Yonder Stands Your Orphan

FOUR

DEE ALLISON’S SONS ISAAC AND JACOB WERE NINE AND TEN, but they already wanted a car, and they planned to take some orphans from the camp on a ride within the year. The car appeared one afternoon in June standing dry out of a former deep bayou that disappeared in a sinkhole. The earth opens and water goes downward in five or six seconds and you have a hole where a pond was, or a service station. Florida, because of its vast underground riverine passages, is first in sinkholes, but in other states wet over long periods you will hear of trailer homes, and a few times fishermen blandly working a pool, suddenly disappearing and the soil gray as lunar earth within the week.

The Allison boys had found the car all bare in the hole yesterday, on the back edge of the insane Irish ex-priest’s land, with one of the priest’s dogs messing around it in high anxiety. The car seemed to be a vintage something none of them had seen in person, but it was a ton and a half of rust mange in a coupe shape when they found it. They very much wanted this for their teenage car, the boys, and their older brother, Sponce, who did not confess it. You had the sense you could chip it out like a hunk of ocher marble and release a beauty within.

Isaac and Jacob did not care who they stole from, and they were also used to obtaining things just by guileless asking. But Carl Bob Feeney was an unbound hermit anxious to fire on trespassers. He loved his Irishness, had always been lonesome, and he compared himself to the expatriate atheist writer Samuel Beckett. He was given to patrolling the woods, as at this moment, with a.22 Magnum rifle, along with his dogs. There were eight of them, pound dogs ill used by deer hunters who’d run them for a season and then deserted them. When Feeney found them, they were feral and starved and had battled coyotes much more sophisticated and swift. Now they were merely loud and always in trouble. Not so much treeing creatures or baying at the moon or pursuing trespassers as rediscovering one another, beasts they seemed never to have encountered on this baseball field — size domain before, and beginning blind fights all over again. Most dogs do not have much recall or shame about recent hostilities. These dogs appeared not to recall other dogs as a possibility.

Today the boys had brought Sponce and his friend Harold Laird, who had such a sick crush on their mother. He fixed engines, but his main vocation was waiting for her to turn up from work in Mortimer’s gift, the Range Rover, used and hunter green, and emerge from it in her white stockings and wary boredom. Harold could fix anything to run, like Ulrich’s lost Jet Ski, given a strong limb and a chain and another working vehicle. He would show them the ropes once the thing was started. He owned a rugged high-horsepower ATV that they all sat on now, soberly driving short distances with a good muffler so Feeney wouldn’t hear them.

The ex-priest’s ears were not that good, anyway, from alcohol and heavy-metal music. Soundgarden, Motorhead, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Marilyn Manson, the forgotten Irish rappers House of Pain. He may have stolen from the collection plate to buy the vast stereo system of 150-wattage that he and his nephew Egan thoroughly enjoyed.

The late seventies and eighties brought on the music of the homicidal charge, a home war after the lost war of Vietnam. This is the land of Visigoths, Picts, Celts, Zulus, Huns, Indians, Scots, Vikings and Tripoli corsairs, with many substrata of Mongols, banditos and racial marines in a polyglot of fierce challenges. The ex-priest himself had been chaplain to the marines in Korea and still believed them the toughest armed force in the history of the world. What other kind of music was inevitable for these people? The armed services know it is classical and employ it freely. And civilians, dressed in the GI-black T-shirt with something nasty printed on it, hair long behind, short at the sides, greasy blue jeans and jackboots tougher than anything they might wear them to do, which is mostly listening to heavy metal and imagining a horde assault against dance majors and carrying off their willing women on their shoulders. The little boys joined the ex-priest in this enthusiasm unknowingly. Harold had gotten them small T-shirts to match their long hair behind. One shirt read: There’s Shit in My Ear Were You Saying Something? The other on the nine-year-old said: If You Ain’t a Hemorrhoid Get Off My Ass. These shirts were made for car drivers.

The problem of claim on the car might not be a problem. Who owned a sinkhole below the land after all? But less clear was whether the car was on Feeney’s land or the disused grounds of the orphans’ camp. They did not intend to ask the couple who owned and ran the camp. This fragile team stayed on Mars, it seemed to the boys, and discipline was so loose that they had seen many an orphan in Redwood and even Bovina when Harold took the family out to eat. They smoked and purchased naked muscle-women magazines, but most of them were nice enough, good playmates. They liked heavy metal too.

