Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

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.

Not until the evening they happened to sit together and cross napkins in a bar of the casino and became single-malt neighbors did they know of the other’s existence. It was a meal of crawfish lightly battered and with Chinese red pepper covering the best New York strips from Nebraska. They were having a tankard of Irish tea. This evening had begun early and rather lonesome and they could not quit drinking. Frank Booth seemed a man of more world than these parts required. He spoke of fine jewelry from his store in Edwards. Mortimer did not know jewelry except in relation to the necks and wrists and ankles of happier sluts, although he had once met up in Water Valley the poor man in a wooden shop who was compelled to make Elvis Presley’s Tupelo space clothes and rings and belts and studded capes for his Las Vegas patheticon. He told this to Booth.

Mortimer had never heard of single-malt scotch. No real drinker, he did not understand what improvement single could be over more. He had been to California twice to talk to Larry Flynt the pornographer. In his opulent antiqued office, Flynt had expressed himself that a woman was the prettiest picture God allowed on this black earth. Mortimer’s man had stolen Flynt’s Lexus SUV and his secretary’s Infiniti SUV. Flynt was an atheist and democrat who was scared stupid by snake handlers in Kentucky when he was a tiny lad. Woman, the most exquisite vision in nature, he said. It was odd there was also a Venice, California, with slimy moats or what all in it too. Sea slugs, for God’s sake. He did not walk to the ocean.

Mortimer and Booth became large in self-congratulations. It was early spring. They discussed life’s good old goodness. Then they gave their names. Then they talked about their fine hot women. Both women would lie a little, but that was somehow even more zesty. You had to say that for these days, they were living. They had it made, it might not get any better. Mortimer in sympathy imagined this gentle soul Booth with some pliant granny of a girlfriend he thought was a rich find.

He noticed the fellow was, well, a tad effeminate. That was fine. All types. This great U.S.A. open for business, to even old guys, twenty-four / seven. He cheered Booth and cheered his own Conway Twitty — faced self. Booth was a navy veteran, no damned sissy anyway. It was the malt, though, had to be, when Booth told him he was a SEAL in peacetime. His man Lloyd was a SEAL, and Mortimer exercised the courtesy of not mentioning this to the silvery-haired old dreamer. Booth told him his mission was to train violent assault dogs to swim underwater toward Japanese drift-net fishermen, the voracious everything-killing nets fifty miles wide in the Gulf of Mexico. Mortimer did not blink. He was just on the brink of handing the keys of his Lincoln Navigator over to his pal to use a week. Let him dream even bigger.

Then the name Dee Allison came up. The same nurse over at Almost There nursing home. Onward, rather.

“I’m proud to pick such a blossom off that tree, given my years,” Booth said. “I must have something left, because that is one satisfied thirty-six-year-old minx.”

His new pal blinked and got sober.

“You say Dee Allison? Then we both owe her something, Frank. Come on out here to the carport and let’s chat on it.”

He pointed to the Mississippi River when they were outdoors, wide and powerful. Just an old barge road now, with its memories. The Siege of Vicksburg, Gibraltar of the West, 1864. The flood of 1927. Lanterns on the levee. Oyster barrels from New Orleans and Texas grapefruit up for Christmas plantationers. Mortimer did not know the dates. He did not like history or time.

They sat in the behemoth Navigator, large as some fighting machines in Desert Storm.

“Dee Allison should be floating dead down that water right now,” he said to Booth. “We both guessed we got all of her. We gave her everything. All we had was another cheat. I love her, Frank, if I’ve ever had love. But she just grabbed for the leavings, likely just for spite of us both. I cannot believe you trained underwater dogs, old man. But I believe you came in my woman, unless this is a prank.”

“No it isn’t. I forgot your name.”

“Man’s my name. Man Mortimer. Means death by sea.”

“Well this is a shock, with Dee.”

“Just think on this a minute.”

They talked about the sickening whirlpools down in that river. The Civil War dead in their sniper pits, still yearning for a clean head shot on Sherman or Grant. They agreed one expert Navy SEAL sniper could have won the war that month. When slavery would have perished as an institution. It was common wisdom that the South would have given the slaves their freedom the instant they kicked the North’s ass, but that the slaves would have chosen to remain. This thought had brought tears to the eyes of many, many old southern frauds, some of whom still owned retarded black men as slaves, retainers, hostelries, cooks, deer dressers. The South was so good. Why was this never discussed? Someone should make an objective documentary, but you couldn’t have it now, all this correctness.