Yonder Stands Your Orphan (20 page)

He was closer to rot and birth with every mile. This place was lodges, bulks of mobile homes, old trailer villages where fugitive creatures abided. Modern doctors did not vacation here anymore, nor modern anybody much, although the fishing was good. The town would ghost out in a bad fishing season, a hot spell, and the loneliness left behind could hurt you physically in the eyes. Long tubal aches to the grand home of migraine and hot rain at noon. The doctors took their families skiing in the West or to the Islands, where they mimicked life as best they could with the new big money. The wives haggard from hanging on to beauty.

Max Raymond realized all of a sudden he had very little doctor money left. It was nearly all saxophone money now. Or Coyote money. Not too bad. He would buy the house and make the landlord happy that its haunted memories would stay in good hands. His life, this place where something was. The red car? A boomerang on the curves now, all red.

Fifteen miles behind him, Vicksburg, city of the bluffs. Gilbraltar of the West at one time. Now into these casinos dime-store Legbas bid the weak and bored come in. See the man with the wonderful saxophone! Illuminations of the bridge over Louisiana at night. Capitulant city! Shops crying deeds and titles for cash. Children out at the orphans' camp because their parents were for sale without buyers. Drugs, car wrecks.

Lightning loved the swamp. The willows thrashed now where all the souls of dead bad poets roamed day and night. In their big sprawling cottage, what good storms Mimi and he watched together. Popping those souls that cannot die but must return to open-microphone poetry slams against an adjacent junior college. Catering by the bad restaurant.
Pop,
a soul in bliss for just seconds thinks it has actually died
and is moving away somewhere beyond this green echo chamber. No such luck, only the cynical lightning.

Raymond had one model for a poet-warrior such as himself and his Mossberg. Or just forget the rifle.
Be a man, use your new long-barrel .38, stuffed in the trousers. You go by even the orphans' camp, there's the mass popping of firearm training now. Nobody can touch them. It's a legitimate sport. Then the thud of the bigger stuff. The lunatic couple ride horses now. The .38, you've got to be good. No real stopping power, no scatter-shooting
. His model was a man he visited in the veterans' hospital, a nationally honored poet, mad and with his shoes on contrariwise. The poet's son in middle age said he had suffered all this while for being a man. He now wanted a woman operation. And as a woman he desired other
women
. His father the old poet could not understand.

Why was madness ever thought to be a transcendent state? What idiot waited how long around the raving to decide this? It was the nastiest and saddest condition Raymond had seen. The man had suffered Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Saipan. He wrote long electric poems, or tried, like an ecstatic writing in sand with a pickax, or something like that, a reviewer said. But then real madness drove him to real madness. Worse, perhaps the son wanted to change into the mother so he could at last have her. And on and on. How can life take this turn? Raymond himself still felt depressed by his short visit. His pity, his terror, his absolute disgust.
But the poems. Were they worth the cost?

He caught up to the red car pulling out of the gravel lot of the little church, continuing around the lake toward the restaurant. Raymond drove up to the window with its stained glass raised to prevent explosion during the storm. Egan was leaning out, watching the sky. Then he looked at Raymond in his car window. Egan had a bloody face and he
pointed. Raymond got out the .38 and drove back to the road, but not before he heard a quartet of trombones behind Egan in the church, playing sweetly and importantly some sacred number, oblivious to both the storm and Egan. He seemed to have gotten his cuts leaning out the window.

Raymond was chilled, but he drove on. Some kill for Christ, he reflected, and cannot be Christian but are Christ's allies. They can never have close communion, only quiet thanks. They do not have visions. They have war.

He touched the pistol, then thought further about Christian soldiers. They live in a dream amid the valley bottoms of tall white pines, live and river oaks, palm trees, palmettos, wild magnolia. They live in a dream between paradise and purgatory. They sleep on hard thin mattresses. They sit down to dinner in the bad restaurant, today with its blue plate special of frozen prefloured meat, gummy white bread and gravy made from cut-rate mushroom soup in giant industrial drums. There should be pictures of ambiguous fiends through history on the wall, all dead by the efforts of the Christian soldiers. Every meal as they wait for the battle, somebody looks at dinner and says, “I've had worse.”

Raymond thought. Separation from Christ through murder for him.

But in his mind he saw again the church in the dell and heard the sweet trombone chorus chording through the window. “Nearer My God to Thee” was the tune.

On the barge that afternoon, Melanie and Dee and several men, including Sidney, began a tradition of meditation on the lake. The pontoon boat was both museum and church afloat, by far the most elegant hand-built craft on these waters, which opened as they went through the lock into a new reservoir.

The first meditation was to be led by Melanie, with comment from others as the rest of church. Essentially, they were floating Unitarians. Facetto was aboard for the first time, his and Melanie's love in plain sight. Dr. Harvard was having a very hard time. Melanie was unconscious of this. They anchored in a cove. She stood at the wheel on the captain's box.

Harvard introduced her. “Today's meditation will be read by Melanie Wooten, a changed woman who now shares an altered worldview.” Harvard did not know about the tongue in the car window, so he did not understand Melanie. But she had a new sadness that Harvard liked, because her careering with this confident young lawman was not right.

Dee Allison and her little girl stood wearing church dresses, but they tended to recede from the group in uneasy shyness. The little girl was fine, but Dee had never been among dressed boat crowds and felt diminished by the blazers and Melanie's smart suit.

