Yonder Stands Your Orphan

ONE

THIS SUNDAY MORNING MAN MORTIMER AND MAX Raymond sat in the pews of the same church, a little white steepled one in a glen set among live oaks and three acres of clover. The jungle swamps encroached on and squared the glen, deep green to black. Loud birds and alligators groaning in their mating season roamed in songs from bayou to bayou. Some fish walked on land in this season.

Cars, just a few of them, sat on the pea gravel under the trees just outside the windows of ersatz stained glass colored like the wreckage of a kaleidoscope. Mortimer and Raymond knew each other then only by automobile. Mortimer favored a rotation of expensive foreign sport utility vehicles. Raymond drove the same old Lexus he had bought when he was a physician.

Raymond came to worship, and to repent, and he wanted a vision. Life heretofore had not instructed him. He had won his wife, a raven-curled, writhing singer of Latin jazz, in a ghastly way that wrecked him as a doctor. He was a dread-stuffed saxophonist in her band. Afraid of his own irony, his insincerity, his ambiguity. Now Raymond had come to repent. He loved Christ, but he yearned for a solid thing to witness, a vision undisputed, because his faith was by no means confirmed.

Man Mortimer was slightly drunk, a state unusual if not unprecedented for this quiet man, a gambler, a liaison for stolen cars and a runner of whores, including three Vicksburg housewives. He was small but substantial, with a big head of waved hair and hooded bedroom eyes. In high school he was a dead ringer for Fabian but in recent years was verging toward the dead country star Conway Twitty. At forty-five he still retained his looks, and the women he sold kept a crush on him and liked his stares, which seemed to invite them into a dangerous ring of power. His charisma assured the women their lives were broad, deep and special, and that half the money in their adventures around the boudoirs of this poor county and in the lacier rooms of Vicksburg belonged to him. The law could not touch him because his bordello was spread in myriad chambers throughout the suburbs and even underpasses in giant, newish sport utility vehicles with flattened rear seats, good mattresses, sunroofs tinted by creamy smoke and fine stereo systems, the aphrodisiacs of new-car smell and White Diamond mist working side by side. These perfumes and compact discs were chosen by Edie, a gal Friday of his who otherwise worked as a blackjack dealer in the casino. His books on the car business were excellent, prepared by an accounting genius named Large Lloyd for his build and his hang, an ex-wrestler and permanent bouncer whose pride in his math and tax savvy was so wild it intimidated the auditors who had once looked into the business. Lloyd was a casino employee, chauffeur and gigolo. Man Mortimer owned three homes, and he gave parties, or mass appointments. He made a point of being nothing like Hugh Hefner, whom he despised for his philosophy and aesthetic pretensions. At Mortimer’s parties there were no drugs, no guns, no liquor more than social.

The casino in Vicksburg was clean, even elegant, for these fly-specked counties, but its exits were full of ruined persons, many of them women. Edie and Large Lloyd could spot them and cheer them. Mortimer would appear in an exquisite sedan, as if happening in to end the night after some happy day with well-heeled Episcopals, and steer the women to their salvation. He knew the faces and the postures, and he never made the mistake of plying a busted gambler who was pious or gowned in unpurchasable pride. He couldn’t afford noisemakers. On the other hand, he could take another kind of woman right off the arm of her escort, who was likely to be broke and puny too. For a man in such despair and trouble, the exit of his consort might seem merely another cloud in a black evening.

Mortimer had come to the church service in a spell of nostalgic spite. He wanted to see if the preachers were still as feeble and funny as they used to be when he was a kid.

The preacher was Egan, a reformed biker, gambler and drug addict, still with a ponytail, brown-gray, and a large black Maltese cross tattooed on his right cheek. A man immoderate in both callings, dissolute and sacred. He was preaching against the casino now, this nearby hell, a factory of thievery and broken hearts. He preached about hollow and slick men and slot-machine hags with no souls. The leering zombies schooled to rob the poor and sad in the name of fun. Worse than the liquor were the glamour and baying of Mammonites, who turned the soul into nothing but the arithmetic of want. His voice boomed out like Johnny Cash.

Then at the pulpit he tied off his arm with his necktie and injected a hypodermic into a great vein and plunged holy water into it, then withdrew the plunger, and they saw the pale blood in it. This is what God gave us, not the green, gray dirty thing we call cash. Filthy lucre. Filthy, how the old scribe knew it. Mortimer had to agree the man was good. A woman near him fainted and hit her head on the pew. None moved to comfort her, not her children, not her paramour in common-law union. Mortimer almost did, spying a piece of business, before he stopped himself.

