Yonder Stands Your Orphan

THIRTEEN

MORTIMER HAD FOUR DREAMS IN A ROW ONE WEDNESDAY night. He had performed a small amount of manual labor in his runaway years, and the work itself was nightmare enough, although it trained him never to go thereabouts again. In each dream he was fired from a different job, jobs he had done in real life. Offshore drilling in Louisiana. Lumberyard. Car salesman. Offshore drilling again off the Chandeleurs out of Gulfport. In each dream the boss man came up and said, “Get out, that’s enough of you.” Then came a fifth dream in which his own mirror told him he was an impostor in the body of Conway Twitty. Then his mirror fired him. But he killed it. A funeral was held with a coffin and pieces of glass. The woman and the boy showed up. They were trying to have a funeral, but her father was late and they could not start. Mortimer said, “He just can’t find his clothes, that’s all. You don’t know the outfit for a mirror funeral.” But he knew he was lying. The news was that her father was coming naked. So they waited at the graveside next to the hole. But instead came Frank Booth, with whom Dee Allison had betrayed Mortimer. They walked in naked like two crabs locked together. Booth was saying, “Please help me. I can’t pull it out of her. Somebody’s got to cut. Help us.”

Mortimer woke in horror, the sun streaming in his window. Yet he had only a few moments of relief before he was in full need from waking life. He was going to have to cut again. This matter was no longer spontaneous. He knew exactly what he would do when he saw the junkman Peden again. Fire him? In his dreams. Peden, his lackey, who owed him money.

Peden was a Protestant. Why then, Mortimer mused, did he spend his idle time making graven images? What did graven mean? Of the grave, serious, heavy? A graver, he graved nearly all his free time. Over there graving, is what. Peden carved wood. He was one for animals like Mrs. Wooten and her glass. Mortimer said out loud, “You look at me, I don’t seem the type to go about having such thoughts on my own, up high in my Navigator, this new green buggy, swank, but look again, looker. I have these thoughts.” In fact he could not quit having these new thoughts that gave him a hand on the common man and the old life he was rushed from by such forces as he now despised.

He recalled the mobile phone he had bought Dee once and the first time he saw it in her hands, in the BMW he had also given her. Must be two years ago, they were new then too. He thought the phone, deep red, was very intimate, and her words, it didn’t matter which ones, excited him. He saw now the red phone in her fingers, her fingernails very red, her toenails too, and then he imagined the razor scar down her thigh and he could not stand it. He wondered if she would ever forgive him, how crazy he was to do it. But that red phone next to her fingers, her lips.

He wondered would there be a day when he would open the car door for her to get in, and on the backseat would be her two younger boys sitting there. He could play with them, make new games. There would come a day he could change, nobody’d recognize him. He might even resemble nobody at all, or a pleasant television star. These things happen. You can get a lot with money.

He thought of his sequence of good cars, and then the whores. His work was his play. That’s what they said of players. He was either moving or flat-out dead asleep, it didn’t matter under what roof. Probably he was a sea shark, even if he feared the sea. Death by sea. Life by eating a great many others. But he had his kindnesses. He was not tight. He set a plate for the unlucky, like the lay preacher Peden. Until this car, under his eye, rode off. Just the core of the apple of his eye, it just rode off, and its mud-bottom rust-faced sister is your date. Old preacher boy Peden eating from the plate and whittling his idolatrous beasts and strumming his psalms. Great hell, he lives there! Otherwise it would be Haven House or a box in back of the Salvation Army. This man’s been passing for a sound old junk general too long, he’s got himself into trouble. Well here comes Not Hardly, Mortimer said to himself, dressing for battle. Peden has his coming.

