Yonder Stands Your Orphan (30 page)

Yet he was a husband and Dee was patient with him. Under other circumstances he would have been glad the boys were gone again.

Dee liked her boys more, but there was something smaller about her. She wondered if marriage to this stern young man would mean much to her living world, such as it was. She was always away in her visions now. She saw men burning, crying out, and now children, great filthy explosions,
deep and shallow water in which there were corpses, all in the shell of Big Mart, bombed and half covered by water. Men cried for water and ran up to her and she spat fire at them. This was a vision, but it had a sleepiness to it, as if it were being carried on by her closed eyes into night dreams. She began watching the color television that Mortimer had given her long ago, asking that it imagine her, because she was afraid. She had great anxiety, and the sight of Harold in his school clothes, with loafers and sweaters, would send her into such a foreign mood, she could not imagine how to address this young stranger, the boy naked in the bed beside her.

The boys were good fishermen when they bothered. Their gear was at the lost lake. It was a tiny oxbow lake three hundred yards from the rear of the bad restaurant, whose food exhaust could be smelled still, even here. Nobody was home at the Raymonds', and they killed the time fishing, hardly saying a word.

The boys had spin-cast reels and a newish Shakespeare bait caster. Bless all the gambling failures and crack addicts, a man could really shop in the pawn. Were the laws not just a little too stiff, you'd probably have found used children there.

The boys kept the rods leaned to a tree at the little lake. They had discovered the place. Nobody else came. They cast with a single bait, never changing lures, the old Lucky Thirteen. If they could not hear the pop and see the strike of a big bass, they had no interest in catching one at all. They took five good bass in an hour. One of them was nine pounds. They did not eat much fish, and they released the others back into the black-green water. Then went back to their car, worn and with tight smiles. If they could see Mimi Suarez, it would be a fine day. They could go home soon.

“There must've been five orphans in that one tree watching us. Thinking we're the car desperadoes. Didn't think we'd even notice.”

“They scared the devil out of me, but I just kept on throwing,” said Isaac.

They were glad to be desperadoes, watched in secret by city children. The orphans were going outside the camp at will, several of them armed.

Harold and Sponce were hunkered down at the rim of the sinkhole, staring down at where the car had been. They watched and watched. As if the mother and son would come back to it, open the trunk in its mud and slip in again. So that their minds could get back to the moment and begin making order.

They were grave robbers, but who was it cared so much? Egan and Mortimer. Who cared so much that this '48 hulk was swapped with another decent '48? Mortimer. Who was after Jacob and Isaac in their custom-made red and gold teenage car? Mortimer.

Now they heard through Egan, who'd invited the newlyweds to church services, that Peden had whipped the hell out of Mortimer, who had come at him with a bat. But Hare was haunted by his own romance. In his serious college clothes, Hare was turning Christian under the influence of Egan. He and Dee attended church now.

About this time Harold lowered his head, and a high-grain bullet of less caliber than a .22, called a Bee, parted his hair and lifted it. They were not aware they were being shot at from an immense distance, and the pops seemed irrelevant to the tragic hole they now studied. There was no blood but a curious burn down the part of Harold's hair. He could not account for this. He had been mad with lust and plans. Now that he was preaching to Dee, he was wild
with guilt. He trembled when he recalled the bones still with meat on them. The unreported dead. It took a sort of Jesus to remember them, with that sweet smell, the ligaments draped down from the sockets. He heard the child's screaming from his head wound once the wind started.

They sat on different pews.

Peden and Egan argued with Max Raymond about who owned a church. You couldn't just buy them, although this one, owned by Reformed Presbyterians, was very much for sale by its richer child in Vicksburg. Raymond was going to buy it. He had promises of money, and a CD with his wife and band that was going somewhere. The band was ebbing at the casino, but they were getting gigs as far as Biloxi and New Orleans now. He had found some old doctor money he had forgotten, from his old drug days when he feared the worst at every turn. It was quite a lot. The firm paid you even for being high and invested wisely for you. Funny, the way he didn't care for money and yet fell into it.

“You can buy a church. And you'd have to let me in if I bought it,” said Raymond.

