Yonder Stands Your Orphan

by Barry Hannah

  Mortimer felt suddenly that he had to buy a new pair of shoes. He was doing this a lot lately. He felt a bit sick and nervous. In the storeroom thinking about the footballs, looking at the sheriff, he felt dirty and low-rent. He went out the back and almost immediately drove at breakneck speed into Vicksburg to purchase a pair of shoes. He wanted bright white ones. Perhaps a boot, a soft suede pair you could hold in your hands while you went off to sleep in any house and feel perfectly at home. The next day when he went out to talk to the lay preacher who kept the junk-car lot, he would buy yet another pair. Sandals and it cold. He knew he would probably never wear them, but still the excitement held.

  Out in the bait shop, a geezer was telling the sheriff, “You got your chartreuse with sorty beige spots, throw it out there with a sorty small fireplug weight on her, and you’ll want a good rope size, say about like a venetian-blind pullrope on her, them slab crappie is big and mean with the teeth too like a band saw sorty.” Bernard the deputy was incensed, being an actual fisherman.

  The sheriff spoke as if nothing had been heard, nothing mocked. He said to Sidney, who was smirking behind the counter, “You don’t think the football contraption is a bit in bad taste, considering your father’s murder?” He quieted the air. Something like church in there now.

  “Family tradition is a man’s own lookout, like his choice of faith, sir.”

  The sheriff did not miss the sir and was astounded that Sidney spoke of faith at all. He was slow to anger, but these crackers were getting confident around him.

  “The faith of your fathers is a chicken hawk and everybody knows it, Sidney. Tradition.”

  “I don’t guess you’ll be welcome in my store from now on unless you got papers, friend. But by the way. They’re taking slab crappie with a light cork, a foot deep on a fuchsia and frog-green jig, sometimes tip it with a small minnow. I seem to be all out of those substances at the moment, but good luck.”

  Bernard and Facetto proceeded to the spillway, where there was another tribe entirely, honored to have the sheriff and his man fish elbow-to-elbow with them as they waded the little rapids over gravel and worked the pools with a light spin cast, lent them jigs and corks hand over fist in that almost belligerent hospitality the state of Mississippi is famous for. The two felt much better and had a full chest before long, and it was splendid to get out of the cold water, rip off the waders and toast in the car, alternating on hot espresso and cold Louisiana beer.

  “I’m sheriff of these folks too, thank the Lord,” said Facetto.

  “The truth. Folks is all right. It just seems tense at the lake nowadays.”

  The sheriff grew solemn. Melanie. Did the deputy know? Or was it something else he meant? Trouble at the orphans’ camp; the immolation of the oldsters’ barge; the disappearance of yet another pair of girls from Oasis. Old Pepper’s seated corpse, bleeding in ropes from the neck while a football stood for his face. The tracing of that jackleg preacher Byron Egan to a methedrine ring of long years standing; a ’48 Ford coupe reported stolen from the St. Aloysius Junkyard and replaced by a filthy rusted-out car of exactly the same vintage. And that stolen car had been reported running down scarcely known county roads, driven by minors, and then parked in a cemetery near the home of Dee Allison, the sex bomb, about whom a groaning man had said, “She’d fuck a snake just to hurt it.” She had four kids, great legs and other acreage, but the talk was she was getting married soon, right there in the cemetery. Shut your mouth. Right in it.

  THIRTEEN

  MORTIMER HAD FOUR DREAMS IN A ROW ONE WEDNESDAY night. He had performed a small amount of manual labor in his runaway years, and the work itself was nightmare enough, although it trained him never to go thereabouts again. In each dream he was fired from a different job, jobs he had done in real life. Offshore drilling in Louisiana. Lumberyard. Car salesman. Offshore drilling again off the Chandeleurs out of Gulfport. In each dream the boss man came up and said, “Get out, that’s enough of you.” Then came a fifth dream in which his own mirror told him he was an impostor in the body of Conway Twitty. Then his mirror fired him. But he killed it. A funeral was held with a coffin and pieces of glass. The woman and the boy showed up. They were trying to have a funeral, but her father was late and they could not start. Mortimer said, “He just can’t find his clothes, that’s all. You don’t know the outfit for a mirror funeral.” But he knew he was lying. The news was that her father was coming naked. So they waited at the graveside next to the hole. But instead came Frank Booth, with whom Dee Allison had betrayed Mortimer. They walked in naked like two crabs locked together. Booth was saying, “Please help me. I can’t pull it out of her. Somebody’s got to cut. Help us.”

  Mortimer woke in horror, the sun streaming in his window. Yet he had only a few moments of relief before he was in full need from waking life. He was going to have to cut again. This matter was no longer spontaneous. He knew exactly what he would do when he saw the junkman Peden again. Fire him? In his dreams. Peden, his lackey, who owed him money.

  Peden was a Protestant. Why then, Mortimer mused, did he spend his idle time making graven images? What did graven mean? Of the grave, serious, heavy? A graver, he graved nearly all his free time. Over there graving, is what. Peden carved wood. He was one for animals like Mrs. Wooten and her glass. Mortimer said out loud, “You look at me, I don’t seem the type to go about having such thoughts on my own, up high in my Navigator, this new green buggy, swank, but look again, looker. I have these thoughts.” In fact he could not quit having these new thoughts that gave him a hand on the common man and the old life he was rushed from by such forces as he now despised.

