Yonder Stands Your Orphan

TEN

IN THE PAWNSHOP WHERE THE SAXOPHONE RESTED IN its velvet-lined dark alligator case, Max Raymond had not been as misled as he supposed. His nemesis Malcolm, the afflicted past lover of Mimi Suarez, had gone by the window. He knew where Raymond was and intended to have a showdown with him but was in no way connected to the red Mercury Sable. He was looking for a weapon, probably a twelve-gauge double, when he missed the pawnshop and was led on by another rank of pawnshop signs down the way. He’d turned into an alley by mistake, tired from hitchhiking down Highway 61. Seven different rides and a grinding wait in all weathers, October going hot, cold, rainy and balmy, freezing. He could not drive, and his old gang did not approve of his pilgrimage.

Malcolm walked out of the mouth of the alley after Raymond had followed the car. Had he bought fast and, leaving Raymond dead behind him, taken the man’s car, he would have arrived at the house with Mimi Suarez away visiting relatives and singing in Miami. Neither he nor Raymond had seen the other. But they never lived a day without the other on their minds. In the next pawnshop was a more comprehensive collection of guns, and in this state of enormous sympathy for gun owner and hunter, where the legislature has even designated a specified season for dwarfs to hunt deer with crossbow, he found sympathy surrounding him on all sides. The pawnshop owner wanted stroke victims armed for whatever.

In the shop were the Ten Hoors and many bigger, meaner orphans and the now fifteen-year-old girls. It was not just a summer camp anymore. It was also less announced what it was now. They were not survivalists, nor religionists, nor paramilitary exactly. They needed guns, ammo, water and canned goods, barbed wire, and already had dynamite and four live grenades from the National Guard. The percussion kind, which they needed more of. You could add shrapnel to the outside of these very easily in the shop. The couple and the others liked Malcolm instantly and they had a much better gun for him. He left with them, he who was skimping on food to buy the twelve-gauge.

Carl Bob and Ulrich imagined they had a temporary grand theft going when they started up the luxurious pontoon launch that Harvard had conceived and largely built for Melanie Wooten and sailed it directly across the lake to preach to the orphans. But it was part Ulrich’s already by original charter, and the keys stayed in it all the time. The men were senile, sometimes raving and unkempt, but Ulrich had handled the launch several times before, and he did pilot well and knew the lake better than Harvard. Also he had no fear of water, although he would forget whether he could swim or not. Carl Bob Feeney simply couldn’t. He wore a fair barrel of life-preserving with two jackets, one in front, the other on his back. You couldn’t have held him under with a semi wheel rim and chains.

They plowed. This vessel required patience, although the Mercuries were powerful and magnificent. Patience and meditation were what it was all about. They had brought their own sermonettes to read when the orphans got aboard.

Ulrich would talk about the white teeth of animals, especially those of the lesser creatures. The traveling was perfect in late October, the sky orange-lit at midafternoon. The trees along the shore were still green, but a few were on fire in that incandescence born of lush summers, fat sopping roots.

Forgive us, little children, he rehearsed, he prayed. Our long years on this earth are an obscenity. They carried pictures of McJordan, the Jackson policeman notorious for shooting two smallish dogs, with a red X across his face. They had had it done at a LazerPrint in Vicksburg owned by an angry animal lover.

Ulrich wished he could sing, write songs and sing, but mainly just sing. So much so long in his bosom that could have been shared and vented to his auditors through the years. They would have liked him instead of fleeing. He wished he could sing all out, in a long exquisite howl for the animals and flight, but he was just croaking here and taking a nose hit now and then from his oxygen bottle. He had heard a story of a man, Roy Orbison, who sang so beautifully that he turned permanently pale. He wore nothing but black and dark sunglasses to memorialize his grief over his wife and children dying in a fire. That was a wonderful fate, thought Ulrich. He wanted to be pale and a bird with a deep throat. The animals would elect him their tongue.

