Yonder Stands Your Orphan (17 page)

fill the Southland.

We go off to other states and make fun and literature

And Hollywood movies about them.

The Best Southern Art On-screen is Stupid and

Heartwarming.

But you do not know what is beyond the window

of your own home.

The crumbs in your navel are your history.

We have pretended that Sherman caused anything

in the South too long.

We have spoken of the fall of Vicksburg as if it

mattered.

Wretched spectators, heads just out of your

mama's womb.

Buy me sumpin, Ma. Plug me in.

All this blindness without no
ON
knob!

Parasites flourish in the lesions of bitten mother

sharks.

Shut up! Shut up! And talk to the animals. They

have soul, they have art.

Shut up and live with your gorgeous neighbors!”

Frank Booth lay in the hospital for three weeks. He had already had four operations. It was mid-September, but the heat had not broken as he waited for the last, a three-hour procedure by an expert plastic surgeon from Florida, in St. Dominic's hospital in Jackson. He was fifty miles from Vicksburg, almost seventy from the lake, but only eight from Clinton, where Mortimer watched his big-screen TV for the return of the perverse evangelical bard he had seen only once. Perhaps it had been public-access television. He couldn't remember, so he kept a vigil. He had acquired a taste just lately for a motorcycle, a Norton like Facetto had, a Commando. He had leather suits already, and he looked good with a knife and a monster key chain.

Frank Booth opened a letter block-printed and addressed to his room at St. Dominic's. His hands trembled. Only three others knew where he was and he didn't want two of them knowing. But he owed them jewelry, and he was an honest man. He barely recognized himself in the mirror even still, and he liked that. He felt hidden, passing for a thin-faced hermitic and pale sort. The letter was on good stationery but in printing like a child's.

OLD FRIEND, HAVE YOU NOTICED MY OWN PATIENT FRIEND ON YOUR SAME FLOOR? HE CARRIES A FROG GIG AND HE'S BAD TO DO FOLKS' EYES WITH IT AT NIGHT OR JUST ANY OLD TIME IT IS SHUTTY-EYE TIME. MAYBE YOU COULD GO THE MAX AND HAVE ZERO EYES
.

Large Lloyd had printed the note for Mortimer. Lloyd was very literate and helped Man a little with writing it but did not ask what it could be about.

Jacob and Isaac fished in the cove and swam. They were childish, changed. They pretended it was a familiar activity under the gaze of their mother, who was not watching at all. She wondered too why the boys came close to her all softly of late to mimic a time with her they had never had.

She was drinking on Melanie's porch. They had one day become friends. Dee quickly realized she'd always liked Melanie, just had a wearying time believing she was sleeping with Facetto. But Dee knew a woman in actual love when she saw one. It might turn out pathetic, but it was true. Melanie did not act as if much between them had ever been less than pleasant, and for people like her, it might be they didn't register bad looks. These things were too foreign to their style.

So they drank and talked, joined by Mimi Suarez, who had recently performed at Almost There with her husband the saxophonist. The tone of his horn was sweeter now, blending with Mimi, with the lustrous hair and hot legs and little dresses. She seemed a good Cuban woman from Fort Lauderdale, and Dee could live with envy, for she had been envied and still was. Being envied was a burden, but these three could afford it, especially with the tequila and gin and vodka. Limes, salt, olives, whatever you wanted on the tray. And as for Mortimer,
Dee was still certain she had won that night, although she had required stitches from Dr. Harvard with his old kit, whiskey and her big lie about a run-in with an electric knife.

She sat up and paid attention now and then to her boys, as she had seen Mrs. Cleaver and others do on ancient television shows. They were above the cove a hundred and thirty yards, and the grass was gray-green in the minor heaven of light when the subtropics finally cools. It is all man could want of this planet's seasons. Many fall in love with anybody and vow marriage simply because they are in this lush afternoon light. Mimi bent to Dee's beautiful daughter, Emma. She gave her a few glass animals that made a family.

“I know now,” said the Coyote, “that I want to have a child too. Seeing her almost makes you pregnant.” The animals were exquisite in her small palms. Pins of light from hooves, snouts.