Mortimer was a bit afraid of this loon high on his own rhetoric. The preacher looked at him and seemed to know him.

People used to have work, with their hands. But behold, the zombie of the empty, the Middleman, the parasite and usurer. God damns too the Usurer of the lost and confused man, especially his precious time, which is given to even the poor, so they might make a highway to paradise of it in their minds. Using your time, your animal want of sport and folly, and at the heinousest high percentage, oh fools, higher than the Carter administration. And you saw the crashed, blackened helicopters in the desert of the Holy Lands. You saw yourselves, paying those high mortgage notes! Handsome, smiling faces, the manicured hand out to clutch you in that old handshake with sick, sick ruin. And behind that hand with its rings and its Vaseline Intensive Care — lotioned palm and fingers, a heart deep cold and black as a well! I give you, brothers and sisters, evil passing for man. The bleached-blond son of Ham. But we know you. Solomon’s robes can’t hide you.

I see Little Las Vegas. Are you, sir, Elvis, Wayne Newton, Sinatra or the wolvine Michael Jackson, child eater? Those Las Vegas — greased and damned? Or are you only some shadow Lounge Punk, wanting to be big in lights? I know you, friend. I have been kin to you. Check your footwear and your belt buckle, Mr. Wannabe Caesar’s Palace Puppy, oh you’re sick all right. Do they call attention to themselves? Is your hair some kind of Goddamned Event?

Man Mortimer could not be dead positive whether the man was speaking directly to him. There were moans from others near by. But he would not look away from the preacher. He would drill him right back with his eyes. He allowed the fellow his moment. He had come to mock. Nostalgic, sporting, a bit tipsy. Now the man was way past that. He was good. He might probably be maimed. He might probably die. Mortimer had once killed, in a way. Without laying a hand on them. Not a little finger.

Max Raymond bowed his head, relishing the casino’s condemnation, where people watched his wife onstage in her tiny dresses, her humid cleavage and thighs. He was her shill, he abetted her writhing with his horn. A jazz pimp, at worst. Her antiphonist.

Raymond heard the family beside him leaving after the service. A child asking, “Mama, who is Wayne Newton? Or Sinatra?”

“Old zombies with too much money,” his brother said.

“Who is a good man?” asked the littler fellow.

“Your granddaddy. Billy Graham,” his mother said.

“And Margaret Sanger,” added the grandmother. “Was a good woman.”

Ulrich lived alone at the lake but now, at Christmas, he was not lonely.

A bombardier out of England and over Germany for the Eighth Air Force, and a puttering aeronaut ever since, a tinkering veteran (though his only personal flight had been without an engine, some fifty yards during Hurricane Camille in 1969), he had thought science his whole life. But recently he had erupted in mourning over man’s treatment of animals. And without gratitude to them either, a holocaust without a ceremony! Even primitive Laplanders gave solemn thanks to the animals for their own survival. He could not bear Napoleon’s millions of dead horses. Nor could he forgive himself for the random horror he had visited on horses, mules, cows, deer and smaller creatures during the war.

He had no people, only a son back in Minnesota. He had been solitary a long time, and now another was present in his cottage. Death itself, which had a voice, which called to him not in English but he could hear it clearly, calling, saying, It is not long, you can feel me, you know it. You’ve had plenty of time, plenty. And God knows, your wides of space, over Germany, France, back to England. You killed others before you even had a train of thought. You always wanted to go over and shake hands with those you bombed in the Eighth Air Force, but you chickened out, Captain Hypocrite. Besides, how were you going to shake hands with a horse or dog or kitten or lamb, those sad ones who never got to look up and hide, just stood there and had your hell all over them. As if nature itself didn’t eat them up enough.

Oh you’re fat at the long table, stuffed with time, friends, your flat stupid brainstorms. Not long. You’re going to shake hands with every dead thing. You recall you were a captain, a flyboy, an assassin’s instrument barely beyond pubic. You could neither write a good check nor imagine any bill beyond a twenty. You had never had a decent woman’s bare breasts against you. All you had was your dog and your model planes and good eyes and baseball. You weren’t shit, and then your Minnesota yokel’s ass made its wings and you commenced gloating over your own worth.

I almost got your blowhard ass again in that hurricane. You knew I was close, as close as your window with those handsome live oaks with their drapes of Spanish moss your retired old stuffed ass had bought into, flat nasty sand and the smell of dead mullet outside the window, that was me.

