Yonder Stands Your Orphan

SIX

MORTIMER PICKED UP THE MAGAZINE. HE COULD NOT quite believe it existed, the gift of an old girlfriend who had found it on the Internet. New Deal, the organ for reformed country people who now hated nature. People who had lost farms. Settlers between town and country who wanted even less. The homes pictured were like mausoleums beside highways, no grass and not a stick of a tree in sight. Paved lawns. Good-looking women and whole families in chairs on brick and concrete lawns. Homes in bare sand neither in the desert nor near the ocean. Not a sunset in the magazine. No visible seasons. The only length of prose was an article about Hitler’s bunker in the last days of Berlin, not for the history but for the architecture.

Some dwellings were high-fashioned storm cellars. To hold off grass, leaves and the elements. Nearing airlessness even in the photograph.

Mortimer was loaded with himself. He had dreamed his history, and in this heavy automobile, in heavy calm, he was a creature of great velocity. He had forgotten to tell her what to wear, and this annoyed him. He went in the casino with her full of self-worth and clarity. It had been awhile and he was mysterious. She was intrigued. Then they walked across the lot and entered the hotel, a huge monster waiting for them.

He wondered why he was not three countries away, but not long. Edie and Large Lloyd were waiting in the penthouse suite. They drank drinks. The wallpaper was flocked with red kudzu and catfish forms swimming in it, gold traces. Somehow not trashy.

She told him in the elevator what a suck-up the sheriff was, coming around Almost There. He liked hearing that.

“Are you attracted to him?”

“I believe it’s the other way around.”

She thought she could hear the din of gamblers, glasses rattling, shouts expressed from a gilded maw somewhere. Impossible at this distance. The very air perhaps.

Large Lloyd and Edie waited in the room, wore sunglasses.

“Let me make an introduction.”

A show about sharks and rays was on a large television. Dee had not watched television since nature began to play such a part. The sharks weren’t bad, although Mortimer seemed frightened of them and presumed she would be. He looked without wanting to and could not even manage to get pensive before looking away.

On the big vanity dresser, his collection of knives stood in their case. Huge machetes to slivery stilettos, even razor knives. Velvet backing two inches thick, scarlet. Gold and silver instruments of despair against people in the golden excess of the room. They all simply stared at the collection.

“Here it is. I’ve shown you the houses over in Belhaven and Jackson, those English cottages and lawns. You didn’t want that. I’m going to play you some more nothing for two hours, and you can’t turn it off or I will come back and you won’t like it. It is a rehearsal of a man named Raymond on a saxophone, from a band called Caliente something. His wife, the Coyote, sings, and she’s good. But you see what you think about him. Then you decide between me and Frank Booth, who won’t be looking very good soon.”

Lloyd the Huge spoke. “My actual name is Lloyd. You will remember this night and my name. Large Lloyd.”

“And my name is Edie,” said the woman in the elegant dress, the ballroom heels. “I go deep.”

When Dee had listened to the dreadful saxophone, the endlessness of its despair and whining, then gaseous punctuations, she turned off the tape deck but kept watching the television for the sharks and rays. She was certain then that Man Mortimer was a disease and had assumed she knew this too for a while. He did make things happen, but the flow of these things had been redundant until now. He was only a man, even with this interesting disease. The others came in immediately.

Dee was not that averse. She had finished many men and loved to reduce them. The woman, when she began with her endearments, was not nightmarish or painful. Dee, who had never had a woman before, was thrilled by naughtiness more wanton and liquid than any since the first naked night of adolescence. An actual departure, as distinct as first leaving the Garden of Eden and perhaps the heavy air of earth altogether.

Lloyd, a mathematician and animal lover, was not accomplished, and they brought him to sighing infanthood quickly. But Man Mortimer was watching, fully clothed, and near the end of something. He rushed in and cut Dee’s thigh.

Edie shouted out, “Oh God, no!”

Lloyd remonstrated but held Dee. Until then she had been winning and asserting her pleasure on others. She felt the long cut on her thigh. It stung and then throbbed. Mortimer left the room. Perhaps never to return to her in friendly form again.

