Yonder Stands Your Orphan

TWELVE

Today

Maxwell Raymond

Eagle Lake, Mississippi

copyright at Vicksburg Public Library

My forebears prayed give me Sherman, Grant or a

lesser general.

Ptoom and bummf, hit square.

This old mistress my rifle.

Nasty bite. I call her Mingo, the old bopster.

Bloooooom! Above the eyes the nice wide forehead.

My headshot, our whole lives.

Fill your head, Ulysses S. Grant, William T.

Sherman.

The visionary like the loaded gun.

If he waits long enough, something will happen.

Unless he rusts, unless his eyes collapse.

The dark diarist, his last words shouted, “I’m

dying, watch this!”

You knowest not what I do, Rag on the cross.

I always loved You Jesus and didn’t understand

much else.

These claims, What the Lord Wants Me to Do,

Greek, Greek to me.

I would like the straight Aramaic right from His

lips.

And why not?

This long wait with this much posture gives you

the blue soul.

I dab and idle, attendant God.

I insist my art and path be crooked, in fear there

will be a herd

Of the simple where I want to be.

Help my eyes and ears,

Or just show up, why don’t You?

Raymond was speechifying to Mimi as never before. He was nearly coherent and it frightened her. They heard a mass of gunfire across the lake from the orphans’ camp one evening.

“Now I can feel the madness of grief in the kitchen where Penny talked to the limb. When they lost the boy, I believe they became just people at last and couldn’t bear it.”

“Became people?” asked Mimi. “What were they before?”

Raymond said aloud, looking past Mimi, “Movers, actors, I’d suppose. Sellers, takers, keepers. Some come apart when they discover themselves. As somebody said, Acts mark the land, words are only its smoke, or something.

“I despise, but am in awe of, this couple, Mimi. They simply ran out of words, don’t you understand? They dealt with things you touch and hold and appraise. Bodies. Bodies and acts is what they knew.

“With drugs or without them, bodies and acts. At my deposition nobody wanted to talk drugs, but two lawyers wanted Halcyon and Xanax, I tell you. I told them, sorry, I’m a saxophonist.

“Sure, Gene and Penny were sad. And they were absent the usual compulsion to be good in sadness. Goodness is respected and often mistaken for a cure. Not only words, though, they seem to have lost even their taste buds toward the end. They went naked or wore clothes to no effect on each other. They collected money. They collected fish. They had destroyed wetlands and aviaries. Now they began nailing it all on the wall.”

“Why is it that you adore the pain and suffering of your family and others? Tell me.” Mimi stared hard at him without warmth. Now he was silent. At last. “You are in love with ruin. You get a contact high from it. You play your horn like you are sick of the notes sometimes. Why is that?”

When Mimi left, he had, he did have, a vision of his old poet mentor, speaking out of a fog at the vets’ hospital. Speaking as he had done in the late seventies.

“Oh I found my feminine side long ago, Max. It’s Edna, an old navy dyke.”

The poet did not smile.

Ulrich and Egan returned home with their petting zoo intact. They met Malcolm, who carried a rifle negligently at his left leg, telling them he was the victim of Max Raymond and he loved Mimi Suarez. The proximity alone seemed to please him. All this he told Ulrich and Egan while they looked at a few bullet holes in the woody wagon. Gene and Penny were on horseback. An accident. They were sorry.

Harvard, who worked to salvage what good timber might be left of the launch, was annoyed when Ulrich and Egan’s dogs came to the pier. He was querulous in his suffering over Melanie. He pouted in her presence and scowled. This might be her last year of radiance. Harvard hoped it was. She was unbearable to him.

America is dreadful for the emeritus, or so Harvard thought. Once a god, a surgeon of few mistakes, now an eccentric out to pasture. His neighbors connected him to more charming days when doctors made house calls and bespoke themselves in soft benisons. Some might hit him for a drug now and then.

He began searching the aisles of the launch, through cinder and ashes, and finding bullet slugs. He knelt and studied them. Mushroomed.22 Magnums, 30/.30 and buckshot. Harvard raked through the coals and could hear the slugs rattling.