Dee had lately come to like the gin, the tonic, the lime, the tingle. When she looked at Mimi again, she grew almost weepy with coziness. Then she felt daughterly to the old lady. It was a family, if you had steady gin. She was fluid in folks. She swam in Mimi Suarez, legs kicking down that canal of hers. Crying out hello, hello. These thoughts did not surprise her. But the next one did, so she said it.

“I got no reason to live.”

“No,” both rushed in. “Yes.”

“I'm just a nowhere cunt. I don't even have a hobby.”

Nobody said anything. Mimi envisioned a helpless vagina hanging over the chair back. Melanie felt something on her spine, wet. Then this succubus went into the slope of the yard. They studied the swimming boys raptly as if they had never seen children or water.

“Well, dear,” Melanie said at last. “They also serve who stand and wait.”

“Crossword puzzles helped me through a bad patch a few years ago,” added Mimi.

“Oh God.” Dee laughed.

Melanie giggled. “Church is good for some.”

The boys turned from their violent wading to hear hoots and shrieks of laughter from the porch. The women seemed to tremble and reach for air around the wicker chairs. The boys' infant sister stood between the women with a glass uplifted in her hands, into the gin.

The pleasure barge closed in on the pier from the western horizon. The engines puttered grandly, washing out the black water. But the men wore the look of mild disappointment common to travelers everywhere, having failed to find a miracle or endure a metamorphosis. Only a further gravity on the face. They could have returned from an expedition around the rim of a vast navel. Harvard, Max Raymond. Ulrich and the ex-priest, found near the animal shelter trying to speak words of love to the inmates through a door. Wren, Lewis and Sidney Farté, more confident since the hacking of his dad, a celebrity and a capitalist. Nobody spoke. Still, they were alert to something new at the pier.

It was Mortimer, down from the hill off a brand-new Norton, in a leather sports coat and fine boots in the style of the Mounties. They knew he was strange before they saw his face closely. Sidney hollered out, “You the man!”

The others looked over at Sidney doubtfully. Mortimer was still a little bent from the stab through the gonads, but he had the posture of a range warrior familiar to cow dung and burning oil. He held a child-size football in his hands, flirting with its shape, unused to it. He did watch the barge arrive and walked into the edge of the water. The boys ran almost on top of him, thrashing. Then they saw. They
froze to the bottom of the lake. He had crept up on everybody in the shadowless remnant of the afternoon.

“Say, boys. I don't know how hard you can take an old pass. What say let's run for a few goals.” He fired the little ball at dangerous speed past the head of Isaac, and the ball skipped toward the willows behind. Mortimer went in up to his knees with his pants billowing. He waded for the ball.

“We got to make some memories here, boys. You got some bones for me? You best get me in a good mood.”

“I'll blow your ass off for you,” said Jacob.

“Is he asking them for help or after them?” asked Melanie, at last seeing the man new to the evening.

Dee had never imagined Mortimer in this form. She could not comprehend this person had ever touched her, but she felt a sour loyalty that confused her. She was fascinated and drunk. A pipe organ went off through her head. Jangling lines of nerves like she was coming or vomiting.

Three fat moccasins hung in the willow forks behind Mortimer, and he was unaware. The boys saw. Isaac made a motion of a receiver through the water away from the willows. “I'll play. Throw here. I'll get her.” Mortimer fired the ball too high, but Isacc leaped and almost grabbed it. Then he waded out and retrieved it. “Go long, Mr. Mortimer!”

The man was half out of the water pantomiming a varsity end, for as he recalled from Missouri, you ran long and then barely missed, every time. A sort of coolness toward completion. He was too suave to really try. He jumped a bit in inches of water, but the ball sailed over him into the snake roost. Mortimer plunged on by momentum right among the fat sleepers, one of them seven feet.

The boredom of the men on the barge was interrupted by a man screaming and flinging in the water. Wails pitched like a woman's. You did not hear this much in men.
Mortimer shook his hands and you thought he might die of
your
shame for him. Then he began scrambling out of the water and up, up the grass. His leather coat was flecked by shore mud. The bargemen looked downward.

