Yonder Stands Your Orphan

PROLOGUE

INSIDE AT THE WALNUT BAR LEANED THE DISAMBULATORY god of the lake. The man was both lazy and quick. Many sought him out.

You needed the luck, the stories, the bait, the clarity of the water, the barometric report.

The roadhouse was a mile from Eagle Lake, a plank box of one warped room a mile off the Vicksburg highway and up a piece of neglected gravel. It harked back to the fifties, when Vicksburg was wide open. Cecil and Robbie had been coming down from the Delta ever since the days of cotton prosperity. They remembered an era of state prohibition and the curious black-market tax and the Mulberry Street fleshpots. The river walk where bottles of cheap liquor and wine were sold in bathtubs, teenagers and policemen shopping side by side.

The lake was storied for bass and crappie, calf-size cats. Carp and six-foot saurian gar, and buffalo fish, which the poor ate fried in balls. Leon Jr. behind the bar knew all the fishing news. Spinners, plastic lizards, worms, jigs, live bait. What depth and what time of day. Leon Jr., whose father ran the roadhouse in the fifties, was no longer young himself, with a blond-gray stubble and sulking orange lips. He was neither happy nor sad from repeating the same stories. These narratives increased the cost of the liquor nearly twofold. All were aware of this. It was overpriced as if bootlegged, which it nearly was. The place was unlicensed, sometimes locked, sometimes open, depending on the whim of whatever sheriff at whatever season. Sheriff Facetto, newly reelected, seemed to be allowing a month of Christmas.

The shelves behind the bar were bare unfinished pine, a few bottles of brown whiskey on them, not that many choices. Leon Jr. did have a rye and a single-malt scotch, sold in a shot glass and priced as liquid platinum. He had Jägermeister with its alleged opium. Some, meaning to fish, had fallen across the bar and slept the main part of business hours. Cold beer sat in a horizontal Coca-Cola watercooler, ancient, faded to pink and brown-speckled with rust. One large clear urn full of vinegar-brine eggs, a full carton of salt and a can of pepper beside it. No napkins. No chairs. No rest room except a deep path in the kudzu and gorse around back.

All this the parcels of its charm. Its absolute freedom from a woman’s touch. An old-time titty-girl calendar on the bar side wall, perhaps from the beloved years of the Korean War, when it was daring. Miscellany of bar glasses with the imprint of loftier saloons, atmosphere of a careless desperation. A must-visit of the bass veterans, their sons, fishing sluts, grave trollers, for its promise of good luck and fine days on the water.

After all, some had died out there on the enormous lake, which would whitecap and roll dangerously in a gale. Some by lightning, some by heart attack, a few by suicide. Two game wardens blown nearly headless by a short twelve-gauge. And you never, never wanted the rare east wind to come on you. All at once nothing bit. Many men, black and white, vowed Satan was at work. For Christ was a fisherman and did not subtract from your allotted lifetime the days you spent on the water. Nobody spoke it, but Leon Jr. might be the version of Christ himself the Lord would give to the state of Mississippi.

Old globe of a gas pump out front. Sign of the old green dinosaur, Sinclair. God knows the actual gasoline it pumped nowadays. A screen door browning, worn blond at the handle, like a sacred stairway in Italy. One pool table to the rear, its felt used to almost gray as if violent football games had struggled over it forever. One stick in the corner, ulcered balls. Better a drunkard’s napping berth than billiards. One man had a giant catfish fellate him there. He was not ashamed to return.

Leon Jr. was famous. He was the last to offer roaches for bait, kept in a cardboard palace and fed on his wife’s cooking. Northwest corner out back.

Lately Leon Jr. had a newer cardboard box under the bar, a new wrinkle, videotapes stacked and unlabeled. He had been assured it was local talent, even though it was slick as Hollywood. What it did was open your eyes to the potential in this state. Peer about for talent.