  He recalled the mobile phone he had bought Dee once and the first time he saw it in her hands, in the BMW he had also given her. Must be two years ago, they were new then too. He thought the phone, deep red, was very intimate, and her words, it didn’t matter which ones, excited him. He saw now the red phone in her fingers, her fingernails very red, her toenails too, and then he imagined the razor scar down her thigh and he could not stand it. He wondered if she would ever forgive him, how crazy he was to do it. But that red phone next to her fingers, her lips.

  He wondered would there be a day when he would open the car door for her to get in, and on the backseat would be her two younger boys sitting there. He could play with them, make new games. There would come a day he could change, nobody’d recognize him. He might even resemble nobody at all, or a pleasant television star. These things happen. You can get a lot with money.

  He thought of his sequence of good cars, and then the whores. His work was his play. That’s what they said of players. He was either moving or flat-out dead asleep, it didn’t matter under what roof. Probably he was a sea shark, even if he feared the sea. Death by sea. Life by eating a great many others. But he had his kindnesses. He was not tight. He set a plate for the unlucky, like the lay preacher Peden. Until this car, under his eye, rode off. Just the core of the apple of his eye, it just rode off, and its mud-bottom rust-faced sister is your date. Old preacher boy Peden eating from the plate and whittling his idolatrous beasts and strumming his psalms. Great hell, he lives there! Otherwise it would be Haven House or a box in back of the Salvation Army. This man’s been passing for a sound old junk general too long, he’s got himself into trouble. Well here comes Not Hardly, Mortimer said to himself, dressing for battle. Peden has his coming.

  The shack at St. Aloysius Junkyard was an old shotgun house weathered to a pale of gray and re-tar-papered and tarped in spots on the roof for rain. The two snows they had in the decade, the edge of a horrendous ice storm. It was warm inside, burned a good modern Franklin. It was electrified, telephoned, a small pawnshop refrigerator did its duty for beer or milk or bacon or the whole old hams Peden often bought at the discount grocery. A stove of propane. Peden liked to keep a soup going during a major bender. He would make the soup days in advance, and it worked so that he was not detected incompetent until a fire broke out or he drove some elected junker queen a
ll around the lot honking the horn and plowing into even more terminal junkers. The law was not necessary. A neighbor black fellow phoned in. Grandson of the owners of the house and the original property years ago, still proprietary although sold out. Then Lloyd or others would come and settle Mr. Peden, clutching his Bible and tearfully spouting out hard plainasyournose truths from the Book of Revelation.

  His recovery usually lasted a week, and he was a very good man afterward for a very long time. When he was sober, he expressed the sentiment that he wished the Book of Revelation had never been written, and that it might even have the hand of Satan in it.

  His speech and dress were clean. The clothes were the best of the Salvation Army and he loved suspenders with a good brogan, no cheap second-tier leather. Perhaps he wanted to be a bit old-timey or reminiscent of his own old wise uncle, who had been a barber and taught private guitar lessons. Peden was once a barber too. He played original interpretations of anything on amplified violin. The black fellow across the hollow who was his monitor wished he would not do this. Peden’s amplifier was powerful. It had been abandoned on Highway 20, almost in Peden’s lap, and it still had the name and logo of a heavy-metal outfit, its former owners, painted on it.

  Peden drove a Comet, a thing out of the age of Sputnik. Low expectations. But he could fix it. He couldn’t fix everything, but he could fix this weary orbiter. When he was drunk and driving it, he imagined he was riding a hydrogen bomb to Los Angeles. But when Peden was sober, he was apt to wonder if there was a god, or not simply a divine wind of oratory investing man, and this divine wind was blind and deaf and cared not in whom or at what time it manifested itself.

  Peden had not meant to either be a lay preacher or play electrified fiddle. But look here, he couldn’t help himself, and he had no models for these behaviors. He could not name one electrified violinist. He knew no other preachers but Byron Egan, whom he had met recently in their common run back and forth from ruin. And what of those pastors who were always Christian and wore new three-piece suits and had the ears of large congregations? Byron Egan said they were lucky but soft, for even Christ was not a Christian until the day he needed to be and knew it.

  Cars were pulled up near the shack at the portals, wide-open storm-wire panels with the chain lock hanging down. There were too many cars. Mortimer recognized some of them, he thought, and listened to a harangue of some sort in the shack proper. One of the first whose back he saw was Frank Booth. Then the back of Dee Allison herself, and Sponce, who seemed to be handing her off to some other young fool. The other young idiot held something interesting in his hands. The keys to the ’48 coupe. Mortimer knew them well. Didn’t even bother taking the rabbit’s foot off, the thick thief. He looked around for the car but didn’t see it. He knelt behind a shed and listened to Peden go on to this large group, and he saw many he knew, was in fact intimate with. They spoke back to Peden, young but creased in his large tweed suit and vest. When he became a Christian, the lay preacher took on the appearance of the actor Strother Martin. And he began wearing suits, also of the Salvation Army.

  The furniture about him was nicked but pleasant enough. Mortimer set the plate for him. He owned him. Without rancor until the loss of this automobile. He’d even send over Lloyd, or Edie, to keep him from burning his furniture after a drunk, as he attempted. Some days you wish you’d married an ugly woman and somebody in your world would stay grateful, thought Mortimer. And do their job and smile.

  “What we make with our hands, what we worship . . .” Peden was going on. The rest was long, spotty although sober, Mortimer noticed. Eavesdropping on his own property was making him angrier by the minute.

  “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 becom
e 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.