We will have a ceremony in gratitude to the animals and then I’ll kill myself, he decided. Carl Bob Feeney bore straight ahead with his stare at the far shore, trying to piece together any orphans’ tableau on their pier that might be ready for them. He could not see well, though, and he was looking at a crowd of heifers with buzzards over them and trying to figure. Carl Bob loved the launch as his, an almost bold late gift to his years on the land with his dogs and cats. Loved his nephew, Byron Egan, a prince of the spirit, a boon relative. Blessed his sister, Egan’s mother, for providing him against this darkness. Sometimes old Feeney forgot he was not still a devoted Roman Catholic. And sometimes he felt he was a whole torn country, afire in all quadrants.

A greyhound, alert to kindness, stood next to Melanie on the pier. It was a gift from Facetto. They had come out after loving and discovered the two ancient loonies had taken the launch. They called Harvard, and he was a little concerned but said gruffly that he did not care to come down to the pier if the sheriff was there. He told Melanie, she thought bitterly, that it was consuming all his care to watch his beloved wife of all these years slowly slipping away. He had begged her not to smoke, to exercise, to eat better. So here they had the results of another individual, fully warned, taking her own road in mild spite against the odds in the newspapers. Betting on Harvard University upsetting Alabama in football. Oh, to be holding her hand again when they were twenty-three! Melanie said that sounded right and it made her cry.

She hung up the phone, bereft and held in the sheriff’s arms at the same time. She had never disgusted anyone before.

In their haste to renounce Melanie, the pier crowd did not notice that their cheerleader looked better than she had since middle age. The evidence was that she was reclaiming middle age right now, however briefly, and enjoying it backwards. A smile on some old women does not become them, and they look macabre in their glee. Not so Mrs. Wooten. She was backlit, it seemed, into severe blond on a blue field. She had admirable teeth, for one thing. But the sheriff was drawn and bag-eyed, more like a throttled immigrant at the turn of the century than the video lecturer. Some did now mock him for his race. They weren’t used to Sicilians except around the Gulf Coast, and he was noted as Mafia-eyed by several older viewers, as well as lying fool, for his failures to indict or even locate the killer of Pepper Farté and the butcherer of Frank Booth and Pastor Byron Egan. These people did not fear his wrath or respect his office. Sheriff Facetto despised being unpopular too. For the main part he had acted himself into this job and had intended to grow rapidly in office.

Melanie and Facetto. Love and despair go hand in hand. Sleep in the same bed. In full light she was not confident of herself, but she could not know Facetto was gone in love for her much deeper than appearances. The love was ruining him, he slept with her soul and never got enough of it. What lines bred Melanie? They ought to store the blood in a safe. He was twice in love with her just for lasting.

She studied the large bent dog. Its face made her think of T. S. Eliot’s famous line, “some infinitely gentle, / infinitely suffering thing.” It was an emeritus of the tracks in West Memphis, where Deputy Bernard had confiscated it from a man who had abused it. For Facetto, the greyhound stood for something. What else could comfort this startling creature better than another startling creature, with eyes haunted as if alarmed by its own creation. He gave it to be there in his absence from her.

“When I come back, I want you to’ve named our dog. We don’t know it. You’ll be at the door of your house and tell me the name, and then drop your gown and I’ll get on my knees.”

“Sweet man.”

He thought he knew his killer now and cutter too. It was long quiet work, but he would have him soon. Bernard had seen something and a church trombonist had seen something. But Facetto’s memory of their last acts was driving him around the bend, riding his Melanie to the tune of “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” on the stereo in the next room. She was taken by several supreme moments, a happy crisis she did not know as a possibility. She was sad after the outflow and wept deeply in gratitude. He said he needed to bring her home good news and wouldn’t return until he did. Then he was gone.

Melanie was very weary of what regular people thought. Their thoughts began to hurt and make her weak. Come let me be your grandmother harlot or whatever it is I’m called. Let me be the source of dissension. I never knew Ben Harvard loved me. But fine, fine — let me serve as not only sin but evil around here. I meant to be a scandal all along. Add me to all the hauntings and chaos and lunacy. I am so tired of these old jaws cracking about it. She went back into the house.