The ultimate goal of most heavy-metal rockers is to catch a sensitive wretch such as Michael Stipe of REM alone in a cow pasture and drive over him in a raid of motorcycles and war Rottweilers. The priest was quiet, however, like Beckett, and organized Gothic invasions of the Vatican itself in his mind when the hard stuff was on. He was in the woods with his rifle now, and he did not know what his dog was into. He could swear he heard bursts of grumbling heavy metal in the woods down to the east. He walked slowly, smoking Players one after the other, hungover on Colt 45 malt liquor, a can of which was cold in his pocket for the moment of necessity.

The boys went straight to work. They were going to ask the priest about the car but decided not to, because nobody knew quite how seriously to take the.22 Magnum. Feeney had shot nothing yet but a yard jockey he had stolen down the lake, from the lawn of white people he detested.

His nephew Egan had tried to take the gun away from him, but he would have had to take on a whole fresh paranoia, a job close to sweeping out a large hospital. Egan would lecture the old man patiently. Except for the idea of his trespassed land, his uncle remained still an ethical Christian without want or hope for material. Even his alcoholism could be moderate, leaving the juice alone three straight days with no real sickness. Egan held up his prized old switchblade with the Mexican flag colors one afternoon and offered to throw it as far out in the woods as he could if his uncle would throw that rifle the same. There was still much goth in Egan, he knew it. He did not think Christian heavy metal was possible, only heavy metal, but it might be the music of Christ’s deepest anger with the whip against the money changers in the temple. The next trip to the lodge, he saw the old man had brought the rifle back in and had a whole new box of shells for it, polishing them, as no sane rifleman ever did. Some of the dogs were going unfed, they urinated and excreted in the hallways.

Egan was worried sick about the sanitation and even more about the fellow shooting an orphan or some other child around the land. Somebody just fishing for crappie in the grotto pond, one of the prettiest natural-spring pools he’d ever seen, where Christ Jesus might have knelt in his loneliness for solace from the ailing masses and baffled disciples. Egan was going to have to put his uncle in Onward, but Egan had no money, and the church had stopped its insurance for the old man. There was nothing. Egan had sold his own Harley Softail, an act that broke his heart. The IRS had taken his Triumph Tiger. He had an old Nissan and no more credit at the hardware store to fix the lodge or his three churches. No more credit at the Robert E. Lee Motel, where they had cut him a nice break by the month. His wife had left him for another Christian biker who still had his Harley, brand-new at $22,000, $5,000 more in leather bags and honcho seat and tank, very righteous. Egan was looking at nothing but a last supper. He had only a hundred bucks. Without the good gas mileage of the ancient Nissan, he could not have made it to Yazoo City.

He loved to go there to visit the grave of an old pal of his, the writer Willie Morris, who had kidded him once with the question “If you were fourth and fifteen on your own one-yard line in the last thirty seconds of the game, would Jesus know what to do?” Egan had laughed wildly. “Of course! Bomb to Peter. No other choice.”

“Peter dropped the ball for Christ at the crucifixion, my friend,” said Morris.

“That’s why he ain’t ever going to drop one again, Willie.”

The past weeks, the weather come over his own grave now, Egan thought deeply of killing the both of them, nephew and uncle, with the gun. But he couldn’t. He was not good enough to see God yet, and the old man was worse. An alternative had presented itself, but Egan was not ready to admit it.

Feeney’s dogs were all over the trunk, and the boys had to kick them back. But the Lord smiled on them then. They heard the old man go back to his lodge, called loudly by his nephew, who had a new car in the drive. A big shiny luxury SUV.

Harold always had the tools. He was from an old stripe, those who fixed everything broken in history. You do not understand how they carry the right tools in those thin white overalls, but they were there around the P-51s and C-47s in the Big One. Nobody cared about them but the fliers who knew. Such a mechanic was Harold.

He popped the trunk and pulled up the lid, and the two boys and Sponce ran backwards like hares through tall grass and bushes. So fast they were out of sight, and Harold was left caught in a cloud of rot, so bad he thought these things in the trunk were huge dead catfish for a minute. They weren’t, and he got back quickly too. Missouri tag. Who would leave the tag? Only a drugged idiot, the man who was now walking swiftly through the four acres of trees and fronds, having heard noise. He held his uncle’s rifle.

The mother and child were collapsed in soured meat. So vile they arose with smell and commenced being skeletons almost instantly. To Harold they seemed to sigh while doing it. The boys had come back to within fifty feet.

“This bitchin’ car’s older’n me,” said Harold. “Sorry for cursing, boys.”

“Ransom,” said Sponce.

“How you know their name?” the smaller boy asked.

