Barry Hannah - Yonder Stands Your Orphan

Hare turned even sicker. If that were possible, heaving a new tomb in a dry rock face from his bowels.

But he spoke in a whisper afterward.

“I’m going through some purification here. I got to have it. Them old stories hit at me. I’m all reamed out of everything nasty. I’m not listening to any more nasty stories. That ain’t right. We all better get us a better story. When I’m well, it’s going to be a good story.”

The next morning Hare awoke on the recliner on the porch in his pajamas. July was well on. The house was too big for its window air-conditioning units. Some corners sweltered, eighty-eight at night. He snapped his mouth to cut off a snore and slept. He had on no shirt. His lean muscles were packed closely.

Dee saw him when she went off to Onward in her whites. Her knees went a little weak. When will I get any better about men , she asked herself. She walked in a trance most of the day. Cautious, polite, gone milky and holy in the head, abstracted into kindness.

MORTIMER PICKED UP THE MAGAZINE. HE COULD NOT quite believe it existed, the gift of an old girlfriend who had found it on the Internet. New Deal , the organ for reformed country people who now hated nature. People who had lost farms. Settlers between town and country who wanted even less. The homes pictured were like mausoleums beside highways, no grass and not a stick of a tree in sight. Paved lawns. Good-looking women and whole families in chairs on brick and concrete lawns. Homes in bare sand neither in the desert nor near the ocean. Not a sunset in the magazine. No visible seasons. The only length of prose was an article about Hitler’s bunker in the last days of Berlin, not for the history but for the architecture.

Some dwellings were high-fashioned storm cellars. To hold off grass, leaves and the elements. Nearing airlessness even in the photograph.

Mortimer was loaded with himself. He had dreamed his history, and in this heavy automobile, in heavy calm, he was a creature of great velocity. He had forgotten to tell her what to wear, and this annoyed him. He went in the casino with her full of self-worth and clarity. It had been awhile and he was mysterious. She was intrigued. Then they walked across the lot and entered the hotel, a huge monster waiting for them.

He wondered why he was not three countries away, but not long. Edie and Large Lloyd were waiting in the penthouse suite. They drank drinks. The wallpaper was flocked with red kudzu and catfish forms swimming in it, gold traces. Somehow not trashy.

She told him in the elevator what a suck-up the sheriff was, coming around Almost There. He liked hearing that.

“Are you attracted to him?”

“I believe it’s the other way around.”

She thought she could hear the din of gamblers, glasses rattling, shouts expressed from a gilded maw somewhere. Impossible at this distance. The very air perhaps.

Large Lloyd and Edie waited in the room, wore sunglasses.

“Let me make an introduction.”

A show about sharks and rays was on a large television. Dee had not watched television since nature began to play such a part. The sharks weren’t bad, although Mortimer seemed frightened of them and presumed she would be. He looked without wanting to and could not even manage to get pensive before looking away.

On the big vanity dresser, his collection of knives stood in their case. Huge machetes to slivery stilettos, even razor knives. Velvet backing two inches thick, scarlet. Gold and silver instruments of despair against people in the golden excess of the room. They all simply stared at the collection.

“Here it is. I’ve shown you the houses over in Belhaven and Jackson, those English cottages and lawns. You didn’t want that. I’m going to play you some more nothing for two hours, and you can’t turn it off or I will come back and you won’t like it. It is a rehearsal of a man named Raymond on a saxophone, from a band called Caliente something. His wife, the Coyote, sings, and she’s good. But you see what you think about him. Then you decide between me and Frank Booth, who won’t be looking very good soon.”

Lloyd the Huge spoke. “My actual name is Lloyd. You will remember this night and my name. Large Lloyd.”

“And my name is Edie,” said the woman in the elegant dress, the ballroom heels. “I go deep.”

When Dee had listened to the dreadful saxophone, the endlessness of its despair and whining, then gaseous punctuations, she turned off the tape deck but kept watching the television for the sharks and rays. She was certain then that Man Mortimer was a disease and had assumed she knew this too for a while. He did make things happen, but the flow of these things had been redundant until now. He was only a man, even with this interesting disease. The others came in immediately.

Dee was not that averse. She had finished many men and loved to reduce them. The woman, when she began with her endearments, was not nightmarish or painful. Dee, who had never had a woman before, was thrilled by naughtiness more wanton and liquid than any since the first naked night of adolescence. An actual departure, as distinct as first leaving the Garden of Eden and perhaps the heavy air of earth altogether.

Lloyd, a mathematician and animal lover, was not accomplished, and they brought him to sighing infanthood quickly. But Man Mortimer was watching, fully clothed, and near the end of something. He rushed in and cut Dee’s thigh.

Edie shouted out, “Oh God, no!”

Lloyd remonstrated but held Dee. Until then she had been winning and asserting her pleasure on others. She felt the long cut on her thigh. It stung and then throbbed. Mortimer left the room. Perhaps never to return to her in friendly form again.

The three remaining were embarrassed and sad. The woman had expected just to slap her a little and Lloyd to insist on familiar desecrations passing for ecstasy in pornographic circles. They brought her a wet towel and then played poker with her while swallowing pills. She swallowed them too. She knew she had been sliced long and deep by a razor of some kind. Her own blood, in this prison, was a relief to see, curiously. Because that had to end it, she could still win.

She believed she had wrecked them all and they were burning now. She had reduced Mortimer to spite and outright crime. She could look him in the face, but she doubted he could look back at her. She guessed she knew him fairly well. But she drank too much and took narcotics with Edie and Lloyd, the towel bunched around her thigh. They tried to play cards but were numbed in giggles. Dee did not understand what trouble she was in until she called Edie a name and Edie hit her very hard in the mouth. Then Lloyd twisted Dee’s arm out of its socket. They were gone and she was in the elevator riding up and down when she woke up. A fifty-dollar bill was pinned to the front of her dress.

She stumbled into her kitchen in early morning, brought all this distance by a sympathetic Vietnamese cabdriver whose family fished out of Biloxi. There were a few hundred thousand of his citizens on the Gulf. They even had gangs now, he explained.

She did not know what she wore or what her hair was like. She was after ice water, then many aspirin in a large bottle. She missed her mouth with the glass. She spilled the aspirin bottle and it clattered on the tile. Her lap was full of melting aspirin when Hare walked in to see her under the hanging light at the table where nobody ate. The little boys sometimes cleaned fish on it or ate cold cereal and used the toaster on it. Enriched white bread, molasses, jam. Some of this food was on her forearms.

“You sick? Hurt?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“You can’t hardly talk.”