Yonder Stands Your Orphan

by Barry Hannah

  Her man Harb got into a wreck. Harb, his woman and car stolen and defaced. And Harb striking me, the last blow an uppercut right through. He began hitting me in the face right then in the hospital, where I worked but was currently a patient on fluids. Now was I sorry I had run with Ruthna? Harb was a small man even at bedside. “Harbison! Harbison!” I appealed to his better nature. Such names as they give down here they make you desist when you call them out. “Have patience, man,” I pleaded with him. “I’m already in pain every minute. She hurt me too, remember? Would you like a high heel in your ass? In your dead mother’s bed?” While she spoke, standing over me, in some unknown tongue of lechery. There’s no use looking like me, she said, if you ain’t going to act it out.

  Her old lover Crews was showing off his mangled leg in the parlor and collecting pills from visitors far counties away. This was Ruthna’s infamy. Nobody wanted to miss her next spree. It might be her last.

  There is no doubt I carried my same love for her straight to Mimi Suarez. My Coyote. But Mimi is innocent. The band was playing at Nubie’s in Memphis, and I had to have her. I was mainly good, I thought. I was no longer a racist. I knew I could exceed their saxophonist simply in pure fury. Yet I disliked most people. If diseases could come attached to something like an ambulant dummy, I might still be a doctor. But her hair meant more to me than . . . Well, there was Malcolm in the way, and I took more than his spot in the band.

  Few liked me at first, with my hunching toward the Coyote as she drove her hips. You can play a lot of jazz in a mambo, actually begin lessons and finish right on the spot, which is jazz. But I opened my eyes to find myself on her, horn grinding away on her thighs. She moved away, threw out her brown arms, to howls of execration from the front row and farther back. I was middle-aged, that was the main horror! But women often like a mean man. Those women who write to killers in prison. It must be for those punks like writing a letter to God. Mean is the diploma of the artist. I was an alleyway myth, but I strutted. She may have married me out of fatigue.

  When my thrusting on the stand, a dreadful thing to behold, became lawful, my fans thought me lessened. But I was good. I swallowed the horn during my feud with music. Mimi screaming like a cat in a bath but with actual talent. I had friends, and they had solid names like Jim, Whit and Alexander, and only one of them asked to borrow money. Well, two. One had designs on the Coyote, the way he grabbed her and lurched at her rear. Lucky I was middle-aged and beyond jealousy.

  I have left out almost all of life that’s beautiful. Its small acts of kindness. The pier crowd over there, who invite me in a little more every time I go to fish. Mimi Suarez almost eternally at ease. The small fame you can get by practicing some dumbish thing over and over. The sleepy awe of these grounds and lake and house. The evil I feel close at hand to know I am alive. The evil thereby. I must see the devil at hand. Then Christ.

  Sponce Allison and Sidney Farté came across each other in the elder Farté’s bait store. Food, engines, devices. Two bass boats, wrecks in progress on trailers on the west side, two gas pumps out front. The last of the black-and-white televisions over an open drink and meat locker. A fine greasy television, studded high on the wall, under which the sullen could eat a dawn-prepared heat-lamped meat in a roll swamped in mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup. Except for the bait, an excellent beer from a microbrewery in Louisiana was the only item of real quality.

  The coffee was bad, the standard for parsimony and contempt at fuel stops. Even fresh, in the prelight of dawn.

  Two tables. Pepper Farté charged fifty cents to sit and eat there if you did not buy grub at the store but ate your own and needed only a drink. The television was free. This bothered Pepper a little. He would rather have put blindfolds on the mere loiterers he suffered around his linoleum.

  Sidney was only fifteen years younger than Pepper, his father. But he was in far worse shape. They were scions of a pusillanimous French line too lazy and ignorant to anglicize their name in a pleasant manner, and they had been laughed at plenty by squires and rootless trash both, and even blacks. In the matter of blacks, Pepper’s hatred of everything was so full it left nothing over for racial distractions. He looked at all the same, his eyelids raised only a bit as if asking silently, Why in hell were you born to trouble me? His being eighty-eight now should have made him resent the hip-hop throbbing from the cars of the bloods out at the gas pump while they came in for a beer. But for Pepper it was only another small pestilence, like his son, seventy-three with shingles and in chemotherapy and radiation, always threatening pneumonia, sent to plague Pepper by the same Overlord who had vexed him always.

