Yonder Stands Your Orphan

TWO

NEAR THE BAD RESTAURANT A MILE AROUND THE LAKE lived the ex-doctor Max Raymond with his wife, Mimi Suarez, the Coyote. She was a good deal younger. They performed Latin jazz with their band at the casino in Vicksburg. The Coyote was Cuban, the singer. She had shining black ringleted hair, very fetching to men and to Melanie too, who adored watching her. She swayed and waved her arms, a torso in a storm of mutiny, the legs beneath her another riot trying to run away from her underwear. And the sheen of sweat under the lights. She was made for tiny dresses and flashbulbs under her face. But this was not the best. Her voice was. Men and women stared at her mouth when she began her singing, startled as if by a ghost flying from her lips. A review had once compared her to Celia Cruz.

But her husband, nearby with his saxophone, the one who enjoyed her pleasures, was a sullen middle-aged creature and seemed to stand knee-deep in unseen wreckage. You could imagine him her jailer. His playing was vengeful, abstract, learned at some academy of the fluently depressed. He played against her, mocking or blaming her for her gifts. He had his fans too, but they were ugly people, sneering bumpkin punks and those who had always had the wrong hair. He seemed driven into low postures by her beauty, clawing at a pole to rise, spit, curse and hurl imprecations at her. During his solos, the rest of the band, men, would look up into the rafters as if incredulous about this tax on joy. His few smirking fans wished he would bitch-slap this Coyote woman once they were home. Because she was so fine, fine, and beyond. Bring her back to heel.

But although he held her responsible for some of his grief, Raymond was gentle to Mimi Suarez in their big decrepit cabin on the lake. He was a sort of Christian, but he despised striving, waited for visions. And was a poet. The Bible and whiskey on his desk, read randomly, drunk grimly. At one time he had thought Mimi Suarez would save him from all lost time. Her fire and rapture and flesh. But time had quit forgiving him and begun running short. He knew his poetry was not good, like his life, but he waited through the weak words for a vision and an act, as you would pan for gold by ten thousand wasted motions. He could get higher, higher to God, by his saxophone, an instrument resuscitated from his high school days when it was only a hole to hide his miserable head in. He needed music, the Coyote and God. And he needed to live close to evil. Mimi Suarez was unaware of this last need.

She did know that Raymond, as the attending physician, briefly, of her violent ex-boyfriend Malcolm, had destroyed the man by urging on his wish to commit suicide, a thing he would announce after beating her. Malcolm became the patient, the weak one needing help, while she sat in the waiting room, black and blue and cracked in the ribs.

Raymond saw her and wanted her. Both he and Malcolm were high on drugs, but Raymond’s drug was cleaner, Demerol straight from the hospital. He was certain he had identified intransigent evil in Malcolm. He dared him to be a man of his word and sent him off with several prescriptions. Malcolm succeeded only in giving himself a stroke. He lay now or stumbled, unable to remember nouns, no longer a songwriter, watched loosely by his old gang, who demanded a hearing on Max Raymond as a medical doctor.

Raymond resigned the profession without much remorse and took Mimi Suarez to live with him at a lesser house in Memphis. She too had been threatened by the old gang. Raymond joined the Latin band she sang with by first managing it and buying new horns and electronic refinements, then stepping into Malcolm’s old spot on saxophone. They rode the trend for Latin and were very prosperous, as bar bands went. Now they played the long casino job. Because Raymond knew the casino was evil. It meant nothing for a Christian visionary to live among the good and the comfortable, he thought. He wanted no cloistered virtue.

But he began seeing his splendid wife as the cause of his despondency, which increased until he played his way out of it. He felt unmanned by their lovemaking. It was all right when it was a big sin, but now that it was a smaller one undertaken with regularity, he felt weakened. He was both voyeur and actor when he took her, in all her spread beauty, but the part of voyeur was increasing and he knew he was a filthy old haint, as far from Christ as a rich man. He could have lived better with the memory of Malcolm dead, but as a stroke victim who might wander in through a door in Raymond’s head at any time, slobbering and gesturing, the guilt he inflicted was infernal, with no finality.