Sidney was in despair. The others could not know why he had invested trust in this man. Mortimer straightened and walked slowly to the pier and to the bow where Harvard and Raymond tied up. Raymond was drunk.

“Hello, sir,” said Harvard.

“I was admiring your ship the other day, and I came over to see if I could join the club. You boys seemed to've got things all smooth as a baby's ass.”

“Is that your red motorcycle up that hill?” asked Raymond.

“It is. It's part of me now. I live it.”

“You can't come aboard, not now we've heard you over there like that. What was that?”

“It was snakes. I was in snakes. You're the saxophone man. You making the rules about the boat club?”

“No, there weren't any rules until you went over the line. You think anybody'd want that sort of noise aboard? You've created the one rule.”

It was Harvard's barge, but he was not interrupting this drunk. He was nodding his head.

“This ain't right. He don't have to prove—” began Sidney.

“You're barely with us yourself, Sidney. You didn't believe in it. Why don't you be quiet?” scolded tall Lewis, surprisingly solid for one so translucent and veined.

Sidney was furious but quiet for a while. He was very confused because he had watched this very man hack off his father's head through the glass of the stockroom door. It
seemed to him old Pepper finally looked at the wrong man with contempt for supporting him.

Man Mortimer had known instantly the nature of Pepper's heart and destroyed him straightaway, Sidney imagined, while others had known and borne cowards like himself. Sidney had never tried to hide his glee. He told his peers that old Pepper's death was the sweetest gift the man had ever given him.

“And the store, of course,” Harvard added.

Now the same man who had killed Pepper almost in an accident of random frenzy told Raymond, “I don't need your club. You're drunk and I'm letting this go. Lots have nerve that's full of liquor.”

“I'm as drunk as I ever get, and then I'm never wrong. I smell evil and it walks like you,” said Raymond.

“Weren't you a doctor?”

“I was. At your service.”

“You don't get many to just quit. You musta mouthed yourself right out.”

Mortimer turned and walked up the hill slowly. He did not look Dee's way or toward the porch at all, except to mutter near it, and the women heard. “Old Sidney he said he saw through her window the other night. Little granny giving a blow job to the law.”

None spoke.

Dee had passed a line where the gin no longer obtained, but she pretended to sip. She saw herself trembling beneath a ghoul in a red chamber of sin. A creature whose veins were swollen blue. They swayed in a penthouse lit with gilt over the raving casino. Grim fun against laws of God and man. Beasts crawled away ashamed.
I queen bring wreckage to my lover
. For seconds she could not remember her
relation to the present evening and its people. Everything was yonder except a central burning ruin, the howl of her counterpart. Then she recalled the man in the mud-smeared leather coat.

“That man, I've seen him in some other version,” said Melanie.

“He was pitiful, nasty,” said Mimi.

“He seems to be wanting to join things,” Melanie said. “I know who it was. The man on the orphans' barge. He brought those teenage girls back to the camp. They'd run away. And Dee, he sat at our table uninvited at the casino music hall.”

“He is after me,” said Dee, blank, sad.

“You know him?” Mimi asked.

“I am his woman.”

“You are not.”

“He was trying to play with my children.”

“Child, you're too young for him. His face is a deep map.”

“Oh no, Melanie. I'm very old. I'm all the ones that watched themselves move everywhere and go nowhere. Your face in the crowd that ain't quite there in every picture.”

“My husband is a fool, but good mostly,” said Mimi.

“My husband turned gay in his seventies,” Melanie reported.

“Is that possible?” Mimi cried. “Then God will forgive you everything. Oh, God, I meant nothing by that. I meant you have license to be free, even dumb.” This caused a long pause, sighs, forlorn detachment.

“You gals made your deals with college presidents and doctors,” Dee said. “When your charms give out, you still got your own roof, your own music. You can piss and moan or strum a harp. You still get the roof.”

“Don't you own your home?”

“I don't know. Something on the verge. My kids always felt rented. Best I could do was leave them alone. Except for Emma there sleeping, the cherub. Me and her father were just clouds she passed through. I don't think I had much to do with her.”