Yonder Stands Your Orphan

SIXTEEN

IN THE BAIT STORE THE PARENTS OF MAN MORTIMER were waiting. Lloyd, Edie and little Marcine were in the store too, with the elder Mortimers, who had just shown up at the car agency. They had come in a long old Ford wagon with canaries caged in the back. The gang was fascinated.

Mortimer ignored the long car, which had wandered slowly and sadly but stubbornly down from Missouri. When he burst in all sick and bloody and woofing, his short gray parents quailed, anxious in their thick spectacles, leisure wear, hard shoes. They would have worn stilts had that been the style when they were thirty. The father spoke.

“We’d heard you were doing so well. We were going to ask you up to Branson to hear a concert with us. Before we die. The Oak Ridge Boys are back to doing gospel.” Then the father saw the blood, the muddy patent-leather opera slippers. He saw Mortimer was not ripe for a concert right now and was not young.

Just a scratch, Mortimer insisted. He had shot himself hunting for snakes. He’d gotten bored and went down to get himself a few snakes. He guessed he was old enough to think about those nasty old guns now, but he’d forgotten how they could turn on you. He’d learned his lesson. Only got three small snakes anyhow. He felt a boy in front of these elders, sick and pouted out, puffy.

Big Lloyd came outside, where Harvard waited with the boys at the bottom of the steps. In their suits they seemed to have trailed Mortimer to be of service. And in fact they brought his great Pakistani knife to him, muddy at the golden gills.

“Is that your sword?” asked Lloyd of Harvard, who held it like a trowel.

“He dropped this knife-thing on the ground when he was hurt,” said Jacob. They handed the gaudy medieval blade over to Lloyd. They seemed a crew of pleasant neighbors doing what they could. Lloyd huge and bald in a tan leather suit.

“You can go home, and I know Mr. Mortimer will thank you.”

“He don’t have to get anywhere nigh that close,” said Jacob. “We ain’t got a home anyway. He don’t seem like he used to be when he was our mama’s boyfriend and had all this money and a different car every week. He ain’t old and ruint or anything, is he?”

“Don’t you worry. He’s the same. He’s had some bad luck.”

“Is he shot in the ear or the head?”

“Only the ear, son. We’ll see you now.”

“It was an accident.”

“I know that. He told us.”

Lloyd went in, closing the door. Marcine then came out on the steps. She was seventeen but looked twenty-one, pleasantly dressed like a secretary to a spangling car-agency showroom, which Bertha was training her to be. Her hair was naturally brown and full and French-cut. She thought she knew the boys and the grandfather guy.

“You boys live here?”

“No.”

“What house?”

“We got many houses. Nature. Porches. Sleeping bags. On the water. Wherever.”

“You dress in suits a lot?”

“There was a funeral. His wife.”

“I express my regrets. I bet she was pretty and kind.”

Marcine looked across the short valley and saw Melanie Wooten standing on her kitchen walk and holding her white hair with one hand in the breeze, still looking Harvard’s way, concerned. But in her church-funeral outfit, black with white pearls at her neck. That woman didn’t die. That’s good, thought Marcine, stunned by this vision across the tops of the sycamores and giant willows. She loved Melanie even more for still living. The points of early spring greening around her.

Inside, Man Mortimer was mellower, gracious even. A fresh towel to his ear, he was expatiating on the foolishness of guns, their cowardice, their chicken distances to things, the modern cheap craven world. With adrenal glands open yet, flooding away, he asked his seated parents whose old Ford wagon that was out there.

“It’s ours,” said his mother. She was uneasy. There is no behavior for a woman in a bait store unless she fishes. The racks of prophylactics near Mother Mortimer were huge, next to brassy naked covers of magazines in plastic thermal seals. Vixen eyes of large destruction.

“Well, get your birds and bags out for Lloyd. He’ll drive it in the lake tomorrow. I’ve got something else for you. Like new. I’m putting you up at the casino hotel, first-class, long as you want. All my houses are under construction, repairs. But we’ll give a party. A fine band. We don’t have to travel to Branson, Missouri, to any concert. Good as the Oaks are. They’ll be by here soon, unless they find out you’re here and too wild for ’em.”

They did not pick up on this joke, but he was their boy all over again. Mortimer felt this too, and this time he liked it, wounded, hiding his fury.

“Son, you’re badly hurt,” said his father. His mother touched him. She had been cleaving to her husband. Edie, middle-aged but with long good legs, got Mortimer out the door and drove him to the clinic, then home to Rolling Fork.

“Man comes back soon, Mrs. Mortimer. Don’t worry. His business is big. Big, big. It wears on him, but he’s a blue-steel spring,” said Lloyd.

When Sidney at last came in the store, half drunk and full of funeral gossip, Mortimer’s parents and Lloyd and Marcine had gone. But he saw the blood on the floor and heard tales from Pete Wren, who knew little but shared it anyway. He did know that Mortimer was hurt and that his parents had come down for him.

“He’s getting weaker. I could own it all,” Sidney whispered.

In a black Ford Expedition, alone, was Bertha, dead now. The windows were smoked, nobody knew for a long while she was there. She had swallowed Valiums and barbiturates with a cold quart of Country Club. Saliva webbed down her chin. She just couldn’t take it anymore. Her age, who she was, holding the smiles till her cheeks hurt. Leading Marcine into the life. Several hours would pass before any thought to find her, because she was like good old furniture to hand. She was cordial always, yet a quiet one too, and well dressed and combed to the end. Peden wanted her badly. He thought to save her and missed by one day. Their date would have been the day after Nita’s funeral. Gone. Blood now to her belly and the rigor passing through the smile.

