Yonder Stands Your Orphan

FOURTEEN

PEDEN WAS A STRONG MAN. HE WAS MUSCULAR IN total despite the years of hard living. His shoulder was bruised black but healed quickly.

Mortimer did not heal much at all. But he didn’t languish long. He hurt in every pore, every tissue. Even his lips had been hit. He was not angry at Peden. He would kill him, he was quite sure, and perhaps with his own hands. But he could not blame him. He hated his attitude, hopeful in his stupid mistakes, the ’48 and now fighting back. When he called up Peden, he told him to destroy the ruined ’48, take it to bits, every cell. His voice was even, and Peden wondered if the fight had proved something.

Mortimer himself wondered whether he would have to use a gun, for which he had no affection. He hoped not, but things would be coming up. His tongue was getting more tied, he could not explain and mollify as he used to do. The wedding. On my own property, Dee, and with a medium-size mechanic, a fool.

Frank Booth, too, chilled him with his bald head and Twitty face. What tribute was this? Or was the man deranged and unaware of what he had become? Bald Conway Twitty, if he had lived longer. Booth’s appearance was a bad thing of the shadows, and Mortimer was horrified he would come near with some other weapon.

Maybe he should call the sheriff. Mortimer smiled. Unbalance the man still more. He would say it was out of his jurisdiction, but Mortimer would keep after him. He dialed. He loved the whining answer, the trembling he heard, the remonstrations.

“Oh, it’s special all right,” Mortimer said. “Man mocking me like this. Got a whole new face to do it.”

“Why did he need a new face?”

“Don’t you even read the papers, man?”

“I read a lot of papers. You don’t want to forget who you’re talking to, sir. I don’t have to stand for this.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. Getting out of hand over here. It’s just spooky. Thought you could speak to him.”

“What would I say to the man about his chosen face?”

“Most of us don’t have that option. I see your point.”

“You don’t just go up to a fellow and say, ‘Fellow, I don’t like your face.’”

“You don’t? Well I do, all the time. Too much, I guess. Thanks for your time, anyway.”

“Who is this again? Mort Durr?”

“Yes sir, Commander Facetto.”

“They don’t call me commander. Sheriff is fine.”

“I’m sure it is. Bye now.”

He had a vision of piling all his SUVs together some afternoon and burning them while the sheriff’s department and other fools looked on.

Mortimer knew Sidney was his man when he wanted him, and he was able enough to drive to the bait store on a Thursday when he could also hold down some soft black-eyed peas and corn bread at the bad restaurant. Sidney’s lackey Opal was minding the store, but this girl told him Sidney was down to the new boat in Farté Cove. When he drove by, he saw Sidney amid a great mix of men and advisers nearly working on the boat. It was another barge going up, all right, and now Mortimer wanted it, to sail it and make it smell good and have something for his whores. He would be well known on the lake and finally a pride of the region when he became an elder, because you were colorful then and people liked to see you prosper. Get nostalgic about when times were colorful and wilder and better. Let go because of history and what you’d done for it. A picture of him shaking hands with the law. A giant three-deck riverboat with paddle wheel in the background. Rest Home of Old Whores and Fishing. This joke hurt his liver when he laughed.

Still, he liked Dr. Harvard and the suddenly plentiful crowd. He didn’t know a third of them, must be twelve, fifteen down there. Sidney was off the deck but the center somewhere at the end of the pier, jawing. The boat would be his in the future. I made Sidney famous, thought Mortimer.

They heard the big stuff over at the camp on a Saturday afternoon. It was dynamite. The Ten Hoors had decided to make an island out of their camp, and nobody could stop them after they got the explosives permit, which was fairly easy. You can blow up your own place if you’ve room for it. Harvard, Lewis and Wren, working on the barge, with Roman and Raymond lifting heavy pieces for them, and Sidney looking on, heard the whumps.

They were blowing canals. They had hired this company, but the leader of the gang was a man who lived to change the earth. He was seventy and loved his job. He had not gotten enough of this in Korea with the marines, blowing away bridges and roads in the famous retreat from Chosin Reservoir that cost the communists one million dead. But this man had not veered, he was happier then than he had ever been, except for right now. Imagine making an island out of your place suddenly, he said. Imagine. Right here at home. It was going to take a lot of bomb here. Across the lake the men and Melanie and Bernice could see the sky get humps of black along its horizon line. Perhaps whole trees and their dust. Sidney hoped for an enormous accident if this was not one already. Limbs and ash and bone-spray in the air. A real shame.

