Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

The boys went straight to work. They were going to ask the priest about the car but decided not to, because nobody knew quite how seriously to take the.22 Magnum. Feeney had shot nothing yet but a yard jockey he had stolen down the lake, from the lawn of white people he detested.

His nephew Egan had tried to take the gun away from him, but he would have had to take on a whole fresh paranoia, a job close to sweeping out a large hospital. Egan would lecture the old man patiently. Except for the idea of his trespassed land, his uncle remained still an ethical Christian without want or hope for material. Even his alcoholism could be moderate, leaving the juice alone three straight days with no real sickness. Egan held up his prized old switchblade with the Mexican flag colors one afternoon and offered to throw it as far out in the woods as he could if his uncle would throw that rifle the same. There was still much goth in Egan, he knew it. He did not think Christian heavy metal was possible, only heavy metal, but it might be the music of Christ’s deepest anger with the whip against the money changers in the temple. The next trip to the lodge, he saw the old man had brought the rifle back in and had a whole new box of shells for it, polishing them, as no sane rifleman ever did. Some of the dogs were going unfed, they urinated and excreted in the hallways.

Egan was worried sick about the sanitation and even more about the fellow shooting an orphan or some other child around the land. Somebody just fishing for crappie in the grotto pond, one of the prettiest natural-spring pools he’d ever seen, where Christ Jesus might have knelt in his loneliness for solace from the ailing masses and baffled disciples. Egan was going to have to put his uncle in Onward, but Egan had no money, and the church had stopped its insurance for the old man. There was nothing. Egan had sold his own Harley Softail, an act that broke his heart. The IRS had taken his Triumph Tiger. He had an old Nissan and no more credit at the hardware store to fix the lodge or his three churches. No more credit at the Robert E. Lee Motel, where they had cut him a nice break by the month. His wife had left him for another Christian biker who still had his Harley, brand-new at $22,000, $5,000 more in leather bags and honcho seat and tank, very righteous. Egan was looking at nothing but a last supper. He had only a hundred bucks. Without the good gas mileage of the ancient Nissan, he could not have made it to Yazoo City.

He loved to go there to visit the grave of an old pal of his, the writer Willie Morris, who had kidded him once with the question “If you were fourth and fifteen on your own one-yard line in the last thirty seconds of the game, would Jesus know what to do?” Egan had laughed wildly. “Of course! Bomb to Peter. No other choice.”

“Peter dropped the ball for Christ at the crucifixion, my friend,” said Morris.

“That’s why he ain’t ever going to drop one again, Willie.”

The past weeks, the weather come over his own grave now, Egan thought deeply of killing the both of them, nephew and uncle, with the gun. But he couldn’t. He was not good enough to see God yet, and the old man was worse. An alternative had presented itself, but Egan was not ready to admit it.

Feeney’s dogs were all over the trunk, and the boys had to kick them back. But the Lord smiled on them then. They heard the old man go back to his lodge, called loudly by his nephew, who had a new car in the drive. A big shiny luxury SUV.

Harold always had the tools. He was from an old stripe, those who fixed everything broken in history. You do not understand how they carry the right tools in those thin white overalls, but they were there around the P-51s and C-47s in the Big One. Nobody cared about them but the fliers who knew. Such a mechanic was Harold.

He popped the trunk and pulled up the lid, and the two boys and Sponce ran backwards like hares through tall grass and bushes. So fast they were out of sight, and Harold was left caught in a cloud of rot, so bad he thought these things in the trunk were huge dead catfish for a minute. They weren’t, and he got back quickly too. Missouri tag. Who would leave the tag? Only a drugged idiot, the man who was now walking swiftly through the four acres of trees and fronds, having heard noise. He held his uncle’s rifle.

The mother and child were collapsed in soured meat. So vile they arose with smell and commenced being skeletons almost instantly. To Harold they seemed to sigh while doing it. The boys had come back to within fifty feet.

“This bitchin’ car’s older’n me,” said Harold. “Sorry for cursing, boys.”

“Ransom,” said Sponce.

“How you know their name?” the smaller boy asked.

“Ransom is a thing , dickweed. Somebody kidnapped these two and held them out for ransom but cheated and killed them or nobody paid.”

“These folks is ours,” said the older child.

“What could you pissants do with them old folks?”

The children began to behave as interns of science, walking and thinking, not too close to the trunk yet, but seeing the car might be saved.

“That is a mother and child. You could boil them bones so they not putrid and set them up with wires and it would be a family, him Jesus the baby and her Mary at Halloween, and you could have Christmas both.”

“They start Christmas the day after Halloween at Big Mart, anyway,” said Harold. “But what you mean, have? Where would you have them?”

“Like on a float in a parade, or you could make that car into a convertible if the top’s not no good and ride them in the backseat.”

“Why? Who the hell would be looking?”

“To scare ’em.”

“You mean the man that did this, if it is a man?”

“Well him too, but he’d be dead too, wouldn’t he? If he was older than this car, or you, Harold.”

“You boys ever hear of Sherlock Holmes?”

“No.”

“Well you ain’t him. You got your detective work running around the barn to hump itself.” This speech by Sponce made Harold very uncomfortable. Despite the T-shirts, he was on a new program to stop using the little bad language he did. He wanted to be an influence on these children, in hopes of giving Dee another one someday.

Egan looked on from the last strand of scrub pine and winter wheat. My God. If I run them off and get that tag. If I can even make myself do that. You go through life asking when do I use the rifle. These boys aren’t even trespassing. The thing is, I could kill myself after I crawl in the trunk with that pair, if they would leave and give me enough time. What they want is that car. All the rest is my hell, not theirs .

It is this far I am now from my Christ .

Take me back .

Or forward .

There ain’t no standing here, Lord .

I just as much as slaughtered Mary and child seven years ago .

When Man Mortimer got out of the hospital, he wasn’t through hurting for a good long while and was almost unmanned. But then he watched his only video and felt the stirring of loin sympathy and was mildly satisfied. He drove to Monroe, Louisiana, in Egan’s old Nissan, ordered a meal at a drive-in, which he never did because he might be seen patronizing one of these things, and when the car waiter came out with the chili dog and diet Pepsi, Mortimer reached out the window as if to offer the boy a long column of change, but it was a box cutter instead. He cut down the whole length of the kid’s forearm, which caused him to shriek and almost faint, scattering the food. Mortimer drove off hastily and left behind smudges of the Nissan’s old tires.

Last night at one of his homes, the big fifties-ranch-style one, he had watched on his large flat-screen Phillips television the film clips and recitation of a minister. A curious breed of faith, perhaps not even Christian.