Harvard backed the barge away from the pier and the boys, ever quick, helped on the lines. They wanted to drive, but he was making them watch carefully. He was afraid of being close to Melanie, so they sailed downshore to his own lawn and berthed on the grass. Although the launch was mainly his project, there were several zealous pilots and many of them keen to impress their own friends who were gathered to this beauty. But Harvard did not care. He would have his grief and his boys.

They went first to the room where Nita had died and took the flowers to all parts of the house so they could see them while they ate and talked.

Another funeral at the church. Preached by Byron Egan. Peden, heart breaking, was not allowed in. Egan did not want him to see Lloyd, Edie, Marcine; the other whores and reivers, black and white; car thieves wearing white socks with suits and thick rubber-soled cross-trainers. Speed and grip. Peden sat outside in the bleak blue Nissan. He listened through a window and held his gun.

Many robins got in the church from the trees and roosted among the congregation. They were drunk from some berries and fallen persimmons. Come into the mead hall out of the chill. In Viking history, once a Christian described human life as the flight of a bird through the mead hall. The outerness afterward, eternity.

The relations of Bertha sat in one sullen and miserable huddle in the front pews. Ronny the body-shop man was among them, barely recognizing his old girlfriend Marcine. Man Mortimer and his parents sat right behind them, concerned and prim in black and white mourning clothes newly bought in town. This was not New Orleans, where they knew best how to mourn drug addicts, evening ladies and jazz mothers. This place had none of that city’s archaeology of concentrated sin.

Bertha’s casket was open because she was at peace and made lovely by the beautician’s touch. The beautician was her weeping but fastidious cousin Elka, who wanted in the Mortimer business. She wanted to take Bertha’s place and knew well what she did besides shift car papers. She knew she could be tough and loved to fornicate anyhow. Elka wore white and pink today and sat near a quartet with whom she was committing three-cornered adultery.

Elka used to run in a circle of lower-Delta party girls who performed on crop dusters while they were flying and poisoning, just for the memory. Under the telephone wires, up quick. Then down for the gin and Costume Ball of the Scots in Panther Burn. Or dynamiting with bachelors in Robinsonville, making new homes in old levees and Indian mounds, where whole old guys might come out, and their pots.

Sidney Farté was in attendance to pick up his rumors. Many thought Bertha had killed herself because Sidney had been with her, and Sidney spread this rumor around as fact.

Frank Booth sat beside Ruthna, motionless. She had told him she knew Bertha and really loved her. Had once roomed with her at the Olympics in Atlanta. Booth was there for Ruthna, and to confront Man Mortimer with what he was now, a Conway Twitty face fresher than Mortimer’s own, unlined. Nobody knew what Booth had on his mind, although Edie, who always carried a North American.22 Magnum derringer, promised to blow his head off if he came near Mortimer in his feeble condition and new black ear. Especially with his parents visiting or maybe even come to live, and he was surviving by their ignorant ministrations as he brought them here and there to bits of his empire in the lower Delta and in Vicksburg. They were amazed the river was so wide, having never expended the energy to look at it directly in Missouri. They recalled only fearing it and now feared it more. They were eighty. They had retired in good financial condition, but it meant little to them with no son, no hobbies and the new small house. No chickens inside city limits anymore. They had been sad for thirty years and wondered how especially terrible they were that he had run away from them. They went to church often and desperately and watched Help Me on television, in case he called out or somebody found them.

Now they had found him, they dreamed separately that Man Mortimer was not a nice person, and they tried to force a good dream about him, but it would not come. Then they began to remember how selfish a child he had been. Yet their love loved this too. They recalled that he was vicious, calculating and secretive, and they could see right through his present act, yokels that they were, and parents, at this very funeral. His counterfeited sorrow for Bertha. Still they loved. It was too late not to love, and it did not matter anymore where they themselves were. It was having him close, that was what life was for in the end. It mattered not where they slept. They barely wrinkled the bedspreads in the Gold Bowl room he got for them, mermaids on the wallpaper. Mrs. Mortimer’s canaries thrived. The maid found the Mortimers so lost she took them on as a project. And they must help him, their son.

It was very intimate here, at the Church of Open Doors, open for the lost and dead of all causes. Raymond sat next to Mimi, his temples gray now and growing hair behind, as if to take up the ponytail Egan had shaved. He was disconsolate near the man who had stabbed him. He had tried to forgive him, but not very hard. He wished to be taken into a different room of heaven with Mortimer’s blood on his hands. He did not require whole salvation, just a little table with books and coffee, pens and paper, the saxophone. Now Mortimer was little and sick. The monster Lloyd was close to him. Raymond hid his murderous thoughts from Mimi, who had dressed up to hide her impatient body. Long dress, lapels. She had no allegiances here. She was weary of Raymond. Weary of the band. Of herself. Of the lake. Why were they still here?

Then she remembered. They had no money. Even nature palled when you had no money. Nature was without religion sometimes when you looked at it poor, and all the creatures seemed bedraggled and begging, hardly getting by. You saw a fat one and wondered. Where was she getting her orders? They had the church. Then there was other money coming, the CDs, but that had proved a more difficult game than Raymond thought. He would always find some money somewhere, she believed.

Mortimer seemed comfortable sitting by his parents, perhaps enjoying his slide to invalidism. Or coiling tighter. He did not know how to act at a funeral, so he looked tragic, but the effect was that of lurid grinning. Egan saw this and the face almost ruined his eulogy.