“Ransom is a thing, dickweed. Somebody kidnapped these two and held them out for ransom but cheated and killed them or nobody paid.”

“These folks is ours,” said the older child.

“What could you pissants do with them old folks?”

The children began to behave as interns of science, walking and thinking, not too close to the trunk yet, but seeing the car might be saved.

“That is a mother and child. You could boil them bones so they not putrid and set them up with wires and it would be a family, him Jesus the baby and her Mary at Halloween, and you could have Christmas both.”

“They start Christmas the day after Halloween at Big Mart, anyway,” said Harold. “But what you mean, have? Where would you have them?”

“Like on a float in a parade, or you could make that car into a convertible if the top’s not no good and ride them in the backseat.”

“Why? Who the hell would be looking?”

“To scare ’em.”

“You mean the man that did this, if it is a man?”

“Well him too, but he’d be dead too, wouldn’t he? If he was older than this car, or you, Harold.”

“You boys ever hear of Sherlock Holmes?”

“No.”

“Well you ain’t him. You got your detective work running around the barn to hump itself.” This speech by Sponce made Harold very uncomfortable. Despite the T-shirts, he was on a new program to stop using the little bad language he did. He wanted to be an influence on these children, in hopes of giving Dee another one someday.

Egan looked on from the last strand of scrub pine and winter wheat. My God. If I run them off and get that tag. If I can even make myself do that. You go through life asking when do I use the rifle. These boys aren’t even trespassing. The thing is, I could kill myself after I crawl in the trunk with that pair, if they would leave and give me enough time. What they want is that car. All the rest is my hell, not theirs.

It is this far I am now from my Christ.

Take me back.

Or forward.

There ain’t no standing here, Lord.

I just as much as slaughtered Mary and child seven years ago.

When Man Mortimer got out of the hospital, he wasn’t through hurting for a good long while and was almost unmanned. But then he watched his only video and felt the stirring of loin sympathy and was mildly satisfied. He drove to Monroe, Louisiana, in Egan’s old Nissan, ordered a meal at a drive-in, which he never did because he might be seen patronizing one of these things, and when the car waiter came out with the chili dog and diet Pepsi, Mortimer reached out the window as if to offer the boy a long column of change, but it was a box cutter instead. He cut down the whole length of the kid’s forearm, which caused him to shriek and almost faint, scattering the food. Mortimer drove off hastily and left behind smudges of the Nissan’s old tires.

Last night at one of his homes, the big fifties-ranch-style one, he had watched on his large flat-screen Phillips television the film clips and recitation of a minister. A curious breed of faith, perhaps not even Christian.

“Why do people look for science, science fiction and signs of the End? Why do they seek the Revelation of the Apocalypse here and there and chant the old chants of the coming of the Antichrist, the Four Horsemen? Science fiction has already been had, fools. It was the Battle of Kursk, German tanks against Russian tanks, fifty-seven years ago. It was Leningrad, Stalingrad, Moscow, Berlin, idiots! What does it take, a sock in the jaw for you to get it that the Forces of Darkness fought then? The Antichrist on both sides. Piss on Star Wars. Nothing touches WW Two for science fiction and wasteland.

“What else do you need? Can’t you see that things are better now? That the prophets are winning more battles? Where they are losing is At Home. Plenty and boredom and people are killing because they got, get this, no other imagination! And you have Mormons, for God’s sake! What the hell is that? And who, by the way, is president of this Space Walk? You got any idea? You got a TV, don’t you? I thought so. You don’t have a clue in hell who our President or His Wifeness are. Now that’s some science fiction. Our President will never kill himself, but if he did, as he ought, he would wonder who was performing the act. And our First Lady would name a different murderer three days running. Is this what the school of Yale does for people? My aching ass. Give me Harry Truman from our worst community college. He’d be on the roll, The Roll, there at last! Shut up!”

Mortimer thought he himself was the point of this address, that he was still suffering from a dizziness rushing from the nads. Behind the man, pictures of Nazis and Russians blowing each other apart in the cauldron kept running, and one of the Russian soldiers in the bowl-shaped helmets looked a great deal like him. This man was directing fire and using binoculars near artillery pumping up and down in a plain of mud. The man looked like the singer Fabian but stealthy and gung-ho, as if he had stumbled into an important movie.

