Yonder Stands Your Orphan (32 page)

“Hidey,” said Mortimer from the winter willows. “You ain't trying to land on my side of this lake over here, are you?”

They saw the big blade and were only thirty feet from his face.

The head was floating toward them, the singer's tall waved gray hair and the smaller creased face. He might now be Earl Clyde, lounge hawker and crooner, sixty-five and still going, reaching deeper and deeper into his throat for a tune. They saw the blade but then only his shoes, a spangling black pair of opera slippers. Could they be? Only Harvard knew what they were and doubted his eyes.

Who could remember a gun in a launch amid boarding his wife's casket, the funeral, the suiting up of the boys, the pouts of old friends when they couldn't come aboard, the sermon and music by bike scum, one of them with a black tattooed cross on his cheek? Who could remember?

The boys had the pistol. They had never forgotten. Isaac raised it, the original bullets in it. Five of the eight went off, but the child was no shooter. So he got Mortimer only once through the earlobe on the left, which hurt a great deal. His hand went to his ear and he howled briefly, the blade spinning as he let it go, nicking him across the shin.

Harvard saw a great deal of smoke for such a small black gun. He could not believe any of the five shots had hit nearly what was meant by it. He wheeled the boat into the dock but was all over the place, like a semitrailer on ice, berthing it.

He recalled the head shrieking in the willow sticks and now the thin body beneath and the opera slippers dancing on the early spring grass. The thing went up the hill like a black goat. The boys were fascinated. Mortimer was so much littler, benter. He could not move very fast, but he loped now to his car, holding his ear.

Harvard docked the boat with their help on the lines. He was having a stupid dream in which the boys were not at fault. He wasn't over the shock of Isaac firing the weapon. He was no longer particularly sad or angry.

Melanie, outside her kitchen door, looked down to them with a hand over her eyes against the western sun. She waved.

She was dressed well, in black. He didn't know whether she had been to the funeral. But he had been conscious of her the entire day. Released to feel what he would.

IN THE BAIT STORE THE PARENTS OF MAN MORTIMER
were waiting. Lloyd, Edie and little Marcine were in the store too, with the elder Mortimers, who had just shown up at the car agency. They had come in a long old Ford wagon with canaries caged in the back. The gang was fascinated.

Mortimer ignored the long car, which had wandered slowly and sadly but stubbornly down from Missouri. When he burst in all sick and bloody and woofing, his short gray parents quailed, anxious in their thick spectacles, leisure wear, hard shoes. They would have worn stilts had that been the style when they were thirty. The father spoke.

“We'd heard you were doing so well. We were going to ask you up to Branson to hear a concert with us. Before we die. The Oak Ridge Boys are back to doing gospel.” Then the father saw the blood, the muddy patent-leather opera slippers. He saw Mortimer was not ripe for a concert right now and was not young.

Just a scratch, Mortimer insisted. He had shot himself hunting for snakes. He'd gotten bored and went down to get himself a few snakes. He guessed he was old enough to think about those nasty old guns now, but he'd forgotten how they could turn on you. He'd learned his lesson. Only got three small snakes anyhow. He felt a boy in front of these elders, sick and pouted out, puffy.

Big Lloyd came outside, where Harvard waited with the boys at the bottom of the steps. In their suits they seemed to have trailed Mortimer to be of service. And in fact they
brought his great Pakistani knife to him, muddy at the golden gills.

“Is that your sword?” asked Lloyd of Harvard, who held it like a trowel.

“He dropped this knife-thing on the ground when he was hurt,” said Jacob. They handed the gaudy medieval blade over to Lloyd. They seemed a crew of pleasant neighbors doing what they could. Lloyd huge and bald in a tan leather suit.

“You can go home, and I know Mr. Mortimer will thank you.”

“He don't have to get anywhere nigh that close,” said Jacob. “We ain't got a home anyway. He don't seem like he used to be when he was our mama's boyfriend and had all this money and a different car every week. He ain't old and ruint or anything, is he?”

“Don't you worry. He's the same. He's had some bad luck.”

“Is he shot in the ear or the head?”

“Only the ear, son. We'll see you now.”