The three remaining were embarrassed and sad. The woman had expected just to slap her a little and Lloyd to insist on familiar desecrations passing for ecstasy in pornographic circles. They brought her a wet towel and then played poker with her while swallowing pills. She swallowed them too. She knew she had been sliced long and deep by a razor of some kind. Her own blood, in this prison, was a relief to see, curiously. Because that had to end it, she could still win.

She believed she had wrecked them all and they were burning now. She had reduced Mortimer to spite and outright crime. She could look him in the face, but she doubted he could look back at her. She guessed she knew him fairly well. But she drank too much and took narcotics with Edie and Lloyd, the towel bunched around her thigh. They tried to play cards but were numbed in giggles. Dee did not understand what trouble she was in until she called Edie a name and Edie hit her very hard in the mouth. Then Lloyd twisted Dee’s arm out of its socket. They were gone and she was in the elevator riding up and down when she woke up. A fifty-dollar bill was pinned to the front of her dress.

She stumbled into her kitchen in early morning, brought all this distance by a sympathetic Vietnamese cabdriver whose family fished out of Biloxi. There were a few hundred thousand of his citizens on the Gulf. They even had gangs now, he explained.

She did not know what she wore or what her hair was like. She was after ice water, then many aspirin in a large bottle. She missed her mouth with the glass. She spilled the aspirin bottle and it clattered on the tile. Her lap was full of melting aspirin when Hare walked in to see her under the hanging light at the table where nobody ate. The little boys sometimes cleaned fish on it or ate cold cereal and used the toaster on it. Enriched white bread, molasses, jam. Some of this food was on her forearms.

“You sick? Hurt?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“You can’t hardly talk.”

“You can’t know.”

“You’re woozy. And faraway. I’ll take care of you.”

Her lips were swollen, saliva in the corner, her nose chapped. A dried rivulet of blood out of one nostril.

“You’re not in love with him, are you?”

She looked at him as if he had just sung in Latin.

“I’ll fix things, Dee. Not to brag. I’ve used this home to grow up in. Now I’ll take care of you.”

It floated, it worked, it launched against a bottle of cheap champagne swatted on the bow planks by Melanie. It was August, and they all wore boat shoes. Ulrich dressed, as usual, as if he had shoplifted in a hurry from a clothes barn in the seventies. Military jacket, purple jean bell-bottoms. Harvard had a cravat, a gold chain from Melanie. For being captain and largely the builder and finisher. Engineer’s cap like Admiral Halsey’s. Because it was somewhere between a railroad saloon and a boat. Twin Mercuries carried them briskly. The pontoons made an oversize wake. You could fish and swim from it. There were lockers with this gear. Sidney, after mocking them like Noah’s neighbors during the laying in of planks, the rail and pews from a razed country church, the stained glass on either side of the cabin, the teak wheel, was aboard as if it had been his idea and he’d never doubted it. He loved hawking into the water the phlegm that rose easily like a permanent natural resource. They were eating burgers cooked on a grill right on the afterdeck and close to the happy engines. John Roman was aboard but not his handsome silver-haired wife, who was sick with something bad, they feared. Life jackets were everywhere. You sat on them, you used them as pillows on the pews. The big cabin was much like a chapel simply portaged over out of the church.

Sidney wore eyeblinding Rod Laver shoes, the old original leather ones his father had got ahold of by lot last month. Pepper worked with people who looted stores that neither had sales nor declared bankruptcy but whose owner simply up and walked away from their stock after a failed fire.

The huge lake today was a suspension of silver. At creek mouths and around treetops you saw fishermen like ants on sticks, this side of a moody horizon. Another barge came out from the orphans’ camp dock, loaded with an extra adult, Man Mortimer. He wore a blazer, double-breasted, with khaki linen breeches and high-gloss rubber-soled moccasins. The two teenage girls, Minny and Sandra, were near him and all aboard were happy, especially the insane couple.

They could not tell their mood from Harvard’s boat, but it seemed roisterous even from a half mile away. Sidney wondered if they would collide. A short-barreled.410 shotgun and a flare pistol were on board and he knew where they were. Inevitably the two pontoons plowed toward each other, as two cars on a desert highway must mate.