The afternoon after his work at the Monroe drive-in, Mortimer was still in Egan’s car, a blue thing going for a record in mileage and fading. He was not sure why he had traded cars, but now he was glad for the incognito and ease of parking. He had a feeling he would get more hooks into Egan yet. He parked under a century oak curved over the drive at Onward. He waited until the hour satisfied him and went around back. When he looked inside the door, he was clear. There was nothing to hurt in the first room, just chairs and a blood pressure cuff. In the next, however, was a nice cabinet with all of Melanie Wooten’s glass animals in a miniature African-plains scene, done with extraordinary patience and care. Giraffes, wildebeests, tigers, lions, monkeys, panthers, elephants. He picked up the whole scene in the swathe of green burlap and crushed it under his Johnson & Murphy wing-tip loafers. He had dust and glass specks on them now. He heaved up the sack and set it as a bag of trash, matchstick trees, shoe-dye water holes, on the cabinet where it had waited for the patients to enjoy. Then he slipped out the back, just about on the spot when nap time at Almost There was done.

Much dither broke out on the discovery of the animals soon afterward. Melanie came in for her readings while it was going. She didn’t want this, but one of the elderly patients had already called the sheriff’s office by the time Melanie arrived. Dee Allison awoke without actually sleeping, as she often did. “Number one, Mrs. Wooten,” she told Melanie, “I have no idea who did this. But the sheriff is not going to come out about a case of smashed glass animals.”

“Oh I know. I’m embarrassed. He can’t be that bored. Who would even take the time to do this?”

“I don’t know anybody who would even come here on purpose,” said Dee.

But the sheriff did come out. He had a good build and short hair and, when he neglected to modulate his voice, did not sound even remotely southern. Delaware, maybe. He admitted he liked espresso very much and was pleased there was a machine here, along with very modern books on all subjects, weight loss, sexual improvement, racy novels. Bleden’s huge child-psychology tome If They Were My Child. The sheriff’s name was Facetto. He performed in plays with the Vicksburg Theater League and had never played a lawman, even when he was in college in Mexico. Dee Allison had not seen his television meditations on the law and the world on the evening news each Saturday night, but he did have a presence. They said he was New Breed, this young high sheriff of Issaquena County. He knew, or talked anyway, psychology and the demographics of crime.

“This is the work of a teenager who may be having early bursts of schizophrenia. Most likely. I’ll get prints, but it won’t lead anywhere, I’ll bet. The girl won’t even remember doing it, I’d guess. Tragic. We had a boy in a youth group when I was young, we all went to the circus, but he attacked the bedroom of our den mother and tore it to shreds. He didn’t know why, we surely didn’t, he’d been urged to go to the circus with us. He was quiet, tall, barely whispered. The attack was his language. I’ll never forget him. Dillon Brad.”

“A girl? Why?” asked a man in a wheelchair. He had a deep crush on Melanie Wooten and was the angriest of all.

“The temperament. This was meant to inflict the most hurt on something delicate and painstaking and artful. A more feminine principle. If she had any intentions at all outside of fury. I think so. It took preparation.”

Dee Allison was very attracted to the sheriff, who was thirty-six. When he slipped back and forth from southern to East Coast accent, she felt at home. She was good at her work that way. She spoke illiteracy and literacy, depending on the patient. They had all kinds at Onward now. Even Vietnamese, Cuban, Korean, Pakistani. The ones who first owned the tourist courts had gotten old right along with the rest. There were the few vicious hicks too, of course, who had never had a right day and intended to live until they found one. Facetto looked directly at Dee’s bosom and blinked in approval without being coarse. But he returned his look to the victim here, Melanie, and held up an uncrushed zebra figure, crystalline and delicate.

“This is art. It is precious, priceless. So we are talking sacrilege of a sort. There may be even religious overtones.”

What an ass. Dee thought of another nasty T-shirt she had ripped off her son and scolded Harold for, which made him beg and beg forgiveness. He had not read it, bright white against black black. Medium-size. But it belonged on a bumper sticker. If I Had Wanted to Hear an Asshole I Would Have Farted. It seemed appropriate now.

The ex-doctor Raymond was having tenderer moments with his wife, Mimi Suarez, and she was learning to love the big cottage. Now she knew that animals listened when she sang on the back stoop, because she saw them hearkening. Once two little boys were hidden, doing the same thing. The boys were in love. It was a difficult love somewhere between the need for an actual mother and the affection a pagan yard ape might have for the Madonna, with the delicacy of all women’s laps and breasts. The voice was what brought it all together, though, the night when they first saw her and she didn’t see them, out under a wild magnolia with its pod mulch underfoot, and she was bare-breasted. In no boastful way, no criminal way, no way wicked. Because who would she be seducing?