“‘There was the snow, and her watch ticking. So many snowflakes, so many seconds. As time passed they seemed to mingle in their minds, heaping up into a vast shape that might be a burial mound, or the cliff of an iceberg whose summit is out of sight. Into its shadow dreams crowded, full of conception and stirrings of cold, as if ice floes were moving down a lightless channel of water. They were going further into darkness, allowing no suggestion that their order should be broken, or that one day however many years distant, the darkness would give place to light.

“‘Yet their passage was not saddening. Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them. Crying out against their implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep.'

“That was a selection from
A Girl in Winter
by Philip Larkin,” said Melanie softly.

“Nice,” said Carl Bob Feeney, less insane than last week.

“I disagree,” said Sidney. He rose from a director's chair near a side pew. “And I need a drink.” Sidney had taken to mixing Stolichnaya vodka with orange juice for his health. He had affected this weeks ago.

“Disagree?”

“Number one, it ain't about me, or nothin'. It's about snow and some time shit.” He looked down at Emma, the child.

“Any other thoughts?” asked Harvard.

“Well I'd like to know who she thinks she is,” said Wren.

“You mean the girl in that passage?” asked Melanie.

“No. You. ‘Unsatisfied dreams crying out against their implacability' or such. Who the hell you think we are, schoolkids you're trying to impress? You're implying you go around the house saying
implacability
often? Ever? Or hoping many of us dumbos wouldn't get it? Why, I understand the word quite well. And I find you and the author posing asses. Christ, I thought we'd get some Robert Frost or something. This is worse than Faulkner.”

Melanie was stunned.

Another man, Ulrich, wanted to speak. “You need to change again from wherever you've changed. You would have us think anybody gives a damn what white people think anymore. They are the killers of seals, baby seals, by clubbing. They shoot polar bears just because they're there. What do
these
creatures think about our thoughtful moaning?”

“That's not fair,” said Facetto. “It was a meditation to invite thought. It wasn't her own writing.”

“She didn't read it because she hated it,” said Wren.

“Maybe she read it because she ain't getting enough dick,” said Sidney. You would not know he was drunk until he went suddenly about it at the drop of a dime.

Many turned. But nobody called down Sidney. He seemed satisfied. Statement, vodka, orange juice, his tweed vested suit, everything.

Melanie tried, but she could not help weeping the rest of the day. The sheriff left her early.

Sidney led a disordered party far into the night. Whores were still coming aboard at nine
P.M
. Large orphans mingled with them, and Minny and Sandra, now fifteen, had on backless cocktail dresses. John Roman and his wife, Bernice, who had not been out in weeks, were aboard celebrating the end of chemotherapy and the beginning of remission. The launch rocked. Chet Baker was heard in the middle of it all, though he was not a noisy man. The pier lit up with fireworks or gunplay. You couldn't be sure. Harvard's hair became disarrayed. He waded in the cove and cursed and howled, holding a bottle of Jack Daniels aloft, baying at the moon. All this practically in Melanie's backyard that Sunday night.

“The best thing about dogs and kids,” Ulrich cried out near the end, feverishly intoxicated, “is they ain't going anywhere. They're already
there
!”

He dandled Emma the cherub on his knee, breathing tortuously, from the emphysema, in long tugs and seekings of his lungs. This angel was not frightened of Ulrich. She thought he was a train. Then one of the fifteen-year-olds took the baby girl in her own arms, saying, “Oh, this one's coming home with me!” At one time Melanie pressed her nose against her own windowpane, watching down the hill in miserable incredulity.

And
, thought Raymond, pulling into the parking lot of the bad restaurant,
back almost to my front door
. He didn't shake as much as he expected he would, and he put the pistol in his belt against his stomach, put the coat on as he stood from his car. The red car, a Mercury Sable, was here all right. The tag wasn't Memphis. It was local. He knew now. But he wasn't certain why it should go on. One would make a quick move. The other would pay. A hum of grief came to his ears.

The air was solid with earth- and tree-frog song. They went
kecka kecka kecka
in the early night, the storm blown past.

The man was at a table next to the wall, tall even in his chair. His eyes were in shadow. Nobody else was about. His hair seemed too great for his neck, which had gotten thinner. Raised and swept to width, set like soft wire. He could be a singer, an evangelist, a small-town sinner living out a sneer established at seventeen. An almost effeminate elegance too, a man deep in self-study, a creature of mirrors.

Raymond looked into the backs of the man's hands on the table. A meal hardly touched in front of him.

“I know you. What is it, Man?” asked Raymond.

“I came out here to get a second opinion. You the doctor?”

The doctor of yester-Memphis stood in the aisle. “Sit down,” Mortimer said. “Unless you planning your way out already.”

As Raymond sat, the trance that had brought him here was broken. The man at this level looked frail, whining, “You called me names and wouldn't let me in your club. There might be a new vote, though. It's a democracy everywhere you look. Sidney wants me to come aboard.”

Raymond had not expected wit, if this was wit. Could evil be witty? If this thing was evil. The hair almost its own life. The Everly Brothers. God recalls them. Two boys packed into one hairdo.

Somebody was in the back. They were the only ones still in the dining area. The hour was desolate, dim, redolent of fried meals. Scorched crust of meat in the nostrils.

“Raymond, let me tell you something that might get your attention. I had to see you. Where is that big knife or whatever? Show it to me.” Raymond reached inside to show Mortimer the butt under his coat. This did not feel unnatural. If he missed him here, he had the longer gun back at the house with the hollowpoints, and he was very good with that one at age eleven.

“You want some of me?” Mortimer raised his hands. He had thinned a good deal, almost to gauntness. He seemed ill.

“I came to destroy you. I don't know much, but I know you're bad straight through.”