So far Raymond remained a hero to Mimi Suarez. Before Malcolm beat her, mainly for being beautiful and healthy and a drag on his addictions, she was attuned to the old precept of the Indian. Life was a river, not a ladder, not a set of steps. She knew something was wrong, but she was unconscious to living with a dead man, which Raymond in his current state nearly was. She knew many musicians looked reamed and dried and skull-faced, but she did not know that many of them, although mistaken for the living by their audiences, were actually dead. Ghouls howling for egress from their tombs. Pale, his black hair drawn straight back, deep startled blue eyes, Raymond was an older spirit gone into mind, a figure of desperate romance to her still. He hurt for things, and she pitied him as you might a deaf and dumb orphan around Christmastime.

He had chosen the very lake house, which he threatened to buy, for its late history of chaos. The landlord had told about these people proudly. He was in ownership of a rare legend. It was a poor county except around the huge lake and could not even afford much local color. Three years ago its tenants were middle-aged, a proclaimed witch and her sissy husband. The witch had been discovered leading a coven of teenage boys in turning over ancient tombstones in local cemeteries. She had plied the boys with oral sex at midnight. The authorities found the matter too stupid and nasty to prosecute. The youth were from good families the witch woman lived squarely among, in a grid of Eisenhowerera brick homes. Her husband stuck by her, and she meant to corrupt another bourgeois suburb in Shreveport when they left the lake house.

The next lodger was an embezzler who had drunk strychnine while the law pounded on the door. The enormous man, with his hound’s eyes, survived, but only as a shrunken wraith in draping skin at a federal pen in Missouri. He had betrayed hundreds of Baptist alumni at the school where he was president, many of whom still prayed for him and were shocked by his transformation. Heretofore he had been taken for brilliant and righteous. But years ago he had lost a teenage daughter, and the more generous said this must be when he turned against God and man. Many of his fellows remained confused, even when they reviled him. He had run with harlots in faraway cities, he had stolen two million dollars, he had become a scholar of hidden offshore accounts. One dear friend said that when he looked in his own bathroom mirror, he saw the wrath of evil just behind his own regular features. This friend was the man who brought the law to the door. He was devoted to the embezzler and thought him the best man he ever knew. He felt a Judas when he turned in his friend. Many spoke of broken hearts, but this man was an actual case.

Two weeks after the arrest, this man, ex — football coach at the college and a fisherman to whom every second on the water was dear, every bass, crappie, bluegill hoisted dripping from the lake, the effluvia of marine oil and gasoline at dawn, the shuddering motor, the skate across the glassy reds at evening. This man returned to the cabin, spent one night there, went out early in his boat and died. They found the boat making circles in the water a mile out. His body, the sixty-four-year-old body of a once second-team all-American guard, finally dead from an attack on the heart. A chorus of moans back at the little college, and agreement. They had never watched a sadder man. A man who perished from belief in a soul brother.

Then two springs ago, the landlord told Raymond, the realtors he was using, a married couple, moved themselves into this place on its small hill, with its vine-wrapped fence, its bee-loud honeysuckle, dwarf magnolias and the palmettos farther into the dark of the riverine bayous behind. At night you could hear the bull gators, hunka hunka, and the bullfrogs. Throats of bleating tin. At dusk, against this forest night, you saw a crane take flight, big as a spread greyhound and purest white.

The couple, Gene and Penny Ten Hoor, were no longer enthralled with each other, but they had a long fishing partnership. Penny sometimes dove from their boat to swim in the green-black lake. The water was still chilly from Tennessee streamlets into the Yazoo and Big Black, which fed the lake. She was in perfect shape and could stay underwater long distances.

In their slick boat, berthed at the eastern landing, was a cell phone. They were very prosperous in real estate, and they bought and sold lots in the pleasant venues remaining around the lake. Only local poverty stood in the way of a vaster development. It was a fishing, not a sports, lake. Bass fishermen do not as a rule care where they stay. Neither do they have much money left over after the outlay on the boat, trailer and tackle. They have brought their home with them.