For his own pain, Dr. Harvard decided to come down to the pier and see Melanie by accident in his mission of concern about Ulrich and Feeney at large on the barge. Others had gathered when word got out they might be in trouble or lost. Wren, Lewis, the dog Son, who frightened the greyhound back indoors, John Roman and the pale and butchered Egan gathered at the end of the pier. Then Sidney dragged down from his bait-store duties, making a show of anger about his lost trade. Nobody remembered who’d called him. He was off on a mad consumer’s ride, a revenge against lost time and missed women, fun, dice, fine liquor. His language was tougher, glibber than his old talk. Nobody knew quite who he was now. He emulated Man Mortimer, who was changing gravely himself.

They could see tiny specks of life across the lake but no boat. They spoke of the boat as if it were at the bottom of the lake and the old men bobbing and yammering in their life jackets. And what each had planned to read next meditation way up the reservoir near Yazoo — the Indian word for death ghost, was it? Sidney reminded Harvard of all the artistic and nautical effort he had put in the project, forget the pile of money, which nobody else here had, combined.

“All for Miss Melanie too. We know that. A grand boat for a grand swank love, wasn’t it? And your poor wife dying at home all the while, smoking them cigarettes and building up her sad neglected ass with chocolate.”

“You are scum,” said Harvard.

All agreed the sheriff was a strange do-nothing about these troubles. That he was just another fraud of vocality like Bill Clinton. The law was fast cars with whip antennae racing around from one unsolved atrocity to another, screaming radios. Shield on the door ought to read Late, Lard-ass, Last to Know. But expert marksmen on small dogs ruffing in a driveway, or puffed actors in dinner theater, a fit of exhibitionism. Your taxes at work.

Then they spoke of Melanie. “There’ll come the day when it’s right, Harvard. You’ll propose marriage, she’ll accept. The two of you were made for each other. Get married on the barge by Parson Egan here,” Lewis said.

Egan watched the water east and west. He had not uttered a word, and he was ashamed of his carved face, the cross in stitched pieces.

“If you don’t care old sheriff boy been a-tappin it,” said Sidney happily.

“Please.” Harvard had found his own small voice at last.

“The two of ’em come ’round, why you can smell it on ’em,” Sidney insisted.

“You’re a wretched man, if not evil,” cried tall Lewis.

“Not no worse than the truth. Yeah, she got her glass animals and her books and music and now her lawman. She a complete woman.”

Harvard turned and walked up the hill, in grief, they presumed.

John Roman was about to reveal Sidney’s late career between the whores. He liked and admired Harvard tremendously. But then Wren spoke again, hopeful that the lying he had done about Wake Island was forgotten.

“You had to move your mouth and break the best heart here!”

He stepped forward and slapped Sidney across the face. His arm was long and he still had surprising power in it. It was not an idle blow. Sidney sat right down on the beach grass. It seemed Wren was not through, and John Roman moved up to restrain him. But you thought he might be wanting a piece of Sidney too. Everybody did.

Sidney, huddled down, delirious in spite, was glad to see that in their unhappiness the others now turned on each other. John Roman got Wren in a half nelson and started dragging him away from Sidney. Lewis kicked at Sidney’s face, missed, came again. Sidney took a blow right into the heaving place and began rolling and firing projectile vomit. Got some on the poor stitched Frankensteinish Byron Egan, who was attempting to intervene. Son pranced around, barking and wagging his tail. Across the lake they heard at an immense distance what sounded like serial gunfire and turned. All this while, Egan, silent about his attacker, pleaded for the flock to return to itself.

