Yonder Stands Your Orphan (28 page)

“I have been under airplanes, under cars,” Peden said, the smoke from the chimney pipe rising upward with his voice in cold air. “God has given me the ends of cars where dead convicts, ladies, babies and little puppies were flung against dashboards. This is my vision, my garden, brothers and sisters and uncles. He has given me the Jaws of Life to pry the poor victim dead or alive from the bunched steel where a snake could barely crawl through. Like if a chicken truck hit a Volkswagen.”

“Amen,” said Byron Egan, standing toward the front of the room.

“People are forgotten as soon as they are slaughtered, except by a few loved ones, you know that?” Peden went on. “Forgotten in these stains of blood you will find on the seat covers and floorboards, and ceilings around this yard. Don't even take the little ones with you if you look.”

Peden raised his arms in the big suit. He did not look funny, just thicker than one supposed. “The Lord has given me this junken place, freed me of drink and drug, and sent a friend, Byron Egan, all the priest a Christian American ever needed. And best, He has given us His Book, which every man and every woman can read.”

Peden breathed long, for this was difficult, and Mortimer felt the sensation of another man standing up amazed inside his own body. Familiar shape, with its khaki sports jacket and its safari boots recently removed from the pelt of floor rugging in his great Lexus. “I announce that Dee Allison is Mrs. Harold Laird, and that Harold Laird is her husband. May the Lord bless this couple, I would say young couple, but a teenage separates them, as it were.” Dee lowered her head and Harold was not amused, although he liked Peden, who could have gotten the law on him before
his confession and seeking of mercy. Harold wished he knew where the boys had taken the car. “Her last husband, Cato, is present, I believe, to confirm the divorce has been finalized and that he approves this union and defies any who might stand against it. And Harold has vowed to be the loving father and mentor of her four children. I say Cato, you are Cato?”

A tall man of graceful carriage, hair still black and thick, in a nice wedding suit, gray, leaned forward, as if he had learned a courtesy faintly European, a roll of the hand and a bow in the affirmative, and a calm smile on his well-cut face.

“Cato is here in protection of the boys and of his other boy or man, Sponce, for a while. The agreement to his protection and his support has been amicably decided upon, and his custody of the young Emma for an agreeable while during the honeymoon period and other adjustments. He seems a fine man, Cato, and will be a father to this favored lass, who smiles every time she sees him enter a room, and this makes her mother happy too. And they will be father and daughter in Toronto, Canada, for as long as the mother assents. Except for the filth and low-mindedness, he would still reside in the U.S.A., he says. Well, the America I know could have kicked Canada's ass all the way back to Paris and London, but out of the generosity of its great high-minded cleanliness of spirit, it has refrained from that minor task. But why am I going on like this at a wedding? I would surmise I am now out of control and will hand the services off to Brother Byron Egan. I do hope I have married the right people here during this spell. I don't feel shipshape right now and I apologize. Remember the good words, if they happened. I'm going to go take a nap.”

Egan stepped up and indicated a seat between Sponce and Emma. Cato looked discomfited but was trying to smile warmly. His smile grew thinner, then curved back with a will.

Mortimer could make out no more than a third of this matrimonium and was by no means certain whether anybody had been married, but he was amazed and baffled by the presence of Cato, Dee's husband, who sent checks from Toronto. He was a better-looking and better-preserved man than Mortimer expected. Otherwise, he was outraged
any
ceremony was transpiring on his property, and in a
junkyard.
Why not the church, and what was Egan? Here he seemed to be only a lackey.

Egan's face was three-quarters healed, and he looked the same but leaner, and his head was shaved. He had cut down severely on the number of rings he wore, and he now went with a woman named Lottie who sat in front of him admiringly. An ex-junkie, alumna of various mild lunatic communes, in which she was invariably the leading advocate and then the first to pack off. Now a nurse, mildly religious, wild for teas of all nations, a smoker, good legs and quite defined high rump, baby lips. She had recently become an advocate of sexual abstinence, which was killing Egan, and he preached to her as well as the flocks, wooing them both.

