Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

It’s a family dream here. What men and some women pay for, dreams nobody else talks about. You ain’t got your odors, your armpits stink. Everything smells like a new car and roses. No birth control, no AIDS, no sad sermonettes the next day, no apology, no forgiveness. Nobody gets hurt. You get nasty, but nobody needs to kill or rob for it. This is my country .

Mortimer wanted to sing. He hurt so much and he knew it had only begun to grab him, but he wanted to sing. “This is my country,” he began. “Land of the free that I love or something.” The Coyote had quit singing entirely and they heard this patriotism, absurd, maybe drunken, around the table. He was nobody’s friend here. But he knew things, felt them. He knew he had been born without a talent for love. He was not ashamed.

You take for starters those orphan girls with their light little neck chains, then you see chains just a little bigger around their wrists, ankles, down their crease. Fairyland bondage, like. Mrs. Wooten and Dee come over to them to explain about being women, easing off their garments, dropping their own, cheerful! Then Large Lloyd enters to prove it to both ladies while the girls watch. Edie in something red and wearing long earrings, and she bathes Lloyd with her tongue. Because she is an older woman too, maybe a widow in the middle of being a mature love acrobat when her husband fell off a barge, and she’s been innocently storing all this up .

The girls keep being astounded. Dee Allison will then satisfy three men at once and then laugh as they shrink out of her. Mrs. Wooten and the silver-haired black woman, Roman’s wife, cheering them on with some old island sex lore .

They take their own pleasure, otherwise it’s all queered. The whole thing is about female power, the man is just a friend to it. That’s why the pope and the hair evangelists hate it. It’s about Onan, careless with his seed. It’s against populating the grimy little flybit species except for them as can appreciate time and flesh and imagination. It’s about your high school play and sport and it don’t speak to nothing but itself. You can’t tell me who’s harmed by it. The Internet is okay, but you develop there a lonely murderous kind of nerd who wears a raincoat in his own den, stepping out into the ether thinking it’s real, realer than Mom, who he’s hammered to death because she wasn’t some Power Ranger with tits who makes waffles every day .

These people ain’t the ones to get me to the hospital, though. Bad choice. Whoa Lloyd, whoa Edie! Come here, get us on out here down the road to Warren General. I’ve done excited myself. That wasn’t the way to go . He rose gingerly and picked his way through to the casino, still patient as a new night watchman, as if he’d never coursed these alleys between the dings and the screaming, the magenta, teal and garnet rugs. Glorified bus station crying havoc. The blackjackers, the seven-uppers and roulette bayers who would have worked the state carnivals in other days, with their Chesterfield growls, women and men.

He began to cry to himself. The pain. Amid the plurality of pawnshop loiterers, lumpen proles. Like his father’s name, Lumpkin. Mortimer gambled, but he never liked it here, even when he won. Too many times he saw the revenants of his parents, yanking on the slot arms in wet-mouthed hopelessness. Like outpatients. The fine family locked and loaded to force once more the steely arm of chance.

Mississippians were good folks. They gave more in charity than any in the nation. Their hospitality seemed to be state law, and some white folks and black had quite a lot of dough now. Despite their rear-march structures in schools, religion, teenage pregnancy, money and tooth decay, the state was receiving an influx of black families. In flight from the cold North, which had revealed its soul after a century of moral high ground as a paved jungle issuing forth a life nasty, brutish and short. They resettled all the old counties, yet the Delta, richer in soil than the Valley Nile, was poor and home to casinos since the early nineties.

But in these poor counties there was other charity, in the form of suicide, often by cop. The lost soul saying, “I cease bothering, sweep me out.” The river awaited nearby, as much death as life. Several hanged themselves in prison, in drunk tanks. One man slit his wrists in a Dumpster behind a Hardee’s because the food was so bad and its black and white teenage staff did little but carry on a race war over its microphones. He left a note to this effect.

Then there was just the sorriness. Was it modern times? A Jackson policeman named McJordan shot two small pet dogs within two weeks. One was loose on its owner’s land. The other fifteen-pounder, yapping in the policeman’s driveway, he claimed was threatening his wife. Did he mean to announce that he was such scum that he must be annihilated by any dog-loving rifleman in this state? McJordan was found to be within the law. He was back on the force, armed. Even Mortimer wondered if the cop was something newborn from science, and Mortimer had no feeling for dogs. Large Lloyd vowed to destroy McJordan, but he was intellectual and was taking his time planning the torture.

“What? What?” Mortimer suddenly shouted above all the noise, the croupiers, the money changers. He had been dreaming, was losing blood.

Just then Mortimer saw Egan the minister in the aisles and was about to pronounce him a hypocrite to his face until he saw the fellow’s mission. Egan was in motorcycle boots, the keys to many churches and their basements on a ring at his belt. He was handing out business cards. Stared at Mortimer as he gave him one.

“You said in your sermon you know me. But Reverend, I think it’s me that knows you .” It dawned on Mortimer, seeing Egan up close, that this boy had driven the car with the woman and her boy in the trunk. He did not know where it was driven, didn’t want to know, but he loved to feel the kudzu, the cane, the palmettos, the lesser Amazon bracken, the pestholes, the bayous and the creekbeds and oxbows all around him here these seven years. To know her and her infanticide would stay in undergrowth, underwater or, surviving that, would have been eaten by good time and its best friend, decay. He decided right then that the schoolteacher in the trunk must have been a dyke.

He understood he was sane too for not hugging nature and mostly spitting at it, wishing more of it was a rug and smelled like new cars. He was satisfied that he had never caught a largemouth bass or even thrown at one. Just the way they said Elvis was proud of never writing a song.

“No, I know you !” said Egan very loudly. Mortimer was not aware of others in the casino.

“Egan my holiness,” he erupted as if with a thought roaring straight out of his gonads, lost in hurt. “There are near a million coyotes in this state. What the hell’s happening ?” All this stuff with eyes was crawling around the bodies in the trunk. Or it might be in the ocean. This boy Egan, the good shepherd. Once beat up women.

“You’re wicked all the way through,” Egan said. “Another day I’d already have jacked up a switchblade to your throat and you’d be forgetting you look like Conway Twitty.”

Mortimer understood from his own grimmer days that it was not good to beat up women you thought weakened by speed and heroin. He understood this the afternoon he hit an almost giant girl with superb legs, messed up on everything. He’d never heard of some of the chemicals, and this girl beat him mercilessly. She was pure girl but could look done for when really she had another whole tank left.

“It’s Fabian, Fabian, boy,” he rallied.

“You might of once looked like Fabian. Not no more.”