He cleared the embers, the broken stained glass, the half-pews, the quarter-wheel. He had once lived across the street from a man with thick glasses. He owned no car. The neighbors called him the Walking Man. He walked everywhere, morning and evening, and nobody knew his mission. He did not sing, laugh, play. He had no work except perhaps at the library. In his thick glasses, he seemed to be taken up with the traffic. Going and returning was a demanding event. You would stop to offer him a ride and he would brusquely refuse. He did not answer his phone. He once drank, but he stopped. He smoked, but he quit. He may have been a failed scholar, a torn philosopher. The thick glasses controlled him. Earnest and officious, even fervent, in his walk, without humor. Never smelled a rose. It was a free country. Harvard wondered why the neighborhood boys hated him so.

Sheriff Facetto and Bernard were in the bait store one evening in khakis and T-shirts and canvas shoes, a johnboat in the gravel out front. The weather was mild and the winter crappie season was in and they had in mind filling a freezer box with fillets for a county beer-and-fish picnic the middle of February. Big slabs lurked thick as necklaces in the brushy sinks near the spillway.

Mortimer in the back did not recognize the sheriff and his deputy through the storeroom window. But these men were not leaving until they learned the color of jig and depth for the slab crappie. The locals were leaning around freezer chests close to a potbellied stove with a good fire. Two of them were having a sport on the sheriff and thought he ought to find out himself about the jig color and technique. It wasn’t something you just handed over to a foreigner, it took years, many bad mornings, many frozen spines. Mortimer could see the skinny younger one, Bernard, getting angrier over this matter.

Mortimer recognized the sheriff and deputy the same moment he saw the thing on the top rack. Two full-size footballs secured in tandem by foot-long black strips of canvas webbing with Velcro at the ends. It was a life preserver, worn around the neck. Pepper’s old footballs. Sidney was having a go at invention. The weekend after the costume dance, when he had gotten with three large women for special tastes right out of Mortimer’s service, the experience of which, he told Mortimer and Lloyd, was like “rolling around in a warm room,” he had worn Mortimer’s silk bandit’s mask all weekend behind his store counter. The effect on a fishing Sunday was disquieting to his hungover clients, drinking beer rapidly before they could decide whether to stay.

Now Mortimer was staring dead-on at Facetto, through the glass and quite unknown to him. He could have rammed a bolo through the two-way storeroom mirror into the man’s very face without his ever knowing what nightmare had struck him.

Years ago a man had driven into the bait shop at night, hungry and with the inventory of an entire bankrupt sporting-goods store in a four-ton truck. It was hot summer, tree frogs and gnats having away at the air, aggravating the man’s thirst. He was broke, bankrupt and alcoholic, and he knew not where he was. He figured perhaps Kansas. Nobody else was in the store. He appealed to Pepper’s charity, spoke to him curiously, as if he might be the governor of the state, who was at that time a graceless yahoo whipping up racial purity among even lesser yahoos in confrontation with the Brothers Kennedy, who wanted one black man in the university at that time. He spoke as if Pepper were in charge of large fates and was known far and wide for his special attunement to the troubles of the little man in this often heartbreaking and deceptive land. He indicated waves of wheat and torrents of oranges out through the door. “I will do anything for a drink and a sandwich,” he told Pepper. “I have a truck full of sports equipment and not a dime. For a bottle I could give you a whole lot of sports equipment. Playground, floor play. There might even be fishing stuff in there, I’m sure there is. Isn’t there a good bottle, two bottles, and a hamburger?” He looked over at the greased meat and soggy bread under the heat-lamp row across the way. A man on the television was pouring down a frosty mug of beer so sweet it seemed to create new muscles of pleasure in his throat.

“First,” said Pepper, unmoved but interested, “I want you to get out a football. Go get it out of the truck there. Something might be waiting on you. Take your time and get a good football, your best.”

“My best football. I got one kind, the best. A Hutch. You got it.” When he came in with it, a bottle of Maker’s Mark sat beside a greasy burger on a napkin with a bottle of mustard next to it. Pepper seemed to have moved no place nor fretted. The man held out the big football.

“Now I want you to suck it. Suck this football. Get a lot of it in there.”

“Aw, man. Why, do you love football? That your game?”

“I hate it. Suck it, now. On in there, moan around on it.”

The man did, caterwauling and gagging. “Is that all right? God damn. You reckon it’s really pig hide?”

