Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2 page)

The lake was storied for bass and crappie, calf-size cats. Carp and six-foot saurian gar, and buffalo fish, which the poor ate fried in balls. Leon Jr. behind the bar knew all the fishing news. Spinners, plastic lizards, worms, jigs, live bait. What depth and what time of day. Leon Jr., whose father ran the roadhouse in the fifties, was no longer young himself, with a blond-gray stubble and sulking orange lips. He was neither happy nor sad from repeating the same stories. These narratives increased the cost of the liquor nearly twofold. All were aware of this. It was overpriced as if bootlegged, which it nearly was. The place was unlicensed, sometimes locked, sometimes open, depending on the whim of whatever sheriff at whatever season. Sheriff
Facetto, newly reelected, seemed to be allowing a month of Christmas.

The shelves behind the bar were bare unfinished pine, a few bottles of brown whiskey on them, not that many choices. Leon Jr. did have a rye and a single-malt scotch, sold in a shot glass and priced as liquid platinum. He had Jägermeister with its alleged opium. Some, meaning to fish, had fallen across the bar and slept the main part of business hours. Cold beer sat in a horizontal Coca-Cola watercooler, ancient, faded to pink and brown-speckled with rust. One large clear urn full of vinegar-brine eggs, a full carton of salt and a can of pepper beside it. No napkins. No chairs. No rest room except a deep path in the kudzu and gorse around back.

All this the parcels of its charm. Its absolute freedom from a woman's touch. An old-time titty-girl calendar on the bar side wall, perhaps from the beloved years of the Korean War, when it was daring. Miscellany of bar glasses with the imprint of loftier saloons, atmosphere of a careless desperation. A must-visit of the bass veterans, their sons, fishing sluts, grave trollers, for its promise of good luck and fine days on the water.

After all, some had died out there on the enormous lake, which would whitecap and roll dangerously in a gale. Some by lightning, some by heart attack, a few by suicide. Two game wardens blown nearly headless by a short twelve-gauge. And you never, never wanted the rare east wind to come on you. All at once nothing bit. Many men, black and white, vowed Satan was at work. For Christ was a fisherman and did not subtract from your allotted lifetime the days you spent on the water. Nobody spoke it, but Leon Jr. might be the version of Christ himself the Lord would give to the state of Mississippi.

Old globe of a gas pump out front. Sign of the old green dinosaur, Sinclair. God knows the actual gasoline it pumped nowadays. A screen door browning, worn blond at the handle, like a sacred stairway in Italy. One pool table to the rear, its felt used to almost gray as if violent football games had struggled over it forever. One stick in the corner, ulcered balls. Better a drunkard's napping berth than billiards. One man had a giant catfish fellate him there. He was not ashamed to return.

Leon Jr. was famous. He was the last to offer roaches for bait, kept in a cardboard palace and fed on his wife's cooking. Northwest corner out back.

Lately Leon Jr. had a newer cardboard box under the bar, a new wrinkle, videotapes stacked and unlabeled. He had been assured it was local talent, even though it was slick as Hollywood. What it did was open your eyes to the potential in this state. Peer about for talent.

This day Cecil and Robbie were at the bar talking seasons and waters, salad days, flush tented ballrooms on the levee, always the best bands. The Red Tops. The Tangents. Good old saxophone Charlie gone down in an overdose in New Orleans. They were three whiskeys in and almost weeping.

Now the villages from which they hailed were shut and dust-windowed. As if a neutron bomb had fallen on the towns. Only a ragged, sullen shifting of black folks back and forth from porch to porch, in their sections, on Saturday afternoons. Automobile wrecks up and down Highway 61 for little more reason than raw liftoff speed. Colonists in retreat from their Egypt, flat land uselessly rich still, its old profiteers scattered. Hunkering men turned to nagging barbershop hags, monologues about niggers, niggers and other niggers, beneath their talk a yearning for homicide, themselves included. Surrender
to the old Shintoism where grandpas cruised in their Caddies, every stud one of them a kingfish.

Leon Jr. knew worse stories. Of men gone mad with religion and vicious with regret, mass conflagrations, graves. A camp for indigent orphans razed to the ground. He reached into the box next to his foot and brought up an unlabeled black videotape. Placed it on the walnut. “I got something new here, maybe up your alley, maybe not.” Wiped the whiskey sweat from it. “You ain't the law or no deacons, are you?”