A storm could be making. The old ones hoped so. The roof had not been tested, but it looked as sweet and snug as all of Harvard’s work. The pleasure barge had taken a year and a month to build. None of them knew how to build anything but Harvard, and Ulrich, putatively. But all but Sidney had labored with care.

They were roofed, windowed, unsinkable. They stormed forward, a chapel on the top of adventure. They were going uncharted places up the river and into the new catfish reservoir flooding down from Yazoo City.

At Yazoo Point something raced out from the creek. It was Sponce Allison on Ulrich’s old Jet Ski. The rooster tails high. Driven in anger at troubling speed toward them, they thought. Closer, you saw a pale boy clutched aghast to its arms, as if the vehicle had stolen him. The boy didn’t seem to know how to slow down the ski. Sidney went for the flare pistol, interested in its stopping power. Sponce barely missed the barge, then came back in a circle beaten seriously by their wake and flying high, wobbling. The smackdown knocked the boy away, and the Jet Ski slowed to the boat’s spirited crawl as the boy looked over at the passengers in both fear and spite.

He saw Sidney gawking at him and straightaway collided with the pontoon.

Sidney had been seasick since the first movement away from the pier, but in an angry active way of his own. Now possessed by three nauseas, he was tamping down a cylinder of puke by main will until it backed into the last of his gorge. A major muscle group undeveloped in other men sprang forth so hard his head recoiled. Nigh ten feet out, some specks may have found Sponce’s foot. The boy went wild with incredulity. He had set against this man void of any purpose and without a final destination. He shrieked over and over.

Ulrich noted that this was his old Jet Ski bobbing, wasn’t it?

Sponce floated on the dead thing and it would not start again.

The old man peered at him. Wren, with skin you could nearly see through. Lewis and Moore, the sexual gymnasts in chemotherapy, were dressed for fun, and she should not, as the girls would say, be wearing a bikini with green stilt cabana heels. The boat stopped.

“No. You ain’t towing me, and I ain’t getting on neither,” said Sponce.

So they left him, and ahead the oncoming orphans’ barge puttered down to bump into them. They were no longer feral, these children, but disciplined by a uniform glee like that of their counselors, the insane couple. The Ten Hoors, Penny still a svelte looker, Gene in better shape and seeming savvy with his freckles and mustache, were distinctly in charge and adult. But they were in beatitude still. The whole group shone, and were much cleaner, and knew what they were doing on the boat. They were having love and the outdoors was what. These things were good. The four engines of the two crafts stopped entirely and they shuddered up against each other. Melanie, Lewis and the Ten Hoors tied up the boats with the wharf lines.

“May we come aboard slowly and singly? You’ve done a splendid job,” their captain, Gene, cried.

“What are all y’all so goddamned happy about?” demanded Sidney.

“Mister Mortimer brought back our silly runaway girls. Minny and Sandra tried to break in his Clinton house and he brought them back to us. He could have turned them in to the law. He’s what this world is made for!” said the woman at high volume, thrilled, radiated by the deed of another.

“Ain’t that forty-five miles or so?” Sidney wondered. “Well, unlawful hitchhike, true.”

Sheriff Facetto took Melanie Wooten to the high school football game in the last week of August. It was in a different county, east twenty miles in the town of Edwards, out of the loess hills. Facetto had once played the sport and done well. Big and quick but not a fast runner. A dodger. He was first team. He now reflected under the lights, sitting down with Melanie, that every other cop he knew was a second-stringer. Usually the ones who knew the game better than the starters, as they explained full-bore. The players tonight were a third again bigger than his team. He wondered if he would find his younger self here, running toward a line as if it mattered hugely.

God help me love these country lizards, he asked during the before-game prayer. Lord, may there be significant but not tragic hits made to the other side.

I run back and forth between them. So they sleep safe in their beds, thought Facetto.