Well now you’re fat, stubby, your spine packed down by gravity. Got emphysema, struggle about fifty yards without a blackout. I’m in the room, you can walk to me easy. Go ahead, light up another one, might as well make it an old Camel straight like you really want, and hack and hawk a spell, walk right into These Old Arms. You know me, flyboy to aluminum walker, you’ve known me. It’s always Veterans’ Day over here.

For Christmas he mailed his son’s family in Minnesota a Southern Gourmet Feast, a crate of tangerines and dry-iced jumbo rock shrimp. The son was back at the old farm with a gorgeous and pleasant Swedish wife and blond children, elfin beauties. They loved Ulrich and believed him to be a dear eccentric. Benignly senile, deafened to communication with any but the nearest friends, who whispered in his ear. They were unaware he was a fool who disastrously misconstrued aeronautical possibilities in his dreams of “personal flight.” Which is to say, a minimalist backpack and propeller raised above the buttocks of the pilot by titanium struts and powered by a camshaft spun by a featherlight nuclear pack almost invented by a renegade physicist and airport bum in Huntsville, Alabama, with whom Ulrich was in correspondence. There were problems of torque in free fall and necessary wingspan and even of where to place the rudder. Reversing the prop for braking also brought the complication of chewing up the legs, ass and spine of the pilot.

This much had in fact transpired in Huntsville as Ulrich and the inventor looked not so much upward but more at tree level. The half of the pioneer aeronaut that remained brought a staggering lawsuit against the inventor and his philosophical adviser, Earl L. Ulrich of Redwood, MS. Though he lived, correctly, at Eagle Lake.

Ulrich had not told his son or his pals about this litigation, which he, the inventor and the aeronaut were just after settling in an anteroom of the courthouse where the Alabama magistrate declared all three rampant idiots who owed the scientific community an apology and a pledge to vacate themselves from his jurisdiction — a jurisdiction that now included all continental airspace into which they might in future hurl a human fuselage — forever. Ulrich rose and began an excursus in rebuttal, citing correctable errors quite obvious to them now, as if this project were steaming full ahead despite the judge, as the sad wretch with his artificial rectum and main colon gawked on from his wheelchair, until Ulrich’s own lawyer hauled him away, then simply deserted him in a nasty alley near the courthouse. Cold, scrawny dogs drank coffee from Ulrich’s large Styrofoam cup, and he knelt, weeping in sympathy for them.

He had not told his son he had the emphysema either, or that he continued to smoke seven long ones a day, against the expostulations of his doctor and the crowd who gathered at the pier. His son believed him to be happy, lucky, if misdressed, and a fine old geezer cheered by others of his kidney, who kept an eye on him that he should want for nothing. In fact he was poor, pitied and increasingly avoided. Some feared he was headed for a breakdown, many were concerned that he might be giving a speech and just die on them.

On Christmas Eve afternoon Ulrich waited in front of the paint and body shop for the boys in the Redwood garage to hammer out a dent in the door panel of his dear old woody wagon, a Ford he boasted he might sell for a little fortune on the West Coast. He had had wonderful trips and thoughts in this car. He waited and smoked, holding on to his walker with one hand, enjoying the nippy air. He dreamed of Minnesota, where the breathing would be easier. He thought of freezing at twenty thousand feet in a flak-holed and strafed B-17, damned near a flying colander, the.50-caliber shell casings rolling back and forth on the floor beside the head of the waist gunner behind him. Until they landed, he had imagined the boy was vomiting bullets the whole time. It might be that a small madness lodged with him then. Flakked, then strafed, by the first of the German jets in the war. Who was he to live, who was he to have madness, even to speak of madness, after the others dead who would give anything to be melancholy just once again? He was old, but he had no wisdom. Age bore him no rich fruit or gain, only the stare of inconsolable amazement.

Ulrich watched while an odd vehicle came on toward him. A teenager in camouflage, speckled by acne in the face, rode an all-terrain cart across the front of which was tied a slain deer, its tongue out. The butt of a deer rifle rose from the frame in a hard scabbard behind his seat, handy to his reach. As the boy motored into the driveway of the shop, Ulrich saw the sparse and nasty whiskers around his mouth. A country girl came out of the garage, a high-schooler, with a body worker in overalls, greasy. The body worker held a rubber hammer. The boy on the cart was taken with himself. The deer flung over the hood, head and antlers down, the pink tongue out. Already the boy was spitting and acting as if this was not such an extraordinary deed. A killer with a sneer and a fine machine, that was about it. He spat. He could not help it, he was a stud with his booty.