The shack at St. Aloysius Junkyard was an old shotgun house weathered to a pale of gray and re-tar-papered and tarped in spots on the roof for rain. The two snows they had in the decade, the edge of a horrendous ice storm. It was warm inside, burned a good modern Franklin. It was electrified, telephoned, a small pawnshop refrigerator did its duty for beer or milk or bacon or the whole old hams Peden often bought at the discount grocery. A stove of propane. Peden liked to keep a soup going during a major bender. He would make the soup days in advance, and it worked so that he was not detected incompetent until a fire broke out or he drove some elected junker queen all around the lot honking the horn and plowing into even more terminal junkers. The law was not necessary. A neighbor black fellow phoned in. Grandson of the owners of the house and the original property years ago, still proprietary although sold out. Then Lloyd or others would come and settle Mr. Peden, clutching his Bible and tearfully spouting out hard plainasyournose truths from the Book of Revelation.

His recovery usually lasted a week, and he was a very good man afterward for a very long time. When he was sober, he expressed the sentiment that he wished the Book of Revelation had never been written, and that it might even have the hand of Satan in it.

His speech and dress were clean. The clothes were the best of the Salvation Army and he loved suspenders with a good brogan, no cheap second-tier leather. Perhaps he wanted to be a bit old-timey or reminiscent of his own old wise uncle, who had been a barber and taught private guitar lessons. Peden was once a barber too. He played original interpretations of anything on amplified violin. The black fellow across the hollow who was his monitor wished he would not do this. Peden’s amplifier was powerful. It had been abandoned on Highway 20, almost in Peden’s lap, and it still had the name and logo of a heavy-metal outfit, its former owners, painted on it.

Peden drove a Comet, a thing out of the age of Sputnik. Low expectations. But he could fix it. He couldn’t fix everything, but he could fix this weary orbiter. When he was drunk and driving it, he imagined he was riding a hydrogen bomb to Los Angeles. But when Peden was sober, he was apt to wonder if there was a god, or not simply a divine wind of oratory investing man, and this divine wind was blind and deaf and cared not in whom or at what time it manifested itself.

Peden had not meant to either be a lay preacher or play electrified fiddle. But look here, he couldn’t help himself, and he had no models for these behaviors. He could not name one electrified violinist. He knew no other preachers but Byron Egan, whom he had met recently in their common run back and forth from ruin. And what of those pastors who were always Christian and wore new three-piece suits and had the ears of large congregations? Byron Egan said they were lucky but soft, for even Christ was not a Christian until the day he needed to be and knew it.

Cars were pulled up near the shack at the portals, wide-open storm-wire panels with the chain lock hanging down. There were too many cars. Mortimer recognized some of them, he thought, and listened to a harangue of some sort in the shack proper. One of the first whose back he saw was Frank Booth. Then the back of Dee Allison herself, and Sponce, who seemed to be handing her off to some other young fool. The other young idiot held something interesting in his hands. The keys to the ’48 coupe. Mortimer knew them well. Didn’t even bother taking the rabbit’s foot off, the thick thief. He looked around for the car but didn’t see it. He knelt behind a shed and listened to Peden go on to this large group, and he saw many he knew, was in fact intimate with. They spoke back to Peden, young but creased in his large tweed suit and vest. When he became a Christian, the lay preacher took on the appearance of the actor Strother Martin. And he began wearing suits, also of the Salvation Army.

The furniture about him was nicked but pleasant enough. Mortimer set the plate for him. He owned him. Without rancor until the loss of this automobile. He’d even send over Lloyd, or Edie, to keep him from burning his furniture after a drunk, as he attempted. Some days you wish you’d married an ugly woman and somebody in your world would stay grateful, thought Mortimer. And do their job and smile.

“What we make with our hands, what we worship. .” Peden was going on. The rest was long, spotty although sober, Mortimer noticed. Eavesdropping on his own property was making him angrier by the minute.

“I have been under airplanes, under cars,” Peden said, the smoke from the chimney pipe rising upward with his voice in cold air. “God has given me the ends of cars where dead convicts, ladies, babies and little puppies were flung against dashboards. This is my vision, my garden, brothers and sisters and uncles. He has given me the Jaws of Life to pry the poor victim dead or alive from the bunched steel where a snake could barely crawl through. Like if a chicken truck hit a Volkswagen.”

“Amen,” said Byron Egan, standing toward the front of the room.