“Go on, get your drink now. We can be trading for a while now. There’s a place for you. Some old crazy man’s tree house, he left it. But the tree house is professional. The tree’d blow down ’fore the house would. He left meat around on the floor like. You goin’ to want to clean some with the critters comin’ after the smell at night.”

The man stayed for six weeks, fed from the store, seined minnows and caught grasshoppers and crayfish for Pepper, and stayed mainly drunk, high in the boughs singing with a transistor radio. There was a wire up to it for reading or coffee. Then he left, and the truck was all Pepper’s. He had sold off most of the gear to fairly delighted people who had hobbies. That is, outside fishing, hunting, weather discussion and church. But he kept the boxes of footballs in the storeroom. When he saw the boy children come along with their fathers to learn the way of the world, he would look at them with no expression and refuse them a football for their own. It was believed he kept the balls as a memorial to the ungodly humiliation he had wrestled from that bankrupt creature those many years ago.

Mortimer felt suddenly that he had to buy a new pair of shoes. He was doing this a lot lately. He felt a bit sick and nervous. In the storeroom thinking about the footballs, looking at the sheriff, he felt dirty and low-rent. He went out the back and almost immediately drove at breakneck speed into Vicksburg to purchase a pair of shoes. He wanted bright white ones. Perhaps a boot, a soft suede pair you could hold in your hands while you went off to sleep in any house and feel perfectly at home. The next day when he went out to talk to the lay preacher who kept the junk-car lot, he would buy yet another pair. Sandals and it cold. He knew he would probably never wear them, but still the excitement held.

Out in the bait shop, a geezer was telling the sheriff, “You got your chartreuse with sorty beige spots, throw it out there with a sorty small fireplug weight on her, and you’ll want a good rope size, say about like a venetian-blind pullrope on her, them slab crappie is big and mean with the teeth too like a band saw sorty.” Bernard the deputy was incensed, being an actual fisherman.

The sheriff spoke as if nothing had been heard, nothing mocked. He said to Sidney, who was smirking behind the counter, “You don’t think the football contraption is a bit in bad taste, considering your father’s murder?” He quieted the air. Something like church in there now.

“Family tradition is a man’s own lookout, like his choice of faith, sir.”

The sheriff did not miss the sir and was astounded that Sidney spoke of faith at all. He was slow to anger, but these crackers were getting confident around him.

“The faith of your fathers is a chicken hawk and everybody knows it, Sidney. Tradition.”

“I don’t guess you’ll be welcome in my store from now on unless you got papers, friend. But by the way. They’re taking slab crappie with a light cork, a foot deep on a fuchsia and frog-green jig, sometimes tip it with a small minnow. I seem to be all out of those substances at the moment, but good luck.”

Bernard and Facetto proceeded to the spillway, where there was another tribe entirely, honored to have the sheriff and his man fish elbow-to-elbow with them as they waded the little rapids over gravel and worked the pools with a light spin cast, lent them jigs and corks hand over fist in that almost belligerent hospitality the state of Mississippi is famous for. The two felt much better and had a full chest before long, and it was splendid to get out of the cold water, rip off the waders and toast in the car, alternating on hot espresso and cold Louisiana beer.

“I’m sheriff of these folks too, thank the Lord,” said Facetto.

“The truth. Folks is all right. It just seems tense at the lake nowadays.”

The sheriff grew solemn. Melanie. Did the deputy know? Or was it something else he meant? Trouble at the orphans’ camp; the immolation of the oldsters’ barge; the disappearance of yet another pair of girls from Oasis. Old Pepper’s seated corpse, bleeding in ropes from the neck while a football stood for his face. The tracing of that jackleg preacher Byron Egan to a methedrine ring of long years standing; a ’48 Ford coupe reported stolen from the St. Aloysius Junkyard and replaced by a filthy rusted-out car of exactly the same vintage. And that stolen car had been reported running down scarcely known county roads, driven by minors, and then parked in a cemetery near the home of Dee Allison, the sex bomb, about whom a groaning man had said, “She’d fuck a snake just to hurt it.” She had four kids, great legs and other acreage, but the talk was she was getting married soon, right there in the cemetery. Shut your mouth. Right in it.