The couple had dreamed once of an empire of condominiums at Eagle Lake, but that had stopped. Three times they had been threatened by angry callers. In this state live men and women nostalgic by age eleven. For things rambling, wooden, rain-worn, wood-smoked, slightly decrepit. The heft of dirty nickels. They flee to lakes from hateful pavements, concrete and glass. They are certain the great wars were fought for cheap fishing licenses.

More than by the telephoners, the couple had been stopped by the death of their young son in a school-bus accident. The lad was smashed, tossed. They had done nothing but fish since they lost him. Bass, crappie and bluegills. They favored the fly rod, an Episcopalian method in these parts. They fished too for catfish at night with a lantern on their boat. Monsters lay deep in this lake, so strong they could move their boat around like a sea fish when they were on. Gene and Penny frowned all the while now, as if trying to read a book in a foreign language. The book of rising each morning and for what? They hardly looked at each other. They returned to the huge cottage worn and sunburned.

When they ate at the awful restaurant, which some of the old fellows from the cove frequented, they were perfect consumers of its fare. They cared nothing for what they ate and barely noticed it. The old men thought it remarkable that the two of them had settled into this speechless apathy at so young an age, when two of the old fellows had waited decades to earn this pleasure from their own wives.

Sidney loved it. “They chanced to look at the other one and they’d kill the bastard, seems like. My word, it stirs the memory.”

Unbeknownst to the other, each had saved up the tranquilizers prescribed for them in their grief over their lost son. They did not begin taking them until the second week in the house, in a lull of energy for fishing. She complained that both the fish and the water smelled like birth, and then they came back to the cabin on the lip of the swamp, which smelled like birth and diapers, itself. Then the restaurant, where the bathroom was the same. But they could not quit going to these places. They began leaving clusters of fish, uncleaned, ignored, around the house. They were barely eating. They began drinking vodka with Gatorade.

After four days in this haze, she saw him lying naked and fat on the bed asleep and cut his member with a fillet knife. He bled a great deal and needed stitches, but they went nowhere. He rocked with a towel in his lap and they talked it over and he forgave her. The next day they went fishing together.

At suppertime she called him to the kitchen, where it was dark. The rest of the house was dim, two bare bulbs somewhere. She stood at the doorjamb with a finger to her lips for him to be quiet. He stood by her awhile, and she said, “He’s there, eating.” She meant their son. He blinked, and he did see something in the chair at the table. “He needs all his nourishment. So long now without eating,” she said. When she left for sleep, he walked to the chair and found the shape to be a tree limb she had brought in from the back and placed there. He cried but embraced the limb.

Then she began calling the ground evil, she could feel the evil in it right through her boat shoes. She felt men fighting, women struggling, animals fleeing. The groans of it shook her feet. They launched their boat on the water, but they drove it, a very nice cedarwood classic, very slowly, like old people with no purpose in an automobile. They never changed clothes anymore except to sleep naked.

They left the lake now and then, driving a Saab, again at the speed of elderly people in bad weather. The woman could not stand the voices that came in the window if they went any faster. They went to a cash machine in Vicksburg and withdrew thousands of dollars. The money was piled or scattered all over the house and they paid no attention to it. Apparently it was intended as getaway money, but they never left. They continued to fish and leave the fish about. Big catfish too, from the lantern fishing. They were pros. They answered neither the phone in the house nor the one in the boat. The phones kept ringing.

In the second week they bought tools in Vicksburg. Every movement was very slow now. If they heard the hammering from the restaurant across the meadow, the denizens might have wondered why anybody would put such effort into rental property. The husband began nailing everything he owned to the walls. Pants, belts, underwear and his fishing tackle, plug by plug. Nailed right through the breast of Lucky Thirteen, Dive-bomber, plastic worms.

Then he nailed up the fish, what grip he could find on what had rotted from the first week. He nailed up her clothing, panties and even Tampax. Then he slept, with the unnailed piles of tackle and money around him. He had begun nailing the money, but there was a lot. Pictures of his real estate office, photos of desirable lots. Big red Seconals and other pills scattered across the throw rugs.

The swamp got louder. The crane flew and brought a great shadow past the windows. The limb stayed where it was in their chair in the kitchen.

