Yonder Stands Your Orphan (15 page)

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.