Ulrich trembled in a sudden revelation. The deer’s full unearthly beauty. The punk who had turned it into trash. He was not poor, he was not hungry. He had driven miles to show it off. His bleeding trophy over the oily pavement.

“Young man! I sense a wrong here.” Ulrich left the walker and was soon at the seated boy, hands around his throat. Squeezing and squeezing to kill him. Choke the punk out of him. The boy could do nothing but claw and moo.

The boy reached back for the butt of his rifle. Nobody had sprung to his aid. Ulrich released one hand and yanked out the rifle before the boy could get an angle on it. The boy was very hurt in the throat and his face was only now unbluing. He gasped. A rag doll, he fell to the concrete.

“This is a thirty-thirty all right, and a fine one. You strutting little shit. All this fine equipment. So much. Here, let me—”

Ulrich beat on the vehicle violently with the gun. Its hood, its lights, its rear rack. The telescope sight flew off, then smaller pieces, and finally the stock split, and Ulrich flung the ruined weapon off into the hard weeds in a yard next to the garage. Next thing, he mounted the vehicle and drove off, over the leg of the hunter. He roared out on the main highway awhile and made a turn for the lake, where they lost sight of him. He took the vehicle into the black deeps of the swampland, where only dogs or another ATV could pursue.

The hunter was in a condition beyond amazement. But he muttered, a sort of squall. “Crazy. Who is he?”

“That man is old, he’s really old,” said the body man, Ronny. “Man, that was some goofy-ass piece of work. He’s off driving your ATV into them swamps, Percy.”

“I ain’t believing.”

“He’s done left his old woody wagon right here.”

The girl had been giggling but trying to maintain her mascara and explosive dye job, newly teased, so you witnessed a kind of intermediate chemotherapy effect of the skull.

“What the hell you laughing at?” yelled Percy, holding his throat.

“Lookit there. He left his walker,” she said.

“Damn. The man can’t hardly breathe. This is one old sonofabitch who changed his life in fifteen seconds,” said Ronny.

“I’ll change him,” croaked Percy. He spat.

“No you won’t,” said the girl. She had gotten sad. “You go hunt out that old man, one on one, I bet he’d walk out of them woods with your balls in his hand.”

“Who the hell you think you are, Marcine?”

“Sick of this country is what. And all you puffed-up little dicks in it. All ’cause your daddies were too cheap to buy a good rubber.”

“That’s enough out of you now, Marcine,” said the body man, lifting the rubber hammer as if he might do something with it.

“I’m sick of my name and I’m sick of my hair and sick of pickups and guns and y’all raising dogs to kick and people calling deer sonsofbitches and wanting me to settle down with them in some goddamn trailer home to breed more like them and—”

“Well, Big Missy Marcine. If you think you so wasted here, why don’t you move on up to Vicksburg and sell what you got. I know the man can help you.” The body man thought she was his.

“It’d be a step up,” she said.

“And don’t let the door hit your butt when you leave.”

“That’s original.”

“Did anybody notice I’m hurt and robbed?” whined Percy, still sprawled on the concrete.

At the end of the doxology, Egan stood, a sinner. In his sweat he was miserable for his own former self as a drug mule. A methedrine bagman, a pavement thug. He himself had driven Mortimer’s car years ago, although he had no idea whose car it was. He sensed something heavy and odorous in the trunk, but he was not paid to smell or reason. He was sent to get the thing below water in a twenty-foot pool of bayou at the rear of his uncle’s land. A busted route of saplings and clipped post oaks was all there was for a path. He let it, a 1948 Chevrolet, below the chilly water, Missouri tag sinking, purple, at last. “Show me.” Then he strolled back, sopping wet, to his chain-smoking uncle’s house, careful to shout hello because the man kept a.22 Magnum rifle at his lodge. God knows what for, except for those who would poach or harm his many dogs and cats.

Egan’s uncle was a decrepit Irish ex-priest, sent to minister to Mississippi, which the diocese described as a third-world country, forty years ago. The poverty of blacks, whites, the paucity of Catholics. But slowly he had turned landowner. His name was Carolus Robert Feeney, but he had long since gone by Carl Bob. He bought a lodge near Eagle Lake and made his peace with the lord of the coons, lynx, bobcat, armadillo and the rolling vinery of the lower Delta jungle. Now he was a pantheist and fairly profane in this faith.