He was asleep on the bathroom tiles when she stabbed him again, this time in the thigh, just missing his testicles. He had never healed properly from the first assault, and this wound was deep. He heard her in the kitchen talking to the limb. The knife still hung in his thigh while he hit her across the back of the head with the flat of a shovel. Then he nailed her foot to the wall in the living room while she was unconscious, and then one of her hands.

He hammered a six-inch rafter spike through the meat of his left heel and was trying to do the same for his left hand when he either passed out or went to sleep. Both of them were full of Dilaudid, a narcotic used in recovery from lung and heart surgeries and sold at huge prices on the streets.

The phone kept ringing deep into the night. The sullen restaurateur was not stirred by their screams, but they brought Sidney Farté, Pete Wren and Dr. Harvard to the house. Then the odor, when they got in the viney yard. Under the hollering, the singer Aaron Neville crooned from the jambox, “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight,” heaving out his grace notes to soprano. But way over that the hollers, now husky female and then croaking male. They were out of drugs, drink, mobility. The old men almost did not go in. An aggressive mirage when they opened the front door. But soon Harvard knelt and did what he could, and somebody telephoned.

Along with the ambulance came the new sheriff of the county. It was their first look at him. He was young for the job and had a master’s in criminology from a school in Mexico. He seemed to be borrowing a southern accent for the benefit of the locals, and they thought him a bit too confident, not as impressed by this event as he should be. When the awe wore off, Sidney Farté felt all warm and lucky to have chanced on this crucifixion.

Months later but unrecovered, mildly brain-damaged, Penny preferred charges and sued her husband. He counter-charged. They limped into court eighteen months later in Jackson. So much was revealed that each side retired and the gallery went away in disgust, horror and pity. Sated. In the middle of the litigation, the Ten Hoors fell back in love.

Or, at any rate, in their wreckage they had found the uncontrollable pity that calls itself love. They wept and fell together. Their new vows did not stop here. Across the lake was a deserted barracks and barn and fifty acres contained by a broken fence of storm wire, a former quarters for a football and majorette summer camp, and this maimed and devoted couple began to convert the camp into a resort for orphans. They kept four horses and a pleasure barge, with fields for softball, archery, volleyball and badminton, horseshoes. They built a hall for movie nights. Catastrophe had brought their earnestness together. Sworn to give something back, they fell more deeply in love. A few weeks back the first orphans had come.

The ex-doctor Max Raymond practiced his saxophone, tuned to this house of chaos and horror. It was spring, or starting to be, and he felt the ghosts passing and then struggling down the green alleys of the deeps in the swamp behind them. His wife sometimes sang, perhaps for the animals and birds, alone on the back stoop. Her voice was pure, lush and sweet, unconscious of ugly history.

Raymond was fishing from the other side of the pier from the old men at work on their own barge when another came over from the orphans’ camp across the lake, twin Evinrudes putting behind, children at the rails. White, black, Vietnamese, Mexican. But they were all speaking like immigrants who knew only a few phrases of obscenity in English. The wife was at the stern trying to lead these children in song. They ignored her. Nevertheless, Penny kept smiling radiantly. Gene was at the wheel, also smiling with a sort of witless beatitude. The couple were still sallow and drawn from their calamity, no longer handsome but invested by their great pity. The children around them made rutting motions and blew noises on their arms. A small one urinated on the deck. All the while, many others were yelling filth. Reviling the dignity of this geriatric gallery on the pier. But the husband steered as if all was in hand and each child adorable. The wife kept leading the song. A vision beyond comment until they left and trolled southward to the dam.

Raymond thought of Malcolm, the rival he had destroyed. Did he look like the couple did now? Lunatic, pale, slumped. The idiotic hope in their faces. “I’m happy there’s a lake between us and that,” said Wren.

It looked like something, well, unlicensed. “My first look at them since they were hauled off in the ambulance,” said Dr. Harvard. “Poor people. Crippled. Thinking they’re doing good.”

“You seen everything that’s wrong with this fucking U.S.A. aboard that scow,” said Sidney. He had a deep chest cold and had been enjoying heaving up phlegm and spitting the gouts into the water, going for distance.