“It was an accident.”

“I know that. He told us.”

Lloyd went in, closing the door. Marcine then came out on the steps. She was seventeen but looked twenty-one, pleasantly dressed like a secretary to a spangling car-agency showroom, which Bertha was training her to be. Her hair was naturally brown and full and French-cut. She thought she knew the boys and the grandfather guy.

“You boys live here?”

“No.”

“What house?”

“We got many houses. Nature. Porches. Sleeping bags. On the water. Wherever.”

“You dress in suits a lot?”

“There was a funeral. His wife.”

“I express my regrets. I bet she was pretty and kind.”

Marcine looked across the short valley and saw Melanie Wooten standing on her kitchen walk and holding her white hair with one hand in the breeze, still looking Harvard's way, concerned. But in her church-funeral outfit, black with white pearls at her neck. That woman didn't die. That's good, thought Marcine, stunned by this vision across the tops of the sycamores and giant willows. She loved Melanie even more for still living. The points of early spring greening around her.

Inside, Man Mortimer was mellower, gracious even. A fresh towel to his ear, he was expatiating on the foolishness of guns, their cowardice, their chicken distances to things, the modern cheap craven world. With adrenal glands open yet, flooding away, he asked his seated parents whose old Ford wagon that was out there.

“It's ours,” said his mother. She was uneasy. There is no behavior for a woman in a bait store unless she fishes. The racks of prophylactics near Mother Mortimer were huge, next to brassy naked covers of magazines in plastic thermal seals. Vixen eyes of large destruction.

“Well, get your birds and bags out for Lloyd. He'll drive it in the lake tomorrow. I've got something else for you. Like new. I'm putting you up at the casino hotel, first-class, long as you want. All my houses are under construction, repairs. But we'll give a party. A fine band. We don't have to travel to Branson, Missouri, to any concert. Good as the Oaks are. They'll be by here soon, unless they find out you're here and too wild for 'em.”

They did not pick up on this joke, but he was their boy all over again. Mortimer felt this too, and this time he liked it, wounded, hiding his fury.

“Son, you're badly hurt,” said his father. His mother touched him. She had been cleaving to her husband. Edie, middle-aged but with long good legs, got Mortimer out the door and drove him to the clinic, then home to Rolling Fork.

“Man comes back soon, Mrs. Mortimer. Don't worry. His business is big. Big, big. It wears on him, but he's a blue-steel spring,” said Lloyd.

When Sidney at last came in the store, half drunk and full of funeral gossip, Mortimer's parents and Lloyd and Marcine had gone. But he saw the blood on the floor and heard tales from Pete Wren, who knew little but shared it anyway. He did know that Mortimer was hurt and that his parents had come down for him.

“He's getting weaker. I could own it all,” Sidney whispered.

In a black Ford Expedition, alone, was Bertha, dead now. The windows were smoked, nobody knew for a long while she was there. She had swallowed Valiums and barbiturates with a cold quart of Country Club. Saliva webbed down her chin. She just couldn't take it anymore. Her age, who she was, holding the smiles till her cheeks hurt. Leading Marcine into the life. Several hours would pass before any thought to find her, because she was like good old furniture to hand. She was cordial always, yet a quiet one too, and well dressed and combed to the end. Peden wanted her badly. He thought to save her and missed by one day. Their date would have been the day after Nita's funeral. Gone. Blood now to her belly and the rigor passing through the smile.

Harvard backed the barge away from the pier and the boys, ever quick, helped on the lines. They wanted to drive, but
he was making them watch carefully. He was afraid of being close to Melanie, so they sailed downshore to his own lawn and berthed on the grass. Although the launch was mainly his project, there were several zealous pilots and many of them keen to impress their own friends who were gathered to this beauty. But Harvard did not care. He would have his grief and his boys.

They went first to the room where Nita had died and took the flowers to all parts of the house so they could see them while they ate and talked.

Another funeral at the church. Preached by Byron Egan. Peden, heart breaking, was not allowed in. Egan did not want him to see Lloyd, Edie, Marcine; the other whores and reivers, black and white; car thieves wearing white socks with suits and thick rubber-soled cross-trainers. Speed and grip. Peden sat outside in the bleak blue Nissan. He listened through a window and held his gun.

