Yonder Stands Your Orphan (33 page)

Then she remembered. They had no money. Even nature palled when you had no money. Nature was without religion sometimes when you looked at it poor, and all the creatures seemed bedraggled and begging, hardly getting by. You saw a fat one and wondered. Where was she getting her orders? They had the church. Then there was other money coming, the CDs, but that had proved a more difficult game than Raymond thought. He would always find some money somewhere, she believed.

Mortimer seemed comfortable sitting by his parents, perhaps enjoying his slide to invalidism. Or coiling tighter. He did not know how to act at a funeral, so he looked tragic, but the effect was that of lurid grinning. Egan saw this and the face almost ruined his eulogy.

Which was that Bertha was quiet and unknown as in Gray's “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and that she hurt even in her prosperity like “Richard Corey,” the suicide who had it all, as others cursed their bad bread and envied him. Did God accept suicides? There was a case for His Own Son's hesitant suicide on this earth. And so much cloudiness here as to shut up the meaner of us who wanted to keep souls out of heaven. Heaven was many houses, very big and wide. Many mansions, many houses, as the savior promised us, or He would not have told us so in His words. Many and large. “May heaven rest her soul in a home she can decorate at leisure,” Egan said. Some of the crowd laughed; most
didn't care but loved a good send-off where you met others who were horny from close death like you, among food and drink afterward. Four were simply dying for a smoke and had no opinion right now of God or the century just passed or Bertha. Bertha's mother would weep later, with a Marlboro Light inhaled and going.

Max Raymond suddenly knew his vision would come at the end of his life and not a moment before. He was nearly blinded by the realization that he was a nuisance to both God and man. He repented. He would act. He felt expendable to a higher power and this was good. He was resigned but in no way sad. He thought of Bertha as she went now, and he prayed to her in that black paradise.

Elsewhere Ulrich watched Melanie's greyhound. He couldn't get over it. He loved the face of this gentle beast, hunched as if alarmed by its own aerodynamics, its eyes sliding away, seeking affection as if its whole soul were poised on ice and betrayal lurked beneath each footfall. Of course Ulrich wept, but not too much.

“Where do you live, son?” Mortimer's mother asked. They were seated at a restaurant under the bluffs in Vicksburg. Beneath its foundation, it was said, were many who had received fire from Federal gunboats, who were losing to the rebel artillery very badly in 1863. Hundreds of bombs and cannonballs fired from the gunboats, many of them on fire or in other distress. Attack from the water was impossible, and even running the water was deathly. The river lit at night with all kinds of barrel flares and wrecks, perfect for gunners who could knock the heads off chickens at a mile. Lord God, war was fun for a while, till it crept up on you.

Now the riverbed's mass grave held a high-beamed, wide-planked bar and grill, that served oysters, fish and pizzas,
and fresh salads from gardens nearby, fine French bread twists. Mortimer liked the lassitude here in the ferns and shadowed glass, as if the dead boys dancing with death had built it just for him 135 years later in a flush Vicksburg, very paved and rolling. Thinking of those good boys and their wails really widened the head for thought.

Mortimer looked benevolently at his mother, but this look was another unnatural one for him and he wound up grinning like a coon. He didn't like to be alone with them because they were getting heavier on him with questions, since they knew nothing beyond their county. They had no life except breathe the old air and sleep again. Mortimer thought,
I don't know anybody even nearly this old except the fools at the pier and Sidney,
who was growing younger, curiously.

“I have several homes. The construction has been slowed by the rains.”

“Why do you lie, son? It ain't rained,” said his father. “We don't care if you live in a palace or a doghouse.”

“It has rained where they are. They're in other counties, spread out. I haven't got them ready for guest occupation. Can't you wait? The Gold Bowl too racy for you? You're afraid of gamblers and performers getting under the door?”

“No. We don't even want to go to your house except to be closer to you. That doesn't matter. We only want to know more about you and your life and friends. You know we have money. We have nothing but patience. We try to not even be here. I know that to you we are plants and hardly animals, son.” Mortimer glanced up at his father in shock. Not a finer man in the county than whatshisname, your postman dad.