Two of the orphans were well-figured girls, maybe fourteen, both smoking cigarettes, their faces already set hard, their eyes already gone whoring, leers ready. Each of the old recalled them in his own way. Glittering eyes of a lizard. Troubled homes, troubled streets. A foreign perfume in these dreams. Old men eaten alive. A mindless revival of unspoken sins. Death by arousal.

Raymond watched their faces. Then he looked up the yard at Melanie coming down the hill, bringing cold beers to them. Sweetness and light, he thought. She was amazing. A face and body kept lineless by virtue, self-sacrifice.

Ulrich had been quiet, painting on deck varnish. Now he spoke. “We don’t love each other as much as we used to. You can see the uncertain looks, the calculations, the dismissals. People are not even in the present moment. Everybody’s been futurized. You look in those eyes and see they’re not home, they’re some hours ahead at least. I hate to go into Vicksburg anymore. Anywhere, really. It’s all like meeting people who have just departed. Old men and women don’t look wise anymore. They are just aged children. And who gets the highest pay? Actors. Paid to mimic life because there is no life. You look at everybody and maybe they’re a little sad, some of ’em. They’re all homesick for when they were real.” Ulrich began painting again as the others tried to guess what could have prompted this.

“Did you see them orphans?” asked Sidney.

“Orphans?” asked Ulrich. “Who isn’t an orphan, I ask you?”

Sidney had a living father who he wished were dead. Pepper Farté hated almost everything that moved. To buy something in his bait house was like pulling goods from the hands of a vicious hermit. When Sidney himself entered the store, the older man became livid, angry at the custom that demanded you acknowledge your son. Sidney was going to correct Ulrich, but then he recalled these matters and merely sneered.

“When you’re crazy like me, the brain keeps you warm. I haven’t had a long-sleeve shirt on all year,” Ulrich reflected.

“Shortness of air to the head is what explains you,” said Sidney.

“I wonder who is helping that poor couple with the orphans,” said Melanie. She handed a beer to Ulrich. “I don’t think you should be breathing paint in your condition, Mr. Ulrich.” She patted his shoulder. Ulrich painted on. She smiled.

Harvard watched Melanie in reverence.

I could love this woman too, thought Raymond. Like a Madonna. Maybe she is all the vision I’ll ever get. How can you have a faith without a vision now and then?

The woman has been graceful so long, kind so long.

A vision cannot be indefinite, an apparition. No, you go down the road and you see something there, dense and none other like it. Those of us who want visions can’t have them, maybe. They are given to old fools like Ulrich. I love him too. A better man than I am. Raymond thought this and then had a bluegill on. But what of the other night when I became so glad all of a sudden and for no reason that there was an Ireland, and that the natives of its villages were going about their ways, to and fro, from stone cottages and green rocky hills. I had an ecstasy thinking that. What was that?

Melanie walked with her small ice chest back up the pier and continued around the cove on an unknown journey. Her walking made no sense until she rounded the inlet with its thick lily pads, then went on to the point where the black man John Roman sat on his bucket fishing. It began to rain a little. The figures over there were small, but the man watched as she handed the fisherman a cold beer. He took it. The rain sparkled over the bent willows above the two.

Fairly soon, as it began to rain thickly, the pier crowd beheld this woman on the back of Roman’s motorbike, clutching his stomach, as he rode them out of the trees and up the long rise to her house. Small figures, they entered her kitchen together.

“Lookee. She’s steppin’ out on you, Harvard,” said Sidney with a wide sneer. “She been wantin’ it, but she can’t wait forever, eh, eh.”

This man of great dignity and honors, the man I should have been, Raymond thought, watching Harvard again, poleaxed by love and this old guttersnipe Sidney. His eloquent white hair flattened out and dripping, eyes stupid. Like a bum with a ruined wig.