Which was that Bertha was quiet and unknown as in Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and that she hurt even in her prosperity like “Richard Corey,” the suicide who had it all, as others cursed their bad bread and envied him. Did God accept suicides? There was a case for His Own Son’s hesitant suicide on this earth. And so much cloudiness here as to shut up the meaner of us who wanted to keep souls out of heaven. Heaven was many houses, very big and wide. Many mansions, many houses, as the savior promised us, or He would not have told us so in His words. Many and large. “May heaven rest her soul in a home she can decorate at leisure,” Egan said. Some of the crowd laughed; most didn’t care but loved a good send-off where you met others who were horny from close death like you, among food and drink afterward. Four were simply dying for a smoke and had no opinion right now of God or the century just passed or Bertha. Bertha’s mother would weep later, with a Marlboro Light inhaled and going.

Max Raymond suddenly knew his vision would come at the end of his life and not a moment before. He was nearly blinded by the realization that he was a nuisance to both God and man. He repented. He would act. He felt expendable to a higher power and this was good. He was resigned but in no way sad. He thought of Bertha as she went now, and he prayed to her in that black paradise.

Elsewhere Ulrich watched Melanie’s greyhound. He couldn’t get over it. He loved the face of this gentle beast, hunched as if alarmed by its own aerodynamics, its eyes sliding away, seeking affection as if its whole soul were poised on ice and betrayal lurked beneath each footfall. Of course Ulrich wept, but not too much.

“Where do you live, son?” Mortimer’s mother asked. They were seated at a restaurant under the bluffs in Vicksburg. Beneath its foundation, it was said, were many who had received fire from Federal gunboats, who were losing to the rebel artillery very badly in 1863. Hundreds of bombs and cannonballs fired from the gunboats, many of them on fire or in other distress. Attack from the water was impossible, and even running the water was deathly. The river lit at night with all kinds of barrel flares and wrecks, perfect for gunners who could knock the heads off chickens at a mile. Lord God, war was fun for a while, till it crept up on you.

Now the riverbed’s mass grave held a high-beamed, wide-planked bar and grill, that served oysters, fish and pizzas, and fresh salads from gardens nearby, fine French bread twists. Mortimer liked the lassitude here in the ferns and shadowed glass, as if the dead boys dancing with death had built it just for him 135 years later in a flush Vicksburg, very paved and rolling. Thinking of those good boys and their wails really widened the head for thought.

Mortimer looked benevolently at his mother, but this look was another unnatural one for him and he wound up grinning like a coon. He didn’t like to be alone with them because they were getting heavier on him with questions, since they knew nothing beyond their county. They had no life except breathe the old air and sleep again. Mortimer thought, I don’t know anybody even nearly this old except the fools at the pier and Sidney, who was growing younger, curiously.

“I have several homes. The construction has been slowed by the rains.”

“Why do you lie, son? It ain’t rained,” said his father. “We don’t care if you live in a palace or a doghouse.”

“It has rained where they are. They’re in other counties, spread out. I haven’t got them ready for guest occupation. Can’t you wait? The Gold Bowl too racy for you? You’re afraid of gamblers and performers getting under the door?”

“No. We don’t even want to go to your house except to be closer to you. That doesn’t matter. We only want to know more about you and your life and friends. You know we have money. We have nothing but patience. We try to not even be here. I know that to you we are plants and hardly animals, son.” Mortimer glanced up at his father in shock. Not a finer man in the county than whatshisname, your postman dad.

His mother came in. “Yes. Why do you get shot?”

“I don’t get shot. I shot myself hunting snakes.”

“We never saw no gun. We saw that weird chopping dagger.”

“Don’t lie again. We’re old enough to smell out these stories, they don’t save us anything painful. They’re hard on us, they hurt. There’s no cause for lies here. Even if you were a gangster, a car thief or married to several women at once. We came to love and have you. Our right.”

“I’m a lot too old myself to have to tell everything to my folks.” Mortimer spoke to the side of his parents’ ready faces.

“I guess you always were. Old that way,” answered his mother. They saw him now after long staring, and he didn’t like it one bit. But on the other hand, he liked being the suspicious boy, charged with secrets, staring out at the rain and the chickens with tears in his eyes.

Sheriff Facetto and Melanie walked in along with Harold and Dee Allison. The married woman was using the last name Laird now, neither happy nor unhappy about the new echo of herself. Dee A. Laird. They sat very close to Mortimer and his parents before they knew who was there, at booth two over near an aquarium of riverine life and the oyster bar. The parents remained unfazed when Dee and the others saw them. Bland mysteries, aged, to the arrivals. They seemed too soft for him even now when he was ill and hurt. Perhaps they were his angels, his salt of the earth, as all men have somewhere. Or perhaps they were midwestern corn money, that very serious corn money you heard about, come down to blow some at the casinos.

The sheriff stared at Mortimer, and Mortimer knew he would do something merry and humiliating to this boy soon. He looked Dee over slowly as if he were a total devoted stranger. Recalling their nights. Dee was looking nowhere, then suddenly directly at him.

Harold had gained weight in his shoulders, his forearms were muscular, his brow and spectacles, new, were intent. Serious mechanic, his own business, his own solid woman.

The sheriff wondered how Mortimer was hustling these old people of the Corn Belt. They dressed in checks and hard shoes. They might be Creationists gambling for their church fund. He had encountered this oddness a few times. They won too. Seemed to have a system or better prayers. What changes the man had, even looking now like that lounge comic with the enormous head and hair, Brother Dave Gardner. Weird interpretations of the Bible, impressions of crashing yokels who couldn’t handle technology.