Ruthna, Harb, Alexander and Whit arrived that afternoon. They had decided they could no longer abide the suburbs, especially since they could not make the house payments. They were something on the order of a middle-age commune and quickly agreed that nature and the lake were just the thing. It was changing them even as they hauled in their luggage, in fact. They had rented a modern, beamed ski-lodge affair, which gave the tourist the rare sense of having fallen off an alp into a steaming bog. They were near the Roosevelt lodge where Ulrich and Egan lived. When the dynamiting started, they were horrified. Their tall white sycamores trembled. They were hungover and in hell. Ruthna fell flat on the ground. Whit held his ears while his luggage scattered.

“He is always talking about his mother and father and Christ,” said Mimi once the scare had passed. Ruthna was becoming her confidante.

“Then he will be tired of talking, Mimi. All theological discussion will become shameful comedy. He has said people are snakes who love talking late at night about God. They don’t know God, but they surround themselves with other pretenders. These are direct quotes, I think,” said Ruthna, who knew Raymond too well.

“But what does Raymond have for acts? He has his saxophone, he doesn’t even have much money left. He has the friendship of punks and old men.”

“And you. Maybe he will do something for the orphans, like his mother did. He can’t forget her.”

“He tries, he speaks of his deaf absent father all the time, the gunner in the war against Japan. I think he was jealous of the orphans,” said Mimi.

“I’ve got to go. We’ll try to be sober next time we see you. Things have fallen apart and we’ve fallen here.”

“You’re at the right place, Ruthna. I don’t know anybody much who’s not decomposing. Even Max says people are hardly necessary anymore, and they have no acts. They tend to float away. It’s frightening.”

“If the Son of God has not visited us, Mimi, who are we? Am I just a lush and actress and tramp?”

“Well, he always said at least you were something, as long as you could stand it. I want to worship something bigger than me or I’m lost. It must be the music, but not always. Not at three in the afternoon. Only an idiot sings always.”

“My acts are all bad, Mimi. What about that? I have no imagination for a good act. Am I dead? I guess I’m normally courteous. So are the dead.”

“Max wants to see a chariot of fire or light one himself.”

“These poets keep wanting to suck the water out of the ocean with a straw.”

The boys were all driven out. It was hard to hide a car painted like this. But they did not want to see their new stepfather. They had seen their father for the first time since they were six and seven and wished he’d stayed longer. Though to them, Canada was just one of many places farther away than Sharkey County. He never heard about the car, and they knew nobody was in favor of small boys owning and driving such a machine. They imagined ogres of many types lost just behind them in their smoke, but nobody had gotten close. High speed over the gravel at the penultimate velocity, over rocks like low shoals of water. The amateurs are dead behind you. This is how the boys felt, and they had gone back to Benson & Hedges, long ones. They were also hidden in the last dry purchase of the swamp behind Raymond and Mimi’s house.

They waited until evening to announce themselves. Looking for Mimi’s titties through the window seemed beneath them now. They loved her singing too much. They sought her now because they were much growner. They had traded their mother for a car, and Harold was all the father they had left.

Lately Harold was picking up wheel rims and flexing with sledgehammers for his strength regimen. He ate two steaks and salads at a time, his acne went away, and he had found chemicals in the Big Mart pharmacy that cut and bulked you out. These were expensive, but the boys saw he did have a better body.

They did not take pity on their mother’s private needs. Nor were they aware that she liked Harold in the least, which she did. He had even begun higher mechanics at the trade school. He brought down the swearing in the house. He threatened to play games with the boys. He was not proud of providing these children with such a garish rocket. His breakneck labor, his theft, which still had to be paid for. He cringed now when he thought he could get away with the switch. One was a car, the other a hulk of gummy decay.

Yet he was a husband and Dee was patient with him. Under other circumstances he would have been glad the boys were gone again.

Dee liked her boys more, but there was something smaller about her. She wondered if marriage to this stern young man would mean much to her living world, such as it was. She was always away in her visions now. She saw men burning, crying out, and now children, great filthy explosions, deep and shallow water in which there were corpses, all in the shell of Big Mart, bombed and half covered by water. Men cried for water and ran up to her and she spat fire at them. This was a vision, but it had a sleepiness to it, as if it were being carried on by her closed eyes into night dreams. She began watching the color television that Mortimer had given her long ago, asking that it imagine her, because she was afraid. She had great anxiety, and the sight of Harold in his school clothes, with loafers and sweaters, would send her into such a foreign mood, she could not imagine how to address this young stranger, the boy naked in the bed beside her.

The boys were good fishermen when they bothered. Their gear was at the lost lake. It was a tiny oxbow lake three hundred yards from the rear of the bad restaurant, whose food exhaust could be smelled still, even here. Nobody was home at the Raymonds’, and they killed the time fishing, hardly saying a word.

The boys had spin-cast reels and a newish Shakespeare bait caster. Bless all the gambling failures and crack addicts, a man could really shop in the pawn. Were the laws not just a little too stiff, you’d probably have found used children there.

