Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Few liked me at first, with my hunching toward the Coyote as she drove her hips. You can play a lot of jazz in a mambo, actually begin lessons and finish right on the spot, which is jazz. But I opened my eyes to find myself on her, horn grinding away on her thighs. She moved away, threw out her brown arms, to howls of execration from the front row and farther back. I was middle-aged, that was the main horror! But women often like a mean man. Those women who write to killers in prison. It must be for those punks like writing a letter to God. Mean is the diploma of the artist. I was an alleyway myth, but I strutted. She may have married me out of fatigue.

When my thrusting on the stand, a dreadful thing to behold, became lawful, my fans thought me lessened. But I was good. I swallowed the horn during my feud with music. Mimi screaming like a cat in a bath but with actual talent. I had friends, and they had solid names like Jim, Whit and Alexander, and only one of them asked to borrow money. Well, two. One had designs on the Coyote, the way he grabbed her and lurched at her rear. Lucky I was middle-aged and beyond jealousy.

I have left out almost all of life that’s beautiful. Its small acts of kindness. The pier crowd over there, who invite me in a little more every time I go to fish. Mimi Suarez almost eternally at ease. The small fame you can get by practicing some dumbish thing over and over. The sleepy awe of these grounds and lake and house. The evil I feel close at hand to know I am alive. The evil thereby. I must see the devil at hand. Then Christ.

Sponce Allison and Sidney Farté came across each other in the elder Farté’s bait store. Food, engines, devices. Two bass boats, wrecks in progress on trailers on the west side, two gas pumps out front. The last of the black-and-white televisions over an open drink and meat locker. A fine greasy television, studded high on the wall, under which the sullen could eat a dawn-prepared heat-lamped meat in a roll swamped in mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup. Except for the bait, an excellent beer from a microbrewery in Louisiana was the only item of real quality.

The coffee was bad, the standard for parsimony and contempt at fuel stops. Even fresh, in the prelight of dawn.

Two tables. Pepper Farté charged fifty cents to sit and eat there if you did not buy grub at the store but ate your own and needed only a drink. The television was free. This bothered Pepper a little. He would rather have put blindfolds on the mere loiterers he suffered around his linoleum.

Sidney was only fifteen years younger than Pepper, his father. But he was in far worse shape. They were scions of a pusillanimous French line too lazy and ignorant to anglicize their name in a pleasant manner, and they had been laughed at plenty by squires and rootless trash both, and even blacks. In the matter of blacks, Pepper’s hatred of everything was so full it left nothing over for racial distractions. He looked at all the same, his eyelids raised only a bit as if asking silently, Why in hell were you born to trouble me? His being eighty-eight now should have made him resent the hip-hop throbbing from the cars of the bloods out at the gas pump while they came in for a beer. But for Pepper it was only another small pestilence, like his son, seventy-three with shingles and in chemotherapy and radiation, always threatening pneumonia, sent to plague Pepper by the same Overlord who had vexed him always.

Pepper looked awful, but he was in good health except for wear and the scholar’s spinal curve he had gotten behind the counter, despising the chore of making change. Many of the prices in his store were rounded to the higher figure for this reason. Change was precious and his arms were feeble, holding it, and he had to fight going higher by a dime on all his goods.

Sponce Allison, matched with Harold Laird, was in the alley of the tinned meat, saltines, fireplugs and prophylactics and salt and coffee. When they collided, Sidney coiled and puked a bright yellow line that never even made an arc before it smacked Sponce in the cheek.

“Ho doggit!” The boy was amazed. Gravy ran down his eyes and dripped in a beard off his face.

Sidney still drooled in a lip-wide stalactite down his own chin. He was undergoing stress, a rapid melancholy that overcame him once he had vomited on another person. This thing wanting out of him so quickly, like a hot weasel in a tube.

Old Pepper, behind the counter near the screen door, raised his hooded scowl. Last night he had seen a mother and baby skeleton in one of the ruined bass boats, he thought, and heard a scurrying off through the edge of his porch light into a stony field. He did not credit it fully, but neither did he tell anybody, because his son wanted this store and Pepper knew it and he would give no psychiatric evidence against himself else the sheriff or Onward might be called. He enjoyed a beaked scowl now before the odor hit him, over that of weltering meat under the lamps nearby. He almost smiled.

His boy was staggering out from the mouth of his premium aisle, now toward all the bright spinner baits and bush hogs and jigs, the solid Rapallas like Picasso, the Sluggos, the salty worms, the wobbling deep-running torpedoes, the high-tech sonic ones that rattled and rolled. The single fishing video entitled You Are in the Wrong Place . A wet boy behind Sidney.

Sidney had not apologized, and the boy was stunned by this discourtesy. But Sidney feared a second eruption and so did his father. Others wanted him out of the store too. But the Allison boy now held him across his neck. He demanded some acknowledgment.

All his working life Pepper had sold instruments of violence against fish and game and some people. He had war-surplus bayonets from Korea. But he had never struck his son, wife or enemies. He was too remote in his hatreds for this. He would have shot his son just then if he had owned the energy. He did hiss as Sponce rode the seed of his lap out into the porch.

“Here now, here now,” called Harold Laird. He was a born remonstrator.

“This old man vom on me!”

“I’m sick, sick, you sons of bitches! Don’t you see?” swore Sidney, then threw out his arms to free himself. His long-sleeved shirt was spotless, the drool gone. He seemed hardly involved. He walked over to the end of his car and, breathless, looked upward dead-on at the sun. Now he was a blind old puke and swore again.

“By gawd you’re stunk out,” said Harold to Sponce. “You ain’t aiming to get in my ride thataway?” Laird had a nice old Camry. He had left Hermansville last year and never looked back, except to retrieve his four-wheel ATV and tools.

“Tell you what. I’m standing here waiting on a goddamn explanation. Or manners at least.”

“Old man, don’t you want to tell him something?”

Sidney turned away from them toward the horizon. Shingles, colon cancer, psoriasis, mouth ulcers, dysentery. In his mind these old friends called out to his young tormentors.

“All right then. Here.” Sponce walked up to Sidney in the gravel lot and hit him in the right jaw with a quick roundhouse left, then knelt in pain himself for the damage to his hand. He might never work on that side of his body again.

Pepper was in the door watching. He was satisfied. Sidney was out cold or stunned, one. But he still stood, arms at hips.

It was an awful thing to watch a sick old man slugged. The boys were uncomfortable. One was in severe pain. So they entered the car, which was suddenly irreal, out of all space and time, hurtling fast to nowhere with its points of chrome light on the hot blue wall of sky.

Nobody came near Sidney, no customers, not Egan the preacher, with his own problems and oblivious. It was Egan’s habit to purchase one pack of Camel straights, light and smoke one, then throw the rest of the pack in the road as a sign of his conversion and for good luck. Cigarettes were $3.20 a pack. He was deciding, needing a smoke badly.