“People are forgotten as soon as they are slaughtered, except by a few loved ones, you know that?” Peden went on. “Forgotten in these stains of blood you will find on the seat covers and floorboards, and ceilings around this yard. Don’t even take the little ones with you if you look.”

Peden raised his arms in the big suit. He did not look funny, just thicker than one supposed. “The Lord has given me this junken place, freed me of drink and drug, and sent a friend, Byron Egan, all the priest a Christian American ever needed. And best, He has given us His Book, which every man and every woman can read.”

Peden breathed long, for this was difficult, and Mortimer felt the sensation of another man standing up amazed inside his own body. Familiar shape, with its khaki sports jacket and its safari boots recently removed from the pelt of floor rugging in his great Lexus. “I announce that Dee Allison is Mrs. Harold Laird, and that Harold Laird is her husband. May the Lord bless this couple, I would say young couple, but a teenage separates them, as it were.” Dee lowered her head and Harold was not amused, although he liked Peden, who could have gotten the law on him before his confession and seeking of mercy. Harold wished he knew where the boys had taken the car. “Her last husband, Cato, is present, I believe, to confirm the divorce has been finalized and that he approves this union and defies any who might stand against it. And Harold has vowed to be the loving father and mentor of her four children. I say Cato, you are Cato?”

A tall man of graceful carriage, hair still black and thick, in a nice wedding suit, gray, leaned forward, as if he had learned a courtesy faintly European, a roll of the hand and a bow in the affirmative, and a calm smile on his well-cut face.

“Cato is here in protection of the boys and of his other boy or man, Sponce, for a while. The agreement to his protection and his support has been amicably decided upon, and his custody of the young Emma for an agreeable while during the honeymoon period and other adjustments. He seems a fine man, Cato, and will be a father to this favored lass, who smiles every time she sees him enter a room, and this makes her mother happy too. And they will be father and daughter in Toronto, Canada, for as long as the mother assents. Except for the filth and low-mindedness, he would still reside in the U.S.A., he says. Well, the America I know could have kicked Canada’s ass all the way back to Paris and London, but out of the generosity of its great high-minded cleanliness of spirit, it has refrained from that minor task. But why am I going on like this at a wedding? I would surmise I am now out of control and will hand the services off to Brother Byron Egan. I do hope I have married the right people here during this spell. I don’t feel shipshape right now and I apologize. Remember the good words, if they happened. I’m going to go take a nap.”

Egan stepped up and indicated a seat between Sponce and Emma. Cato looked discomfited but was trying to smile warmly. His smile grew thinner, then curved back with a will.

Mortimer could make out no more than a third of this matrimonium and was by no means certain whether anybody had been married, but he was amazed and baffled by the presence of Cato, Dee’s husband, who sent checks from Toronto. He was a better-looking and better-preserved man than Mortimer expected. Otherwise, he was outraged any ceremony was transpiring on his property, and in a junkyard. Why not the church, and what was Egan? Here he seemed to be only a lackey.

Egan’s face was three-quarters healed, and he looked the same but leaner, and his head was shaved. He had cut down severely on the number of rings he wore, and he now went with a woman named Lottie who sat in front of him admiringly. An ex-junkie, alumna of various mild lunatic communes, in which she was invariably the leading advocate and then the first to pack off. Now a nurse, mildly religious, wild for teas of all nations, a smoker, good legs and quite defined high rump, baby lips. She had recently become an advocate of sexual abstinence, which was killing Egan, and he preached to her as well as the flocks, wooing them both.

Mortimer knew Lottie too, although if asked, his memory would be hazy, tentative, as if she’d been confused with her cousin. He had collaborated with Lottie a few years before on a porn acupuncture video that went nowhere, exciting only Mortimer and Edie. They decided it was too educated and had no audience outside, oh, the Chinese-grocery dynasties in Vicksburg and upward through the Delta. Marketing to old Chinese grocers was too delicate. Besides, the plot was thin, and why were there so many white people hanging around in the background just looking incredulous? But Lottie had looked good as a Chinese woman.