Max Raymond no longer liked to think of himself as a former doctor at all. He had met and chatted with a real doctor, Harvard, many times, and he understood that much of his life consisted simply of a failure to fail. Now he was a saxophonist and bad poet. He thought more and more of his mother, was working on writing about her. Most thoughts that were any good, he recalled, were merely getting frank with an ancient truth.

His mother was a powerful Baptist who thought constantly of the Lottie Moon Mission and its Chinese orphans. His father was a former gunner on a battle cruiser in the Pacific, but his anguish over this remained in the form of absence. Not drink or drugs, certainly not psychological trauma, but a refusal to be anywhere much if he was not firing a gun at a Zero, the height of his life and the depth of it too. He had been aired out by a halo of lead, and his steps on this earth were light. He was not big and muscular. He remained spidery like a distance runner or a tall jockey.

Ma was navy too. That burnt-leather voice. She sucked on Old Golds, Fatimas. Smoke ran out of her like a bombed ship. She had mated twice, bringing forth Raymond and his brother. By her will, Max arrived ten months after conception. Of average height although a little thin, he was born discouraged. Too big for grade school, then suddenly too small for life, he felt.

Raymond’s mother would grab him by the throat when he was a lad. “Love the Lord, you little nit.”

“Ma, these swimming trunks are too big.”

“Excuse me, but I am feeding the heathen orphans of the world. What is your difficulty now?”

I was sent to my room to beg the Lord to have me, Raymond wrote, hitting whiskey straight from the bottle but only twice an hour. When Ma got the sad fairy organist at the church fired, she said, “What he is stays between him and his Lord. But his music blent poorly.”

It was the movies A Mighty Fortress, The Life of Luther, Ben-Hur, The Robe and others she approved. Then, for myself, I slunk to the old Royal Theater in Jackson to see the vampire films and their women breathy and innocent in their nightgowns. Like a pink supper in the rainy Carpathians. I had a mental woman, imaginary I mean, who wrote me letters from Dracula’s castle, surrounded by her friends, the beauties from the Bible movies, also almost naked and looking down at their Jew sandals. My replies to them would do whole peoples in. “I’ve had it with them. My dears, the French must die.”

I didn’t have much left for the local girls except Ruthie, a majorette, who slapped me for my thoughts and told Ma, now small and whispering like a husk in the wind. She forgave me because Ruthie wore her legs bare, spangled and strutting like a field slut. It was staggering what a humanist Ma became when Pa stepped out the last step. Her mercy took on the softness of a hound’s ears. I don’t know if this was love or only understanding.

Now that you’re dead, I have your life to play with, Ma, Mary Perkins Raymond, and forgive me for it. Guide my mercy. Endlessly rocking, and she died. She did so much good she was never bored until the time of her final sweetness.

Ruthie did love Ma and her memory. It was not this writer but Ruthie who put flowers on Mother’s grave once a month. I brought along a cup of steaming coffee from the truck stop for her tomb, unable to think of much else she enjoyed but cigarettes and orphans and Baptists. And Pa with his own tomb right beside her. I believed he had missed so many Japanese with his gun back in the forties that, disheartened, he could not smell the roses. Could not find the silver lining. I did not know a firm thing about him. A near acquaintance of his informed me that Pa was stone deaf from cannon every minute he knew me. I always thought he was a mystic. He couldn’t hear, he didn’t want to see us, he ranged solitarily I still don’t know where. The money he returned with, it smelled like dogs sometimes.

I did not throw myself on Ma’s tiny form in the coffin, but I wanted to. They keep you so far away with that last taxidermy. So much I had not done for her, never mind her orphans overseas. I was now forty-five, married twice. But I was still a boy in some kind of trouble in the room, needing to pray for myself in a smaller room, needing to regret this worm of me. I lost my bones, it felt like. They had spilled clicking around my shoes. But I was not given to histrionics, as Ruthie was, her whom I never married, regardless of all her postures.

Ruthie sinned, again and again, and cheated at cards, even stole cattle. Deceived her boys and her husbands. Then she would pick her Sunday and appear in a small church where theater had never been. She was now sorry in public for everything, everything. In a new meek dress accenting nothing. From her midheeled sensible shoes.

“I have sinned in automobiles, airplanes, under trestles, in warm ponds with cattle watching. This was partly liquor, that liar, or the chemical cocaine, that serpent. I was Jezebel who fell out of her window onto the street and the dogs licked up her blood. I have betrayed my marriage, over and over. I played all evil rock bands that there are on the stereo, at deafening volume. Lynyrd Skynyrd. Can you call this life?” Everything she should have whispered, she yelled. The churchgoers were cowed. Small children laughed or applauded.