“We'd let you in anyway. The definition of a church is open, isn't it?” asked Byron Egan. He looked at Peden, because the junkman was nervous, his cheeks jumping.

“Nobody denies the wanderer,” said Peden. This didn't seem quite on the mark. The three men shut up awhile.

“My emphasis would always be on acts, not chats,” said Raymond. “I have turned around on this matter and gone against Luther and the rest, I know. I'm not sure there was ever even a sect of me. Offshot from
in fides sola
. You can have a church without firm belief, is all I'm saying. Most churchmen can't tell you what they believe anyway.”

“All right,” Egan said. “Christ himself said whoever is not against us is on our part, and he might know the church. Buy it. We stand. I and Peden have a church and the doors are wide open.”

“For none of us knows who lives tomorrow, who may tarry yet come the sun dead on his pillow,” Peden burst out. He rose from the pew as if delivering an involuntary oath and strode toward the trombonists gently tuning in the little chair gallery to the left of the pulpit. These five men were dark black and were cousins. They had no interest in recording or selling their music. Many said they blended like the best tea of heaven, and they could make you cry with their hymns. Only one read a note of music, and he was not the leader. The leader was James. He played the enormously belled bass trombone. Two others had valved trombones. So intense were these men in their harmonies that there seemed no other world for them.

Now the trombonists stopped and looked at Peden as if he were a goat wandering into their music.

“Say, men,” asked Max Raymond, with his instrument case between his legs, “you think I could sit in with you a few tunes? James?”

“No.”

The men, dropping the saliva out of their spit valves, looked at one another. “It ain't no place to make your entrance,” said James. “Nor get out if you was in.”

“It be in there like a piece of hair on a bar of soap,” said another seriously. They were musicians but much like deacons too. They frightened Raymond a little. They began playing again, silvery, in trouble and then deliverance. One of them with the bell of his horn under the church light going gold to bronze to red.

Christ, we are your throat.

MORTIMER AND SIDNEY MET IN THE BAIT STORE AFTER
hours. Sidney's emporium was prosperous now. It needed both Opal and Iona, his new helper. A yellow Lexus sports wagon was parked behind the store. Sidney watched Mortimer with pleasure. Thin, bent, elderly in almost every movement. Pain on his face. The pretty boy home sick from school.

When all was clear, they went out and told the girls to exit the Lexus newly stolen from Sevierville, Tennessee. It was yellow with a cream white grille in front. It was a little girl's car, in fact.

Mortimer put on a CD in the jambox. The girls had done this before. The music was elvish dancing music that Mortimer had gotten at a bargain in the mall. Nobody had ever bought it. It was a junior college symphony from Kansas.

The orphans, Betsy and Irma, began by holding hands and skipping together in the aisles of the heavily stocked store, knocking over flashlight batteries, sardines, bananas. Since Sidney had restocked, you could see the equipment for much iniquity. Magazines about muscular naked girls.

The girls walked to the tunes and disrobed privately behind a far aisle. They were not certain how to carry on, but the elvish meadow dance music urged them onward, and they came out demurely in nothing. Mortimer cheered them to continue to dance. No hand touched them. It was an arrangement by the artist in his last creative fever.

He and Sidney watched from padded chairs. They shared a single-malt scotch bottle between them. Farté Bait
House glasses to drink from. They seemed to desire nothing else; they were not anxious but meditative. Once Sidney accidentally touched Mortimer's arm reaching for his drink, and Mortimer's knife hand flew to his back pocket. But there was nothing there, the movement was involuntary.

At the end they gave the girls money and said it was a very fine audition. This was the form of Mortimer's current sin. Sidney was the more lecherous of the two and had gotten tight enough to hold the shoulder of the child Betsy. But this act was so repellent to her that she almost fainted, so he left her alone to return to the yellow Lexus and home to Clinton, where they had pallets and a large television in a vacant room, with snacks and sodas and their own phone, in Mortimer's very teenage hangout.

Melanie, Bernice and John Roman ate at the rib house, Near 'Nuff Food. Its theme was medieval chaos, and people dumped buckets of ribs on a tablecloth of butcher paper, then tore off a length from the top and bagged the rib bones in preparation for the next arrivals. It was festive and harsh, and a success. Employees of the bad restaurant ate here.