“Well hell no,” said Robbie, older than Cecil and with sunspots. Four whiskeys in now, the two had almost forgot fishing, although their boat sat outside on its trailer fully suave and loaded as carefully as a space station.

“Fifty-five dollars. I'll throw in the sales tax.”

“What show could be that good? Good hell, Leon. You got some new bass fool selling his miracle bait? It ain't even labeled.”

“On purpose. It's some show. And I hear local talent.”

“Local. You mean an appeal for some poor soul with no liver and no insurance,” said Cecil, whose face got even redder.

“Boys, it's ‘Teenage Lesbian Comedown.' That's why it ain't labeled. This here is professional stuff. Real slick and Technicolor. Either the law or my old lady caught it on me, wouldn't be nothing left of my free ass.”

“You mean child pornography?”

“Well. You decide. There's titties. It's cultured. Violins. It starts them in big fur coats, mink or Asian-wolflike. You got some fine young nookie here, and it's like medical art, say. Don't have no secrets. Then a man come in, like they's ruler.”

“You're changing, Leon,” said Robbie. “Aren't you making living enough?”

“We're all changing,” said Cecil. “Lots of us ain't making living enough. Give it here.”

“You gonna buy it?”

“Sure. Who's the artist? Where do I get my money back if it's some dog or a fraud?”

“Now, that person has to remain unknown. But you ain't going to want your money back. Just don't invite the wife or the kids or the preacher over. This here is bachelor art. Still, one old boy told me he did invite the wife. Said it went just fine. There ain't no law, state nor federal, says what kind of home you got to have. That's why the good Lord made venetian blinds.”

They walked out whiskey-righteous, and Robbie started the Jeep Grand Cherokee with officiousness, like a senator entering a filibuster. Then he spoke.

“I don't know. This place had a purity to it. Low-down but pure. I hate to see him join the common, I guess go modern, you might say.”

“All those poor colorful folks we been watching all our lives and wishing they'd never change, Robbie. We thought they'd just grind it out and be our what, wallpaper. Pretty selfish, us old heads.”

“You got a point there, pal.”

“Nostalgia, shit, me too. I got it every second. Nothing new looks worth a shit to me. New houses seem like goddamn rest stops. We're dirty old men already, Robbie, face it. And even the dirt don't seem as tasty as it used to. Now the whiskey's talking, but I tell you. I'm willing to look at anything'll change my life before I blow this weary head off.”

“Now, Cecil. Don't forget a big old she-bass snapping down a top-water plug. About sundown on your flat green water.”

“I never meant there wasn't still a God, old son.”

“Just wait'll God's back in the office. And Cecil, if she could stand this speckled old ass, I'm not averse to teenage love myself.”

They both laughed. A sort of burned laughter.

THIS SUNDAY MORNING MAN MORTIMER AND MAX
Raymond sat in the pews of the same church, a little white steepled one in a glen set among live oaks and three acres of clover. The jungle swamps encroached on and squared the glen, deep green to black. Loud birds and alligators groaning in their mating season roamed in songs from bayou to bayou. Some fish walked on land in this season.

Cars, just a few of them, sat on the pea gravel under the trees just outside the windows of ersatz stained glass colored like the wreckage of a kaleidoscope. Mortimer and Raymond knew each other then only by automobile. Mortimer favored a rotation of expensive foreign sport utility vehicles. Raymond drove the same old Lexus he had bought when he was a physician.

Raymond came to worship, and to repent, and he wanted a vision. Life heretofore had not instructed him. He had won his wife, a raven-curled, writhing singer of Latin jazz, in a ghastly way that wrecked him as a doctor. He was a dread-stuffed saxophonist in her band. Afraid of his own irony, his insincerity, his ambiguity. Now Raymond had come to repent. He loved Christ, but he yearned for a solid thing to witness, a vision undisputed, because his faith was by no means confirmed.