Now Egan spoke. “Old Brother, sit down and strip off your burden. Good Peden has risked much when not in the best shape. All of us in this strange church on the border of a junk pyramid, in the very parlor of the man who has hurt many of us so badly and so permanently. Who has blackmailed us and cowed us and bullied us. Strip off your burdens, get lighter, unjunk yourselves. Peden has brought us into the halfway house of his life, is gainfully employed by the very wretch at the heart of our troubles. I think the wretch is attempting to play, to have friends.”

Frank Booth suddenly turned around in his cardtable chair and looked through the window directly at Man Mortimer without seeing him. Booth’s face had been reconstructed too, but radically. He looked exactly like Conway Twitty, midcareer, but instead of the tall thick hair, he had his own nearly bald head with strings of gray-white. Healthy sideburns. Mortimer quivered and nearly lost his legs, weak, firing with nerves. He knew he had not been seen, but he had sure seen Booth. He almost left the yard on his belly, crawling. His face.

“We are expecting two more guests shortly,” Egan continued, “and we owe them our attention even if we do not like them.

“There is the business of marrying Gene and Penny yet again, in renewal of their vows. The couple will soon be here with their best man, Malcolm, a new member of the lake community whose handicaps have not prevented his service to the children at the camp.”

“Malcolm is coming here?” cried out Max Raymond. “Will he be armed?”

“Well who isn’t?” Peden said from his chair. “I personally know a peaceful soul, a sculptor and motorcycle mechanic, in possession of over a hundred and fifty guns. He likes to hold the history.”

“Malcolm is an ex-patient of mine who wants to harm me,” Raymond said. “But let him come. Let him do what he has to do. I stand to pay, and if it’s my time, I’m ready to die for my sin.”

Mimi Suarez was seated next to her husband. On this outburst, she rose and slapped him very hard, then left the meeting. Mortimer hid himself entirely behind a tin out-building where spark-plug harnesses hung.

“Could I ask,” called out Sidney from his perch near the door. He had not been invited, and few had known he was there. “Is this a town meeting, a church gathering, or are you just screwing the pooch here?”

“Or just a debating society,” said Dr. Harvard angrily. “Led by two thugs who’ve exchanged one addiction for another and who want to rub our noses in junk. Your revenge on others who’ve tried to bring some beauty and light into the world.”

“Fine words, Doc,” Sidney sneered. “No noble rot about it.”

“Not one mention has been made of the animals. For whom old Feeney died!” Ulrich began weeping. He was smoking a cigarette and soon was hacking out bottomless gut calls, knocking over his oxygen tank. But he would not be helped.

“We’re going on our way,” said Harold, the new husband. “We’ve got underage kids and an automobile to find.” He picked up baby Emma, and Cato the Torontoan followed him, Sponce and Dee out the aisle between the chairs. Cato still with his suave readiness to fly toward northern sanity and newly claimed fatherhood.

It was a different audience who waited for the renewal of vows from Gene and Penny. They were getting remarried naked and had written their own nuptial poems, and so although the crowd was surlier, they were by no means less alert. Lewis, Wren and Harvard lingered only to get a full frontal on Penny, who, though insane, was still a fine looker with nail marks about her ankles. Gene had the hack marks on his thigh. Trim, he wouldn’t make a bad nude either, though his red beard and freckles and wild woolly hair looked as if they were fleeing in a red-and-white-confetti protest. The altar empty, people looked forward, backwards, sideways. Malcolm was late. Max Raymond was still there, determined to look his nemesis in the face. Peden had risen and was clear to marry folks again. It was his nature to get suddenly clear.

They awaited Melanie and Facetto. What arrogance was detaining them? Or were they deliberately missing the nude wedding? Gene and Penny were eager.

Mortimer stayed in the plug-harness shed. He would wait until all had cleared out but Peden. Then Peden was his. He already was, but he had forgotten and needed the touch of his master.