Harold was into a long declamation on mechanics, and it gave the sheriff time to think. His woman was drunk, and he was deeply in love with her. Her white hair was in some disorder, and he did not know what to do. He was adoring the world more and yet losing in the eyes of men, and this was plain in the sad look he gave himself in the mirror each morning as he combed his short hair. He wanted a smart marine look. Acting, acting, he was a ham and never denied it. Several still loved him for it, especially women he did not respond to at all. The only one who moved him was Melanie Wooten. Maybe he was making up for his failure to save his mother from his father, who had them both cowed. He didn’t care. He was at the end of his sheriff’s term and opposed by a very tough dumb man with a history of penal administration. Hoover “Who” Hooks put his posters up quick. “Who” despised Facetto.

Crime was not particularly rampant, in fact it was calm, but Hoover insisted Facetto was lax. He wanted pawnshop spies, vigilante groups against whores parked in neighborhoods, did Hooks. He derided Facetto as a schoolmarmy dramatist whose body was in too good a shape for him to be doing his job.

“Who” accused him of wearing Man Tan and shining his haircut.

The subject of Melanie Wooten also had floated to “Who,” and a campaign of rumor began, to the effect that Facetto was deeply odd. Melanie was aware of her bad name, and she drank.

Dee did not get around much anymore. She was a bit softer if not heavier. Inside she suffered high winds, terrible lightning and hail. She saw pictures that would not stop, the dead and wrecked, children, guns, high explosives, felt hellish thunder. She stared as if down a string of blocks through a town flattened by a tornado. She saw Mortimer holding an oyster on a tine, dipping it in Tabasco, hunting her with glances.

Facetto could hardly believe this man had come toward him a few months before on a Norton Commando motorcycle like his own, in Mountie boots, laughing like a twin. The man who had wanted to join the nonexistent launch club after he fell shrieking into the snakes.

“Dee?” Melanie asked brightly, “how’s your thing? I mean, when you really get down to it, we old things want to keep up.”

Dee smiled for the first time in the evening. Mortimer’s table had heard.

“Is she a harlot?” whispered his father.

“She’s my woman,” whispered Mortimer. “The younger one. The old lady’s just drunk and lively. She can’t stay away, Dee Allison. Married now, but we belong together.”

They were relieved, truly, that he had at last confessed to something clandestine. They had made way. They were loving him.

“Is there a tragedy in this situation?” asked his mother. She looked like an old pie somebody had drawn in, he thought.

Mortimer’s empire was collapsing. Reduced to a showroom of fairly new SUVs, with some older models stolen from the coasts and Chicago. Some women, twenty-nine actually, roaming three counties. A junkyard, prosperous for junkyards. He wandered to his houses and they did not comfort him. The large-screen television in his bare Clinton home.

I got to get Peden where he lives, he vowed. I see him letting his debt to me go, as if it was canceled when he whipped me.

Who will I be serving in my older years? he thought suddenly. Where will I be? Still home, counting my money and wondering what to give it to? Maybe the orphans. I could go straight and healthy after all this, I could make it. Just thinking of it makes me feel better. Using my talents, growing toward a light. I’m old history around here, and history itself must feel uncomfortable a right good part of the time. It’s been good brooding here at the table, staring at Dee and hearing that old lady drunk. The world turning new for you.

The world’s a little thing, he concluded as his cognac came. Peden owes me and he lost my car. He lost my history, worse, and he should learn how to suffer now.

They’re going to catch me one day, or I’m just going to walk in and give them my story, calm as a bard of old. Then it’ll be over when I say it is. Maybe old sheriff boy could play the sheriff in the movie. I’d let him, I’d smile. Another way of his being mine.

A local college-age boy walked right up to the table where Mortimer sat with his parents, who were almost asleep from the unusual big dinner. “I know who you look like, but you’d have to be dead. Brother Dave Gardner. My dad played all his albums. Thought he was the funniest man in the world. Are you related?”

“Get out of here with that. I don’t like you this close to my face. You understand me?”

His parents awoke to this talk and were frightened.

Ulrich had lost the dogs, or the dogs had lost him. The late-spring air was too thick for him and he worked, shouted, then stumbled toward the cool shade and ferned banks of Green Trout Creek. Then he was a bit lost himself. His compass became stars as his lungs fought for air, and he blacked out before he could turn up the oxygen on the bottle at his waist. What was left of his lungs after the cigarettes smoked since the days of German jet airplanes? When he revived, he wisely followed the creek toward the highway, but he wound up a mile west of the Raymonds’ house. He tried to call the dogs again but could make no sound. It was his intention that morning to give them a good forest run, then wash his favorite dog and give it to Mortimer. All his plans went bust now. The dogs never ran away from him of a sudden like this.

Ulrich was very sick, staggering. He was terrified that ruthless deer hunters would kidnap his dogs for deer season next fall, then either shoot or abandon them, as they had done many times before. He knew all the dogs’ names. He sent telepathy to them. Prayers, really. He knew he could not remain horrified much longer and live. He must get cool, take off clothes, get in the water maybe, strike his fist against his chest. They were smart dogs. He was the dummy. He had petted them too much.

Then he thought he saw a woman in a flowery dress in an alley of tall grass. Almost a flag, and foreign.

All his years came to right here. He began breathing again.

“Old man, who are you?” asked the woman’s voice, unafraid, only curious. His sight was blurring. But he knew she would be a pleasant woman. Her hair would be black like the dress with flowers. She would be foreign to America but at ease.