Man Mortimer was slightly drunk, a state unusual if not unprecedented for this quiet man, a gambler, a liaison for stolen cars and a runner of whores, including three Vicksburg housewives. He was small but substantial, with a big head of waved hair and hooded bedroom eyes. In high
school he was a dead ringer for Fabian but in recent years was verging toward the dead country star Conway Twitty. At forty-five he still retained his looks, and the women he sold kept a crush on him and liked his stares, which seemed to invite them into a dangerous ring of power. His charisma assured the women their lives were broad, deep and special, and that half the money in their adventures around the boudoirs of this poor county and in the lacier rooms of Vicksburg belonged to him. The law could not touch him because his bordello was spread in myriad chambers throughout the suburbs and even underpasses in giant, newish sport utility vehicles with flattened rear seats, good mattresses, sunroofs tinted by creamy smoke and fine stereo systems, the aphrodisiacs of new-car smell and White Diamond mist working side by side. These perfumes and compact discs were chosen by Edie, a gal Friday of his who otherwise worked as a blackjack dealer in the casino. His books on the car business were excellent, prepared by an accounting genius named Large Lloyd for his build and his hang, an ex-wrestler and permanent bouncer whose pride in his math and tax savvy was so wild it intimidated the auditors who had once looked into the business. Lloyd was a casino employee, chauffeur and gigolo. Man Mortimer owned three homes, and he gave parties, or mass appointments. He made a point of being nothing like Hugh Hefner, whom he despised for his philosophy and aesthetic pretensions. At Mortimer's parties there were no drugs, no guns, no liquor more than social.

The casino in Vicksburg was clean, even elegant, for these fly-specked counties, but its exits were full of ruined persons, many of them women. Edie and Large Lloyd could spot them and cheer them. Mortimer would appear in an exquisite sedan, as if happening in to end the night after some happy day with well-heeled Episcopals, and steer the women
to their salvation. He knew the faces and the postures, and he never made the mistake of plying a busted gambler who was pious or gowned in unpurchasable pride. He couldn't afford noisemakers. On the other hand, he could take another kind of woman right off the arm of her escort, who was likely to be broke and puny too. For a man in such despair and trouble, the exit of his consort might seem merely another cloud in a black evening.

Mortimer had come to the church service in a spell of nostalgic spite. He wanted to see if the preachers were still as feeble and funny as they used to be when he was a kid.

The preacher was Egan, a reformed biker, gambler and drug addict, still with a ponytail, brown-gray, and a large black Maltese cross tattooed on his right cheek. A man immoderate in both callings, dissolute and sacred. He was preaching against the casino now, this nearby hell, a factory of thievery and broken hearts. He preached about hollow and slick men and slot-machine hags with no souls. The leering zombies schooled to rob the poor and sad in the name of fun. Worse than the liquor were the glamour and baying of Mammonites, who turned the soul into nothing but the arithmetic of want. His voice boomed out like Johnny Cash.

Then at the pulpit he tied off his arm with his necktie and injected a hypodermic into a great vein and plunged holy water into it, then withdrew the plunger, and they saw the pale blood in it.
This is what God gave us, not the green, gray dirty thing we call cash. Filthy lucre. Filthy, how the old scribe knew it
. Mortimer had to agree the man was good. A woman near him fainted and hit her head on the pew. None moved to comfort her, not her children, not her paramour in common-law union. Mortimer almost did, spying a piece of business, before he stopped himself.

Mortimer was a bit afraid of this loon high on his own rhetoric. The preacher looked at him and seemed to know him.

People used to have work, with their hands
.
But behold, the zombie of the empty, the Middleman, the parasite and usurer. God damns too the Usurer of the lost and confused man, especially his precious time, which is given to even the poor, so they might make a highway to paradise of it in their minds. Using your time, your animal want of sport and folly, and at the heinousest high percentage, oh fools, higher than the Carter administration. And you saw the crashed, blackened helicopters in the desert of the Holy Lands. You saw
yourselves,
paying those high mortgage notes! Handsome, smiling faces, the manicured hand out to clutch you in that old handshake with sick, sick ruin. And behind that hand with its rings and its Vaseline Intensive Care–lotioned palm and fingers, a heart deep cold and black as a well! I give you, brothers and sisters, evil passing for man. The bleached-blond son of Ham. But we know you. Solomon's robes can't hide you
.

I see Little Las Vegas. Are you, sir, Elvis, Wayne Newton, Sinatra or the wolvine Michael Jackson, child eater? Those Las Vegas–greased and damned? Or are you only some shadow Lounge Punk, wanting to be big in lights? I know you, friend. I have been kin to you. Check your footwear and your belt buckle, Mr. Wannabe Caesar's Palace Puppy, oh you're sick all right. Do they call attention to themselves? Is your hair some kind of Goddamned Event?