Yonder Stands Your Orphan (7 page)

Down in the south corner of the lake, Mortimer watched the absurd floor and roof on pontoons move toward him. Two adults and crammed with children. He did not like children. But he became suddenly alert when he noticed the two fourteen-year-old girls leaning on the rail his way. They both smoked in the sullen manner of the hopeless. One was already bosomy. The other had fine bare shoulders. Just budding upper frame, but muscled long legs. Then he stared at the adults. They had loony smiles, but there was something depleted about them both. They must be church people, he decided. That stupid hope on their faces. That trust that they were always on the Lord's stage, pulled by the strings of a larger design. Looking for a cross. Maybe these brats themselves. He heard a few curses shouted his way, but the adult couple seemed oblivious. Speakers of another tongue.

He knelt here at the boat ramp with chipped granite boulders banked close to it, red sand to either side. It was his first time at the lake, he had come to take a boat from a
man deeply in debt to him. The man had wanted to fish one last time in it. He was waiting. The girls were the first exciting thing he'd seen in weeks.

At this juncture he had no plans to hurt people around the lake. He did not like bodies of water much, had never seen the ocean. He was indifferent to trees. Soil was hateful to him, as was the odor of fish. But like many another man forty-five years in age, he wanted his youth back.

He wanted to have pals, sports, high school girls. This need had rushed on him lately. He lived in three houses, but he had no home. He did not like the hearth, smells from the kitchen, an old friend for a wife, small talk. It all seemed a vicious closet to him. He moved, he took, he was admired. But he had developed a taste for young and younger flesh. This was thrilling and meant high money. Men and women in this nation were changing, and he intended to charge them for it.

Religion had neither formed nor harmed him. Neither had his parents in southern Missouri. But he despised the weakness of the church, and of his parents, whom he had gulled. He was a pretty boy born of hawk-nosed people. It was a curse to have these looks and no talent. Long, lank. Hooded eyes, sensual lips that sang no tune. Still, he quit the football team because of what it did to his hair, claiming a back ailment that had exempted him from manual labor since age fourteen. There are thousands of men of this condition, most of them sorry and shiftless, defeated at the start. Many are compulsives and snarling fools, emeritus at twenty.

His parents doted on him. The pew in the church also hurt his back, he said. But he would go with them now and then, a martyr. Because already he liked to mock the sheepish Methodist minister, to whom the world was a terror from which he led his little flock in long, constant retreat.
The hymns of this church were like the moan of doomed animals to his ears.

Mortimer's parents were both unassertive postmen. They had no other children but kept a chicken yard in the back, which mortified him. He was often in the house alone, indisposed to school, to the wretched town, where almost everybody walked with a sag. A neighbor boy showed him a pornographic picture when he was fifteen, and the bone-deep thrill of seeing that woman in her happy pain had never left him, had never diminished. He looked for it behind every curtain of culture, of law.

His likeness to Fabian had attracted many girls, then women, often several at once. They loved his brooding, his shy muttering, his brute eyes. He seemed all hooded by his brows even when he had nothing on his mind. The thick wavy hair was eloquent for him. These were girls of lesser elegance, lesser clothes, lesser cuteness, but nice enough.

At home one evening he screamed out suddenly that he didn't have a fine car or any money, and he knew that the two of them, his parents, were hiding it for themselves. He promised he would never attend their funerals. There would be no grown son to honor them when they passed. He frightened his mother and father. They gave him a nice car and money. When he got enough, he left them. There was other money too, from the three girls who left with him, one of them a student teacher from a nearby college. She was his first conquest of the better sort, the scioness of a middling-wealthy owner of a department store. She had good legs, spectacles, grammar. He spent some years doing manual labor but cushioned by women, who gave him money. Then around thirty he found his calling, as most do.

He did not know the term
gigolo
. Something about him canceled scruples in women. He didn't know what that
was either but accepted it as a birthright. For reasons he didn't ponder, he did not love but found the language of love came fluid to him. He never even had the puppy kind of love. He was jaded before he had a crush. He was a pimp before he comprehended what a pimp was. It was just that women liked him, especially the marginal breeds. They shed all natural jealousies, even pride, for him. They broke open on him. They went with other men and gave him half the money.