Down in the south corner of the lake, Mortimer watched the absurd floor and roof on pontoons move toward him. Two adults and crammed with children. He did not like children. But he became suddenly alert when he noticed the two fourteen-year-old girls leaning on the rail his way. They both smoked in the sullen manner of the hopeless. One was already bosomy. The other had fine bare shoulders. Just budding upper frame, but muscled long legs. Then he stared at the adults. They had loony smiles, but there was something depleted about them both. They must be church people, he decided. That stupid hope on their faces. That trust that they were always on the Lord’s stage, pulled by the strings of a larger design. Looking for a cross. Maybe these brats themselves. He heard a few curses shouted his way, but the adult couple seemed oblivious. Speakers of another tongue.

He knelt here at the boat ramp with chipped granite boulders banked close to it, red sand to either side. It was his first time at the lake, he had come to take a boat from a man deeply in debt to him. The man had wanted to fish one last time in it. He was waiting. The girls were the first exciting thing he’d seen in weeks.

At this juncture he had no plans to hurt people around the lake. He did not like bodies of water much, had never seen the ocean. He was indifferent to trees. Soil was hateful to him, as was the odor of fish. But like many another man forty-five years in age, he wanted his youth back.

He wanted to have pals, sports, high school girls. This need had rushed on him lately. He lived in three houses, but he had no home. He did not like the hearth, smells from the kitchen, an old friend for a wife, small talk. It all seemed a vicious closet to him. He moved, he took, he was admired. But he had developed a taste for young and younger flesh. This was thrilling and meant high money. Men and women in this nation were changing, and he intended to charge them for it.

Religion had neither formed nor harmed him. Neither had his parents in southern Missouri. But he despised the weakness of the church, and of his parents, whom he had gulled. He was a pretty boy born of hawk-nosed people. It was a curse to have these looks and no talent. Long, lank. Hooded eyes, sensual lips that sang no tune. Still, he quit the football team because of what it did to his hair, claiming a back ailment that had exempted him from manual labor since age fourteen. There are thousands of men of this condition, most of them sorry and shiftless, defeated at the start. Many are compulsives and snarling fools, emeritus at twenty.

His parents doted on him. The pew in the church also hurt his back, he said. But he would go with them now and then, a martyr. Because already he liked to mock the sheepish Methodist minister, to whom the world was a terror from which he led his little flock in long, constant retreat. The hymns of this church were like the moan of doomed animals to his ears.

Mortimer’s parents were both unassertive postmen. They had no other children but kept a chicken yard in the back, which mortified him. He was often in the house alone, indisposed to school, to the wretched town, where almost everybody walked with a sag. A neighbor boy showed him a pornographic picture when he was fifteen, and the bone-deep thrill of seeing that woman in her happy pain had never left him, had never diminished. He looked for it behind every curtain of culture, of law.

His likeness to Fabian had attracted many girls, then women, often several at once. They loved his brooding, his shy muttering, his brute eyes. He seemed all hooded by his brows even when he had nothing on his mind. The thick wavy hair was eloquent for him. These were girls of lesser elegance, lesser clothes, lesser cuteness, but nice enough.

At home one evening he screamed out suddenly that he didn’t have a fine car or any money, and he knew that the two of them, his parents, were hiding it for themselves. He promised he would never attend their funerals. There would be no grown son to honor them when they passed. He frightened his mother and father. They gave him a nice car and money. When he got enough, he left them. There was other money too, from the three girls who left with him, one of them a student teacher from a nearby college. She was his first conquest of the better sort, the scioness of a middling-wealthy owner of a department store. She had good legs, spectacles, grammar. He spent some years doing manual labor but cushioned by women, who gave him money. Then around thirty he found his calling, as most do.

He did not know the term gigolo. Something about him canceled scruples in women. He didn’t know what that was either but accepted it as a birthright. For reasons he didn’t ponder, he did not love but found the language of love came fluid to him. He never even had the puppy kind of love. He was jaded before he had a crush. He was a pimp before he comprehended what a pimp was. It was just that women liked him, especially the marginal breeds. They shed all natural jealousies, even pride, for him. They broke open on him. They went with other men and gave him half the money.

His name was Man Mortimer. Death by sea or by mother. He was horrified of progeny. Nothing was busy or brooding enough to follow him.

Seven years ago the girl from his early days, a store owner’s daughter, had come to him with a child six years old she claimed was his. She was on hard times, drugged, worn, emaciated. She thought the son would bring him back to her. He denied fatherhood.