His nephew Egan still loved him and appeared at odd times to make repairs to the lodge. In these chores he had found scriptures in the house and converted to Protestant ecumenism although railed at by his uncle, who now despised all churches.

Feeney loved Egan too. He nursed him through the jitters of several whiskey and methedrine collapses. The old man knew nothing of the underwater Chevrolet, as Egan knew nothing of its story. Neither Large Lloyd nor Edie, Mortimer’s right hands, had any idea where it rested.

Scores of corpses rested below the lakes, oxbows, river ways and bayous of these parts, not counting the skeletons of Grant’s infantry. The country was built to hide those dead by foul deed, it sucked at them. Back to the flood of 1927, lynchings, gun and knife duels were common stories here. Muddy water made a fine lost tomb.

It was just seven years ago Egan had been the driver who felt silent forms in the car seats beside him wanting to scream and party. When the car went under, he loved even the sweat on his brow. Done. The Christian antiapotheosis. Now, he said, let’s really get wasted, brother monkeys. Mister Me, I be dead.

Two days later a deputation arrived at the body shop in Redwood. Dr. Harvard and Melanie Wooten in the front seat of her station wagon. The culprit Ulrich in the back, hangdog. Behind them they towed the ATV, dinged up and muddy. It was not Ulrich’s only misadventure with a local machine. Two years ago he had bought a used Jet Ski and had gone airborne with it on the other side of the cove. Went out of the lake and pile-drove into blackberry bushes and wild vicious yucca plants. The steering column had driven his scrotum upwards into some unprepared cavity, and the yucca spears had entered his thighs and stomach very deeply before he rolled off into the lesser crucifixion of blackberry thorns. He could not recall what he was trying to prove. Perhaps atonement for the maimed pilot in Huntsville. Or all of his life after the war.

Melanie came out to the body man, Ronny, who was waiting with the same rubber hammer, and with Percy and Marcine too. They had squabbled but returned because there was nowhere else in Redwood to gather. Marcine was much taken with Melanie, who was elegant and lovely, but in a natural way that would have suited any outfit. Marcine was not aware there were any women in this county, young or older, like Melanie. And the older woman did work her charm, as the dignified Harvard leaned on the car hood smoking a pipe, her ally.

Melanie explained that Ulrich was very sorry, he was a sick old fellow with rare convictions. He had brought money to take care of the broken vehicle and the rifle. He had little money left. She felt he had been punished. Now he needed his woody and his walker back. The body man stood aside as if there was no more discussion, Percy took the money, and Ulrich struggled from the rear seat offering his hand but looking at the pavement. Percy agreed. He did not even ask about the deer, had forgotten it.

“Thank you ever so much,” Melanie said as the body man handed over the keys to Ulrich. “You are very human and forgiving.” She smiled at Marcine. “And lovely.” Marcine had tamer, modest hair now, and wore only lipstick, mid-heeled white shoes.

They drove away in the two cars, and Marcine watched, a startled worship still on her face.

Next afternoon, she pouted, then went to the home of Ronny the body man’s aunt, who worked for this man in Vicksburg at a kind of car agency. The aunt dressed well and seemed to have no worries, had a thirty-five-inch Sanyo television with Direct Digital TV system and a brick house.

“What is the name of the man you work for in Vicksburg, Bertha?”

“The man is Man.”

“What?”

“His name is Man Mortimer. Hard, but a teddy bear. If you know him.”

“You look to be doing fine.”

“Oh, they is opportunities up there. If you get in, all you have to do is one main deal.”

“What’s that?”

“Forget everything. You going to rise, you gonna love forgetting you ever had a memory. I recommend it. You know there’s no world with that pissant nephew of mine. You’ll remember every day till when you cut your own heart out with a knife.”

“I heard that.”

When her husband Wootie died, Melanie stayed on the lake in their rambling vacation house. She was seventy-one years old and wished she were a poet. But she was too direct for that, her senses too good, her memory too precise, and she couldn’t drink much.

She loved the egrets, the cranes, the herons, and in the evening the bullfrogs singing around the cove in their squat ardor. She was a pretty old woman, and her husband, a college president, had been very grateful. Theirs was a kind marriage without much fever, and in his sixties Wootie began falling in love with boy students and writing them letters. He was fired. This did not confuse Melanie’s esteem for him. She stuck with him until he died in this house on the lake where he had fled in terminal depression. They had friends among the old men who spent their days on the pier.