Why do we keep as keepsakes the implements of our own destruction and hang them on the wall? Mortimer wondered. As if they were not hung between our ears. Near Mortimer’s head, on the wall, was a kind of shillelagh wrapped with barbed wire that Peden had used in biker and mobile-home fights. There was either dried blood or shoe polish on it. It was three feet long, shaped like a narrow bowling pin, with all its weight in the head. Mortimer figured if Peden was so proud of this, the man should know what it felt like. He knew he did not have the strength of old, but this club should carry the day. He wondered about just a bash, repeated bashes, without the first softness, the gee, the little feathers at the base of his spine. Did Mortimer have it in him, or would his hand go to his rear pocket where the rug knife rested in joy?

He was wondering when the day would be that they would let him back into real life, which he had once thought possible, at age sixteen in southern Missouri, looking out back at the chicken yard. Little bit of rain coming down. Not lonesome. But the chickens looked happy and they were so dumb, scratching and lurching. Killed and ate them, but his mother was very tender with them. They had names for their short time. Mortimer began to cry. Just a little, and soon stopped. Then, through the smudged window, he saw Gene and Penny pulling off their clothes on the porch of the shotgun shack. They both had long gnarled feet, he noticed, as if these parts had married and grown alike in time. And Facetto and Melanie were about to walk right up on the disrobing couple before they realized it.

John Roman may have been the most uncomfortable at the nude wedding. The world wasn’t meant to be buttnaked and smiling ear to ear, he reasoned, and here came the poems. Peden presided woozily over the entire thing. Here was a man who in his bad, bad days had almost blown Roman over on a gravel road riding his giant Harley next to Roman’s little motorbike, loaded with fish. Now a Christian orator when he was not playing hooky from the Anonymous program.

Roman was there because it was a place to be out of the house with Bernice. He knew he could not shoot Mortimer if Bernice lived on and lived well, so he had deferred the head shot on Mortimer. Roman was the only trained killer on the lake. He could summon a chilliness beyond such huffers as Raymond, who had recently confessed to Roman his own wound at the hands of Mortimer. How could Mortimer risk all his whore world and his fleet of lust hearses, all his women and thugs, for a bit of fun like this?

Now in stumbled the best man. Clothed, thank the Lord for small favors, but dragging a leg and unable to make low sounds like, for instance, a whisper. But what protocol was appropriate when two fools rammed together in poetry to initiate some awful Eden all over again? Couldn’t Gene have combed his hair? Or worn shoes?

“Uh seen this guy in the tin hut!” Malcolm was moaning to the back row.

He was ignored. Penny picked up a guitar and began strumming and hooting a song directed toward the higher obedience of everybody to the untenanted, unastronauted moon.

When Roman first heard of integration, he thought it was a movement about meeting and drinking with people like Chet Baker, and he was a partisan. But it was mostly the Pennys and the Genes and the Pedens and the split-in-two Raymonds who were at the table.

Peden began speaking, looking neither left nor right. “Thank you for your arrival, Malcolm. It is good a husband and wife freshen their vows. We lose sight of the face of God, which we must at least try to see every day, and we lose sight of each other. We become annoying mists to each other, let’s face it. Egan said those words, I stole ’em.”

“No, wait, I’ve got my poem!” said Sidney. This grainy man was in the doorway watching all worlds. “Women. You can’t live with them and you can’t fuck their ears.”

Melanie alone was scandalized, but she had brought her own scandal with her and so she stayed quiet. The ceremony jerked on to its end, and Sidney, nervous as Judas, suddenly ran for his car. Mortimer saw this act, hoping the rest would leave shortly. He was not good at waiting.

Egan moved among the crowd, glad the wedding was quick. There was no reception. The sheriff began talking loudly.

“I wasn’t quite done, Facetto,” said Peden. “It’s my house we’re in.” Peden didn’t like cops.

“I’m sorry. Go ahead. I thought we were going to talk about the man.”

“Sure we are. Now I’m through talking. Go ahead.”

“We are needing testimony against Man Mortimer,” said Facetto.

“This sounds like you on television. The new breed of high sheriff,” taunted Peden. “What the hell is new about Mortimer?”