His mother came in. “Yes. Why do you get shot?”

“I don't get shot. I shot myself hunting snakes.”

“We never saw no gun. We saw that weird chopping dagger.”

“Don't lie again. We're old enough to smell out these stories, they don't save us anything painful. They're hard on us, they hurt. There's no cause for lies here. Even if you were a gangster, a car thief or married to several women at once. We came to love and have you. Our right.”

“I'm a lot too old myself to have to tell everything to my folks.” Mortimer spoke to the side of his parents' ready faces.

“I guess you always were. Old that way,” answered his mother. They saw him now after long staring, and he didn't like it one bit. But on the other hand, he liked being the suspicious boy, charged with secrets, staring out at the rain and the chickens with tears in his eyes.

Sheriff Facetto and Melanie walked in along with Harold and Dee Allison. The married woman was using the last name Laird now, neither happy nor unhappy about the new echo of herself.
Dee A. Laird
. They sat very close to Mortimer and his parents before they knew who was there, at booth two over near an aquarium of riverine life and the oyster bar. The parents remained unfazed when Dee and the others saw them. Bland mysteries, aged, to the arrivals. They seemed too soft for him even now when he was ill and hurt. Perhaps they were his angels, his salt of the earth, as all men have somewhere. Or perhaps they were midwestern corn money, that very serious corn money you heard about, come down to blow some at the casinos.

The sheriff stared at Mortimer, and Mortimer knew he would do something merry and humiliating to this boy soon. He looked Dee over slowly as if he were a total devoted
stranger. Recalling their nights. Dee was looking nowhere, then suddenly directly at him.

Harold had gained weight in his shoulders, his forearms were muscular, his brow and spectacles, new, were intent. Serious mechanic, his own business, his own solid woman.

The sheriff wondered how Mortimer was hustling these old people of the Corn Belt. They dressed in checks and hard shoes. They might be Creationists gambling for their church fund. He had encountered this oddness a few times. They won too. Seemed to have a system or better prayers. What changes the man had, even looking now like that lounge comic with the enormous head and hair, Brother Dave Gardner. Weird interpretations of the Bible, impressions of crashing yokels who couldn't handle technology.

Harold was into a long declamation on mechanics, and it gave the sheriff time to think. His woman was drunk, and he was deeply in love with her. Her white hair was in some disorder, and he did not know what to do. He was adoring the world more and yet losing in the eyes of men, and this was plain in the sad look he gave himself in the mirror each morning as he combed his short hair. He wanted a smart marine look. Acting, acting, he was a ham and never denied it. Several still loved him for it, especially women he did not respond to at all. The only one who moved him was Melanie Wooten. Maybe he was making up for his failure to save his mother from his father, who had them both cowed. He didn't care. He was at the end of his sheriff's term and opposed by a very tough dumb man with a history of penal administration. Hoover “Who” Hooks put his posters up quick. “Who” despised Facetto.

Crime was not particularly rampant, in fact it was calm, but Hoover insisted Facetto was lax. He wanted pawnshop
spies, vigilante groups against whores parked in neighborhoods, did Hooks. He derided Facetto as a schoolmarmy dramatist whose body was in too good a shape for him to be doing his job.

“Who” accused him of wearing Man Tan and shining his haircut.

The subject of Melanie Wooten also had floated to “Who,” and a campaign of rumor began, to the effect that Facetto was deeply odd. Melanie was aware of her bad name, and she drank.

Dee did not get around much anymore. She was a bit softer if not heavier. Inside she suffered high winds, terrible lightning and hail. She saw pictures that would not stop, the dead and wrecked, children, guns, high explosives, felt hellish thunder. She stared as if down a string of blocks through a town flattened by a tornado. She saw Mortimer holding an oyster on a tine, dipping it in Tabasco, hunting her with glances.

Facetto could hardly believe this man had come toward him a few months before on a Norton Commando motorcycle like his own, in Mountie boots, laughing like a twin. The man who had wanted to join the nonexistent launch club after he fell shrieking into the snakes.

