly of the Lottie Moon Mission and its Chinese orphans. His father was a former gunner on a battle cruiser in the Pacific, but his anguish over this remained in the form of absence. Not drink or drugs, certainly not psychological trauma, but a refusal to be anywhere much if he was not firing a gun at a Zero, the height of his life and the depth of it too. He had been aired out by a halo of lead, and his steps on this earth were light. He was not big and muscular. He remained spidery like a distance runner or a tall jockey.

  Ma was navy too. That burnt-leather voice. She sucked on Old Golds, Fatimas. Smoke ran out of her like a bombed ship. She had mated twice, bringing forth Raymond and his brother. By her will, Max arrived ten months after conception. Of average height although a little thin, he was born discouraged. Too big for grade school, then suddenly too small for life, he felt.

  Raymond’s mother would grab him by the throat when he was a lad. “Love the Lord, you little nit.”

  “Ma, these swimming trunks are too big.”

  “Excuse me, but I am feeding the heathen orphans of the world. What is your difficulty now?”

  I was sent to my room to beg the Lord to have me, Raymond wrote, hitting whiskey straight from the bottle but only twice an hour. When Ma got the sad fairy organist at the church fired, she said, “What he is stays between him and his Lord. But his music blent poorly.”

  It was the movies A Mighty Fortress, The Life of Luther, Ben-Hur, The Robe and others she approved. Then, for myself, I slunk to the old Royal Theater in Jackson to see the vampire films and their women breathy and innocent in their nightgowns. Like a pink supper in the rainy Carpathians. I had a mental woman, imaginary I mean, who wrote me letters from Dracula’s castle, surrounded by her friends, the beauties from the Bible movies, also almost naked and looking down at their Jew sandals. My replies to them would do whole peoples in. “I’ve had it with them. My dears, the French must die.”

  I didn’t have much left for the local girls except Ruthie, a majorette, who slapped me for my thoughts and told Ma, now small and whispering like a husk in the wind. She forgave me because Ruthie wore her legs bare, spangled and strutting like a field slut. It was staggering what a humanist Ma became when Pa stepped out the last step. Her mercy took on the softness of a hound’s ears. I don’t know if this was love or only understanding.

  Now that you’re dead, I have your life to play with, Ma, Mary Perkins Raymond, and forgive me for it. Guide my mercy. Endlessly rocking, and she died. She did so much good she was never bored until the time of her final sweetness.

  Ruthie did love Ma and her memory. It was not this writer but Ruthie who put flowers on Mother’s grave once a month. I brought along a cup of steaming coffee from the truck stop for her tomb, unable to think of much else she enjoyed but cigarettes and orphans and Baptists. And Pa with his own tomb right beside her. I believed he had missed so many Japanese with his gun back in the forties that, disheartened, he could not smell the roses. Could not find the silver lining. I did not know a firm thing about him. A near acquaintance of his informed me that Pa was stone deaf from cannon every minute he knew me. I always thought he was a mystic. He couldn’t hear, he didn’t want to see us, he ranged solitarily I still don’t know where. The money he returned with, it smelled like dogs sometimes.

  I did not throw myself on Ma’s tiny form in the coffin, but I wanted to. They keep you so far away with that last taxidermy. So much I had not done for her, never mind her orphans overseas. I was now forty-five, married twice. But I was still a boy in some kind of trouble in the room, needing to pray for myself in a
smaller room, needing to regret this worm of me. I lost my bones, it felt like. They had spilled clicking around my shoes. But I was not given to histrionics, as Ruthie was, her whom I never married, regardless of all her postures.

  Ruthie sinned, again and again, and cheated at cards, even stole cattle. Deceived her boys and her husbands. Then she would pick her Sunday and appear in a small church where theater had never been. She was now sorry in public for everything, everything. In a new meek dress accenting nothing. From her midheeled sensible shoes.

  “I have sinned in automobiles, airplanes, under trestles, in warm ponds with cattle watching. This was partly liquor, that liar, or the chemical cocaine, that serpent. I was Jezebel who fell out of her window onto the street and the dogs licked up her blood. I have betrayed my marriage, over and over. I played all evil rock bands that there are on the stereo, at deafening volume. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Can you call this life?” Everything she should have whispered, she yelled. The churchgoers were cowed. Small children laughed or applauded.

  Christ loved sinners so, better than the pious, she went on. He loved the hot blood that flowed under his cool fingers. She’d brought her own sermon and redemption with her.

  I barely realized I was mad for her. There was a time, very tender, when that was possible. Just as John Roman is mad for Chet Baker, who was made for love and for horn, Chet at the end with toothless bony soul. Fell out of a window and died, I think, after being everything God gives a man. He never played the horn loud, never. Never showed off. What an ear. No running around jagged, like me, he was mad for love. To be more like Chet Baker in my heart. My good Christ, give me talent please, no more art. I loved Ruthie.

  I was a success, but wrongly, deeply. Each year there was a new record of giving to the Lottie Moon Mission fund led by my mother. And I needed an appointment with Dr. God, as the Oak Ridge Boys sang. The better part of my malformation was my own. Beyond the saxophone I had no dreams. Well, a few cigarettes and looking out the window. I wondered what my essence was all through med school. As if I had one. Then the Peace Corps and back like a lost hound to the delinquent Ruthna, the hospital bed, the narcotic line. She now called herself Ruthna of the suburb Rathnar. What in my glassy delirium to do except begin dating her? But is there anything wronger than your young daydreams coming true?