  Pepper looked awful, but he was in good health except for wear and the scholar’s spinal curve he had gotten behind the counter, despising the chore of making change. Many of the prices in his store were rounded to the higher figure for this reason. Change was precious and his arms were feeble, holding it, and he had to fight going higher by a dime on all his goods.

  Sponce Allison, matched with Harold Laird, was in the alley of the tinned meat, saltines, fireplugs and prophylactics and salt and coffee. When they collided, Sidney coiled and puked a bright yellow line that never even made an arc before it smacked Sponce in the cheek.

  “Ho doggit!” The boy was amazed. Gravy ran down his eyes and dripped in a beard off his face.

  Sidney still drooled in a lip-wide stalactite down his own chin. He was undergoing stress, a rapid melancholy that overcame him once he had vomited on another person. This thing wanting out of him so quickly, like a hot weasel in a tube.

  Old Pepper, behind the counter near the screen door, raised his hooded scowl. Last night he had seen a mother and baby skeleton in one of the ruined bass boats, he thought, and heard a scurrying off through the edge of his porch light into a stony field. He did not credit it fully, but neither did he tell anybody, because his son wanted this store and Pepper knew it and he would give no psychiatric evidence against himself else the sheriff or Onward might be called. He enjoyed a beaked scowl now before the odor hit him, over that of weltering meat under the lamps nearby. He almost smiled.

  His boy was staggering out from the mouth of his premium aisle, now toward all the bright spinner baits and bush hogs and jigs, the solid Rapallas like Picasso, the Sluggos, the salty worms, the wobbling deep-running torpedoes, the high-tech sonic ones that rattled and rolled. The single fishing video entitled You Are in the Wrong Place. A wet boy behind Sidney.

  Sidney had not apologized, and the boy was stunned by this discourtesy. But Sidney feared a second eruption and so did his father. Others wanted him out of the store too. But the Allison boy now held him across his neck. He demanded some acknowledgment.

  All his working life Pepper had sold instruments of violence against fish and game and some people. He had war-surplus bayonets from Korea. But he had never struck his son, wife or enemies. He was too remote in his hatreds for this. He would have shot his son just then if he had owned the energy. He did hiss as Sponce rode the seed of his lap out into the porch.

  “Here now, here now,” called Harold Laird. He was a born remonstrator.

  “This old man vom on me!”

  “I’m sick, sick, you sons of bitches! Don’t you see?” swore Sidney, then threw out his arms to free himself. His long-sleeved shirt was spotless, the drool gone. He seemed hardly involved. He walked over to the end of his car and, breathless, looked upward dead-on at the sun. Now he was a blind old puke and swore again.

  “By gawd you’re stunk out,” said Harold to Sponce. “You ain’t aiming to get in my ride thataway?” Laird had a nice old Camry. He had left Hermansville last year and never looked back, except to retrieve his four-wheel ATV and tools.

  “Tell you what. I’m standing here waiting on a goddamn explanation. Or manners at least.”

  “Old man, don’t you want to tell him something?”

  Sidney turned away from them toward the horizon. Shingles, colon cancer, psoriasis, mouth ulcers, dysentery. In his mind t
hese old friends called out to his young tormentors.

  “All right then. Here.” Sponce walked up to Sidney in the gravel lot and hit him in the right jaw with a quick roundhouse left, then knelt in pain himself for the damage to his hand. He might never work on that side of his body again.

  Pepper was in the door watching. He was satisfied. Sidney was out cold or stunned, one. But he still stood, arms at hips.

  It was an awful thing to watch a sick old man slugged. The boys were uncomfortable. One was in severe pain. So they entered the car, which was suddenly irreal, out of all space and time, hurtling fast to nowhere with its points of chrome light on the hot blue wall of sky.