The sheriff was angry, red.

“You’ve gotten plenty of airtime, sir,” Harvard broke in. “Much expatiation on criminology. Little actual arresting of it. There is not much you have done except,” Harvard swept his hand toward Melanie, “dally with a woman twice your age.”

“I am older than that. We are in love,” said Melanie.

“In heat,” spat Harvard. “I think Facetto should abdicate for the woman he loves. Or whatever negligent sheriffs do. Man, you can’t serve.”

Facetto was mad. He had been taunted by mail, the telephone, distant shouts, and now by this considerable old surgeon whose intelligence he could not deny.

“You’ve got an orphans’ militia over there,” said Lewis. “Somebody’s going to be hurt.”

“I’ve spoken to them,” Facetto said. Many folks stood up and milled, just absorbing him. Nobody else was listening. They were talking on their own and leaving. He was very sorry he had come. There was no face to maintain here, no walk to walk. He felt himself melting and near tears. His gun hand trembled. He was beginning to join the hate for himself. Melanie saw all this. She could not rush to him, and in fact she despised him a little herself.

“You can’t gang up and destroy this man. He’s a good man. He works hard,” Melanie was saying. This too was ignored, drowned out, mocked. They themselves left and Peden was alone.

Peden, with a coffee, fresh and hot French roast from his loyal Big Mart maker, was in agreeable shape finally. The last of the kicks of the lush, peaceful even during the last wedding. No longer threaded out and driven forward, he sat and reviewed the life he lived in the junkyard, and he found it good. These stacks and caverns of heavy metal around him. They had a quietness. A solid face. It was something, he was something that made it signify. He had the Lord, he had his time. Who suspected any would haul in this rotted rust and take the better version of the same ’48 with them? Peden still hoped he would get over it, and that his old debt would be forgiven.

The debt was this. Peden had once gone in to Mortimer while very drunk and asked him for $13,000 to buy a new Harley Davidson Softtail. Everything depended on it, Peden thought, for his own esteem. His soul was already in the bike. It was only a matter of what he would do to get it. He had a woman named Bertha at that time, from up at Redwood. She had satellite television and they had a good time, she mainly sober. Bertha fell off his new machine on a curve out of Panther Burn on Highway 14. She had no medical plan, only Peden. Peden borrowed more, and Bertha began working for Mortimer at the car place in Vicksburg. SUV demos. Good deals. Now Peden was in big hock, and the interest was berserk, but he and Mortimer kept smiling, and Bertha’s back and leg were okay.

Peden lit a Lucky, sat and stretched in front of the potbelly woodstove. Very nice to be out of the rain, very comfortable here. Didn’t need the television on, even if it was a good big fat Phillips like Bertha’s. He thought of Byron Egan, what a constant pal he was. How all was right when Egan cheered him. Peden had had another pal who died, Debord. Debord had simply gotten lung cancer and died, but Peden was certain his friend rode next to him still. Whenever he thought of Debord, and then Egan, he became spiritual. Perhaps he should not even read the newspaper, to keep it that way. The trio was all they needed. One happened to be gone and needing no coffee anymore. But riding with them, his white hair behind him like fleece in a legend.

Just then a man came in the window with a club, clambering over the windowsill from the shotgun porch. Peden couldn’t believe it was Mortimer or that he was coming straight at him this way. Later he thought Mortimer expected he’d be watching television when he came in. The club was big, with wire around it. Peden didn’t recognize it until Mortimer had limped away, with little effeminate screams. Mortimer hit him once on the shoulder, then Peden was all over him, picking up chairs and an old wooden Coke case. He thrashed on Mortimer very well, over and over. Saw he was going for the hip, where there was a knife, he well knew. Peden beat and beat on Mortimer until the man could take no more, found the door and dragged away. Without even a threat.

For a good long while, Peden rubbed his shoulder and thought about a trip to the hospital. Then he decided on it but grew cold when he thought of Mortimer. He doubted the man could stand and feared rooming with him in the emergency ward. This was not a problem. Mortimer was not in the building.