“We smokers must be helpful to each other,” she said coming up. She held a long, lit Winston.

“I’m a pitiful lost man. Lost my dogs. Maybe my life, running after them.” He could not recall a personality for himself before the blackout. “I need help, I think.”

It was Mimi Suarez. She was serene in her black flowered dress on a hot spring day, even in this vale of mosquitoes. Ulrich knew he was alive when her shoulders gave him pause. Spilling ringlets to her clavicle.

“I think I might be dying,” whispered Ulrich. As fatigue and repetition prepare men for death until they seek it, Ulrich felt a final tiredness. No pressing on, no other place. He sat down and all of his failures went past in a brief caravan beyond him.

The woman rested with him on a stump where he sat with his oxygen bottle. He thought of the dogs again. He thought he heard them whimpering not far off.

“You decide,” she suggested. “Either go ahead or stay behind for others. My grandmother in Cuba, and still there, told me this once when I was a little girl with an awful disease, a high fever. Only a few pictures in my young head, and them already mixed with dreams of my future in the U.S.A. I didn’t know what they were, but here I am having them. The fever left, here I am.”

They both smelled something very sweet and bad, and they heard the dogs running and whining below an old pecan farm, which had once had a mansion to go with it. Fever and then the Depression finished it off. The pecans themselves were enormous. Up to the grove was beige wheat. They saw the dogs now, and Ulrich pulled himself up with Mimi’s help, grasped his bottle. Got a bigger blast into his lungs. They made their way.

This was where they found the little girl’s T-shirt, cut to shreds, thrown over human dung, lying on an anthill a foot high. Ants were all over it. The dogs were circling and very concerned, but they had not torn the shirt. They were circling, and it was plain they were in the deepest grief over the child’s shirt.

It is this place where Ulrich died.

Little Irma.

Who had recently, during her flight, talked to the boys on Harvard’s lawn. She knew she was pursued by Malcolm, but he was crippled and she did not think he would kill her once he caught her. She was starved, skinny and alone. Malcolm would not let her have her own suicide like Bertha’s. She was on the way to becoming Bertha, she had come to the orphans’ camp with suicidal urges, which she had acted on twice in Indianapolis when she had living parents.

She stumbled upon the Allison boys in Harvard’s driveway busting up a long-dead pecan limb for the simple reason that it was whole. She did not know where she was, but the house was so wide and nice, with its pine-needled lawn, that she thought it might be a church or a fort, and she dreamed of it as if it were in a book right before her. She had had friends who lived in such homes, but it seemed two eras ago. She was playing Ping-Pong in a garage of one in Indianapolis and an old man came out of the house and said, “I see it now, child. You will become a medical missionary somewhere and be a great woman.” He was the grandfather of the house, and she took him for mad and giggled along with her playmate, but now it seemed a deep saying and a future waiting on her, if she could walk out of here now, away from Malcolm, who claimed to love her, him an old hairy man.

He loved Irma, but it was Mimi Suarez he wanted and her husband he wanted to exterminate. He was lost in waves of passion. Driving him down a gray wall. Like those motorcyclists in the velodromes at the state fair.

The boys looked like they belonged here, and she was encouraged, even in her weakness. They were her age, native to this boondockery. The pines, the briars. She felt like a ruined hibiscus, the most exotic plant she knew. Stomped, gums bleeding, perhaps white around the mouth.

“You an orphan?” Jacob asked her.

“Yeah, I’m an orphan, a real orphan, on the move. Nobody stops me,” Irma said. She almost fainted but smiled.

“Are they after you?”

“One man. I think I’m on my way to being a medical missionary.”

“You real skinny and pale. We’ll get you a cola.”

“All right.”

Jacob went off to the house and Harvard came out on the porch, but it was not clear he could make her out at this distance. A big old smooth yard.

She sat on the lawn in a sweaty Big Mart T-shirt with a little cartoon girl and an enormous flower on it. This cartoon girl had big eyes. I will work with tiny orphans like her on my shirt, thought Irma. There’s so much I could tell her. Jacob returned with a cold wet towel and she pressed it to her face and arms, then stomach. They watched her belly button with no apology. It was pretty, a deep tunneled shadow. She also had the buds of breasts in the cartoon shirt. It unsettled the boys, the idea of her, their age. They weren’t ready to be like her. In fact, they were closer to infants.

“You couldn’t live here like us, but you could stay and play with the boats Doc Harvard made us for a while till they came got you. Eat some popcorn and get ice from the machine on the refrigerator,” said Jacob.

“No. I have to walk on.” She was in a dream and taking care of foreign children in it.

When she walked away, she had only enough energy to last for the mission. She believed health would rise in her as it had many times before. I could begin with those boys. I will tell them about Jesus and Mary. How they are better than parents.

Irma suddenly heard something after a mile in the woods. She wondered if there were great apes left in these thick woods, with its little alleys of sawgrass. Then she knew it was Malcolm thrashing toward her. A thing fighting its own sweat, tall pink stumbling, hair streaming.

Irma knew he was coming from her dream mission in the foreign lands. She said to the thing, “Go ahead and eat me.”

“You notice anything new about me?” asked Malcolm.

She took off.

“You ran and made me mad, now,” panted Malcolm, covered in burrs and scratches. “You ain’t got nothing but me now. You want to see my new moves.” She ran as he was beset by an attack of diarrhea over an ant mound.