He had gotten a call that afternoon, a wild, high voice on the other end saying, “My uncle put out cigarettes on my forehead for twenty years.” “Why didn’t you do something, or move?” the sheriff asked. “What could I do? He was blood,” the reply. His uncle had just died, the man said. He wanted his uncle’s corpse arrested.

Some fans recognized Facetto as they found their seats, and they thought he was there with the newly divorced governor’s wife. They could not fathom this bright scandal, but who knew? Mastodons, tapirs and buffalo had roamed here once. Coyotes had made a vast migration east to Connecticut. You just couldn’t tell even who was where anymore.

They adored the scandal until somebody said no, that isn’t her. Then they turned their wrath on this person, for otherwise that night was charged with wild meaning, and their lives attached to it, like the football. “She’s an actress,” the person said. “I seen her playing the modern queen of France.”

“There isn’t a queen of France, liar.”

“Fuck you.” A squabble broke out several rows behind Melanie. Facetto made a pacifying gesture and it settled.

Melanie looked ahead, understanding a bit of the game from her years with Wootie but more delighted now. Blown by the first cool breezes of the season. Once or twice he touched her knee. She went wet as an oyster, blind with tears.

A blond cheerleader twisted and hollered for the love of the night and her own fame. Usually the cheerleaders were watched by their parents and pals only. Except when a flash of thigh. Mortimer was watching.

The sheriff told Melanie, “Men don’t want eternal life so much as the years sixteen to twenty-three back, with what they know now and their bodies no longer middle-aged.”

“You’re not even middle-aged. Don’t try to impress me.”

The cheerleader struggled on. You don’t know me yet, wing and thigh launched in air. Know me. Eat me up.

Mortimer went to the men’s rest room and waited, leaning on a wall, then standing again. Between urinal troughs, doing nothing else. The teenagers, children and few fathers who saw him didn’t know his function. They couldn’t read his troubles. Nobody lingered in this bunker. There was no leisure space here. Somebody said he was half-time entertainment, but shit, why would he loosen up here? Maybe to escape pesky fans. Sure, but who was he? Not dick if he was playing here. Some were disturbed as by the ghost of Twitty, but they couldn’t identify his age, if he was supposed to be dead or if it was his son. The tall thick waves of hair, the thyroidal eyes that swept them, then looked out at the concessions. A celebrity down on his luck. One said he was Russian. In black polished loafers with that special glare when you’re either from the casino or in sales.

Then a small boy came in alone.

“You having a good time? Having a good game?” asked Mortimer.

“We’re not having the game, we’re watching it, mister.”

“Could I play?”

“I said we’re not playing it.”

“Come on. Tackle me. Show me some touchdown.”

“I’ll go get my daddy.”

“Sure thing. He could play run up my ass. But sonny, you see that man at the hot dog counter. That’s my friend Mr. Booth. Please go tell him to come in here. I’ve found his wallet. Call him Mr. Booth.”

The boy went out and Mortimer watched him call Frank Booth in the line. Booth felt his pocket, lifted out his wallet and looked puzzled. But he came.

Booth walked in, and by the time he had opened his mouth to say thanks but he had his wallet on him, Mortimer had seized him by the face and cut him so quickly over and over on his cheeks, brows, even neck with a carpet knife that he was not yelling until it was over and his face was streaming blood. Then as he knelt squealing, Mortimer straddled him, knowing he could strike across the throat. But he did not. He said something about higher law and Booth’s not wanting to find Mortimer because he might want to keep his eyes, then ran from the blockhouse with a clap of loafer heels. The concessionaire who watched him said, “That sonofagun went out of here like a running back.”

Mortimer entered a strange car. It was his but strange. The car was new and had a grumbling muffler and nobody on a bet would guess he’d be caught dead in it. It was a Trans-Am with a firebird painted across its hood such as the car punks of every trans-Appalachian district would use to demonstrate muscle and arouse fright and disgust. He had never had the thrill he had watched richer boys have, North and South. Burning gas loudly and for no point whatsoever except to warn the universe. He saw them chase girls, the cars of troubled librarians, teachers at the end of their rope. The muffler spoke to his blood. Leave rubber, leave pavement, leave governance. You got your foot in something, but it feels like you’re kicking it. Cock-deep in internal combustion, metal, fire and gas.

