Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

It was noon and no shadows and Mortimer was sweating hard in his sports jacket. A little pistol fell out of his pocket, but neither of them noticed this. The other boy came running toward them, bounding, enraged and driven by fear at the same time, like no animal.

“Believe me, boy. Your brother best stop right there too. Ease on up.” Now Mortimer had the boy by his hair and grabbed for the other with his knife hand. This was not a good idea. He nicked the boy fairly well on the shoulder, and the boy shook loose as his brother plunged his fist into Mortimer’s gonads. Mortimer held on, however, and now the hitter saw the blood on his brother’s shoulder and desisted altogether. A lamb shaking with fear.

Mortimer grabbed the boy’s hair again more tightly by the trailing rattail in back. “You come over here for a haircut or you run and it’s. . a head cut,” he said slowly and way short of breath.

“We ain’t hurt you.”

“But you stink and I don’t like you.” Mortimer sawed the boy’s hair loose and it fell in a black lank. He indicated the other to come over. The first was holding the back of his scalp but looking at the enormous knife, almost a cutlass. Mortimer sawed the other’s beaver hang, really just touched it, and it came off in his hand too. “Now you look more, more nicer. Like boy people. You shouldn’t wear your hair like rock and roll when you your age. Like you mated up with some old Mexican beaver.” He bent down to chat on their level. “Now where’s your cart with your friends on it?”

The boys simply ran. Why could he not have thought about that?

He looked for them awhile. Too tired for the same rage, he took on another one, a cold haunting in the cells of his blood that would not leave him until an awful thing was done. He hollered out into the thicker woods, though still scraggly, all around him. “I see you with it, I’ll put you in the orphanage or the penitentiary!” He walked short distances yelling this.

When he left, the boys came out. It was within the hour. You could hear a car a long ways here, could almost hear the browning pines bake. So few cars came by at all. You would be cursed to have trouble here, amid the trailer hulks taking on shadows and figures down alleys, mouths. The boys ate from the box of raisins and vowed to go on home. The cart was way back on the other side of the lake, not too far behind the bad restaurant and Max Raymond’s cottage. Then Isaac looked down and saw the little pistol. He picked it up very carefully.

“That sumbitch’s ass is mine ,” he said.

“You got to beat me to it.”

They were ravenous and they decided to go to Pepper’s shop and get what they could. They walked three and a half miles with the pistol, which, small as it was, became weighty as a hand steam iron. Weak as they were, trading it back and forth by the mile. They went in the store and did what they said.

They were clumsy shoplifters. Pepper stood right there and he knew. But the younger boy’s shoulder was bloodied, and hadn’t he seen a gun in the other’s back pocket? You just had no idea nowadays. Never did.

In the early morning hours, Mortimer watched again for the prophet, on a television big as a closet in his British Tudor house in Clinton, hoping for more science fiction and apocalypse. But the prophet did not come on at the regular hour. Instead was an ordinary bloated carnival figure and his wife, evangelists. His wig of slate waves, her towering nest of curls and paint thick on her massive eyebags. An ex-hooker, shouting and laughing in raptures as she explained she was actually at the moment walking with Christ and his apostles on the shores of Galilee, hearing their laughter. Their laughter , thought Mortimer. Here was a new one. Repentant whore laughing with God’s men. He thought about some of his own women. He offered no retirement plan, no health insurance. This was no worse than he treated himself. What you did was just make money and watch out. He fondled a new purchase. A rainbow-painted clasp knife with a fillet blade.

Outside in his driveway his ride was a long black Mercedes. He could not find the pistol in any of his cars. He had to cut down on the coffee. He wrote this down. Then he cried a little for having no friends.

Sponce and Harold were very sick. They hallucinated odors of burning oil and monoxides to awful intensity. They smelled their own life tenfold. They could not rid themselves of the odor of sunbaked vomit. Both stood under headaches that drove them to the darkened back of the house. On separate cots they rolled in nausea and the jitters. Head of black air shot full of spangling pins. Sponce thought he would upchuck his heart itself. They could not keep down even Tums, only cold Gatorade, which Dee brought them in such quantity that she began to make it from powder. She took two days off from Almost There and was nervous in her home, but she didn’t mind.

She saw they were clammy, too pale. She wore her white uniform and sat in a chair long into the night with a thermometer in one hand. Then fell asleep like that. She never turned on the television and did not think much of Man Mortimer, more of her real husband, which she seldom did. She had turned thirty-seven the day before. The boys were finally asleep at dawn. She amazed herself by her energy and tender domestic feelings. She had taken Emma to the Mennonite couple down the road two days ago. The couple had tragic pity for her. They took the child in with hardly a word.

The small boys had been away three days, but that was not unusual. The little scutters. They were devoted to their skits. She had little say in their lives anyway. They seemed like vagrant lies she had told once, in the form of children. She wondered if she loved them or should.

In the back, Sponce moaned at noon. “Feels like that old man puked straight through to my brain.”

Harold whispered, “Lord God, don’t leave me hanging. Decide.” So sick he was not in love for hours.

Out of torpor, Dee watched a religious channel finally. It was the Assembly of God folks. Appease the Lord, the absentminded Big Skull. You always had to get his attention or he wouldn’t recall you from an hour ago when he directed you up shit creek, and it raining. She decided these folks needed to be laughed at because their lives were otherwise flat and cold.

On Saturday the next round of fishermen in their old cars and muddy boats and ragged families would buy their ice and nothing else at Pepper’s store to furnish a day at the spillway, where they fished for crappie and catfish or stripers from the bluffs not in sport but for meat. The men were not greedy, but they could carry a lot. The aerators chugged in the background like distant sucking hells. Miles and miles of fields and valleys had been flooded to make an entire county adjacent to Warren and Issaquena counties the biggest catfish plantation on earth. Cynical neighbors to the state had suggested the whole region be flooded so as to have a closer Gulf of Mexico to Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. But Alabama did not want Mississippi’s brown seawater interfering with the emerald coastline of the condoed and biker-barred Redneck Riviera. This delicacy, catfish, was now Mississippi’s leading export.

Universally, nothing is better for bluegill than live crickets. Pepper had them fat and brown. The inside of Pepper’s store smelled like old minnow water and the stale bread he fed the crickets. Once Isaac and Jacob had caught crickets for Pepper to make pocket money. Now they left with their spoils, passing by the poor families on their ragtag fishing trips, and on to the bad restaurant, staying off the road.

They knew the woman with curly hair might sing at sunrise, so they slept not far from their cart in the wet bottom under a holly bush and on soft pine needles from a stand of ten huge pines, unlumbered by some miracle of cross deeds. This was a hundred yards from Raymond’s back stoop, where the dark woman would come for her aubade to the animals after a hard night of thick cigarette smoke and rum and Cokes. They were becoming tristate stars, the band Linga Caliente with their Coyote, found out by a crowd new to this area like the coyotes who had swum the river or trotted across the bridge from the west two decades ago.