Many robins got in the church from the trees and roosted among the congregation. They were drunk from some berries and fallen persimmons. Come into the mead hall out of the chill. In Viking history, once a Christian described human life as the flight of a bird through the mead hall. The outerness afterward, eternity.

The relations of Bertha sat in one sullen and miserable huddle in the front pews. Ronny the body-shop man was among them, barely recognizing his old girlfriend Marcine. Man Mortimer and his parents sat right behind them, concerned and prim in black and white mourning clothes newly bought in town. This was not New Orleans, where they knew best how to mourn drug addicts, evening ladies and jazz mothers. This place had none of that city's archaeology of concentrated sin.

Bertha's casket was open because she was at peace and made lovely by the beautician's touch. The beautician was her weeping but fastidious cousin Elka, who wanted in the Mortimer business. She wanted to take Bertha's place and knew well what she did besides shift car papers. She knew she could be tough and loved to fornicate anyhow. Elka wore white and pink today and sat near a quartet with whom she was committing three-cornered adultery.

Elka used to run in a circle of lower-Delta party girls who performed on crop dusters while they were flying and poisoning, just for the memory. Under the telephone wires, up quick. Then down for the gin and Costume Ball of the Scots in Panther Burn. Or dynamiting with bachelors in Robinsonville, making new homes in old levees and Indian mounds, where whole old guys might come out, and their pots.

Sidney Farté was in attendance to pick up his rumors. Many thought Bertha had killed herself because Sidney had been with her, and Sidney spread this rumor around as fact.

Frank Booth sat beside Ruthna, motionless. She had told him she knew Bertha and really loved her. Had once roomed with her at the Olympics in Atlanta. Booth was there for Ruthna, and to confront Man Mortimer with what he was now, a Conway Twitty face fresher than Mortimer's own, unlined. Nobody knew what Booth had on his mind, although Edie, who always carried a North American .22 Magnum derringer, promised to blow his head off if he came near Mortimer in his feeble condition and new black ear. Especially with his parents visiting or maybe even come to live, and he was surviving by their ignorant ministrations as he brought them here and there to bits of his empire in the lower Delta and in Vicksburg. They were amazed the river was so wide, having never expended the energy to look at it
directly in Missouri. They recalled only fearing it and now feared it more. They were eighty. They had retired in good financial condition, but it meant little to them with no son, no hobbies and the new small house. No chickens inside city limits anymore. They had been sad for thirty years and wondered how especially terrible they were that he had run away from them. They went to church often and desperately and watched
Help Me
on television, in case he called out or somebody found
them
.

Now they had found him, they dreamed separately that Man Mortimer was not a nice person, and they tried to force a good dream about him, but it would not come. Then they began to remember how selfish a child he had been. Yet their love loved this too. They recalled that he was vicious, calculating and secretive, and they could see right through his present act, yokels that they were, and parents, at this very funeral. His counterfeited sorrow for Bertha. Still they loved. It was too late not to love, and it did not matter anymore where they themselves were. It was having him close, that was what life was for in the end. It mattered not where they slept. They barely wrinkled the bedspreads in the Gold Bowl room he got for them, mermaids on the wallpaper. Mrs. Mortimer's canaries thrived. The maid found the Mortimers so lost she took them on as a project. And they must help him, their son.

It was very intimate here, at the Church of Open Doors, open for the lost and dead of all causes. Raymond sat next to Mimi, his temples gray now and growing hair behind, as if to take up the ponytail Egan had shaved. He was disconsolate near the man who had stabbed him. He had tried to forgive him, but not very hard. He wished to be taken into a different room of heaven with Mortimer's blood on his hands. He did not require whole salvation, just a little
table with books and coffee, pens and paper, the saxophone. Now Mortimer was little and sick. The monster Lloyd was close to him. Raymond hid his murderous thoughts from Mimi, who had dressed up to hide her impatient body. Long dress, lapels. She had no allegiances here. She was weary of Raymond. Weary of the band. Of herself. Of the lake. Why were they still here?