Yonder Stands Your Orphan

by Barry Hannah

  “The two of ’em come ’round, why you can smell it on ’em,” Sidney insisted.

  “You’re a wretched man, if not evil,” cried tall Lewis.

  “Not no worse than the truth. Yeah, she got her glass animals and her books and music and now her lawman. She a complete woman.”

  Harvard turned and walked up the hill, in grief, they presumed.

  John Roman was about to reveal Sidney’s late career between the whores. He liked and admired Harvard tremendously. But then Wren spoke again, hopeful that the lying he had done about Wake Island was forgotten.

  “You had to move your mouth and break the best heart here!”

  He stepped forward and slapped Sidney across the face. His arm was long and he still had surprising power in it. It was not an idle blow. Sidney sat right down on the beach grass. It seemed Wren was not through, and John Roman moved up to restrain him. But you thought he might be wanting a piece of Sidney too. Everybody did.

  Sidney, huddled down, delirious in spite, was glad to see that in their unhappiness the others now turned on each other. John Roman got Wren in a half nelson and started dragging him away from Sidney. Lewis kicked at Sidney’s face, missed, came again. Sidney took a blow right into the heaving place and began rolling and firing projectile vomit. Got some on the poor stitched Frankensteinish Byron Egan, who was attempting to intervene. Son pranced around, barking and wagging his tail. Across the lake they heard at an immense distance what sounded like serial gunfire and turned. All this while, Egan, silent about his attacker, pleaded for the flock to return to itself.

  Ulrich and Feeney approached the pier and slowed, observing the etiquette of the small wake. They were doing fine, nothing going over had been senile or forgetful. It was just that Ulrich was relying on Feeney for a bit of navigation and Feeney didn’t see right, nor did he acknowledge this to himself, so he had taken them out of their way a bit. Now he thought he saw a sail come up on the pier, and a boat, hoisted by its small crew. What was happening was that armed children were making a barricade on the end of their pier at the behest of the camp founders, Gene and Penny Ten Hoor.

  The couple was armed too. They did not expect the oncoming barge to be armed, but they guessed Mortimer might be aboard and intended to deliver a volley that would part the man fifteen ways.

  They had made a flag, orange, black and white, with the letters OASS in black. They called themselves Oasis, Orphans Against Smiling Strangers. A slogan stitched on it:

  WE HAVE ALREADY LOST, SO WE WILL WIN

  WE SHALL LOSE MANY, WE SHALL KILL FEW

  THE ONE WE KILL, SMILING STRANGER,

  WILL BE YOU.

  The changes were inspired by the awful revelations of the fifteen-year-old girls. Man Mortimer thought he had charmed them and sent them back to recruit fresher younger subjects for his new video company. But Sandra, the littler one, had been injured by Large Lloyd, who had grown angry and impatient in his work and felt ludicrous in a cape and mask. They intended to kill Mortimer, and Lloyd too. And Edie, Bertha and especially Marcine, who was hardly older than the camp girls and helped betray them. Both ruined for life by intimacies distributed widely as underground art.

  Minny and Sandra had turned on Mortimer when he explained over the telephone, with compassion and sweetness, he thought, that they were too old now for his projects. One day, he promised, he would take them away and set them up in fine style. But day after day, Mortimer failed to show. Then came the day when they exposed him for what he was. They did not say how glad they had been to participate, but they mentioned drugs, blackmail and death threats that had never occurred. Gene and Penny were in violent sympathy with hurt children. A new spirit took over. They would not assassinate outside the camp fence, but anybody from outside who entered the grounds, well, the new spirit was on the end of the pier behind a canoe. They began to string razor wire from the cab of a pickup, but several were cut and the going was slow. They glued glass onto percussion grenades with Krazy Glue. Many a little one glued the grenade to his palm too. No discussion. No trust in the laws of men. Death to smiling strangers on the spot. Death by long-overdue Higher Law.

  Both girls now knelt behind the canoe barricade with seven others, all taking aim not on the man in the wheel-house but on the one standing and trying to unblur his impressions, Carl Bob Feeney. Minny, the girl with breasts, had the honor of handling a Winchester lever-action .30/.30 with hollowpoint bullets. A telescope for sighting. She had known for a long time that Mortimer was not aboard, but Feeney looked a good deal like her second stepfather in Galveston, Texas.