Christ loved sinners so, better than the pious, she went on. He loved the hot blood that flowed under his cool fingers. She’d brought her own sermon and redemption with her.

I barely realized I was mad for her. There was a time, very tender, when that was possible. Just as John Roman is mad for Chet Baker, who was made for love and for horn, Chet at the end with toothless bony soul. Fell out of a window and died, I think, after being everything God gives a man. He never played the horn loud, never. Never showed off. What an ear. No running around jagged, like me, he was mad for love. To be more like Chet Baker in my heart. My good Christ, give me talent please, no more art. I loved Ruthie.

I was a success, but wrongly, deeply. Each year there was a new record of giving to the Lottie Moon Mission fund led by my mother. And I needed an appointment with Dr. God, as the Oak Ridge Boys sang. The better part of my malformation was my own. Beyond the saxophone I had no dreams. Well, a few cigarettes and looking out the window. I wondered what my essence was all through med school. As if I had one. Then the Peace Corps and back like a lost hound to the delinquent Ruthna, the hospital bed, the narcotic line. She now called herself Ruthna of the suburb Rathnar. What in my glassy delirium to do except begin dating her? But is there anything wronger than your young daydreams coming true?

Her man Harb got into a wreck. Harb, his woman and car stolen and defaced. And Harb striking me, the last blow an uppercut right through. He began hitting me in the face right then in the hospital, where I worked but was currently a patient on fluids. Now was I sorry I had run with Ruthna? Harb was a small man even at bedside. “Harbison! Harbison!” I appealed to his better nature. Such names as they give down here they make you desist when you call them out. “Have patience, man,” I pleaded with him. “I’m already in pain every minute. She hurt me too, remember? Would you like a high heel in your ass? In your dead mother’s bed?” While she spoke, standing over me, in some unknown tongue of lechery. There’s no use looking like me, she said, if you ain’t going to act it out.

Her old lover Crews was showing off his mangled leg in the parlor and collecting pills from visitors far counties away. This was Ruthna’s infamy. Nobody wanted to miss her next spree. It might be her last.

There is no doubt I carried my same love for her straight to Mimi Suarez. My Coyote. But Mimi is innocent. The band was playing at Nubie’s in Memphis, and I had to have her. I was mainly good, I thought. I was no longer a racist. I knew I could exceed their saxophonist simply in pure fury. Yet I disliked most people. If diseases could come attached to something like an ambulant dummy, I might still be a doctor. But her hair meant more to me than. . Well, there was Malcolm in the way, and I took more than his spot in the band.

Few liked me at first, with my hunching toward the Coyote as she drove her hips. You can play a lot of jazz in a mambo, actually begin lessons and finish right on the spot, which is jazz. But I opened my eyes to find myself on her, horn grinding away on her thighs. She moved away, threw out her brown arms, to howls of execration from the front row and farther back. I was middle-aged, that was the main horror! But women often like a mean man. Those women who write to killers in prison. It must be for those punks like writing a letter to God. Mean is the diploma of the artist. I was an alleyway myth, but I strutted. She may have married me out of fatigue.

When my thrusting on the stand, a dreadful thing to behold, became lawful, my fans thought me lessened. But I was good. I swallowed the horn during my feud with music. Mimi screaming like a cat in a bath but with actual talent. I had friends, and they had solid names like Jim, Whit and Alexander, and only one of them asked to borrow money. Well, two. One had designs on the Coyote, the way he grabbed her and lurched at her rear. Lucky I was middle-aged and beyond jealousy.

I have left out almost all of life that’s beautiful. Its small acts of kindness. The pier crowd over there, who invite me in a little more every time I go to fish. Mimi Suarez almost eternally at ease. The small fame you can get by practicing some dumbish thing over and over. The sleepy awe of these grounds and lake and house. The evil I feel close at hand to know I am alive. The evil thereby. I must see the devil at hand. Then Christ.

Sponce Allison and Sidney Farté came across each other in the elder Farté’s bait store. Food, engines, devices. Two bass boats, wrecks in progress on trailers on the west side, two gas pumps out front. The last of the black-and-white televisions over an open drink and meat locker. A fine greasy television, studded high on the wall, under which the sullen could eat a dawn-prepared heat-lamped meat in a roll swamped in mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup. Except for the bait, an excellent beer from a microbrewery in Louisiana was the only item of real quality.