Mortimer, all he did was look. Betsy had a book about Conway Twitty. This man had changed his name from something like Vernon to Conway Twitty, from the names of two ugly towns in Arkansas and Texas. Or because he had a sense of humor, but by his eyes she did not think so, if photographs told the truth. He was a family man, upright, embarrassed by lewdness or even rumor, although he was sexy with his tunes, the writer wrote. Mortimer sat across the room watching the gigantic Japanese television while Betsy read. She tried to find Twitty in his bone structure.

She did not think of this, but it was a strictly adolescent house they occupied, nothing but a few sticks of furniture and thick throw rugs and the giant-screen television, sloppy at the base with mixed videos. Not a plant or even salt. Loaded with snacks and sodas. Otherwise a clean kitchen, no odor except the smell of manufacture.

“I will tell your mother and father what you do with me,” she said once.

“You’re not even going to see them. Don’t be an idiot. You’re not here against your will.”

“Some of it. I’m thirteen.”

“Get back in the book. Nobody’s hurt you.”

“You and me, old man, are orphans from normal. Remember? But I can change.”

“Stay quiet and you can be anything you want.”

“We’ll see.”

A curious pause on the front porch of the bait store. Mortimer’s yellow Lexus parked, no others. Dark clouds but not a speck of rain, only this deep shadow. Raymond and Roman could see Mortimer and Sidney at the counter inside peering into a glass-lidded case full of knives on velvet. They seemed at church. Not yet touching these treasures.

See this little man, the high wavy bush of hair, the thin ankles in tasseled and buckled moccasins that seemed trimmed with actual coral snakeskin. Raymond and Roman had meant to buy supplies for crappie fishing on Harvard’s launch, then have some talk of cancer, music, the history of Roman’s Indian tribe, Jesus Christ as a man of the whip, taking time to make it right there in the temple. Raymond had not known a black man since the days of southern apartheid, although he called their names.

The fifties. In Raymond’s small town, there was a tiny college campus on which the faculty and students lived in three-storied Edwardian brick houses. The snow and then vicious ice had been on three days, a storm of the century for where they lived, in southern Mississippi near the capital city. A professor’s house caught fire. He was a veteran and had brought back live German rounds and weaponry in glass cases. It was not clear whether he just taught Nazis or taught them because he loved them, their flags, their helmets. Much of this ambiguity in the early fifties.

The water pipes were frozen. Nothing to do but throw snowballs into the fire engulfing the professor’s house. Then they saw the glass cases, and the bullets began exploding. Two men were scraped, the crowd widened. A hopeless single fire truck, officious yokels wringing their hands but having fun too. Germany rearing up on three stories and blowing its flak around. Raymond had no better memory. That evening of the fire and the booms and the thrilled citizens, a bullet of the Reich could touch anybody. The professor might be in there, on fire and lecturing.

What I am, thought Max Raymond suddenly, is an overprepared man. Here I am back at the burning place, where I keep returning ever since I was eleven. Shiloh. Where man meets God, but the man has come too early and wearing the wrong things. I have suffered. If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren’t really there.

Raymond stood ashamed before Mortimer. A bootlicker to a phantom.

John Roman was also humiliated to meet his attacker. Getting shot was nothing like this. This little man had his number.

“Hello, Man,” Roman said, surprising himself. He and Raymond watched Mortimer climbing down from the stool. A head with his wig, exempted from blame, by a shape totally shifted into sickness. He might as well be a little girl, almost unbalanced by his large hair. Maybe he didn’t remember Roman.

Raymond and Roman moved off as Mortimer and Sidney laid hands on the glass. Eloquent hilts. Arcs and stilettos, a near sickle, smaller but heavy in the blade like a bolo. A sickness sat in the room, which they each seemed to have agreed not to discuss. Their faces blank, the men acted as though they had never met.

Mortimer said something had to be done, these evil children were all over the place. Uptown, other towns. Some had been making nude movies, was the rumor. Nobody had much shame left. Mortimer smiled ear to ear.

“I picked you up this tonic. Brings up the immune system, said the old boy at the herb store. I’m feeling better for it myself. Feistier. Heart’s back in my projects,” Man said.

“You ain’t looking it. You poorly.”

“We ain’t old yet.”

“I am, and sick as a dog,” Sidney lied. He awoke nowadays with a fine mean on.

But Sidney knew sickness. The way you could sink inside yourself and worship it. Shock them by your dilapidation yet refuse to fall.

Mortimer’s people had changed too. They were not as stupid as he thought. They had their own righteousness. They were no longer amazed by the excesses of his career. The SUVs, the strange empty homes, the small film production concern in Clinton. He knew they expected sin close to him. When he left for business, he saw pain in their looks.

His old man was interested most in the junkyard, where he played quarter poker with Peden. His man Peden, in the shotgun house, whom Mortimer was allowing to live unmaimed. Peden and Mr. Mortimer played cards and talked fifties automobiles.

Mortimer tried to find his mother a hobby, but her eyesight was not good and she preferred silence. It bathed her, she said. She loved telling clean, pointless stories in which her struggles were the only memorable thing. Changing a tire on her own and finding a neighborhood dog nestled in with a family of coyotes. The old woman had insight too. When he brought little Irma past his folks at his SUV agency and told them she was the granddaughter of a client, Mrs. Mortimer’s face went red.

Still, she said they loved him and owed him for being stupid about his needs in Missouri. She agreed how a chicken yard in back could humiliate a boy who needed cars and girlfriends. How they went to church too much, expecting the pastor to correct all troubles straight from the pulpit, and how some of these pastors were fools who had barely entered life before they began announcing on it. She hugged Mortimer over and over now, commenting on his new white hair.