  Ulrich performed a slow turn about fifty yards out in a hail of lead. The pleasure boat was riddled, its wind-shield and stained-glass cabin windows shattered. Only the ineptness of the orphans’ rifle training was on their side. Outside of real estate, the Ten Hoors had no talents, though they presumed to emit rays of instruction by simply riding horses and setting a good example. Minny fired over and over at Feeney through the telescope and must have carved his outline in blue space around him. Somebody threw two grenades. Thumping, pumping geysers and minnow kill out of twelve feet of clear green water. The barge was on the way back at full throttle. Twin Mercuries churning all-out. Ulrich must have caught up to the point where most of the bullets and buckshot were going in their error, for the back of the right stern disappeared and smoke crept up.

  After a year, it felt to Feeney and Ulrich, they were out of range. In another place and time they would have been commended to some award. Soon they were pretty well afire back there but making good time to Farté Cove. The Ten Hoors stood arm in arm behind the firing line, hating the vehicle that might have brought another Man Mortimer to their shores. An armed Carl Bob Feeney would have shot down the both of them.

  The Oasis flag still flew on its pole at the front of the barricade. The couple considered this a victory, and they celebrated with hot dogs and a long movie that night. Outside, older orphans patrolled the fence and beefed-up sections of unrolled barbed wire. Rifles slung on a rope across their backs. They gathered around the campfire for chats. An unwise salvo, bad military instruction. But there had been army error everywhere. A tradition carried on apace.

  The pier crowd watched as Ulrich brought the barge over across the lake. There was a fire in the stern near the gas tanks. Saner men would have jumped overboard five minutes ago, but not these pilgrims. They plowed, they felt the power drop back to a single Mercury, they felt orange and hot on their backs. One of the tanks seemed a wall of flames and threatened to explode the next tank. It will blow, it will immolate, it will soon be over, Ulrich thought. Not a bad thing, as I am ready to go to the dead animals in that other world and spend my next life atoning. Carl Bob Feeney alongside. This is the hell never described, where you get a second chance to correct your miserable life by daily ministry to those you harmed or made dead. Perhaps these are the reincarnated ones, the saints we still have scattered among us. Hitler and Stalin working as good men in obscurity somewhere. And Mao, who never took a bath except in the organs of his young lovers, as he put it, and who murdered even the sparrows of the air to bring a pestilence of grasshoppers. Feeney and I will recognize them, workers in the vineyard.

  Feeney would have been long gone in his double life jacket except he feared water so much and thought it capable of melting off the buckles. All deeper water to Feeney was a sucking vortex activated by contact with any warm thing that thrashed. Then there were the sharks. Great fat blond lake sharks that lay on the bottom until stirred by that music above, men flapping, kicking their legs, yelling for help.

  “We’ll have to run her aground near the pier and call for help,” said Ulrich.

  “Friend, there is no help here. Try to make the shallows out of the shark beds.”

  “Feeney, you’re an old priest from Ireland. There are no sharks. Leave it to me. I know nature!” This was a lie.

  All considered, Feeney thought, those children blazing away were very charitable. They might have k
illed us easily instead of this warning. We could have been the church, the state or landlords. Preachers and destroyers.

  They neared the pier, jumped down from a fully engulfed floor of the bow and cabin. The pleasure barge was a collapsed charcoal hulk by the time Melanie got the Redwood fire department there. No obvious evidence of foul play, only the vague idiocy of two old fools. Ulrich and Feeney never mentioned they were fired upon and took the abuse with equanimity.

  Nevertheless, sane fishermen avoided fishing the weeds and lily pads of the orphans’ camp shoreline. All that rifle range going, you might get into something stray.

  Sidney was back at the bait store when he got word and almost wrecked his fine car several times racing over, wallowing on gravel and twisting on grass, fishtailing. With water on the road he would have hydroplaned. Then he limped wildly down the hill where others gathered. Ulrich had done this trying to light a cigarette aft, near the gasoline, he was told. One more chance before they hauled him and Feeney to Almost There. Sidney Farté was in ecstasy.