The boys kept the rods leaned to a tree at the little lake. They had discovered the place. Nobody else came. They cast with a single bait, never changing lures, the old Lucky Thirteen. If they could not hear the pop and see the strike of a big bass, they had no interest in catching one at all. They took five good bass in an hour. One of them was nine pounds. They did not eat much fish, and they released the others back into the black-green water. Then went back to their car, worn and with tight smiles. If they could see Mimi Suarez, it would be a fine day. They could go home soon.

“There must’ve been five orphans in that one tree watching us. Thinking we’re the car desperadoes. Didn’t think we’d even notice.”

“They scared the devil out of me, but I just kept on throwing,” said Isaac.

They were glad to be desperadoes, watched in secret by city children. The orphans were going outside the camp at will, several of them armed.

Harold and Sponce were hunkered down at the rim of the sinkhole, staring down at where the car had been. They watched and watched. As if the mother and son would come back to it, open the trunk in its mud and slip in again. So that their minds could get back to the moment and begin making order.

They were grave robbers, but who was it cared so much? Egan and Mortimer. Who cared so much that this ’48 hulk was swapped with another decent ’48? Mortimer. Who was after Jacob and Isaac in their custom-made red and gold teenage car? Mortimer.

Now they heard through Egan, who’d invited the newlyweds to church services, that Peden had whipped the hell out of Mortimer, who had come at him with a bat. But Hare was haunted by his own romance. In his serious college clothes, Hare was turning Christian under the influence of Egan. He and Dee attended church now.

About this time Harold lowered his head, and a high-grain bullet of less caliber than a.22, called a Bee, parted his hair and lifted it. They were not aware they were being shot at from an immense distance, and the pops seemed irrelevant to the tragic hole they now studied. There was no blood but a curious burn down the part of Harold’s hair. He could not account for this. He had been mad with lust and plans. Now that he was preaching to Dee, he was wild with guilt. He trembled when he recalled the bones still with meat on them. The unreported dead. It took a sort of Jesus to remember them, with that sweet smell, the ligaments draped down from the sockets. He heard the child’s screaming from his head wound once the wind started.

They sat on different pews.

Peden and Egan argued with Max Raymond about who owned a church. You couldn’t just buy them, although this one, owned by Reformed Presbyterians, was very much for sale by its richer child in Vicksburg. Raymond was going to buy it. He had promises of money, and a CD with his wife and band that was going somewhere. The band was ebbing at the casino, but they were getting gigs as far as Biloxi and New Orleans now. He had found some old doctor money he had forgotten, from his old drug days when he feared the worst at every turn. It was quite a lot. The firm paid you even for being high and invested wisely for you. Funny, the way he didn’t care for money and yet fell into it.

“You can buy a church. And you’d have to let me in if I bought it,” said Raymond.

“We’d let you in anyway. The definition of a church is open, isn’t it?” asked Byron Egan. He looked at Peden, because the junkman was nervous, his cheeks jumping.

“Nobody denies the wanderer,” said Peden. This didn’t seem quite on the mark. The three men shut up awhile.

“My emphasis would always be on acts, not chats,” said Raymond. “I have turned around on this matter and gone against Luther and the rest, I know. I’m not sure there was ever even a sect of me. Offshot from in fides sola. You can have a church without firm belief, is all I’m saying. Most churchmen can’t tell you what they believe anyway.”

“All right,” Egan said. “Christ himself said whoever is not against us is on our part, and he might know the church. Buy it. We stand. I and Peden have a church and the doors are wide open.”

“For none of us knows who lives tomorrow, who may tarry yet come the sun dead on his pillow,” Peden burst out. He rose from the pew as if delivering an involuntary oath and strode toward the trombonists gently tuning in the little chair gallery to the left of the pulpit. These five men were dark black and were cousins. They had no interest in recording or selling their music. Many said they blended like the best tea of heaven, and they could make you cry with their hymns. Only one read a note of music, and he was not the leader. The leader was James. He played the enormously belled bass trombone. Two others had valved trombones. So intense were these men in their harmonies that there seemed no other world for them.

Now the trombonists stopped and looked at Peden as if he were a goat wandering into their music.

“Say, men,” asked Max Raymond, with his instrument case between his legs, “you think I could sit in with you a few tunes? James?”

“No.”

The men, dropping the saliva out of their spit valves, looked at one another. “It ain’t no place to make your entrance,” said James. “Nor get out if you was in.”

“It be in there like a piece of hair on a bar of soap,” said another seriously. They were musicians but much like deacons too. They frightened Raymond a little. They began playing again, silvery, in trouble and then deliverance. One of them with the bell of his horn under the church light going gold to bronze to red.

Christ, we are your throat.