Ulrich and Feeney approached the pier and slowed, observing the etiquette of the small wake. They were doing fine, nothing going over had been senile or forgetful. It was just that Ulrich was relying on Feeney for a bit of navigation and Feeney didn’t see right, nor did he acknowledge this to himself, so he had taken them out of their way a bit. Now he thought he saw a sail come up on the pier, and a boat, hoisted by its small crew. What was happening was that armed children were making a barricade on the end of their pier at the behest of the camp founders, Gene and Penny Ten Hoor.

The couple was armed too. They did not expect the oncoming barge to be armed, but they guessed Mortimer might be aboard and intended to deliver a volley that would part the man fifteen ways.

They had made a flag, orange, black and white, with the letters OASS in black. They called themselves Oasis, Orphans Against Smiling Strangers. A slogan stitched on it:

WE HAVE ALREADY LOST, SO WE WILL WIN

WE SHALL LOSE MANY, WE SHALL KILL FEW

THE ONE WE KILL, SMILING STRANGER,

WILL BE YOU.

The changes were inspired by the awful revelations of the fifteen-year-old girls. Man Mortimer thought he had charmed them and sent them back to recruit fresher younger subjects for his new video company. But Sandra, the littler one, had been injured by Large Lloyd, who had grown angry and impatient in his work and felt ludicrous in a cape and mask. They intended to kill Mortimer, and Lloyd too. And Edie, Bertha and especially Marcine, who was hardly older than the camp girls and helped betray them. Both ruined for life by intimacies distributed widely as underground art.

Minny and Sandra had turned on Mortimer when he explained over the telephone, with compassion and sweetness, he thought, that they were too old now for his projects. One day, he promised, he would take them away and set them up in fine style. But day after day, Mortimer failed to show. Then came the day when they exposed him for what he was. They did not say how glad they had been to participate, but they mentioned drugs, blackmail and death threats that had never occurred. Gene and Penny were in violent sympathy with hurt children. A new spirit took over. They would not assassinate outside the camp fence, but anybody from outside who entered the grounds, well, the new spirit was on the end of the pier behind a canoe. They began to string razor wire from the cab of a pickup, but several were cut and the going was slow. They glued glass onto percussion grenades with Krazy Glue. Many a little one glued the grenade to his palm too. No discussion. No trust in the laws of men. Death to smiling strangers on the spot. Death by long-overdue Higher Law.

Both girls now knelt behind the canoe barricade with seven others, all taking aim not on the man in the wheel-house but on the one standing and trying to unblur his impressions, Carl Bob Feeney. Minny, the girl with breasts, had the honor of handling a Winchester lever-action.30/.30 with hollowpoint bullets. A telescope for sighting. She had known for a long time that Mortimer was not aboard, but Feeney looked a good deal like her second stepfather in Galveston, Texas.

Ulrich performed a slow turn about fifty yards out in a hail of lead. The pleasure boat was riddled, its wind-shield and stained-glass cabin windows shattered. Only the ineptness of the orphans’ rifle training was on their side. Outside of real estate, the Ten Hoors had no talents, though they presumed to emit rays of instruction by simply riding horses and setting a good example. Minny fired over and over at Feeney through the telescope and must have carved his outline in blue space around him. Somebody threw two grenades. Thumping, pumping geysers and minnow kill out of twelve feet of clear green water. The barge was on the way back at full throttle. Twin Mercuries churning all-out. Ulrich must have caught up to the point where most of the bullets and buckshot were going in their error, for the back of the right stern disappeared and smoke crept up.

After a year, it felt to Feeney and Ulrich, they were out of range. In another place and time they would have been commended to some award. Soon they were pretty well afire back there but making good time to Farté Cove. The Ten Hoors stood arm in arm behind the firing line, hating the vehicle that might have brought another Man Mortimer to their shores. An armed Carl Bob Feeney would have shot down the both of them.

The Oasis flag still flew on its pole at the front of the barricade. The couple considered this a victory, and they celebrated with hot dogs and a long movie that night. Outside, older orphans patrolled the fence and beefed-up sections of unrolled barbed wire. Rifles slung on a rope across their backs. They gathered around the campfire for chats. An unwise salvo, bad military instruction. But there had been army error everywhere. A tradition carried on apace.