It was five minutes before anybody could remember a sheriff was at the game. Two local officers had gone out into the parking lot, hunting between cars slowly on foot. But with grim authority, warning all others to stand back. This was not really an issue, as nobody was standing anywhere except for the small group around Frank Booth outside the Masonite bunker. Milling, they watched this stricken man, and you could not have paid them to follow that monster into the night.

The sheriff told them he had no power here. He was out of his jurisdiction and not armed. He did not offer to help, did not even arise and walk to see the man’s ravaged face, and this was held against him. He had swollen up beyond the workingman, him on TV. Him and his sugar woman. They would go off and drink their wine and forget where they were from, which was where?

Melanie was not aware of their ebbing popularity. Her smile was radiant under the lights, she was a moist girl, serene. To the east the ambulance crept in with dogs barking around it. The crew took off a beswathed thing who cursed God through a hole in the gauze.

Facetto said they had better leave.

The cheerleader, ignored all around, stared at the powdered dirt on her shoes as if her face had fallen there.

The sheriff was not affectionate in the county car and let Melanie out in a mood he apologized for. He said for her to lock her doors well, and she looked at him curiously. For all his build, he seemed a frightened boy. The night, or the people in the night, concerned him, reached out and held him. She had never seen him nervous before.

At the office late, he was hoping he saw somebody who admired him, but there were either those who didn’t or other subhumans. Help me, he thought. I’ve acted my way into this job. I am now an officer and a coward. There was a note on his desk from an anonymous hand: PLEASE REMEMBER TO ARREST THE CORPSE OF MY UNCLE.

The next morning a call came in at four A.M. and dispatch awoke him at his nice apartment near the old Catholic school and convent. They had found the old owner of a bait store early this morning with a missing head and a football stuffed in its place.

It was six before Facetto arrived at Pepper Farté’s bait store. Facetto didn’t even live in the county, and this was not known yet. He seemed to push them and dare them, didn’t he?

The smell of minnow water, cricket refuse, crawfish aerated in a tank where hundreds of these bait crustaceans clicked together in the sound of sprayed mist on aluminum, each on its way to digestion by one monster or another. Pepper despised everyone, a deputy told Facetto, but he was up to date on bait, he missed nothing in colors, wiggle or odor that was the rage nationally on black bass, white and black crappie, blue and yellow catfish. The black bass was so sought after for its hard hit and pull, sometimes a full minute before boatable, and the expenditure so enormous per decent fish, that you came close to an industrial religion of bassers. Pepper would have sold colored New Testaments with hooks in them if that’s what the bass wanted this season. Because the fish tire of the same colors, trim and wobble after a season, like high-fashion ladies. Crawfish were big this year for largemouth bass. The next year they might be ignored altogether. There was an era when fish hit bath soap as it dissolved underwater. Pepper knew all this. He knew that bassers expend a ration of money to bass almost exactly that of modern warfare. In Vietnam, for instance, the budget was one million dollars per dead Viet Cong. Bassing was a war, in fact, and the exorbitant fiberglass boats doing sixty over water spread in miles of honey holes was about like an airport where no machine did anything but taxi. This was music to Pepper’s ears, if he heard music at all. He was an institution and not a poor man.

A part of his store was devoted to army surplus. This was a brisk trade too. Fishermen are fetishists about equipment. They are high-lonesome folks and need to surround themselves with goods like knives with good edges, whetstones for sharpening hooks, superior lanterns, army rain ponchos, machetes and cut-down twenty-gauges for snakes. Pepper had been done in, after general laceration by some other sharp edge, by one of his own bolo knives. These short and thick machetes will take down an old kudzu trunk, which is like a sapling. They cut so quickly the parted end stays in the air a millisecond before falling. The Bolos were frightening commandos and guerrillas in the Philippines. Heads rolled.