He felt something for her and his father. It was intense, this feeling, a fresh one for him. Made him nervous and awkward around them. He gave aid needlessly, as out of a tube of charity inside his heart. He sat with them, saying nothing, three porch-bound elders watching for cars at the four-way stop.

At the house Mortimer finally had finished for them in Rolling Fork, they sat for three hours without a peep. Mortimer’s new shoes the only true expression hereabouts. Penny loafers, black, the leather stamped with leaping trout.

The house was plush leather furniture, gold and bright copper hardware set next to black for kitchen and bathroom fixtures. Stinking of fiberglass and new wool on the floors.

After the silence, while he was leaving, he said, “I’m happy we got all that cleared up.”

They laughed their first laugh together.

Mortimer drove to Big Mart to buy his mother flowers for her sitting room where she actually sat as if friends might arrive any second. He pulled up behind a man loading topsoil. Mortimer thought he recognized him, Bertha’s nephew Ronny, whose body shop he had used. The man did not know who Mortimer was, now in a Rolls Land Rover stolen in San Francisco. The man kept loading the topsoil in front of Mortimer’s windshield, with his car door out in the passing lane. Mortimer could not move, yet he was practicing patience, thought, depth. Then he put his face out the window and asked, “Would you shut the door so I can get by, please?”

A look of disgust crossed the man’s face. Mortimer reached to his ashtray, put on his new ring. He had lately been interested in the concept of irony. How on the face of others it meant insult, such as Pepper had shown him before his beheading. The man had figured Mortimer to be a small irrelevance. This man closed the car door with that irony on his face. He was, after all, a busy foreman at the body shop now. Who was this skinny sissy with big hair in his tank of a car? Mortimer saw all this. Then stopped his car in front of the man’s. “Excuse me, sir. Would that be a look of irony on your face? Would you be giving me irony right now?”

“Tire iron, you say? No, I don’t lend out.”

At this Mortimer’s right hand flew up and a ring-mounted razor swiped across the man’s chin and lip so there was an awful amount of blood. The man squalled through a dark mustache of it dripping over his hands, at his chin, his jowls. “It’s the rudeness, man. Everywhere. And you worked for me, forgot me, let your real self loose on me out here.”

The man recognized him then. He was astounded by his thinness and wild high hair. Puny Italian sandals and no suitable beach sand for hundreds of miles.

Ronny watched for Mortimer’s return and other strokes. Waited on the story of Mortimer’s fury. He could not believe his own lips bore the tale, pouring down his shirtfront. He did not know why it had angered the man to find him ungiving about the tire iron.

Mortimer walked in on Peden and his father. They were paging through Peden’s file box of calendar art. Motorcycles or cars with women. Lazing across a car hood, handlebars, a fender. On one a man’s great tongue against thighs, scrawled there by a jokester. Worship of moving parts, combustion, bodies these two could covet. More than a spaceship or a moon landing, this local steel mesmerized them. No destination but the thing itself.

They barely recognized Mortimer.

“I need meth to tide me over. To end the blues and the nasty world out there. You know how it is, getting well,” he began straight off.

“You at the wrong place. No meth for three years,” Peden told Mortimer. He looked at Mr. Mortimer’s face. “Even when I sold, you wouldn’t find me at home doing it.”

“Pawn guy said you holding.”

“That man is dead, the holding man,” said Peden.

“Peden is now a Christian minister. He won’t even touch a beer,” said Mr. Mortimer.

“Man, you got to help me past this day. I might kill myself. Myself.”

“Which pawnbroker?”

“The guy, man. Tattoos. Civil War sabers, metal detectors.”

“Who are you?” asked Peden.

“C’mon. You know me.”

“No I don’t,” said Peden.

“Everybody knows me.”

“So?”

“I exist, man.”

Mr. Mortimer gathered himself to Peden’s side. “You could be a demon to be dealt with by the Lord.”

“He would know me. He would.”

“But I don’t. You’ll have to forgive me.”

“I don’t.”

“I believe I killed somebody but it was in another country.”

“God help you, you haven’t gone anywhere,” said Peden.

“I exist, man,” said Mortimer.

“I took you for somebody you’re nothing like. Now I can’t remember that person. You’re the demon itself. I’ve seen them before and you too,” said Peden.

Peden looked at Mr. Mortimer, the father, who had made a noise. He was actually squirming, lost in humiliation. It had been thirty years since he had reckoned on the fact his son might be an absence, or all things present at once. Against the chickens in the back window, he had watched the profile of the boy and comprehended him as a dangerous nullity, although he could not have voiced this. He knew only that he had been frightened and should be dying of shame.

Egan approached the orphans’ camp slowly. He had the dogs in the car. Ulrich’s death had nearly broken him, and he thought what he would find at the camp might do the rest of the job. The camp was strangely silent and marks of destruction were everywhere. Two dead orphans were floating near the bridge to the northern entrance, shot at close range in the head.

Trembling Egan left the dogs in the car and crossed the bridge. Exploring the grounds, he saw no one, though he thought some orphans might be hiding in one of the buildings. Finally old Pete Wren waved to him and came out of the assembly hall. He was living at the camp lately as a counselor emeritus, had worn a bathrobe during the whole catastrophe. He told Egan everything had started because of some new arrivals: two big black inmates from Norfolk, Virginia, and Paterson, New Jersey, and a white boy from South Mississippi who had made himself an orphan, who had killed his own father after watching his mother die of alcoholism, but was exonerated. Wren seemed curiously calm but wouldn’t stop the irrelevancies, Egan thought.