She was an artisan who blew glass animals in a rear part of the house and sold them at the bait house in the crossroads of the lake and Vicksburg highways. She had living money and did not need to do this, but she had never honestly known the world of men and intended to have contact with it. The women she had known were trivial and glum academic wives. Without hate she withdrew from them. She also cheered the old at the Onward nursing home and gave away her animals there. She organized speakers and entertainments for them. She would sometimes visit the casino in Vicksburg all alone, not to gamble but because she relished the musicians. Men thought she was in her late forties, most likely, and some wondered if her elegance indicated a high-class prostitute of some sort. But she had a poise about her that kept them polite and even a little scared, because they assumed she must be connected to a powerful man not of these parts.

She watched from her windows. She watched for men like a teenager. She watched for wildlife like a child. One day she saw an eagle fishing. Another day she saw an armadillo mother playing with her children.

She liked a big-stomached black fellow who sat on a white lard bucket fishing a lesser inlet of the big cove with a cane pole. He was quiet until a fish was on, and then she would hear him talking to it. Sometimes he whooped as if rolling down the aisle in a church. He was engaged. Otherwise he ate his boiled meat, rat cheese and saltines with a cold tall can of beer from the ice of his other lard bucket, then slept whole half hours on top of the lard bucket in the shade of the willows and cypresses.

This man was a veteran of Korea and Vietnam. Melanie had seen him in Redwood one Veterans’ Day. His name was John Roman, and he was proud of the Indian in his blood and adored his wife, Bernice, who looked even more Indian than he did. On his last tour he was shot three times, twice through the shoulder and once through the mouth, in a cane field at twilight. He was heavy even then and bore it well. He listened to Chet Baker on the tape deck over and over when he was in the hospital. He belonged to the world of smoky old jazz clubs and wanted fervently to return to it. He loved how this white man held his tones with an old sincerity, even when he was lacking teeth. He felt allied to Baker because now he too had missing teeth from the gunshot through his jaw. “My Funny Valentine.” Never enough of that. He was planning to sing like that himself when he got back to Bernice in Mississippi. He would struggle for the tone as the injured Chet Baker did. He sang with a whistle from the side of his mouth. He went to San Diego, Houston, New Orleans, then Jackson, Mississippi, where she waited in the airport.

She put her finger in the dimple where his cheek had sunk to the gap. “What you gonna do now, old soldier?”

“Wear out my ass. Wear sandals.” White was on top of his hair.

He wasn’t just coming home. He was making a home, and his ass was going to be nailed to it. They bought a Walter home on stilts near a pleasant green bayou a hundred yards from the reservoir road. The home was made to collapse about the time he and Bernice died together. Passersby could barely imagine the exquisite joy inside this meek home. John Roman himself could hardly believe his pleasure when he touched the front doorknob of this, his own settlement.

Melanie watched him and wondered why he had fought. For this home?

Last week a rain had come on suddenly and so white that her mind reflected to another rain in Caw, Texas, in the thirties, when she was a child. She was on the esplanade in front of the hardware store waiting for her father, a cattleman and well digger, inside. She was abruptly frightened by a white rain out of earthquake thunder, a rain of such density she could not discern buildings across the street. She looked five minutes into a writhing blanket of it and believed she saw forms go over, arms of darker frantic air. She had not seen a rain like this since, until last week on the cove when she was watching the heavy black man fishing from his bucket. She could not make him out in the downpour and thought it was because he was not there, was someplace dry. Yet when the rain dispersed, the man still sat holding his cane pole in the mist. He was drenched and he was singing. His motorbike lay in a puddle, knocked over by the storm.

It was a feat how he balanced his buckets and pole on the skinny machine. Big sandaled feet banked on either peg like underwings. The fish were in wire baskets saddled across the fender behind him.

She wanted to be his friend but was not sure how to go about it.

When you take someone for a friend, you feel you owe him something, she decided. You have owed him far back into unconscious time and will spend the rest of your days giving to him. The man brought tears to her eyes. White hair and wearing overalls, unconscious of her. She watched him pour Stanback powder into a Pepsi one afternoon. Then he drank it down in one draft. She wondered if he was a saint. If he had served a larger power without whimpering these years while she had served almost nothing but civility. Her parties among the chattering phlegmatists of the campus. Driven from fecklessness to symbols. And yourself, she thought in her nainsook, you want him to be Uncle Remus goes to war, then the old happy fishing patriot. Who am I, old as he is and more? I might be an advanced case of local poet. A trivial and obvious woman, alone. She wrote nothing.