  Sheriff Facetto had a lead. The last to see Pepper alive seemed to have been Ruthna, a somewhat notorious woman, and two men called Harb and Alexander. The sheriff had tracked them to the tame and brick-streeted town of Clinton, where the Baptist college was, and where Grant had once stabled his horses in a chapel in the midst of giant cedars. Now its suburbs defined it. Pine forests ripped down for the blocky bunkers of new businessmen and computer Christians fleeing the blacker Jackson to the east.

  The sheriff met all three in Ruthna’s ragged house, an ersatz hacienda with failing cactuses and yuccas about. It was the home of her fifth husband, Harb, who was her ex but still came around to visit with Alexander over a bottle or two now and then. They were friends of Max Raymond and did see Pepper a few minutes before ten that night. But they were depressed and godless, divorced and alcoholic, and their memories were random. Once they were not suspects, they began to be drunk and pathetic in a short space, fighting for narrative time with each other. The sheriff was sorting, writing, reacting. Then he just asked them to shut up.

  The night in question they had gnawed bones in a booth of the northside restaurant, Near ’Nuff Food, far superior to the restaurant right at the saxophonist and singer’s cottage. Raw beams, linoleum, spiderweb Formica tabletops, leatherette seats, happy waitresses. A theme. A waitress hurried out and dumped ribs on a heavy paper tablecloth, two rolls of paper napkins.

  They wanted to be higher when they left to visit Raymond and the Coyote. They considered themselves urbanites, ignorant of philosophy but crammed with half-remembered songs, which served. They were unhappy, and if God existed, they blamed him for much. The whiskey still worked on them, but they needed more. Ruthna pulled the Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo into the gravel lot of the bait store for a last beer. At least ice and cups and Tums. The ribs of Near ’Nuff Food were loggy and scalding in their tender stomachs.

  Harb and Ruthna had already begun to fight regarding her past. Alexander went inside and left them to it. A hound watched them all from the porch. Soon enough the fight grew tiresome. They passed a man on a high stool, a note written on an envelope on the counter before him. He was asleep, a football was in the aisle of the store and this was a curious thing, as if somebody had just left off a game of touch. They had a sense somebody was in the back but just left this old man to his sleeping. He was a dry white old creature, leaning on the bulwark of a Lucky Strike display case in which all brands of smokes were stacked. Old Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls and Roitan cigars, brands that seldom moved in modern towns. The note under his fingers must be a message to customers, they figured. Out to Lunch or the like, even though he was there. They got the sack of ice, the plastic cups, the soda, lemons. For a geezer he was well stocked in the needs of the drinking life.

  Maybe he was deaf as well as asleep. They couldn’t get his attention. Alexander turned the note around, thinking maybe to wake him. The note seemed oddly personal but scrawled in excitement or carelessness.

  I SEEN THE LIGHT AROUND THE CORNER OF THE TUNNEL THEM BASTARDS WAITING FOR ME.

  His face was perhaps more purple than was good for a fellow. But he could damn well sleep and they decided this was quaint and in their sleepless tossings they envied him.

  They grabbed a bottle from the shelf behind him and went out with the goods, pocketing the cash. They thought this was what the sheriff had come about and this they apologized for. The drink, the weirdness of the scene, their lightness of spirit. Really it was only a prank.

  They continued a bit just to hear for themselves what happened the rest of the night once they got to Max Raymond’s. They told Raymond about the catatonic man. Old Pepper harked back to Raymond’s adolescence, his first night here in a cabin with other boys. The rare night it snowed here. A January with only a few crappie fishermen around. Somebody had insisted Pepper look out at the snow falling thickly in the porch light. He went out, peered briefly and returned.

  “Nasty,” he said. Nothing else. Raymond insisted this was modern poetry.

  Two thought Raymond was affected. Another fight broke out.

  He and the Coyote had been drinking too. She told him the way he clung to his past was morbid. He accused her of having no memories. Fort Lauderdale, Memphis. What was that? She was nowhere, just tits and hair with a voice.

  The others took her side. Mimi Suarez said she was not pregnant and was glad.