The coffee was bad, the standard for parsimony and contempt at fuel stops. Even fresh, in the prelight of dawn.

Two tables. Pepper Farté charged fifty cents to sit and eat there if you did not buy grub at the store but ate your own and needed only a drink. The television was free. This bothered Pepper a little. He would rather have put blindfolds on the mere loiterers he suffered around his linoleum.

Sidney was only fifteen years younger than Pepper, his father. But he was in far worse shape. They were scions of a pusillanimous French line too lazy and ignorant to anglicize their name in a pleasant manner, and they had been laughed at plenty by squires and rootless trash both, and even blacks. In the matter of blacks, Pepper’s hatred of everything was so full it left nothing over for racial distractions. He looked at all the same, his eyelids raised only a bit as if asking silently, Why in hell were you born to trouble me? His being eighty-eight now should have made him resent the hip-hop throbbing from the cars of the bloods out at the gas pump while they came in for a beer. But for Pepper it was only another small pestilence, like his son, seventy-three with shingles and in chemotherapy and radiation, always threatening pneumonia, sent to plague Pepper by the same Overlord who had vexed him always.

Pepper looked awful, but he was in good health except for wear and the scholar’s spinal curve he had gotten behind the counter, despising the chore of making change. Many of the prices in his store were rounded to the higher figure for this reason. Change was precious and his arms were feeble, holding it, and he had to fight going higher by a dime on all his goods.

Sponce Allison, matched with Harold Laird, was in the alley of the tinned meat, saltines, fireplugs and prophylactics and salt and coffee. When they collided, Sidney coiled and puked a bright yellow line that never even made an arc before it smacked Sponce in the cheek.

“Ho doggit!” The boy was amazed. Gravy ran down his eyes and dripped in a beard off his face.

Sidney still drooled in a lip-wide stalactite down his own chin. He was undergoing stress, a rapid melancholy that overcame him once he had vomited on another person. This thing wanting out of him so quickly, like a hot weasel in a tube.

Old Pepper, behind the counter near the screen door, raised his hooded scowl. Last night he had seen a mother and baby skeleton in one of the ruined bass boats, he thought, and heard a scurrying off through the edge of his porch light into a stony field. He did not credit it fully, but neither did he tell anybody, because his son wanted this store and Pepper knew it and he would give no psychiatric evidence against himself else the sheriff or Onward might be called. He enjoyed a beaked scowl now before the odor hit him, over that of weltering meat under the lamps nearby. He almost smiled.

His boy was staggering out from the mouth of his premium aisle, now toward all the bright spinner baits and bush hogs and jigs, the solid Rapallas like Picasso, the Sluggos, the salty worms, the wobbling deep-running torpedoes, the high-tech sonic ones that rattled and rolled. The single fishing video entitled You Are in the Wrong Place. A wet boy behind Sidney.

Sidney had not apologized, and the boy was stunned by this discourtesy. But Sidney feared a second eruption and so did his father. Others wanted him out of the store too. But the Allison boy now held him across his neck. He demanded some acknowledgment.

All his working life Pepper had sold instruments of violence against fish and game and some people. He had war-surplus bayonets from Korea. But he had never struck his son, wife or enemies. He was too remote in his hatreds for this. He would have shot his son just then if he had owned the energy. He did hiss as Sponce rode the seed of his lap out into the porch.

“Here now, here now,” called Harold Laird. He was a born remonstrator.

“This old man vom on me!”

“I’m sick, sick, you sons of bitches! Don’t you see?” swore Sidney, then threw out his arms to free himself. His long-sleeved shirt was spotless, the drool gone. He seemed hardly involved. He walked over to the end of his car and, breathless, looked upward dead-on at the sun. Now he was a blind old puke and swore again.

“By gawd you’re stunk out,” said Harold to Sponce. “You ain’t aiming to get in my ride thataway?” Laird had a nice old Camry. He had left Hermansville last year and never looked back, except to retrieve his four-wheel ATV and tools.

“Tell you what. I’m standing here waiting on a goddamn explanation. Or manners at least.”

“Old man, don’t you want to tell him something?”

Sidney turned away from them toward the horizon. Shingles, colon cancer, psoriasis, mouth ulcers, dysentery. In his mind these old friends called out to his young tormentors.

“All right then. Here.” Sponce walked up to Sidney in the gravel lot and hit him in the right jaw with a quick roundhouse left, then knelt in pain himself for the damage to his hand. He might never work on that side of his body again.

Pepper was in the door watching. He was satisfied. Sidney was out cold or stunned, one. But he still stood, arms at hips.

