Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

“Why do people look for science, science fiction and signs of the End? Why do they seek the Revelation of the Apocalypse here and there and chant the old chants of the coming of the Antichrist, the Four Horsemen? Science fiction has already been had , fools. It was the Battle of Kursk, German tanks against Russian tanks, fifty-seven years ago. It was Leningrad, Stalingrad, Moscow, Berlin, idiots! What does it take, a sock in the jaw for you to get it that the Forces of Darkness fought then ? The Antichrist on both sides. Piss on Star Wars . Nothing touches WW Two for science fiction and wasteland.

“What else do you need? Can’t you see that things are better now? That the prophets are winning more battles? Where they are losing is At Home. Plenty and boredom and people are killing because they got, get this, no other imagination! And you have Mormons, for God’s sake! What the hell is that? And who, by the way, is president of this Space Walk? You got any idea? You got a TV, don’t you? I thought so. You don’t have a clue in hell who our President or His Wifeness are . Now that’s some science fiction. Our President will never kill himself, but if he did, as he ought, he would wonder who was performing the act. And our First Lady would name a different murderer three days running. Is this what the school of Yale does for people? My aching ass. Give me Harry Truman from our worst community college. He’d be on the roll, The Roll , there at last! Shut up!”

Mortimer thought he himself was the point of this address, that he was still suffering from a dizziness rushing from the nads. Behind the man, pictures of Nazis and Russians blowing each other apart in the cauldron kept running, and one of the Russian soldiers in the bowl-shaped helmets looked a great deal like him. This man was directing fire and using binoculars near artillery pumping up and down in a plain of mud. The man looked like the singer Fabian but stealthy and gung-ho, as if he had stumbled into an important movie.

The afternoon after his work at the Monroe drive-in, Mortimer was still in Egan’s car, a blue thing going for a record in mileage and fading. He was not sure why he had traded cars, but now he was glad for the incognito and ease of parking. He had a feeling he would get more hooks into Egan yet. He parked under a century oak curved over the drive at Onward. He waited until the hour satisfied him and went around back. When he looked inside the door, he was clear. There was nothing to hurt in the first room, just chairs and a blood pressure cuff. In the next, however, was a nice cabinet with all of Melanie Wooten’s glass animals in a miniature African-plains scene, done with extraordinary patience and care. Giraffes, wildebeests, tigers, lions, monkeys, panthers, elephants. He picked up the whole scene in the swathe of green burlap and crushed it under his Johnson & Murphy wing-tip loafers. He had dust and glass specks on them now. He heaved up the sack and set it as a bag of trash, matchstick trees, shoe-dye water holes, on the cabinet where it had waited for the patients to enjoy. Then he slipped out the back, just about on the spot when nap time at Almost There was done.

Much dither broke out on the discovery of the animals soon afterward. Melanie came in for her readings while it was going. She didn’t want this, but one of the elderly patients had already called the sheriff’s office by the time Melanie arrived. Dee Allison awoke without actually sleeping, as she often did. “Number one, Mrs. Wooten,” she told Melanie, “I have no idea who did this. But the sheriff is not going to come out about a case of smashed glass animals.”

“Oh I know. I’m embarrassed. He can’t be that bored. Who would even take the time to do this?”

“I don’t know anybody who would even come here on purpose,” said Dee.

But the sheriff did come out. He had a good build and short hair and, when he neglected to modulate his voice, did not sound even remotely southern. Delaware, maybe. He admitted he liked espresso very much and was pleased there was a machine here, along with very modern books on all subjects, weight loss, sexual improvement, racy novels. Bleden’s huge child-psychology tome If They Were My Child . The sheriff’s name was Facetto. He performed in plays with the Vicksburg Theater League and had never played a lawman, even when he was in college in Mexico. Dee Allison had not seen his television meditations on the law and the world on the evening news each Saturday night, but he did have a presence. They said he was New Breed, this young high sheriff of Issaquena County. He knew, or talked anyway, psychology and the demographics of crime.

“This is the work of a teenager who may be having early bursts of schizophrenia. Most likely. I’ll get prints, but it won’t lead anywhere, I’ll bet. The girl won’t even remember doing it, I’d guess. Tragic. We had a boy in a youth group when I was young, we all went to the circus, but he attacked the bedroom of our den mother and tore it to shreds. He didn’t know why, we surely didn’t, he’d been urged to go to the circus with us. He was quiet, tall, barely whispered. The attack was his language. I’ll never forget him. Dillon Brad.”

“A girl? Why?” asked a man in a wheelchair. He had a deep crush on Melanie Wooten and was the angriest of all.

“The temperament. This was meant to inflict the most hurt on something delicate and painstaking and artful. A more feminine principle. If she had any intentions at all outside of fury. I think so. It took preparation.”

Dee Allison was very attracted to the sheriff, who was thirty-six. When he slipped back and forth from southern to East Coast accent, she felt at home. She was good at her work that way. She spoke illiteracy and literacy, depending on the patient. They had all kinds at Onward now. Even Vietnamese, Cuban, Korean, Pakistani. The ones who first owned the tourist courts had gotten old right along with the rest. There were the few vicious hicks too, of course, who had never had a right day and intended to live until they found one. Facetto looked directly at Dee’s bosom and blinked in approval without being coarse. But he returned his look to the victim here, Melanie, and held up an uncrushed zebra figure, crystalline and delicate.

“This is art. It is precious, priceless. So we are talking sacrilege of a sort. There may be even religious overtones.”

What an ass. Dee thought of another nasty T-shirt she had ripped off her son and scolded Harold for, which made him beg and beg forgiveness. He had not read it, bright white against black black. Medium-size. But it belonged on a bumper sticker. If I Had Wanted to Hear an Asshole I Would Have Farted . It seemed appropriate now.

The ex-doctor Raymond was having tenderer moments with his wife, Mimi Suarez, and she was learning to love the big cottage. Now she knew that animals listened when she sang on the back stoop, because she saw them hearkening. Once two little boys were hidden, doing the same thing. The boys were in love. It was a difficult love somewhere between the need for an actual mother and the affection a pagan yard ape might have for the Madonna, with the delicacy of all women’s laps and breasts. The voice was what brought it all together, though, the night when they first saw her and she didn’t see them, out under a wild magnolia with its pod mulch underfoot, and she was bare-breasted. In no boastful way, no criminal way, no way wicked. Because who would she be seducing?

Max Raymond no longer liked to think of himself as a former doctor at all. He had met and chatted with a real doctor, Harvard, many times, and he understood that much of his life consisted simply of a failure to fail. Now he was a saxophonist and bad poet. He thought more and more of his mother, was working on writing about her. Most thoughts that were any good, he recalled, were merely getting frank with an ancient truth.