The pier crowd watched as Ulrich brought the barge over across the lake. There was a fire in the stern near the gas tanks. Saner men would have jumped overboard five minutes ago, but not these pilgrims. They plowed, they felt the power drop back to a single Mercury, they felt orange and hot on their backs. One of the tanks seemed a wall of flames and threatened to explode the next tank. It will blow, it will immolate, it will soon be over, Ulrich thought. Not a bad thing, as I am ready to go to the dead animals in that other world and spend my next life atoning. Carl Bob Feeney alongside. This is the hell never described, where you get a second chance to correct your miserable life by daily ministry to those you harmed or made dead. Perhaps these are the reincarnated ones, the saints we still have scattered among us. Hitler and Stalin working as good men in obscurity somewhere. And Mao, who never took a bath except in the organs of his young lovers, as he put it, and who murdered even the sparrows of the air to bring a pestilence of grasshoppers. Feeney and I will recognize them, workers in the vineyard.

Feeney would have been long gone in his double life jacket except he feared water so much and thought it capable of melting off the buckles. All deeper water to Feeney was a sucking vortex activated by contact with any warm thing that thrashed. Then there were the sharks. Great fat blond lake sharks that lay on the bottom until stirred by that music above, men flapping, kicking their legs, yelling for help.

“We’ll have to run her aground near the pier and call for help,” said Ulrich.

“Friend, there is no help here. Try to make the shallows out of the shark beds.”

“Feeney, you’re an old priest from Ireland. There are no sharks. Leave it to me. I know nature!” This was a lie.

All considered, Feeney thought, those children blazing away were very charitable. They might have killed us easily instead of this warning. We could have been the church, the state or landlords. Preachers and destroyers.

They neared the pier, jumped down from a fully engulfed floor of the bow and cabin. The pleasure barge was a collapsed charcoal hulk by the time Melanie got the Redwood fire department there. No obvious evidence of foul play, only the vague idiocy of two old fools. Ulrich and Feeney never mentioned they were fired upon and took the abuse with equanimity.

Nevertheless, sane fishermen avoided fishing the weeds and lily pads of the orphans’ camp shoreline. All that rifle range going, you might get into something stray.

Sidney was back at the bait store when he got word and almost wrecked his fine car several times racing over, wallowing on gravel and twisting on grass, fishtailing. With water on the road he would have hydroplaned. Then he limped wildly down the hill where others gathered. Ulrich had done this trying to light a cigarette aft, near the gasoline, he was told. One more chance before they hauled him and Feeney to Almost There. Sidney Farté was in ecstasy.

Sheriff Facetto had a lead. The last to see Pepper alive seemed to have been Ruthna, a somewhat notorious woman, and two men called Harb and Alexander. The sheriff had tracked them to the tame and brick-streeted town of Clinton, where the Baptist college was, and where Grant had once stabled his horses in a chapel in the midst of giant cedars. Now its suburbs defined it. Pine forests ripped down for the blocky bunkers of new businessmen and computer Christians fleeing the blacker Jackson to the east.

The sheriff met all three in Ruthna’s ragged house, an ersatz hacienda with failing cactuses and yuccas about. It was the home of her fifth husband, Harb, who was her ex but still came around to visit with Alexander over a bottle or two now and then. They were friends of Max Raymond and did see Pepper a few minutes before ten that night. But they were depressed and godless, divorced and alcoholic, and their memories were random. Once they were not suspects, they began to be drunk and pathetic in a short space, fighting for narrative time with each other. The sheriff was sorting, writing, reacting. Then he just asked them to shut up.

The night in question they had gnawed bones in a booth of the northside restaurant, Near ’Nuff Food, far superior to the restaurant right at the saxophonist and singer’s cottage. Raw beams, linoleum, spiderweb Formica tabletops, leatherette seats, happy waitresses. A theme. A waitress hurried out and dumped ribs on a heavy paper tablecloth, two rolls of paper napkins.