  Nobody came near Sidney, no customers, not Egan the preacher, with his own problems and oblivious. It was Egan’s habit to purchase one pack of Camel straights, light and smoke one, then throw the rest of the pack in the road as a sign of his conversion and for good luck. Cigarettes were $3.20 a pack. He was deciding, needing a smoke badly.

  Sidney spoke. “Well then. I can make other things die.” He staggered back up the steps of the bait store. “Pepper. Give me a pack of twenty-two long-rifle hollow points. The Winchester. Not the cheap stuff.”

  Pepper handed on the little box without comment. There were many snakes around, but he didn’t care about that either.

  The boys did not feel right. Bereft, divested, exasperated into sickness from the old man. It hit almost immediately. They drove in circles, then they walked that way.

  “It ain’t been right since them skeletons. Them kids loose with them.” Sponce was irritated at Harold for wiring the skeletons together for his brothers. “You promising that car to them.”

  “We made a deal, a square deal.”

  “Remind me, genius.”

  “They would pay on the installment when they could. Or get parts for me as they found them.”

  “I stink.”

  “Don’t I know it. I’m sick myself, son.”

  “I’m sick as a dog, Hare. But what do you get if you keep taking us all out to eat at night. Steak and Ale, Red Lobster. I’m too sick to talk food. Aw.”

  The deal that had been struck without Sponce’s knowledge was that the little boys would persuade their mother to put out to Harold, and then Harold would become their father, in the proper way, after a divorce from their gone father.

  “I can still afford it. Mechanics is big money if you get serious, which I have been since eleven and started smoking then too. I quit the smoking, you notice. The swearing too.”

  “But you ought to get a new hairdo. That one’s too college.”

  “You don’t know but what I might go on up to Ole Miss or Southern, even State if I’m good enough. Your own mother went to a Jackson nursing college. High education’s in your blood, son.”

  “I remember that zoo over there. A good un.”

  “I didn’t notice a hell, heck of a lot right before we found the skeletons, and the car came with it.”

  “You got a rust bucket. And the bullets in they’s head. Them skeletons belong to the law, Hare.”

  “The law didn’t care to find them, did it? Seven or eight years. And that car ain’t rusted that deep. You just can’t see the form like I can.”

  “How long till you get it running?”

  “Seventeen years. They said teenage car,” Hare joked. They would have laughed but they were too sick. Then they got back in the car and drove some more. Sometimes, in fact usually, a man had to just burn gas. Let the big dog eat. They wanted to drive across the Vicksburg bridge for no reason except to change states, but they were too sick and had to come back home.

  “Hare, you ain’t given Dee the prize yet that’d make her . . . that’d move her toward that surrender. I mean marriage. Them two old guys gave her this, that and the other and she laughs and says it don’t get them anywheres. Even if you’re in love with her.”

  “I got patience. And I’m changing quick.”

  “Yeah. You’re all wore out from being nice.”

  “I ain’t had but one day since I met her that I wasn’t in love with her, and that wasn’t her fault. That’s when the flesh boiled off them skeletons.”

  The sheriff was doing a five-minute commentary on the Weekend Review on television Saturday night. Both Dee and Melanie watched.

  “The world is full of middle-aged men who seek revenge. The anger passes for most when they see there is no way. The rate of incarceration is very low for first-time offenders of sixty. For some, there is a bigger engine of hate even then, running at the red line and very vigilant toward what they might consider insults or even bossiness. They aren’t just having it, the engine, like the others. They are it. They have not been aware of this, and their acts confound them. Those are ones you see on television or in the newspapers discussing sodomy, rape, kidnapping and murder in the passive voice, something happened, somebody was killed and so on, sometimes even giggling. ‘Mistakes were made, yes, when she was killed. I can’t remember, really.’ Such as that.”