Mortimer knew Lottie too, although if asked, his memory would be hazy, tentative, as if she'd been confused with her cousin. He had collaborated with Lottie a few years before on a porn acupuncture video that went nowhere, exciting only Mortimer and Edie. They decided it was too educated and had no audience outside, oh, the Chinese-grocery dynasties in Vicksburg and upward through the Delta. Marketing to old Chinese grocers was too delicate. Besides, the plot was thin, and why were there so many
white people hanging around in the background just looking incredulous? But Lottie had looked good as a Chinese woman.

Now Egan spoke. “Old Brother, sit down and strip off your burden. Good Peden has risked much when not in the best shape. All of us in this strange church on the border of a junk pyramid, in the very parlor of the man who has hurt many of us so badly and so permanently. Who has blackmailed us and cowed us and bullied us. Strip off your burdens, get lighter, unjunk yourselves. Peden has brought us into the halfway house of his life, is gainfully employed by the very wretch at the heart of our troubles. I think the wretch is attempting to play, to have friends.”

Frank Booth suddenly turned around in his cardtable chair and looked through the window directly at Man Mortimer without seeing him. Booth's face had been reconstructed too, but radically. He looked exactly like Conway Twitty, midcareer, but instead of the tall thick hair, he had his own nearly bald head with strings of gray-white. Healthy sideburns. Mortimer quivered and nearly lost his legs, weak, firing with nerves. He knew he had not been seen, but he had sure seen Booth. He almost left the yard on his belly, crawling.
His
face.

“We are expecting two more guests shortly,” Egan continued, “and we owe them our attention even if we do not like them.

“There is the business of marrying Gene and Penny yet again, in renewal of their vows. The couple will soon be here with their best man, Malcolm, a new member of the lake community whose handicaps have not prevented his service to the children at the camp.”

“Malcolm is coming here?” cried out Max Raymond. “Will he be armed?”

“Well who isn't?” Peden said from his chair. “I personally know a peaceful soul, a sculptor and motorcycle mechanic, in possession of over a hundred and fifty guns. He likes to hold the history.”

“Malcolm is an ex-patient of mine who wants to harm me,” Raymond said. “But let him come. Let him do what he has to do. I stand to pay, and if it's my time, I'm ready to die for my sin.”

Mimi Suarez was seated next to her husband. On this outburst, she rose and slapped him very hard, then left the meeting. Mortimer hid himself entirely behind a tin out-building where spark-plug harnesses hung.

“Could I ask,” called out Sidney from his perch near the door. He had not been invited, and few had known he was there. “Is this a town meeting, a church gathering, or are you just screwing the pooch here?”

“Or just a debating society,” said Dr. Harvard angrily. “Led by two thugs who've exchanged one addiction for another and who want to rub our noses in junk. Your revenge on others who've tried to bring some beauty and light into the world.”

“Fine words, Doc,” Sidney sneered. “No noble rot about it.”

“Not one mention has been made of the animals. For whom old Feeney died!” Ulrich began weeping. He was smoking a cigarette and soon was hacking out bottomless gut calls, knocking over his oxygen tank. But he would not be helped.

“We're going on our way,” said Harold, the new husband. “We've got underage kids and an automobile to find.” He picked up baby Emma, and Cato the Torontoan followed him, Sponce and Dee out the aisle between the
chairs. Cato still with his suave readiness to fly toward northern sanity and newly claimed fatherhood.

It was a different audience who waited for the renewal of vows from Gene and Penny. They were getting remarried naked and had written their own nuptial poems, and so although the crowd was surlier, they were by no means less alert. Lewis, Wren and Harvard lingered only to get a full frontal on Penny, who, though insane, was still a fine looker with nail marks about her ankles. Gene had the hack marks on his thigh. Trim, he wouldn't make a bad nude either, though his red beard and freckles and wild woolly hair looked as if they were fleeing in a red-and-white-confetti protest. The altar empty, people looked forward, backwards, sideways. Malcolm was late. Max Raymond was still there, determined to look his nemesis in the face. Peden had risen and was clear to marry folks again. It was his nature to get suddenly clear.

They awaited Melanie and Facetto. What arrogance was detaining them? Or were they deliberately missing the nude wedding? Gene and Penny were eager.