Melanie had not seen many white men having fun or even smiling in Caw, a town thickly grim even by Texas depression standards. Most were Christian, but their music was dirges and they would rather nod than talk. Once musicians came to town in a dusty Airstream trailer towed by a Mercury. They did not mean to stop here, but they had no money for gas to move on westward, perhaps to Auburn, where one of them had an aunt of substance. They set up in the street and began to play.

One of them was a Negro who played trombone, a man of some girth like the present John Roman. He was not young but still had the face of a boy in his jowls. He wore spectacles. Nobody had seen anything like this. The man was from Galveston, dark as French coffee. Four men gathered around the front of the band, peering directly at the chubby Negro. Melanie was uncertain whether they intended to harm the dark man or were mesmerized by him. They were unschooled in an audience’s relationship to a band, these weathered white men in gabardine pants or overalls and each with a felt George Raft hat the color of lead with sunspots and sweat lines on the crown. They stood right in the faces of the reed players on their folding chairs, planted almost in the band itself.

The sun made perfect high noon. This was no time to hear jazz, this Tuesday. Nor was any a good day in this part of Texas, she supposed, staring at John Roman asleep on his lard bucket.

The Negro trombonist might have been playing for his life. He set his horn and face, that face of a happy boy in rims of flesh, and never closed his eyes, as she saw other horn men do in later days. She knew one of the white men was a Baptist preacher who’d once ordered an unrepentant man’s death as he sat drunk and cursing in bedroom slippers with his sex loose under a vomitous white shirt. One of the assassins his brother.

In the street before the one-room school, students of all heights stood at the window for a sight of the band. The bandsmen were unaware of interrupting school, and Melanie did not know whether the white men cared. The band kept playing, an open suitcase on the ground before them where folks might toss coins, but three tunes and none had dropped a penny. Urchins stood behind the legs of the men. The black man began getting happier and happier in the face around the big mouthpiece. He was the soloist often, with only bass fiddle and drums and tinkling piano nursing the silences.

Grown children now stood behind the others, and a little Chinese-Cajun man in a straw hat with an ethereal crown carried a bucket of water to the survivors of the music. A carpenter began nailing and sawing on planks across saw-horses at the hardware door four buildings northward. The hammer popped squarely like shots. The carpenter was good, off in his own dream. Then the Negro began to shuffle and dance during the trumpet solo. The dust rose around his polished brogans, his brown ankles went pigeon-toed and duck-footed, without hosiery.

The bell of the trombone seemed to Melanie like a cave for an elf city. The man worked the plunger with violence and trembling. He danced and danced and then played with the rest toward the end and they desisted.

The carpenter was walking rapidly to the band, urging himself through the crowd. He held a hinged-lid trunk clean-squared, nail heads sunk smoothly, an artifact of instant cabinetry. He knelt to remove the open suitcase and lock it. Then he put the trunk in its place, drawing the lid back. “So as not to get your luggage dirty,” he said to the bandleader, whose hands had left his accordion as if to prevent blows on his person.

Then the rain of coins into the box began. The weathered men backed away. The spectacled boy in the face of the fat black man had never stopped smiling. Melanie dropped in her dime. She understood the man had saved his own life and her eyes grew wet in love for him. His music, the boy in the man’s face, his peril.

Returned to our world, the next day she saw an eagle eating a gar carcass where John Roman had sat.

Wootie had been nearly a saint until the last, she thought. Goodness would wear you down too, God knows. You needed to see a bit of hell now and then. That and great joy. Would she ever have them? It seemed goodness was eroding her now, driving her into something flat and simple-headed.

At the bottom of her lawn was the pier. Old men gathered there, working on a sort of great cruising porch, a pleasure barge, under the supervision of Dr. Harvard. Dr. Harvard loved Melanie with a dreadful love, although she did not know it. His own wife, Nita, had cancer, so this pleasure craft could not be for her. He said it was for them all, for mild adventures up the enormous reservoir and for good philosophy and conversation, but it was really for Melanie. He was white-haired with a face unlined, four years older than Melanie. They were pretty old people and seemed matched and destined for a couple. Although there was the wife, taking her time to pass on, and Harvard, an ex-surgeon heavy with honors and thick with dignity, who could not declare himself. He wore his honors lightly, but the love of Melanie was like a tow chain locked around his neck.