It was an awful thing to watch a sick old man slugged. The boys were uncomfortable. One was in severe pain. So they entered the car, which was suddenly irreal, out of all space and time, hurtling fast to nowhere with its points of chrome light on the hot blue wall of sky.

Nobody came near Sidney, no customers, not Egan the preacher, with his own problems and oblivious. It was Egan’s habit to purchase one pack of Camel straights, light and smoke one, then throw the rest of the pack in the road as a sign of his conversion and for good luck. Cigarettes were $3.20 a pack. He was deciding, needing a smoke badly.

Sidney spoke. “Well then. I can make other things die.” He staggered back up the steps of the bait store. “Pepper. Give me a pack of twenty-two long-rifle hollow points. The Winchester. Not the cheap stuff.”

Pepper handed on the little box without comment. There were many snakes around, but he didn’t care about that either.

The boys did not feel right. Bereft, divested, exasperated into sickness from the old man. It hit almost immediately. They drove in circles, then they walked that way.

“It ain’t been right since them skeletons. Them kids loose with them.” Sponce was irritated at Harold for wiring the skeletons together for his brothers. “You promising that car to them.”

“We made a deal, a square deal.”

“Remind me, genius.”

“They would pay on the installment when they could. Or get parts for me as they found them.”

“I stink.”

“Don’t I know it. I’m sick myself, son.”

“I’m sick as a dog, Hare. But what do you get if you keep taking us all out to eat at night. Steak and Ale, Red Lobster. I’m too sick to talk food. Aw.”

The deal that had been struck without Sponce’s knowledge was that the little boys would persuade their mother to put out to Harold, and then Harold would become their father, in the proper way, after a divorce from their gone father.

“I can still afford it. Mechanics is big money if you get serious, which I have been since eleven and started smoking then too. I quit the smoking, you notice. The swearing too.”

“But you ought to get a new hairdo. That one’s too college.”

“You don’t know but what I might go on up to Ole Miss or Southern, even State if I’m good enough. Your own mother went to a Jackson nursing college. High education’s in your blood, son.”

“I remember that zoo over there. A good un.”

“I didn’t notice a hell, heck of a lot right before we found the skeletons, and the car came with it.”

“You got a rust bucket. And the bullets in they’s head. Them skeletons belong to the law, Hare.”

“The law didn’t care to find them, did it? Seven or eight years. And that car ain’t rusted that deep. You just can’t see the form like I can.”

“How long till you get it running?”

“Seventeen years. They said teenage car,” Hare joked. They would have laughed but they were too sick. Then they got back in the car and drove some more. Sometimes, in fact usually, a man had to just burn gas. Let the big dog eat. They wanted to drive across the Vicksburg bridge for no reason except to change states, but they were too sick and had to come back home.

“Hare, you ain’t given Dee the prize yet that’d make her. . that’d move her toward that surrender. I mean marriage. Them two old guys gave her this, that and the other and she laughs and says it don’t get them anywheres. Even if you’re in love with her.”

“I got patience. And I’m changing quick.”

“Yeah. You’re all wore out from being nice.”

“I ain’t had but one day since I met her that I wasn’t in love with her, and that wasn’t her fault. That’s when the flesh boiled off them skeletons.”

The sheriff was doing a five-minute commentary on the Weekend Review on television Saturday night. Both Dee and Melanie watched.

“The world is full of middle-aged men who seek revenge. The anger passes for most when they see there is no way. The rate of incarceration is very low for first-time offenders of sixty. For some, there is a bigger engine of hate even then, running at the red line and very vigilant toward what they might consider insults or even bossiness. They aren’t just having it, the engine, like the others. They are it. They have not been aware of this, and their acts confound them. Those are ones you see on television or in the newspapers discussing sodomy, rape, kidnapping and murder in the passive voice, something happened, somebody was killed and so on, sometimes even giggling. ‘Mistakes were made, yes, when she was killed. I can’t remember, really.’ Such as that.”

Such a pompous ass, thought Dee. Though she admitted the guy was hot. She had seen him and Melanie, twice his age, having a moment as he went out the door at Onward. Mrs. Melanie Wooten of the linen slacks, black slippers, a Martha Stewart hang of bangs. Dee could not believe the sheriff was gone for an old woman. But he was beginning to be.

Besides acting in local theater, the sheriff rode a Norton motorcycle. The people of the county were not clear on what man they had. He was handsome and very verbal. These things were measured against him. Many women, however, wanted to see his warm gun and dreamed, since there was little else to do.