Yonder Stands Your Orphan

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 stared 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 hidden 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.

He watched Sidney behind the cash register standing and watching him back as if he might be a common shoplifter. To his left in the mouth of another aisle, Mortimer walked out from his own shopping with a sea gaff in his hands.

“You know John Roman, Mr. Mortimer?” Sidney began, strangely formal. “He’s a veteran. Wounded. One of our brave ones from the lost battles.”

“Oh, I’ve heard. And he dates white women, I’ve heard. I have knelt on my knees at the graves of such white women. Is your name Ramp?”

“No. John Roman.”

“All right. Guess my name.”

“I know it. You’ve stood five feet from me.”

“Death by sea or death by mother. Morte de Mer or Morte de Mère. Merman, seaman, see. Did anybody tell you I now own a big piece of this store, John? Your feet are walking on my—”

Sidney began to protest. “N—”

“Oh for pity’s sake, sit down, Sidney. I was just going on.”

Sidney seemed relieved and did sit down on his proprietor’s high stool, a swivel chair new to his regime, fairly swank. He immediately jumped up and out in the air, screaming, holding his bottom. He pulled his hands from behind. Tiny points of blood on them. He held three or four map tacks.

Mortimer squalled, “He fell for it! Fell for it!”

Sidney grinned.

Who were they? What was this?

Roman thought they were like two little brothers. Who was leading who? His stomach turned. He drew off one of the ancient dusty cellophaned white handkerchiefs from a snap display and handed it over the counter to Sidney, who began eating off the wrapper and getting the cloth out with his teeth and fingers. A kid, a not unhappy kid in an old boyhood-prank cutabout. Buckwheat, Spot, Spanky. The other freckled goony-haired one. Alfalfa with centerparted hair, cross-eyed a lot. These two men were brats, that’s what they were. They were neighborhood bullies. I took three shots to the collar and jaw for them and their recesses.

The tall one with rock-and-roll hair was still holding on to that fish gaff, that shark gaff. What is the verb. The word? They are in collusion. Noun, I guess. Roman walked down the front steps with his new jigs and good minnows. Various geezers, Ulrich among them, were bunched at the base of the steps having at it.

“What was we looking at?” one said.

“The mother lode of weird,” said another customer.

Ulrich was in a bomber jacket with fleece and it eighty-five. He was real.

“Bad news with big preacher hair on it.”

“I don’t know what that cocksucker was. But this old fist would be his watch-out if he chanced to come close to me.”

“That man was crossbred with Lazarus.”

“That cut-up preacher?”

“I seen him before.”

“Said he ain’t said word one. Like he talked to a devil.”

“You don’t see nothing like that twice. But we did. That old boy in the Edwards football-game lavatory.”

“He seen maybe an unclean spirit, like.”

“Or trying to exorcise one, like.”

“You here one day and Stagger Lee cut off your face the next.”

“Or your head like Pepper. We ain’t never finishing talking on that one. Your hotshot sheriff wandering around like a mascot.”

Ulrich in the moth-eaten bomber jacket, the corduroy trousers much too big now in this skinnier madness, spoke again. “Spiders hold the altitude record for earth-bound creatures. Mount Everest.” He seemed on the verge of tears, then was over it. “Up there above the murder of men, these fine little creatures. Their thin legs. Having their families. Those delicate eggs. The winds must howl and howl outside.”

Roman was sorry he had not gone straight to fishing, but these were fine minnows. He might seine his own, keep a little pool of them behind the house. He headed off to his car.

When the fishing was over, he would be glad and sorry both to return home to Bernice. She was suddenly an old sick woman like Harvard’s Nita, and he felt just paces behind him, unable to drag her back from the maw of huge nonsense ahead.

The spider of Ulrich, he considered abruptly. Wind howling on the jagged mountaintop. Their little legs. Shuh. Down between them rocks. Icy winds the only weather, only world. Get aholt of something heavy, don’t never quit. New babies coming, feel the wind outside their shells already. Get born a half foot from ruin between a rock and another rock.

When you knew death was not far off, you always got a strange arrangement of the usual facts. You almost saw the spirit itself. An essence of the familiar, shifted. Sound, smell, dirt, sky. Thirty-three years ago, three times he had left where a sniper’s bullet struck seconds later. Then on a hot afternoon he had known the strangeness but was weary and, he knew now, curious. He had made no move and gotten shot.

Roman hummed around the remnants of a tune. “Time After Time,” Chet Baker’s version of airy sweeter days. He kept a pistol in his kit for snakes, but he knew he didn’t need that much caliber. You lived long enough, mildly on the lake. That was the plan. Nothing greedy or hungry about it, hardly even a dream. Now some sullen force came in to take away this small existence. No harbor. Us small craft, cracked against the wall by mean winds. Now he realized he had bought the pistol for men and lied to himself about it. Men in this new newspaper headline shoot-out, even on the school yards. How many niggers drove down a road like this to die fifty or a hundred years ago. They’d looked wrong, they’d whistled like wolves, they’d voted.

If, say, some fool in a smoked-glass car came up beside him running parallel and wouldn’t stop it, kept looking at him, he would pull the gun and fire a magazine through the glass. Death worked on Bernice at home. Here, Whoever, here’s some for you too. He had changed and hated his changes.

Pastor Egan lay silent. The other patient was watching a television show about a hospital as he lay there in the hospital. Maybe he wasn’t convinced enough he was truly here. Egan knew better. His inner voice had just returned and he liked himself again.

Episcopals, your rituals are babble, it muttered. Robed baboonery. Lukewarm, I spit them from my mouth, even while loving them and their gold and whiskey and cable-knit sportswear.

You are postwar, postmodern, posthuman. You sweep up, is all. The waste of the stores and storerooms find their place in each consumer heart to rot and reek. You are lukewarm, my people, my people. No decisiveness. Saith I the pastor. The man who owes thousands to the pimp who butchered him. Something large is in the woods. Not what you planned. You have not decided, so the thing in the woods is deciding.