“I came over because I was inspired by the church services held by you and Peden that woke up a thing in me, to act, to do some good in my old age, because I stole my cousin’s good name. It felt good to drive here and be taken right in. I slept the best sleeps I had slept in years on my hard simple cot.

“There weren’t many rules. Before long, I began to find out there might not be any rules. Gene or Penny were always talking about love and trust at the center of the universe and how vigilant we should be against the Old World, as they called it, but the children didn’t seem to listen. They also seemed to have sex a lot, and about where they wanted it, fairly loudly and known to the children, and I could not, for the life of me, decide the lesson in this because it did not appear purely natural man-and-wife devotion but a sort of scheduled thing like a cup of coffee. They said they had been instructed by the Ultimate Pain of the bad life they’d had before now.

“Then the orphans gathered and all moved into the main building one night. They said they weren’t Oasis anymore. They were Ataxes, which spelled attack and from an axis of high consciousness about children or something like that. A new bad spirit was into them, little and big, led by those black boys and the boy who’d killed his father. Somebody took a random shot at Gene and Penny trying to start a sing-along. I thought the shot was a firecracker at first. The big boys said they had learned things about who was the enemy and they were getting down serious to it. Everybody on the other side of the lake was bad. They had been using the girls and enslaving them, then turning them away when they were hurt and no good to them anymore. Gene and Penny had to know about this and didn’t tell them.

“One of the black boys, the one from Paterson, put a pistol right in Malcolm’s face and kept it there. The smaller rough boy told him to sit in the chair. True, I have had my lifetime of trouble with black boys and men. They were rude, sassy, out-of-the-way tricky when a straight yes or no would do. Had all the tricks especially for old white men because I guess they want up on the old colonel of the plantation. Rheumy-eyed, can’t take care of himself, looking for somebody to open the door for him. But a cigarette, is that too much to ask when they have a box in their pocket? Then you say you don’t have a light, and they push out a dead lighter to you so you’re lighting your cigarette but it’s dead. These guys are rigged for whites like that when they’re fifteen. Do they learn this at the knee of somebody, or at church, or special power groups? They’ll go to prison and they come out with more cigarette tricks and are losing the war every day. Minister Farrakhan, can’t he do something? They need love even with old bigots like me.”

“Wren, you old fool, shut up,” Egan said. “What happened here?”

“I’m saying it was them and Leopold, the white boy who killed his father. He was a Mississippi Irish criminal. You’ll see a strain of that pop out in the best families who’ve been mild and rich for three generations. Then the guns come, the screams, murder and suicide. Anyway, Leopold was quiet but in command because he had the blood on him. What most in the world he hated was adults messing with children. He was some rough animal who had been passing for mild. You’d think only an inner city could breed that coldness and that easy killing. No manners, a hiss for a voice, and big dead eyes greener than green. Became his daddy’s monster, a stroke of revenge, no mercy. He and the black boys twinned up in some awful memories together. They would say the war was coming, and in a war there was no guilt. Nobody would ever find out who did what in a war. You had freedom to kill and hurt your slave masters. Nobody looked at me, and I’m glad they didn’t.

“They kept Gene and Penny on the movie stage and accused them of being depraved. Penny began weeping, then told how much they had sacrificed, her and Gene. ‘You are the child we lost, come back to us in many souls.

“‘You done tore each other up getting your piece, which is slobbering on each other in front of children,’ said the white father-killer. Then they nailed Gene and Penny in their room and began starving them.

“Then the three boys walked up on poor Malcolm. They hanged him on a tree right in the horse yard, but they were sloppy and Malcolm pulled up and hung on the limb before he choked. But hanging there was bad enough. They let him crawl down and live like it was what they meant. But he better never make a whimper. And he wouldn’t.”

“What were you doing while all this was going on?” Egan asked.

“I would say I was a mascot, too old for them to blame for anything. All I can brag to is I was around, in a corner or under a stage or in the projector room or the broom closet, and sometimes I held the scareder little ones on my lap.

“I don’t believe the orphans are the ones who cut Penny’s head nearly off. I was in the building where her and Gene’s room was. I think it was Man Mortimer.”

“Mortimer?” Egan shouted. “He was here?”

Wren said, “He was here, walked right through everything like a floating head of hair protected against gun lead and explosives. The orphans saw the pleasure boat approaching and opened fire, and the white father-killer had taught them how to shoot. Dr. Harvard was driving the boat with Mortimer and his mother in it, but he didn’t seem a willing pilot. Large Lloyd and Edie were aboard too, Edie holding a derringer on Harvard. Harvard had an old shotgun with him and a few shells, and there was a snake pistol and flares in the survival locker. When the shooting started, Mortimer and Lloyd and Edie hit the deck and returned fire as Harvard tried to turn the boat around again, but Mortimer jumped off the boat and waded to shore. He didn’t turn back as his mother fell dead on the bow.

“The older girls, that first pair in trouble with the video lesbian girls thing, were snapping those guns, one with a telescope on it. They wanted to hurt Mortimer personally, owed him. But he walked right ashore, and I can’t imagine them not having a clean shot.

“It got to where I was making peace, I was a peacemaker. I brought back peace and trust in adult humans, kept them from setting the pleasure boat on fire a second time. I helped them out when it started settling down a little, waiting for the law, gathering ammunition, food and explosives, gasoline, moving barbed-wire fences. Even setting the moat on fire at one point because they’d seen it in the movies right there. You’re the first person to come.”

Egan took Wren back over the bridge and drove for Sheriff Facetto.