This day Cecil and Robbie were at the bar talking seasons and waters, salad days, flush tented ballrooms on the levee, always the best bands. The Red Tops. The Tangents. Good old saxophone Charlie gone down in an overdose in New Orleans. They were three whiskeys in and almost weeping.

Now the villages from which they hailed were shut and dust-windowed. As if a neutron bomb had fallen on the towns. Only a ragged, sullen shifting of black folks back and forth from porch to porch, in their sections, on Saturday afternoons. Automobile wrecks up and down Highway 61 for little more reason than raw liftoff speed. Colonists in retreat from their Egypt, flat land uselessly rich still, its old profiteers scattered. Hunkering men turned to nagging barbershop hags, monologues about niggers, niggers and other niggers, beneath their talk a yearning for homicide, themselves included. Surrender to the old Shintoism where grandpas cruised in their Caddies, every stud one of them a kingfish.

Leon Jr. knew worse stories. Of men gone mad with religion and vicious with regret, mass conflagrations, graves. A camp for indigent orphans razed to the ground. He reached into the box next to his foot and brought up an unlabeled black videotape. Placed it on the walnut. “I got something new here, maybe up your alley, maybe not.” Wiped the whiskey sweat from it. “You ain’t the law or no deacons, are you?”

“Well hell no,” said Robbie, older than Cecil and with sunspots. Four whiskeys in now, the two had almost forgot fishing, although their boat sat outside on its trailer fully suave and loaded as carefully as a space station.

“Fifty-five dollars. I’ll throw in the sales tax.”

“What show could be that good? Good hell, Leon. You got some new bass fool selling his miracle bait? It ain’t even labeled.”

“On purpose. It’s some show. And I hear local talent.”

“Local. You mean an appeal for some poor soul with no liver and no insurance,” said Cecil, whose face got even redder.

“Boys, it’s ‘Teenage Lesbian Comedown.’ That’s why it ain’t labeled. This here is professional stuff. Real slick and Technicolor. Either the law or my old lady caught it on me, wouldn’t be nothing left of my free ass.”

“You mean child pornography?”

“Well. You decide. There’s titties. It’s cultured. Violins. It starts them in big fur coats, mink or Asian-wolflike. You got some fine young nookie here, and it’s like medical art, say. Don’t have no secrets. Then a man come in, like they’s ruler.”

“You’re changing, Leon,” said Robbie. “Aren’t you making living enough?”

“We’re all changing,” said Cecil. “Lots of us ain’t making living enough. Give it here.”

“You gonna buy it?”

“Sure. Who’s the artist? Where do I get my money back if it’s some dog or a fraud?”

“Now, that person has to remain unknown. But you ain’t going to want your money back. Just don’t invite the wife or the kids or the preacher over. This here is bachelor art. Still, one old boy told me he did invite the wife. Said it went just fine. There ain’t no law, state nor federal, says what kind of home you got to have. That’s why the good Lord made venetian blinds.”

They walked out whiskey-righteous, and Robbie started the Jeep Grand Cherokee with officiousness, like a senator entering a filibuster. Then he spoke.

“I don’t know. This place had a purity to it. Low-down but pure. I hate to see him join the common, I guess go modern, you might say.”

“All those poor colorful folks we been watching all our lives and wishing they’d never change, Robbie. We thought they’d just grind it out and be our what, wallpaper. Pretty selfish, us old heads.”

“You got a point there, pal.”

“Nostalgia, shit, me too. I got it every second. Nothing new looks worth a shit to me. New houses seem like goddamn rest stops. We’re dirty old men already, Robbie, face it. And even the dirt don’t seem as tasty as it used to. Now the whiskey’s talking, but I tell you. I’m willing to look at anything’ll change my life before I blow this weary head off.”

“Now, Cecil. Don’t forget a big old she-bass snapping down a top-water plug. About sundown on your flat green water.”

“I never meant there wasn’t still a God, old son.”

“Just wait’ll God’s back in the office. And Cecil, if she could stand this speckled old ass, I’m not averse to teenage love myself.”

They both laughed. A sort of burned laughter.