  Such a pompous ass, thought Dee. Though she admitted the guy was hot. She had seen him and Melanie, twice his age, having a moment as he went out the door at Onward. Mrs. Melanie Wooten of the linen slacks, black slippers, a Martha Stewart hang of bangs. Dee could not believe the sheriff was gone for an old woman. But he was beginning to be.

  Besides acting in local theater, the sheriff rode a Norton motorcycle. The people of the county were not clear on what man they had. He was handsome and very verbal. These things were measured against him. Many women, however, wanted to see his warm gun and dreamed, since there was little else to do.

  FIVE

  THE SMALL BOYS LIVED ON RAISINS OUT OF A BOX TWO nights in Blackjack, a ghost trailer-home village. There had never been much of the natural graces here. It was just a hill with a curved narrow pavement across it like a bad part in tan hair. Winter wheat, chaff stalks, stunted pines. Right up to the right of way. Old electric poles, downed wires. Kudzu stopped at the slabs of the old precincts. Repeated fires from years gone by, cigarettes tossed out, the seepage of chemical toilets. But still a town of hulks, with alleys.

  Both boys kept combs in their pockets and groomed their strange but pretty hair often, sensing their beauty in this desolation. They were on a fast without knowing it. They were not particularly hungry and their energy was high, their heads clear and visionary, with the Benson & Hedges 100s they puffed now and then. They were in minor ecstasy.

  The black T-shirts with the obscenities on the chest were baggy and stretched out. Sometimes hung out to dry after washing in a creek. The boys were thin and muscular. Their line had furnished the crafty retreaters and battlefield scavengers since Shiloh. Such men whose craven disappearance had only begun the troubles of their enemies.

  Mortimer had seen them on the highway shoulder with the bones on a cart. He was driving a Lincoln Continental at the time and was incredulous until he drove two more miles, then credulous but confused, then in Rolling Fork he turned around white with concern. He parked his car in a square two miles from their home and worked his way in on foot, so he would not be seen. You could not heave a big cart without at least a path, he thought. He could not go to the Allison house yet. He would see Dee soon enough. The physical absence from her was hurting him, so he knew he was at least a third healthy, although not right, or he couldn’t have borne it at all.

  He seemed every minute to cross the borderline of a small foreign land. He had not spent any time walking in the country. Otherwise he could have hidden the people better himself than the idiot Egan, who would pay soon. Egan the man of God who had borrowed Mortimer’s money. What a fraud in all ways. Does everybody just act and lie? Mortimer thought. He felt in quicksand, in alligators.

  Now he was in Blackjack, near where he had seen the boys and their cargo. A great bomb might have hit here, deeps on either side of the road and the ghost of the trailer park hove into view on the right. He immediately saw a child running between the burned-out hulks and got
out of his car, the engine still on. In his right hand he held an absurd knife such as you saw only in pawnshops. Of not even commando utility, it was so huge. It had a saw blade on one edge and most likely would have been more shiny than it was sharp had Mortimer not made it a project. You could hack off the stump of a yucca plant with it.

  He trotted down an alley and looked in the blasted and rusted door frames. Past a ghost fence that was barely an idea of wire and rot. Then he had one cornered in a trailer with his nasty black T-shirt on. He could smell the boy and raced into where it was nearly black and caught him by the arm. “I’ll cut your head off if you. . . .” The boy resisted, then stopped.

  It was noon and no shadows and Mortimer was sweating hard in his sports jacket. A little pistol fell out of his pocket, but neither of them noticed this. The other boy came running toward them, bounding, enraged and driven by fear at the same time, like no animal.

  “Believe me, boy. Your brother best stop right there too. Ease on up.” Now Mortimer had the boy by his hair and grabbed for the other with his knife hand. This was not a good idea. He nicked the boy fairly well on the shoulder, and the boy shook loose as his brother plunged his fist into Mortimer’s gonads. Mortimer held on, however, and now the hitter saw the blood on his brother’s shoulder and desisted altogether. A lamb shaking with fear.

  Mortimer grabbed the boy’s hair again more tightly by the trailing rattail in back. “You come over here for a haircut or you run and it’s . . . a head cut,” he said slowly and way short of breath.