Mortimer stayed in the plug-harness shed. He would wait until all had cleared out but Peden. Then Peden was his. He already was, but he had forgotten and needed the touch of his master.

Why do we keep as keepsakes the implements of our own destruction and hang them on the wall?
Mortimer wondered.
As if they were not hung between our ears.
Near Mortimer's head, on the wall, was a kind of shillelagh wrapped with barbed wire that Peden had used in biker and mobile-home fights. There was either dried blood or shoe polish on it. It was three feet long, shaped like a narrow bowling pin, with
all its weight in the head. Mortimer figured if Peden was so proud of this, the man should know what it felt like. He knew he did not have the strength of old, but this club should carry the day. He wondered about just a bash, repeated bashes, without the first softness, the
gee
, the little feathers at the base of his spine. Did Mortimer have it in him, or would his hand go to his rear pocket where the rug knife rested in joy?

He was wondering when the day would be that they would let him back into real life, which he had once thought possible, at age sixteen in southern Missouri, looking out back at the chicken yard. Little bit of rain coming down. Not lonesome. But the chickens looked happy and they were so dumb, scratching and lurching. Killed and ate them, but his mother was very tender with them. They had names for their short time. Mortimer began to cry. Just a little, and soon stopped. Then, through the smudged window, he saw Gene and Penny pulling off their clothes on the porch of the shotgun shack. They both had long gnarled feet, he noticed, as if these parts had married and grown alike in time. And Facetto and Melanie were about to walk right up on the disrobing couple before they realized it.

John Roman may have been the most uncomfortable at the nude wedding. The world wasn't meant to be buttnaked and smiling ear to ear, he reasoned, and here came the poems. Peden presided woozily over the entire thing. Here was a man who in his bad, bad days had almost blown Roman over on a gravel road riding his giant Harley next to Roman's little motorbike, loaded with fish. Now a Christian orator when he was not playing hooky from the Anonymous program.

Roman was there because it was a place to be out of the house with Bernice. He knew he could not shoot Mortimer
if Bernice lived on and lived well, so he had deferred the head shot on Mortimer. Roman was the only trained killer on the lake. He could summon a chilliness beyond such huffers as Raymond, who had recently confessed to Roman his own wound at the hands of Mortimer. How could Mortimer risk all his whore world and his fleet of lust hearses, all his women and thugs, for a bit of fun like this?

Now in stumbled the best man. Clothed, thank the Lord for small favors, but dragging a leg and unable to make low sounds like, for instance, a whisper. But what protocol was appropriate when two fools rammed together in poetry to initiate some awful Eden all over again? Couldn't Gene have combed his hair? Or worn shoes?

“Uh seen this guy in the tin
hut
!” Malcolm was moaning to the back row.

He was ignored. Penny picked up a guitar and began strumming and hooting a song directed toward the higher obedience of everybody to the untenanted, unastronauted moon.

When Roman first heard of integration, he thought it was a movement about meeting and drinking with people like Chet Baker, and he was a partisan. But it was mostly the Pennys and the Genes and the Pedens and the split-in-two Raymonds who were at the table.

Peden began speaking, looking neither left nor right. “Thank you for your arrival, Malcolm. It is good a husband and wife freshen their vows. We lose sight of the face of God, which we must at least try to see every day, and we lose sight of each other. We become annoying mists to each other, let's face it. Egan said those words, I stole 'em.”

“No, wait, I've got my poem!” said Sidney. This grainy man was in the doorway watching all worlds. “Women. You can't live with them and you can't fuck their ears.”

Melanie alone was scandalized, but she had brought her own scandal with her and so she stayed quiet. The ceremony jerked on to its end, and Sidney, nervous as Judas, suddenly ran for his car. Mortimer saw this act, hoping the rest would leave shortly. He was not good at waiting.

Egan moved among the crowd, glad the wedding was quick. There was no reception. The sheriff began talking loudly.

“I wasn't quite done, Facetto,” said Peden. “It's my house we're in.” Peden didn't like cops.

“I'm sorry. Go ahead. I thought we were going to talk about
the man
.”