  After a while Alexander and Harb insisted Mimi sing. For song was what was left in the world. Ruthna felt her powers waning and began taking off her clothes. She went out to the back stoop like that and thought she heard boos from nature and her feelings were hurt. She came in and the Coyote passed her and began singing out there with her back to them. Raymond passed the naked Ruthna, dancing. Harb was swaying before her in boxer shorts and black shoes. Alexander watched Mimi’s back as she faced the swamp and sang. Presently Raymond accompanied her on the sax. Then he tore her dress off.

  Raymond and the weak porch light on Mimi’s shoulders and buttocks. Out there kneeling and spying, Sponce, Harold and the little ones were at pains to keep their faces behind the fronds. Mimi was the first woman Harold had seen naked. He looked straight through her as through a lens to his beloved Dee. This woman was not his stopping place, pretty as her voice was, strange as his vantage. The younger boys stayed close to the skeletons.

  “I’ve got more confidence. I’m not scared of melody anymore,” they heard Raymond call to the others. Nobody cared.

  The guests lumbered about the rooms in a great sweat, dancing, one nude, wishing themselves lost from their species.

  ELEVEN

  CARL BOB FEENEY WAS DEAD, THE SHERIFF LEARNED, arriving at the mortuary in Vicksburg. Feeney’s nephew had identified the body, but he was not here now. Loved ones do not linger in these precincts. Only the women who sought Christ in the tomb to pay their respects and discovered the resurrection, announced by a frightening young man in all-white garments. Perhaps the writer of the gospel Mark himself, who had fled the law and run naked out of this garment one night long ago at Gethsemane.

  But Facetto was not here about Feeney. The mortuary staff had called him with a problem. It was after nine, but lights were on in the basement. A man had been telephoning them at regular intervals, then random ones, about the embalming of an Uncle Ricky, who was not there in any form. Yet the caller insisted they save Uncle Ricky’s head to be arrested. Who would arrest him? the mortuary director asked him, the caller. Sheriff Facetto, said the caller. He knows this case. Uncle Ricky put his cigarette out on his forehead for twenty years and now his head needed to be arrested. The calls became harassing and then stopped, but they threatened the mortuary and the sheriff both if Uncle Ricky’s head did not stand trial alone. It must not go underground or into cremation.

  Have mercy on these people who see the living become a thing, thought the sheriff. Look here, said the dead, I’m going now, but I’ll leave you this gray meat to lug around a few hour
s more. No matter what rattlesnakes the dead were, the living had to salute the leavings. All must submit. He thought of his father, a small savage marine, proud of his dry heart. The old soldiers around his grave, lying through their teeth. Oh he was the salt of the earth, a man’s man. His mother a tall beauty desiccated and driven nearly mute by his company. Like an old television antenna finally, obsolete decades ago.

  The man at the car door surprised Facetto. He was already scared.

  “I’m Sheriff Facetto. You called?”

  “Oh yes, Sheriff.”

  “This is about the telephone calls. Uncle Ricky and all that.”

  “Yeah, he called again just now.”

  “What was the cause of death on Feeney, by the way?”

  “A coronary, I think. He had very bad lungs. His nephew said he had become a chain-smoker since leaving the Catholic Church. He was once a priest. He had other diseases. But Lord, he was eighty-two. He came from Ireland and was a missionary to Mississippi. My wife informed me this was a third-world mission field to Irish Catholics.”

  “Ireland. All their broods and terrorists. Well.”

  “Anyway, we wondered if you could put a trace or stop the calls.”

  “This isn’t my county. I don’t know who’s calling, either, or I’d act on it. Sorry, friend.”

  Facetto drove off. He felt pulled by dread to nowhere. He’d never even gotten out of his car and had spoken only through the window. He might wobble if he walked, or thrust headlong like a swimmer through this fog. Next week he was onstage again in a production of the Vicksburg Theater League. Now he couldn’t remember who he was playing, or what he spoke.

  He acknowledged he was a fearful man, but why had this Uncle Ricky call shaken him so much? Horrible laughter and Facetto’s ruin were in the voice over the phone. That specter every man might feel at his shoulder. You would turn and here was the shape and face, the awful laughter, the thing pointing at you. It knew who you were and had caught up with you at last. It had seen you faring back and forth in that old woman. Hot Granny. Pulling a long one out of Granny. Hiding her false teeth. He needed sleep. He needed to be out of love.