They were at an old gravel bed outside St. Louis. She walked back to his car where the boy was waiting and shot him in the forehead. Mortimer was not aware she had a pistol. Now she sat in the car beside the body of the child. The night silent, hot, the moon white somewhere. Mortimer’s expensive loafers on the gravel. He always needed expensive shoes and boots. He stood looking in the foggy windshield at the woman behind it until she raised the pistol and shot herself in the temple. He looked away, and for a long while he watched lightning reveal shivering bushes in the field next to him. He couldn’t be sure this was not a dream. Even while he dragged them both to the trunk.

A thin highway dog lurked at the edge of the trunk light. Skeletal but with full paps. She smelled the blood, thrust out her muzzle, wanting to eat but fearing him. He took pity on her and intended to use the pistol on her. With this thought he assured himself he was a right man. But she ran off into a dark field of sedge.

He drove southward with his burdens, hating that his shoes were scuffed from labor. These sordid details, these fluids. He could never forgive her. She had shown him hell.

“She just wanted me to watch, is all,” he said aloud. “It was already done when she got here. She wanted to ruin me. Well.”

He felt no pain outside this nasty theater of his mind. But he felt a surge of power. A tougher man seemed to drive the car now. He gathered himself into this new form. He took some pride in the force of his withdrawal from women. He had driven some into lesbianism. Or supposed he had. He had barely laid a hand on any of them. He believed in the mind.

Acquaintances in Vicksburg would help him bury his old history.

He wondered vaguely, and not for the first time, whether his departure had destroyed his mother. A person like me don’t come along every day, he thought. You just got to watch yourself. Don’t ever mistake that I’m like you.

It was only when his looks started to go, at age forty-three, that he became hungry for all the life he had missed. Something had made him grow up too fast, and he cursed that thing now. He fled from one of his three houses to the other, the next house always a getaway from the last. The people he knew were made curious by his changes this last year. With them he seemed to be doing some imitation of warmth, friendship, trust. Childish, stilted gestures, as if studied from some old book on stagecraft. They had no idea what he had on his mind.

When the man who owed him the boat at last came up, Mortimer told him to stay in it. He wanted driving somewhere.

“You see that pontoon barge way out there? I want you to follow it, see where they get off it.”

“Those children? Them is orphans from the new camp.”

“Orphans? Well. Let’s see where they land. I might could help them.”

The man was surprised. Then he looked at Mortimer’s feet. “Careful. Them ain’t no boat shoes. They like for selling cars in.”

“Just drive it. If you can stay quiet, you might be earning this boat back.”

The man was very warm to this idea. Parting with the boat was breaking his heart. He should have stuck with it and fishing. A simple soul who don’t ask much more than God’s waters. But no, he had to get off into gambling, borrowing and the night sweats.

The adult couple were weary, the same idiot glassy beams in their faces as they watched the children disembark to the pier. They seemed unconnected to the children individually but joined to their collective oversoul. Only about six of the children were tame. They peered at Mortimer and his pilot coming up in the boat, but he could not be sure they quite perceived him. The huge smiles were already on them when he came, and they seemed only a little puzzled.

“I saw you across the lake.” Mortimer pointed. “A voice said to me, ‘Now what can I do to help out?’ And it not even Christmas. I said, ‘I bet these good folks could use a hand.’”

“A hand?” the husband said.

“Myself, I had no mother or daddy either. I know where you’re coming from.”

With their great smiles, they seemed unequipped to deny him. Like they had already assented when he was on the way over. Both of them nodded. Mortimer knew they were damaged, and this fact pleased him. He felt to be their senior officer the minute he set foot on the pier, looking for where those two girls could have got off to. They were over to the side, watching him, sullen, too old for this camp, their legs jammed to the grass in a stance both defiant and beckoning. Street-corner women.

Mortimer found out he had much in common with the male adult. Their pain. As Mortimer walked up the pier to the lawn with the couple, the man in the boat whispered, “I heard a voice out there too. It said, ‘Freddy, watch out. You driving up some nasty river with this shark.’”