The football concerned Facetto. They had left it in, the deputies, one of them Bernard. The corpse had no family to horrify, for his son stood right there, conversing too cheerfully around it with the police and photographer. It might have been an exotic cargo just in that Sidney had ordered for a conversation piece. The store was his now. He told stories about the old man, none of them pleasant, since Pepper’s fatherhood of Sidney at the age of fifteen. No mother came into any of these stories. Three of the cops knew Pepper for a rude bastard, but still. There was blood everywhere and one of the cops was a woman. She noted the mother was dead and now the father was dead. In this family, dead meant dead. Sidney’s wife had been dead for four years, and he recalled little about her.

Facetto told the deputies about the mutilation the same night over at Edwards. It was not his investigation, but somebody had called him about midnight just to chat about committing his uncle to a mental ward or Onward. A pastor Egan. The old man was loose on the fields as they spoke, and nobody had seen him for days. So he was a missing person too, and a candidate for the bin when and if he was run down.

The football game, the football game, Facetto kept saying to Bernard and the woman corporal.

“Conway Twitty and football,” said Facetto. Sheriff Millins of Hinds County, who liked Facetto, had called him earlier too, right before he left the office. A man resembling the singer Twitty standing around the urinal talking football with a child. The little schoolboy knew more about the game than the tall man. Very odd. Another eyewitness said the man dressed like a pedophile. This witness was the boy’s father and the description meant little besides shiny black loafers, as far as Millins could tell. He could run fast, this perp. Somebody heard an open muffler or glass pack. A driving nun had been threatened on the road by a car with wings on it, loud muffler, she said. Wings on it.

“Did your father play football?” Facetto asked Sidney. “In high school, that you know of?”

“He didn’t get to but seventh grade. He never played nothing, except he was in the merchant marine in a liberty ship that was blowed up right outside its own harbor in Port Aransas, Texas. He started swimming. He couldn’t swim, but he damn well did swim. A German Nazi torpedo boat was chasing them sailors too. It couldn’t just shoot the boat off the water. Them Nazis was mean.”

This was the only near-positive story Sidney had ever told about his father, who leaned off the stool stiff with rigor mortis and with a football for a head. The actual head lay just to the east of the stool on the filthy oiled floor where he had stood for fifty-five years. Sidney appeared to have a lump in his throat all of a sudden.

“He cared about his own life, I guess, back then. Well, folks change.”

“You don’t think he cared for his life?”

“I don’t give much of a shit for mine,” said Sidney. “Do you?”

“My life, or your life?”

“Well sure you care for your life. You tappin’ Mrs. Wooten. You tappin’ that old pretty grandmother, son. You gone break ol’ Bennie Harvard’s heart when he finds out.”

Everybody there, twelve, turned to look at Facetto and Sidney. Facetto simply went out and got in his car. Bernard was the only one who noticed his hurt and confusion. That was a mean little fuck himself, Sidney. They had a tradition here that broke with southern civility. French. Just straight mean and rude and unnecessary, this line.

Facetto had two idols as investigators. One was the well-known sheriff of Coweta County, Georgia, the man who had no unsolved crimes in his county during his tenure in the forties. A man of humble genius and savvy. But look. What about the population. Small. Homogenous. Everybody a cousin. Little to kill for. Finding a murderer might be like finding Frankenstein in an elementary school. What would he do with crack, folks killing for cell phones, sneakers. Fiends off the highway rearranging someone’s body for some aspirin, for methedrine, sometimes just for the hell of it.

The other was a brilliant investigator in Mexico City. Plenty of unsolved untold everything. But the quick deduction. The five-minute profile. No, not a murder, a suicide. See here. Exactly the right thing. Piece of bird shot in the ceiling. Feather on a finger from a pet pigeon. The blood on it there. No other bird would stay close to a gunshot. So his first model would be Lieutenant Maury Fuentes.

The sheriff seemed nonchalant, but he was afraid. These cuttings and the phone calls drew him into a family of hurt he did not want to know. He was paralyzed.

He could not think about this case and had no interest. He wanted only to pull the panties off of Melanie Wooten and enter her and listen to her make her joyful noises again. Straightening and pumping her nice legs and girl’s bottom. He was consumed by love for her. And afraid anywhere she wasn’t.

It was only eight in the morning, but he drove straight for her house.