Among the other old was Sidney Farté, with his shingles and bitterness, in starched shirts so stiff they seemed to make the little man into a kite, whispering with curses, bouncing in agony from one breeze to the next. Ulrich carried on with his new emphysema. He wore floral shirts and had cut down to five enormous Benson & Hedges cigarettes a day. Tall Pete Wren and his dog, Son, remained the only earnest fishermen of the pier crowd. Wren a master bluegill fisherman with fly rod and a Wake Island prevaricator who had borrowed the biography of his cousin and written a letter from a Private Martin Lewis testifying to his captain’s heroism. The local VFA gave a ceremony in Vicksburg with great belated reverence until the actual hero Wren was rolled in, sad but not angry at the cousin he had not seen in years. Pete Wren was a colonel who had made his rank in the Oregon National Guard.

Melanie had seen the old man weeping for loneliness in the middle of the pier crowd one afternoon. This emotion did not surprise her, and she drove with Wren to get him a dog from the Vicksburg pound. Now, with Son, a furred brat needing all kinds of attention, Wren seemed better. Though the dog, an Australian cattle dog, was a neurotic bother who would dive underwater to retrieve a fishing lure. Sometimes Lewis and his bride, Moore, only seventy, came to paint or sand. They were both in chemo, but active and inseparable. Moore was always overdressed, like a creature of ancient television housewifery. She wore heels and a pearl necklace when she shopped in Vicksburg. She retained these habiliments when naked and mounted by old Lewis, and this fact somehow got out to the rest, but the couple were unashamed in this scandal. In fact, honored by it.

When Ulrich was told of the scandal, he blinked and seemed pained, showing teeth in a yanked smile of incomprehension. It was feared he was headed for a breakdown. Ulrich watched the dog Son constantly, always near tearbreak.

Among these denizens Melanie moved. Lean, clean beige skin, bowed lips. An elegance on loan from the cinema, they thought. She was frank, to the point, with a high brow under pulled-back white hair, a visage of permanent gravity. The men almost quit their lies when she appeared, and this disgusted Sidney Farté, who felt it squeezed him into a church pew. It had been the same with the near-saint Wooten, her dead husband, such a clean little statesman who had rebuilt the cove pier and given it handsome rails. Sidney felt censored around him and was overjoyed to hear, after Wooten’s death, that he had begun running queer in his last days at the Methodist college.

Sidney’s old papa, Pepper, ran the bait store and was even nastier than Sidney, who waited on him to die. Sidney suspected both of them were born without a heart, but this did not alarm him. He had been in a position to improve himself and leave these counties for happier parts, but he had turned down each chance out of spite.

After a month’s visit, his nephew from Yale had told him he was a poisonous old coot who ought to be ashamed of himself. This floored Sidney for a week, but when he arose again, it was to enjoy this legend. He had been at it for seventy-eight years. Four years ago, when his wife died, he stood, dry in his eyes, blaming her for the cold rain over the hole but loving the fact the burying minister was a Korean Baptist who would have horrified her. Her form of dementia the last years was suspecting that Koreans were taking over all the acting parts on television.

During the actual Korean War, Sidney had volunteered to kill Koreans, having never known they were a possible race. The army turned him down for premature belligerency. Nevertheless, Sidney lied that he slaughtered gooks of all stripes over there and this was what had changed him. Not the guilt but the present absence of such happiness. Melanie, who wanted to know about men and war, looked through him with piercing gray eyes. He could hardly stand her presence. Oh, he wanted to sodomize her and puke on her back, but he certainly didn’t respect her.

Even to Melanie herself it wasn’t clear why she stayed here by the lake. Wooten’s old boat hung by ropes in the carport next to her station wagon. She could live where they delivered drugs and groceries. She could live in a house next to Eudora Welty, the grande dame of American letters, over in Jackson, the capital city, if she wanted. They would say what a striking woman in the aisles of the Jitney-Jungle, and she could return to a home of bleached, ivied brick, three stories. But the land of wealthy widows and elderly divorcées was not hers anymore, and she feared it.

In Vicksburg, on the asphalt, the deflected minions of want walked, those who lived to care for and feed their cars, and she watched them outside Big Mart. And the sad philosophic fishermen who lived to drag slabby beauties from the water, that dream of long seconds, so they told her. About the same happy contest as sexual intercourse, as she recalled it, though these episodes sank deeper into a blurred well every day. She loved the men and their lostness on the water. Their rituals with lines and rods and reels and lures. The worship they put into it. How they beleaguered themselves with gear and lore, like solemn children or fools. She had spent too much time being unfoolish, as if that were the calling of her generation. As you would ask somebody the point of their lives and they would answer: horses.