His name was Man Mortimer. Death by sea or by mother. He was horrified of progeny. Nothing was busy or brooding enough to follow him.

Seven years ago the girl from his early days, a store owner's daughter, had come to him with a child six years old she claimed was his. She was on hard times, drugged, worn, emaciated. She thought the son would bring him back to her. He denied fatherhood.

They were at an old gravel bed outside St. Louis. She walked back to his car where the boy was waiting and shot him in the forehead. Mortimer was not aware she had a pistol. Now she sat in the car beside the body of the child. The night silent, hot, the moon white somewhere. Mortimer's expensive loafers on the gravel. He always needed expensive shoes and boots. He stood looking in the foggy windshield at the woman behind it until she raised the pistol and shot herself in the temple. He looked away, and for a long while he watched lightning reveal shivering bushes in the field next to him. He couldn't be sure this was not a dream. Even while he dragged them both to the trunk.

A thin highway dog lurked at the edge of the trunk light. Skeletal but with full paps. She smelled the blood, thrust out her muzzle, wanting to eat but fearing him. He took pity on her and intended to use the pistol on her. With
this thought he assured himself he was a right man. But she ran off into a dark field of sedge.

He drove southward with his burdens, hating that his shoes were scuffed from labor. These sordid details, these fluids. He could never forgive her. She had shown him hell.

“She just wanted me to watch, is all,” he said aloud. “It was already done when she got here. She wanted to ruin me. Well.”

He felt no pain outside this nasty theater of his mind. But he felt a surge of power. A tougher man seemed to drive the car now. He gathered himself into this new form. He took some pride in the force of his withdrawal from women. He had driven some into lesbianism. Or supposed he had. He had barely laid a hand on any of them. He believed in the mind.

Acquaintances in Vicksburg would help him bury his old history.

He wondered vaguely, and not for the first time, whether his departure had destroyed his mother.
A person like me don't come along every day
, he thought.
You just got to watch yourself. Don't ever mistake that I'm like you
.

It was only when his looks started to go, at age forty-three, that he became hungry for all the life he had missed. Something had made him grow up too fast, and he cursed that thing now. He fled from one of his three houses to the other, the next house always a getaway from the last. The people he knew were made curious by his changes this last year. With them he seemed to be doing some imitation of warmth, friendship, trust. Childish, stilted gestures, as if studied from some old book on stagecraft. They had no idea what he had on his mind.

When the man who owed him the boat at last came up, Mortimer told him to stay in it. He wanted driving somewhere.

“You see that pontoon barge way out there? I want you to follow it, see where they get off it.”

“Those children? Them is orphans from the new camp.”

“Orphans? Well. Let's see where they land. I might could help them.”

The man was surprised. Then he looked at Mortimer's feet. “Careful. Them ain't no boat shoes. They like for selling cars in.”

“Just drive it. If you can stay quiet, you might be earning this boat back.”

The man was very warm to this idea. Parting with the boat was breaking his heart. He should have stuck with it and fishing. A simple soul who don't ask much more than God's waters. But no, he had to get off into gambling, borrowing and the night sweats.

The adult couple were weary, the same idiot glassy beams in their faces as they watched the children disembark to the pier. They seemed unconnected to the children individually but joined to their collective oversoul. Only about six of the children were tame. They peered at Mortimer and his pilot coming up in the boat, but he could not be sure they quite perceived him. The huge smiles were already on them when he came, and they seemed only a little puzzled.

“I saw you across the lake.” Mortimer pointed. “A voice said to me, ‘Now what can I do to help out?' And it not even Christmas. I said, ‘I bet these good folks could use a hand.'”

“A hand?” the husband said.

“Myself, I had no mother or daddy either. I know where you're coming from.”

With their great smiles, they seemed unequipped to deny him. Like they had already assented when he was on the way over. Both of them nodded. Mortimer knew they were damaged, and this fact pleased him. He felt to be their senior officer the minute he set foot on the pier, looking for where those two girls could have got off to. They were over to the side, watching him, sullen, too old for this camp, their legs jammed to the grass in a stance both defiant and beckoning. Street-corner women.

Mortimer found out he had much in common with the male adult. Their pain. As Mortimer walked up the pier to the lawn with the couple, the man in the boat whispered, “I heard a voice out there too. It said, ‘Freddy, watch out. You driving up some nasty river with this shark.'”