They wanted to be higher when they left to visit Raymond and the Coyote. They considered themselves urbanites, ignorant of philosophy but crammed with half-remembered songs, which served. They were unhappy, and if God existed, they blamed him for much. The whiskey still worked on them, but they needed more. Ruthna pulled the Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo into the gravel lot of the bait store for a last beer. At least ice and cups and Tums. The ribs of Near ’Nuff Food were loggy and scalding in their tender stomachs.

Harb and Ruthna had already begun to fight regarding her past. Alexander went inside and left them to it. A hound watched them all from the porch. Soon enough the fight grew tiresome. They passed a man on a high stool, a note written on an envelope on the counter before him. He was asleep, a football was in the aisle of the store and this was a curious thing, as if somebody had just left off a game of touch. They had a sense somebody was in the back but just left this old man to his sleeping. He was a dry white old creature, leaning on the bulwark of a Lucky Strike display case in which all brands of smokes were stacked. Old Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls and Roitan cigars, brands that seldom moved in modern towns. The note under his fingers must be a message to customers, they figured. Out to Lunch or the like, even though he was there. They got the sack of ice, the plastic cups, the soda, lemons. For a geezer he was well stocked in the needs of the drinking life.

Maybe he was deaf as well as asleep. They couldn’t get his attention. Alexander turned the note around, thinking maybe to wake him. The note seemed oddly personal but scrawled in excitement or carelessness.

I SEEN THE LIGHT AROUND THE CORNER OF THE TUNNEL THEM BASTARDS WAITING FOR ME.

His face was perhaps more purple than was good for a fellow. But he could damn well sleep and they decided this was quaint and in their sleepless tossings they envied him.

They grabbed a bottle from the shelf behind him and went out with the goods, pocketing the cash. They thought this was what the sheriff had come about and this they apologized for. The drink, the weirdness of the scene, their lightness of spirit. Really it was only a prank.

They continued a bit just to hear for themselves what happened the rest of the night once they got to Max Raymond’s. They told Raymond about the catatonic man. Old Pepper harked back to Raymond’s adolescence, his first night here in a cabin with other boys. The rare night it snowed here. A January with only a few crappie fishermen around. Somebody had insisted Pepper look out at the snow falling thickly in the porch light. He went out, peered briefly and returned.

“Nasty,” he said. Nothing else. Raymond insisted this was modern poetry.

Two thought Raymond was affected. Another fight broke out.

He and the Coyote had been drinking too. She told him the way he clung to his past was morbid. He accused her of having no memories. Fort Lauderdale, Memphis. What was that? She was nowhere, just tits and hair with a voice.

The others took her side. Mimi Suarez said she was not pregnant and was glad.

After a while Alexander and Harb insisted Mimi sing. For song was what was left in the world. Ruthna felt her powers waning and began taking off her clothes. She went out to the back stoop like that and thought she heard boos from nature and her feelings were hurt. She came in and the Coyote passed her and began singing out there with her back to them. Raymond passed the naked Ruthna, dancing. Harb was swaying before her in boxer shorts and black shoes. Alexander watched Mimi’s back as she faced the swamp and sang. Presently Raymond accompanied her on the sax. Then he tore her dress off.

Raymond and the weak porch light on Mimi’s shoulders and buttocks. Out there kneeling and spying, Sponce, Harold and the little ones were at pains to keep their faces behind the fronds. Mimi was the first woman Harold had seen naked. He looked straight through her as through a lens to his beloved Dee. This woman was not his stopping place, pretty as her voice was, strange as his vantage. The younger boys stayed close to the skeletons.

“I’ve got more confidence. I’m not scared of melody anymore,” they heard Raymond call to the others. Nobody cared.

The guests lumbered about the rooms in a great sweat, dancing, one nude, wishing themselves lost from their species.