The face of Frank Booth passed by a window, and Roman was shocked again by the surgeon's ability to bring a third Conway Twitty into the world. He reached for his big rib knife, a heavy steel thing, and awaited Booth's appearance at the door.

Booth came in the door, with Ruthna and the very drunk Whit and Alexander. Ruthna was not drinking and looked cleanly figured, getting some of her womanly curves back. Melanie admired her and thought she had seen her around the lake. Bernice was deeply affected by Melanie, who had stayed close to her through the illness even though Roman sometimes had doubts about the lady's curious goodness.
His reservations were gone now. He saw she could not help being a good woman, and he was sorry for her pain as an old lover. He was a happier man now that Bernice was back among the living, but the Booth man hovered near him, and the women noticed him too.

“Is he that singer, or isn't he?” asked Melanie. “‘A Bridge That Just Won't Burn'? He's bald now. Doesn't he wear a hairpiece when he comes here to eat?”

“That is not Conway Twitty. That is another man who looks like him. And it ain't right,” said Roman.

“My word. With the woman and her poor drunken friends.” The group of them sat down at a near table. Whit and Alexander had brought brown bags with liquor in them, allowed on dry Sunday evenings.

The bald man with Twitty's face was paying serious court to Ruthna. He was touching her face and being most solicitous about her hair and comfort as she combed away at a snarl. He seemed to be feeling just capital, but there was an appalling quality to this, seeing a dead singer making time with Ruthna, just back from the dead herself and nearly as pale as her drunkmates. These men had not turned into mean drunks yet, a miracle for the decades they had been lushes. They sweated and carped merrily, waiting on the fat ribs, the cowgirl wenches, the huge fruit-jar glasses with ice and lemon setups. Melanie saw that Ruthna was not as ardent as Booth, but she was not disinterested.

Roman snorted. “Skank.”

“You ain't the total darling you once were,” said Bernice. His healthy wife. He could hardly believe she was here. Maybe he suffered from Mortimer for her life. That night of the masks. Her pain had seemed to have had no reason, her waiting, his watching. He could not keep his eyes off Booth's face. He felt lifted from his seat, memory throbbing
in his wrist. The thing, as if warned, turned and beheld him directly.
Help me
, the lips seemed to form.

Roman held his rib knife tensely, poised. The women were scared and jittery now, including Ruthna, who seemed at last to recognize the mask of her date.

Ulrich and Egan were visiting Peden in his house by the junkyard. Peden now had a gun he rested in different rooms. He had reports of Mortimer in good humor, but scrawny, aged. Lloyd drove for him almost always. Edie gave him rubdowns in Clinton and Rolling Fork. She was showing her age too. Maybe she was back on the Valium.

Sponce had only his stepfather Harold's connection to Peden when they stole the '48 together. They knew the call for the car was out and that Mortimer intended to hurt somebody about this matter. The boys had not come home at all since their mother's wedding weeks ago. They might be legal drivers before they were seen again. That or dead in the trunk of their '48.

Sponce could hardly stay at home with Dee and Harold. He did not understand his own position there anymore. There was no family left, only the marriage, a queer thing that seemed to make his mother weaker and Harold officious, strutting and lecturing Sponce about life, now that he was almost a graduate of the mechanics college.

Sponce became a wanderer with no home and barely a car, only Harold's old Chevrolet El Camino with its truck bed and car cab. It smelled like very lonely oil men. It looked like their wallets inside. A web of rusted veins ran all about. It had a good engine, but sleeping in it was hard when he quit playing like he was training for the air force. But where could he go?

He went into the orphans' woods and walked, knowing they were all around him from across the canal around their island fortress, and he held a rifle as if he were an idle hunter of deer, perhaps lost. He sought their company, but he did not know how to acknowledge them. He wanted a confrontation so he could shout out his innocence, but he fled when nobody pursued. He walked himself into a ragged hungry thing. By the time he made it to Peden's house, he was stunned, sleepy, a scarecrow driving a car from the era of eight-track tapes. But he stumbled onto the porch and held out his hand.