DEE ALLISON HELD HER BRA AND PANTIES IN ONE HAND AND
watched the reflection of herself in the blank television screen. She wanted to see if she still had powers, and she was satisfied, looking directly at her breasts, stomach, the lush dark curls of her pubic hair.

She was only thirty-six. Her husband was a memory since the birth of her baby girl, but she understood not being here. She was almost not here herself. Nor anywhere. At least he sent money. He was doing well. She didn't care what he did or where he was. She was just about exactly what she looked like, a phlegmatic starlet, made lazy by her rolling daydreams. But cheerful. Life had not beaten her. She was glad.

Each one has his master, and Mortimer had at last met a woman who moved him in all ways. Who could be visited but never occupied. He gave her money, a car, a television she rarely watched, drugs she threw away, drink she barely uncapped. She never asked for anything and was indifferent to her station in life, that of a nurse and single mother of four, in a sagging house on the scrub side of the lake not far from the new orphans' camp. He met her needs for animal passion, but he knew another man could furnish her just as well. Dee was heedless of the fact that he was very special, or that she was.

He told her dreadful tales about his business. The whores, the sharking, extortion, the ruined lounge rats who ran to do his will. With her, he had quit his laconic muttering. He had gone full-bore to revelations, which startled him.
There was a desperate poet suddenly grafted onto him. She barely responded.

She might writhe with him in bestial greed, but otherwise she seemed the nun of apathy. She was wearing him out both ways. Having her and not having her so quickly.

The truth was, she had her daydreams and did not live much outside them. Television bored her, but she sat wishing musical scores and images onto its blank screen. She worked at the Onward Rest Home, called Almost There by wags in the county, and many remarked that she was too bright and lovely to stop there. She was not trash, she was clean and dressed well. Her four children lived with her. Two boys, a near man of twenty, and Emma, a baby girl with the disposition of an angel and startling beauty, often baby-sat by a nearby Mennonite couple when she was out on the town. She paid little attention to her home and let her children run wild.

She did not know where the dreams came from, but she sometimes imagined men exploding into flame, and then the surrounding buildings, sometimes as she stared at them. Perhaps it was their strutting confidence that they belonged and were needed by their place. Women also drew her anger. The ones too assured, too comfortable with this world. Going down the road in their cars and thinking everybody waited for them like dogs, tongues all out and fawning. Her imagination was the Old Testament, although she had never read it and had no god.

In her nurse's outfit, white stockings, white shoes, she was a form of wreckage too. When she walked away from the old men at Onward, they witnessed the struggle of her rumpcheeks in the skirt and they knew hurt, even terror, and vast pity for themselves. She did not patronize them, never called them
sweetheart
or
boyfriend
, these convicts of time.
She did not mean to harm them. They were all right, they were reality, they knew their place, deaf and aiming monologues out the window and across the river at Louisiana. The democracy of the pained, the fearful, the unheard. She was gentle and content to be the young beauty among them. On whom they fastened the dopey old fogs of their desire.

They knew full well they stood no chance with her, even had their health and worried fortunes caught her attention. She had her man, in fact two of them, the Mortimer one and the sixty-year-old one who some days quietly drove her away in a restored battleship-gray Chevrolet Bel-Air from the fifties with its Antique tag. He was a recessive man, gentle, and loved that Dee shared his bliss over the oldies from the tinny radio speaker. He had added the FM band just for her. Frank Booth was his name. He wanted old-time dates, with courting and the moon, and especially the voices of Patsy Cline and Connie Francis. And the heartbreaking teen-angel ballads with God and the chapels in them. Things had not prospered for him in his earlier years, and he wanted the softness and the victory of them now, although he was by no means a failure. He had a jewelry business in Edwards just off Highway 20. He did not want to just coo and sigh either, no, he wanted full, half-clothed intercourse with Dee on a lonesome road with high orange moons up there, and her brassiere off and her priceless white stockings. Lover's Lane. He was sworn to this, he was sworn to stolen pleasure, so that God would barely know in the act's hot brevity what might have transpired. Yes he was strange, but Dee liked the manners and cherished the nights, odd as they were. They made her feel young too. The man Frank, he asked permission to expend himself inside her. Asked permission. I'd be hurt if you didn't, she'd say.