“Dee?” Melanie asked brightly, “how's your thing? I mean, when you really get down to it, we old things want to keep up.”

Dee smiled for the first time in the evening. Mortimer's table had heard.

“Is she a harlot?” whispered his father.

“She's my woman,” whispered Mortimer. “The younger one. The old lady's just drunk and lively. She can't stay away, Dee Allison. Married now, but we belong together.”

They were relieved, truly, that he had at last confessed to something clandestine. They had made way. They were loving him.

“Is there a tragedy in this situation?” asked his mother. She looked like an old pie somebody had drawn in, he thought.

Mortimer's empire was collapsing. Reduced to a showroom of fairly new SUVs, with some older models stolen from the coasts and Chicago. Some women, twenty-nine actually, roaming three counties. A junkyard, prosperous for junkyards. He wandered to his houses and they did not comfort him. The large-screen television in his bare Clinton home.

I got to get Peden where he lives,
he vowed.
I see him letting his debt to me go, as if it was canceled when he whipped me.

Who will I be serving in my older years?
he thought suddenly.
Where will I be? Still home, counting my money and wondering what to give it to? Maybe the orphans. I could go straight and healthy after all this, I could make it. Just thinking of it makes me feel better. Using my talents, growing toward a light. I'm old history around here, and history itself must feel uncomfortable a right good part of the time. It's been good brooding here at the table, staring at Dee and hearing that old lady drunk. The world turning new for you.

The world's a little thing,
he concluded as his cognac came.
Peden owes me and he lost my car. He lost my history, worse, and he should learn how to suffer now.

They're going to catch me one day, or I'm just going to walk in and give them my story, calm as a bard of old. Then it'll be over when I say it is. Maybe old sheriff boy could play the sheriff in the movie. I'd let him, I'd smile. Another way of his being mine.

A local college-age boy walked right up to the table where Mortimer sat with his parents, who were almost asleep
from the unusual big dinner. “I know who you look like, but you'd have to be dead. Brother Dave Gardner. My dad played all his albums. Thought he was the funniest man in the world. Are you related?”

“Get out of here with that. I don't like you this close to my face. You understand me?”

His parents awoke to this talk and were frightened.

Ulrich had lost the dogs, or the dogs had lost him. The late-spring air was too thick for him and he worked, shouted, then stumbled toward the cool shade and ferned banks of Green Trout Creek. Then he was a bit lost himself. His compass became stars as his lungs fought for air, and he blacked out before he could turn up the oxygen on the bottle at his waist. What was left of his lungs after the cigarettes smoked since the days of German jet airplanes? When he revived, he wisely followed the creek toward the highway, but he wound up a mile west of the Raymonds' house. He tried to call the dogs again but could make no sound. It was his intention that morning to give them a good forest run, then wash his favorite dog and give it to Mortimer. All his plans went bust now. The dogs never ran away from him of a sudden like this.

Ulrich was very sick, staggering. He was terrified that ruthless deer hunters would kidnap his dogs for deer season next fall, then either shoot or abandon them, as they had done many times before. He knew all the dogs' names. He sent telepathy to them. Prayers, really. He knew he could not remain horrified much longer and live. He must get cool, take off clothes, get in the water maybe, strike his fist against his chest. They were smart dogs. He was the dummy. He had petted them too much.

Then he thought he saw a woman in a flowery dress in an alley of tall grass. Almost a flag, and foreign.

All his years came to right here. He began breathing again.

“Old man, who are you?” asked the woman's voice, unafraid, only curious. His sight was blurring. But he knew she would be a pleasant woman. Her hair would be black like the dress with flowers. She would be foreign to America but at ease.

“We smokers must be helpful to each other,” she said coming up. She held a long, lit Winston.

“I'm a pitiful lost man. Lost my dogs. Maybe my life, running after them.” He could not recall a personality for himself before the blackout. “I need help, I think.”

It was Mimi Suarez. She was serene in her black flowered dress on a hot spring day, even in this vale of mosquitoes. Ulrich knew he was alive when her shoulders gave him pause. Spilling ringlets to her clavicle.